And Yet Saul will Never Really be Gone

How does one conclude one of the greatest TV shows of all time? It's a daunting task and while I was left unsatisfied by last night's series finale of Better Call Saul I'm not so arrogant as to say I know how co-creator Peter Gould could have done it better.

There's just so much it feels like the penultimate episode left on the table that the final episode doesn't even seem to be aware of. The season had spent a lot of its thematic energy making it clear that Saul and Kim were compulsive mischief makers. Are we meant to believe that's just gone--"Saul Gone"/"S'all Gone"--by the end of the episode?

My favourite part of the episode was the busload of convicts, upon recognising Saul, chanting "Better Call Saul" despite his insistence that he's going by Jimmy McGill again. It was like Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison. It made me wish that more time had been spent on the relationships between Saul and his clients. He was a "criminal lawyer" and while that meant he was helping some criminals get away with their crimes, he must also have been the only light in the dark for some desperate people. So I don't see the dichotomy of Good and Evil in Jimmy and Saul.

I would have liked another season. I would have liked Saul to get away with the seven year sentence and then come back into the world, back up to his old tricks. I like Kim a lot and Rhea Seehorn was great and, if they were real people, I'd be overjoyed for Kim and Saul to get back together. But as a story point, I don't think their reunion was quite as interesting as a more permanent break might have been. Maybe that's a sign of my lack of faith in the redemptive power of love, I don't know.

I liked the first two flashbacks and the use of the time machine idea. The flashback with Chuck might as well have been taken from one of the actual episodes for all the new ground it didn't cover. I did like Walter White throwing a tantrum about the impossibility of time travel. His bringing up the company he'd been hoodwinked out of was nice. I like contemplating the alternate reality in which Saul or Jimmy actually managed to sue Walt's former friends out of everything they had, everything legal and above board.

Anyway, I would have liked to have seen a more straight-forward courtroom drama series about Saul and Kim following this episode. Something like The Practice or Boston Legal. But I guess this was a pretty good run.

On another note, Wolfgang Peterson died a few days ago, his death was announced to-day. I haven't seen all of Peterson's movies but Das Boot is a masterpiece. There's a good example of not letting morality get in the way of telling a good story. The NeverEnding Story and Enemy Mine are both admirable achievements, too.

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Desert Rain

Last night's Better Call Saul brilliantly twisted the tragedy knife. We're all eager to see the finale next week which goes to show what masochists we are, I guess. Is there any way out for Saul?

We finally learned what happened to Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and about what she was up to during the events of Breaking Bad. It turns out her life was even more depressing than Saul's. She's become an ordinary office worker, writing copy for a sprinkler company's web site.

The big decisions in her life involve choosing between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise and between vanilla or strawberry ice cream. She seems desperately repressed and almost seems to have a panic attack when Gene/Saul (Bob Odenkirk) calls her. As I suspected, she rebukes him on a moral level and it leads to her going all the way back to Albuquerque and confessing her crimes.

Rhea Seehorn has a tremendous scene when she breaks out crying on a bus. It hits hard because of her performance and because it's easy to see exactly what she's feeling and why, facing the inexcapable reality of who and what she and Saul are, based on the evidence of what they've done. But they're both more complicated than the worst of their actions, of course, and even their actions were more complicated than the results make them appear.

Imagine if Howard hadn't been killed. In his confrontation with Kim and Saul, all three acknowledged that he would very likely "bounce back" from the prank they pulled on him. And the goal of the prank was to resolve the Sandpiper case early so it would be within the lifetimes of the elderly residence of the retirement home. Kim and Saul did enjoy the con but there was more too it than just assassinating Howard's character. It was horribly bad luck that Lalo stepped in and Kim and Saul's machinations took on monstrous new connotations.

Last night's episode was directed and written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. I liked how the background score started to sound like the Breaking Bad theme when Saul came close to physically assaulting an innocent man at home. But when he was really tested, later in the episode, with Carol Burnett in a role that has gotten a lot jucier, he pulls back. He's really not a killer.

Better Call Saul has been an incredible show with well written complicated characters and I couldn't imagine a more fitting final season. Series co-creator Peter Gould writes and directs next week, an episode called "Saul Gone". Now that's ominous. But I'm looking forward to it.

Gene's Breaking Bad

Last week's Better Call Saul was a tough act to follow. But last night's episode, "Breaking Bad", gets better the more I think about it.

The title is, of course, a reference to the series of which Better Call Saul is a spin-off. But there's more to it than that. The scenes set during the events of Breaking Bad in this episode of Better Call Saul come from an episode of Breaking Bad called "Better Call Saul". So there's a kind of symmetry there. But more importantly, this episode of Better Call Saul is the one in which Gene Takavic "breaks bad".

