Better Call Saul

OK, so not meticulously planned, but they at least knew going in how many seasons they had to work with, right?

I'm not a big fan of series churning out new seasons until they lose enough viewers to get cancelled, and that model is particularly weird when you're making a prequel.

They did not.

Here's the thing about TV. It's a job like any other. The showrunners work for the studio and the network. If the showrunners decide to quit the show, they have no garuntee the studio will stop making it. And even if they do, they are willfully rendering themselves unemployed.

Hell, not only are they rendering themselves unemployed, they are also effectively firing literally every single person who works on the show. Studios and networks don't keep folks on retainer. They don't go up to the cameramen and lighters and sound engineers and say "okay, this is the next show you're working on." All those folks have to find new jobs.

So you can see why most showrunners are reluctant to give their projects a set expiry date. This is why most showrunners leave before their show ends for a new project (like Michael Schur left Brooklyn Nine-Nine for The Good Place) or just keep making the show until the network decides to stop (like Carter and Bays did for How I Met Your Mother.) Hell, the original plan for Saul was for Gilligan to eventually step down and leave Gould in charge.

Edited by Wackd on Oct 12th 2018 at 6:18:27 AM

People who are in work prefer to stay in work as long as possible, yes. They also want to get paid more and take longer holidays; their bosses want to pay them less and charge advertisers more, and as a viewer, I'd prefer to watch a story that was building to a defined endpoint. Obviously we can't all get everything we want, but we can still want it.

Mesa Verde is really a cursed topic.

I think Mesa Verde influenced Kim's riskier/more irresponsible/more guilt-ridden behaviors in season 4. It’s the thing that made her career as a lawyer, and she worked very hard to get it, but it’s been so tainted by everything that’s happened since.

It’s so depressing that she never even got to enjoy it as something she accomplished for herself, because Howard took it away from her almost immediately (literally as soon as the Mesa Verde people walked away!), and her getting it back was primarily the result of Jimmy committing a felony, which dragged her into a whole other mess. Everyone loves the “You don’t save me. I save me.” line, but what occasionally gets lost is that Jimmy felt like he had to go in and “save” her anyway, by doing something that she never would’ve considered acceptable. And she knows what he did, she knows Chuck was right about what he did and why (otherwise she wouldn’t have punched Jimmy in the car), but she defends Jimmy anyway, both informally (pointing out Chuck’s lack of physical evidence & playing along with Jimmy’s gaslighting of him during the confrontation at his house), and formally (the bar hearing). I get the feeling that this is another one of those things that the two of them never discussed or talked about, the only communication being Kim’s punches, but it’s such a selfish gesture on Jimmy’s part, even if it’s being done for the benefit of someone he loves. (I don’t mean that the act of wanting to help Kim is itself selfish, but feeling like he should do it anyway despite her telling him otherwise…the fact that it came with the added bonus of humiliating Chuck professionally isn’t great either, in terms of evaluating his motives.)

Let's put it another way: the way Kim got Mesa Verde was very messy, to say the least, but...did she ever truly want it?

The only reason Kim went after Mesa Verde in the first place was out of more of an unfortunate chain of circumstances than any interest in the “exciting” world of banking. She thought it might get her out of doc review. She spent days trying to get anyone to sign. Finally, Kevin and Paige said yes. Of course Kim thought she’d be involved with the account, but then Howard left her in doc review and she decided to do Wexler-McGill instead.

Wexler-McGill came with a ton of financial responsibilities, from Jimmy's end. And who is Kim, if not a responsible person? If she could take Mesa Verde with her, she would ensure Wexler-McGill wouldn’t bankrupt her. So of course she threw her hat in the ring, and Mesa Verde decided to go with her. Then Chuck stole them back, and then Jimmy stole them back-back, and then Kim had Mesa Verde, and all of a sudden it was this HUGE deal that Mesa Verde was her destiny (Jimmy: “You were meant for MV!”). And now Mesa Verde is that one client that defines Kim's career and… she never wanted that. She never even cared that much about banking law. It’s not the “Let’s do GOOD in the world!” that Kim got into the law for. It bores her. She’s living someone else’s dream (that scene with the models made that very clear). Kim is losing herself, but she’s too stubborn and pragmatic to do something about it. She sucks it up, thinks of the prestige, and keeps on keeping on. That's why she used it as a backdoor into Schweikart & Cokely.

But I don’t think Kim cares about Mesa Verde all that much, and she wouldn’t mind a way out of it. Of course, Kim being Kim, she wouldn’t do something dramatic things like Jimmy would do in her position. She’s been suffering in silence (for now), but she will have to make a choice eventually. I think this will be Kim’s season 5 storyline. Jimmy, for better or worse, has finally found a way to practice law that he is good at and enjoys and where he can be himself. Kim deserves that, too… Although by finding herself, she will probably lose Jimmy in the process.

Kim is the only lawyer character on the show who seems to have a purely altruistic reason for wanting to practice law; it might be a bit naive (and she probably realizes that), but she does generally want to help out the “little guy” and defend the defenseless. (Jimmy sometimes does as well, but he often waffles on it and he's due to completely toss that bit aside in due time) Howard and Jimmy were following in the footsteps of family members' legacies (Howard's father and Chuck respectively).

