'Better Call Saul' has rested its case after six glorious seasons, and it made quite a closing statement — read our series finale recap.
Back in the present, Jimmy (let’s just call him Jimmy, huh?) rides a prison bus on his way to the subpar facility he tried to negotiate his way out of, the one he dubbed “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” One of the other prisoners recognizes him as Saul Goodman, and though he tries to tell him his name is McGill, word spreads fast, and soon the whole bus full of prisoners is chanting “Better call Saul!” Jimmy allows himself a little smile at this. “You had them down to seven years,” she says with admiration — and after his confession, now he’s been sentenced to 86 years. Saul says he’d go back to when he was 22 and pulled a slip and fall outside a department store and really hurt himself: “My knee’s never been the same.” Walter chuckles to himself: “So you were always like this.” I wanted her to hear this.” He confesses that he “was more than a willing participant” in Walt’s crimes. “Where do you see this ending?” Bill asks, and Gene answers: “With me on top, like always.” Bill accompanies Gene to a meeting with the feds — with Hank’s widow Marie watching! After that, he killed himself.” He adds sadly, “And I’ll live with that,” before taking his seat again. He looks behind him and locks eyes with Kim before continuing: “What happened to Howard Hamlin, it was… (“It’s really good ice cream,” Gene counters.) Kim is volunteering at a free legal service firm in Florida when she gets a call from Suzanne Ericsen, who lets her know Saul was arrested and is being extradited to New Mexico: “He’s giving testimony that affects you, personally.” Marie is horrified, but the feds reluctantly work with Gene and Bill, dismissing a bunch of charges and eventually whittling his sentence down to a measly seven years. He rings his old pal Bill Oakley, offering to make him his “advisory counsel” and basically acting like he’s doing Bill a favor by hiring him. Money. You did it all for money.” Gene tries to offer her his condolences for Hank, adding: “You and he are victims… He’d also go forward in time and check on some people, “see if they’re doing OK.” As for Jimmy, he’d go back to the day Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway and invest in it so he’d be filthy rich.
Still, the series reached a logical if understated conclusion, one that saw Jimmy/Saul (Bob Odenkirk) engage in a single noble, self-sacrificing act in order to ...
Ultimately, though, first Kim and then Saul/Jimmy had to atone for what in hindsight was the show's pivotal moment: How their shared glee in perpetrating scams finally resulted, if only inadvertently, in the death of Howard (Patrick Fabian). In the end, though, Saul found something more important, for what seemed to be less about rescuing Kim, or clearing her from a potential lawsuit, than simply seeing her again. Back in his element arguing on his own behalf, Saul appeared to have outsmarted the suits yet again by securing an absurdly light sentence.
In the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul, which aired its finale on Monday, estranged spouses Kim Wexler and Saul Goodman—né James “Jimmy” McGill and ...
It leaves us with a final question, too: Is the perversion of justice inevitable in any society, under any circumstances, or just within this particular society and the justice system it has built? His story line is hardly the only one in the show to constitute a travesty of justice. And she very nearly manages to blow up that sun-drenched purgatory when she confesses her role in the death of Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) to both his widow and the DA. Kim has suffered more than enough for the harm she and her ex-husband caused together, yet at one point in the series finale it seems inevitable that she’ll be ruined by civil, if not criminal, charges in yet another miscarriage of justice perpetrated by Saul Goodman. If The Wire became a classic by showing us the crumbling of America’s institutions, then Better Call Saul deserves a place in the canon for the vividness with which it captured something less tangible but more elemental: Americans’ crumbling faith in the values that once gave those institutions meaning. Debuting in the long lead-up to the 2016 election, it unfurled its disconcerting observations into a culture inundated with misinformation and disinformation, Constitutional crises and Supreme Court chaos, where laws protecting women’s bodily autonomy are struck down while laws that would save children from being gunned down at school almost never gain traction. Both brothers hide their selfish motives in the letter of the law; in Saul’s case, said text just happens to be printed on his office walls. Every element of his life without her is a lie or a fake or a reproduction or a performance. But this time, he uses his power to manipulate the system for an unselfish purpose: to divert all the blame, more than even he should have to shoulder, onto himself. Later, what propelled many of us through the seasons was the attachment we developed to Kim, who turned out to be the show’s moral center—not just the proverbial woman who made Jimmy want to be a better man but a hero in her own right—and who, as many nervously noted, was no longer a part of Saul’s life by the time Walter White walked into it. For us, the surprise was that initial glimpse of Jimmy as a reformed scammer turned courtroom crusader. But when she leaves Saul, the last dregs of his professional dignity, of his desire to serve justice rather than to settle scores or line his own pockets, trickle out behind her. Creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are known for condensing complex themes into potent images, and the episode opens with Saul bouncing a ball off his Constitution wall until a flimsy pillar falls across his desk.
This show is ultimately about how you live with what you've done”: Talking about the end of Jimmy and Kim with the show's mastermind.
And if you can't think about your regrets, then you can't change your ways. But you can't help think about the pages that you would go back and rewrite if you had the opportunity. When you watch Bob [Odenkirk] in that scene, you know, he's got to be thinking about his brother. And the time machine is a thought experiment: if you could change something in your life, what would it be? Better Call Saul became something of a time machine, flitting between the technicolor days of Jimmy and the future noir-scape of Gene, with glimpses of Saul’s gaudy high-life in between. Especially for Jimmy, but also Mike, and Kim, and Walt—all of them have made decisions that I think, if they were to be honest about it, they regret.
After a little United States v. Saul Goodman legal action, the now-reformed Jimmy McGill ended up with 86 years in prison as Walter White's “indispensable” ...