We finally get our answer as to whether or not Kim was alive at the time of Breaking Bad's conclusion. But the phone conversation Gene has with someone who is possibly Kim is made inaudible with the camera placed on the other side of the street and the sound being covered by passing trucks. Gene ends the scene angry, so angry he kicks the glass in on the phone booth. And then he breaks bad, as the term is used by Jesse Pinkman in the first season of Breaking Bad. He goes on a crime spree. At first not a reckless one--in fact a carefully considered one. But he's definitely becoming less and less cautious 'til the episode concludes with him doing something outright foolish.

Last night's episode was written and directed by Thomas Schnauz and next week's is written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. So I suspect we'll hear the phone booth conversation then. My suspicion is that Gene/Saul talked to Kim and he didn't merely discover she wasn't interested in connecting with him again. I suspect she'll condemn him on moral grounds, maybe even expressing disgust. I wouldn't be surprised if she has a line like, "I'm a different person now."

It's shaping up to be a real nice tragedy. I think by the end of Breaking Bad, most viewers are rooting for Walter White. But in Better Call Saul, as entertaining and fascinating as his scams are, we're more afraid for him than anything else and just want him to stop. But the reasons why he can't have been made abundantly clear so we're along for this ride. It's pretty great. Breaking Bad was Spaghetti Western but Better Call Saul is film noir.

Only Gene in the Building

Wow. What an incredible night of television. Better Call Saul and Only Murders in the Building both had exceptional episodes. Better Call Saul in particular was extraordinarily brilliant.

Directed by Michelle MacLaren and written by Alison Tatlock, "Nippy" was a rare exhibition of relentless tension. From the moment Carol Burnett, playing a woman in a motorised wheelchair, meets Gene (Bob Odenkirk) on a snowy sidewalk, the story constantly keeps the viewer constantly captivated.

What is Gene's scam with the woman? Can he keep it up? It turns out her son is the cab driver who recognised him as Saul. Can Gene maintain this delicate balancing act? Well, not only does he spin those plates, ladies and gentlemen, he takes on two more, concocting a plan to rob a department store and worming his way into the lives of two security guards to do it.

Not only can he do it, he clearly seems alive for the first time in years. This is why retail employers don't like to hire exceptionally smart people. Without a complex problem to work on, they get bored and depressed. It's not just the Saul identity Gene misses. It's not the suits and the glam--it's the challenge and the risk. The same things that drove him as "Slippin' Jimmy" and in his relationship with Kim. And also, sometimes, as in the Sandpiper case, it's what drove him to do a genuinely good deed.

Gene has another problem, too, as we see in the scene where he has to distract the guard unexpectedly. He's profoundly lonely, he has no-one in his life who cares for him really. No-one will miss him if he dies. Now he's starting to think about that wife he has somewhere in the American wilderness . . .

Also to distract the guards, of course, he uses Cinnebons. What great free publicity. Or maybe it wasn't free, maybe Cinnebon provided some budget to the show. In any case, it sure made me hungry for Cinnebon. The department store, meanwhile, is the fictional "Lancaster's". I wondered at first why no real department store would lend their name to the show but then I realised the plan Gene concocts to rob them is a little too credible. Having worked in a department store myself, I'd say, yeah. It'd probably work. If you're willing to spend the money to rent a freight truck and buy a cell phone for a single use and you've worked out a way to reliably distract the security guards from watching the cameras. Gene says Jeff, the cab driver, doesn't have to worry because the security tapes will be wiped by the time the department store does its next inventory. But actually, since Jeff steals a relatively small quantity of merchandise, the missing inventory would likely be put down to "shrinkage" and never seriously investigated. I mean, even if someone suspected it was a robbery, no-one wants to waste time sitting through hours of security footage. There are always little discrepancies. I remember the manager of the JC Penney where I worked would always quote some astonishingly big number at the end of inventory periods--I'm talking thousands of dollars of merchandise unaccounted for. I never heard about any shoplifters being apprehended for it. It was as likely to be due to paperwork discrepancies, damaged merchandise, or some other mix-up. Only the store manager, who had to answer to corporate, truly cared, and even then she was far too busy to spearhead a massive investigation.

This sense of authenticity is partly why this episode works so much better than any of the nonsense with Gus or Lalo. Those Mexican cartel guys are like cartoon characters--they're larger than life figures that could maybe fit into the kind of Spaghetti Western that Breaking Bad eventually tried to be. But the initial concept of Breaking Bad, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug lord, tapped into a very appealing authenticity. And that's what last night's Better Call Saul did.

