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Better Call Saul

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Watch Better Call Saul with a subscription on Netflix, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

Cast & Crew

Bob Odenkirk

Saul Goodman

Jonathan Banks

Mike Ehrmantraut

Michael Mando

Nacho Varga

Patrick Fabian

Howard Hamlin

Rhea Seehorn

Giancarlo Esposito

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Better Call Saul (2015–2022)

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'Better Call Saul' finale soars as a meditation on consequences and regret

Eric Deggans

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television hide caption

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman.

(Fair warning: This story has LOTS of spoilers about the Better Call Saul finale episode, "Saul Gone.")

In the end, the question that loomed largest in the poignant, masterful series finale of AMC's magnificent drama Better Call Saul wasn't whether main character Saul Goodman – a.k.a., Gene Takavic, a.k.a. Jimmy McGill – would go to jail.

Carol Burnett as Marion. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television hide caption

Carol Burnett as Marion.

Arrest and incarceration seemed inevitable, given the events of last week's episode, where Saul – who had been hiding from the law under the name Gene Takavic, working a soul-deadening job as manager of a Cinnabon restaurant in an Omaha mall – was exposed to police. He'd been found out by the mother of an accomplice to a new scam he'd put together, unable to resist the lure of getting back in the criminal game.

(Shout out to comedy legend Carol Burnett, who knocked it out of the park playing feisty mom Marion. And props to the show's producers, who had the guts to cast her for their final few episodes, in a role that began as a glorified cameo and grew into one of the most pivotal exchanges of the series.)

Bob Odenkirk & Peter Gould On The End Of 'Better Call Saul'

Instead, the question that hung over the show's final episode was a simple one: Would Saul ever grow a conscience? Would he ever let himself feel real regret?

An ambitious spin-off idea

Better Call Saul began in February 2015 as an ambitious project: a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed dramas in modern TV history and an origin story for Saul, one of Breaking Bad 's most outrageous characters.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Catching up with 'better call saul' like a con artist would.

The spin-off kicked off with a scene showing Saul after the events in the Breaking Bad finale. He's living under the radar as Gene Takavic, working a menial job, depicted in footage shot in a drab, black-and-white format that seemed both elegantly cinematic and drained of all life or enthusiasm. Right away, it established the elaborate two-step that would define the series, toggling between Gene's drab life in the present and his evolution into Saul, which intensified in the last few episodes. Those images answered a question that had been nagging Breaking Bad fans since they watched high-school-teacher-turned-drug-kingpin Walter White meet his maker in that show's finale two years earlier. Whatever happened to Walter's fast-talking attorney, an amped-up counselor for drug cartels who had TV ads like a personal injury lawyer and patter like a used-car salesman?

After that quick introduction to Gene, the first episode of Better Call Saul jumped back in time six years, transitioning to color and introducing viewers to aspiring attorney Jimmy McGill (Saul's given name). Once known as "Slippin' Jimmy," for his habit of falling in front of businesses to scam injury settlements, he was struggling to make ends meet and caring for his brother Chuck, once a brilliant lawyer, who had to step down from his law firm.

Peter Gould, Bob Odenkirk and Vince Gilligan shooting the series finale. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television hide caption

Peter Gould, Bob Odenkirk and Vince Gilligan shooting the series finale.

In 2015, I talked with star Bob Odenkirk about playing Saul/Jimmy/Gene, and series co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. Odenkirk said the crew on Breaking Bad had always joked about Saul getting his own spin-off series, while Gilligan marveled at how "heroic" the character could be, referring to Saul's efforts to take care of his brother.

Missing Your 'Breaking Bad' Fix? 'Better Call Saul' Will Hit The Spot

But Gould, who would later write and direct Better Call Saul 's finale episode "Saul Gone," said at a press conference back then that the show would turn on a niggling question. "Why be good?"

"Usually, in fiction, behaving ethically always ends up having good results," he said. "And we all know, in life, sometimes being ethical lands you in the s------, so to speak."

Creating the best drama on TV

Better Call Saul would spend the next six seasons exploring that answer, producing some of the best drama on television. We saw Saul confront his brother at a hearing before the bar association, exposing his sibling's unbalanced belief that he was overly sensitive to electromagnetic fields. Chuck, played with agonized grace by Michael McKean, eventually committed suicide.

Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television hide caption

Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler.

We saw Saul marry Kim Wexler – played masterfully by the Emmy-nominated Rhea Seehorn – a much better lawyer who is attracted to the rule-breaking scams her husband dreams up until, seeing the awful collateral damage they can bring, she decides to leave him and the law behind.

It's a testament to the show's quality that these new characters became just as compelling as figures from Breaking Bad who rejoined the party, including Jonathan Banks' magnificently tortured cop-turned-cartel enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut, and Giancarlo Esposito's controlling drug kingpin/fast food entrepreneur, Gus Fring.

Even Odenkirk's real-life heart attack — which came as he was filming one of the show's final episodes and nearly ended his life — didn't stop the completion of the story.

The series showcased the increasing dissonance between the guy Saul thinks he is trying to be – a sharp, savvy lawyer who finds the simplest solution to any problem – and the toxic consequences he creates for others. The finale season wove all these threads together in a tremendous climax, when a lawyer who is being scammed by Kim and Saul is unexpectedly killed by Gus' biggest rival — a murder which would not have happened if the lawyer, Patrick Fabian's officious Howard Hamlin, hadn't been wrapped up in the couple's con artistry. Producers took massive creative swings that turned episodes into high-wire acts. Four episodes before the finale – not long after the lawyer's shocking death — they plunged the story back into Gene's world, shifting to black-and-white images in a way that almost felt like a different series had started.

Bob Odenkirk as Gene Takavic. Greg Lewis/ AMC/Sony Pictures Television hide caption

Bob Odenkirk as Gene Takavic.

The finale episode stuck to that black-and-white format, showing a captured Saul negotiating a deal with prosecutors for a light sentence, before realizing Kim had already confessed to their role in the lawyer's death.

Saul then lies to get Kim into the courtroom for the finalization of his plea deal, where he admits to everything he did to enable Walter White's drug empire and his participation in Hamlin's death. This is the moment Saul becomes Jimmy again; a man taking responsibility to regain the respect of the ex-wife he still loves. (Among a very long list of artful cameo appearances in Better Call Saul , the return here of Betsy Brandt as Marie Schrader, wife of a DEA agent murdered in Breaking Bad 's finale season, ranks as one of the coolest.) In the final scene, as Saul shares a cigarette with Kim during a prison visit — he was sentenced to 86 years, after all — the question Gould asked way back in 2015 seems answered. Why be good? To have a clean conscience.

Common ground between "Breaking Bad" and "Saul"

Different as Better Call Saul 's story ultimately was, its finale also revealed a fundamental similarity with Breaking Bad . Both shows are about men facing something terrible at the core of their being, admitting the horrific damage they have caused and, finally, accepting the consequences of their behavior.

'Better Call Saul' might be the greatest of all time — if it can stick the landing

In stories about antiheroes, there is always the question of what separates them from villains. Why do we root for Tony Soprano and not his Uncle Junior on The Sopranos ? Or champion Ozark 's fast-talking financial planner Marty Byrde over cartel leader Camino Del Rio? Often, the difference is values and a conscience; antiheroes have them, and villains don't.

On The Sopranos , creator David Chase seemed to relish slowly stripping away all the stuff which had allowed fans to see Tony as the kind of charismatic outlaw we love in pop culture – which forced the audience to admit they had been rooting for a psychopath all along. But Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul tell a different tale. In these shows, the antiheroes are forced to face the toxic truth about themselves, ultimately taking responsibility for the pain they have created as a final admission to those who love them and realized the truth about them long before they did. My thinking on this is influenced by a conversation I had with Vince Gilligan many years ago. We were hanging out at a press reception for Breaking Bad , which was still several seasons from its end. I noted how much I was enjoying watching this show about the slow curdling of a man's soul, as a high school chemistry teacher dying of cancer morphed into a ruthless, boundlessly wealthy meth manufacturer. Gilligan, who has a well-deserved reputation as one of the nicest showrunners in TV, gently corrected me. What if, he suggested, you saw the story as slowly revealing something about Walter White that was already there? Perhaps what's really happening is that all the things in society which kept him in check are slowly falling away, and he's flowering into the controlling, ruthless narcissist he always was at his core? This is why Saul's questions about regret, featured in two crucial scenes from the finale, mean so much. In flashbacks, he asks two of the franchise's other antiheroes – Jonathan Banks' Mike Ehrmantraut and Bryan Cranston's acerbic Walter White, in another inspired cameo – what they would change about their lives if they had a time machine.

Hiatus brain: When your favorite show returns, but you can't remember a thing

White acidly and correctly points out that Saul is really asking about regret. In other words: What would you undo in your life, if you could?

Mike wanted to undo the moment he took his first bribe as a cop. Walt wanted to take back his decision to walk away from a successful company he created, leading to a bruised ego which fueled all his subsequent dysfunction.

Saul's answers were always about making more money, executing a better scam, finding a better way to come out on top. And comparing his answers to his compatriots, Saul (and viewers) could see something important was missing.

The series began with Jimmy McGill desperate to prove that everyone in his life who saw him as a loser had it all wrong. And it ended with a bravura finale showing Saul Goodman realizing those people were more right about him than he wanted to admit.

That is the stuff of legendary television.

Correction Aug. 17, 2022

In a previous version of the story, we said that Patrick Fabian played Harry Hamlin. In fact, the character's first name is Howard.

‘Better Call Saul’ series finale a fitting end to a brilliant television journey

“better call saul” evolved into arguably the greatest spin-off series in the history of television, a near-equal to “breaking bad.”.

Bob Odenkirk (left) as Jimmy McGill and Michael McKean as Chuck McGill in a scene from the series final of “Better Call Saul.”

Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

After Bryan Cranston’s Walter White exited this world after the Monday night series finale of “Breaking Bad” and we heard the sounds of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” on the soundtrack, if you asked me which character from Heisneberg’s world would be best-suited for a spin-off series, I probably would have voted for Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman or Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut or Giancarlo Esposito’s Gustavo Fring.

Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman? Wouldn’t have been my first or even second choice. To be sure, Odenkirk had created a memorably slippery character who provided invaluable dark comic relief and was a catalyst for any number of major plot twists and turns — but he seemed a bit one-dimensional to carry a series.

Sometimes it’s great to be wrong.

Thanks to showrunner Vince Gilligan, an enormously gifted team of writers and directors, one of the best ensemble casts in recent memory and Odenkirk’s richly layered and electric work as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman/Gene Takovic, “Better Call Saul” evolved into arguably the greatest spin-off series in the history of television, a near-equal to “Breaking Bad.” Saul turned out to be as complex and Machiavellian as Walter White himself. (And in a way, Jesse, Mike and Gustavo all DID have their own-spinoff storylines: Jesse in the feature-length “El Camino,” and Mike and Gustavo as major players in “Better Call Saul.” We had our Blue Bell mint chocolate ice cream and ate it, too.)

Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler in “Better Call Saul.”