In fact, I think it’ll be something Kim’s done that will do her in. She’s in for a serious blow of some sort, more than just the car crash. I think her prolonged close association with Jimmy has morally compromised her in subtle ways that she’s unwilling to even admit to herself. Season 2 marked the course of her gradually slipping standards, but the Huell scam went far beyond what Jimmy did back then, in just making a video of a man sitting in a pie. In fact, part of the cause of Kim’s scamming and acting out in season 4 might be her way of processing her guilt in the Chuck debacle–she felt bad about it even when Chuck was still alive. Her whole practice and the subsequent rise of her career was based around Mesa Verde, which she only got back from HHM after Jimmy committed a felony, gaslit his brother about it, and then got into trouble trying to cover it up, which snowballed into bigger problems from there. The guilt weighs heavy on her even though she did the least to precipitate any of the events that led up to it.

Edited by dmcreif on Mar 8th 2019 at 1:02:52 PM

Kim is probably going to go down hard in season 5. I don't even get people who think Kim has a "happy ending" in sight, by cutting ties with Jimmy and doing her own thing, a respectable lawyer.

A couple seasons ago, I could've bought it, but not anymore. Kim isn't just being "corrupted" by Jimmy anymore like Chuck wanted to believe; she's doing a pretty good job fucking things up on her own. With Mesa Verde, with her mistake, with taking too much on her plate (cases she doesn't need to take), with her car accident, and on top of that, she might be getting a little addicted to drinking.

In the early seasons, Kim was mostly "Jimmy's girl", and Jimmy had a horrible influence on her yes, but look at how she pulled off the elaborate scam to strongarm the prosecutor into giving Huell a lighter sentence. She isn't just the angel being pulled to the dark side by Jimmy anymore...she's a flawed character who's doing more and more things wrong without Jimmy's influence.

So from this point, is "Kim get her shit together, become a top lawyer and cut ties with Jimmy" really a satisfying ending? What was the point of her fucking up everything in the last season?

I don't know to what extent Jimmy will be responsible, but I full expect Kim to have a lot more bad times than good times in the season(s) to come. And if she DOES turn better and more professional, then I still expect a (different) bad ending: Jimmy beating her in a court of justice, by "cheating" or something, going all in vs her.

Her past could also be a factor, as one might recall from a conversation in "Inflatable":

Kim: I'm from the Midwest, just a tiny, little town barely on the map... you know, that Kansas-Nebraska border. You've never heard of it.[...] I guess... uh, one day, I just looked around at my life, at who I was, and realized if I kept going the way I was going...

There is a huge pause before she replies with something that seems like a bit of a non sequitur. When someone winds up with if "I kept going the way I was going", I don't start to think they are talking about a dead end job and bad marriage. I start thinking about more severe things like arrest or death. Reminds me a bit of Karen Page in Daredevil (2015) where similar circumstances were in play prior to the reveal of her backstory.

Now, maybe that isn't realistic because Kim did get admitted to the Bar and one would think that required a background check but it might be that at the time she wasn't implicated in the crime or scandal or whatever.

Season 1, Episode 7 "Bingo"

• I don't see where and why Jimmy thought he could use Mike to deliver money to the Kettleman's. Sure Mike gave him a tip that helped him find them. Mike called in that favor and had Jimmy spill coffee in order to take a detective's notepad. But those interactions alone shouldn't have given Jimmy the idea "let me hire this guy to break into a person's home and steal from them." We're aware of Mike's capabilities - but Jimmy shouldn't be, not at this point in the timeline.
  • And Mike, in "Five-O," the episode prior, states he's not looking for [illicit] kind(s) of work. So why'd he even agree to this?
    • Apparently Mike considered this "making them square."
• I wanted to give this a re-watch and figure out where the "Jimmy Mc Gill" portion of the story ended - because it seemed like "Slippin Jimmy" was already there in the beginning, and the difference between him and Saul minute and unimpressive. But this episode, combined with what I recall from the season finale, paints it clearly. Jimmy's lighter suits especially.

Edited by Soble on Dec 25th 2019 at 2:20:33 AM

Season 3, Episode 4 "Sabrosito"

• ...
• ...talented storyteller that Gilligan and his writing team might be, I am frequently skipping a few minutes each episode whenever he does the random, long, establishing shots of people doing things to "set the scene."
• To use examples from previous episodes:
  • Mike disassembling an entire car for 5-7 minutes to find a tracker, Mike putting together a spring wire, Mike hunting Salamanca - pretty much all of Mike's storyline since he met Hector has been a series of Navel-Gazing moments.

Edited by Soble on Dec 28th 2019 at 12:53:47 PM

The show has been renewed for a sixth and final season, which will be 13 episodes long, and in essence mean the show will be one episode longer than Breaking Bad.

Full list of episode titles:

• Episode 1: Magic Man - Jimmy unveils his new legal persona, Saul Goodman; Lalo discovers a flaw within his operation.

• Episode 2: 50% Off - Jimmy's promotional stunt has unintended consequences; Mike loses his temper.

