Better Call Saul finale

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.

'Better Call Saul' showrunner Peter Gould explains how the series finale serves as a fitting end for the AMC drama. (Spoilers ahead.)

Was that flashback what Jimmy really would change if he could go back in that time machine: to just be a low-profile Albuquerque lawyer and still bring his brother groceries? In my perfect world, to me, the great movies — and we aspired to it, I don’t know if we achieved it — but the great movies keep driving the story in your head after the movie is over. Jimmy and Kim do end up sharing that last cigarette at the prison, which was a great callback to the pilot where they’re leaning against the wall together. But he tells a good part of the truth, and certainly the part of the truth that’s going to get him in the most trouble. And for all the pain there is in the finale, he does make a big change, which is: He stands up in court and tells a good part of the truth. He likes to win in the court. He likes to win in conversations. Did he see that as the only way to redeem himself and win back Kim’s respect and affection? Jimmy confesses everything with Kim there in the courtroom when he could’ve just gotten away with seven years in a cushy federal prison. He’s the interface between the legal world and the criminal world, and he’s part of the machine of justice, but he’s the gear that does its own thing. So at what point did you settle on this particular ending, and what made you decide to go that way with it? Better Call Saul wrapped up its six-season run on Monday with a supersized series finale that saw Jimmy/Saul/Gene meet a fitting end: sentenced to 86 years in federal prison for his role in Walter White’s drug empire and all his other misdeeds.

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.

"Better Call Saul" ended its seven-year run Monday night with a finale that cements its status as one of the greats alongside "Breaking Bad."

It's good enough to make a shared cigarette in a supermax federal prison feel as intimate and devastating as the ending of "Casablanca." There’s no erasing Howard’s murder, his divorce from Kim, or the work he did in "Breaking Bad" to help build the meth empire that wrought so much death and destruction – the details of which Hank Schrader's widow Marie (Betsy Brandt) reminds viewers of in an intense confrontation. What Saul gets instead is one last crossroads to make the right choice. True to form, he picks the day he left the company he helped found, Gray Matter Technologies, yearning for lost fame and glory. With the ominous title "Saul Gone," Monday night's finale promised to be devastating. Sun-blistered, dehydrated and having just evaded death, Saul asks Mike where he would go if he had a time machine.

Co-creator Peter Gould, who wrote and directed the show's last episode, on Jimmy's twist of fate, Walt's last scene, what happens to Kim, and more · Alan ...

how does it feel to be at the end of it? They’re deep in my heart and deep in my soul, and I don’t think that’s ever going to end. That’s why we started the way we did, at the very beginning of the show, of showing Gene Takovic, and coming back to the Gene story. [Gould emailed me: “Here’s a screenshot of one of the pages to illustrate.”] Over the years, whenever I’ve asked you if Jimmy was really Saul yet, you’ve said that in the scripts, you would keep referring to him as “Jimmy” as long as Kim did — i.e., until the transformation was complete. In my heart, I keep feeling like we’re about to reopen the writers room for Season Seven. But of course, that’s not happening. What we started realizing was that the right ending for Saul was for him to be in the justice system, as a suspect and ultimately a convict, rather than a lawyer. What was the point of it? I’ve been asking some of the other writers on the show, including Vince, what they would change about Saul or Breaking Bad if they had a time machine. And like in the Breaking Bad finale, “Felina,” you have the main character coming back to Albuquerque, making some amends for what he did, and getting some small measure of satisfaction. Neither one of them can really quite bring himself to speak the truth. Fourteen years ago, Peter Gould wrote an episode of Breaking Bad, “Better Call Saul,” where he was tasked with introducing a character who would serve two purposes: 1) provide legal expertise to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, so that it would be more plausible when they kept eluding law enforcement; and 2) bring back some of the humor that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan worried that the show was losing as Walt and Jesse’s arcs both turned darker.

Bob Odenkirk as Gene in 'Better Call Saul.' The following contains spoilers about the "Better Call Saul" series finale, which premiered Aug.

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.