Saul also confesses about how he sabotaged his brother Chuck McGill’s (Michael McKean) career, which led to his suicide. After being sworn in, Saul pulls a 180 and confesses to all of his crimes with Walter White, almost bragging about how Walt couldn’t have built his drug empire and stayed out of prison without him. His sentence gets reduced to seven years, plus he gets a cushy prison in North Carolina. He even offers to give up the dirt on what happened to Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), but the prosecutors inform him that Kim already gave her confession about the murder. Saul returns to his question about the time machine, which Walt brushes off as a scientific impossibility, but then says he regrets leaving Gray Matter Technologies, the company he co-founded. Saul lands in a prison cell, where he calls his Cinnabon co-workers to tell them they’ll need to find a new manager. Mike says he’d go back to the moment he accepted his first bribe, or he’d check on a few people in the years to come.
The Better Call Saul finale puts Gene Takovic, Saul Goodman, and Jimmy McGill all on the stand to uncover uncomfortable truths.
As Jimmy is being taken away to jail (and not a swanky federal jail with a golf program at that) one of his fellow inmates identifies him as Saul Goodman. Jimmy tries to deny the accusation but news travels around the bus like wildfire and before you know it an entire bus full of men is excitedly cheering “Better call Saul!” But in the end all paths lead to a cigarette with Kim all the same. In addition to the aforementioned Walter White and Mike Ehrmantraut (who doesn’t really count because he was in Better Call Saul), the show has one last treat for Breaking Bad fans. And it’s hard to imagine another spinoff continuing on without him or Saul showrunner Peter Gould. AMC doesn’t have a great track record in letting sleeping content lie with The Walking Dead blossoming into one of TV’s most overwhelming franchises, but even the most artistically bereft corporate exec has to realize that this world has run its course, right?…right??? But as Saul points out…he doesn’t have to convince anyone in that room, he just has to convince one juror to the point where they refuse to prosecute and lead to a hung jury. Jimmy tells the truth about Walter White. He was afraid of the man at first but then he realized how much money was in the meth game and dove headfirst into Heisenberg’s world. And that leads to the first bit of fireworks of the episode. And he makes sure that the U.S. Marshal overhears him so that Kim is summed to court as well. Jimmy tells Bill Oakley that he wants to tell the feds even more about the Howard Hamlin case, stuff that even Kim never would have known. With his attorney-in-name-only Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) at his side, Saul gets himself and incredible plea deal that amounts to seven and a half years at the cushiest federal prison of his choice. As Jimmy unpacks the contents of his grocery run for Chuck, his brother notes that he doesn’t have to do this for him. Enough of the past and onto the ending – you know, the one you want explained.
Gene gets caught, Saul cuts a deal … and Jimmy finds a way back into Kim's good graces.
Did it square at all with anything we’ve seen of this character over the past few episodes, let alone the entire run of the season? No, it didn’t have the relentless, clock-like precision of the Breaking Bad finale, but clock-like precision isn’t Better Call Saul’s thing. It wasn’t not grim, but it was a lot less grim than I’d feared it might be.
The series finale of Better Call Saul masterfully wraps up Vince Gilligan's deeply human crime universe. Read our spoiler-filled review.
In the end, Better Call Saul goes out just as it lived — in intelligent, charming, deeply human fashion. In just a few quick lines, the pain and regret that hovers around Mike, but his desire to provide for his loved ones are all illuminated. Kim was the only person that could break the hold that Chuck had on Jimmy’s psyche, the only person that could make him feel regretful. Walt tears into the absurdity of the premise using science and is domineering toward Saul, yet he’s wise enough to get to the heart of what Saul’s really asking. He also discusses using the time machine to visit his family in the future. However, a final flashback with Chuck explains the behavior. Most fitting is that Mike is the first of these flashbacks because early on, Better Call Saul was as much Mike’s origin story as it was Saul’s. Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould have been frank about the fact that Saul’s story has evolved greatly from its original conceit, and Mike’s presence in the series may have suffered as a result, but it’s nice to see one more conversation between the two characters. Not only was Breaking Bad the darling of Peak TV’s first wave, a word-of-mouth hit upping the ante creatively each week until it crescendoed to universal acclaim, but it was also special to me beyond the entertainment it provided or the conversations it drove. Reviewing Breaking Bad was the first time I received feedback from strangers in the comments here, and shockingly, it was mostly positive. My fears were that Better Call Saul would tarnish the legacy of my sentimental favorite. Breaking Bad may not have been the first series I covered for Den of Geek, but it felt like the first time I was really connecting with people through my writing. They also give us precious final moments with Mike, Walt, and Chuck, giving us a snapshot of who they were as characters on a fundamental level and allowing them a curtain call.
'Better Call Saul' has come to an end after six seasons. Read EW's recap of the series finale.
When he got in his machine, the only place he ever went was the future — and before he returned to his own time, he went so far forward that he witnessed the end of the world. They finish the cigarette, in that room where the barred window is nothing but a shadow above them. But as much as this final episode centers on the question of regret, the usefulness of that question is undermined by the way that this story has always been permeated by inevitability. Her hair is curled again, but still dark, still different, because Kim can't travel back in time any more than he can; this is how it looks for her to move on. Better Call Saul has always dwelled in the irresolvable tension between the two, in the way that Jimmy McGill's genuine sweetness and Saul Goodman's venal self-interest were two parts of the same whole. By the time he's finished describing how he built Walt's criminal empire, his plea agreement is toast, but Kim's safety is secure — and he's going by "Jimmy McGill" again. He tries to tell them his name is McGill. He tries not to smile. Regrets, he's had a few, but he has neither the time nor inclination to linger on them. Is it purely altruistic, that he still loves Kim, and still wants to protect her? But when he finally arrived to a life of leisure — when he'd made more money than he knew what to do with, when he'd installed himself in a home that reflected both his material wealth and his life's emptiness from every one of its copious mirrored surfaces — he could never belong there. A striver, a dreamer, a man with big plans to claw his way into the sun where he belonged. We don't see Saul's mirrored mansion in this episode, but I thought of it at one particular moment, the one where he calls Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) from the police station.
