It turns out that there are two sides to Saul Goodman, the huckster lawyer retained by Breaking Bad to be specifically one-sided. But spinning-off from a dark moral comedy can do strange things to a person, and Bob Odenkirk's Saul has been split into at least three. There is Gene, the present-day manager of a shopping mall Cinnabon, his colourless new identity since going on the run, whose thinning-hair and fuller torments are seen in brief sequences of black and white. And there is Jimmy McGill, the focus of Vince Gilligan's series and the man who would be Saul, whose colourful escapades in 2002 as a talented shyster and one-time scammer are more sumptuously shot.
As a prelude to Breaking Bad, with plenty of room for flashbacks, Better Call Saul leaves Jimmy in an unusual position, making him a man who can neither escape his past or his future. Now entering its third season, writers Gilligan and Peter Gould, who have never been in a hurry with the show, even seem to make time its subject.
Jimmy, ensnared at the end of the last season when his eccentric brother Chuck (Michael McKean) secretly recorded his confession to a felony, falls into misty remembrance over a children’s book, while building up a now jeopardised law practice dealing with elderly clients. Between those life stages, the present just seems like a waiting game.
His gruff colleague Mike Ehrmantraut, played by Jonathan Banks, is meanwhile puzzling out how his attack on cartel boss – and Breaking Bad villain – Hector Salamanca has been so adroitly thwarted, an effort that requires the complete dismantling of a car. Typically, Gilligan films this in real time, then presents it sped up. Even before we accompany Mike on his subsequent stakeout (which takes up a good wordless third of the episode), or watch Jimmy painstakingly redecorate his office, or see his partner Kim (Rhea Seahorn) spend a night redrafting the punctuation on a contract, this feels like a study in obsession, obsessionally told.
Does Better Call Saul have more to offer other than such minute detail? It certainly allows Odenkirk, an effortlessly engaging performer, to reveal unhurried depths to a character originally conceived without gravity. But, still in thrall to its progenitor, the show fleshes out character backstories as though creating hardy alibis and labours intensely, and slowly, to draft in familiar faces from Breaking Bad, as though rewarding patient fans.
Even after two episodes of the new series, in which the camera disappears down bins or behind petrol caps like a restless snoop, or gazes upwards into looming skies and scudding clouds, it’s hard to allay fears that the series is simply killing time. Jimmy’s destiny is well known, a surprisingly tragic path from crafty to cynical to cinnamon, and here his encounters just seem to clang out that fate. “You think you don’t have to play straight with anybody,” complains a gulled army captain. “But the wheel’s gonna turn.” Perhaps that wheel is just cranking up, but at the moment, the spin-off is creaking.