'Better Call Saul' has rested its case after six glorious seasons, and it made quite a closing statement — read our series finale recap.

Back in the present, Jimmy (let’s just call him Jimmy, huh?) rides a prison bus on his way to the subpar facility he tried to negotiate his way out of, the one he dubbed “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” One of the other prisoners recognizes him as Saul Goodman, and though he tries to tell him his name is McGill, word spreads fast, and soon the whole bus full of prisoners is chanting “Better call Saul!” Jimmy allows himself a little smile at this. “You had them down to seven years,” she says with admiration — and after his confession, now he’s been sentenced to 86 years. Saul says he’d go back to when he was 22 and pulled a slip and fall outside a department store and really hurt himself: “My knee’s never been the same.” Walter chuckles to himself: “So you were always like this.” I wanted her to hear this.” He confesses that he “was more than a willing participant” in Walt’s crimes. “Where do you see this ending?” Bill asks, and Gene answers: “With me on top, like always.” Bill accompanies Gene to a meeting with the feds — with Hank’s widow Marie watching! After that, he killed himself.” He adds sadly, “And I’ll live with that,” before taking his seat again. He looks behind him and locks eyes with Kim before continuing: “What happened to Howard Hamlin, it was… (“It’s really good ice cream,” Gene counters.) Kim is volunteering at a free legal service firm in Florida when she gets a call from Suzanne Ericsen, who lets her know Saul was arrested and is being extradited to New Mexico: “He’s giving testimony that affects you, personally.” Marie is horrified, but the feds reluctantly work with Gene and Bill, dismissing a bunch of charges and eventually whittling his sentence down to a measly seven years. He rings his old pal Bill Oakley, offering to make him his “advisory counsel” and basically acting like he’s doing Bill a favor by hiring him. Money. You did it all for money.” Gene tries to offer her his condolences for Hank, adding: “You and he are victims… He’d also go forward in time and check on some people, “see if they’re doing OK.” As for Jimmy, he’d go back to the day Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway and invest in it so he’d be filthy rich.

James Morgan McGill and Walter White join forces one final time midway through “Saul Gone.” It is a flashback to the two of them hiding out in the vacuum ...

As those prisoners on the bus realize they are in the presence of legal greatness of a sort, one of them starts a celebratory chant that the rest join in on: “BETTER CALL SAUL! BETTER CALL SAUL! BETTER CALL SAUL!” It is a reference to the man that Jimmy McGill has chosen to stop being. When he tells the judge about Chuck, the camera focuses on the courtroom’s exit sign, much like the one that was such a memorable visual during Chuck and Jimmy’s bar hearing duel in “Chicanery.” In Montrose, Jimmy gets to put his Cinnabon skills to use by baking bread in the prison kitchen, and he shows off the finger guns one more time as he and Kim are separated by two different fences. Jimmy will bring Chuck his groceries and his newspapers out of sibling loyalty and love, but the thought of just making small talk, or telling his esteemed brother about his latest lowlife clients, makes as much sense to him as the mere idea of Jimmy being a lawyer does to Chuck. He was in the process of growing up when we met him, before things with Chuck, Howard, Mike, Lalo, and more led him to allow himself to decay into Saul Goodman, before transforming into Gene Takovic just to stay alive and free, then finding a way to turn back into Jimmy at the end. Jimmy McGill’s big final moments involve a shared cigarette and silent glances, as befitting a show whose emotional highs and lows — especially in Jimmy and Kim’s half of the series — tended to be on the subtler end of things. But as a dismayed Bill tries to get his confession stricken from the record, he looks back at Kim and sees — as he did on the faces of the Bar Association lawyers as he prepared to read from Chuck’s letter — that what he had planned is not going to be enough. He talks about his guilt over Howard’s murder, and notes that while Kim left town, “I’m the one who ran away.” He let his every good instinct recede as a way to blot out the pain of Kim’s exit, Howard’s murder, Chuck’s suicide, and everyone else injured by the unbridled power of Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree. He will offer a true accounting of his crimes, no matter how much it extends his sentence (which goes from 7.5 years to 86), in the hope that Kim will stop hating him(*). This could be the Better Call Saul version of the best and most important scene from the Breaking Bad finale, “Felina,” where Walt finally admitted to Skyler that he did all of these monstrous things not out of concern for his family, but because he liked doing them, was good at them, and they made him feel alive. (Like every elaborate lie either Walt or Saul has told on their respective series, it starts from an honest place before being twisted to serve the needs of the man telling it.) To the horror and disbelief of Marie Schrader (still less than a year removed from her husband’s disappearance, and only a few months from his body being found in the desert), he will serve seven and a half years in a cushy federal prison. Worse, he realizes that he goaded her into it during his telephone call during “Waterworks,” and as poor, put-upon Bill Oakley tells him on the flight back to New Mexico, Cheryl Hamlin is likely to sue Kim for all she’s worth. Walt begins to admit that he erred in leaving Gray Matter, but as always, everything bad that ever happened to him is someone else’s fault, and Gretchen and Elliott were “artfully maneuvering” him out of his own company.

