They say fire possesses a cleansing purity, offering destruction and rebirth in flame. The universe of Vince Gilligan – a droll, violent New Mexico in which Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are set – often traffics in portentous symbolism such as this, and latter program’s recent third-season finale drew on that particular time-honored imagery. Just when it seemed like Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) might have had his electromagnetic hypersensitivity under control, a full breakdown sent him into a paranoid spiral. Though the series had called the veracity of the illness into question, it was enough to have him ripping the wiring out of the walls and toppling a precariously placed lantern that set his house ablaze, with him in it.
Vince Gilligan on Better Call Saul: 'We dread the future as much as the fans do' Read more
With that demolished home, the popular drama razed its premise and freed itself up to build anew. While Better Call Saul was smartly pitched as an origin story, the dynamic between the man born Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and his brother Chuck quickly revealed itself as the true backbone. They’d spent decades locked in a rivalry of biblical proportions, playing a game of chicken with trust, each daring the other to betray him. After three years of overtures to reconciliation followed inevitably by further backstabbing, the show rightly decided that it was time to break out of the vicious cycle. Gilligan’s skill as a storyteller has always been to wriggle out of corners he’s painted himself into, and with McKean’s departure from the cast, he turned what could ve been a fatal blow into an opportunity for reflection and growth. Jimmy had to leave Chuck behind to move forward.
With Chuck out of the picture, each hour (the first three of which were shared with critics) has ample space to focus on Jimmy’s compromised moral odyssey towards decency while balancing its tangential prongs of plot. The new episodes bring Jimmy closer to a slippery concept he’s spent most of his life chasing: an ethical con. Jimmy hatches a plan to make a little money by stealing something that nobody will notice is gone and selling it to someone who wants it very badly. It’s a meaningful step forward for him, as he finds a tarnished but morally acceptable place for himself in a seemingly random world. As familiar faces Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) continue to move inexorably towards their starting positions for Breaking Bad and other pre-introduced characters enter the fray, Jimmy’s story can continue to flourish and expand outward.
The cloud of whether Chuck’s death was intentional or accidental hangs heavy over the first few episodes of season four, but Jimmy won’t let his parade be rained on. He leans hard into denial, refusing to let Chuck’s final act on Earth hurt him even more than he already has. His constant love interest and on-again, off-again legal partner Kim (Rhea Seehorn) shoulders much of Jimmy’s grief for him, racked with sadness even as she’s concerned by Jimmy’s complete lack of reaction. But emotions stuffed down always catch up with a person, and there’s no way the show will let Jimmy avoid the personal ramifications of what’s happened for long.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul. Photograph: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
The third episode, titled Something Beautiful, offers the single most dangerous thing a show’s writing staff can give its characters: closure. Chuck leaves a posthumous message for Jimmy that should unravel their decades of bickering and self-imposed inadequacy. Without getting into any specifics, Chuck takes responsibility for himself, gives Jimmy a frank appraisal as a brother and human being, and leaves him with a few pearls of substantive, lasting wisdom. He says things that have been percolating their whole lives, things that viewers have now spent four years waiting for one brother to admit to the other, things that could have ground the show to a screeching halt if uttered while both men were still alive. Jimmy’s reaction suggests that he’s only damming up an eventual deluge of feelings, which the episodes to come will undoubtedly bear out.
Couple that intimate process of grief with a victimless scheme Jimmy can feel good about, and Gilligan’s game starts to come into focus. Chuck’s death advances Jimmy to the next major juncture of a path he’s been on for years of our lives and decades of his. Without Chuck undermining him at every turn, an unencumbered Jimmy can find his own way to be crooked, on terms that let him get to sleep at night. Until his lingering guilt and resentment for Chuck rears its ugly head, that is. But nothing stays buried for long in Gilligan’s New Mexico, and if Jimmy wants this move forward to stick, he’ll have to do some serious excavation himself. It’s all there, right beneath his surface.
Season 4 picks up after one of the defining and sometimes tedious conflicts of the show—between Chuck’s snooty moralism and Jimmy’s by-any-means-necessary scrappiness—met a fiery conclusion. While another series might fast-forward to months after a major character’s chapter-ending death, Saul slow-walks through the devastation as Jimmy and his girlfriend, Kim, a former colleague of Chuck’s, grapple with what happened. That might sound gratuitously wrenching, but it’s actually revelatory. Old dynamics flip, long-gestating character studies pay off, and feelings geyser up in surprising places.