The series finale “Saul Gone” is a supremely satisfying sendoff.
Later, in his flashback to the visit with Chuck, Chuck has a paperback book on the kitchen counter: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. For a minute, they are those two people in the first episode of the series, “Uno,” when they are in the HHM parking garage, oozing chemistry while they are passing a cigarette back and forth. She makes a point of telling Jimmy she got in to see him with that New Mexico bar card that has no expiration date on it. Saul gets emotional as he tries to talk about what happened to Howard, but then, when he sees Kim at the back of the room and sees that she’s really listening to him, he finally reveals what he did to Chuck, ruining his ability to practice law, to purposefully hurt him, after which Chuck killed himself. Poor Bill tries to save some semblance of the case, because while Saul was getting his Jimmy McGill on and redeeming himself with Kim, he was costing himself that sweet government deal. At first, we think Saul is angry that Kim got the better of him and has limited what he may be able to get out of the government. All is not lost, though: During that bus ride, his fellow inmates recognize him not as Jimmy, but as “Better Call Saul,” and they stomp their feet and shout his catchphrase in appreciation of their hero. - Jimmy’s big break began with dumpster diving for info to help the Sandpiper residents sue the company. In another beautifully shot scene, Kim and Jimmy (that’s what she calls him) stand against the visiting room and share a cigarette she has snuck in for him. Showrunner and episode writer and director Peter Gould’s storyline sent Saul to jail early in the finale, which amped the excitement about all that awaited us. When asked to give a hint about how Better Call Saul would wrap up during a Tribeca Festival panel in June, Bob Odenkirk offered two words: “second life.” That clue turned out to be much pithier and more perfect than anyone might have guessed. He can totally own his opponent, even when he should be looking at decades in prison.
An analysis of 'Saul Gone,' the series finale episode of Better Call Saul, which makes multiple references to time machines, a reminder of how elegantly the ...
If time travel is really just a way to confront regrets, then the time machine that is Better Call Saul has done its job. The third time travel reference, in the Jimmy/Chuck sequence, sneaks its way into a spat between Jimmy and Chuck. As usual, the McGill brothers struggle to connect. That’s what Better Call Saul is: a show about the patterns people can’t break, and how hard it is to actually go back and change the path one has already taken. Exhausted and parched, they pause to rest and Jimmy, after joking that they could take part of the money they’ve “inherited” and build a time machine, asks Mike where he would go if he could travel to any moment in the past or future. Jimmy looks after Chuck by delivering groceries and Chuck attempts to take an interest in Jimmy’s law practice, yet neither is able to recognize the love behind either of these efforts. He doesn’t feel bad about trying to pull a scam outside of a department store — it’s really the injury that bothers him. Our understanding of so much in Better Call Saul is based on either memories or a prescience granted to us by all the flashbacks and flash-forwards. Consider the back-and-forth between Jimmy and Mike at the beginning of “Saul Gone,” when they’re lost in the desert, following Jimmy’s misguided effort to act as Lalo’s bagman. In the end, it’s money and power that drive Walt and consume his thoughts. While the series spends most of its time exploring what happened to Saul Goodman and other key characters before Breaking Bad, when Saul was still living life as the flawed, conniving Jimmy McGill, it also depicts events that occurred post-Breaking Bad. It has jumped as far back as the 1970s and ’80s to revisit moments from Jimmy’s and Kim Wexler’s childhoods, and as far forward as the mid-to late-2010s when Jimmy transforms from Cinnabon manager into incarcerated criminal. Knowing what happened before or what happens after has always added a richness to this series, which so often calls back to things we’ve seen before, either on Saul or Breaking Bad. The sight of that fancy Zafiro Añejo top rolling near the gutter during the extended sequence that opens season six means nothing if you don’t remember the con job that Kim and Jimmy pulled while drinking that fancy tequila. Monday night’s finale, an episode called “Saul Gone” that was written and directed by series co-creator Peter Gould, confirmed Better Call Saul as yet another kind of series: a time-travel show.
Better Call Saul is one of the last examples of prestige television still airing - with its finale, we say goodbye to the golden era of TV.
I think one of the themes of Better Call Saul is that real, fundamental change of a person is driven by some pretty hard and powerful forces. We pity Jimmy in particular as he tries in vain to be accepted by the corporate mainstream. Better Call Saul resonates because it’s filled with characters who feel smothered by dead-end compromises, like Ignacio “Nacho” Varga (Michael Mando) and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), both of whom are caught in the orbit of the drug cartel. This is what makes Jimmy’s slow transformation into Saul Goodman so despairing, and yet so relatable. He is not a Dexter Morgan or a Tony Soprano. If anything, Jimmy is one of life’s losers, struggling to hold onto his individuality in a corporate system that thrives on conformity. As a prequel spin-off, Better Call Saul was always going to be compared to its beloved predecessor.
Emmy nominee Rhea Seehorn breaks down the 'Better Call Saul' series finale, opens up about Bob Odenkirk's heart attack and more.
