Better Call Saul / Tropes O to Z

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O

• Obfuscating Postmortem Wounds: In "Breathe", Gus kills Arturo by suffocating him to death with a plastic bag over his head. At the same time, he forces Nacho to be his double-agent against the Salamancas. To hide this fact, the following episode has Tyrus and Victor drive Nacho and Arturo's corpse out into the desert, shoot Nacho twice non-fatally, and Arturo's body and the car are riddled with bullets to make it seem like a random drive-by shooting by an unaffiliated rival gang.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Mike swipes Tuco's car, then pretends to be a stubborn old man who is Too Dumb to Live in order to goad Tuco into beating him up, leading to Tuco being arrested. Tuco is genuinely impressed. As in Breaking Bad, Mike is in fact one of the most intelligent characters in the series and tells Daniel Wormald that if you want to be a criminal, you need to make sure to do your homework.
• Official Couple: Jimmy and Kim. They manage to be both a dangerously toxic to everyone else mess, and the kindest, healthiest relationship those two have ever had. When the series ends, they reconcile Older and Wiser, while still being freaks having horny fun.
• Off the Wagon: Although he has been seen drinking socially without issues throughout the series, it seems killing Werner has driven Mike back to alcoholism. Played With in that it was never clear if his previous troubles with alcoholism were legitimate or merely a ruse to catch Hoffman and Fenske off-guard.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Chuck's face at the end of "RICO" when he realizes that while he was distracted reading some papers, he had just spent the last minute or so outside and didn't feel a thing.
  • Chuck's face at the end of "Chicanery", when he realizes he's been ranting about how he hates Jimmy and would have gladly disbarred him, weakening his case and all but assuring the end of his own law career.
  • "Plan and Execution": Kim and Jimmy's faces when Lalo walks into their apartment and unexpectedly finds a drunken and upset Howard also there, and they realise they can't convince Howard this stranger is a serious danger to him and that he should leave immediately. We then get a further example in the look on Howard's face when he notices Lalo fitting a silencer to his pistol and reality finally dawns him just before Lalo shoots him in the head.
• Old Master: Mike may be retired and working as a parking lot attendant, but he shows his Cop-Fu is still much stronger than a couple of younger cops hoped it was.
• Old Shame: An In-Universe example in "Cobbler". Jimmy is checking out his newly-delivered company car, feeling the quality and really savouring the moment. Until he notices it has a sunroof...
• Ominous Hair Loss:
  • In season 4 Jimmy starts losing hair a bit more rapidly and is seen fretting about it and noticing loose strands coming away. This follows Chuck's death at the end of season 3, and the stress may be a cause.
  • The season 6 episode "Fun and Games" features a time jump from 2004 to approximately 2007, which reveals that Jimmy has lost a lot of hair over the course of just a few years. The stress of Jimmy and Kim's misadventures in season 6 may have taken their toll.
• Omnidisciplinary Lawyer: Played with as Jimmy has yet to specialize so he takes small and diverse jobs, from elder to defense and even patent law (until it turns out to be a creepy speaking toilet). Being a big law firm, HHM has lawyers specialized in criminal law and others for different fields like contract and banking law.
  • Kim herself takes up public defender work when she begins to feel unsatisfied with her work for Mesa Verde.
• Once More, with Clarity: In the season six episode "Breaking Bad", we're re-treated to the scene from Saul's first episode when Walt and Jesse kidnap him to the desert. This time, we see it from his perspective, and with the full context, we now know that he thought Lalo had finally come back to kill him after biding his time for so long, and Saul's desperately trying to tell him that he had nothing to do with Nacho betraying him. He has no idea that he's terrified of a man who's been dead for years.
  Saul: OH NO NO NO NO NO! IT WASN'T ME, IT WAS IGNACIO! HE'S THE ONE-
• The Oner:
  • The episode "Fifi" begins with a complex tracking shot as a Regalo Helado truck passes through a border checkpoint, lasting 4:15. It has three disguised cuts.
  • The episode "Plan and Execution" has a lengthy tracking shot of Jimmy, Kim, an actor, and the UNM film crew scrambling to stage a series of photos, albeit with a few disguised cuts.
• One Last Job:
  • After a wild week in Chicago with his old buddy Marco, Jimmy is eager to get home to his clients, when Marco asks if they can do one more Rolex scam. Marco suffers a heart attack during the scam and dies.
  • Jimmy pulls off an elaborate heist to keep Jeff the cab driver from revealing his identity, roping Jeff into aiding him in robbing the mall where his Cinnabon is located.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted. There are two Marcos: Jimmy's con artist pal Marco Pasternak, and Marco Salamanca, one of the two Cousins. Both show up in the show, although Pasternak has died by the time the Cousins enter the plot and the Cousins are usually not referred to by their names anyway.
  • There are also Brian Archuleta, a co-worker at Davis & Main, and Hugo Archuleta, a janitor working at Walter White's school. No mention if there's a relation.
  • In addition, in the flash-forward which opens the pilot, we see Jimmy working at a Cinnabon having assumed the name "Gene." In the cold-open of the episode "RICO," we see a flashback to Jimmy working in the mailroom at HHM, and one of the employees to whom he delivers mail is named Gene. Possibly justified in that Jimmy could have used the name as a tribute to him.
  • And as with Breaking Bad, there's Dr. Barry Goodman and Jimmy's alias "Saul Goodman".
• Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers:
  • A Discussed Trope in "Uno". When the county treasurer Craig Kettleman is implicated for embezzling $1.6 million, Jimmy explains that what gets innocent people wrongly convicted is not understanding what makes you look guilty in the first place: it's the arrest, not your decision to lawyer up. He points out that the cops themselves often invoke this trope, to encourage people not to have a lawyer present during questioning. Without an attorney it's fairly easy for the police to twist what you said and get you convicted.
  • Makes a more subtle second appearance in "Five-O", when Mike is questioned by police about the deaths of his deceased son's partners. They do their best to convince him he doesn't need legal counsel because he isn't under arrest, and seem disappointed that as a fellow police officer he isn't willing to cooperate with them by answering questions informally. Mike isn't fooled, and only replies with one word no matter what they say: "Lawyer." To take it a step further, he is guilty of the crime they're questioning him for: the revenge-murder of the two corrupt cops who set up his son Matthew to get killed.
  • In "Cobbler", Daniel Wormald, a nerdish IT worker turned drug dealer who's been ripped off by Nacho, calls the cops to complain about his baseball card collection being stolen, but the cops quickly suspect that he's a drug dealer and start investigating him under the guise of investigating the burglary. Jimmy figures this out and Mike hires Jimmy to be Daniel's attorney. The cops are openly suspicious that a man who called the cops has an attorney present during questioning. Jimmy ultimately has to come up with an outlandish justification for why the dealer is so protective of his privacy to throw the cops off the trail. The cops are so stunned by the story (and the videos Jimmy forces Daniel to make) that they have no choice but to accept it.
  • Lalo secures Saul as a lawyer to get Krazy-8 out of custody and negotiate a deal for the DEA to disrupt Gus' drop sites, and later takes on Saul as his attorney after Mike nudges the police to arrest him for Fred Whalen's murder.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Jimmy is very emotional and not afraid to show it. When he lays on a bit of the Tranquil Fury you know he's really angry.
  • Gus Fring is a man who is meticulous in everything he does, down to even the most minute body movements. When he accidentally knocks a glass off a table after learning that Lalo Salamanca survived his assassination attempt, it shows that Gus is genuinely terrified for his life.
• Open Heart Dentistry: Mike has to go to a veterinarian with criminal connections to get his bullet wound sewn up. Dr. Caldera lampshades this, saying that he can't provide a sling but can wrap a cone around Mike's head. Later, Nacho has to do the same.
• Out-Gambitted: In "Switch," Jimmy and Kim pull a magnificent ploy against Ken Wins, by posing as two second-generation Central European immigrants trying to invest their non-existent uncle's inheritance money. They use the fake names they gave him to sign the papers he brought out, and immediately left the scene before he caught on. And for what, exactly? It's all so he can pay for their expensive bottle of Zafiro Añejo tequila.
• Outlaw Couple: Jimmy and Kim's relationship has shades of this.
• Out of Focus: After the Season 4 premiere which is centered around Chuck's death and the immediate aftermath of it, Howard Hamlin has very minimal involvement throughout the rest of the season. His appearances only consist of short scenes scattered across four episodes. He has a minor subplot of suffering from insomnia and struggling to keep HMM running as its reputation has diminished but it doesn't receive very much screen-time.