Kim comes off as inwardly unnerved but outwardly pragmatic while she processes her own horror and tries to anticipate her boyfriend’s. As for Jimmy, the show plays his grieving like a mystery, with existential questions creating thick suspense. Who is the underdog without his tormenter? What does a person do with peace that’s come at a terrible moral cost? How does someone routinely accused of shamelessness handle grief? By the end of the season premiere, we get something close to answers to these questions, and they’re rather shocking. What’s more, Saul resembles Breaking Bad’s most profound passages—when the implications of some monstrous choice could be felt changing Walter White deeply.
Somewhat awkwardly though, the show’s cloistered world still contains three essentially separate plot lines. Independent of Jimmy and Kim, there’s the fixer Mike Ehrmantraut continuing in his security hustle so as to ensure his granddaughter’s financial security. And there’s the saga of the drug cartel in disarray after the downfall of Don Hector at the hands of his henchman Nacho. In the latter story, rapidly escalating tension mirrors and amplifies the darkly charged energy of Jimmy’s narrative. Visceral Breaking Bad vibes surface here, as well (helped along by a few more Breaking Bad cameos). The quiet crime boss Gus Fring finally shows his capacity for brutality, and the Walter White–ian question of whether Nacho’s secret betrayal of Hector will be exposed is used to excruciating effect.
Ehrmantraut, meanwhile, undertakes a project that allows Gilligan and Gould to indulge another of their favorite genres: competence porn. It’s hard to imagine any actor other than Jonathan Banks being able to make a monologue about warehouse security that’s spine-tingling, but that’s the word I want to use here. Then again, Saul has always found beauty in the banal. The newspaper obituary, the funeral receiving line, the reading of a will: all rituals of mourning that, in the way they are filmed this season, resemble the mechanistic processes—Cinnabon baking, coffee making, trash pickup—that have previously filled the show. The difference now is that Saul obsesses more closely about the things that make us human, or inhuman.
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Better Call Saul, which begins its fourth season on AMC tonight, is all about specifics. It’s never in a hurry. It takes the time to look at situations and objects and think about what they mean. It’ll get into a scene between, say, shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and his business partner and girlfriend Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), and stay in it for several minutes, imparting the most important information by watching their faces as they listen to each other. Or it’ll show ex-cop turned gangland fixer Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) starting a new job as a security consultant at German conglomerate Madrigal Elekromotive by entering the place without announcing himself, then prowling around the open-floor-plan office, his bald dome gliding above the tops of cubicles like a shark’s fin.
As is tradition, the first scene in Better Call Saul’s new season takes place in the present day, and cranks up the sense of jeopardy by fixating on Odenkirk’s anxious face rather than ladling on expository dialogue. (Jimmy/Saul doesn’t speak his first syllable for several minutes.) We return to the past through a series of transitions establishing that the story picks up immediately after the self-immolation of Jimmy’s brother Chuck (Michael McKean). Here, too, everything is conveyed with image and sound, climaxing with a touch that could almost be called magical realist.
Like its predecessor Breaking Bad, this is a series you can’t just half-watch while scrolling your phone, because if you do, you won’t know what’s going on. The show can be hard to follow even if you’re watching closely, because so much of the plot is inferred. The season-four premiere has a scene where a character you’ve never met leaves his suburban home, goes to his car and sits in it for a while, failing to start the engine, then calls in to work to tell his boss he’ll be late. The next scene tells you why you met this man, and you laugh as you figure things out. In the same episode, we realize that Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) suspects that Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) had something to do with Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) having a stroke, even though he can’t possibly know the details. But you can tell he knows because of the way he glances at Nacho as the ambulance pulls away.
I’m intentionally being vague here because, more so than most current series, the pleasures of Better Call Saul are almost entirely visceral and emotional. It’s about what happens in the frame: what you see, what you hear, the looks on people’s faces, and the thoughts that pass through their eyes as they contemplate their next move. Series creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan were smart to rethink the tone of this tale as they refocused the Breaking Bad lens on Saul Goodman, a.k.a. Jimmy McGill. We know Jimmy’s going to make it through, along with Mike, Gus, and anyone else we met on Breaking Bad (assuming, of course, that this series is set in the Breaking Bad universe and not some parallel timeline where anything can happen), which means that what happens next is less important than what the characters are thinking and feeling as a result. We see the ultimate example of this philosophy in the season’s fourth episode, which includes the most significant marker yet of Jimmy’s evolution into Saul, as well as peak performances from Seehorn and Odenkirk. The camera just sits on the two of them without cutting while Jimmy speaks and Kim listens. It sounds simple, and in filmmaking terms I guess it is, but it’s one of the most wrenching moments in the series, so private that I felt I shouldn’t have been watching it.
