With Breaking Bad, writer and producer Vince Gilligan spun the scorched-earth morality fable of a teacher metastasising into a drug dealer into rip-roaring prestige television. But his prequel series Better Call Saul (Netflix) is something else entirely: a melancholic, occasionally quirky counterpoint to Breaking Bad's meth-lab Götterdämmerung. And as it returns for its farewell season, Saul sticks to what it does best in bringing us the closing chapters of the sad tale of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk)– a decent human cursed with the soul of a natural-born huckster.
Better Call Saul has always been ambivalent as to whether we should empathise with or pity Jimmy, who has by now adapted his Breaking Bad trickster lawyer persona of Saul Goodman. That note of ambiguity chimes more loudly than ever as, in two deeply satisfying, if characteristically muted new episodes, we catch up with Jimmy and wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) and their latest screwball scheme.
Their mission this season is to take down Jimmy's old legal eagle bête noire Howard Hamlin. Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) is not a sympathetic character: smug and condescending he gives off the too-much-aftershave whiff of unacknowledged privilege.
First, Covid delayed filming back by nearly a year. And then Odenkirk had a 'minor' heart attack which required several weeks in hospital
But the lengths to which Jimmy and Kim are prepared to go to undermine Howard underscores how close to the moral void they are dancing. We know from Breaking Bad – where Saul is the fawning enabler to Albuquerque meth kingpin Walter White – that Jimmy will eventually fall all the way down. The mystery this year centres on the fate of Kim. And while there is little indication yet where she ends up, it's not hard to feel that she will pay a terrible price for encouraging Jimmy's worst tendencies.
Seldom has drama felt as comfortable in its skin as Better Call Saul through its later seasons. That remains the case even as it has faced a number of existential challenges. First, Covid delayed filming back by nearly a year. And then Odenkirk had a “minor” heart attack which required several weeks in hospital.
And yet as we beam back into the Breaking Bad extended universe, there are no indications of anything amiss behind the screens (new episodes will be released weekly with the concluding six instalments arriving in July). Everything slots into place as we accompany Jimmy on the road to moral hell and check in with Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), the small time crook sent to Mexico by the quietly despicable Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) to assassinate mouthy Salamanca cartel capo Lalo.
Lalo (Tony Dalton) lives, unbeknownst the man dispatched to kill him. That, however, is the least of Nacho's worries as he tries to cross back into New Mexico. These scenes, caked in desert grit and with a thrumming undertow of violence, sometimes feel as if they belong to an entirely different show to that inhabited by Jimmy and Kim. But just as with the once and future Saul Goodman it's clear that a terrible reckoning is coming for Nacho. The miracle of Better Call Saul is that it makes these studies in slow-motion self-destruction feel like such hypnotically wholesome viewing.