P

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Jimmy needs a special director outfit so he can not be Jimmy anymore but Saul Goodman, director. Obviously it doesn't do much to hide his face, but in his head it's another identity.
• Paperwork Punishment: Howard Hamlin punishes Kim for the debacle over the Kettleman case by sending her to document review, AKA "the cornfield." It's mind-numbing drudgery, involving close examination of thousands of legal documents, and far beneath someone of Kim's talent and education. Although she manages to get back in Howard's good graces (with Jimmy's help), she ends up their again when Jimmy makes a commercial embarrasing HHM.
• Parking Problems: A Running Gag is Jimmy clashing with Mike Ehrmantraut, the parking attendant at the courthouse, due to failing to collect the required number of parking validation stickers to have his parking fee waived. At one point, he reaches through the window of the booth to lift the barrier arm when Mike won't let him out without payment, causing him to be briefly barred from the car park. In another episode, he blocks the exit lane in protest and picks a fight with Mike, causing him to be arrested for assault.
• Percussive Pickpocket: Played with. Huell uses this technique to plant a battery on Chuck before Jimmy's bar hearing.
• Pet the Dog: For such a smarmy douche, Howard Hamlin has his moments.
  • After Jimmy finds out that it was Chuck, not Howard, who stonewalled his career at HHM, Howard becomes much more friendly to Jimmy. He and Kim also put in a good word for Jimmy at Davis & Main.
  • Howard does it again in the second season to Kim. After punishing Kim for Jimmy's screw-up and ultimately driving her out of the firm, Howard reacts to her decision with grace, casually waves off her remaining debt to the firm, and compliments her.
  • After Chuck threatens to sue HHM, knowing full well that the suit against his own firm would render it insolvent, Howard buys out Chuck's share using money from his own funds (and putting himself into debt in the process) in order to protect the firm and the people working there. He also gives Chuck a well-deserved "Reason You Suck" Speech criticizing how he put his vendetta against Jimmy above HHM's best interests.
  • He does it more than once in "Smoke", urging Jimmy not to look at Chuck's body in the coroner's van, and calling Jimmy to have him approve the obituary HHM plans to print before Chuck's funeral. He also confesses to Jimmy and Kim about the role he thinks he played in Chuck's suicide, but Jimmy throws it back in his face and Kim accuses him of passive-aggressively pushing guilt onto Jimmy.
• Phoney Call: In "Marco" Jimmy and Marco pull their "Kennedy Half-Dollar" scam on an unsuspecting bar patron. In order to convince their mark that the coin is valuable Marco has loud conversation with a "coin dealer" on the bar's telephone. Their poor mark isn't close enough to hear that he has actually called the speaking clock.
• Phony Degree: Jimmy got his law degree from correspondence courses from The University of American Samoa. Jimmy insists that the school is actually accredited, but it's strongly implied that the school is just a shady diploma mill with rock-bottom standards. Chuck reveals that he feels Jimmy's degree has no legitimacy, and it's a major reason for him undermining Jimmy's legal career.
• Place Worse Than Death: Jimmy really grows to hate the New Mexico desert. He already doesn’t like it, preferring the coldness of Cicero and calling it a barren wasteland, but all through his own shit choices, he gets himself kidnapped and brought out there, nearly tortured and has to convince Tuco to not kill the two skateboarders, is ambushed when he’s picking up bail money for Lalo and develops PTSD from the ensuing shoot-out as well as the trek he and Mike have to go on, and so when the Once More, with Clarity scene in the “Breaking Bad” episode happens, it’s really no wonder he’s screaming to do this anywhere but the desert.
• Placebo Effect: Chuck suffers from the exact opposite: Nocebo Effect. Chuck has electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which studies (and the occasional In-Universe spotlight) have never shown to be anything more than in the subject's head.
• Plausible Deniability: In "Five-O", before Mike executes his plan to murder the two corrupt cops, he tells the bartender that he's leaving for Albuquerque the next day to establish that he was already planning on going there.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A lot of people in Albuquerque wouldn't have been killed in Breaking Bad if Chuck just told Jimmy there was no place for him in HHM the first time Jimmy asked him about it.
  • Chuck's situation wasn't really clarified enough to HHM. Howard sending Ernesto to Chuck implies that had they known the severe extent of it, they would have intervened to help out.
  • Jimmy not getting authorization to run his TV ad from the Davis & Main partners, even though he had plenty of opportunity to do so. This bites him in the ass when the partners find out and are furious, and gets him very close to being terminated (the partners vote 2 to 1 in favor of terminating Jimmy, but Cliff votes to spare him with the understanding that Jimmy will be under closer scrutiny).
  • The tragedy of Jimmy and Chuck, and hinted by the show, confirmed by Bob and Michael, that they’ve been doing this since their childhood. If they had ever actually talked and grabbed the olive branches that they could occasionally give each other, whether it was Jimmy genuinely attempting to be better or Chuck trying to not be a Big Brother Bully, then things could have been different. The series finale reveals hadn't Jimmy blown Chuck off by expecting a condescending lecture, Chuck would have Easily Forgiven him for his past misdeeds due to witnessing his attempts to change.
  • While they eventually get better and reconcile, and genuinely are good together (mostly), this is the bug in Jimmy and Kim’s relationship. They’re coming from similar damage and are very insecure, and both resent actually talking about their feelings, so when their relationship gets into a bit of a lull like all long-term relationships do, Jimmy will assume it’s over and he’s blown his chance, or Kim gets freaked and make things exciting with a scam.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Like his portrayal in Breaking Bad, Jimmy makes a lot of pop culture references in his everyday dialogue. It's also played with, as the pop culture he talks about is often at least a decade or two out of date, and younger characters (in this case Turn of the Millennium twentysomethings) don't know what he's talking about.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Mike's son Matty, whose death was a driving element in the plot of "Five-O", never showed up on-camera.
  • Jimmy and Chuck's father, whose death Chuck blames, at least in part, on Jimmy's behavior.
  • George Hamlin, Howard's father and one of HHM's named partners, is dead by the beginning of the show, leaving Howard and Chuck in charge of the firm.
• Pranking Montage: The episode "Inflatable" features a montage of Jimmy deliberately annoying and pranking his co-workers in a bid to get himself fired and keep the big bonus he'd forfeit by quitting. We see him intentionally spill coffee on a client, pretend not to know a Latino co-worker speaks English, repeatedly leave the toilet unflushed, and coming to work the whole time in garishly colored outfits that make everyone at the firm look ridiculous.
• Precision F-Strike: AMC's limits on swearing and sex mean the F-bombs are used sparingly and to great effect:
  • Jimmy calls Howard a pig-fucker in "Pimento", then repeats the insult when he apologizes in the following episode.
  • In "Gloves Off", Tuco says it when Mike hits his parked car.
  • In Piñata, Howard to Jimmy, in response to Jimmy's The Reason You Suck speech.
  • In "Wexler V. Goodman", Kim delivers the same line as above after Jimmy makes her the sucker in front of her employer.
  • In "JMM", Saul to Howard during his Freak Out at the courthouse.
  • In "Rock and Hard Place", Nacho to Hector while revealing he's the one who put him in his wheelchair.
  • In "Axe and Grind", Jimmy screams it after learning the mediator is wearing a cast, foiling their plans.
  • In "Fun and Games", Jimmy uses it to refer to Lalo when he's trying to convince Kim not to quit the law.
• Present-Day Past/Anachronism Stew:
  • The first episode takes place in 2002, but in the scene where the skaters are following what they think is their target car, you can see a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited JK and a third generation Toyota Prius on the road, these vehicles were not available until 2007 and 2009 respectively. Understandably, it's not too uncommon to see other background cars of late 2000s and 2010s makes and models. But, seeing as the general design of cars hasn't changed much since the time the show is set, only a few people will notice.
  • Jimmy's Suzuki Esteem is treated as a beat-up old clunker. In 2002, that car would have been five years old at most. Incidentally, it'd only be about two years older than the Cadillac sedan that Jimmy drives in Breaking Bad, which is a 1999 model.
  • There are a couple of stock timelapse shots of Chicago during the montage of scams in "Marco." In one of them, you can see the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the construction of which did not begin until 2005, three years after the scene is supposedly meant to take place.
  • Tuco's gun is a "Raging Judge", which wasn't made until 2010.
  • In "Chicanery", a bag of Wonderful Pistachios can be seen in the vending machine outside of the courtroom. The brand was known as Paramount Farms at the time.
  • The New Mexico Rail Runner didn't begin operation until 2006, making Mike's arrival to Albuquerque via that train in 2002 anachronistic (not to mention he should be arriving on Amtrak's Southwest Chief, given he's coming straight from Pennsylvania).
  • In Season 5 Episode 8, a robber is armed with a MP7A1 sub machine gun, which would not be commercially available in 2004 even if the Mexican black market would somehow procure the model. It has not finished development yet.
  • A minor one in "Bingo": During a call with Kim, Jimmy refers to the Kettleman case as "The 25th Hour starring Ned and Maude Flanders". 25th Hour wasn't released until December of 2002 and this episode took place during the summer of that year so there is no way Jimmy or Kim could have seen that movie at that time. However, with Jimmy and Kim both being avid movie watchers, there's a possibility they were aware of the film's premise from trailers or other media.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: Jimmy's school where he got his degree, the University of American Somoa, has one. It fits his personality well. "Aut inveniam viam aut faciam."^translation "I shall either find a way or make one"
• Profane Last Words: Nacho Varga's last words to his captors are a long and hate-fueled rant towards the entire Salamanca family, ending with him revealing to Hector that he sabotaged his heart meds and saying that any time he thinks about how much he hates his current life:
  You think of me, you twisted fuck.
• Properly Paranoid: Chuck immediately suspects that Jimmy sabotaged his Mesa Verde paperwork. He's right.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain:
  • Jimmy's path and descent to becoming Saul mirrors how Walter White descended to becoming Heisenberg; how a man who's had aspirations to do good becomes rotten in the process.
  • If it wasn't enough, final episodes revealed how Saul can descend even further in the immoral despicable conman "Viktor".
  • The series slowly becomes a Deuteragonist's journey to villain, as Kim progresses from sporadically acting as the stooge for Jimmy's cons to an aider and abettor first, to co-conspirator later and finally to a criminal mastermind in her own right.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • In season 3, Jimmy may have avoided disbarment from the disciplinary hearing, but that doesn't stop him from being suspended from law practice for one year, cutting off his main source of income. On the other hand, even though Chuck managed to get Jimmy (temporarily) out of the law, his mental illness has been publicly outed and his reputation is ruined as a result of the hearing. And he never recovers it.
  • In season 6 Kim and Jimmy's scheme to discredit Howard and bring about an an early settlement of the Sandpiper case goes entirely to plan. This secures their 20% share of the substantial payout earlier than planned, but it also indirectly leads to Howard's murder at the hands of Lalo. The near-death experience is so traumatizing that Kim leaves Jimmy over it the night after Howard's memorial.

