BETTER CALL SAUL reminds us that a gripping tale about well-drawn characters can hold audiences even if it’s not the story they thought they wanted to see. Although it’s an off-shoot of Breaking Bad, Saul rarely has high-octane action sequences to compare with Bad‘s. Much of the time, it exists entirely outside conventional genre, even though its characters include lawyers and drug traffickers. That contrariness extended to the Season 3 finale in spades. There wasn’t so much of a glimpse of Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) in the episode, and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) appeared in one nearly wordless–although important–scene. Unlike the show’s premieres and finales of the past, we saw nothing of Jimmy McGill’s (Bob Odenkirk) life in the post-Breaking Bad future. For that matter, Jimmy himself was in the background through much of the finale (written by Executive Producer Gennifer Hutchinson and directed by series co-creator Peter Gould), which concentrated on Jimmy’s girlfriend and quasi-legal partner Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), junior gangster Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), Jimmy’s elderly client Irene Landry (Jean Effron), and especially Jimmy’s brother, the brilliant, hopeless, doomed Chuck (Michael McKean).
The landscape of Better Call Saul is moral decay, and this season continued to explore the road by which Jimmy, who cuts corners and cons people but is basically good-hearted, will become the amoral Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad. Jimmy literally took on the Saul persona this season, although in a different context than the one he’ll adopt later on, using it as his nom de TV commercial when his legal license was suspended for a year and he had to sell off the local station time he’d bought in advance. Much of the season was concerned with the heartbreaking emotional chess game between Jimmy and Chuck, when the latter brought his brother up on charges before the New Mexico bar, and Jimmy retaliated by humiliating Chuck in open court, making it clear that Chuck’s overwhelming phobias about electricity were a mental illness and not a physical one. Jimmy went farther when he made Chuck’s malpractice insurer know about the condition, which resulted in Chuck being forced out of his firm. In the finale, that blow led Chuck to hurt Jimmy verbally more than he ever had before, telling his younger brother that Jimmy had never really mattered to him. But the blowback from that Pyrrhic victory was that Chuck fell off the wagon of his illness and engaged in a hunt for active electricity in his house that would have done The Conversation proud, ripping out all of his walls. Although the ending was slightly ambiguous, it seemed fairly clear that Chuck’s repeated kick to his gas lantern that caused his house to catch fire left him dead. (The fact that the episode concluded with a public service tag for a suicide prevention hotline appeared to confirm that conclusion.)
In one point in that same scene, Chuck told Jimmy that all he could do was hurt people, and the finale showed other collateral damage of Jimmy’s thoughtless greed. Kim, who had buried herself in work partly out of guilt over her role in aiding Jimmy’s destruction of Chuck at the hearing, drove while exhausted and had a serious car accident. Mrs. Landry lost all her friends when Jimmy tried to manipulate her into entering into a class action settlement so he’d get his piece, and even though he repaired those relationships in the finale, it was at the cost of ruining his own ability to practice law among senior citizens, something he was genuinely good at doing. One by one, the social conventions and grounded emotions that have kept Jimmy tethered to some kind of morality are falling away.
The drug trafficking part of the story has been more concerned with connecting the dots to Breaking Bad, and this season brought not only the arrival of Gus Fring, but Breaking character Lydia (Laura Fraser), and in the finale we saw the heart attack that will put Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) in his wheelchair, which we discovered was due to Nacho changing his medication–a fact that Gus was quick to notice.
Better Call Saul sounds formless in summary, but Gould and Vince Gilligan, along with the rest of the writers, create tightly-wound narratives that constantly further character as well as plot, much of it dosed with dark humor. The bar hearing episode this season was as entertaining as any hour of television around. The show is also blessed with a phenomenal group of actors, brilliantly cast down to the smallest roles. It’s been pure pleasure to have Esposito back in his signature role, but this season, in particular, was a showcase for McKean, who made the disagreeable Chuck a figure of pity and stature, as well as Seehorn, who’s delicately created a character whose affection for Jimmy is slowly starting to rip her apart.
Better Call Saul hasn’t officially been picked up for Season 4, but that’s presumably for financial reasons, since the ratings are strong. (And if for some reason AMC weren’t able to make a deal, one assumes that a streaming platform would pick up the show in less time than it took to read this sentence.) Even amid the clutter of Peak TV, it’s a unique piece of work that remains one of television’s best dramas.
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