And what an intelligent way to cast Carol Burnett, who is superb.

Only Murders in the Building was also good. An exceptionally funny episode. I especially liked the scene where the three main characters are too distracted with their personal drama to notice their glitter bomb going off in the background. Guest appearances by Tiny Fey and Jane Lynch also worked very nicely.

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Only Saul in the Building

Last night brought new episodes of Better Call Saul and Only Murders in the Building. This week, Better Call Saul was definitely the more interesting of the two but Only Murders in the Building wasn't bad.

More scenes of Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne making out were worth the admission price alone. Though, honestly, Gomez doesn't seem that into it.

It seemed a bit late in the game to establish Martin Short's character having an ability to spot a killer. But I thought Steve Martin starting to get cosy with Jan (Amy Ryan) again was funny.

Better Call Saul went close to how I was expecting. I figured the aftermath of last week's trauma would cause a split between Jimmy and Kim. It was interesting that writer Ann Cherkis made the split around Kim's realisation that she has too much fun being bad with Saul and then Saul apparently accepting the break after Kim confesses how she'd forecast their breakup if she'd told him Lalo was back. It was a scene that really said a lot more about Kim than it did about Jimmy and maybe Cherkis was unable or uninterested in exploring the man's perspective in this. But with a big jump cut, it was enough to establish Jimmy's full conversion to Saul.

Waking up with a prostitute in his palace of tackiness, we see "Saul" is no longer merely an act. It's who he is. The tragedy that began with Jimmy's tension with Chuck ended with Jimmy's trauma with Kim. Now he's in the depths of Hell. Can he climb back out?

Of course, the episode spent too much time with Mike and Gus but, as boring as I think that subplot is, I do have to appreciate the subtlety of Giancarlo Esposito's performance, particularly in the wine tasting scene.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere while Better Call Saul is available in various places. I watched it on Netflix.

Only Lalo in the Laundry

It was a good night of television last night with effective new episodes of Better Call Saul and Only Murders in the Building. Only Murders in the Building was easily the stronger of the two, though, with an outstandingly funny episode that finally saw Steve Martin's character reunited with his daughter, Lucy.

She really looks more like a granddaughter, doesn't she? Actress Zoe Colletti was born in 2001, when Steve Martin was 56. I guess it's plausible. But I think the idea here was to make sure she was younger than Selena Gomez (born in 1992) because somewhere, maybe deep in the back of the writers' minds, they would still like to pair Gomez and Martin.

Colletti gives a good performance in any case and she's really cute. The scene where Mabel is startled to find how difficult it is to relate to someone just nine years younger than her was pretty funny.

The episode was written by two writers new to the series, Valentina Garza and Rachel Burger. I hope they write many more.

Last night's Better Call Saul, written by Gordon Smith and directed by Vince Gilligan, was mostly good for what it means for future episodes. Because last night's episode seems to have finally marked the end of the boring Lalo plot. To do it, of course, they had to spend the whole episode on him and, except for the nice moment when Jimmy convinces Lalo to send Kim on the mission to kill Gus, mostly Jimmy and Kim were reduced to just pawns in the Lalo plot. The best part of the episode was the shot of Howard's corpse at the end when we join Mike in reflecting on Howard's sad fate. He may have been a prick but he didn't deserve this. "You've come to a bad end, old man," as Dmitri said in The Brothers Karamazov.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ elsewhere and Better Call Saul is available in multiple places, I watched it on Netflix.

Hold His Calls

I was so busy on Tuesday I forgot to watch the new Better Call Saul. And what an episode to miss!

It did two things I really liked. It brought to fruition a subplot from the first season and did so in a way that completely changed the viewer's perspective on the characters. Suddenly there's another dimension to this prank Kim and Jimmy are pulling on Howard. It's not just mischief for mischief's sake.

The episode was written and directed by Thomas Schnauz whose credit comes up at the exact moment when a film student is talking about the importance of the auteur. That was pretty funny.

But funnier was the moment Howard realised he had photos of Saul handing a frisbee to someone. It was such a perfectly delicious moment.

I still wasn't interested in the Lalo plot until he turned up unexpectedly at the end. That was good. The whole thing would've worked perfectly if Lalo's inexplicable trip to Europe had just been left out of it. But, oh, well. However we got here, we're here, and it's good.

Now we just have to wait for July to see the second part of this beautiful piece of television.

Saul Calls Kim

A much better episode of Better Call Saul premiered last night than last week's. Once again, the show's much better when it focuses on Saul and Kim.

