Better Call Saul

From the desk

A Prequel That Argued Like a Novel

Filed by Julian Hart · The Binge Brief

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould's Albuquerque coda as moral architecture: color, silence, Kim Wexler, and a closer that keeps the promises Breaking Bad spent.

Watch the silence after a con. Not the punchline — the parking lot, the overhead, the man who has already started telling himself a story about why this was technically fine. Better Call Saul is a prequel in the way a moral is a prequel to a crime: you already know the destination, so the show is free to care about the walk. Bob Odenkirk's Jimmy McGill does not enter as a bit. He enters as a man whose hustle still thinks it is charm. The series has six seasons to explain, without shouting, how charm becomes a brand and a brand becomes a cell.

People came for Easter eggs. The text offered patience. Gilligan and Gould, with a camera that loves empty space, built the rare spinoff that is more interested in ethics than in cameos. Mike's hours are procedural grief. Nacho's hours are a vice tightening. Chuck is the brother as institution. Kim Wexler — Rhea Seehorn, giving one of the decade's great television performances — is the argument. Not the girlfriend. The argument. What does a competent, decent-seeming person owe a charming disaster, and at what point is competence complicity? If you are here only to watch the cartel do cartels, you will still be fed. You will also have missed the novel.

What the seasons are arguing, in short: that small cons train large ones; that the law is a costume you can wear until it fits like a joke; that color can tell the truth a scene is lying about; that the funniest man in the room is not safe. Five-O is Mike's ethics in a bottle. Chicanery is a courtroom hour that understands humiliation as craft. Bagman is the desert as a moral climate. Plan and Execution is structure as trap. None of those require a recap blog. They require you to sit still, which is apparently the controversial part.

The comparison sport with Breaking Bad is perpetual and mostly a category error. The first show is combustion. This one is rust. Both are about men who pick a story and then have to live in the wreckage. Saul is louder, Gene is greyer, Jimmy is the person those names are trying not to be. The black-and-white stretches are not a gimmick; they are a tense. Gossip, as a footnote: the internet wanted more Salamanca fireworks every week, and the cut kept giving them a man in a Cinnabon instead. The tabloids will call that slow. The cut is the point. Prestige gossip treats patience like a snub. Sometimes patience is the art.

It ended. Saul Gone, August 2022, is a closer that argues with the louder show's ending rather than begging a sequel. You can prefer the explosions. You cannot say this one failed to finish the sentence. In a decade of prequels that exist to keep IP warm, this is the counter-exhibit: a second series that is often the better-argued object. That is not a dunk on Walter White. It is a note about what happens when the follow-up is allowed to be quieter, longer, and less interested in your dopamine.

Verdict: watch it if you like character as architecture and framing as ethics. Do not watch it as a clip show for the other title. Start at Uno, stay through the desert, let Kim wreck you, and accept that the funny parts are not relief. They are evidence. The scandal of a great prequel is that it makes the original look like a first draft of a moral. The original remains a masterpiece. This one is the brief. Closed.

Episode guide

How this series is filed

TV Flash files Better Call Saul (2015–2022) on AMC as the episode guide: 63 listed hours across 6 seasons, 2015-02-08–2022-08-15 from “Uno” (S01E01) to “Saul Gone” (S06E13).

Open the episode guide · S01E01 Uno · S06E13 Saul Gone