R

• Race Against the Clock:
  • "Axe and Grind" throws a wrench in Kim and Jimmy's plan when it's revealed the presiding judge in the Sandpiper Case now has a cast, which won't match up with the photos featuring their decoy judge. By "Plan and Execution", they have a few hours to assemble the crew and actor to redo the photoshoot, prepare new photographs, and find a way to drug Howard.
  • In "Point and Shoot", Kim has one hour to kill Gus, photograph his corpse, and bring the proof to Lalo before he executes Saul. Subverted in that Lalo doesn't actually expect her to succeed, and leaves the apartment to enact the next part of his plan as soon as she leaves.
• Real Vehicle Reveal: After Jimmy loses the "sex with a severed head" case in the pilot, he is seen walking across the courthouse parking lot towards a white 1999 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, the car he will drive in Breaking Bad... only for the camera to pan as Jimmy gets into his actual car, in the space next to the Cadillac: a beat-up yellow 1997 Suzuki Esteem.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • When Nacho threatens Jimmy for ratting him out to the Kettlemans, Jimmy strikes back by flooding him with all the textbook mistakes he's made.
  • Chuck to Jimmy at the end of "Pimento."
    Chuck: You're not a real lawyer! "University of American Samoa," for Christ's sake? An online course? What a joke. I worked my ass off to get where I am, and you take these shortcuts and you think suddenly you're my peer? You do what I do because you're funny and you can make people laugh? I committed my life to this! You don't slide into it like a cheap pair of slippers and then reap all the rewards!
    Jimmy: I thought you were proud of me.
    Chuck: I was. When you straightened out and got a job in the mailroom, I was very proud.
    Jimmy: So that's it then, right? Keep old Jimmy down in the mailroom. Cause he's not good enough to be a lawyer.
    Chuck: I know you. I know what you were, what you are. People don't change. You're "Slippin' Jimmy." And "Slippin' Jimmy" I can handle just fine but "Slippin' Jimmy" with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun. The law is sacred! If you abuse that power, people get hurt. This is not a game. You have to know on some level, I know you know I'm right. You know I'm right!
  • In "Nailed," Kim tells Chuck that he's always looked down on Jimmy and now blames him for his own failure. Subverted, as both she and the audience know that Chuck's accusations that prompted the speech are actually 100% true. But that it was Chuck's prior prejudices against Jimmy that caused him to become Slippin' Jimmy are also true.
  • In "Lantern," Howard points out to Chuck how he has put his personal grudges above the well-being of the firm he founded, which has led him to threaten a breach-of-contract lawsuit that the firm can't afford at the mere suggestion that he retire.
  • In "Breathe," Kim lets loose on Howard when she learns that Chuck pretty much short-changed Jimmy in his will. She specifically attacks Howard for having self-serving ulterior motives for telling Jimmy about his theory that Chuck killed himself, and for expecting Jimmy to sift through the charred ruins of the house where his brother died.
  • In "Wiedersehen", Jimmy and Kim give one to each other after Jimmy is told that his suspension from practicing law will be extended — Kim for Jimmy's ungratefulness for all the times she has helped bail him out of trouble, and Jimmy for the way Kim uses his "Slippin' Jimmy" schemes for cheap thrills.
  • In "Wexler v. Goodman", Kim rips into Jimmy for going back on his word and showing the blackmail video/commercial during the meeting with Mesa Verde, calling him out for making her the "sucker" in his ploy. Subverted in that Kim, rather than ending their relationship as it's implied she's about to do, instead suggests that they get married.
  • In "Plan and Execution", Howard realizes that Kim was an active participant in Saul's plot to end the Sandpiper case, and he calls them out for doing their scheme For the Evulz.
  • Gus delivers one to Don Eladio, and the Salamanca family, while stalling so he can Kill the Lights and shoot Lalo.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Kim avoids this by the skin of her teeth when the Kettlemans fire her, being sent by Howard to the East Wing, or what Jimmy calls "the cornfield." She gets assigned later to document review after viewing the ad that Jimmy had had aired without authorization.
• Red Herring:
  • Howard Hamlin is set up as the season one antagonist, but it turns out that Chuck is the one who's actually blocking Jimmy's career.
  • Kai's abrasive personality will lead many viewers to see him as a liability to the meth lab construction crew, but in reality the liability is the affable Werner, who first drunkenly reveals details of the project to strangers in a bar, and later breaks security protocol to arrange a rendezvous with his wife.
  • Kim comes across as a pragmatic and morally conscientious person who initially takes Jimmy to task for his missteps giving the impression that at some point Jimmy will cross a line that Kim won't be able to forgive him for and her rejection will lead to him becoming Saul. Ultimately, she reveals an unethical side of herself and she breaks with Jimmy due to disgust with her own behavior. It’s also revealed earlier that she likes Saul Goodman when she sees it as a comforting turn-on ^note until Lalo calls her “Mrs Goodman”, and was the one to encourage the car, the office, the “I’ll fight for you” Catchphrase, the flamboyant clothes and going further into criminality.
• Redemption Rejection: Jimmy learns at the end of Season 1 that Chuck, not Howard, kept him out of HHM. However, Jimmy then gets another offer to possibly become partner at a prestigious firm Chuck has no control over. But because of Chuck's disrespect and his time working with Marco again, Jimmy decides he doesn't want to be reformed after all.
• Reformed, but Rejected:
  • The main plot of Season 1, as eventually revealed in "Pimento". Jimmy puts his "Slippin' Jimmy" past behind him, starts a new specialty in elder law, and winds up uncovering a massive fraud/racketeering case. It should have been his ticket to a great career as a lawyer, but Chuck doesn't respect him and can't forget his "Slippin' Jimmy" past, so he torpedoes Jimmy's career by refusing to let HHM hire him.
  • In the season 4 episode "Winner" we meet Kristy Esposito, a student who is interviewed for the HHM scholarship. She is ultimately rejected because of a shoplifting conviction. The one committee member who casts a vote in her favour is Jimmy, who sees her as someone being unfairly penalised for having made one mistake in their youth- in short, he sees a lot of himself in her. Her rejection is a painful reminder that to some he will always be seen as a lowlife and refused a second chance no matter how hard he works.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Jimmy's use of the "Squat Cobbler" defense to throw police suspicion off of Daniel Wormald works because the story is so ridiculous that the police believe that there's no way Jimmy could make it up. It also helps that Jimmy even bullies Daniel into making an actual Squat Cobbler video to satisfy the cops.
  • Kim's scam involving a phony show of support and the threat of a fictitious media circus in "Coushatta" to get the assistant district attorney to plea bargain Huell to time served with probation (when she'd been seeking a multi-year sentence).
  • How does Saul manage to disarm a belligerent old man like Mr. Acker so that he can convince him to pursue legal action against Mesa Verde? By showing him an incredibly obscene photo. And it works.
    Saul: Sir, if you would just, just — please, just take a look at my proposal? Okay? Because I think you'll find it persuasive.
    Acker: I don't want it!
    Saul: Just LOOK at it, sir. Just look. What do you see?
    [Acker looks down at the "proposal", then at Saul again with horrified disbelief, then back at the picture]
    Acker: [Voice breaking, in shock] A man...
    [Saul nods, encouragingly]
    Acker: ...F-fuckin' a horse.
    Saul: Sir, I HATE Mesa Verde. I HATE them. Looking down at us from their glass tower — they think they can shit on whoever they want, and we just have to smile and say 'thank you'? Look, picture me as the man, and Mesa Verde as the horse. I'm the guy who'll do whatever it TAKES to stick it to them.
• Relationship Upgrade: Throughout season 1 it is strongly implied that Kim and Jimmy were previously romantically involved- and that they may still have feelings for one another. In the season 2 opener "Switch" they kiss and then sleep together, but Kim refuses to lend Jimmy her toothbrush despite Jimmy's protest that "our germs have already intermingled". In "Nailed" a close-up shot reveals a second toothbrush has appeared in Kim's bathroom, telling us that Jimmy has moved in with her.
• Replaced the Theme Tune: In order to avoid Soundtrack Dissonance, certain episodes drop the bluesy, suitably sleazy outro theme with silence or a more somber piece of music. They are "Lantern", "Rock and Hard Place", "Plan and Execution", and "Point and Shoot", all due to a major Character Death, as well as "Nippy", "Breaking Bad", "Waterworks", and "Saul Gone", all being Gene Takavic-related episodes.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: Saul’s panicked begging in his intro episode that it wasn’t him, it was Ignacio, and thinking Lalo has come to kill him, gets resolved thirteen years later with “Point and Shoot” (and all the events leading up to it) where, after indirectly getting Howard killed and making Kim leave, he gets tied up by Lalo who tells him all about Nacho’s betrayal with the compound and - as he remembers Jimmy lying to him about the desert - thinks Jimmy helped, and promises he’ll come back so they can “talk”. Years later, even with “Saul Goodman” running the show and Jimmy shoved way down, a part of him will always be trapped in that moment.
• Retired Badass: Mike is a retired cop with decades of experience. His comments about military rifles in "Gloves Off" also heavily imply that he's a Vietnam veteran. This history goes a long way to explaining his unflappable badass tendencies.
• The Reveal:
  • Howard wasn't the one keeping Jimmy out of HHM all those years. It was Chuck.
  • Jimmy's rant in "Marco" reveals what a "Chicago sunroof" is: shitting though the sunroof of a car, preferably when there aren't children sitting in the backseat.
  • Chuck folding back a space blanket to reveal a tape recorder, which he has used to tape Jimmy's confession to the Mesa Verde address swap.
• Revolvers Are Just Better:
  • Within the cartel, Tuco and Hector's truck driver use revolvers as their primary guns. Tuco uses a Taurus Raging Judge M513, while the truck driver sports a Llama Comanche.
  • Though Mike does occasionally use semi-automatics (like when Hector's men break into his house), his primary sidearm is a Smith & Wesson Model 629 Performance Center.
• Rich Sibling, Poor Sibling: At the start of the series. While Jimmy and Chuck both grew up poor in Cicero, Chuck is a famous lawyer who lives like a Man With Wealth And Taste (just no electricity), Jimmy is a struggling public defender living in the back of a nail salon and having barely enough money to even eat. It also affects them emotionally, Chuck might not want help but he has everyone falling over themselves to assist if he's struggling, while Jimmy's never even been taught the tools to help himself.
• "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc:
  • The show essentially charts the rise and fall of Saul Goodman as we see him in Breaking Bad—a successful mob lawyer, criminal-for-hire and local celebrity. The struggling Jimmy McGill is Saul on the rise, and the paranoid and depressed Gene Takavic is Saul after the fall.
  • We also get this for Mike, showing how he went from a cop working the beat at Philadelphia to Gus' righthand enforcer in Albuquerque. We already see his "fall" in Breaking Bad, so it's a matter of seeing where he came from and why he went down his path.
  • By Season 3 onwards, we start getting this for Nacho. He goes from accompanying the leader of the Salamancas' Albuquerque branch with his own pettier agenda to getting promoted by Don Eladio on Lalo's recommendation, all under Gus' manipulations as a double agent while trying to get himself out of the game.
• Romantic Candlelit Dinner:
  • In a flashback at the start of "Chicanery," Chuck sets up a romantic candlelit dinner with his ex-wife, claiming that the electricity went out so he decided to make an event of it. In reality, he hadn't been using electricity for some time due to a psychosomatic illness, but didn't want her to find out. This in spite of Jimmy's attempt to convince him to just tell the truth.
  • Jimmy and Kim have one in the season 5 finale while laying low at a hotel to hide from Lalo.
• Roofhopping: Done by Nacho to retrieve a drug cache in a building that is actively being raided by the police, much to Lalo's amusement.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Jimmy's large, garish thermos does not fit into his practical, luxury Davis & Main car. He eventually leaves the company, calling himself a "square peg" and saying that the company wasn't a "good fit" for him.
  • "Quite A Ride" reveals that the Saul Goodman office walls are fake and you can hide what you need behind it, just like Saul is a facade for Jimmy to lie down and die behind.
  • In "The Guy for This," Kim is clearly uncomfortable with Jimmy's placement of a beer bottle on the narrow rail of their third-floor balcony, symbolizing her discomfort with his unethical approach to law. Later, after Kim does the right thing for a stubborn client and is rebuffed and insulted anyway, she lobs beer bottles off the balcony, and Jimmy gleefully joins her.
  • In "Point and Shoot", Lalo Salamanca and Howard Hamlin are buried next to each other, symbolizing how the previously separate legal and criminal stories the show ran on have now permanently merged together due to their deaths.
  • In “Breaking Bad” (the episode, not the show), the open grave that Jesse and Walt dug for Saul transitions into Gene lying in bed, momentarily in the grave himself, and the whole episode pinpoints how in any identity, Jimmy will respond to pain he can’t deal with by making self-destructive choices, i.e digging his own grave.
• Rules Lawyer: Doesn't matter what excuse you make, you're not getting past Mike's booth unless you've got the right amount of cash or validation stickers.
  • After getting a job at Madrigal to launder his illegal money, Mike applies his same details-oriented work ethic there.
• Running Gag:
  • Jimmy having problems with Mike being such a strict enforcer of the parking validation rules at the courthouse.
  • The show continues the Breaking Bad tradition of people with personalized license plates being assholes, this time with Daniel Wormald's garish Hummer H2 baring a "PLAYUH" plate and Howard changing his license plate to "NAMAST3" after accepting Chuck's suicide.
  • Almost every Precision F-Strike is either directed at Howard Hamlin or said by Howard himself.
  • Jimmy explaining the pun behind "Saul Goodman". He's slightly disappointed when Hank Schrader is the only one to get it right away.

