Before we talk about the finale of “Better Call Saul,” the collection calls for a query: What can we name this man? Who is he, actually?
The title would appear to present us the reply. The collection reintroduces us to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), whom we met in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” because the sleazy lawyer to the chemistry instructor turned drug lord, Walter White.
But we meet him in “Saul” as Jimmy McGill, the title underneath which he was born, ran con jobs and first plied the legislation, and as Gene Takavic, the alias underneath which he goes into hiding and manages a Cinnabon in Nebraska after Walt’s meth operation crumbles.
Jimmy is hungry and hustling; Saul, preening and peacocky; Gene, overwhelmed and bitter. Each has a bit of the others in him. In its closing run, “Better Call Saul” has jumped about in time, shuffling these identities just like the shifting targets in a shell recreation. Which one holds the pea?
Monday evening, the collection delivered its reply, in an understatedly potent finale that engaged the themes that allowed the collection to — largely — keep away from the destiny of the superfluous sequel. If “Breaking Bad” traced one man’s course from schmuckdom to villainy, “Better Call Saul” requested, extra broadly: How can we develop into who we’re? Do we’ve got a selection within the matter? And what does it take to develop into a brand new particular person?
The Jimmy we meet within the “Better Call Saul” premiere — set in 2002, six years earlier than the occasions of “Breaking Bad” — is a hapless public defender who desires of emulating his massive brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), a revered New Mexico lawyer. Chuck’s legislation companion, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), rebuffs Jimmy’s efforts to affix the agency whereas Chuck affords Jimmy the well-meaning however patronizing recommendation to knuckle down, know his limitations and be affected person.
Patience shouldn’t be within the talent set of Jimmy, a former slip-and-fall artist with the reward of gab. His wheels don’t grind slowly however exceedingly high-quality; they run on overdrive and throw off sparks. Why, he wonders, ought to he be demeaned for his abilities? Why ought to propriety hold his motormouth caught in first gear?
He finds an ally, and ultimately a spouse, in Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn, giving certainly one of TV’s most fine-tuned performances), a lawyer in Howard and Chuck’s agency. She’s each steadiness and confederate, a cooler buyer who shares Jimmy’s reward for the grift.
But Jimmy can’t hold his rip-off artistry a interest. It consumes him; it turns into him. He pulls a vengeance scheme that drives Chuck to suicide. He adopts his commerce title — ’s all good, man — and builds a buyer base of drug sellers. With Kim’s assist, he runs a plot to destroy Howard’s popularity that inadvertently leads, on this yr’s midseason finale, to Howard’s homicide by certainly one of Saul’s gangster purchasers.
The shock of the killing ends his and Kim’s marriage; the guilt of it derails her authorized profession. The incident additionally initiates the tip of the collection’s weaker half, a drug-world thriller that re-creates the blood-soaked narco-noir exploits that Walter White followers had come to anticipate.
With the “Breaking Bad 2: Breaking Badder” part of the story line full, the creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, centered on their central characters within the closing run. Despite the reappearance in flashbacks of Bryan Cranston as Walter White and Aaron Paul as his sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, the final half-season is much less an try and reprise “Breaking Bad” and extra a productive dialog with it — possibly even a pleasant argument.
“Breaking Bad” is an intensely ethical present with no illusions about Walter’s depravity. But additionally it is intoxicated along with his felony genius. Walter, financially struggling and stricken with lung most cancers, finds virility and function in his heinous deeds. He breaks each dangerous and badass.
In “Better Call Saul,” crime is usually simply unhappy, the extra so the nearer the collection will get to its finish. The closing episodes return to Gene in his Nebraska exile, shot in blood-draining black-and-white and looking out like an off-brand Walter White, all the way down to the soup-strainer mustache.
As Saul says of Walter, in a late-season flashback, “Guy with that mustache probably doesn’t make a lot of good life choices.” Now he appears to be proving his personal level. To replenish his nest egg, and possibly his sense of self-worth, Gene enlists a dim-bulb taxi driver to rob a division retailer, then to assist him fleece a string of wealthy marks, ending with a most cancers affected person.