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.

Gene gets caught, Saul cuts a deal … and Jimmy finds a way back into Kim's good graces.

Did it square at all with anything we’ve seen of this character over the past few episodes, let alone the entire run of the season? No, it didn’t have the relentless, clock-like precision of the Breaking Bad finale, but clock-like precision isn’t Better Call Saul’s thing. It wasn’t not grim, but it was a lot less grim than I’d feared it might be.

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.

'Better Call Saul' has come to an end after six seasons. Read EW's recap of the series finale.

When he got in his machine, the only place he ever went was the future — and before he returned to his own time, he went so far forward that he witnessed the end of the world. They finish the cigarette, in that room where the barred window is nothing but a shadow above them. But as much as this final episode centers on the question of regret, the usefulness of that question is undermined by the way that this story has always been permeated by inevitability. Her hair is curled again, but still dark, still different, because Kim can't travel back in time any more than he can; this is how it looks for her to move on. Better Call Saul has always dwelled in the irresolvable tension between the two, in the way that Jimmy McGill's genuine sweetness and Saul Goodman's venal self-interest were two parts of the same whole. By the time he's finished describing how he built Walt's criminal empire, his plea agreement is toast, but Kim's safety is secure — and he's going by "Jimmy McGill" again. He tries to tell them his name is McGill. He tries not to smile. Regrets, he's had a few, but he has neither the time nor inclination to linger on them. Is it purely altruistic, that he still loves Kim, and still wants to protect her? But when he finally arrived to a life of leisure — when he'd made more money than he knew what to do with, when he'd installed himself in a home that reflected both his material wealth and his life's emptiness from every one of its copious mirrored surfaces — he could never belong there. A striver, a dreamer, a man with big plans to claw his way into the sun where he belonged. We don't see Saul's mirrored mansion in this episode, but I thought of it at one particular moment, the one where he calls Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) from the police station.

Jimmy McGill returns to square up to what he's done and earn redemption from the person who matters most. A recap of “Saul Gone,” season 6, episode 13 and ...