S

• Sad Clown: With complicated baggage from his family history, inner turmoil stirring the more the series progresses from one traumatic event to another, and his desire to keep pushing forward while snarking his way through, Jimmy is very much this.
• Satellite Love Interest: Jimmy’s first two wives. The first one serves as an excuse for the Chicago Sunroof incident, and they could be assumed to be short marriages when Jimmy was younger, but they’re never seen or mentioned more than a couple of times, Jimmy’s One True Love being Kim, and despite being cheated on twice, the main fault for his desperately craving affection and low self esteem is shown to be Chuck.
• Saved by Canon:
  • Gus, Mike, Tuco and Hector all die during Breaking Bad, but since they show up here, we know they'll survive this show.
  • As tense as Chuck's scheme to get Jimmy disbarred can seem, we know Jimmy will still be practicing law by the end of the series. And no matter what situation Jimmy finds himself in, we know he'll live long enough to become Saul (and later, "Gene Takavic").
• Screw Destiny: It’s a prequel, so Jimmy McGill was always doomed to become Saul Goodman, and for a long time, he’s hellbent on proving everyone right about him, turning into his own Heisenberg with his sociopathic Viktor St. Claire identity, but he realises at the end that he doesn’t have to stay “like a chimp with a machine gun”, and spurred on by love for Kim and wanting to make her proud, goes back to being himself, now with added taking responsibility and not both shoving down trauma while using it as an excuse.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!:
  • When Jimmy sees the money that the Kettlemans are accused of stealing, they try to bribe him to not mention it to anybody. Jimmy repeatedly insists that he cannot accept a bribe, but is willing to accept a retainer for his legal services. The Kettlemans still do not hire Jimmy, and he does eventually accept the bribe money, but then he goes to his office and calculates out how much he would have actually charged them for his work as a lawyer, spending only the money that he "earned".
  • As revealed in "Waterworks", Kim refused her share of the Sandpiper settlement after what happened with Lalo and Howard.
• Second Episode Introduction:
  • Nacho makes his introduction in "Mijo," the second episode of season 1.
  • Gus makes his introduction in "Witness," the second episode of season 3.
• Sequel Escalation: Downplayed. After six seasons, Better Call Saul will end with 63 episodes, exactly one more than its predecessor.
• Serenade Your Lover: For part of season 2 Jimmy moves out of Kim's apartment in Albuquerque and into his Davis & Main corporate apartment in Santa Fe. He serenades her daily by calling her landline and singing to her answerphone- the episode "Bali Ha'i" is named after one of his song choices. His singing is dreadful but Kim finds his attempts endearing.
• Sexual Karma: Inverted. After Kim leaves Jimmy and scamming behind and starts to do everything by the book, with her new Love Interest Glen being similarly law-abiding and honest. Their sex life however is portrayed as passionless due to Glen being a unexciting man and a lousy lover, in direct contrast to the time she had with the amoral Jimmy, whom she had a passionate and healthy sex life with a Power Dynamics Kink.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: The show features several of these, possibly due to AMC's restrictions on sex and swearing in their productions:
  • In "Switch," Jimmy ropes Kim into conning KEN WINS. After conning him, they slip out, giggle over their conquest, and kiss. Cut to commercial break. We come back and it's clear that they did the deed at Kim's apartment.
  • The same thing happens in "Coushatta" after the ADA caves to Kim's plea offer for Huell. Jimmy follows Kim into the stairwell to ask how it's turned out. She answers by dropping her briefcase, shoving Jimmy against a wall, and kissing him. Next scene is them in bed, limbs tangled together, Jimmy doing his "Southern pastor" voice.
  • "Plan and Execution" features a close-up shot of a flip phone which is covertly dialled in to an HHM meeting. In the background, an out-of-focus Kim and Jimmy are making love on the couch, evidently turned on by the success of their scam.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Of the frustrated variety. Jimmy stocks Chuck up with a few days' worth of supplies before confronting him, and leaves him to care for himself after confirming Chuck's hand in secretly preventing him from getting ahead.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Hank and Gomez engage in these in both of their season 5 appearances, debating about Marie's picky habits over expired food when coming to interview Krazy-8 in jail, and having a similar dispute about the origins of the word 'culvert'.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: It's debatable whether Chuck's criticisms of Jimmy's lack of ethics have driven Jimmy into becoming an unethical attorney. Jimmy seems to want to do right by his brother and is crushed when Chuck says that he'll always be Slippin' Jimmy, but we also see that Jimmy returns to his shady ways even when handed the perfect opportunity to go straight. By the time Jimmy becomes Saul Goodman for real, the show confirmed both points were true, Jimmy is a man over forty responsible for his own often spiteful choices, but Chuck’s constant little digs at his self esteem and thinking he was worthless, didn’t help in the slightest.
• Sexual Karma: Inverted:
  • Kim and Jimmy have a healthy sex life and have many cute domestic moments, but they mostly bang when Evil Feels Good, literally having sex to the Sandpiper meeting falling apart. The crew have likened them to two addicts, still very much in love but having the most fun when they’re causing trouble. To contrast, "Waterworks" shows Kim in her new life with her new partner Glenn. He's a mundane man and a lousy lover who calls out "Yep. Yep. Yep." during their passionless and mechanical sex sessions. It's apparent that Kim was having a lot more fun with Jimmy.
  • Howard Hamlin is a decent guy trapped in a sexless marriage.
• Shady Lady of the Night: Saul hires the prostitute Wendy to ruin Howard Hamlin's reputation by making it seem like Howard had been Wendy's john.
• Shoot the Builder: Gus ends up having his lab architect killed. Downplayed, since Gus had no plans to kill him from the beginning and only did so once Werner showed he could not be trusted (first by speaking a little too freely while drunk at a bar, and then by actively sneaking out to rendezvous with his wife).
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Mike convinced his son, Matty, not to go to internal affairs (in fear of having him killed by other cops) and to just take the bribe from his corrupt partners. They killed Matty anyway since his initial reluctance made them fear he would rat them out.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Shown Their Work:
  • During "Marco," Jimmy tells Marco that he plans on catching a Cubs game and getting a hot dog at Henry's. That's an actual Cicero area establishment, Henry’s Hot Dogs of Cicero on Ogden Avenue.
  • With such an emphasis on his Identity Breakdown, all the masks, and how he doesn't really know his true self and will keep stealing from everyone important to him, Jimmy's been praised as a character who is written and played like people who do actually understand dissociation as a disorder/coping response. Also helps that it's not an excuse for the incredibly bad choices he makes and the damage he's done, just part of an explanation.
  • Gene's conversation with the security guards in Omaha make several references to Nebraska Cornhusker football, specifically quarterback Taylor Martinez's 400 yard game, Coach Bo Pelini, and an upcoming game with Texas, confirming that events in this part of the show take place in 2010.
• Signature Shot: Most (if not all) episodes include at least one shot of a character's face reflected in a mirror or another shiny surface. This device is even used for Jimmy's Establishing Character Moment, a Mirror Monologue in the very first episode.
• Significant Anagram: If you rearrange the first letter of the title of every episode in Season 2, the result could be welcome news to Breaking Bad fans, as well as a hint towards the identity of the person who leaves Mike a note warning him against killing Hector Salamanca in the Season 2 finale. Fring's back.
• A Simple Plan:
  • Jimmy's plan to get hired as the Kettlemans' lawyer seems simple and foolproof. The skaters will pull a Staged Pedestrian Accident on Mrs. Kettleman and Jimmy will 'just happen' to be driving by and able to come to her rescue. She will be grateful to Jimmy and impressed by his skill as a lawyer and will then tell her husband to hire Jimmy to represent him in his embezzlement case. Unfortunately, the skaters Failed a Spot Check and targeted the wrong car, which just happened to belong to Tuco Salamanca's grandma.
  • Jimmy ratting out Chuck to HHM's insurer was probably just a petty, spur-of-the-moment decision simply meant to get back at Chuck over his suspension. But it's this decision that gradually snowballs and leads to Chuck's relapse and suicide.
  • A drive down to the border to pick up the bail money for Lalo should be the simplest milk run conceivable, right? That is, until he's ambushed by another gang on the way back, is only saved from certain death by Mike, and then they have to spend two days hiking their way back to civilization.
• Slipping a Mickey: In "Something Unforgivable" Kim considers drugging Howard before shaving his hair off. In season 6 she and Jimmy implement a plot which involves drugging Howard with a substance absorbed through the skin. Later in season 6, Viktor identifies bar patrons as marks before Jeff the cab driver drugs them with water laced with barbiturates.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Jimmy and Kim versus Chuck and Howard. Jimmy and Kim grew up poor (as did Chuck, but he grew up to be a highly respected lawyer who could be helped when he was broke), Jimmy having to take PD cases at the start of the series so he doesn’t starve and Kim still carrying around the childhood dread of having to stay ahead of the landlord, and they resent Chuck and Howard for having a seemingly charmed existence.
• Slut-Shaming: For a guy who is in a committed relationship five seasons out of six, is the one who got cheated on (twice) and adores his current partner, almost everyone seems to think Jimmy is a slut. Chuck firmly believes his brother ruined his marriage, Marco thinks him having clients means he’s a gigolo, Mike assumes Kim will think him not coming home means he's catting around, and Lalo calls him Spanish for gay prostitute. No wonder Saul Really Gets Around as a coping mechanism, with even Jimmy in season four thinking all he's good for is a quick lay.
• Snarking Thanks: Howard's response to Kim when she visits his office to argue that HHM is being unfair to Jimmy in "Pimento":
  Howard: Want to know what I believe? I believe that you're way out of your depth in this matter. So the next time that you want to come in here and tell me what I'm doing wrong, you are welcome to keep it to yourself. Because I don't care.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Numerous examples:
  • "Mabel": The Deliberately Monochrome flashforward to Jimmy's life as "Gene" is soundtracked with Sugar Town by Nancy Sinatra. While this clearly refers to an ingredient of Cinnabons, the lyrics about living a carefree life are wildly at odds with the portrayal of Gene becoming so stressed he collapses.
  • "Bagman": The cold open shows The Cousins delivering Lalo's bail money to a garage where two Salamanca associates and frantically scrubbing a car's upholstery of blood stains. This scene is soundtracked with the upbeat love ballad Dejame Quererte ("Let Me Love You") by César Castro And His Group.
  • "Axe and Grind": A Dreamer's Holiday by Perry Como at first appears a good fit for Howard's racks of Hamlindigo Blue suits, knitted ties and and expensive cufflinks. As the scene goes on however we see Howard is getting dressed for work in a sparsely-furnished guest bedroom, into which he has hurriedly moved his personal belongings following the breakdown of his marriage. This is another example of a song about carefree living playing over the actions of a very stressed and lonely man.
• Splash of Color:
  • In the opening Deliberately Monochrome flashforward, the reflection of the TV playing Saul's commercials in his glasses is the only color.
  • The season 6 key art◊ features a monochrome image of Gene putting on a bright red suit jacket.
• Spinoff Babies: The animated prequel series, Slippin' Jimmy, follows the adventures of Jimmy and Marco as childhood best friends and precocious con artists in Cicero.
• Spousal Privilege: The reason Kim marries Jimmy in "JMM".
• Staged Pedestrian Accident:
  • Jimmy earned the nickname "Slippin' Jimmy" for his expertise at this racket. He goes back to his old ways in Season 3 to extort two music store owners who are refusing to pay him, through the use of strategically placed drumsticks on the floor.
  • The two skaters try to pull this scam on Jimmy. He then hires them to pull it on the wife of a potential big client so Jimmy can come to the rescue. They end up accidentally pulling it on Tuco Salamanca's grandmother, who drives a very similar looking car, and this ends badly for them.
• Stalker Shot:
  • As one of Gus' top men, Victor is tasked to track and follow certain people to keep tabs on them:
    • In Season 4 "Smoke", Nacho goes to a bridge to dispose of the pills that caused Hector to have his stroke. When Nacho thinks he's safe, the camera cuts to show a different view of the bridge and the camera zooms out to reveal Victor sitting in his car watching Nacho from a distance and it's revealed he has a tracker installed on Nacho's truck so he's able to follow his movements.
    • In Season 5 "Bad Choice Road", after Lalo is done visiting Hector at the retirement home and he gets into the car with Nacho in the parking lot, as they depart, the camera cuts to Victor, who is parked several spots away from them, tracking their movements with the tracker that's installed in Nacho's car, again.
  • In Season 4 "Winner", Lalo is on a hilltop overlooking Gus' chicken farm to watches the activities going on through binoculars and jots down detailed notes. When he notices Gus and his men getting into cars to hunt down Werner after he escaped, Lalo decides to follow them to sees what's going on. Mike goes to a money transfer office to find clues on Werner's whereabout, and once he figures out where he might be, the camera switches to a Binocular Shot where Lalo is watching Mike through his car. Lalo was originally following Gus, but he changed his target to Mike to see what task Gus has him doing.
  • In Season 5 "Bagman", the Twins are grabbing $7 million at a Cartel stash house to pay for Lalo's bail and to meet with Saul to deliver him the money. As they leave in their car, the camera zooms out to reveal one of the workers at the stash house was observing the Twins and he makes a phone call to someone to inform them about the Twins' next move.