Breaking Bad was about self-willed moral rot and what it does to individuals, families, and communities. Better Call Saul has a touch of that, but it has a much tighter emphasis, zeroing in on one or two people at a time and distributing its attention rather democratically among the major characters, like a Robert Altman–style ensemble piece about white-collar and blue-collar criminals in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s patient and resists the cartoonish hyperbole that made Breaking Bad so exciting and troublesome. Both do share a sincere interest in economic struggle — something you don’t normally see on American TV — although this aspect, too, is expressed more subtly in the prequel series. Where Breaking Bad kicked off with its schoolteacher hero deciding to finance his cancer treatment and leave behind a nest egg for his family by cooking crystal meth, and in its final season served up such grandiose images as a gigantic brick of shrink-wrapped cash and a helicopter shot of Walter White’s mobile drug-lab tents popping up, Better Call Saul is more inclined toward the understated gesture of resilience or diminution.
I’m thinking specifically of a moment in the season premiere, as Mike spends his last few minutes in the glass booth where he works as a parking attendant. Director Minkie Spiro gives us four shots of Mike: from the back, from the side, in three-quarters view, and finally from head-on, as a co-worker arrives in the background to relieve him. Mike doesn’t say anything until his colleague approaches — the episode takes the opportunity to watch Jonathan Banks sitting there (and why wouldn’t it, with a face that craggy-magnificent?) — and once Mike exits the booth, we get a little moment that’s about a man enduring indignity with a positive mental attitude only because he knows he’s leaving his job for another, better one. “Take it easy,” Mike says, by way of good-bye. “So, uh, the boss says he’s gonna want the windbreaker,” his co-worker says. Pause. Mike says, “Course he does,” then takes it off, hands it over, and walks away.
Better Call Saul is back for its fourth season. I spoke with Vince Gilligan about the show’s difficult origins and how it’s improbably become so great, and I have many thoughts on the season premiere (with full spoilers) coming up just as soon as Bruce Lee has a gun…
“Well, Howard, I guess that’s your cross to bear.” -Jimmy
The thing about Saul Goodman – and the reason Gilligan and Peter Gould had such a devil of a time figuring out how to build a show around him – is that he’s at peace with his life. He has very little inner conflict. He’s not as openly or proudly malevolent as many of the other major players from the Heisenberg-verse, but he’s also not particularly troubled by the things he’s an accomplice to. The capacity for guilt, or the desire to do the right thing for its own sake, got left behind along with his real name. The Jimmy McGill we’ve been watching for the previous three seasons is far from a perfect man. But there’s a core of decency in him that would make him so appealing to Kim, and that would drive him to blow up his eldercare practice to undo the damage he caused to Irene’s reputation. He takes shortcuts, and he relishes the prospect of separating obnoxious rich bros from their money. Still, there’s more good in him than bad.
How does that guy we’ve been watching for the previous three seasons become the carefree monster-enabler we met on Breaking Bad? What kind of seismic event must have caused him to cast aside all his best qualities in order to more easily enjoy a criminal attorney’s life? How about the gruesome suicide of his revered older brother, as a result of various offenses Jimmy perpetrated against him? Think that could do the trick?
Jimmy spends much of Season Four’s premiere — “Smoke” — in shock over news of Chuck’s death, and his understandable belief that the events of last season’s episode “Chicanery” led to it. This is a muted, closed-off Jimmy, struggling to come to terms with what happened to his brother and the thought that he might be to blame. It’s as quiet and understated as Bob Odenkirk has ever been in the role (even more than when he’s Cinnabon Gene, whom we’ll get back to in a moment), and it perfectly fits what we know about his complicated but ultimately loving and worshipful feelings about Chuck.