And yeah, and the woman that kept asking me to taste the almond milk to tell her if there was sugar in it, when she could taste it herself, I’m like, “Why would somebody do, like, why wouldn’t you just taste it?” He was like, “I don’t know!” But I’m always like, “Oh, I’m going to put this in a scene. And when I look back on it, I know I wanted to be in entertainment, but I was chubby at the time, and I didn’t know anybody in entertainment, and I didn’t understand that acting was a craft. And it was like, “Was it my pants?” Everything about growing up to me felt safer if I was allowed to think about the whys of human behavior. I feel like, “Man, I wish he could have beaten the disease, because he’s such a great person and I wish he was around.” But I think that being an observant kid and watching life and watching the decisions my mom had to make, my sister had to make, I had to make, people around us make — watching that interior versus exterior of what people think about. I knew I wasn’t a character from “Breaking Bad.” I knew that some people are just going to want this show to be “Breaking Bad.” Some people are only going to want cartel stuff. And they were writing things that I was then like, “Oh, that matches.” I mean, when we did the flashback and my mom was an alcoholic, I was like, “Mmmm!” I think I thought it was my dad. The fact that Peter was not interested — and Vince, when he was co-showrunning for the first couple of seasons — they were not interested in spoon-feeding the audience or telling you it’s A or it’s B, nature versus nurture. I don’t think it’s the end of their relationship, but I also think there’s plenty of people that will think that she’s never going back there and that is the end of the tale. You were nominated for your first Emmy, and it was actually a double nomination: one for supporting actress in a drama series for your performance as Kim and one for your role in the short-form series “Cooper’s Bar.” And I know you were in London when you got the news. Not both.” And I was so desperate to not ever appear that I’m not grateful, but at the same time, I’m there to do my job. So, then what happens in the courtroom, I just think is a journey for Kim going from fury and just absolute shock that he would do this to realizing, “Oh, you just did this to get me here. Prior to that birthday song moment and the phone call when you can tell that there is Kim in there somewhere, the Kim that we know.
Jimmy McGill returns to square up to what he's done and earn redemption from the person who matters most. A recap of “Saul Gone,” season 6, episode 13 and ...
A few times during “Saul Gone,” Jimmy brings up the idea of a time machine as a thought experiment — with Mike during their miserable trek through the desert, with Walt during their stay in the basement of a vacuum-cleaner repair shop, with Chuck as he’s bringing him his supplies. (Cutting to the yard afterward seemed akin to adding a denouement after “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” in Casablanca.) Few shows in television history have been as artfully filmed as Better Call Saul. I’ll miss its images perhaps most of all. A time machine has the power to erase the past or jettison a person so far into the future that the past ceases to matter. Later, Walt seethes over his own billion-dollar company getting swiped out from under him by Elliott and Gretchen. There were more complicated reasons than money for Jimmy and Walt to act as they did, but wanting it was still a factor. While it’s true that Walt and Jesse Pinkman abducted Jimmy and held a gun to his head over an open grave, the rest of his story is nonsense. “If you don’t like where you’re heading,” says Chuck in a touching flashback, “there’s no shame in going back and changing your path.” He doesn’t have to live the rest of his life as the 22-year-old who went down the literal slippery slope by pulling “a slip-and-fall” outside Marshall Fields. He can square up to what he’s done and earn a measure of redemption from the person who matters most to him. The problem with regret is that it’s not anything close to a time machine. He saw the chance to build the drug empire that would make him a millionaire, and he didn’t have Kim around any longer to look at him sideways for doing it. “Saul Gone” is essentially about two versions of the same speech, one by “Saul Goodman” and the other by Jimmy McGill. The first is when “Gene” is finally captured and brought before a tableful of prosecutors to discuss the charges against him, with Marie Schrader as a special guest. That finale image of a gut-shot Walt returning to the lab with the tenderness of a serviceman coming home from a long tour overseas is a sublimely perverse and pathetic fantasy. Last week, the door was closed firmly on the notion that maybe Jimmy and Kim could somehow rig a future together because Jimmy could not be helped. That’s what 14 years of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul has been about — who these men are fundamentally and whether they have the capacity to change.
Throughout both shows, schools and colleges are places seemingly devoid of meaning or moral education. Formal schooling figures into key storylines, ...
Over the course of both shows, Mike Ehrmantraut, the ex-cop turned private investigator (and occasional hitman), dispenses a series of gruff lectures on what it means to live by an ethical code—even as he lives a life of dubious morality. Gilligan and Gould’s world of meth dealers, cartels, and seedy lawyers winds up offering an uncompromising meditation on the distrust with which so many Americans regard schools and colleges today. Truth is, the shows are rich with mentoring, almost all of it rooted in the hard-earned wisdom and discipline of criminal enterprise. Indeed, it’s perhaps no coincidence that formal faith and its accoutrements are absent from the show. Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, is a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who’s frustrated and unsatisfied. Across perhaps 120 hours of story, one never gets the sense that any character even once found education to be fulfilling or formative. Breaking Bad was the story of a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a murderous drug kingpin. He had slacked off on his first attempt but when the teacher, Mr. Pike, asked him if that was the best he could do, Jesse painstakingly constructed the lustrous, intricate box. Then there’s the tragic figure of Gale Boetticher, who, like White, uses his mastery of chemistry to produce high-grade crystal meth. Formal schooling figures into key storylines, but this education contributes nothing of import to the characters’ interior lives. While I’m no TV critic and won’t speak to all that, I do think it’s worth taking a moment to contemplate what the operatic, gritty world that creator Vince Gilligan brought to life has to say about–of all things–American education. For those who know and love these shows, that may sound like a stretch.
The star joined The Times to discuss Monday's series finale, why the role left him “ragged,” and his future hopes for the “Breaking Bad” universe.