At times it was a heavy lift to keep track of the timeline in “Better Call Saul,” as we spent most of the series in the early 2000s, before the events of “Breaking Bad,” but we often jumped forward to the early 2010s, especially in the final season. (Even Odenkirk seemed to lose track of the timeline when on a recent episode of the after-show “Talking Saul,” he said Saul hadn’t seen Kim for a year and a half and had to be corrected and told it was more like six years.)

Spoiler alerts!

The series finale was set mostly in the Gene timeline and filmed in gorgeous, noirish black-and-white, as Jimmy’s past finally caught up with him and he was arrested in a garbage dumpster in Omaha. (Not the first time Jimmy found himself in a dumpster.) As Jimmy squares off against federal law enforcement officials and begins negotiating in his typically slick manner, Betsy Brandt’s Marie Schrader returns with a fierce and triumphant splash, testifying as to the character of her husband Hank, who along with his partner, Steve Gomez, was murdered in the desert. (“They tell me they found you in a garbage dumpster,” says Marie. “Well, that makes sense.”)

We were also treated to a trio of brilliant flashback sequences: first with Saul and Mike in the desert, then with Saul and Walter White hiding out beneath Ed Galbraith’s vacuum shop, and finally with Saul and his brother Chuck (the magnificent Michael McKean) in Chuck’s house. Saul asks Mike where he would go if he had a time machine and poses the same question to Walter. (When Saul says his big regret was injuring his knee in a “slip and fall” scam outside Marshall Field’s when he was 22, Walt says with disdain, “So you were always like this.”) In both cases, Saul is talking more about regrets than time travel. Later, in Chuck’s house, Chuck tells his brother, “If you don’t like where you’re headed, there’s no shame in going back and changing your path.” And we catch a glimpse of the book Chuck is reading: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells.

Bob Odenkirk as Gene Takovic in the series finale of “Better Call Saul.”

The final episode, titled “Saul Gone,” contains a number of such callbacks and Easter eggs, e.g., when Saul is extradited to New Mexico, he’s on a Wayfarer flight — and it was a Wayfarer jet that collided with a charter flight in “Breaking Bad” and resulted in the deaths of 167 passengers, due to a chain of events initiated by one Walter White.

After negotiating an unbelievably favorable deal that will have him out of prison in just seven years, Saul Goodman acts as his own counsel at the official sentencing hearing, reclaims the name Jimmy McGill and incriminates himself in a number of offenses, in order to save Rhea Seehorn’s Kim from possible prosecution and to demonstrate to Kim he still has a soul. He can’t make up for all the damage he’s done, but he can do this one thing. I was reminded of that final scene in “Breaking Bad” and the use of “Baby Blue,” which was a nod to Walter White’s signature blue meth but also contains this almost too on-the-nose line: “Guess I got what I deserved…”

So many of characters in the “Breaking Bad” universe got what they deserved, from Walter to Gus, from Mike to Lydia, from Todd Alquist to his uncle Jack Welker, not to mention all those Salamancas and the notorious Eladio Varga. But there were so many others who were innocent victims: those airline passengers; the 10 Mexican passengers in the back of a truck; the aforementioned Hank and Steve; Howard Hamlin; Charles McGill; Jesse’s girlfriends Jane Margolis and Andrea Cantillo. Saul Goodman wasn’t complicit in all those deaths, but as he states in his sentencing hearing, “If he hadn’t walked into my office...Walter White would have been dead or behind bars within a month, and Agent Schrader and Agent Gomez and a whole lot of other people would still be alive.”

After a final moment between Kim and Jimmy that harkens back to the premiere episode of “Better Call Saul,” Kim takes one last look at Jimmy, who has been given an 86-year sentence and will never breathe free air again. It’s a brutal and devastating curtain closer, but the look on Jimmy’s face tells us he believes he got what he deserved.

Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III sits with Rev. Jesse Jackson at the Rainbow PUSH Convention on July 18, 2023.

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Better Call Saul' s final episodes have been astonishing, whatever the finale brings

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk do career-best work in a boldly disturbing, downbeat aftermath.

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

Better Call Saul returned in July at a moment of cliffhanger calamity. Howard Hamlin ( Patrick Fabian ) lay dead on the floor, shot by grinning Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton). Kim Wexler ( Rhea Seehorn ) and Jimmy McGill ( Bob Odenkirk ) looked on, horrified. The married lawyers and their renegade captor were on a collision course with Gus Fring ( Giancarlo Esposito ) and his trusty-crusty lieutenant Mike Ehrmantraut ( Jonathan Banks ). Blood, bullets, and burials ensued.

What I'm describing sounds so much like Better Call Saul that it actually sounds nothing like Better Call Saul . Across six seasons, the AMC series followed a relatively small core cast. Gus and Lalo trickled in as tormentors for poor doomed Nacho (Michael Mando), right around the same midpoint when Jimmy's brother Chuck ( Michael McKean ) flamed out. Saul 's universe was vast, though, and some major characters never interacted. (Apparently, some of them never will.) This was a show that simmered. People could die, but the highest drama was in the paperwork, or the legal maneuvers, or in one of Jimmy's gradual con jobs. The hugest thing Gus ever did was start (then halt) construction on a hole in the ground.

This midseason premiere, "Point and Shoot," was something else entirely. Call it Mega- Saul , a high-fatality shock show where shady lawyers and devious underworlders all actually talk to each other. There was even a genuine showdown. That almost rendered the next episode, "Fun and Games," an epilogue. Gus mopped up cartel problems. Jimmy and Kim kept a poker face during Howard's funeral. But two depth charges awaited. First, Kim left everything: the law, Jimmy, New Mexico. Then came moral oblivion. A time jump reintroduced Jimmy as the once and future Saul Goodman, the crooked lawyer we met 13 years ago on Breaking Bad .

By my count, I've just described three perfectly good TV drama endings. Gus spent his whole Saul life edging into Salamanca territory, and Lalo's death finally gave him the druggy real estate to supercharge his operation toward a cartel coup. Kim and Jimmy were the show's emotional center, so Kim's rejection of Jimmy (and her career self-destruction) would mark a clear cutoff point. And the leap forward fulfilled Saul 's prequel purpose. Here was Jimmy finally putting on the Vader suit, Jimmy finally going to Mordor to meet Sauron, Jimmy finally creating the xenomorphs on the Planet of the Engineers. I'm stretching for good prequel comparisons because there are barely any good prequels, which is why Saul is the best prequel ever.

Except it isn't a prequel anymore. The three episodes after "Fun and Games" mostly move far past the Breaking Bad timeline. This future is white, black, and bleak. Co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan have demarcated the shift with extraneous clues. The "and" episode titles of season 6's first nine parts are gone. The faded-VHS title cards keep cutting to a retro blue screen, like someone's using a fuzzy old tape to record new TV. The familiar has become unfamiliar. Where did Better Call Saul go?

You could argue the show, and its title character, have assumed a new identity. In Omaha, the runaway Saul Goodman disappears behind the mustache of Gene Takavic, previously relegated to season-opening flashforwards. In a sudden-onset trilogy of episodes — "Nippy," "Breaking Bad," and "Waterworks" — Gene takes center stage, complete with a new supporting cast. There's cabbie Jeff ( Pat Healy ), a textbook failure-to-launcher who lives with concerned mom Marion ( Carol Burnett ). Jeff's pal Buddy (Max Bickelhaup) becomes the third man in Gene's criminal crew, as the gang springs from a luxury-fashion mall heist into regular defraudings of Omaha's rowdiest business bros. We've shifted from Mega- Saul to Nega- Saul , the show shorn of any obvious signifiers beyond the presence of Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn.

The episodes aren't just about Monochromatic Omaha. (MonochrOmaha?) "Breaking Bad" features long-promised cameos in Albuquerque flashbacks. "Waterworks" reveals Kim's future as a Florida phantom. But Gene gets primo real estate. Episodes start and end with him: Staring at a loud shirt-and-tie combo, bashing a window open at a mark's house. Trust the Saul writers for fearful symmetry. "Nippy" begins the Omaha trilogy when Saul meets Marion, conning her toward friendship with a sob story about a lost dog. "Waterworks" pushes those characters together for a disturbing, revelatory climax. Suspicious about her son's recent arrest, Marion Asks Jeeves about Albuquerque Con Men. Up pops Saul Goodman, clear as day. "There never was a Nippy, was there?" she asks. It's a hall of fame moment for 89-year-old Burnett, majestic and betrayed, tough but visibly heartbroken.

I have no idea what will happen on Monday. It's possible the finale (titled "Saul Gone") will reunite key cast members in a colorful flashback. It's equally possible that the few yet living main characters will meet again in the far future of, like, 2022. Maybe Gene assumes yet another identity. Maybe the finale is a Slippin' Jimmy feature cartoon. Maybe the four actresses who've played Kaylee Ehrmantraut will join forces to rescue the Kaylee-verse. It's certainly possible the last episode will immediately undercut literally everything I am about to say.

But I've noticed a wild array of feelings about the last few episodes. Anecdotally, I've heard love, hate, bafflement, frustration, intellectual admiration without real enjoyment, abject adoration, and everything in between. Personally, I'm in the "masterpiece" camp. This is the best and boldest run of final episodes of any TV drama I've ever seen. The biggest TV dramas tend to go volcano with their endings, ramping toward murderous climaxes or (thanks to bigger budgets and the mainstream embrace of fantasy) worlds afire. Saul did the showdown thing four episodes ago. Now we're in much freakier territory. To carry forward the Mordor analogy, we're in "Scouring of the Shire" territory now: The long sad aftermath, a feeling that what is broken will only get broker.

So I understand the clash of opinions. The Omaha shift feels singular, and willfully unconcerned about frustration. Here's a TV show with a clearly defined setting and cast — and in its final days, it's going new places with a lot of new people. Factor in Breaking Bad as part of the narrative, and you have characters like Mike and Gus with a decade-plus of screen history who have less role in the endgame than Buzz from Home Alone . The appearances by Bad 's stars feel cannily low-key, avoiding any moments of canonical drama. It would've been easy to reintroduce Walter White ( Bryan Cranston ) in his Heisenberg shadowgod peak, giving a One Who Knocks level speech to worshipful Saul. Instead, the show opted for Walt and Jesse ( Aaron Paul ) at their most Laurel and Hardy. (There's even a lingering poignance to Healy's splendid and sweaty performance; because actor Don Harvey didn't return, Gene can't even hang out with the original Jeff anymore .)

The mind leaps for comparisons. In the AMC pantheon, you could note how Mad Men 's final phase sent ad man Don Draper ( Jon Hamm ) on a cross-country quest. The ending trapped him in hippie Eden, only reachable by telephone. But Mad Men never left the rest of the cast behind — and the concluding smile retconned the whole tangent as a career-capping ad campaign. HBO's The Leftovers split everyone up on a climactic trip to Australia, but that show was always doing weird tangents.

It also lasted, like, three brisk seasons. Actually, over the course of Saul 's life, the whole notion of a six-or-seven-season TV drama has faded. Hourlongs have shrunk and grown in either direction, caught between the rise of limited series and the corporate insistence on endless universes. Meanwhile, the grinding mechanics of streaming content edge Saul -adjacent material (see: Ozark ) into three or four (boring, disappointing) seasons. I have patiently waited almost 1,200 words to compare Saul 's last act to Twin Peaks: The Return , another franchise extension that threw audience expectations to the wind. Consider: A central famous protagonist ( Kyle MacLachlan 's Dale Cooper) spent most of the Showtime revival living under different identities in far-flung locations. And the mood of Twin Peaks ' black-hole finale captures something of MonochrOmaha's deflation: An empty feeling that the characters have outlasted their own show, and are cut off from everyone they ever loved.