A few times during “Saul Gone,” Jimmy brings up the idea of a time machine as a thought experiment — with Mike during their miserable trek through the desert, with Walt during their stay in the basement of a vacuum-cleaner repair shop, with Chuck as he’s bringing him his supplies. (Cutting to the yard afterward seemed akin to adding a denouement after “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” in Casablanca.) Few shows in television history have been as artfully filmed as Better Call Saul. I’ll miss its images perhaps most of all. A time machine has the power to erase the past or jettison a person so far into the future that the past ceases to matter. Later, Walt seethes over his own billion-dollar company getting swiped out from under him by Elliott and Gretchen. There were more complicated reasons than money for Jimmy and Walt to act as they did, but wanting it was still a factor. While it’s true that Walt and Jesse Pinkman abducted Jimmy and held a gun to his head over an open grave, the rest of his story is nonsense. “If you don’t like where you’re heading,” says Chuck in a touching flashback, “there’s no shame in going back and changing your path.” He doesn’t have to live the rest of his life as the 22-year-old who went down the literal slippery slope by pulling “a slip-and-fall” outside Marshall Fields. He can square up to what he’s done and earn a measure of redemption from the person who matters most to him. The problem with regret is that it’s not anything close to a time machine. He saw the chance to build the drug empire that would make him a millionaire, and he didn’t have Kim around any longer to look at him sideways for doing it. “Saul Gone” is essentially about two versions of the same speech, one by “Saul Goodman” and the other by Jimmy McGill. The first is when “Gene” is finally captured and brought before a tableful of prosecutors to discuss the charges against him, with Marie Schrader as a special guest. That finale image of a gut-shot Walt returning to the lab with the tenderness of a serviceman coming home from a long tour overseas is a sublimely perverse and pathetic fantasy. Last week, the door was closed firmly on the notion that maybe Jimmy and Kim could somehow rig a future together because Jimmy could not be helped. That’s what 14 years of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul has been about — who these men are fundamentally and whether they have the capacity to change.

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould gave us fourteen fucking years of unparalleled television and stuck the landing twice. Incredible. Pretty sure we'll never see ...

But for now, we can only stand in awe of Saul Goodman. Once again, he’s managed to pull off a show for the ages, and we can’t look away. This last episode has been called “ the best ending possible for the best series ever,” “the best show of all time,” and the closest thing we have to “ a modern day Shakespearean tragedy.” This Monday (August 15) marked the series finale of Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s sequel series to Breaking Bad. It was a historic moment in television and arguably one of the biggest moments of scripted TV in all of 2022.

If you're curious what happens in 'Better Call Saul's Season 6 and series finale, "Saul Gone," we've got you covered. Here's AMC's 'Breaking Bad' prequel's ...

She hands him a cigarette and the lean against the wall and share a smoke like the good old days. We see Jimmy being transported to prison on a bus, where a convict recognizes him as Saul Goodman and spreads the word. He uses his phone call to ring Krista at Cinnabon and tells her to call the main office and let them know they’ll need a new manager. He uses his time before the judge to say, “The fact is, Walter White couldn’t have done it without me.” Then he expresses remorse for Howard’s death and confesses to driving his brother Chuck to suicide. When the judge asks Saul to settle down, and he replies, “The name’s McGill. I’m James McGill.” Walt says he regrets stepping away from the company he and his friends started as a grad student. Oakley flies to Saul and escorts him into a room where a possible sentence of life plus 190 years is being discussed. When Gene arrives, Marion threatens to call the cops and he threatens to strangle her with the phone cord. “March 17, 1984,” Mike says, “the day I took my first bribe.” Saul says he’d go to 1965, invest his share of the money, and become a billionaire. He gets home and sees police parked outside, so he slips out the window and makes a run for it, carrying only his box of Saul-era mementos. Mike tells him to slow down or he’ll make himself sick, and the two sit down to rest. She comes clean about Gus, Lalo, the staged suicide, and her and Jimmy’s involvement before heading back to Florida and breaking down in tears.

We first hear it during a flashback to the season 5 episode "Bad Choice Road," where Jimmy and Mike are wandering through the desert hauling $7 million of ...

Jesse Pinkman is free somewhere, everyone else is dead, and "Saul Goodman" is in jail for the rest of his life. - Not only is this the end of "Better Call Saul," but this also feels like the end of all-things-"Breaking Bad." There's nothing left to say. There's a wonderful moment where Jimmy is headed to prison and recognized by the other convicts on the bus — all of whom begin chanting "BETTER CALL SAUL!" as a slight, knowing smile comes on Jimmy's lips. There's a wide shot here of the two of them, separated by fences and distance and space and eternity. "We always end up having the same conversation," Chuck ultimately says, receding into the darkness of his house with a copy of "The Time Machine" in his hands. He admits that he saw an opportunity to make a fortune, and he took it. Saul being so blatantly out to hurt Kim was both horrifying and a hint of where this was really going. But her joy is short-lived when she learns Saul has been arrested, and that he might implicate her in something. I'll confess that here I thought I had an idea of where the finale was going — Saul being so confident about being on top made me assume he had one final grand scheme up his sleeve, and that maybe, just maybe, Kim was somehow in on it. First, he tells the truth, that Walt and Jesse kidnapped him and took him to an open grave. As Saul Goodman, he offers Bill the chance to be his co-counsel in his case. In his cell, he paces and punches the wall and asks himself what he was thinking.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – On Monday night, people said goodbye to the one-of-a-kind TV franchise that made Albuquerque a household character.