“He’s a guy who is showing the audience his need, his hunger for love and respect from his brother Chuck. His heart is open to Chuck, and Chuck crushes him. Said Odenkirk: “The craziest thing is, all of these feelings I’m going through now — saying goodbye to this great thing — are going to be really helpful in this next role. He’s not a great guy in a lot of the actions he takes. She’s a person with a stronger sense of herself and a stronger mettle than Jimmy. She has a greater desire to be good, but there’s something wrong with her. “I play a character, who, while he reveals earnest sides of himself and can be very likable, most of the time he’s doing unethical, unjustified stuff. He returned to work in September after a hospital stay and recovery at home. It’s the biggest journey the character makes in the whole series.” “I love the finale and where it goes,” Odenkirk said. “The courtroom scene was hard,” Odenkirk said. The fugitive attorney, who has been hiding with a new identity as Cinnabon manager Gene Takavic, finally ends up behind bars, but he finds redemption in his punishment for multiple crimes, including accessory to murder and money laundering. There’s a degree of self-awareness this character gains that I always knew he was capable of. And it’s going to hit me.”
'Identity change is often catalyzed by trauma — in his case, coming to terms with his losses'
While Jimmy repeatedly escapes both, the black-and-white footage of his post-Saul life (as Gene Takovic) is an intrusive reminder that his troubles are not over. Ushering Chuck toward his suicide may have settled their rivalry in his favor, but it’s also the first of many red lines to cross on his way to Goodmanhood. He is the last McGill left and his unique skill sets cannot be monetized in the legitimate world. Kim Wexler, who goes from fellow lawyer to co-conspirator to his wife, gets addicted to the thrill of recreational or utilitarian rule-breaking binges he inspires. Jimmy has a pathological need to challenge the power structure. Despite displaying several features of antisocial personality disorder (stealing from his family, a history of conning people, and defying authority), he can be compassionate and is guided by an idiosyncratic code of ethics. As a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor of psychology — and a fan of Better Call Saul — it’s been fascinating to watch the progression of the character who transforms into three different identities. People close to him are drawn to his magnetic personality and are able to see “the good in him.” He makes friends easily, and typically keeps them for life. Jimmy’s personal responsibility for his misfortunes is another fascinating thread. Even the battle-hardened, fish-eyed private investigator Mike Ehrmantraut (whose life trajectory provides a subtle road map to Jimmy’s) has a growing respect for him. As his emotional scar tissue accumulates, it turns into callouses. Even so, his vibe is intoxicating.
'Better Call Saul' star Bob Odenkirk bids a fond farewell to the show in a new Twitter video — watch his goodbye.
“But we weren’t. We were given a chance, and hopefully we made the most of it. “It’s too many moving parts, and they fit together too beautifully, and it’s a mystery to me how it even happened.” We came out of maybe a lot of people’s most favorite show ever [in Breaking Bad], and we could have been hated for simply trying to do a show,” he continues.
Bob Odenkirk has shared a heartwarming message with fans as the “Better Call Saul” finale finally landed on Netflix. Fans of the hit “Breaking Bad” spinoff ...
Thank you.” Thank you for staying with us. Fans of the hit “Breaking Bad” spinoff were hit with the final episode, titled “Saul Gone,” on Monday.
What's next for Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler? Emmy nominee Rhea Seehorn reflects on the "Better Call Saul" finale on "The Envelope" podcast.
Seehorn also opens up about the scary moments after Bob Odenkirk had a heart attack on set, how growing up with a father who suffered from alcoholism shaped her acting skills, and why “Better Call Saul” helped her to finally internalize that her success wasn’t a fluke. Fresh off last evening’s “Better Call Saul” series finale, Rhea Seehorn joined me to break down the biggest moments of the episode, including the surprise decision Jimmy makes and what she thinks is next for Kim Wexler. Seehorn — who is nominated for two Emmys this year, including a first for her performance as Kim Wexler — also shared the moment that Kim would go back to if she were to use a time machine (a running theme in the finale). I’m Yvonne Villarreal, TV writer for The Times and co-host of “The Envelope” podcast.
Watch Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk talk about saying goodbye to Saul Goodman and the show itself as he thanks fans and co-workers.
It’s too many moving parts and they fit together too beautifully and it’s a mystery to me how it even happened.” “It’s a mystery to me how it even happened,” he said, in the emotional and heartfelt video (see it in full below). Odenkirk further expressed gratitude for his fellow actors, the crew and the fans.
Better Call Saul Season 6, Episode 13, "Saul Gone", the finale of the Breaking Bad spinoff, reveals the fate of the crooked lawyer.
He also asks to be called Jimmy McGill, the name he was born with, burying Saul Goodman once and for all. During the hearing, Saul also reveals he plotted to disbar Charles and took responsibility for the scheme against Howard. With one speech, Saul demolishes his deal. During his transportation to a prison where he is sentenced to spend 86 years, the other inmates recognize Saul Goodman. The prisoners start to chant his slogan, excited to be in the presence of a legend of the criminal world. Saul was fine in aiding a criminal if he could get rich in the process, even underlining how Walter and Jesse would probably have been dead or in prison after a few months if he'd never helped them Saul could have prevented Heisenberg from ever becoming the monster he turned out to be, but he decided money was more important. A similar dialogue happens in the second flashback scene, set at the moment when Saul and Walter had to stay hidden in a basement while the Disappearer worked on their escape. The promise is a ruse, though, created to force Kim to be present during the court hearing. Saul is smart, knows the law like the back of his hand, and is successful in pushing his demands. Saul, on the other hand, would go back in time to place some profitable investment that would turn him into a billionaire in the present. First, we go back to the desert where Saul almost died of dehydration by the side of Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks). The duo was carrying seven million dollars to free Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), and Saul thought more than once he would die from the heat before reaching civilization. The widow is watching the meeting from behind a mirror before confronting Saul face to face. Saul is apprehended, knowing that he’ll be gone for a long time for a very long list of crimes. There’s a lot to unpack here, and with all the time jumps, things can be somewhat confusing.
From left, Michael McKean as Chuck McGill and Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill. Michele K.Short/AMC/Sony Picture. Better Call Saul ended last night with a wonderful ...