No fair, though. The Return was a single-season beneficiary of the miniseries and universe trends, picking up a legacy narrative for an 18-Hour Movie. Meanwhile, a more recent show like Atlanta (ending in season 4) can lose its whole cast for a few episodes, because savvy viewers expect anthology aspirations from any out-there sitcom. Better Call Saul has just been doing the damn thing as a single ongoing story right up to episode 63.

So the best comparison is the most obvious one. Breaking Bad revved toward its own finish line with the emotionally devastating "Ozymandias," then concluded with a redemptive bulletstorm in "Felina." In between those two hours came "Granite State," a chilly trip to New Hampshire purgatory. Fugitive Walt lives entrapped in a nowhere cabin. He pays his handler for casual conversation: Shades of Saul begging his secretary Francesca to gossip awhile, after he leaves her some money by a lonely telephone booth. The former meth-cooking dark lord quietly disintegrates, wracked by cancer, nothing to do but watch bad DVDs.

"Granite State" was written and directed by Peter Gould, who became Saul 's showrunner and guiding light. No big jump to see the black-and-white Saul episodes as an expansion of that Bad episode's breakaway sensibility. Of course, Walt leaves New Hampshire with a clear mission — and as awful a human being as he had become, it was hard not to root for him against Jesse-imprisoning literal Nazis.

Amazingly, Saul 's approach to its own finale has been much, much more downbeat. A phone call to Kim sends Gene down a bad choice road, hustling new cons while he drinks more and takes pointless risks. Crucial to note, I think, that the Omaha crimes are exciting . The robbery in "Nippy" gets the full Ocean's Eleven treatment, with snowbound rehearsals for a down-to-the-millisecond scheme that's nearly undone by a pratfall. Likewise, the "Waterworks" break-in is a feat of tension, with multiple moving parts (the sleeper is awaking! The cops are outside!). The new settings seem to re-inspire Saul 's zest for montages, whether we're watching Gene get closer to his rubes or quickly learning about Kim's new suburban-ennui reality.

Is it brutal to cut the leads off from each other this late in the game? Yes, but with a purpose. I think Odenkirk and Seehorn are both delivering career-best work, partially because their character's circumstances are a silent torment. They're both living in secret; their eyes are tinted windows into tortured souls. To keep friendly Frank ( Jim O'Heir ) from checking the security monitors, Gene rambles a speech that becomes a confession: "I got no one. My parents are dead… my brother is dead… I got no wife. No kids. No friends. If I died tonight, no one would care." Odenkirk's giving performances within the performance: You see the excited realization that the distraction is working, and the simultaneous realization that every sad thing he's saying is true. Kim offers her own confession in "Waterworks" — and then falls to pieces in an airport bus, crying under the weight of years of guilt and disappointment. Their single phone call is actually two devastating scenes witnessed on separate occasions from both perspectives: Jimmy/Gene's destructive rage, Kim's horrified stillness.

Is Saul heading for its own "Felina," a high-octane ending with a conclusive showdown? Or will "Saul Gone" venture further into the unknown? I'm already forever haunted by the moment when Marion figures out her new friend's true identity, and Gene starts wrapping a telephone cord around his hands. "I'm still the good friend you thought I was, okay?" he promises. "Jeff understands me. Buddy understands me. And you will, too."

He sounds pitiful, and monstrous. (Freaking Buddy understands you???) Breaking Bad offered Walt one final big awesome moment, mowing down badder guys and rescuing his old partner. Will Saul be so kind? Or will this most wanted man, the former toast of the Albuquerque retirement community, exit his TV life as the guy who almost strangled 89-year-old Carol Burnett? In its final hours, the show has pushed its main characters further than most ever shows dare. Worse for them, Better for us.

Better Call Saul Was a Brilliant Show About the Inevitable Perversion of Justice

Bob Odenkirk as Gene - Better Call Saul _ Season 6, Episode 13 - Photo Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Spoiler alert: This piece discusses, in detail, the series finale of Better Call Saul.

In the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul , which aired its finale on Monday, estranged spouses Kim Wexler and Saul Goodman—né James “Jimmy” McGill and later known as Gene Takovic—reunite to formally dissolve their marriage. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) visits Saul’s (Bob Odenkirk) strip-mall law office, a mecca for petty criminals in search of shady representation, to sign the divorce papers, and her eyes drift to the decor: an absurdly large desk, a statue of Lady Justice with her scales, walls papered with the Constitution and bracketed by Greek revival pillars that recall the Supreme Court building. “What do you think?” Saul asks. “Pretty great, right?” All she can manage to say is: “Yeah, it’s, um… yep.”

Because we’ve gotten to know the intelligent, idealistic Kim so intimately through Seehorn’s riveting performance over the past six seasons, it’s easy to imagine what she’s really thinking: that Saul has made a mockery of the values that brought her and Jimmy, the struggling public defender we meet in the series premiere , together. Once committed to helping the little guy, even if that meant deviating from the letter of the law, he’s now found fortune and fame by surrounding himself with the tackiest signifiers of his profession and building a reputation as the criminal-defense equivalent of an ambulance chaser. There could be no other trajectory for the protagonist of a show about justice and its inevitable perversion. Creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are known for condensing complex themes into potent images, and the episode opens with Saul bouncing a ball off his Constitution wall until a flimsy pillar falls across his desk.

Breaking Bad fans have always known that Saul was heading in this direction. For us, the surprise was that initial glimpse of Jimmy as a reformed scammer turned courtroom crusader. Later, what propelled many of us through the seasons was the attachment we developed to Kim, who turned out to be the show’s moral center—not just the proverbial woman who made Jimmy want to be a better man but a hero in her own right—and who, as many nervously noted, was no longer a part of Saul’s life by the time Walter White walked into it. Contrary to our worst fears, Kim survives. But when she leaves Saul, the last dregs of his professional dignity, of his desire to serve justice rather than to settle scores or line his own pockets, trickle out behind her.

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Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler - Better Call Saul _ Season 6, Episode 13 - Photo Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

In the first scene after Kim departs from the apartment they shared, Saul wakes up tangled in garish, tiger-print bedding, next to a snoring sex worker. His new home has a Baroque-via-Versace aesthetic, with lots of gold paint, stained-glass windows, and wall-sized replicas of fleshy Renaissance art. “I’m so sorry, I’m getting another call,” he tells a client, before putting down his phone and taking a blow dryer to his audacious comb-over. His breakfast is a Nutri-Grain bar in a plastic wrapper that boasts “real fruit.” Upon arriving at his office, he hangs a disability parking permit in his window. A mammoth inflatable Statue of Liberty, tethered to the building’s roof, waves in the wind. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” he declares into the intercom at his desk, in an empty invocation of a legal maxim after Kim’s own heart. Every element of his life without her is a lie or a fake or a reproduction or a performance. The idea of justice is a sick joke. “It’s showtime,” Saul says in the finale, as his criminal trial begins.

His story line is hardly the only one in the show to constitute a travesty of justice. Earlier in the same episode, Mike Ehrmantraut (the great Jonathan Banks) tracks down the father of Nacho Varga (Michael Mando, an undersung member of an ideal cast), whose murder at the hands of the bloodthirsty Salamanca family he was ultimately compelled to abet. “Your son made some mistakes,” says Mike, clearly thinking of his own broken boy . “He fell in with bad people. But he was never like ’em, not really. He had a good heart.” At least “you won’t have to worry about the Salamancas. Their day is coming. There will be justice.” Nacho’s father shakes his head. “What you talk about is not justice. What you talk of is revenge,” he says, before adding, in Spanish: “You gangsters and your ‘justice.’ You’re all the same.” His words wound Mike, who likes to think his hypercompetence and lack of malice separate him from monsters like the Salamancas. But the father is right. Vigilante violence is also a perversion of justice; so was the fate of Nacho, a young man with immense potential who spent years trying to escape the criminal underworld.

Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill, Michael McKean as Chuck McGill - Better Call Saul _ Season 6, Episode 13 - Photo Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

In the opposite corner of the moral matrix—the lawful evil to Nacho’s chaotic good, if you will—sits Saul’s late brother Chuck (Michael McKean), whose obsession with laws and legitimacy helped catalyze his descent into suicide midway through the show’s run. Chuck’s concept of justice, which privileged rules above genuine ethics or benign intentions, was at least as hollow and self-serving as Mike’s own moral code. The finale reminds us of that, in a flashback where Jimmy delivers groceries to his housebound brother, who responds to the ice-packed cooler of food by sniffing: “I’m hoping you didn’t steal that from a hotel ice machine.” (After Chuck’s death, the show explored the dire consequences of hypocritical, elitist mindsets like his across a justice system that doesn’t truly believe in rehabilitation.) Jimmy’s devolution into Saul is depressing, in part, because of the extent to which his justice-themed kitsch echoes Chuck’s superficial grasp of what it means to be a good lawyer. Both brothers hide their selfish motives in the letter of the law; in Saul’s case, said text just happens to be printed on his office walls.

Read more: How Better Call Saul’s Final Season Connects to Breaking Bad

Only Kim ends up living by a definition of justice that isn’t clouded by self-interest, and that existence is anything but glamorous. A snoozy desk job in Florida, a boyfriend who frets over the right kind of mayonnaise to put in a potato salad, a group of interchangeable girlfriends, a mousy dye job that literally hides her light—this is the artificially sweetened, Miracle Whip version of a life. And she very nearly manages to blow up that sun-drenched purgatory when she confesses her role in the death of Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) to both his widow and the DA. Kim has suffered more than enough for the harm she and her ex-husband caused together, yet at one point in the series finale it seems inevitable that she’ll be ruined by civil, if not criminal, charges in yet another miscarriage of justice perpetrated by Saul Goodman.

Instead, in a final twist that made me gasp out loud, he takes advantage of the broken system to give her the vindication she deserves. Representing himself at his trial, he lures Kim to court with the suggestion that he’s going to throw her under the bus and gives one of his signature speeches, the kind that has already convinced the prosecutor to offer a plea deal that would reduce Saul’s sentence to just seven years to avoid having to trust a jury to see through his performance of victimhood. But this time, he uses his power to manipulate the system for an unselfish purpose: to divert all the blame, more than even he should have to shoulder, onto himself. And he does a virtuosic job, landing himself a whopping 86 years behind bars.

Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler, Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman - Better Call Saul _ Season 6, Episode 13 - Photo Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

His subsequent, arguably well-earned, reclamation of his good name, Jimmy McGill, fails. On the bus en route to prison, his fellow criminals immediately recognize him as the guy from the commercials and start chanting “Better Call Saul.” But he’s Jimmy again to Kim, when she comes to visit him in the slammer, looking partially recovered from her flop era with the curl back in her hair, and they smoke one more cigarette against the wall together. If his fatal flaw was an inability to stop scheming, then hers was an irrepressible propensity to trust an unjust system. Jimmy’s great act of heroism was to use his inherent crookedness to give Kim the justice her inherent honesty never would’ve yielded. Forget Bridgerton —that’s a romance for the ages.