• Episode 3: The Guy for This - Kim's confidence is tested when she's faced with a legal problem only she can solve.

• Episode 4: Namaste - Jimmy entertains an interesting proposition; Mike attempts to smooth things over with his family.

• Episode 5: Dedicado a Max - Mike takes an impromptu trip out of town; Kim makes a surprising call.

• Episode 6: Wexler v. Goodman - Kim tries to pump the brakes on Saul's latest scheme; Mike turns the heat up on Lalo.

• Episode 7: JMM - Kim sets things straight with her clients while Jimmy is compromised by his.

• Episode 8: Bagman - When a simple errand for a client goes sideways, Jimmy is pushed to the limit.

• Episode 9: Bad Choice Road - Jimmy tries to return to business as usual; Kim takes stock of her life.

• Episode 10: Something Unforgivable - Jimmy and Kim make a sideways move that takes a serious turn; Nacho gets closer to the cartel.

So wait is it 10 episodes or 13?

Ten this year, thirteen next year.

If they're ending the show they need to play catch up real bad since Saul still isn't where he was in Breaking Bad.

Still 23 episodes to go. And remember Breaking Bad's final 2 seasons being when shit really hit the fan.

Time-skips. But ... it could still work even without that.

Oh. And. Guess who's back?

The script for the season 4 finale is available online here, and it's got an interesting detail that's worth mentioning. The episode was long and a lot of things had to be cut.

One of the things they cut was a scene showing Lalo burning down the Travel Wire to cover up all evidence that he was there.

EXT. TRAVEL WIRE - MINUTES LATER PULLING Lalo forward as he emerges, wiping his face with a paper towel as he goes. Fingers of SMOKE curl from inside — a FIRE glows behind the counter.

In classic Salamanca style, Lalo is burning the evidence. We can guess that Fred is still in there, somewhere.

I think this is relevant to bring up because it's clear that firebombing is routine for Lalo. This also falls in line with some candid bystander photos from filming of season 5, which included a picture of burned hedges in front of Gus's house, and one of Gus's Los Pollos Hermanos restaurants getting fire-bombed.

This would've made a funny sort of parallel/contrast with Jimmy's lines earlier in the same episode.

The character descriptions on AMC's website have now been updated for season 5. They are as follows:

Jimmy McGill: Determined to move beyond the shadow cast by his brother’s troubling death, Jimmy begins practicing law as his colorful alter ego, “Saul Goodman.” His choices set off an avalanche of consequences that threaten his future and his relationship with Kim.

Mike Ehrmantraut: Wracked with guilt and regret, Mike hits rock bottom. He must come to terms with the bargains he has made to provide for his family.

Kim Wexler: As Kim tries to make sense of Jimmy’s decision to pursue a career as “Saul Goodman,” she faces her own confounding professional and personal choices. With only the best of intentions, Kim finds herself on a slippery slope of cut corners and white lies.

Howard Hamlin: Howard has put HHM back on a successful path following Chuck’s death, but righting some past wrongs proves more challenging than he imagines.

Nacho Varga: Struggling to extricate himself and his father from the Salamancas’ clutches while serving as Gus Fring's double agent, Nacho's situation seems impossible. An unexpected alliance gives him a ray of hope as he walks the razor’s edge between these explosive and deadly forces.

Gus Fring: Plotting his long-simmering revenge, Gus is now at war on all fronts as he attempts to build his drug empire out of view of the cartel’s prying eyes. Now he faces his most formidable opponent — the relentless Lalo Salamanca.

Lalo Salamanca: Seductive and merciless, Lalo is now the Salamanca family's best hope. Leaving a path of destruction in his wake, Lalo won't rest until his family’s standing in the cartel is restored — no matter the cost.

I'm surprised Howard is still going to be in the show - it looked like they were writing him out, since it seemed HHM was going ok a downward spiral after Chuck's death

The biggest question so far now is, how to address Saul? Do we address him as Saul and as Jimmy alternatively like they're two separate characters? Or treat them as one and the same?

The good(ish) man Jimmy was destroyed (by his brother's betrayal/death) and became Saul Goodman.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 28th 2020 at 7:22:58 AM

When Jimmy says he's going to take care of it himself what he means is that he's going to turn himself in and hire Kim as his lawyer.

It occurs to me that Jimmy indirectly caused the events of Breaking Bad with his 50% off stunt. First, his offer caused that pair of Stupid Crooks to go on a crime spree. Their crime spree resulted in Krazy 8 getting arrested. Krazy 8's arrest resulted in him becoming an informant for the DEA. He then used his status as an informant to pass on information about his competitors to the DEA. One of those he informed on was Emilio. The resulting arrest of Emilio was where Walt saw Jesse and got his idea to start cooking meth with him.

So Jimmy is an Unwitting Instigator of Doom?

On the Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, Peter Gould stated that Sobchak's appearance in this most recent episode was originally intended for someone else, but they had to change it with scheduling conflicts. I get the feeling that this appearance was meant to be for Patrick Kuby, since the dialogue seems more suited to Kuby than to Mr. X.