We get a little glimpse of Kim's childhood this time and witness something that may partially explain her current compulsion for wrongdoing. She's not the lifelong goody-two-shoes driven mad by repression. It's in her family history.

I love how clearly she hates the classy makeover Francesca gave to Saul's office. I actually kind of like it. It looks a bit like a Bergman film or--probably quite intentionally--like Twin Peaks.

The subplot with Lalo clearly seems to be echoing Twin Peaks this week as we find Lalo battling a woodsman somewhere in Germany. It was a decently directed scene by none other than Gus himself, Giancarlo Esposito. But it's undercut by its silly premise running from the previous episode.

Why the hell did Lalo go to Germany? Why does he care if Gus had secret dealings or an underground structure? Is he planning to get revenge by nailing Gus on building code violations? The show has consistently overestimated how interesting that underground structure is. And I know Lalo attacking the woodsman with the razor was supposed to be badass but it was too implausible. It came off as just silly.

But mainly the episode was a win. I love how Saul actually seems to be the one with the levellest head in his life.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.

Better Call Time

Sometimes Better Call Saul is a bit insubstantial. I seriously thought about skipping past the Gus stuff in last night's new episode. I saw his picture in the thumbnail on Netflix and thought, "Gee, I sure hope we get to watch Gus stand around with a blank expression again." Actually this time we got to watch him scrub bathroom grout with a toothbrush.

Like Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito is visibly much older than the character he's playing now. And he's put on some pounds, visually working against that fastidiousness we're supposed to be seeing. Which doesn't help his scenes feel like they have any more of a point. I think there's supposed to be tension around the possibility of Lalo showing up but we already know Gus survives. So it's not there.

I may sound like a hypocrite after I've gushed so many times about Twin Peaks and I suspect the makers of Better Call Saul are quite consciously influenced by Twin Peaks. But every episode of Twin Peaks season three felt like a feast while episodes like this of Better Call Saul feel like thin soup. It reminds me of a bowl of ramen I ordered back in San Diego once that was mostly just hot water. I tell that story to people here in Japan to illustrate how much better the ramen is here. Even that infamous scene where a guy sweeps the floor for a minute at the roadhouse on Twin Peaks felt more substantial than watching Better Call Saul once again show us that big underground structure to remind us that Gus has a big underground structure.

I'm afraid there was only one moment I really liked last night, the scene where Kim wakes up at 3:17am and sits smoking on the couch. And we see the bedroom light click on and we see little signs of her frustration that Jimmy's woken up. That was nice and felt like an authentic relationship. But, come on, this is the last season, let's use time a little more economically.

Kim on Kim Action

Last night's new Better Call Saul was written by Ann Cherkis and directed by Rhea Seahorn, the actress who pays Kim. Which may explain how sexy she looks in this episode.

I'm not a fan of selfies but there is something sexy about a beautiful woman admiring her own beauty.

The show's already improved for the absence of Nacho and the story is free to focus almost entirely on Saul (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim. The whole routine with Saul stealing Howard's car had a great payoff when Saul, wearing a ridiculous Howard wig, kicks a prostitute out of his car in front of Howard's associate.

I also liked Kim's confrontation with Mike and the men following her.

I'm starting to think Kim's fate is that she'll end up taking the rap for this elaborate prank on Howard and she spends the entirety of Breaking Bad in federal prison. There's no way they can just kill her off at this point. At least I do hope not.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.

Last Call for Nachos

I found the ending to last night's Better Call Saul very satisfying though it mainly involved the Nacho subplot. Mostly I find Nacho intensely dull and for the most part that held true last night.

The episode began with his continued escape from Mexico which continues to be shot through a yellow filter. I'm not even the only one complaining about productions doing that anymore. Why are they still doing this?

There were about a hundred logistical problems in Nacho's (Michael Mando) hiding in that old oil tanker. It doesn't even seem possible he could've climbed back out of there.

But the Saul (Bob Odenkirk) plot was great as usual. It featured another intriguing scam, this one involving a valet and Huell (Lavell Crawford).

I also liked Kim's (Rhea Seahorn) confrontation with the DA (Julie Pearl) and Kim's insistence on using the name Saul. Damn, I want to know what happened to her.

Saul is Called Again

The first two episodes of the new season of Better Call Saul appeared on Netflix last night. These are the first new episodes in two years and they're pretty good. It really feels like the show picks up where it left off right down to having the same strengths and weaknesses.

The subplots involving Gus and Nacho and Lalo are still not remotely interesting while Jimmy's decent into Saul-hood is captivating. But I think the question on everyone's mind is, "What happens to Kim?"