• Start of Darkness:
  • The show shows how the upstart, aspiring attorney Jimmy McGill becomes the fully crooked Amoral Attorney Saul Goodman. Ironically, the show starts just as Jimmy has turned his life around and gone straight after years of living as a conman and facing sex offender charges.
  • A flashback episode shows the exact moment when Jimmy first began to go off the moral path: he watches his father get duped by an obvious con artist yet again, who tells Jimmy that everyone is either a wolf or a sheep. Jimmy visually resolves to be a wolf and steals cash from his father's register for the first time.
  • The show also shows Mike's rise from parking lot attendant to Gus Fring's lead enforcer. The show starts by the time he's already retired from a career as a dirty cop with a history of vigilantism.
  • Beginning in Season 3, the show explores how Francesca goes from a perky ex-DMV clerk to the jaded receptionist/accomplice we see in Breaking Bad.
• Stealing from the Till:
  • A young Jimmy literally did this while working at his father's shop in Cicero. Chuck tells Kim that Jimmy stole thousands of dollars from the cash register, which he believes eventually drove their father out of business and possibly shortened his life. Several episodes later, we see Jimmy as a child doing this for the first time, his Start of Darkness.
    • Jimmy is guilty of a bit of petty theft while working at Davis and Main, and later he shamelessly furnishes his office with a Davis and Main-branded mug full of all the Davis and Main-branded pens he stole while working there.
  • Craig Kettleman embezzles $1.6 million from the County Treasury while working there. Later he and his wife Betsy start their own tax services business and are found to be creaming off a portion of their clients' tax rebates for themselves.
  • Daniel "Pryce" Wormald works in IT for a pharmaceutic firm and can't resist helping himself to some of their products, which he sells to drug dealers for profit.
  • Mike snuck money from criminals he'd busted back in Philadelphia, which he says was the norm for his peers.
• Stealing from Thieves:
  • Subverted in the episode "Bingo", where Jimmy and Mike only take the Kettlemans' embezzled money to force them to take a plea deal for stealing it in the first place. Jimmy regrets not invoking this trope later on, though:
    Jimmy: Help me out here. Did I dream it, or did I have $1,600,000 on my desk in cash? When I close my eyes, I can still see it. It's burned into my retinas like I was staring into the sun. No one on God's green earth knew we had it. We could have split it 50-50. We could have gone home with $800,000 each! Tax-free!
  • Played straight with Nacho Varga, who outright prefers to rob other criminals because they can't go to the police. When he learns about the Kettlemans' embezzlement money, he plans to steal it from them, knowing they'll take the fall for it, and is only thwarted from doing so by Jimmy warning them. He does the same thing later when Daniel Wormald carelessly leaves his vehicle registration (which includes his real name and home address) out in the open during a drug deal, breaking into his home and robbing him of all the cash he's made selling drugs.
• Stealth Pun:
  • One scene in "Alpine Shepherd Boy" involves Tony the Toilet Buddy, a talking toilet making unintentionally lewd comments. You know, toilet humor.
  • An advertisement for the Garden Weasel plow follows Jimmy's TV spot, as if judging him to be a weasel.
• Stepford Smiler: Jimmy in reaction to Chuck's death. After initially suffering a Heroic BSoD, Jimmy becomes more upbeat and energetic than usual and behaves in a completely casual manner to any reference to the subject. This is shown to be a case of Obviously Not Fine when he behaves erratically and self-sabotages at a job interview. He manages to repress his grieving right up until the season finale (where he also pretends to be grieving as much as expected in the bar hearing, when HHM's rejection of a troubled-but-promising internship candidate, followed by the Esteem failing to start, finally sets off a fit of Inelegant Blubbering. This continues in later seasons, torturing Howard because Howard seemingly got over Chuck and he hasn't, and other traumas mount up until he's Saul Goodman full-time.
• Stopped Dead in Their Tracks: Subverted by Howard. He continues walking while Jimmy hurls insult after insult at him, not even acknowledging his presence.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: In season 4, Kim is shown borrowing one of Jimmy's neckties to dress up one of her public defender clients in court. Just like Jimmy was shown doing with his public defender clients in the montage in "Mijo". This is Truth in Television, as public defender's offices and even major law firms often do clothing drives to ensure that defendants always can dress up and look presentable (so as to avoid drawing any unfair bias from the judge and jury).
• Stupid Crooks: The first season is rife with them, with only marginal improvements in later seasons.
  • Jimmy's public defender clients in "Uno" broke into a mortuary, cut off the head off a corpse and then had sex with it. On top of it, they made a video of the whole event. The prosecutor only needs to play the tape as his closing statement to get them sent to jail.
  • The second-rate skater hustlers of stupid also count; they're first introduced trying a Staged Pedestrian Accident scam on Jimmy, despite Jimmy's shitty car obviously indicating that he has no money. Even with Jimmy's coaching, they're terrible: First, they target the wrong car because they don't bother to look too closely to make sure they struck the correct vehicle (such as not memorizing the specific shade of color). Then they call Tuco's grandmother a "bizznatch." Were it not for Jimmy's negotiating skills, their fate would have been bullets to the head, Columbian neckties, and burial in a shallow grave.
  • The Kettlemans stage their own kidnapping and flee into the woods near their home. They clearly had no plan beyond that and things could have gone very tragic if Jimmy did not find them. Furthermore, they did an awful job covering up the fact that they embezzled the money with tactics such as writing government checks to themselves to falsely claim it. Jimmy later lampshades this to Mike and tells him that he thought that criminals would be smarter than that.
  • When Nacho threatens him, Jimmy responds by pointing to all the elementary mistakes Nacho made, like using his own van in staking out the Kettlemans' house, getting spotted by a neighbor, and failing to clean the blood (from the skaters) out of the back of his van which gave the cops the probable cause to arrest him and start to dig into his activities. He essentially framed himself for a crime he has not yet committed. Season 2, though, establishes that Nacho's stupidity on the Kettleman matter is the result of trying to apply the principles of his cartel dealings to crime in white-collar suburbia. Indeed, it takes Nacho a bit to grasp that not everyone in his organization has the same ability to look at the bigger picture as he does and too many of his mooks are stupid enough to make impulsive decisions that end up incriminating them.
  • Daniel Wormald uses his drug-dealing money to buy himself a brand new Hummer H2. When Mike refuses to get in such a suspiciously flashy vehicle, Daniel stupidly decides he no longer needs Mike's protection. Nacho immediately takes advantage of Mike's absence by sneaking a glance at Daniel's driver's license, so that he can learn his address and burglarize his house. If that weren't stupid enough, Daniel even goes so far as to report his stolen baseball cards to the police, who instantly deduce that he's a drug dealer.
  • Jimmy's reasoning for going from being the cellphone guy to the Albuquerque low-lifes to lawyer as Saul Goodman is that he figures they'll need representation when their stupid antics land them in the back of a patrol car.
  • Season 5 is kickstarted by a pair of junkies who take Saul's "50% off" pitch the wrong way, and the two twerps go on a multi-day crime spree. It culminates into them getting the police sent to the neighborhood where the Salamancas sell meth (due to their baggie getting stuck in the drainpipe the dealer uses to send the units down, and the two of them making a scene trying to get it out), resulting in Krazy-8 getting arrested when he's caught trying to remove the drugs. The junkies themselves are arrested only a few days later.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Jimmy's commercials, full of cheap editing effects, corny promises and melodramatic delivery, are quite comical, but it's still easy to see why their dynamism and hard-sell tactics are better at getting the attention of viewers.
  • Davis & Main's commercials, meanwhile, are awful in the exact opposite way from Jimmy's: they consist of nothing but flat, dull narration over plain white text on an amorphous blue swirly background. The partners are so protective of their urbane image that they keep it as safe and conservative as possible. Their ads aren't even targeted correctly; Jimmy catches one late at night, well after its target audience are asleep.
  • The show's title cards use strange color patterns, a poor Chroma Key filter, a shaky handheld camera and cheesy computer effects to capture Jimmy's unsavory and low-rent character. Also, the soundtrack cuts off prematurely. From Season 2 onwards, the cards flicker between color and black-and-white and show the type of picture disruption seen on deteriorating VHS tapes, symbolizing the shift in Jimmy's path. By season 5, the title cards start to corrupt to show flashes of the next episode's title card. By second half of Season 6, already deteriorated images are switching to blue screen.
  • "What is Mesa Verde Hiding?", a compilation of tacky greenscreened "testimonies" from subpar acting, accompanied by poor fonts and cheap effects.
  • Played with in Bagman with the Cousins. Their scenes are shot using techniques which are common when split-screen doubling is used: favoring their backs, having a foreground object take up the middle of the frame to hide the matte line, building symmetrical sets so they can just mirror half of the image. This is all done is spite of the fact that the Cousins are played by two different actors (who are real life brothers). This is paid off in the scene where they're loading duffle bags with money, it looks like a symmetrical set is being used with mirroring, but one of the cousins drops a stack of bills and has to bend over to pick it up, breaking the illusion.
  • The online training videos for Los Pollos Hermanos are deliberately designed to look like it has low production values. The green-screen effects on Gus are not only obvious, but tear in places. Also, the Limited Animation has a few flaws, such as dirt and errors on the screen. Finally, the sound quality for Gus doing voce-over work is also bad, as the sound hasn't been equalized and has a very overtuned bass. All of this was done intentionally to make them look realistically tacky, like a real employee training video would look for a fast food restaurant.
• Suddenly Speaking: Played with for Hector Salamanca. In present-day scenes in Breaking Bad, he couldn't speak on account of his stroke and could only communicate by ringing his bell, and in flashback scenes in that show, he only ever spoke Spanish. So Hector's interactions with Mike in season 2, and Gus and Nacho in season 3, are the first times we've heard him speak in English in any form.
• Sunroof Shenanigans: The "Chicago Sunroof", the entire reason why Jimmy ended up in Albuquerque.
• Surprise Car Crash: Happens to an overworked Kim when she falls asleep at the wheel.
• Surprise Witness:
  • At his disciplinary hearing, Jimmy names Huell as a surprise witness. Played with in that Jimmy did write his name in the list of witnesses, he just didn't tell anyone what Huell would be testifying to. Huell planted a battery on Jimmy's electro-sensitive brother Chuck for almost an hour and Chuck felt nothing, proving that Chuck's sickness is mental despite what he claims and cause him to blow his whole case against Jimmy in a rant.
  • In "Namaste", Saul reveals a lookalike of the defendant has been at his side the whole time, with the actual defendant in the back of the courtroom much to the surprise of the witness and the annoyance of both the prosecutor and the judge.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: Gould pointed it out in a writer’s panel, that most of the cast are dead, one character is in federal prison and only just learning how to be himself and live with guilt instead of switching himself off, another character has spent years destroying her life and will probably have a civil suit hanging over her head… yet it’s still the happiest, romantic ending that these two could wish for, with a lot of hope for the future.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In the Season 3 finale, Chuck — who's been doing good with his condition since it being revealed at the hearing — relapses hard after being pushed out of his firm and having pushed away Jimmy. Even with the epiphany that the condition was all in his head, it can be hard to dump behaviors and habits that have been with you for years, especially after something as stressful as losing your job and having a falling out with a family member.
  • One that extends into Breaking Bad, as Gordon Smith confirmed that Lalo holding Jimmy captive affected him so badly, a part of his brain is always going to be trapped Bound and Gagged waiting for the guy to come back, and it doesn't matter how many times he's told that all the Salamancas are dead, because that's what happens with PTSD, especially when you never get help for it.
• Suspicious Spending: After a few deals, Daniel Wormald goes and spends his drug money on a gigantic Hummer with a flame paint job and spinning rims. Naturally, when his house is burglarized by Nacho, the cops take one look at the thing and swiftly deduce that he's engaged in illegal activities.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Especially when it hits Saul Goodman time. Aside from knowing who Lalo is now, and why he's so terrified of the desert, scenes with Walt and Jesse have new context with Jimmy behind Saul and why he's doing all this, but they don't know that and see only what he was in the parent show, a scummy Ambulance Chaser who can't shut up and has no actual human emotions beyond greed.
• Sympathetic Murder Backstory: Mike really was involved in the deaths of those two fellow police officers, just as the Philadelphia cops suspects he might be. In fact, he's the one who killed them. Considering they were a couple of sleazeball corrupt cops who murdered his son on the mere suspicion he didn't have their backs, and would have murdered Mike too once they learned for certain he knew, your sympathies are naturally entirely with Mike.