And it’s a conclusion that rings true to real life in the present-day U.S. More often than not, when a TV series is described as timely or relevant it’s because it literally parallels a specific cultural moment: a show about workplace sexual harassment in the #MeToo era, or a show about a pandemic during a pandemic. Among the many elements that distinguished Saul from Breaking Bad —and made it the superior of the two classics—was its rigorous engagement with justice, a preoccupation whose creeping pessimism proved timely in a more artful, profound way. Debuting in the long lead-up to the 2016 election, it unfurled its disconcerting observations into a culture inundated with misinformation and disinformation, Constitutional crises and Supreme Court chaos, where laws protecting women’s bodily autonomy are struck down while laws that would save children from being gunned down at school almost never gain traction.

If The Wire became a classic by showing us the crumbling of America’s institutions, then Better Call Saul deserves a place in the canon for the vividness with which it captured something less tangible but more elemental: Americans’ crumbling faith in the values that once gave those institutions meaning. It leaves us with a final question, too: Is the perversion of justice inevitable in any society, under any circumstances, or just within this particular society and the justice system it has built? If only Kim Wexler were a real person, I’d call her up and ask.

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Amc’s ‘better call saul’ season 6: tv review.

The fates of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), Kim (Rhea Seehorn), Mike (Jonathan Banks) and more hang in the balance as the 'Breaking Bad' prequel enters the first half of its sixth and final season.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill - Better Call Saul

As AMC’s Better Call Saul stands at the precipice of its sixth and final season (or technically, the first half of a supersized final season that will be broken up into two parts , just like the final season of its predecessor Breaking Bad ), there’s a sense that its narrative possibilities are simultaneously expanding and contracting.

On one hand, the bigger picture seems to be falling into place, paying off years of meticulous plotting as its characters’ disparate fates finally converge somewhere in the hellish sprawl of the Albuquerque underworld. On the other, we already know more or less where the limits of that bigger picture lie, having seen the aftermath of Better Call Saul already on Breaking Bad .

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10 Great Movies To Watch If You Liked “Better Call Saul”

The sixth and final season of AMC television series ‘Better Call Saul’ concluded in August 15, 2022 with a 69-minute capper that gave us one last chance at saying goodbye to our favorite TV lawyer in Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), and brought the entire ‘Breaking Bad’ universe to satisfying conclusion. Eight years ago when the prequel show was announced, many scoffed at the idea of a ‘Breaking Bad’ comedy spin-off centered around the shady and cowardly lawyer that aided Walter White in becoming a feared meth kingpin. But if this final stretch run by co-creator Vince Gilligan has cemented anything, is that ‘Better Call Saul’ didn’t just ride to coattails of its parent show, but built upon its foundation to become one of the flagship dramas of the past decade — with many putting it on the same pedestal as ‘Breaking Bad’.

We have assembled ten movies that should come in handy once you’ve completed all six seasons. The series might be over, but these titles should keep you covered while you cope with the post-binge blues.

1. Sicario (2015)

There’s two types of ‘Better Call Saul’ aficionados — the first can’t get enough of Jimmy’s (il)legal shenanigans, while others gravitates towards the classic crime subplots involving the Salamanca clan, Gustavo Fring and Eladio Fuente among many others. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking both aspects of the show, but if you fancy yourself as part of the second group, and you’re currently aching for more high-wire cartel-drama down south the Mexican border, we have just the right film for you.

‘Sicario’ is an uncompromising look at the unwinnable and perpetual War on Drugs that continues to ravage North America as seen through the eyes of an FBI task force that is sent near the border to conduct an elaborate drug-busting operation. You might have recently heard of the man behind the camera, Denis Villeneuve, for his 2021 space epic adaptation of ‘Dune’. ‘Sicario’ is no less accomplished, with plenty of bravura sequences that will keep you on the edge of your seat, more notably an unforgettable raid scene at Juárez. If you liked watching Saul and Mike down on their luck trying to smuggle $7 million in bail money through the desert in season five’s ‘Bagman’, this film will scratch that itch.

2. No Country for Old Men (2007)

Vince Gilligan knows that having a compelling villain is tantamount to creating compelling drama. From Tuco, Fring, the Twins, Jack Welker and his neo-nazi gang to Walter White himself, ‘Breaking Bad’ delivered those in spades. The creators proudly continued the tradition all throughout ‘Better Call Saul’, with Lalo Salamanca quickly establishing himself as one of the top-tier foes ever penned by the showrunner.

Critics and fans have recently sung the praises of Tony Dalton for his unforgettable turn in ‘Saul’. But when it comes to on-screen villains in recent memory, few can compare to the laconic, bowl-cut serial killer seen in this Best Picture-winning movie by the Coen Brothers. Anton Chighurn, masterfully brought to life by heavyweight actor Javier Bardem, not only took the world — and moviegoers — by storm, but instantly bled into the zeitgeist to become this generation’s Villain with capital-V. Watching this psychopathic hitman chase off a trail of money and savagely destroy everything and everyone in his wake can only be described as a morbidly enthralling spectacle. From the visual palette, slow-burn narrative, and existential dread that pervades all throughout the film, it’s no wonder ’No Country for Old Men’ has been cited as an inspiration for the series.

3. Uncut Gems (2019)

Jimmy McGill, later known as Saul Goodman, can be described in layman’s terms as a proverbial loser who knows no better than to dangle on the edge of oblivion time and time again against his better judgment. And yet, whether it’s watching him forge legal documents, prank coworkers, rob malls or manipulate sweet old ladies, there’s an unmistakable charm to good ol’ Jimmy that makes us grudgingly root for him to get away with it all.

Our next film is one that follows yet another flawed but loveable anti-hero who, much like Jimmy, gets roped into chaotic spirals of self-obliteration at every turn. The man in question is one Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a compulsive Manhattan diamond dealer who keeps pushing his luck through a series of unhinged gambling sprees involving basketball legend Kevin Garnett, a mysterious Ethiopian black opal, and an ever-growing black hole of mounting debts. Sibling directors Josh and Benny Safdie have already established themselves as second to none when it comes to getting under our skin, and it’s hard to argue against ‘Gems’ being their most exasperating film to date.

We dare you to sit through the entire thing and not be reminded of Jimmy’s chicanery as you watch Adam Sandler run crazy loops around his life.

4. Nobody (2021)

It would be downright criminal to make a list of ‘Better Call Saul’ recommendations without featuring both the heart and soul of the show himself, Mr. Bob Odenkirk. Though mostly known for his comedic chops after cutting his teeth for years on SNL, the actor nevertheless managed to land a juicy lead role in a blood-pumping, high-testosterone action flick from the same writers that brought you ‘John Wick’.

Odenkirk brings all the dry wit and easy presence we’ve grown to love him for as Hutch Mansell, a depressingly boring middle-aged suburban dad whose daily routine involves reading spreadsheets, pouring coffee, and feeling emasculated at home. That is, until his seemingly mundane existence comes crashing down in front of his eyes after a couple of burglars invade his home. What follows is an ultimate middle-aged man revenge fantasy where this hapless loser stops at nothing to lay waste on his perpetrators. If that sounds awfully similar to the 2014 Keanu-led actioner, it’s because the writers did rehash the same story beats and motifs here. But hey, watching good guy Bob kick some ass and pull off sick stunts is arguably worth the price of admission alone.

5. Fargo (1996)

It can be argued that some of the best comedies in recent memory have been delivered under the guise of prestigious crime drama. David Lynch and Mark Frost paved the way back in 1990 with ‘Twin Peaks’, a groundbreaking, dreamy soap opera that ran the gamut from jovial to cheesy to utterly terrifying throughout its three seasons. HBO’s ‘The Sopranos’, the landmark series that followed the exploits of a depressed New Jersey mob boss, soon became the measuring stick by which all other dark comedies would be judged in television, after essentially setting the template for subsequent hit cable dramas like ‘Mad Men’, ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Barry’ or ‘Better Call Saul’.

All of the aforementioned shows share one fundamental trait; seamlessly blending humor and violence only to find bitter irony in the twists of fate and absurdity of crime. Arguably no film encapsulates these themes better than ‘Fargo’, the dark comedy to rule all dark comedies — a stone-cold classic constructed upon a pileup of reckless misconceptions, greedy losers, mild-mannered cops with folksy charm, and petty criminals undone by their own carelessness. Any enthusiast of the Coen movie is obviously encouraged to check out the phenomenal FX television series the 1996 film inspired if they haven’t already.

Review: As ‘Better Call Saul’ Returns, ‘Breaking Bad’ Comes Into View

In the fifth season of AMC’s esteemed drama, Jimmy McGill completes his transformation into Saul Goodman and the show’s separate story lines also start to converge.

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By Mike Hale

“Better Call Saul” begins its fifth season, per established practice, with a black-and-white, vérité-style peek into the grim future of the shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). Fearing that his cover as an anonymous fast-food manager has been blown, he’s descending into paranoia, camped in his dark apartment, peeking through the blinds.

These season-opening scenes serve as a kind of narrative relief valve, alleviating some of the sense of determinism inherent in a show that’s a prequel to a series, “Breaking Bad,” whose events and characters tended to have big, bold outlines. This time around, though, the flash forward offers an unexpected bit of fan service: an appearance by the vacuum cleaner repairman Ed Galbraith, played, as he was in “Breaking Bad” and the film “El Camino,” by the great character actor Robert Forster, who died in October .

Forster’s brief, characteristically businesslike turn in “Better Call Saul” is like a blessing, and it reinforces a tone: laconic, no-nonsense, amused by life’s absurdities but rarely taken by surprise. As with so many of Forster’s roles, you suspect he is there to show you how the creators (in this case Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould) would like to see themselves and their story.

So in Season 5, which begins Sunday on AMC , the best thing about “Better Call Saul” is still its minimalism, its quiet spaces, its willingness to linger on details, like a frazzled prosecutor’s struggle to get a bag of chips out of a courthouse vending machine.

But “Better Call Saul” is also on a clock. We know where Jimmy is headed, and in the opening episodes of the new season (four were made available) the springs of the narrative start to tighten more noticeably.

Jimmy’s assumption of the even smarmier, less scrupulous persona of Saul Goodman, begun at the end of Season 4 , is quickly completed, over the protests of his girlfriend and fellow lawyer, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn). And Jimmy’s story arc, focused through four seasons on his problematic law career and his relationships with Kim and his overbearing older brother Chuck ( Michael McKean ), finally definitively crosses over with that of the drug-dealing rivals Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton).

A hiccup in the Salamanca supply line, detailed in the style of studiously deadpan comedy at which the show excels, brings Jimmy in, and as the cartel lieutenant Nacho (Michael Mando) tells him, “When you’re in, you’re in.” Once there, he encounters a pair of DEA agents, Hank and Steven (Dean Norris and Steven Michael Quezada). And voilà, the outlines of “Breaking Bad” start to come into focus.