“I love you, too,” she says, her composure finally breaking in that way that Seehorn can play so well, “but so what?” She can no longer stomach the kind of fun they’ve had going back to their evening with Ken Wins, so she walks out of Jimmy’s life, and he responds — in a harsh and unexpected time jump — by embracing all that is wicked about being Saul Goodman. That is the devastating climax of the story Better Call Saul was telling for six seasons, and it’s worth all the time and effort it took us to get there. (He could jump from superhuman heights, for instance.) But as much fun as it was to see him run roughshod over Gus and the other cartel characters, it was even more exhilarating to see him get verbally dismantled by Kim Wexler in a rare lawyer world/cartel world crossover. But the last one we got — the last scene of the series to feature Gus, in fact — was extraordinary. “JMM” offers our first unnerving glimpses of the real Saul Goodman in the series’ present-day, rather than Jimmy just using that name professionally. By the end, our severely dehydrated protagonist has become so battle-hardened — and/or mad at himself for letting Lalo talk him into the idea — that he takes a long, disgusted pull on a bottle filled with his own urine. I save me.” And then we see her do just that, in a fabulous montage (scored to a “A Mi Manera”) where she tirelessly works the phones on her lunch break, day after day, week after week, trying to land a client big enough to get her out of the dungeon. Chuck assumes he is much too smart to fall for one of Slippin’ Jimmy’s tricks, which is exactly how Jimmy — with nimble-fingered help from future best friend Huell (Lavell Crawford) — is able to get over on his brother. Jimmy spends most of Season Four repressing his grief over Chuck’s suicide and trying to keep busy during his one-year bar association suspension. Every terrible thing that these two will cause in later seasons is born out of this long, drunken night where they pose as “Viktor with a K” St. Clair and his sister Giselle in order to enjoy some expensive tequila without paying for it. He turned out to be pretty spectacular at the dramatic thing (more examples of that below), but it was still a joy to behold those moments when he was truly ridiculous. We recapped the finale and spoke with Saul co-creator Peter Gould, but we’re not ready to say goodbye to the classic AMC drama just yet. Better Call Saul ended last night with a wonderful episode that brought the entire Breaking Bad universe to a satisfying conclusion.
Your complete guide to streaming Better Call Saul episode 13 – Saul Gone – from wherever you are on the planet right now. Don't miss the gripping finale of ...
You'll need to use a VPN to watch Better Call Saul episode 13 on your UK Netflix account when travelling abroad. Catch Better Call Saul on AMC with with a 50 per cent discount on the Sling TV Blue or Orange package in your first month. In the UK, the final ever episode of Better Call Saul has landed. Make sure you know how to watch Better Call Saul episode 13 from anywhere with a VPN. Better Call Saul episode 13, titled 'Saul Gone', is available to stream now in the UK and US and it's the finale. Fans can watch the last ever Saul episode on Netflix. Away from home?
After 61 immaculate episodes, this cinematic, immersive drama ends today. It was visually beautiful, detail-oriented TV that became so much more than Vince ...
From the get go, all that said, this wasn’t a promising premise. Sometimes, all plot development suspended for a few hypnotic moments, the camera would linger on a worn-out dollar bill caught on a cactus thorn, or on some abstract composition of a piece of metal foil blown about the desert. When Jesse Pinkman drove off into the desert, leaving Walter White murdered by cartel goons at the end of Breaking Bad’s final episode nine years ago, the safe money would not have bet on Bob Odenkirk starring as the reptilian “Slipping” Jimmy McGill in a prequel that traced his mutation from small-time schlemiel into still more slimy attorney Saul Goodman.
The title would seem to give us the answer. The series reintroduces us to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), whom we met in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” as the sleazy ...
Maybe he is finally less comparable to Walter White than to Don Draper of “Mad Men,” another fast-talking slick in a suit whose words save him until they don’t, who is taken with the idea of time machines, who has a history of changing his name and running from trouble. At last he can be himself, and, in its closing run, so could “Better Call Saul.” I don’t want to make too much of the much-heralded End of the Antihero — “Barry” is still around, for starters. As Saul says to Walter White in one of their first “Breaking Bad” meetings, “Conscience gets expensive, doesn’t it?” The final run of “Saul” keeps finding little pockets of story to revisit within it, restaging Saul’s first run-in with Walter and having Kim meet Jesse during the “Breaking Bad” timeline, at a crucial moment in both their lives. The climax of “Saul” seems at first to be going a similar way. Despite the reappearance in flashbacks of Bryan Cranston as Walter White and Aaron Paul as his sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, the last half-season is less an attempt to reprise “Breaking Bad” and more a productive conversation with it — maybe even a friendly argument. Instead, the protagonist utters something you would never expect to hear from Saul Goodman in a courtroom — the truth — and blows up his plea deal. As Saul says of Walter, in a late-season flashback, “Guy with that mustache probably doesn’t make a lot of good life choices.” Now he seems to be proving his own point. In “Better Call Saul,” crime is mostly just sad, the more so the closer the series gets to its end. In its closing run, “Better Call Saul” has jumped about in time, shuffling these identities like the moving targets in a shell game. The series reintroduces us to Saul Goodman ( Bob Odenkirk), whom we met in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” as the sleazy lawyer to the chemistry teacher turned drug lord, Walter White. Each has a little of the others in him.
"Better Call Saul" stars Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn and Peter Gould discuss the finale, cigarette scene and more.