T

• Take Away Their Name: Downplayed realistically, as Chuck (but blaming Howard) doesn't want his brother using his own name, and asks if he wants to build his own identity instead of riding someone else's coattails. It's eventually revealed that Jimmy started on the way to using "Saul Goodman" as a name because he thinks that if he stays Jimmy, he'll just be considered Chuck's loser brother.
• Take a Third Option: Chuck refuses to retire after his breakdown at Jimmy's hearing, knowing that they'll have to let him stay since the only other option would be dissolve the firm since they don't have the cash to buy him out. Howard takes a third option and puts up most of the buyout money from his own funds, essentially forcing Chuck out.
• Talent vs. Training: It's left undiscussed, but one of the MANY issues between Chuck and Jimmy is that Jimmy has a natural rapport with his clients and pretty much breezed his way into becoming a lawyer. For Chuck, who studied and worked hard to get where he is but relies on his partner Howard to keep the clients happy, this is too much of an insult to both the law and himself.
• Tears of Fear: In "Bagman", Jimmy finds himself in the middle of a shootout. As he is cowering behind his car he realises how totally out of his depth he is and begins literally weeping with fear.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Howard tries to dissuade Chuck from testifying at Jimmy's hearing before the bar association, reasoning that the case is strong enough with his eyewitness testimony to support it and that HHM's reputation is on the line. Chuck dismisses him and says that some things are more important. Thanks to Jimmy's elaborate Batman Gambit, Chuck's testimony ends in disaster for himself and HHM.
    • Within that example is an even sharper one. On the stand, Chuck calls out Jimmy's (apparent) strategy of bringing his ex-wife into town to see his condition revealed and rattle him. He specifically says that Jimmy's hoping it will make him break down and "confess like a murderer on an episode of Perry Mason", and that he won't fall for it. Then Jimmy reveals the battery in Chuck's pocket.
  • Jimmy/"Gene" calls Kim after the events of Breaking Bad to check up, because Kim called Francesca and asked about him. After some talk, she says he should turn himself in. He gets mad and says she could turn herself in for the things she's done, since nothing is stopping her^note Any criminals who could retaliate against them are dead.. She ends up doing just that.
  • Jimmy and Kim find out in "Axe and Grind" that the lawyer they hired an actor to pretend to be—so it could look like Jimmy was bribing him—is in a cast so that the photos they took would instantly be discovered to be false and while Jimmy thinks they should cool it and plan for another point down the road, Kim refuses to give up on doing it the next day. The plan succeeds, but Howard confronting them that night results in his death at Lalo's hands in "Plan and Execution".
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: Jimmy goes through a short sequence meeting potential clients, including a rich nutjob who wants to secede from the country and found "the Sovereign Sandia Republic", a suburban dad who wants to patent a talking toilet that spouts creepy innuendos, and an old lady who wants to write a will divvying up her tacky Hummel figurines. The last one at least provides useful work, starting Jimmy on a career path in elder law.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Invoked by Jimmy during his first visit to Dr. Caldera with a very sick goldfish:
  Dr. Caldera: "Jesus, what are you doing, man? There's barely any oxygen in that bag! You're suffocating her!"
  Jimmy: "Her?"
  Dr. Caldera: Yeah, just because you don't see swinging dicks doesn't mean you can't tell a boy fish from a girl fish.
  Jimmy: "Oh yes, now I can see the lipstick."
• Then Let Me Be Evil:
  • Jimmy began his law career as an ex-conman trying to go straight and follow his brother Chuck's path as a legitimate attorney. However, Chuck believes that he'll never truly go straight and works to deny him opportunities at every turn, until Jimmy gives up on the straight and narrow and decides to do things his own, much darker way. While Jimmy is responsible for his own choices, it’s made clear that Chuck’s resentment and sabotage and “you never meant that much to me” cruelty didn’t help.
  • After the courthouse where Jimmy spends most of his time learns of his ruse to get Lalo Salamanca free from a murder beef, they start treating him like dirt. But he takes this in stride, as his criminal clientele jumps up considerably.
• Therapy Is for the Weak:
  • Jimmy would rather bottle up his emotions instead of talking about how his brother's betrayal of his feelings are eating at him in "Marco". Throughout Season 4, he refuses to go to a therapist after his brother's suicide stirs with every clash they went through in Season 3, despite showing clear signs of benefitting from having a professional to talk to. He tries his best to make himself too busy to seek any sort of counselling, and when he sees how battered Howard looks from confronting his own guilt, Jimmy shuts the idea of therapy down for good.
  • Chuck is far too prideful and stubborn to even consider the chances of his EHS being a delusion. He instead requests alternative ways to treat his supposed illness up until it's shown to not be real in front of an entire court. Jimmy also enables this, first by supplying him with everything for a non-electrical lifestyle, then by getting his mind off it with legal work from his practice.
• Thermometer Gag: In "Axe and Grind" Jimmy agrees to be experimented on by Dr Caldera as part of his and Kim's plot to destroy Howard's reputation. When Caldera gets out a thermometer of the kind usually used on animals Jimmy looks alarmed and asks if it has been sterilised. Caldera assures him that the thermometer is brand new, and that as a human patient he only needs to put it under his armpit.
• Thirsty Desert: So much so in "Bagman" that Saul resorts to drinking his own urine.
• Time Skip: "Fun and Games" skips into the future after Kim leaves Jimmy. Word of God suggests that the scene of Saul waking up in his Mc Mansion is set in 2007
• Time Travel: The finale features flashbacks to Jimmy disussing the subject (as a proxy for discussing regret) with all the major characters he has known who have died throughout the two series: Mike Ehrmantraut, Walter White, and Chuck McGill.
• Title Drop: Each episode's title is spoken by different characters at least once in that episode, or alluded to in some form.
  • In season 1, it's done in spoken form. This is especially true for Episode 5, having both the titles of "Jello" (the original title before copyright issues with Kraft forced them to change it) and "Alpine Shepherd Boy" mentioned in it.
  • Season 2:
    • "Switch" refers to the light switch in Jimmy's new D&M office.
    • "Cobbler" refers to the "Squat Cobbler" lie Jimmy spins to the police about Daniel's secret stash. Nacho's last name, Varga, also means Cobbler in Hungarian.
    • "Amarillo" refers to the opening sequence of Jimmy bribing a bus driver so he can solicit clients.
    • "Gloves Off" refers to both the nature of Jimmy's confrontation with Chuck, and to Mike's setup of Tuco.
    • "Rebecca" refers to Chuck's ex-wife, the name shown in the sheet music in "Cobbler".
    • "Bali Hai" has Jimmy serenade Kim over the phone with the song.
    • "Inflatable" is named in reference to Jimmy spotting a wacky wavy arm inflatable tube man, and taking inspiration from it to get himself fired from Davis & Main.
    • "Fifi" is named for its usage of that particular B-29 for a commercial shoot.
    • "Nailed" refers to Chuck's integrity being thrown into question by Jimmy's forgery and Mike using nails as spike strip.
    • "Klick" is a unit of measurement, equating to a shooting distance of just under 1,100 yards. The episode also ends with a very significant "click" sound from Chuck's tape recorder.
  • Season 3:
    • "Mabel" refers to The Adventures of Mabel, a book that Jimmy and Chuck read together as children.
    • "Witness" refers to Howard and a private investigator being present when Jimmy breaks into Chuck's house to threaten Chuck and destroy the tape recorder.
    • "Sunk Costs" refers to Kim invoking the sunk cost fallacy.
    • "Sabrosito" refers to the bobblehead Hector presents to Don Eladio in the opening flashback.
    • "Chicanery" refers to Jimmy's elaborate Batman Gambit which causes Chuck to have a meltdown on the witness stand.
    • "Off Brand" refers to Jimmy being forced to promote himself as a commercial filmmaker instead of a lawyer as a result of his one-year suspension.
    • "Expenses" refers to Jimmy's difficulty finding money to meet his half of the expenses for the office space he shares with Kim.
    • "Slip" refers to the Staged Pedestrian Accident that Jimmy pulls on two music store owners who refuse to pay him.
    • "Fall" can alternately refer to Jimmy's moral fall by scamming his Sandpiper Crossing clients, Chuck's professional fall by being pressured to leave HHM, and Kim's physical fall by having her car accident.
    • "Lantern" refers to the gas lantern Chuck uses to commit suicide.
  • Season 4:
    • "Smoke" refers to that which lingers from Chuck's house after his suicide.
    • "Breathe" refers to the way by which Gus kills Arturo at the end, by hogtying him with zip ties and suffocating him with a plastic bag, to intimidate Nacho.
    • "Something Beautiful": Jimmy using the phrase when trying to entice Mike into his Hummel heist.
    • "Talk": Mike attends talk therapy, while Jimmy starts his career of selling drop phones to criminals.
    • "Quite a Ride": Gus has Mike subject architects being recruited for his secret meth lab to a very long ride in the back of a van while blindfolded. The title is also said word-for-word by Saul in the opening flash forward before he calls Ed the Disappearer.
    • "Pinata": Jimmy gets back at the teens who mugged him by having Huell and Man Mountain tie them up like pinatas.
    • "Something Stupid": The episode shares a title with the song that accompanies the opening montage.
    • "Coushatta": Huell's hometown, where Jimmy goes to mail letters as part of Kim's scheme to strongarm ADA Ericsen into agreeing to a probation plea deal for Huell
    • "Wiedersehen": Lalo reconnects with Hector for the first time in ages and Werner flees from the secured housing for the superlab. It's also painted on the rock that Werner's construction crew are blasting to make room for their elevator shaft.
    • "Winner": Jimmy gets his law license reinstated through totally manipulating the reinstatement panel and even Kim. He sings "The Winner Takes It All" in the opening flashback and later invokes the song when talking to the girl who was rejected by H.H.M. because of her criminal record.
  • Season 5:
    • "Magic Man" is what Saul claims Huell calls him, despite being asked not to.
    • "50% Off" refers to Saul's offer for a discount on the legal retainer for non-violent felonies, and becomes a battle cry for the two lowlifes in the opening montage.
    • "The Guy For This", what Lalo calls Saul when he is sizing him up for the set up they're planning.
    • "Namaste" is the new vanity license plate on Howard Hamlin's car.
    • "Dedicado a Max", what the plaque reads on the fountain in the center of Gus' memorial village South of the border.
    • "Wexler V Goodman" refers to Saul turning the tables on Kim during discussions with Mesa Verde.
    • "JMM" refers to the monogrammed bag Kim gave Saul, and the discussion Saul has with Lalo about what the initials mean.
    • "Bagman", how Kim disdainfully refers to Saul's role in Lalo's scheme.
    • "Bad Choice Road", Saul's bastardization of the talk Mike gave him after their experience in "Bagman".
    • "Something Unforgivable", said by Kim in reference to her plan to ruin Howard's career.
  • Season 6:
    • "Wine and Roses", an abbreviated title of the song that plays in the opening Flash Forward.
    • "Carrot and Stick", Saul and Kim's respective methods of dealing with the Kettlemans.
    • "Rock and Hard Place", obviously refers to the position Nacho has been put into between Gus and the Salamancas. It also refers to Jimmy having to choose between becoming a cartel lawyer or ratting on his dangerous clients.
    • "Point and Shoot", refers to instructions given by Lalo on how to operate both the gun and the camera used to kill Gus and prove the job is done, and is what Gus does to put Lalo down for good, using the one he stashed behind equipment.
    • "Nippy" is the name of the fictional dog Gene pretends to have lost.
    • "Waterworks" refers to Kim's new job at a sprinkler company, but also the tears that come to Saul's eyes after he reads Kim's petition for a divorce and later Kim's very public fit of anguished crying after confessing her crimes to Cheryl Hamlin.
• Too Much Information: Jimmy compares passing the bar on his third try to a finally losing his virginity third time lucky. He's also saying this to his brother, who probably doesn't want to know this.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Starting in Season 2, it becomes increasingly apparent to Kim that loyalty to Jimmy means gradually becoming more and more complicit in his con games and his war with Chuck, usually to the detriment of the person involved. It's also a Deconstructed Trope, since Jimmy generally doesn't realize he's having this effect on others and isn't actively trying to talk his friends into getting involved in his schemes... most of the time, anyway. It could be argued he wakes up something in Kim, who has a past she's not very inclined to discuss much with others.
  • Kim also seems to be something of an enabler to Jimmy. She may not want to encourage his immoral behavior, but she isn't exactly helping him by jumping into bed with him every time they pull off a scam together. By the end of season 5, the shoe's on the other foot and Kim is the one trying to rope Jimmy into ruining Howard's career, with Jimmy concerned that she may be going too far.
• Tracking Device: Upon realizing that Mike is starting to get mixed up in cartel business, Gus arranges for Mike's cars to be bugged in hopes of drawing him out.
• Tragedy: This being a prequel we know how things will end for Jimmy, and that it won't be pretty. It is the story of a Doomed Protagonist who learns that Being Good Sucks and embarks on a Protagonist Journey to Villain which follows a "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc as his Fatal Flaw brings about his brother's Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. And the Rest. This show probably ticks even more of the boxes than its parent show.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Many of the misfortunes suffered by Jimmy and those close to him are entirely attributable to his recklessly impulsive behaviour. The course of his life would also have been drastically different if only he hadn't got drunk one fateful night in Cicero:
  Jimmy McGill: "One little Chicago sunroof and suddenly I’m Charles Manson?! And that’s where it all went off the rails! I’ve been paying for it ever since. THAT’S WHY I’M HERE!"
• Tragic Keepsake: The season 6 opening reveals that Saul kept the Zafiro Añejo bottle stopper- and that he left it behind when he fled to Omaha.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The previews for Season 3 featured Gus Fring heavily, even though he hadn't officially appeared in the show. It's implied that Fring left the note on Mike's car reading "Don't" in the final episode of Season 2.
• Tranquil Fury: Jimmy may be loud, flamboyant and emotional but he still has his moments:
  • In "Pimento", after Chuck admits that he has been blocking Jimmy's appointment to HHM, Jimmy calmly replies:
    "I got you a twenty-pound bag of ice and some bacon and some eggs and a couple of those steaks that you like, some fuel canisters, enough for three or four days. After that, you're on your own. I am done."
  • In "Sunk Costs", while waiting for the police to show up after Chuck reported Jimmy for breaking into his home:
    "Here's what's gonna happen. One day you're gonna get sick, again. And one of your employees is gonna find you, curled up in that space blanket. Take you to the hospital. Hook you up to those machines that beep and whirr and hurt. And this time it will be too much, and you will die there. Alone."
• Trauma Conga Line: Jimmy's skateboarding scam is one long line. First, the skateboarders target the wrong car. A car that's driven by Tuco's grandmother. Which gets them in trouble with Tuco. Which ends with the skateboarders getting their legs broken and Jimmy being traumatized.
• Trauma Button:
  • In "Mijo" Tuco forces Jimmy to watch and listen as he breaks the skateboarders' legs. Later he is in a restaurant, where diners snapping breadsticks trigger the memory of breaking bones, causing him to be violently ill.
  • In "Bagman" Jimmy's shirt gets spattered with blood when the man who was about to shoot him is shot by Mike first. In "Bad Choice Road" Kim makes a traumatised Jimmy some breakfast. The juicer gets clogged and orange juice backfires onto Kim's clothing, reminding Jimmy of the incident in the desert and triggering a PTSD flashback.
  • In "50% off" Kaylee keeps asking Mike what Matty was like as a policeman, and if he was a good one. This reminder that Matty was one of the few non-corrupt cops on the force, and that this is what ultimately led to his death, clearly traumatises Mike before he loses his temper in an uncharacteristic outburst at Kaylee.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Jimmy's father becomes concerned in "Inflatable":
  Jimmy McGill: "Every grifter in town knows that this is the spot to come for an easy handout."
  Charles McGill Sr.:"'Grifter'? Where in the world did you learn that word?"
• Tuxedo and Martini: Lalo while posing as a suave American businessman named Ben in "Black and Blue".
• 20 Minutes into the Past: The bulk of the series takes place from 2002-2004, while the black and white flash forward segments take place in late 2010.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Through seasons 2 through 4, Mike's and Jimmy's plot lines are almost completely detached and only make a few interactions (Jimmy twice interacting with Mike at the booth, and Mike later hiring Jimmy to provide his amended statement regarding his altercation with Tuco). There's a bit more interaction in season 3, where Mike and Jimmy use each other for various jobs on a quid pro quo - where Jimmy goes into Los Pollos Hermanos to do some spying for Mike, and in exchange, Mike agrees to infiltrate Chuck's house posing as a repairman to get some photographs showing off Chuck's living conditions. But then they only have one intersect in season 4 as Jimmy tries and fails to recruit Mike to steal a valuable Hummel figurine. Their storylines finally come back together in season 5 as Jimmy gets roped into Lalo's conflict with Gus, and season 6 ties them together permanently when Lalo kills Howard and Mike has to help with the coverup.