All of this is presented with the show’s usual high degree of technical and dramatic accomplishment, and its alternately peppery and dreamlike evocations of the Southwestern landscape, urban and desert. There may be a downside, though, if a slight one, to the approach of the show’s inevitable conclusion and a perceived need to lock in on its themes. In the new season it pauses occasionally to spell out Jimmy’s reasons for becoming Saul (as Jimmy, he’d always be Chuck’s loser brother), as if the flow of the story itself isn’t enough to persuade us, which might be true.

A comic montage shows a couple of stoners going on a spree of petty crime, drug use and general life wastage because of Saul’s offer of a 50 percent discount on legal services. A subplot involves Kim’s being forced to leave her pro bono work to do a job for her corporate employer, Mesa Verde, forcing an old man out of his house. (The codger is played by Barry Corbin, another instance of the show giving work to accomplished veteran actors.)

Both of those sequences are handled faultlessly, but they’re also a little more on the nose than we’re used to from “Better Call Saul” — they push us just a little harder than we need to be pushed toward appreciating Jimmy’s corruption and Kim’s ambivalence. (The same could be said of a repeated motif in which episodes end with scenes of broken, castoff objects — a garden gnome, an ice cream cone, bottles of beer.)

To repeat a contrarian view that I’ve advanced before , my attention is more likely to flag during the Jimmy-Kim American-dream scenes than it is during the scenes from the drug plot, which may be more formulaic but are imbued with humor, tension and their own nuances of feeling. (For the other side of the argument, read my colleague James Poniewozik here .)_

Part of this has to do with the presence, on that side of the show, of engaging performers like Esposito, Jonathan Banks as the steadfast enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut (having his own moral crisis now, after the killing of the gentle German engineer, Werner) and especially Dalton as the charismatic Lalo, a wonderful creation whose menace is ever-present and hardly visible. The more we see of them, as the story lines converge, the better for “Better Call Saul.”

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

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‘Better Call Saul’ Creator Explains the Series Finale

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

This post contains spoilers for the Better Call Saul series finale.

Fourteen years ago, Peter Gould wrote an episode of Breaking Bad , “Better Call Saul,” where he was tasked with introducing a character who would serve two purposes: 1) provide legal expertise to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, so that it would be more plausible when they kept eluding law enforcement; and 2) bring back some of the humor that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan worried that the show was losing as Walt and Jesse’s arcs both turned darker. Beyond that, and the casting of Bob Odenkirk in the role, no one gave much thought to who Saul was, let alone believed he would one day anchor a prequel series — also titled Better Call Saul — that would come to rival the reputation of Breaking Bad itself.

Now that prequel has come to an end, with Gould (who co-created the spinoff with Gilligan) appropriately serving as writer and director for the series finale, which we recapped here . Gould spoke with Rolling Stone about why he chose to end the series with Jimmy/Saul going to prison, bringing Walt back for one final conversation with his criminal lawyer, what he thinks happens to Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler, and a lot more.

When we spoke after Season Five, you said that while you were writing that year’s episodes, “the fog started to clear slightly about where we were going with all of this.” Is what you were planning then what you ultimately wound up doing? It’s similar, but not exactly. What we started realizing was that the right ending for Saul was for him to be in the justice system, as a suspect and ultimately a convict, rather than a lawyer. This guy has lived in the justice system, he’s made a farce of it, he’s played it. And it just felt like that was the right place to end the series: him behind bars. But that was pretty much all we had back then.

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How important was it to the end of Kim’s story that Jimmy be behind bars? I think that Kim was on her own journey. I don’t know that Jimmy being behind bars is axiomatic for her. But I think the fact that they both confess, they both unloaded their consciences, they are both living more honest lives, that is the core of the ending.

You bring Walt back one last time. And like in the Breaking Bad finale, “Felina,” you have the main character coming back to Albuquerque, making some amends for what he did, and getting some small measure of satisfaction. Were you thinking about that at all when you did this? When I thought of “Felina,” mostly what I thought of was, it’s such a big, rip-roaring episode that Vince wrote and directed. It was so right for Breaking Bad . I knew that the ending of this show was going to have a different feel. It did feel right to have these two guys, Saul and Walt, in one last scene, which kind of touches on their reluctance to really be honest with themselves about what they’ve done and who they are, and what their true regrets are. Neither one of them can really quite bring himself to speak the truth.

I’ve been asking some of the other writers on the show, including Vince , what they would change about Saul or Breaking Bad if they had a time machine. And now you’ve gone and made that question part of the text of this show! So I have to ask if there’s anything you would change about either series, just to have made your life easier on this one. It’s a difficult question, because usually the things in the writers room that we struggled with on either show, where we said, “Oh, if only we had done that differently,” those problems led to an interesting solution. So it’s really hard for me to wish that things were easier, because having them be a little difficult was helpful. There’s that old Orson Welles quotes that “lack of limits is the enemy of art.” Sometimes having to live with choices that you’ve made makes things more fun.

If I were going to pick one thing — and it’s hard to say I’d want to change it, because it seemed so right — it’s what a scumwad Saul was to Francesca on Breaking Bad . We got there [on Better Call Saul ], but only barely.

Can you think of a specific example where the struggle to work around the plot of Breaking Bad led to a more interesting solution? The obvious one is the Lalo-Ignacio dialogue that Saul was spouting in the first episode where we met him: “It wasn’t me, it was Ignacio!” And “You’re not with Lalo?” For a long time, we were wondering, “What the hell is he talking about?” And even after we had Nacho, who was obviously Ignacio, we asked, “What did he do?” And how is Lalo involved? We just didn’t know. It really helped guide us to where we landed. That was certainly one of them. But the other thing is, why on earth does he have that crazy office? What was the point of it? What is he really after? And ultimately, the question that we started with, which seemed insolvable, which is: What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?

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The version of Better Call Saul that we’ve been watching since 2015 basically ends with “Fun and Games.” The cartel characters mostly don’t appear again, the main title sequence is different, and the focus is almost entirely on Jimmy and Kim. Why did you decide to structure the season like that? There’s a lot of different pieces to the show, but ultimately, the through-line, the core, the emotion of the show, is about this guy’s journey — about Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill/Gene Takavic, his journey. We felt like just answering the question of how he became Saul Goodman wasn’t enough. We wanted to know, was there ever a chance for this guy, even in a small way, to redeem — redeem is a big word, I don’t know if he redeems himself, but is he always going to be trapped in this cycle that he has been in? It felt right to continue the story, because the man’s life continued. Of course, that was the idea, really from the beginning. That’s why we started the way we did, at the very beginning of the show, of showing Gene Takavic, and coming back to the Gene story. I think we would have really left something on the table if we hadn’t finished the Gene story.

Walt appears again, you bring both Chuck and Marie Schrader back as well. Were there any other characters you wanted to include in the finale but couldn’t? Oh, man. You’re talking to the writer-director of the episode. I would have loved to have Patrick Fabian back, to have Dean Norris back. Anna Gunn would have been great if it fit in the story. I love our entire cast. Giancarlo Esposito is one of the best, most fun actors to work with there is. So I would have wanted them all. I’m greedy. We didn’t want to make a kind of overstuffed epic, and I hope we didn’t. We wanted it to feel like a drama, and not like a collection of scenes. I would have absolutely brought them back. And of course Michael Mando, Nacho’s shadow hangs over the whole season. The feeling I had about this episode was that it was a little bit like A Christmas Carol . Gene becomes Saul, and he’s visited by three ghosts. And each time he’s visited by one of these ghosts, you realize this guy is trapped in the cycle. It’s not an exact analogy, but hopefully those flashbacks help to illuminate the change that he’s making in this episode. He’s making a change, and it’s a tough thing to do.

To your mind, do you think what Saul does in the hearing will get Kim out of legal trouble with Cheryl? No, I don’t. I think that Kim is on her own journey, and I think he knows that. He does feel bad about what’s happening with Cheryl. But I don’t think Kim would like it if Jimmy pulled some maneuver that protected her from Cheryl. He doesn’t save her; she saves her . They’re done with saving each other by this time. What he sees is that she had the courage to face what she’s done. And she did something that I don’t think Jimmy/Gene ever thought she would do, which is not only to turn herself in, but actually to sit across from Cheryl Hamlin, who they both lied to disgustingly, and be 100 percent truthful.

Over the years, whenever I’ve asked you if Jimmy was really Saul yet, you’ve said that in the scripts, you would keep referring to him as “Jimmy” as long as Kim did — i.e., until the transformation was complete. I’m curious if his name in the script and stage directions for this episode kept shifting in the black and white scenes of this episode, or if you just used one of Jimmy, Saul, or Gene throughout. Since this is an episode where he goes from Gene to Saul and, eventually, back to Jimmy, I was pretty careful to use the name that felt “right” at every moment. I called those moments out in the script. [Gould emailed me: “Here’s a screenshot of one of the pages to illustrate.”]

Finally, Vince says that, at least for now, this is the conclusion of the Heisenberg universe. You’ve been doing this for 15 years. how does it feel to be at the end of it? I haven’t figured out how I feel about it. It’s really upsetting. In my daily life, the thing that’s most upsetting is that I’m not seeing all my collaborators and co-consiprators on the show every day. My life for the last 15 years has had a very regular rhythm of going into the writers room, of being on set, of being in post. It’s the wonderful thing about this job. Just when you’re exhausted with one phase of it, the next phase begins. In my heart, I keep feeling like we’re about to reopen the writers room for Season Seven. But of course, that’s not happening. My fervent hope is that as many of us as possible get to work together again. And, of course, these characters mean so much to me. I love writing all of them, but especially I love writing Jimmy, and Kim, and Mike. Their voices, I’m going to have to really struggle, in whatever I do in the future, not to have those voices peek through. They’re deep in my heart and deep in my soul, and I don’t think that’s ever going to end.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, amc’s better call saul returns as confident as ever.

“Yesterday was bad. Today, I’m gonna fix it.” – Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn)

AMC’s brilliant “Better Call Saul” is about many things, but an undercurrent of trying to “fix yesterday” definitely courses through all five seasons of the show. Jimmy McGill ( Bob Odenkirk ) was first trying to fix the yesterday of his conman past, going as straight as possible before realizing that his brother would never let yesterday go. Now he’s trying to fix the yesterday of Jimmy McGill by discarding that entire part of his existence, becoming Saul Goodman, an attorney who offers 50% and only half-considers how that may encourage his new clients to commit crimes they may otherwise not commit. Meanwhile, Mike Ehrmantraut ( Jonathan Banks ) is unable to fix the yesterday of his complicity in the death of his son, while Kim is stuck between the perceived authority of Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill, the pro bono work she finds more satisfying, and uncertainty as to whether or not she cares for Saul Goodman in the way she did for Jimmy McGill.

After the longest season-opening “flash-forward” to date, season five picks up close to where we left off last year. As it has for four full seasons before, “Better Call Saul” tracks multiple plotlines over the first four episodes. The main arc is that of Jimmy finally becoming Saul, owning the name, the style, and the bravado that he would be known for on “Breaking Bad.” He uses the networks created by the burner phones to find the people in Albuquerque who may need something better than a public defender but can’t afford Howard Hamlin. The writing on this show is so nuanced that one can track the gradual steps from Jimmy to Saul over the first four seasons, and see how what has happened to him with his brother, HHM, Kim, and others has brought him here. And he’s still trying to do some good by helping those in need of good counsel—at least, he can still convince himself he’s doing some good.