I got a cold breeze on my back, because I felt so strongly the right ending for Saul was to be in the system that he’s made light of and twisted around for his own purposes…In terms of the trilogy of the shows, it feels very elegant that Walt dies, which he was always going to do. He’s in a prison of his own and he gets away and starts healing. After Walt (Bryan Cranston) dies in “Breaking Bad” and Jesse runs free in the spinoff movie “El Camino,” Gould said he’s satisfied with how all three of the protagonists had a different ending. “At that point, Vince [Gilligan] was out of the room working on ‘El Camino’ and he pitched potential endings to ‘El Camino’ and one of them was very similar to this, except for Jesse. It was beautifully pitched. It felt more honest to have the two of them apart instead of together.” It’s more about, this is the one bit of color in his world, his relationship with Kim. He’s the one person who sees him as he is and as he was. There was a version that didn’t have that; it ended with the two of them smoking. The first was in the penultimate episode, when Marion (Carol Burnett) revealed to Saul that she discovered his lawyer commercials and they were reflected in color in Saul’s glasses. “[It’s a] horrible place, but they’re without artifice and armor, sort of maskless with each other, which is the best part of their relationship. “It was the easiest scene we ever shot,” Odenkirk added. Peter is so great not overwriting it: trusting us and the audience.” “This is them at their best,” she told reporters.
Season 6's end is nothing as flashy or grandiose as Breaking Bad's was. Remember when I wrote in episode 10 how that was the day Jimmy died? Well, this ...
The door to the outside world opens and Kim exits. Jimmy stands in the courtyard; Kim is on the other side of the fence. Jimmy also confesses that Kim has no part in the wrongdoing and he lied to the government because he wanted her present. He is the ultimate criminal. Winning back Kim is everything to Jimmy; maybe not Saul. Jimmy is relentless in establishing that he was pivotal in keeping Walt’s operation going and keeping him out of jail. He pauses at the point in the story when Jesse and Walter unbound him and he actually senses an opportunity. He notices Kim sitting in the back and keeps looking. He starts getting cocky and even asks to be relocated to an amicable prison in North Carolina. He cannot take the place he is in for granted and be sent to a place like ADX Montrose. The AUSA reluctantly agrees but signals they’re done. Saul asks Bill to stop on his way to the bathroom. “You’re the last lawyer I would have gone to”. I wonder what Chuck would think about that and how he could hide his chuckles. He goes to his house and escapes out the back when he sees officers arrive. He also apologizes for not coming to work and asks Kritsa to call the management: they would need a new manager.
Killed off in “Breaking Bad,” Mike Ehrmantraut had a long second act in “Better Call Saul.” Banks said playing Mike made him “a little more silent, ...
And part of his misery is that he can read “The Little Prince” with Kaylee, and then he’s going to go do something that he knows is not good. In spite of all his fears and trepidations, the world is good for a moment with that innocent child and that innocent book. I have a quote in my kitchen — I’m going to take you over here with me so I can read this to you. It’s a passage where the little prince says, “My flower is ephemeral, and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world.” What do you think this scene means for Mike? I love “The Little Prince” so much. The first thing that comes to my mind is in “Breaking Bad” when Mike left his granddaughter in the park and had to escape. I still have a tough time with Mike leaving his granddaughter in the park. And I was going, “No, Mikey would never leave his granddaughter.” And of course, the reasoning is, the police department — they’re there in the park. In the Sunday comics, there is “find the six differences in between two photos or two drawings.” I have difficulty with that. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. Morally conflicted, with plenty of wrinkles but little mirth, Ehrmantraut was mostly a blunt, coldblooded crank — with a soft spot for his granddaughter — in “Breaking Bad,” arriving in the second season and getting killed off three seasons later. The last scene that Bob Odenkirk and I had together in the desert, and where I say to him, “You regret nothing?” — Mike was still looking for the humanity in this guy.
The series finale of 'Better Call Saul' drew the show's biggest same-day audience since the end of season three.
Elsewhere Monday, The Bachelorette led primetime on the broadcast networks with 3.29 million viewers and a 0.76 in the 18-49 demo. The episode, “Saul Gone,” also had more viewers than any episode in season five, or season four — or any Saul installment since the third-season finale back in June 2017 drew 1.85 million people on its first night. Those numbers will only grow, of course, with delayed viewing and streaming. [series finale](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/better-call-saul-series-finale-explained-interview-1235199278/) for the Breaking Bad spinoff averaged 1.8 million viewers for AMC, a same-day season high by almost 400,000 viewers (the season premiere in April had 1.42 million viewers). Fox News’ The Five was the most watched cable program with 3.6 million viewers, and WWE Monday Night Raw on USA led the 18-49 chart on cable with a 0.53 rating. The Better Call Saul finale also averaged a 0.47 rating among adults 18-49, its best mark in the key ad demographic since the season five premiere in 2020. Better Call Saul has been adding about a million viewers with three days of DVR playback this season, according to Nielsen, and AMC says the show has performed well on its AMC+ streaming platform (though as is often the case with streaming services, there’s no public data to back up the claim). [Better Call Saul](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/better-call-saul/) drew the show’s biggest audience in three seasons — a span of more than five years. [Subscribe Sign Up](https://pages.email.hollywoodreporter.com/signup/) [Share this article on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&sdk=joey&display=popup&ref=plugin&src=share_button&app_id=352999048212581) [Share this article on Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&text=TV%20Ratings%3A%20%E2%80%98Better%20Call%20Saul%E2%80%99%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&via=thr) [Share this article on Email](mailto:?subject=thr%20:%20TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&body=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/%20-%20TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Show additional share options](#) [Share this article on Print]() [Share this article on Comment](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/#respond) [Share this article on Whatsapp](whatsapp://send?text=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High%20-%20https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/) [Share this article on Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=1&url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&summary&source=thr) [Share this article on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Share this article on Pinit](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/link/?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&description=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Share this article on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool/preview?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl&url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&posttype=link&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) The final episode of
The 'Better Call Saul' stars and EP speculate on Jimmy and Kim's future after the series finale, reveal an alternate ending and more.