U-V

• Underestimating Badassery: Mr Arsenal underestimates the Old Master Mike and directly challenges him. Mike disarms him and beats him up.
• Unequal Pairing: Played for Laughs in "Dedicado A Max" when Kim and Jimmy get turned on by him roleplaying Kim and Kim roleplaying Kevin. He has no interest in her fucking her boss, and she has no interest in her boss, it's just a fun roleplay that ends in Kim topping Jimmy in the shower.
• The Un-Favourite: Chuck and Jimmy's dad always liked Jimmy better. Even though Jimmy was irresponsible (and secretly stole from their father, thought not as much as Chuck thinks), he's much more personable than Chuck. On their mother's deathbed, it was Jimmy that she called for. Chuck has clearly developed a complex about this, as evidenced in the flashback where he gets irritated by how charmed his wife is by Jimmy's jokes.
• Unflinching Walk: Gus doesn't look back as his Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant explodes in a giant fireball. Justified in this case; Gus is not doing this just to look cool, he values his chicken business just as much as his drug empire. He catches a glimpse of the restaurant's burning husk through his rearview mirror before driving away, and seems genuinely upset at the sight.
• Unfriendly Fire: Matt Ehrmantraut, Mike's son, was an honest cop in a precinct full of dirty cops. As a result he was "killed in the line of duty by an unknown shooter". Hearing the story Jimmy immediately realizes what really happened.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • Nacho, in "Hero." What does he do after being gotten out of jail by Jimmy? Threatens him for ratting him out, of course. Jimmy, having had enough, points out that Nacho isn't as smart as he thinks.
  • Cal and Lars, the skaters, for whom Jimmy stuck out his neck to save their lives from Tuco.
  • Zig-zagged by Chuck. Throughout the first season, especially by the end, Chuck seems to take Jimmy's devoted care of him for granted. In the second season, however, Chuck does take a moment to sincerely thank Jimmy and say that he would do the same for Jimmy in spite of all their baggage if their positions were reversed. However, Chuck falls back hard on being an ingrate by using and firing Ernesto and then turning on Howard, his own partner.
• Unit Confusion: In the episode Cobbler, Jimmy makes futile attempts to insert a king-size coffee mug in the console of brand-new Mercedes, expressing "Must be Metric system". Justified, since Mercedes-Benz is a German car and made with Metric measures.
• Unholy Matrimony: While they initally act like the marriage is just a legal arrangement, neither Jimmy or Kim can go an episode without mentioning they're married now, and while they're not true sociopaths like Howard accuses, they're both villain protagonists.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Occurs frequently throughout the series. If the characters explicitly lay out the details of a scheme for the audience, expect it to go horribly wrong.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Early in the series, Jimmy discovers Sandpiper ripping off its elderly patrons and begins a class action suit against them, with Chuck advocating for him to take it to HHM so an actual firm can take it up - it's later revealed that this is also Chuck sneakily throwing Jimmy out of the way out of distrust and the belief that he's not a "real lawyer". This single act, largely motivated by petty jealousy, kickstarts a deadly spiral of events that end with Chuck and Howard dead, Kim leaving the legal profession, HHM crippled and downsizing, and Jimmy becoming Saul Goodman. Going even further, because Jimmy becomes Saul, he serves as the connection between Gus and Walter White, which, among all the deaths within the criminal underworld, also leads to hundreds of deaths in a midair plane collision - all because of a petty slight.
  • Jimmy getting back at Chuck by tipping off the insurance company about his brother's mental illness starts the series of events which end in Chuck's suicide. Jimmy goes through fluctuating feelings of guilt, depression and denial when he realizes this at the start of Season 4.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Saul's assistant Francesca used to be a nice and rather innocent woman. When Saul first gets his law office, she designs the waiting room to be welcomng and comfortable for their clients and even plans to put in a water fountain. A few years later, she's become the sourpuss we all know, and the office waiting room is a gloomy place where clients are packed in like rats.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: The end result of Chuck and Jimmy’s Cain and Abel. Not responding to Chuck’s sole olive brunch pre-show is deemed to be Jimmy’s greatest failure, and he admits his role in Chuck’s suicide, having to live with that for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Chuck has been trying to punish Jimmy since childhood for being the baby/favourite/spoiled brat, and ruined his life, career and every relationship trying to get at him.
• Villainy-Free Villain:
  • Howard Hamlin is an uptight Jerkass, but still an honest lawyer who is in opposition to Jimmy. It's eventually revealed that he was merely following Chuck's orders and doesn't have much personally against Jimmy.
  • Chuck pulls a Face–Heel Turn in "Pimento." While he is guilty of lying to and manipulating his brother, he feels that he's upholding the sanctity of the legal system. However, he loses the "villainy free" part of the trope as he becomes more obsessed with upstaging and disgracing Jimmy.
• Villain Song: "Better Call Saul", written and performed by Junior Brown, with lyrics by Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan. It was produced as a promo for the first series, and the song showcases Saul Goodman's skills at helping the obviously guilty evade justice:
  ♫Saul, Saul, you better call Saul
  He'll fight for your rights when your back's to the wall
  Stick it to the man, justice for all
  You better call Saul
  Better call Saul♫
• Violin Scam: Both the coin scam and the fake Rolex scam that Jimmy and Marco pull involve pressuring someone into paying real money for an item that is actually worthless.

