Does Goodman finally pull through?
Spoilers ahead: don’t read until you’ve seen the finale of “Better Call Saul” on AMC.
After all that, a happy ending.
Or as close as one comes in the world of showrunners Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan. “Better Call Saul” (AMC) was never going to end with a triumphant ride into the sunset, or even a quiet retreat to a Nebraska Cinnabon. After all of Saul Goodman’s (Bob Odenkirk) bickering – and the trail of laundered money, corpses and ruined lives in its wake – there could only be accountability.
With the ominous title “Saul Gone”, Monday night’s finale promised to be devastating. The penultimate episode saw Saul’s cover as mild-mannered Cinnabon manager Gene Takavic blown away by a shrewd octogenarian (Carol Burnett), while Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), a traumatized and guilt-ridden shell of her -even, hand-delivered a signed confession to Howard Hamlin’s widow.
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Wasn’t everything already gone after that? What’s left for Gould and Gilligan to take?
The finale begins with a thought experiment and time jump, all the way to the jaw-dropping Season 5 episode 8, “Bagman,” in which Saul and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) wander the New Mexico desert. with $7 million in cash. Sun-damaged, dehydrated and having just escaped death, Saul asks Mike where he would go if he had a time machine. Would he return to see the Civil War, or perhaps ancient Rome? Mike instead chooses the seemingly innocuous date of March 17, 1984 – the day he accepted his first bribe, the start of a series of events that the shrewd viewer knows will eventually lead to murder. of Mike’s son.
Saul might choose to revisit a number of life-changing moments and write a happier ending for himself: on the first day of his childhood, he robbed his father’s store; the time he defecated drunk through a sunroof; or when he engineered the downfall of his brother Chuck, a move that led to his suicide.
Saul instead picks the day Warren Buffet took over from Berkshire Hathaway, so he could invest and become a billionaire.
” That’s it ? Money ? Mike asks.
“What else?” said Saul.
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Saul plays the same game in another flashback, staring down the barrel of his life’s choices again in “Breaking Bad” Season 5. An irate Walter White (Bryan Cranston, savoring his return with surly condescension) refuses to concede the scientific possibility of a time machine, even though he’s locked in the vacuum cleaner repairman’s basement cell that they just paid tens of thousands of dollars to give up their new identities.
Walt, like Saul, is full of options, times when he could have changed course. True to form, he chooses the day he left the company he helped found, Gray Matter Technologies, yearning for lost fame and glory. Again, Saul deflects some serious introspection.
In a third and final flashback, Chuck (Michael McKean) wanders around his lamp-lit home carrying a paperback copy of HG Wells’ “The Time Machine.”
“If you don’t like where you’re headed, there’s no shame in going back and changing lanes,” he tells his brother, a newly embattled public defender.
(Speaking of time machines, if you were to build one and use it to go back and tell someone in the ’90s that the most intense dramatic confrontation of that year would be between Burnett and ” Mr. Show’s “Odenkirk, you’d be laughed back in the 21st century.)
But for all its flash-and-butterfly plot machinations, “Better Call Saul” isn’t an easy piece of sci-fi to pull off. Saul doesn’t have his time machine. There’s no way to erase Howard’s murder, his divorce from Kim, or the work he did on ‘Breaking Bad’ to help build the meth empire that caused so much death and destruction – the details of which Marie (Betsy Brandt), the widow of Hank Schrader, reminds viewers in an intense confrontation.
What Saul gets instead is one last crossroads to make the right choice. He can either selfishly embrace his alter ego Saul Goodman for good and get away with a slap on the wrist, or save what’s left of Jimmy McGill – and set Kim free.
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Because after all that, “Better Call Saul” is a love story.
With brilliant writing, a charismatic lead, and an equally brilliantly burning romantic heroine, Gould and Gilligan have taken their unlikely spin-off starring comic relief from one of the all-time great dramas and made a prestige series that could, under certain lights, eclipse the show that spawned it. It’s good enough that a shared cigarette in a supermax federal prison is as intimate and devastating as the “Casablanca” ending.
At the end, “Better Call Saul” gives its deeply flawed hero a severe punishment for his sins. But for Jimmy, it’s well worth a last cigarette with Kim.
USA Today