Brandt surprised fans by reprising her Breaking Bad role as Hank Schrader’s widow Marie in the Saul finale, and Gould says she was a late addition to the script, but “I think we wanted very much someone to be the voice of the victims… Gould agreed that “it was a really important scene,” so he went back and “simplified the dialogue a little bit” for the third day of shooting. Years ago, when Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan was working on the Breaking Bad sequel movie El Camino, he pitched a number of possible endings for the movie to the Saul writing staff, and “one of the endings was very similar to this, except for Jesse,” Gould remembers. “This is the one bit of color in his world,” Gould notes, “the relationship with Kim, such as it is… I think ultimately, we all felt like ending with the two of them felt like the strongest way to go.” Also in the original version, Jimmy “was fearful about what was going to happen to him in prison, and it was a lot about the fear. Odenkirk made that connection when speaking about Bryan Cranston’s cameo as Walt in the finale: “Jimmy finds himself in a f–king room with a guy who’s just like his brother Chuck, and he realizes he’s done it yet again. “It was scheduled for two days of shooting,” but they had to come back for a third day, and the actor told Gould, “‘If it’s OK with you, I want to reshoot the whole monologue.’ And everybody who overheard that little conversation wanted to kill me.” But Odenkirk wasn’t satisfied with the version they had: “It got very emotional, and I’d become more and more skeptical of gushing emotion on screen. Then ultimately, having watched them both, I felt like it was right, and it felt more honest to end with the two of them apart rather than the two of them together.” The climactic scene where Jimmy confesses to his crimes in a soul-baring courtroom monologue was “very hard” to shoot, Odenkirk recalls. Gould, who wrote and directed the finale, said he had actually written several different versions of that scene where “there was a lot more said, and a lot more catching up.” But “it just kept getting leaner and leaner as I worked on it, because in a weird way, they don’t have to say that much to each other. Odenkirk called it “the easiest scene we ever shot,” adding that “it’s one of the few times that one of them isn’t trying to manipulate the moment [or] push some argument in some direction… When the writers were first working on the finale, Gould revealed, they originally had Jimmy and Kim “meeting in Albuquerque before he went to prison, and the last scene was him in prison by himself, thinking.
Kim and Marie could (perhaps still?) have a buddy-cop spinoff. Gould referred to Betsy Brandt, who reprised her role as the widow Marie Schrader in the finale, ...
While Odenkirk described the scene as “the easiest scene we ever shot” because of the actors’ comfort with each other, the cigarettes they had to smoke posed some difficulty — Odenkirk and Seehorn were coughing, and Gould said he had cigarette smoke down his throat for days afterward. “I just felt so strongly that the right ending for Saul was to be in the system, the system that he’s made light of and that he’s twisted around for his own purposes,” Gould said. The writers’ room decided around season four or five that the series would be returning to the post–Breaking Bad world of Gene Takavic, Saul’s alias when he went into hiding and became manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha. And the last scene is the judge in jail crying.” While it may not have been in the cards for Better Call Saul, it’s one that would’ve worked just fine for a “Hopefully Vince won’t be mad, but I think some of us, I especially, said, ‘What about another ending for Jesse?’ And I think the ending he came up with for Jesse was exactly the right one.” One ending for Jesse was very similar to the ending Gould and the writers had in mind for Saul.
6. Howard Hamlin. There has perhaps never been a more shocking and undeserving death in modern television than when Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) fell victim ...
Nacho will forever be a legend to all of us, and one of the most likable antiheroes in Breaking Bad lore. The death is deserved, both from the perspective that Lalo is a horrible person who didn’t deserve to live, and that his arch-nemesis throughout the series was the one who got him. As we got to see Nacho’s relationship with his father, his unique code of ethics in the cartel game, and his friendship with Mike Ehrmantraut ( Jonathan Banks) blossomed, he became a fan favorite on par with Jesse Pinkman. [kicking a lantern over in his house](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/better-call-saul-season-3-episode-10-review-lantern/), it is clear that Chuck’s pure contempt left nothing left to live for. He’s a man doing his job, and he becomes a cog in the cat and mouse game between Mike (Jonathan Banks) and Lalo. His scathing monologue that laid waste to the Salamanca name, along with calling out Gus on his cowardly act before shooting himself in the head was the high point of the beginning of season six. He’s a man who is doing something criminal, but he doesn’t really understand the entirety of his situation or the misdeeds he’s performing. The friendship that developed between Mike and Werner also served a great purpose in Mike’s character arc. He could be a mean person in his life outside of his job. He also treated Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) with some disdain that seemed a little petty at times, but he paid a price that was completely unnecessary. Now that the show has wrapped its run, we thought it would be a great time to recap which departed characters got the most and least deserving fates. Did their death signify a turning point in the story, or could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould give these people more of a dramatic farewell?
Near the end of that series' run, Jimmy, a.k.a. Saul Goodman, and Walter, a.k.a Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston), hid in a basement as the two awaited the Vacuum ...
“In drama, we always say, ‘Oh, it’s about character change,’ but it’s sometimes characters just becoming more of what they were, or they’re continuing down the tracks that they’ve laid for themselves.” The question of whether Saul has always been “like this” and if he could possibly change has been at the heart of Better Call Saul from the start. Attempting to lighten the mood with the perpetually snappish Walter, Saul spun a tale of his Slippin’ Jimmy con-man days. He proved himself to be a gifted lawyer capable of tremendous compassion for his elderly clients at Sandpiper Crossing. Near the end of that series’ run, Jimmy, a.k.a. After previously brandishing his superhuman ability to cast doubt on even the most clear-cut set of facts for a jury, he had initially spooked the prosecutor into settling for an unjustly brief jail sentence. One of the most remarkable stretches of “Saul Gone” revisited the timeline of its predecessor, Breaking Bad.