Better Call Saul' Finale

SPOILERS GALORE: The 63rd & final episode of the Breaking Bad prequel pulled a lot of strings together & closed some big doors tonight.

You know, when his brother, Chuck (Michael McKean) dies, it takes a long time for Jimmy to feel what he’s feeling, and maybe I’m the same way because I haven’t quite got my head around it. DEADLINE: Well, I would say, and this has spinoff stuck all over it one way or another, she also isn’t going to be satisfied not playing the game. She takes off at midday of work, and where does she go, she goes to a legal office, and she’s going to volunteer there. Of course, when he comes into the meeting room with Kim, she calls him Jimmy, and you can see the vulnerability in Bob’s face when she does that. Ultimately, even if he becomes Jimmy McGill again in his own mind and to himself, to the outside world, he’s always going to be this two-dimensional cartoon character that he made. Saul Goodman’s going to be something that he has to live with for the rest of his life, and that’s his own kind of purgatory. The first BCS episode to be both directed and entirely penned by showrunner Gould, the layered finale seeks and satisfactorily achieves resolution for the title character in a yarn that intertwines the color of the past with the black and white of the ultimately-confining present. DEADLINE: Certainly Kim’s found a freedom in Jimmy taking the full fall for everything, including Howard’s demise, but he’s also a full-on Saul Goodman, the king of the joint. GOULD: Yes, on Breaking Bad it’s revealed he has a gun in his desk, but you’ve never seen the guy pick up a gun. DEADLINE: Peter, I doubt there are very few people who watched the Saul finale who didn’t at least get a Breaking Bad refresher if not binge to get this far. To that end, throwing his love and once fellow lawyer Kim Wexler ( Rhea Seehorn) under the proverbial bus for the death of rival Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) earlier in the season, Goodman tries to escape decades behind bars with a mix of coercion, Heisenberg victimhood, and a big roll of the dice. “As soon as we land, I want you to tell the other side that I’ve got more to trade,” a busted but still hustling Saul Goodman ( Bob Odenkirk) tells his lawyer on a flight from Nebraska to New Mexico in tonight’s Better Call Saul series finale.

Everything comes to a conclusion in the 'Breaking Bad' prequel's last episode.

Jimmy wonders if what he says in front of the air marshall is privileged and when he learns it isn’t he realizes he has the ears of the prosecution because of that. Heading into court sporting a suit reminiscent of Saul’s heyday, he enters the court in Albuquerque to see Kim sitting in the back. He says what happened to Howard was horrible and he commends Kim for picking herself up and carrying on with life, admitting that he was the scared one who metaphorically ran away. As she exits the prison, she looks back at the yard where Jimmy is standing by a chainlink fence. Hearing this, Jimmy wonders why Walt never came to him for advice as he could have helped him get what he was owed, but Walt says he’s the last lawyer he would have reached out to. As Bill and Jimmy prepare to walk into a meeting, he notices Marie ( Betsy Brandt) speaking to a lawyer in a separate room. When he’s put into a cell, Jimmy begins pacing and repeatedly questions himself, “this is how they get you?” He’s in disbelief that he’s been caught and is angry at himself to the point where he begins punching the cell door. As their conversation continues, Walt asks Jimmy about his regrets, but instead of saying anything about Kim or his brother Chuck ( Michael McKean), Jimmy mentions a slip and fall scheme he pulled at 20. She mentions how she heard he was found in a dumpster and proceeds to tell him what a good person her husband Hank ( Dean Norris) was and how his partner Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada) was also brutally murdered for no reason, leaving behind a wife and three kids. In the station, he sits cuffed to a bench where he watches a group of cops in another room who are viewing his commercials. He informs Bill that he’s going to be a part of Saul Goodman’s advisory council as he faces criminal charges, but Bill is reluctant at first. As he tries opening up the burner phone he’s going to use to make the call, Jimmy knocks over the tin and desperately tries scooping up the diamonds and also tries making hast with the call, but soon a knock sounds from above and he exits with hands up.

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.

In the series finale, Jimmy and Saul go to war. Kim flies across the country, twice.

He becomes the toxic version of Saul because of Kim. He returns to the morally fastidious version of Jimmy for the same reason. Oh, and a hat tip to Betsy Brandt, who turns up in the finale and gives what is arguably Marie Schrader’s finest soliloquy. In the comments section, opine on this episode and the entire series. It’s a narrative cliché that character is destiny, and Jimmy/Saul’s true character was a coin toss until the end. There were goofy elements to the scheme to frame Howard, for instance, which felt out of place even before the guy was murdered. In the next to last scene, the two are sharing a cigarette, just as they did at the beginning of their legal careers. The finale and the last few episodes were designed to keep viewers wondering which of these two — Jimmy or Saul — would have the upper hand. In Omaha, we watched his on-the-lam persona, Gene Takavic, devolve into what might have been the most contemptible version of his character we have ever seen. Or rather, it was the result of a decision that managed somehow to seem both determined and out of the blue. To Mike, in dialogue set during their near-death march through the desert in Season 5, Jimmy says that given a time machine, he would teleport back to 1965 so he could invest early in Warren Buffett’s epochal moneymaking run at Berkshire Hathaway. It was a sweetheart deal based on a version of his working relationship with Walter White that was utterly fanciful, one in which he was a victim of the deceased meth king, not his most important enabler. In the ultimate reverse Perry Mason moment, Saul confesses to everything in open court, defying both an incredulous judge and his stupefied co-counsel, dooming himself to life behind bars.