Kim Wexler isn’t so sure. One of the first arcs involves a man (played by the wonderful Barry Corbin ) who is adamantly unwilling to leave the land needed by one of Wexler’s high-profile clients. He will legally be forced to leave because of a stipulation in his deed that allows them to buy it out from him at barely over market price, but there’s an interesting parallel being drawn between Saul’s work and Kim’s. Everyone is running some sort of scam or con—it’s just in different clothing.

The start of season five also brings back a theme of process and structure to a show that has often taken the time to detail how things get done. We see more of the internal operation of Gus Fring ( Giancarlo Esposito ) as he deals with the fallout over the Mexicans learning too much about his business. Tony Dalton is excellent as Lalo Salamanca, who starts digging around Fring’s business in a way that puts Nacho (the always underrated Michael Mando ) in a tough spot. Finally, as the previews have revealed, season five of “Better Call Saul” brings back a serious feeling of yesterday with the return of Dean Norris and Steven Michael Quezada as DEA Agents Hank Schrader and Steven Gomez, respectively. Seeing Hank in this world again poignantly connects “Saul” through “Bad” and even “ El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie .” Without spoilers, he’s on the edge of the Fring operation in a way that makes it feel even more tragic that he won’t connect the dots for years.

Where does “Better Call Saul” go from here? One of many remarkable things about “Saul” is how the writers have defied the common trap of prequels in that we still feel urgency even though we know that nothing too bad can happen to Saul, Mike, Gus, and now Hank because that wouldn’t line up with “Breaking Bad.” (Although I worry more about Kim with each passing episode.) Somehow, we still feel the immediacy of their situations in ways that “Bad” didn’t even do given how breakneck that show was in its pacing. The truly remarkable accomplishments of “Better Call Saul” that make it arguably the best drama on TV are in the subtlety and nuance of the characters—both in terms of writing and performance. It’s in the relatability of how they’re often just fighting to figure out how to get through the day, and sometimes too concerned about fixing yesterday to do what they should be doing—worrying about tomorrow.

Four episodes screened for review

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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SPOILER ALERT : Do not read if you have not watched the series finale of “ Better Call Saul ,” titled “Saul Gone.”

More than seven years after “Better Call Saul” began, and 13 years after Bob Odenkirk first popped up as the sleazy lawyer in “Breaking Bad,” his story has come to a close — and Saul is behind bars.

After a little United States v. Saul Goodman legal action, the now-reformed Jimmy McGill ended up with 86 years in prison as Walter White’s “indispensable” criminal lawyer. After going down a dark path the past few seasons, Saul finally turned a corner and confessed to all of his crimes, clearing Kim Wexler’s ( Rhea Seehorn ) name.

So how did we get to this (somewhat) happy ending, at least by “Breaking Bad” standards? The episode started with a flashback to “Better Call Saul” Season 5, Episode 8, where Saul and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) are trapped in the desert carrying $7 million. While sweating it out, Saul asks Mike what he would do if he had a time machine and could go back to change something? Mike says he’d go back to the moment he accepted his first bribe, or he’d check on a few people in the years to come. Saul, on the other hand, selfishly would go back in time to when Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway so he could play the stocks and become a trillionaire. This time machine motif continues through the episode, so pay attention.

Then, we pick up where last week’s episode ended: Saul is on the run from the police after Marion (Carol Burnett) LifeAlert-ed them. But finally, Saul’s luck runs out. Everywhere he turns, there are cops. After hiding in a dumpster, Saul tries to dig out a phone to call Ed the Disappearer, but he fumbles everything he’s holding and the police find him.

Saul lands in a prison cell, where he calls his Cinnabon co-workers to tell them they’ll need to find a new manager. Then he convinces Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) to be his advisory counsel in the upcoming trial. At this point, we get our first shocking cameo of the episode: Betsy Brandt is back as Marie Schrader! For the first time since “Breaking Bad,” Marie has returned to put Saul behind bars for the rest of his life.

“They told me they found you in a dumpster. That makes sense,” she tells Saul, tragically recounting how her life has changed in the wake of Hank (Dean Norris) and Steven Gomez’s (Steven Michael Quezada) murder in “Breaking Bad.”

But Saul has a story for himself: He’s been a victim ever since he was kidnapped by Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and forced to do his bidding. To paint a picture of just how violent Walt was, Saul even describes the prison massacre Walt orchestrated, where 10 men were killed in three prisons within two minutes. Ultimately, Saul says he only needs one juror to believe him. His sentence gets reduced to seven years, plus he gets a cushy prison in North Carolina. He even offers to give up the dirt on what happened to Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), but the prosecutors inform him that Kim already gave her confession about the murder.

From here, we jump back to “Breaking Bad” and see what Walt and Saul were up to while they were waiting to get whisked away into their new lives. Saul returns to his question about the time machine, which Walt brushes off as a scientific impossibility, but then says he regrets leaving Gray Matter Technologies, the company he co-founded. When Saul says he regrets pulling a “slip and fall” in his 20s, Walt coldly asks “So, you were always like this?”

Back in Florida, Kim is volunteering for the Central Florida Legal Aid, but Saul is seemingly plotting to betray her — she learns he’s going to testify about Howard’s murder. Now, it’s showtime: the United States v. Saul Goodman commences. Saul, Kim and Marie are in court, as Saul represents himself with Bill Oakley. The judge says Saul’s recommended seven-year sentence is the most generous she’s seen in her career, but before a full-blown courtroom drama can unfold, Saul interrupts to tell his shocking testimony. After being sworn in, Saul pulls a 180 and confesses to all of his crimes with Walter White, almost bragging about how Walt couldn’t have built his drug empire and stayed out of prison without him.

Saul also confesses about how he sabotaged his brother Chuck McGill’s (Michael McKean) career, which led to his suicide. The courtroom erupts in pandemonium. Saul asks to be called James McGill and the prosecution wants the full sentence.

Before we see Saul’s fate, we get another flashback with another surprise guest star: McKean back as Chuck. In his brother’s darkened home, a younger, pre-Saul Jimmy drops off some groceries. In the final reference to time travel and regrets, Chuck tells him that there’s “no shame in going back and changing your path.” It’s then revealed that Chuck has been reading H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine.”

Finally, we see Jimmy, shed from his Saul persona, on a prison bus, surrounded by inmates who recognize him and chant “Better call Saul!” Before Jimmy is locked away for the rest of his life, he gets a visit from Kim, who shares a cigarette with him, just like in the series premiere. We learn he’s been sentenced to 86 years, just a tiny bit higher than the seven years he first negotiated. Once friends, co-workers and lovers, Jimmy and Kim share glances at each other while Jimmy is in the prison yard. With a quick blast of the finger guns, Jimmy is gone. His life of crime has finally caught up to him, and “Better Call Saul” has finally come to an end.

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Better call saul, common sense media reviewers.

Breaking Bad spin-off is a darkly comic tale of ambition.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this TV show.

The series explores how the law can be used to see

Saul Goodman is a lawyer who uses tactics he learn

The main characters are middle-aged and White. Mos

Guns are used to threaten, kill, and hurt people.

Main characters date and have sex under the covers

"F--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "p---y," "d--k," "damn,

The Cinnabon brand is prominently featured; off-sc

Social drinking and cigarette smoking; the illegal

Positive Messages

The series explores how the law can be used to seek justice -- or twisted to protect criminals. Even then, the definition of "justice" is fuzzy.

Positive Role Models

Saul Goodman is a lawyer who uses tactics he learned as a scam artist in order to help criminals. He's unscrupulous and loyal only to himself. Kim Wexler tries her best to do the right thing, even leaving her firm to join a philanthropic cause, but many times she's reduced to being Saul's conscience. Howard Hamlin shows some integrity in his work as Saul's boss, never allowing him to mix him up in his corrupt cases, but he comes off as cocky and arrogant.

Diverse Representations

The main characters are middle-aged and White. Most Mexican and Latino characters are either drug dealers, laborers, or undocumented immigrants, such as Nacho Varga (played by Michael Mando, who's Guinean-German Canadian), a small-time drug dealer who dreams of making it big, or Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito, who's multiracial), a criminal mastermind. Black characters are small-time criminals and ex-convicts; Huell (Lavell Crawford) fits into the stereotype of a built but dim-witted Black sidekick, used for comedic relief. A long story arc portrays senior citizens as gullible and powerless. Most women in the show are someone's mother, daughter, or wife, except for Kim Wexler (Rhea Sehorn), who's a lawyer, but she's often reduced to being Saul's conscience. Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) has a mental illness that manifests as a fear of electromagnetism, which leads other characters to dismiss him to the point that he's forced to retire.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns are used to threaten, kill, and hurt people. The show's first season is the most graphic; someone slits a character's throat, a man's foot gets chopped off with an axe, etc. Violence continues in later seasons, but it becomes less graphic. Many characters die in non-gory ways. Death by suicide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Main characters date and have sex under the covers, implied through moans and movements. Male buttocks are seen several times. Sex workers offer their services.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "p---y," "d--k," "damn," "hell," "son of a bitch," "douche bag," and so on. "Chingar," which means "f--k" in Mexican Spanish, is used as well.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The Cinnabon brand is prominently featured; off-screen, the chain has sponsored several Saul-themed promotions. Better Call Saul is also part of the Breaking Bad franchise, which includes movie, video game, and TV spin-offs.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking and cigarette smoking; the illegal drug trade factors prominently in the plot. Methamphetamine and cocaine are smoked and snorted. Characters who sell drugs often handle packages of meth, cocaine, and heroin. A subplot in Season 4 has characters building a meth lab.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Better Call Saul is a spin-off of the acclaimed drama Breaking Bad , focusing on ambitious lawyer Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman ( Bob Odenkirk ). Positive messages include the importance of the law, with the warning that it can be bent and used to aid powerful people. But the show is filled with violence and moments of peril: Characters use guns and knives to threaten and kill people. People are injured and die, including a death by suicide. Main characters date and have sex under the covers, and male buttocks are visible in various scenes. Characters use words such as "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "p---y," "d--k," and "ass," among many others. The show heavily leans into stereotypes of Latino and Black men as drug lords and criminals, and women are largely sidelined except for lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Sehorn), but she's largely reduced to being Saul's conscience.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (21)
Kids say (54)

Based on 21 parent reviews

Excellent spin-off has violence, sexual dialogue, language and some drug content

Pure excellence, what's the story.

Long before he met crystal methamphetamine wizard Walter White ( Bryan Cranston ), Saul Goodman ( Bob Odenkirk ) led a very different life, with a different name -- James "Jimmy" McGill -- and ambitions to leave small-time lawyering behind. He's also living under the shadow of his vastly more successful but currently ill older brother, Chuck ( Michael McKean ). But when an inspired scheme to scam a hit-and-run driver goes awry, it changes the course of Jimmy's career and spawns a new slogan: BETTER CALL SAUL.

Is It Any Good?