I like how she's become a co-conspirator in the creation of Saul. The scene in the country club was terrific fun and I was happy to see the show has gone back to the original concept of Jimmy playing he Jewish sounding name, "Saul Goodman", as an angle.

The scene also featured a cameo from James Urbaniak. whom you may know as Doctor Venture from The Venture Brothers. He gives a pretty funny and subtle performance here as Saul's tour guide at the club. You can see the gears working in his head as he tries to keep up with Saul's grift.

This season's also supposed to see the return of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. I hope their presence is worked in organically.

The first episode of this season notably didn't begin with a "flash forward" of Saul's life post-Breaking Bad as the show has routinely done in previous seasons. I hope this means there'll be a time shift to the present this season. Bob Odenkirk doesn't resemble his younger self much at all anymore so it's gotten a bit awkward watching him play younger. It's too bad de-aging technology hasn't gotten flawless and cheap. Anyway, he's still giving a good performance and if 50 year old men can play Romeo surely Odenkirk can play Saul.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.

A Long Dangerous Walk

Last night brought not just the end of the fifth and latest season of Better Call Saul but the conclusion of a really terrific trio of episodes. Beginning with "Bagman", written by Gordon Smith and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, the show finally managed to make its Mexican drug cartel subplot interesting by making it a traumatically personal experience for Saul.

Through the perspective of Saul's (Bob Odenkirk) reactions to being ambushed by gunmen and saved by Mike (Jonathan Banks), all the gunplay and posturing suddenly become deadly serious. In the next episode, "Bad Choice Road", writer and director Thomas Schnauz makes a very wise choice in not making the events of the previous episode about Saul's deal with Kim (Rhea Seehorn) about not lying to her. She only brings it up to highlight the fact that the trauma Saul has clearly experienced has gone well beyond any such relationship boundary.

In fact, the season finale, "Something Unforgivable", is almost a step backward because it spends so much time on Lalo (Tony Dalton) and Nacho (Michael Mando) in Mexico without Saul--and once again, like Breaking Bad, the show returns to that annoying device of tinting yellow everything that happens in Mexico.

The United States does not have a monopoly on the rest of the spectrum, you know.

But the confrontation between Lalo, Saul, and Kim at the end of "Bad Choice Road" remains to haunt the episode. That stand off so brilliantly played off the underlying tension of Saul's trauma, his long standing criminal inclinations, Kim's increasingly dodgy ethics and sensitivity for Saul, and Lalo's suspicion--and then Kim saving the day by basically being a really good lawyer. So this show does have legs without Chuck after all.

The final episode seemingly sets up a conflict for season six in which Kim and Saul go after Howard (Patrick Fabian) to win millions in a case from season one. I can't imagine this will go well for anyone. I kind of hope we don't find out Kim ended up going to federal prison. I definitely don't want her to die, I'm still holding out hope we'll see her in the present day.

The Old Saul was Older

It is getting increasingly difficult to think of Better Call Saul as a prequel. Everyone looks so much older now than they did on Breaking Bad, I have to admit it's a little distracting. Particularly when it comes to Bob Odenkirk, whose face has a lot more lines and his eyebags a lot more weight than when his character was introduced on Breaking Bad eleven years ago. On the one hand, I'm all for suspension of disbelief but, on the other, there's something kind of bittersweet about this older Saul. There's a sense of weary compassion in Odenkirk's performance here that seems to suggest someone much more experienced with life.

I watched a bit of the first episode of Breaking Bad to feature Saul last night, which I've done before when it seemed like the spin-off was going in a very different direction. I was surprised to find the difference made more sense now.

"JMM", last night's episode, featured the courthouse wedding between Saul and Kim (Rhea Seehorn), her peculiar solution to being blind-sided by his strategy in the previous episode. Now she wants no more secrets between them and, at an oddly chosen time during some passionate foreplay, Saul confesses he's taken as a client a prominent figure in a Mexican cartel. It takes some visible effort for Kim to swallow that with a smile, especially after Saul brags about how much money he could make if he's in good with a cartel.

Rarely has it been shown so clearly that Kim is the biggest restraint on Saul's worser instincts. We know something causes them to part eventually and now the shape of the tragedy may be a little clearer. I still suspect that the real cause of their sundering will be some high crime committed by Kim, not Saul. The show deliberately called back to her bad girl inclinations a couple episodes ago. The difference between Kim and Saul may not be that she's the straight arrow and he's the crook--it may be simply that she's more repressed than he is so when she acts out she does so with less moderation and tact. I suppose we'll see. I do hope the show eventually goes to a post-Breaking Bad setting full time at some point so Odenkirk's visible age can be more of a strength.