W-Y

• Walking Spoiler:
  • It's hard to talk about the first two episodes without mentioning Tuco's involvement in them.
  • Chuck similarly is hard to discuss, especially after "Pimento".
  • Similarly, we have Marco's role in the show, especially in "Marco".
• We Need to Get Proof: Lalo's plot in Season 6 is built around him trying to find evidence that Gus was involved in the attempt on his life and has betrayed the Cartel.
• Went Crazy When They Left: Neither Jimmy or Chuck are particularly pictures of sanity anyway, but they both go massively downhill when their wives leave. Jimmy's first wife cheating on him was the catalyst for the sunroof incident, and Kim leaving is the final nail in the coffin to make him Saul Goodman. (Not that she does well either, leaving because of her own feelings of not deserving to be loved, and making herself miserable in Florida.) And Rebecca leaving was the snap in Chuck to make him The Shut-In.
• Wham Episode:
  • Season 1:
    • "Pimento": When Jimmy is yet again turned down by HHM when delivering the Sandpiper case, he then eventually learns the truth: it turns out that Chuck has been secretly undermining Jimmy the whole time—as in gave Howard orders before not to hire him when he first got his degree and then used Jimmy's phone the night before the meeting about Sandpiper to call Howard and once again reiterate not to bring Jimmy into HHM. Chuck's disgusted by Jimmy's attempt to be a lawyer and thinks that he's nothing but a scumbag. Before Jimmy finds out, Howard tells Kim the truth in confidence and to spare Jimmy's feelings, she tells him to take the deal to relinquish the case for a price.
    • "Marco": Jimmy's good friend Marco dies—and it's revealed that's how he got his pinky ring, but then is offered a job working at Davis & Main on Sandpiper in lieu of the job he thought he was going to get at HHM thanks to Kim putting in a good word for him. However, Jimmy has second thoughts about the job and realizing morality and following the rules always holds him back, he vows that those things won't get in the way again, indicating his very first step to taking on his identity as Saul.
  • Season 2:
    • "Nailed:" Chuck's integrity is thrown into question by Jimmy's forgery of his Mesa Verde documents. He ends up having an EMS attack in a copy center when trying to find evidence of it—and falling and suffering a horrible head injury as a result. Mike pulls off a heist on one of Hector's trucks and later learns that an innocent bystander was killed by Hector for stumbling upon the driver.
    • "Klick": Mike is warned to not go through with his attempt to take out Hector by someone powerful who's been keeping eyes on him (every episode of Season 2's first letter rearranged spells out "FRING'S BACK") and Chuck fakes his retirement—in the wake of his injury, trauma and humiliation in the previous episode—in order to guilt Jimmy into confessing to sabotaging Mesa Verde's files—which Chuck secretly recorded.
  • Season 3:
    • "Witness": Mike's pursuit of whoever warned him leads to Los Pollos Hermanos where Jimmy randomly encounters Gus and upon learning about Chuck recording him, Jimmy angrily forces his way into the house while berating him and destroying the tape—somethign Chuck didn't quite expect—only to realize that both Howard and the PI are there to see it and will now back-up Chuck on the crime just committed right in front of them.
    • "Chicanery": While cross-examining Chuck, Jimmy exposes and proves that his condition and negative reaction to electricity is not a physical one, but a mental one by having Huell Babineaux plant a fully charged phone battery on him and not telling him about it for nearly two hours. Chuck loses it and blurts out his resentment and mistrust toward Jimmy in front of everyone as a result of the prosecutor saying he has Schizophrenia and then realizes he's now wrecked his own credibility in the process—and begins to realize his condition actually isn't what he thought it was.
    • "Fall": Daaaaamn. Nacho's plan to kill Hector fails and is forced to tell his father to give in to Hector's demands, leading his father to disown him. Thanks to Jimmy tipping off Chuck's malpractice insurer about his mental illness, the insurer seeks to double HHM's premiums. Chuck turns against Howard when he demands that Chuck go into retirement, and takes HHM to court in a breach of contract lawsuit the firm can't afford. Jimmy engages in a cruel scheme where he turns his elderly clients against one of their friends so that the woman will agree to an early Sandpiper settlement and earn him a hefty payday. And Kim, who has taken on an ungodly workload to keep her firm with Jimmy afloat, falls asleep at the wheel and has a car accident.
    • "Lantern": Nacho's plan to give Hector a heart attack works, only for Gus to notice. Along with him and Kim being forced to shut the doors on WM due to loss of funds, Jimmy purposely leaves on his mic in a plan to confess to driving Irene away from her friends, destroying his good standing as an elder attorney and opening him more to his future as Saul. Finally, trying to permanently sever ties with Jimmy and suffering a horrible mental breakdown because of it—Chuck kills himself after being dismissed from HHM—Howard paying him out of pocket to protect the firm and condemning him for his pettiness—burning his house down.
  • Season 4:
    • "Smoke": In the aftermath of Chuck's death, Howard confesses his own feelings of responsibility and how he thinks ousting Chuck from HHM led to his fatal breakdown. Rather than take responsibility for his part—getting Chuck's insurance canceled by letting word of his illness slip—Jimmy instead chooses to deny it and lean into Howard's guilt.
    • "Breathe:" It doesn't take long for Gus to figure out Nacho's role, and once he has the proof, he kills Arturo in front of Nacho and uses this knowledge to blackmail Nacho into working for him.
    • "Widersehen": Werner flees from the facility when his request to take time off to meet with his wife is denied, Lalo looks into Gus's business more closely while Nacho continues to be dragged along for the ride and Jimmy is denied the chance to have his suspended license back due to not talking about his relationship with Chuck at all—to which Jimmy spews Blatant Lies over how he doesn't think about or miss Chuck at all, before projecting onto Kim that she thinks of him as a lowlife like Chuck did.
    • "Winner:" Jimmy makes a compassionate speech about Chuck to the bar association, convincing them to reinstate his law license. Immediately afterwards, he admits to Kim that he didn't mean a word of it and intends to no longer practice under his own name, signifying his final transformation into Saul Goodman. Also, Mike is forced to kill Werner when Lalo is on Werner's tail and everything is at risk.
  • Season 5:
    • "Bagman": Jimmy is nearly killed in the desert by gunmen sent to prevent him from delivering Lalo's bail, is saved by Mike who then guides him through the desert, the Esteem is ultimately severely damaged and abandoned to a ditch by Jimmy and Mike and Kim goes to see Lalo and her involvement increases—with Mike telling Jimmy that "she's in the game now."
    • "Something Unforgivable": Jimmy and Kim start hatching a plan to destroy Howard's career, Mike and Gus make arrangements to have Lalo killed with Nacho assisting in the gunmen being able to enter through the gate. This however results in Lalo killing everyone sent for him, discovering Nacho—who's now running for his life—betrayed him and setting out on the war path against all his family's enemies.
  • Season 6
    • First Half:
    • "Rock and Hard Place": Nacho dies, and does so on his own terms—meaning with Mike's help, he allows himself to be captured by the Salamancas while insisting a rival gang that has nothing to do with Gus was who he was working with—and who was actually responsible for the hit on Lalo, says he doesn't regret it while confessing to causing Hector's stroke and then getting a gun to shoot himself in the head to avoid a far more painful and unpleasant fate instead.
    • "Hit and Run": Upon discovering she and Jimmy are being followed, Kim meets Mike for the very first time who tells her he was having them watched because Lalo is alive and wanted to make sure he knew if Lalo came to them at any point—and that Mike is telling her because he thinks she can handle the truth better than Jimmy. Kim ultimately decides not to tell Jimmy as well.
    • "Axe and Grind": Upon the discovery that the judge they're making it look like Jimmy is bribing is currently in a cast—meaning they can't use the photos in which the look-alike is not wearing a cast—Jimmy suggests to Kim that they should call it off for now rather than try to fix it with only so much time. Kim after a moment of reflection, demands to go forward no matter what.
    • "Plan and Execution": Lalo discovers that the line is bugged when he attempts to call Hector and make him aware of his next plan, so he lies about striking Gus at his house next while surveying the super lab site from a storm drain on the outside. Mike arranges to make sure Gus is heavily guarded and protected when Lalo shows up, meaning guys are all stationed directly there and nowhere else as a result. Saul and Kim's plot to end the Sandpiper case by discrediting Howard goes as planned despite the last-minute complication. Howard later appears at their home to chew them out for their actions, but Lalo arrives shortly after and kills Howard so he can interrogate the couple.
    • Excluding the Grand Finale "Saul Gone", the rest of the sixth and final season—the Final Six—counts:
    • "Point and Shoot": Lalo sends Kim to kill Gus—but it's really a distraction, Jimmy is tied up and forced to remain at the condo with Howard's body and the trauma of Lalo saying he will come back and question him again stays with him for years and Gus is captured by Lalo and taken to be executed at the super lab as Lalo films it, but then Gus is able to step on the switch to turn off the lights and shoot Lalo dead with the concealed gun he earlier hid there. Mike then oversees as Howard and Lalo's bodies are buried underneath the bedrock of the super lab.
    • "Fun and Games": Gus decides to continue with his desire to ruin the Salamancas further rather than move on and have a peaceful and content future while Mike tells Manuel what happened to Nacho and receives Manuel's ire for thinking that picking sides when it comes to gang on gang violence matters in any way. Kim eventually cracks under the pressure of living the lie about what happened to Howard, has her law license withdrawn, packs her bags and prepares to leave Jimmy believing the two of them together constantly ruins the lives of everyone they encounter as well as admitting she knew Lalo was alive but chose to say nothing so that they could move forward with the scam on Howard which she now severely regrets. She also say that she thought things would end between them because he'd want them to hide and forget about the plan. Cue a Time Skip going forward many years later to when Jimmy is now in full swing in his role as Saul and is about to meet Brandon "Badger" Mayhew in a matter of days.
    • "Nippy": In present day, Gene manipulates Jeff and his friend into a massive robbery of merchandise from the mall only for the purpose of extorting them and guaranteeing their silence about him being Saul—all while now getting the taste for schemes and cons again as a result.
    • "Breaking Bad": Saul is advised in a flashback by Mike against working with Walter White because he's way too new and ignorant to the business—which Saul clearly ends up ignoring when he goes to see Walt at his high school anyway and in present day, Gene ropes Jeff and his friend into a scheme that involves drugging rich guys and taking their money and/or other info in their house—only for Gene to get Jeff to help finish an aborted scam against a cancer patient in which Gene actively has to force his way into the house by means of breaking a window and unlocking the door.
    • "Waterworks": Jimmy speaks to Kim for the first time in years, Kim confesses to the conspiracy against Howard Hamlin and the true circumstances of his death, Kim meets Jesse Pinkman in a flashback, Gene's plans get Jeff arrested when he tries to flee from the police and crashes his car and Gene's true identity is uncovered by Marion, who calls the police on him after he all but threatens her—forcing him to now flee for his life.
• Wham Line:
  • In "RICO", Chuck states the amount of money he and Jimmy want from the shady nursing home and raises the stakes for a (what was until then) a rather low-stakes sub-plot.
    Chuck: $20 million.^note For context, the opposing counsel had just offered $100k to settle
  • In "Pimento", Chuck changes the entire tone of his person in a single cruel insult that confirms all of his brother's worst suspicions.
    Jimmy: It was always you, right? Right back to when I passed the bar and tried to join the firm. You didn't want me. Speak up. Tell me why. It's the least you can do for me now. I am your brother; we're supposed to look out for each other. Why were you working against me, Chuck?
    Chuck: You're not a real lawyer.
  • Kim and Jimmy's rooftop argument in "Wiedersehen":
    Jimmy McGill: "There you go, kick a man when he's down."
    Kim Wexler: "Jimmy, you are always down."
  • In "Winner", after Jimmy gets reinstated and announces that he's not going to practice law under the name McGill, Kim asks what he's doing. He turns around quips, "S'all good, man!" This signifies that his permanent turn into Saul Goodman has arrived.
  • Mike's line to Werner Ziegler:
    Mike: Werner, nothing you can say or do will make anyone trust you again.
  • In "Waterworks", when Marion finally alerts the police to Jimmy's whereabouts.
    (Marion presses the button on her LifeAlert dongle, and the main unit beeps)
    Operator: Marion? This is Valerie with LifeAlert. Are you OK?
    Marion: No, Valerie, I'm not OK! There's a criminal standing in my kitchen threatening me. He's a wanted man, and his name is Saul Goodman!
• Wham Shot:
  • The end of the first episode, "Uno," has Jimmy check on the house entered by his skateboard flunkies, only for someone to pull a gun on him and demand he come inside. Tuco Salamanca peeks out afterward.
  • "RICO" has Chuck casually going outside while looking over some papers. And yes, he intentionally did this.
  • At the end of "Klick," we find out that Chuck was hiding a tape recorder from Jimmy. After Jimmy confessed to committing forgery.
  • In the ending scene of "Fun and Games", after Kim leaves Jimmy, there's a Time Skip to Breaking Bad (or at least close) with Jimmy in his complete Saul getup and office.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?:
  • In "Switch" Pryce turns up for a drug deal in a car that screams "drug dealer". He then tells Mike he won't be paying him to come to the meet because "You don't really do anything" before setting off to meet Nacho alone...
  • In "Bagman" Jimmy sets out for his desert rendezvous in a car which often fails to start, wearing a suit and tie and loafers, and with just one small bottle of drinking water, some of which he decides to use to clean his shoe. And that's before we even consider the possibility of his $7 million cargo and all of the dangerous people who could possibly be after it...
• What Does She See in Him?: Several characters wonder aloud what a straight-laced, hard-working, beautiful woman like Kim sees in a lowlife like Jimmy. Kevin Wachtell tells her "You could do a whole lot better" while Lalo thinks Jimmy is punching above his weight and is clearly impressed. The truth is that Jimmy and Kim have much more in common that people realise, and while Kim could have her pick of any of the wealthy but charmless older men who offer to buy her drinks at Forque, she'd much rather call her Lovable Rogue to help her pull a scam on them instead.
  • This is deconstructed by Howard Hamlin in "Plan and Execution". After questioning Kim's decision to choose a life of scamming with Jimmy, he has a moment of clarity, realising that they both enjoy scamming and do it for fun:
    "You're perfect for each other."
• What Have I Become?: Seemingly how Jimmy feels when he sees the family of the victim his cartel defendant murdered in "JMM".
• White-Collar Crime:
  • The Kettlemans with their rumbled attempt to embezzle $1.6 million of county funds, and their repeated denials of doing so.
  • Daniel "Pryce" Wormald selling stolen pharmaceuticals to drug dealer Nacho. Mike Ehrmantraut makes it clear to Daniel that "you took something that wasn't yours and you sold it for a profit".
• Witless Protection Program: Season 4 features a fascinating, almost complete inversion of this trope. It involves the construction of a meth superlab using foreign contractors. The contractors are carefully vetted and hired by Mike, who supervises them in a secure location while they do the work (living in a warehouse almost like a government safe house). The contractors all have cover stories and don't know where they are geographically. When one naively exposes the operation to possible discovery by both the DEA and a rival cartel, Mike is forced to execute him and is shown to be greatly upset by it.
• Worst. Whatever. Ever!: In "Mijo" when Jimmy drops off the skaters to the emergency room after their legs were broken by Tuco. Despite managing to talk Tuco out of killing them, Lars still calls him the "worst lawyer ever".
  Jimmy: I talked you down from a life sentence to a six month probation. I'm the best lawyer ever!
• Worthy Opponent: Tuco seemingly considers Mike this when Mike manages to outsmart him by playing dumb. He still punches Mike's lights out.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Mike and Kim to Jimmy in different ways. Mike finds Jimmy irritating, but he’s disappointed in the guy for being hellbent on proving his brother right and turning into Saul Goodman, while Kim was always proud of the real Jimmy, wants him to live without pain, and mourned how much Chuck made him feel like he was doomed to be worthless.
• You Did the Right Thing: When the German engineers are leaving New Mexico, Kai tells Mike that he did the right thing killing Werner, as he was a security risk. Mike responds by punching him, as he liked Werner and feels guilt over his death.
• You Have to Believe Me!: For all of Chuck's skill in strategy, this is his main Genre Blind move, as seen when he freaked out about the numbers Jimmy swapped and when he lost it at the disbarment hearing.
• You Know I'm Black, Right?: Jimmy invokes this after the manager of a country club refuses his membership application. Having just introduced himself as "Saul Goodman", he tries to claim he's a victim of antisemitic discrimination and invokes Godwin's Law: "I know you were Just Following Orders". When Kevin Wachtell overhears and calls him "money-grubbing" he takes offence, accusing him of invoking the Greedy Jew trope. Wachtell isn't fazed:

  "You're 'bout as Jewish as my Aunt Fanny."

• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: The flashforward which opens "Axe and Grind" shows a nervous teenage Kim Wexler sitting in the back room of a department store where she has just been caught attempting to shoplift a necklace and a pair of earrings. The manager brings in Kim's mother, who apologises profusely and puts on a big display of being disappointed in her daughter. The manager accepts the apology and decides not to press charges, letting Kim go with a warning. As they leave the store, Kim's frowning mother suddenly breaks into a smirk, before telling Kim "I didn't know you had it in you" and appearing to actually be proud of her daughter. She then presents Kim with the jewellery she attempted to steal, having swiped it from the office herself. Kim looks more guilty and ashamed at her mother's reaction than she did at getting caught.

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