But we know more about what happened to Chuck, and by the end of the episode, so does Jimmy. Poor Howard Hamlin – whose transformation from smarmy villain to utterly sympathetic supporting player has been as thorough as it’s been surprising(*) – comes over to Kim’s apartment to not only share his belief that Chuck’s death wasn’t an accident, but to clarify that Chuck actually got over the Bar Association incident fairly quickly. It wasn’t until their falling out over the malpractice insurance premiums that Chuck began the spiral that ended in his death.
(*) It surprised even the creators of the show, who intended for Howard to be every bit the jerk he seemed in the early episodes, and Chuck to be Jimmy’s housebound advisor. Midway through Season One, it occurred to them that things would be much more interesting if Chuck had been secretly working against his brother this whole time. (As Tom Schnauz recalls, “Chuck was so proud, and his brother was Slippin’ Jimmy. The idea that they could be equals was ridiculous.”) Yet another example of this creative team showing that a master plan is much less important than the ability to improvise when the story calls for it.
We already knew that the premiums only spiked because Jimmy ratted his brother out to the insurance agency in a fit of pique over the cost of his suspension, and this discovery is too much for him to handle. The thought of Chuck dying because Jimmy publicly humiliated him was bad enough, but he could always justify his actions as self-preservation, prompted by Chuck manipulating him into confessing and then destroying the tape. Had it stopped there, his brother might still be alive and returned to his beloved practice of the law. But Jimmy didn’t let it stop there, and his outing of Chuck to the insurance rep gave him no benefit other than schadenfreude.
As Jimmy comes to understand the true, and truly indefensible, reason his brother killed himself, something in him breaks. It’s the same something that has made us like him so much over these three years, the thing that has made us all dread the moment when it goes away and he becomes Saul Goodman for real. In that moment, Jimmy McGill realizes that the only way he can deal with this horrible understanding is to turn off his fundamental decency and let Howard take the blame for it all. More than ever before on this show, he is Saul Goodman, utterly untroubled by the decisions he’s made and the people he’s hurt, whistling without a care in the world as he checks the fish tank and makes coffee, just like Walter White whistled after the Drew Sharp incident. (And Kim looks just as dismayed to witness this one as Jesse was to witness that.)
It’s such a small moment in isolation, but Better Call Saul has turned out to be a masterclass in how to turn small things into something emotionally huge. That ability is on display throughout “Smoke,” which in lesser hands would just be a housekeeping episode dealing with the aftermath of Chuck’s suicide and Hector Salamanca‘s stroke, but feels like so much more because these great storytellers (including Gould on script, Minkie Spiro as director and all the actors) know how to mine each little detail for all it’s worth.
Take, for instance, our latest black-and-white glimpse of Gene from Cinnabon. We’re picking up right where Season Three left him, having passed out in a panic over giving legal advice to the mall shoplifter. He’s taken to the emergency room (a visit that briefly resembles the time we saw Chuck taken to the hospital), and though he’s soon allowed to leave, the admissions clerk reminds us of how every moment of Gene’s existence is fraught with the possibility of being discovered, arrested or worse. For a normal person, a typo on a hospital admissions form would be something to laugh about, or at worst a bureaucratic headache; for Gene, it’s a potential extinction event. You can feel that dread right along with him, as well as when the cab driver taking him home turns out to have an Albuquerque Isotopes air freshener and seems to squint in recognition at Gene. If the show sticks to the pattern of one Gene appearance per season, we’ll have a terribly long wait to find out if he’s in as much trouble as he believes — and that in turn only puts us inside his paranoid head even more.
The air freshener also provides us with a link to the Mike and Gus half of the show, as the former is watching an Isotopes game when he decides he’s going to earn his laundered money by becoming a security consultant for Madrigal Electromotive. This is another vintage Mike Ehrmantraut heist story (or in this case, a reverse heist, as he breaks into Madrigal’s Las Cruces facility to prove it can be done), defined by how little he says and how easily he accomplishes what he sets out to do. It’s unclear exactly what his game is, other than arranging another meeting with Lydia in a very public way, but it’s also a welcome respite from the grief of the Jimmy story, as well as the tension of what’s happening with Nacho and the other cartel players.