We will just have to focus on the store, I guess.” So far the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, has said Better Call Saul’s finale is the end of the famous franchise. We may just be out wandering the streets,” said Marq and Edward. “Who knows? And all proceeds go to the local non-profit. But if you ask New Mexicans, there was one character that stood out above the rest. Tractor Brewing in Albuquerque has been hosting Better Call Saul viewing parties since the show premiered in 2015. Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spinoff, just wrapped its season and series finale.

The star joined The Times to discuss Monday's series finale, why the role left him “ragged,” and his future hopes for the “Breaking Bad” universe.

“He’s a guy who is showing the audience his need, his hunger for love and respect from his brother Chuck. His heart is open to Chuck, and Chuck crushes him. Said Odenkirk: “The craziest thing is, all of these feelings I’m going through now — saying goodbye to this great thing — are going to be really helpful in this next role. He’s not a great guy in a lot of the actions he takes. She’s a person with a stronger sense of herself and a stronger mettle than Jimmy. She has a greater desire to be good, but there’s something wrong with her. “I play a character, who, while he reveals earnest sides of himself and can be very likable, most of the time he’s doing unethical, unjustified stuff. He returned to work in September after a hospital stay and recovery at home. It’s the biggest journey the character makes in the whole series.” “I love the finale and where it goes,” Odenkirk said. “The courtroom scene was hard,” Odenkirk said. The fugitive attorney, who has been hiding with a new identity as Cinnabon manager Gene Takavic, finally ends up behind bars, but he finds redemption in his punishment for multiple crimes, including accessory to murder and money laundering. There’s a degree of self-awareness this character gains that I always knew he was capable of. And it’s going to hit me.”

Following the dramatic "Better Call Saul" finale, actor Bob Odenkirk shared a video message with fans thanking them for their support over the years.

"Hopefully we made the most of it. I'll never be around so many people doing their jobs so well, I can't imagine it, it was great." In his video message, Odenkirk first took the opportunity to give his thanks to co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, before heaping praise on his fellow cast members and the crew that worked on the sets of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I write this review fresh from watching the series finale of Better Call Saul, an episode so profoundly powerful and well-crafted, I can think of few hours ...

He gets them down to 7.5 years, even picks the low-security prison he wants to stay at, and the wing of the prison he wants to stay in. And I didn’t expect that the final moments of this brilliant show would be so powerful and profound and heartbreaking. Then he talks about Chuck and how he hurt his brother and how his actions led directly to his brother’s suicide. I was right and I was wrong, as is so often the case with predictions. He confesses, but he’s confessing for Kim and for himself and for his brother. Soon, he’s hiding in a dumpster trying to call the vacuum man, but the cops find him and take him to jail. So Saul asks him what his regrets are, and of course Walter doesn’t think about the way he ruined his family’s life or the many other lives he had a part in snuffing out, including his brother-in-law’s. He doesn’t think about his actions at all. He makes it home to his apartment and gets some money he’s stashed there, but the cops show up outside so he flees out a back window. He regales the lawyers with tales of murder and fear. It’s what he wanted in the end: Not the deal he eked out of the Feds. He wanted to confess, in the end, not to the state or the judge but to Kim. Finally, after so many years of running from himself and justifying his mistakes and rationalizing the terrible things he did to others, Jimmy owned up to what he had done. When he was 20, he tried to do a “slip and fall” and cracked his knee on ice. Mike tells him he’d go back to the first day he took a bribe, implying heavily that he’d make a different choice.