When word got out that there might be a Breaking Bad spin-off about shifty lawyer Saul Goodman, fans of the AMC series were practically giddy, maybe because it allowed a story they loved to live on. But could show creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould really spin Saul's story into gold, and was Odenkirk up for the challenge of starring in a dramatic series that put him in the spotlight? The answer is yes. Better Call Saul retains the bleak yet darkly hilarious vibe of its predecessor. And just as Breaking Bad did when Walter and his protégé Jesse Pinkman ( Aaron Paul ) started cooking together, Saul eventually shifts into high gear and delivers real promise as an addictive drama that's full of surprises and, more importantly, thoughtful storytelling.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Better Call Sau l's premise and its success as a Breaking Bad spin-off. Does it deliver the same brand of drama or offer up something new? What other popular TV shows spawned spin-offs, and how did they fare?

Will people who haven't seen Breaking Bad enjoy Better Call Saul? Who's the target audience, and how can you tell?

What's Better Call Saul 's take on the state of the American legal system? Or the idea of justice? How does the show's point of view compare with that of popular courtroom dramas such as Law & Order ?

How does the show perpetuate stereotypes about Latino and Black men? Why is this damaging in real life?

Premiere date : February 8, 2015
Cast : Bob Odenkirk , Michael McKean , Patrick Fabian
Network : AMC
Genre : Drama
TV rating : TV-14
Last updated : January 22, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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7 Ways 'Better Call Saul' Bettered 'Breaking Bad' (& 7 Ways It Didn't)

An Albuquerque civil war.

Read update

Better Call Saul vs Breaking Bad is an inevitable conversation that many fans of the two shows are likely to have, now that both have concluded. Rather than answering a question as simple as "Is Better Call Saul better than Breaking Bad ?", it's more worthwhile to highlight the unique strengths and shortcomings of both. Ultimately, most would agree that both shows are easily worth anyone's time, and that in the end, the whole Breaking Bad vs Better Call Saul debate might not be worth having, given it's likely a matter of personal taste, in the end.

Content Warning: The following article contains spoilers for the shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. With Breaking Bad having concluded way back in 2013, and Better Call Saul ending in 2022, it's now possible to compare the two shows directly. It's important to note that both are great in their own ways (even if one somehow still doesn't have any Emmys ), and are heavily linked, as Better Call Saul is set (mostly) before Breaking Bad , and features many returning characters from the original show.

Given Breaking Bad succeeds as a crime-thriller tragedy with a fast-paced plot, and Better Call Saul works as a slower-paced, character-focused drama (with some dark comedy), the following list doesn't aim to argue that one is better than the other. It's a matter of personal preference, but it's hard to deny that there are certain things Better Call Saul does better, but also some areas where it isn't quite as great as its parent show. To highlight the quality of both shows, here are five things it improves, and five ways it arguably lags behind.

Updated May 9, 2023, by Jeremy Urquhart:

Better than 'breaking bad', a less predictable arc for the main character.

While the prequel nature of the show restricts what some characters can do, Better Call Saul sidesteps this for its main character, Jimmy McGill. Right from the start, he's going by a name other than Saul Goodman, and the show hints at what the character does after the ending of Breaking Bad , too.

These flash-forwards - shot in black and white - were a great way of keeping viewers hooked. Viewers would have known Jimmy would become Saul before the series was over, but they didn't know how, and they certainly didn't know what would happen to him after Breaking Bad . It meant Jimmy/Saul's journey was always an interesting one, and made him a compelling protagonist for the show to center on.

The Relationship Between Jimmy and Kim

Breaking Bad had its fair share of strong relationships. The central one was perhaps Walt and Jesse, who went through a great deal together, and had a dynamic that became more strained as the show went on. Similarly, Walt and Skyler's pairing made for some of the show's best scenes, especially in the later seasons, even though Skyler was (unfairly) the subject of intense dislike by some of Breaking Bad 's fans (she never did anything as criminal as Walt, for one thing).

Yet Better Call Saul's central pairing of Jimmy and Kim was one of the best in either show, and they're two characters who are universally praised. It helps that Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn are both great actors, and the journey their two characters take together is believable, sometimes heartwarming, and ultimately very bittersweet. They each work together to elevate the show considerably.

Varied and More Confident Visuals

Breaking Bad could be a great-looking show. It often had the feel of a Western, with generally excellent use of color, and got a ton of mileage out of contrasting sweeping wide shots with often uncomfortably in-your-face close-ups.

It had its own visual language, but certain choices may have pushed things a little too far (the infamous yellow filter used for scenes set in Mexico, for example, or the fact that many shots were distractingly handheld for little discernible reason). Better Call Saul's visual style was more subtle and confident, and was arguably the better-looking show as a result. The use of black and white for many of its acclaimed final episodes was a well-received artistic decision, too.

A Less Predictable Final Season

Breaking Bad was a show that was always going to end with at least some tragedy, and its final season was inevitably going to have Walter White emerge as a full-blown villain. It wasn't so much a show about what was going to happen or when, but how it was going to happen, and who was going to be hurt as a consequence of Walt's actions.

Better Call Saul , on the other hand, managed to build to a less predictable final season. There were some jarring deaths, shocking plot twists, and large time jumps on the show that all served to keep viewers on their toes, all making for a great final season in the process.

Deeper Character Development for Some 'Breaking Bad' Characters

Truth be told, some Breaking Bad characters didn't stick around as long as was ideal. It introduced and disposed of certain characters pretty quickly: both Mike and Gus, for example, each appear in less than half of the show's total episodes.

It's safe to say fans wanted to see more of the characters they liked, and thankfully, Better Call Saul provided them with more screen time. Mike in particular became a far deeper and more complex character thanks to Better Call Saul , as an excellent episode like season 1's "Five-O" demonstrates.

Helped Shake Up the Idea of Prequels by Including Post 'Breaking Bad' Material

The idea of an "interquel" is nothing new, and certainly isn't something that Better Call Saul invented. There are films within series that end up taking place between the start and end of a bigger story or pre-existing films, like the Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries, and films based on TV shows are sometimes set during the show's events, like The Cowboy Bebop Movie .

The way Better Call Saul emerges as something that's not entirely prequel - but not entirely sequel - by the end of the show's run is one of its best attributes, though. The fact it shows events that happen after Breaking Bad's finale and gives closure to certain characters (like Marie) arguably makes it an essential watch for all fans of that original show.

Gave Bob Odenkirk More to Do Beyond Comedic Relief

It's certainly the case that Breaking Bad surprised people by showing a different side of Bryan Cranston than many were used to. Prior to 2008, he was best known for starring in the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle , and that certainly contrasted with his performance in the far darker (though sometimes comedic) Breaking Bad .

The range of Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul , on the other hand, is arguably even more surprising. He was known for being a comedian and featuring in various cult shows and movies before Breaking Bad, with his role on that show largely being one of comedic relief. He can be funny in Better Call Saul , sure, but it shows a more serious side to the character, and Bob Odenkirk's performance - and the various emotions he has to display - emerges as one of Better Call Saul's biggest strengths.

Not as good as 'Breaking Bad'

Less compelling antagonists.

Breaking Bad , at the end of the day, had a better assortment of antagonists. Even minor Breaking Bad villains who were in less just a few episodes - like Tuco or the Salamanca twins - were very memorable, and Gus Fring's role as a villain for the middle third of the show gave it some of its best episodes.

Sure, the Neo-Nazis in season 5 might have been a step-down from Gus, but by the show's final season, Walter White had essentially taken on the role of the show's main antagonist; he was too far gone to be an anti-hero. Chuck McGill served as a villain for the first half of Better Call Saul , and was arguably just a little much, and too irritating and obnoxious to understand where he was coming from, or even "love to hate." The villain situation improved once he was gone, but the damage had already been done.

A Sometimes Very Slow Pace

Even those who prefer Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad would have to admit it's a slower-paced show. It's by design, and it's something that some people are going to appreciate more than others.

For some viewers, coming to Better Call Saul after the usually fast-paced and thrilling Breaking Bad may feel jarring. It's certainly a slow burn, with the vast majority of viewers feeling like the payoffs in the final couple of seasons make the slower earlier seasons worth sticking with. Still, it can be hard to see where it's going at a couple of points, especially in some of the more laid-back episodes found in seasons 2 and 3.

Lacked an Episode as Impactful as "Ozymandias"

For as devastating as Better Call Saul could get, though, it never quite equaled Breaking Bad's most devastating hour: the third last episode of its final season, "Ozymandias."

It's one of the heaviest, most intense, and best episodes in TV history , as it's the one that aims to shake viewers by showing things finally tumble down around Walt; the point in the show where nothing could ever be the same again. It'd be hard for any show to deliver a single episode like "Ozymandias," so the fact Better Call Saul never quite equaled it is ultimately understandable.

Less Tension Because of Its Prequel Nature

Better Call Saul may have kept the fate of its main character a mystery throughout its run, thanks to its flash-forwards, but not everyone fared so well. Many characters from Breaking Bad showed up in Better Call Saul , and often, we already knew how their stories ended (given how many people died in Breaking Bad ).

This meant that the show lacked some suspense, compared to Breaking Bad . Sure, there were characters new to Better Call Saul whose fates weren't known, but you're never left wondering whether characters like Gus, Mike, or Hector are going to survive Better Call Saul , given we see them all die during Breaking Bad .

Occasional Over-Reliance on Fan Service

Returning characters could be something of a curse, as well as a blessing. Better Call Saul could sometimes stray a little too far into fan service, especially in its otherwise strong final season, when it seemed like the writers wanted to feature almost every character from Breaking Bad , usually as cameos.

It's a small nitpick, and there are likely numerous fans who loved every single cameo Better Call Saul threw their way. For others, however, some were better and more meaningful than others, and the less vital cameos could feel like they were just there to make fans happy, rather than being essential for the show's narrative.

It Doesn't Have the Same Level of Rewatchability

Because of the pacing found in Better Call Saul , the idea of rewatching it can be a daunting one. Knowing that it seriously picks up in later seasons could be enough to have one feel motivated to stick a rewatch out, but the pacing can be intentionally challenging, and that's then combined with the natural obstacle of all rewatches: you know where it's going to end up.

Breaking Bad's a rollercoaster ride the first time through, and then can benefit from being revisited and admiring how it puts all its pieces in place, setting up explosive consequence after explosive consequence. It's a little faster and more fun, and it has the natural advantage of being an older show, meaning it might well be a more desirable TV show to revisit for some fans (whereas Better Call Saul may need a few more years to marinate before a second watch).

It Took Longer to Get Really Good

Most will agree that Breaking Bad picked up in its second season, but that first season still had a ton to offer. It was darkly comedic, frequently intense, and had a pilot episode that perfectly set up the show's central premise. It got off to a reasonably quick start, and then from season 2 onwards, only kept accelerating.

With Better Call Saul , the audience was likely more trusting of the writers, feeling safe in the knowledge that they knew where they were going. As such, the writers didn't seem to mind taking their time. It ended up rewarding patient viewers for sure, with the show's best moments largely found in the last couple of seasons, but it could be a somewhat slow burn to get there at times.

NEXT: Spin-Off Series That Surprisingly Lasted Longer Than the Original

Serving the University Community Since 1890

Peter Gould offers valuable insight during a Q&A with “Better Call Saul” class

The co-creator of the critically acclaimed show joined university students to discuss the decisions made on set and in the writers’ room.