The Nacho story is the sort of “in-between moment” that Gilligan loves to pepper into both of his shows. It would be so easy to jump from Hector having the stroke to even the next day, so we could get a sense of what the new status quo is between Gus’s crew and the Salamancas. Instead, we watch Nacho trying to find the right opportunity to dispose of the placebo pills with others watching him. It’s not strictly necessary, plotwise, especially since Gus already seemed suspicious of Nacho in the Season Three finale. But there’s value to a refresher course on just how thorough the Chicken Man’s operation was even pre-Mike (with Victor using another gas cap tracker to follow Nacho to the bridge where he ultimately dumps the pills), as well as appreciating just how deep a hole Nacho understands that he’s dug for himself. Like the hospital interlude with Cinnabon Gene, it puts us right inside his head. The cartel half of the show is operating at a handicap compared to the Jimmy half, because we simply know more about what’s to come for most of these people, which can give these stories an air of boxes being dutifully, if entertainingly, checked. Anything that’s done to help us better understand and empathize with the characters going through these motions — particularly someone like Nacho, who never appeared in Breaking Bad (though Saul mentions him to Walt and Jesse) — does a world of good.
The patience of that first attempted pill disposal scene is also there in how the Jimmy portion of the episode begins. We get over three dialogue-free minutes to watch Jimmy and Kim sleep — a sleep haunted by burning embers that they’ll only find out about after they wake — and to watch Jimmy putter around the kitchen, listen to jazz, make coffee and check the classifieds for a job. Three minutes is a very large amount of screen time to devote to something so little, but it’s fascinating to watch. Not only is it well-shot by Spiro (even when Saul is slow, it’s nice to look at, which goes a long way), we know that these are the last peaceful moments before those dreams of floating ash become the waking nightmare of Chuck having died in a fire and Jimmy having to reckon with his role in that. It’s as emotionally fraught as the on-screen action is mundane.
Does Jimmy’s brutal response to Howard’s confession, and his upbeat demeanor afterwards, mean he’s gone full Saul Goodman, never to turn back? That feels too easy, especially since this show has already featured a half-dozen potential Goodman “Eureka!” moments that proved only temporary. But this is by far the closest we’ve ever felt to Jimmy becoming Saul. Given how much I’ve grown to care for Jimmy, it’s the kind of moment I’ve been dreading. “Smoke” delivered it with as much craft as I hoped and as much pain as I feared.
Some other thoughts:
* In case you missed it, AMC has already ordered a fifth season of the show, and not in terms that said it would definitely be the last one. Breaking Bad‘s own fifth “season” was, for contractual reasons — really a fifth and sixth season in everything but name— but it would be funny if the spinoff winds up lasting more years than its predecessor. Given how much Gilligan and Gould have talked about the importance of the Cinnabon Gene era to give Saul’s story its proper conclusion, I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked by a sixth season or if the show even went beyond that.
* Did the cabbie recognize Gene as Saul? One clue is that he was played by Don Harvey, a busy character actor (he’s one of the uniform cops on The Deuce), whom the production wouldn’t have spent money to fly in from out of town for a nothing part.
* Speaking of that expense, I appreciated that Ed Begley Jr. and Dennis Boutsikaris were brought back for glorified walk-ons at the funeral to illustrate Chuck’s hallowed place in the local legal community. Naturally, Clifford Main and Rick Schweikart would come to see him off like this.
* Strength in the little details: Rather than just show the Madrigal employee getting in the car and realizing it won’t start, the episode spends an extra minute with the guy (who vaguely resembles Bryan Cranston from a few angles) teaching his son how to fix his bike chain. That’s a Mike Ehrmantraut kind of lesson, suggesting that even a thorough and patient man can be hustled by an even more thorough one. The way that the dad makes this difficult task seem so easy is Saul in a nutshell.
* Okay, so Muhammad Ali vs. Bruce Lee. In general, both shows treat Mike’s opinions as the most sensible and likely correct ones, but I don’t think it’s nearly as one-sided as he suggests. You have to first figure out which era Ali and which era Lee you’re getting, since by the time of Enter the Dragon, Lee was still in peak form while Ali was much slower than when he fought Liston. Then you have to figure out the arena and the rules, in the same way you do whenever anyone talks about boxers vs. MMA stars. If it’s a traditional boxing match in a traditional ring, then yes, Ali’s size and strength advantage likely leads him to mop the floor with Lee. But if it’s MMA rules, or a street fight with no rules at all? Well, once Bruce Lee can jump and kick, I don’t feel very good about Ali’s chances.
What did everybody else think?