Bob Odenkirk has shared a heartwarming message with fans as the “Better Call Saul” finale finally landed on Netflix. Fans of the hit “Breaking Bad” spinoff ...

Thank you.” Thank you for staying with us. Fans of the hit “Breaking Bad” spinoff were hit with the final episode, titled “Saul Gone,” on Monday.

'Better Call Saul' co-creator Peter Gould breaks down Jimmy's shocking move in the finale — and that Jimmy-Kim reunion.

And this time we shot in the desert, it was way too cold, so we just can't win. He's playing the guy out in the desert with Mike, he's playing Saul as he was in Breaking Bad, he's playing Gene terrified and running. And I think the reason why that rings for Jimmy is that is exactly Chuck's take: "You are who you are and that's who you're going to stay." And the only reason that Betsy's character is in the earlier scene is that she's got the DEA connection. Last season we shot in the desert and it was way too hot. And I don't think it would've had the reality that we were hoping for. I don't know that the audience is going to see how grueling it was because the courtroom was certainly an issue for us. And it felt more honest to have her leave the prison because, of course, she does have to leave. And you can see in the way that Rhea carries herself in that final sequence that she's come into her own again. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Jimmy was a man who couldn't transact with his pain and regrets, as we were reminded by in those flashback conversations with Mike [ Jonathan Banks] and Walt. How did you arrive at the idea that Jimmy McGill would follow Arthur Jensen's orders and atone? And then he unearthed more of his soul and truly communed with himself, accepting responsibility for all the misdeeds in his life, especially what he'd done to his brother, Chuck ( Michael McKean), who was driven to suicide. Let's call the main office and let them know they're going to need a new manager, trust experience (and Oakley), crack open a pint of Bluebell mint chocolate chip ice cream, and light up a cigarette (in color, with everything around it still in black and white): Co-creator/showrunner Peter Gould is here to break down the key moments of the epic send-off that was "Saul Gone."

AMC's hit show Better Call Saul wrapped up its six season run on Monday night. The show, a prequel to Breaking Bad, follows attorney Jimmy McGill and his rise ...

He has caused a lot of trouble and the only way to redeem himself is to pay for his actions. After watching the endings to both shows, I feel they aren’t truly comparable on a basis of which is better. He finally has to face the consequences of his actions, and since he is the only Albuquerque member still alive or not on the run, which is the case for Jesse Pinkman, he also has to face the wrath of Marie Schrader. But prison isn’t bad to him because the inmates recognize him from his commercials and immediately befriend him. He mumbles “it’s showtime,” a nod back to the first episode when he was still Jimmy McGill and he was preparing for his case. That last part is what makes the series finale of Better Call Saul so different from the series finale of Breaking Bad. Saul has always been great at talking himself out of bad situations, including in the finale where he talks a plea deal down to just seven years with his choice of prison. He has a sweet plea deal he has already accepted, all that’s left is arraignment in Albuquerque. In Breaking Bad, turning himself in or ever doing time is not something that Walter would ever accept. Saul Goodman’s fate was not only left open in the final season of Breaking Bad, but even more so after last week’s episode of Better Call Saul after we saw Carol Burnett’s character Marion calling the police to report him. He wants to sweeten the deal, literally, by adding into the plea deal ice cream every Friday for the duration of his sentence. The mention of Kim doing the right thing gets Saul thinking. Breaking Bad focuses on Walter White’s journey as a criminal in the drug empire.

Nearly a decade after last inhabiting the role, Betsy Brandt returned to perhaps her most recognizable character, Marie Schrader.