Throughout the session, Gould shared a variety of insights about the show’s creation, from the writing process to the commercial decisions made by its showrunners.

Students in the new “Better Call Saul” media studies course convened on Zoom Tuesday morning and eagerly awaited the arrival of a very special guest — Peter Gould, the television writer and co-creator of the show. In an engaging and intriguing hour-long Q&A session, Gould not only shed light on the behind-the-scenes elements of the show, but also heard interpretations and analysis from students about their favorite aspects of the series. What resulted was a delightful exchange of ideas between an esteemed industry professional and inquisitive and thoughtful students.

“Better Call Saul,” the Emmy nominated prequel to “Breaking Bad,” has become a recent fan favorite in the television world. Six seasons of meticulously thought-out storylines, plots and characters provide the perfect focal point for academic analysis. Assoc. Media Studies Prof. William Little’s spring 2024 course, named after the show itself, creates a space for students to apply theoretical readings from various disciplines — from anthropology to legal studies — to the very scenes fans obsess over daily.

According to Little, organizing the Q&A session took lots of planning and required him to leverage several connections. Jocelyn Diaz, television producer and executive and class of 1999 alumna, connected Little to Mark Johnson — a producer on “Better Call Saul” and class of 1971 alumnus — and Johnson then connected Little to Gould, which set talks of a visit to the class in motion. Little said that the purpose of the Q&A session was to not only offer a peek behind the scenes of the show, but also to add another dimension to the class material.

“We hoped that Peter Gould would actually kind of serve as a resource for the students — that the answers he gave would be such that they would entail information or ideas that students could use to supplement or complement the work they were doing in the course,” Little said.

Throughout the session, Gould shared a variety of insights about the show’s creation, from the writing process to the commercial decisions made by its showrunners. At one point, he shared that the producers were initially hesitant to allow the show to be streamed on Netflix — a decision that would eventually boost the show’s success.

“The initial reaction by some of the folks at the network was that [streaming] is going to destroy the show. Everyone will know they can watch it on Netflix — they won’t watch it on air,” Gould said. “I’m glad everyone came to an agreement, because suddenly the audience started popping and the show became a phenomenon. And I think it was because it was really a show that was made to be consumed.”

For the session, students were asked to formulate a question in advance that referenced one of the course’s assigned readings. Little — with the help of Jake Berton, the fourth-year College student who helped Little create the course — then chose speakers based on their questions and asked students to present their questions in a specific order. Students asked about prominent imagery in the show and its significance, including electricity, technology and fire.

One motif that appears in “Better Call Saul” that Gould discussed at length was the cell phone. Since the show takes place in 2002, flip phones appear frequently throughout the show — protagonist Jimmy McGill has a brief stint in which he sells burner phones to shady customers. Cell phones function in the show both as a prop and a narrative device — however, Gould noted that it presented the writers with challenges.

“Technology was an issue for us constantly, especially in terms of communication,” Gould said. “The cellphone has traditionally been the enemy of drama. So much drama is about communication and lack of communication, and so you have to come up with new ways of dealing with cell phones and texting.”

According to Berton, the conversation was a productive exchange for everyone involved. Gould took an interest in the material students have been working with all semester — at the mention of a particular reading for the course, Gould requested that it be shared with him for his own reading. Berton said he was pleased at Gould’s willingness to interact with students.

“I think Gould was really able to kind of take the questions in whatever direction he saw fit, but that didn't mean that he completely dismissed what students [brought] to the table,” Berton said. “You could tell that he was really sort of surprised by the depth of the questions and the quotes that people were citing and bringing in.”

Students said that Gould’s insights enriched the learning experience of students in the class. Third-year College student Ethan Marx reflected on the conversation, noting that Gould provided eye-opening answers to even the most challenging questions.

“I thought he was really willing to sort of just play around with stuff,” Marx said. “People were asking about, like, you know, sort of obscure sort of concepts, and he was very willing to sort of engage, which I think was impressive and, and, like, just cool for him to take his time out and engage.

The most notable aspect of the conversation was the collaborative and cohesive flow of the dialogue between members of the course and Gould. They continued to introduce new and fresh interpretations of the show that Gould invited and built on. Little pointed out the value in academic exchange and discussion of culturally significant works of art like “Better Call Saul.”

“The purpose of a liberal arts education, particularly in the kind of dynamic that we can construct in a seminar, is to foster a kind of community,” Little said.

Instead of being labeled a Q&A, the Zoom link to the class was titled “A Conversation With Peter Gould.” The session was exactly that — not just a lecture from Gould, but a discussion in which ideas and knowledge flowed in both directions. The conversation with the TV giant not only gave members of the class insight on the media industry, but also offered a new perspective on the scenes and shots they have become so familiar with over the semester.

In line with the “Impractical Jokers” style of comedy that revolves around playing jokes on strangers, Gatto made sure to interact with the crowd right from the start.

Joe Gatto brings his prank-fueled comedy to Old Cabell Hall

Former “Impractical Jokers” star Joe Gatto’s performance was filled with references to his time on the show, making it an especially memorable experience for longtime fans of his work.

With an influx in free time on the horizon for University students, many will have the opportunity to partake in the activities they lost touch with during the school year.

The educator’s bookshelf — a list of must reads from U.Va. professors

For any student unsure of what their first post-finals read should be, look no further than the favorite books of these four academics.

As suggested in its name, Black Voices also serves as an important hub for Black students, allowing them to recognize and celebrate their shared identity — a principle that dates back to the choir’s founding.

Black Voices merges Christian fellowship and spirited musicianship

One of the distinctive qualities of Black Voices is its ability to draw from the diverse perspectives — both personal and religious — of all its members.

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COMMENTS

Better Call Saul
Better Call Saul. 98% 282 Reviews Avg. Tomatometer 96% 10,000+ Ratings Avg. Audience Score He wasn't always Saul Goodman, ace attorney for chemist-turned-meth dealer Walter White. Six years before ...
'Better Call Saul' Finale Review: A Brilliant Reverse 'Breaking Bad'
Spoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for "Saul Gone," the series finale of "Better Call Saul." It turns out that there was one person the once and future Jimmy McGill would put ...
'Better Call Saul' review: The 'Breaking Bad' spin-off wraps up
Better Call Saul, the AMC show which serves as both a prequel and a sequel to Breaking Bad, has been outstanding ever since it debuted in 2015. Depending on how well it sticks the landing in the ...
Better Call Saul (TV Series 2015-2022)
Better Call Saul: Created by Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould. With Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Rhea Seehorn, Patrick Fabian. The trials and tribulations of criminal lawyer Jimmy McGill in the years leading up to his fateful run-in with Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
Better Call Saul finale review: The greatest showman comes clean
Walt is talking quantum mechanics, while Saul brings up an old slip-and-fall scam that left his knee forever not right. "So," says the scientist, "You were always like this." It's a remarkably ...
Better Call Saul (TV Series 2015-2022)
Better Call Saul has a 8.9 rating for a reason and that's because it's fantastic! It's absolutely one of the best shows ever created! The acting, writing, storytelling, etc are all as good as anything that's ever been on television.
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Better Call Saul review: The (leisurely, tense, funny, horrifying) end begins Better Call Saul creator says 'this is the season where worlds collide' Better Call Saul co-creator teases the fate of ...
'Better Call Saul' finale analysis and a look back at the series
Better Call Saul began in February 2015 as an ambitious project: a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed dramas in modern TV history and an origin story for Saul, one of Breaking Bad's most ...
Better Call Saul Series Finale Review -- "Saul Gone"
After many magic tricks over the years, the finale, aptly titled "Saul Gone," pulls its biggest one yet and manages to pay off 14 years' worth of story. It is a fulfilling, thought-provoking ...
'Better Call Saul' series finale: a fitting end to a brilliant
At times it was a heavy lift to keep track of the timeline in "Better Call Saul," as we spent most of the series in the early 2000s, before the events of "Breaking Bad," but we often ...
Better Call Saul's final episodes have been astonishing: review
Better Call Saul'. s final episodes have been astonishing, whatever the finale brings. Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk do career-best work in a boldly disturbing, downbeat aftermath. By. Darren ...
Better Call Saul Finale: The Inevitable Travesty of Justice
August 16, 2022 1:01 AM EDT. Spoiler alert: This piece discusses, in detail, the series finale of Better Call Saul. In the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul, which aired its finale on Monday ...
AMC's 'Better Call Saul' Season 6: TV Review
AMC's 'Better Call Saul' Season 6: TV Review. The fates of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), Kim (Rhea Seehorn), Mike (Jonathan Banks) and more hang in the balance as the 'Breaking Bad' prequel enters ...
10 Great Movies To Watch If You Liked "Better Call Saul"
The sixth and final season of AMC television series 'Better Call Saul' concluded in August 15, 2022 with a 69-minute capper that gave us one last chance at saying goodbye to our favorite TV lawyer in Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), and brought the entire 'Breaking Bad' universe to satisfying conclusion.
Review: As 'Better Call Saul' Returns, 'Breaking Bad' Comes Into View
Greg Lewis/AMC. "Better Call Saul" begins its fifth season, per established practice, with a black-and-white, vérité-style peek into the grim future of the shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob ...
'Better Call Saul' Creator Explains the Series Finale
By Alan Sepinwall. August 15, 2022. 'Better Call Saul' co-creator Peter Gould, left, with star Bob Odenkirk. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures. This post contains spoilers for the Better Call Saul ...
AMC's Better Call Saul Returns as Confident as Ever
Finally, as the previews have revealed, season five of "Better Call Saul" brings back a serious feeling of yesterday with the return of Dean Norris and Steven Michael Quezada as DEA Agents Hank Schrader and Steven Gomez, respectively. Seeing Hank in this world again poignantly connects "Saul" through "Bad" and even " El Camino: A ...
'Better Call Saul' Ending Explained: Saul in Jail in Series Finale
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched the series finale of "Better Call Saul," titled "Saul Gone.". More than seven years after "Better Call Saul" began, and 13 years ...
Better Call Saul TV Review
Excellent spin-off has violence, sexual dialogue, language and some drug content. Better Call Saul a spin-off to the series Breaking Bad, following "criminal" lawyer Jimmy McGill or Saul Goodman through all of his scams and lawyering experiences while also touching on the greatest Breaking Bad characters along the way.
'Better Call Saul' Series Finale Review: The Time Machine
Credit: AMC. I write this review fresh from watching the series finale of Better Call Saul, an episode so profoundly powerful and well-crafted, I can think of few hours of television that compare ...
7 Ways 'Better Call Saul' Bettered 'Breaking Bad' (& 7 Ways ...
Prior to 2008, he was best known for starring in the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, and that certainly contrasted with his performance in the far darker (though sometimes comedic) Breaking Bad ...
Peter Gould offers valuable insight during a Q&A with "Better Call Saul
According to Little, organizing the Q&A session took lots of planning and required him to leverage several connections. Jocelyn Diaz, television producer and executive and class of 1999 alumna, connected Little to Mark Johnson — a producer on "Better Call Saul" and class of 1971 alumnus — and Johnson then connected Little to Gould, which set talks of a visit to the class in motion.