It’s a sad-sack model of the ultimate spree that left Walter with a pile of money the dimensions of a California king mattress. It ends ignominiously, with Gene ID’d by the aged girl (Carol Burnett) whom he deceived to begin his ruse. It wasn’t even that tough, she tells him: “I typed in ‘con man’ and ‘Albuquerque.’” The man who eluded the legislation and survived the cartel will get introduced down by Eunice Higgins.
Over a decade and a half, the “Bad”-iverse has developed a number of narrative actual property. The closing run of “Saul” retains discovering little pockets of story to revisit inside it, restaging Saul’s first run-in with Walter and having Kim meet Jesse throughout the “Breaking Bad” timeline, at an important second in each their lives.
The finale, likewise, will get its theme and construction from three flashbacks with now-dead characters — Mike, Walter and Chuck — every of which entails the thought of going again and altering one’s life path. Mike tells him that he would return to the day he took his first bribe as a police officer and his life went off monitor. Then, he says, he would go into the long run: “There’s some people I’d like to check on.”
Mike is describing “Better Call Saul” itself. Both prequel and sequel, it’s a time machine that strikes backward to seek out how a person went fallacious and ahead to see the place he finally ends up. And like many a sci-fi time-travel story, it explores how a lot of our destiny is inside our management.
As Saul tells Walter (in a scene that picks up from their final encounter in “Breaking Bad”), his time-machine hypothetical is a “thought experiment.” But it’s additionally the type of cheater’s fantasy that has at all times appealed to him — a shortcut, a fast repair, a loophole to beat the system.
It’s the type of simple approach out that he appears to seek out midway into the finale, when he activates the blarney spigot yet one more time to speak his approach right into a comfortable plea deal. But what Jimmy/Saul/Gene lastly has to simply accept is that there isn’t any one bizarre trick to set his life proper. He can’t name a mulligan. He lives in a time machine that solely goes ahead.
But he doesn’t uncover this by himself. Kim has lengthy been the ethical heart of the present, not as a result of she’s a paragon however due to her willingness to deal extra truthfully together with her flaws. Learning that his ex-wife has confessed her guilt to Howard’s widow does for Jimmy what Chuck couldn’t: It convinces him to do the proper factor, the arduous approach.
The “Breaking Bad” finale is ready up as a collection of wins for Walter — he defeats his enemies and secures his household’s funds — ending in a demise penalty on his personal phrases. The climax of “Saul” appears at first to be going an analogous approach. Instead, the protagonist utters one thing you’d by no means anticipate to listen to from Saul Goodman in a courtroom — the reality — and blows up his plea deal.
Unlike Walter White, he doesn’t discover a method to have his destiny and cheat it too. He doesn’t, as when Walter clears his spouse on a phone call with police listening in, immediately finish Kim’s troubles. He doesn’t exit in a blaze of glory. He sentences himself to life. As Saul says to Walter White in certainly one of their first “Breaking Bad” conferences, “Conscience gets expensive, doesn’t it?”
Maybe he’s lastly much less similar to Walter White than to Don Draper of “Mad Men,” one other fast-talking slick in a go well with whose phrases save him till they don’t, who’s taken with the thought of time machines, who has a historical past of adjusting his title and working from bother. His endgame shouldn’t be that of a gangster dealing with down the legislation however, like Don, of a person discovering integrity in his splintered id.
At final he may be himself, and, in its closing run, so might “Better Call Saul.” I don’t need to make an excessive amount of of the much-heralded End of the Antihero — “Barry” remains to be round, for starters. But at an almost 15-year run, “Breaking Bad” and “Saul” make an period unto themselves.
“Saul” had the advantages of expertise with out the complacency of incumbency. It was one of many best-made reveals on TV — assured, attentive to element and gorgeously composed. (Check out the ultimate sequence’s reprise of Kim and Jimmy sharing a cigarette in a slant of sunshine.) It challenged itself to be greater than a brand new model of a factor you used to love. And it ended true to its concepts and its protagonist.
So who is that this man ultimately? The finale’s title, “Saul Gone,” ideas us off. “Gene Takavic” died within the Nebraska dumpster the place the police arrested him. “Saul Goodman” lives on as a legend to his fellow inmates who know him from his TV adverts. But we go away understanding him by the title he lastly provides the decide.
Call him James McGill. He is not Saul. He might but be man.