Saul was an accomplice to crimes committed in “Breaking Bad,” including the death of Marie’s husband, Hank (played by Dean Norris). Marie listens — her face expressing shades of sorrow and anger — before delivering a cutting dialogue, directed at Saul. The actor who played Hank in “Breaking Bad” even chimed in on the social media platform about Brandt’s return to her character after eight years. “So great to see Betsy Brandt!!!!! Maybe not everyone knows, but Betsy Kettleman is a Betsy in homage to @betsy_brandt. When I found out I was both intimidated and honored,” wrote Julie Ann Emery, who played the character of Kettleman in “Better Call Saul.” In season 1, Kettleman was helping her husband, a thieving treasurer, flee from criminal conviction. In her reprisal Monday, Brandt’s Marie character appears first in a 10-minute scene where she faces the “Better Call Saul” title character, Saul Goodman (played by Bob Odenkirk), following his arrest after years on the run. Brandt, who played the sister-in-law of the lead character in “Breaking Bad” from 2008-13, returned in a surprise appearance as Marie Schrader in the Monday, Aug. 15, episode of the AMC series’ popular spin-off show, “Better Call Saul.” She had not previously appeared in “Better Call Saul,” which debuted in 2015 and wrapped up with this week’s episode.

What's next for Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler? Emmy nominee Rhea Seehorn reflects on the "Better Call Saul" finale on "The Envelope" podcast.

Seehorn also opens up about the scary moments after Bob Odenkirk had a heart attack on set, how growing up with a father who suffered from alcoholism shaped her acting skills, and why “Better Call Saul” helped her to finally internalize that her success wasn’t a fluke. Fresh off last evening’s “Better Call Saul” series finale, Rhea Seehorn joined me to break down the biggest moments of the episode, including the surprise decision Jimmy makes and what she thinks is next for Kim Wexler. Seehorn — who is nominated for two Emmys this year, including a first for her performance as Kim Wexler — also shared the moment that Kim would go back to if she were to use a time machine (a running theme in the finale). I’m Yvonne Villarreal, TV writer for The Times and co-host of “The Envelope” podcast.

Co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have accomplished something rare in the annals of fiction: a superior prequel. Still, Better Call Saul suffers from ...

Jimmy will live out his days in prison, protected by his legacy as Saul Goodman but separated from the love of his life. This could easily be the parting shot of the series (and perhaps should have been), but Kim’s departure from the prison removes any ambiguity that this will be the couple’s final meeting. It’s only once he becomes willing to live with regret, rather than dismiss it, that he is capable of changing for the better. It appears that Jimmy makes the decision to sacrifice himself in the time that it takes his attorney (Peter Diseth) to visit the airplane bathroom. Jimmy and Kim’s final scenes together are understated but deeply affecting, as Kim comes to visit Jimmy in prison, posing as his attorney. He takes responsibility not only for his role in building Walter’s empire, but in the deaths of Howard Hamlin and his brother, Charles McGill. He gets to look Kim in the eyes again and have her see him — the real him, the him who loves her — rather than the ghoul who sat across from her during their divorce proceedings. The two share a cigarette, its embers the only pop of color in their black and white world. The episode “Breaking Bad” folds Better Call Saul and its ancestor together with remarkable poetry and economy, juxtaposing Gene’s ill-fated last con against flashbacks to Saul Goodman’s first encounters with Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. The penultimate episode, “Waterworks,” ranks among the best of the series, as Gene’s new life falls apart around him and Kim Wexler chooses to face justice for her sins. It’s a romantic notion that all that Saul Goodman needs to change back into Jimmy McGill is for Kim’s future to be in jeopardy, but that’s more idealistic than we’re accustomed to in Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque. If not for the black and white epilogue segments scattered throughout the series, a viewer could be convinced that “Fun and Games” is the last episode, and would probably not be disappointed. Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), having seen the human cost of her perfect long con, chooses to exile herself from her home and the man she loves rather than risk hurting anyone else. (The ur-example here is the smash cut to black that finished off The Sopranos, which both incensed the viewership and holds up as one of the greatest TV finales of all time.) Breaking Bad’s spin-off, Better Call Saul, has proven to be more than a match for its mother series in every respect, debuting with a level of confidence and stylistic refinement that Breaking Bad took years to achieve.

'Better Call Saul' star Bob Odenkirk bids a fond farewell to the show in a new Twitter video — watch his goodbye.

“But we weren’t. We were given a chance, and hopefully we made the most of it. “It’s too many moving parts, and they fit together too beautifully, and it’s a mystery to me how it even happened.” We came out of maybe a lot of people’s most favorite show ever [in Breaking Bad], and we could have been hated for simply trying to do a show,” he continues.

"I did nothing to deserve this part, but I hope I earned it over six seasons."

But we weren't. We were given a chance, and hopefully we made the most of it. "It's too many moving parts, and they fit together too beautifully, and it's a mystery to me how it even happened." Immediately following Better Call Saul's series finale on August 15, star Bob Odenkirk posted a video to Twitter bidding a fond and appreciative farewell to the fans and his co-workers.

The title would seem to give us the answer. The series reintroduces us to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), whom we met in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” as the sleazy ...

Maybe he is finally less comparable to Walter White than to Don Draper of “Mad Men,” another fast-talking slick in a suit whose words save him until they don’t, who is taken with the idea of time machines, who has a history of changing his name and running from trouble. At last he can be himself, and, in its closing run, so could “Better Call Saul.” I don’t want to make too much of the much-heralded End of the Antihero — “Barry” is still around, for starters. As Saul says to Walter White in one of their first “Breaking Bad” meetings, “Conscience gets expensive, doesn’t it?” The final run of “Saul” keeps finding little pockets of story to revisit within it, restaging Saul’s first run-in with Walter and having Kim meet Jesse during the “Breaking Bad” timeline, at a crucial moment in both their lives. The climax of “Saul” seems at first to be going a similar way. Despite the reappearance in flashbacks of Bryan Cranston as Walter White and Aaron Paul as his sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, the last half-season is less an attempt to reprise “Breaking Bad” and more a productive conversation with it — maybe even a friendly argument. Instead, the protagonist utters something you would never expect to hear from Saul Goodman in a courtroom — the truth — and blows up his plea deal. As Saul says of Walter, in a late-season flashback, “Guy with that mustache probably doesn’t make a lot of good life choices.” Now he seems to be proving his own point. In “Better Call Saul,” crime is mostly just sad, the more so the closer the series gets to its end. In its closing run, “Better Call Saul” has jumped about in time, shuffling these identities like the moving targets in a shell game. The series reintroduces us to Saul Goodman ( Bob Odenkirk), whom we met in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” as the sleazy lawyer to the chemistry teacher turned drug lord, Walter White. Each has a little of the others in him.

Better Call Saul ends with a satisfying finale that provides surprises, laughs, tears, and emotional gut punches.

He gets 86 years in prison – a shoddy prison at that – but he is beloved by the inmates who recognize the legend of Saul Goodman, the man who helped countless people, no matter the crime. In comparison, “Saul Gone” is not just clever wordplay, but a thematic bookend on a show that was never really about Saul Goodman, yet felt his presence loom large over the story. As for Jimmy, we don't get an easy death scene that absolves him of his crimes while the rest of the characters are left to pick up the pieces off screen. Not only did we already know that Jimmy would one day turn into Saul, but we learned from the first season that Jimmy had always struggled with his own inner Scarface, with "Slippin' Jimmy." No matter how hard he tried to do good things, he inevitably resorted back to Slippin' Jimmy, and eventually Saul, because it was much easier to put up that front than to take the hard road and confront his mistakes. Though he doesn't say it, we get the feeling this is the moment Jimmy would travel back to in order to correct things (made clear by Chuck having a copy of H. G. Wells' book in his hand). This is undoubtedly his biggest regret: failing to try to build a bond with his brother beyond obligations. Most shocking, however, is when he starts tearing up as he talks about Howard Hamlin's death, and goes as far as confessing to causing Chuck to lose his insurance, which ultimately led to him losing his job, then his life. In the very first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter says chemistry is "growth, then decay, then transformation!" The second flashback includes a surprise appearance from Bryan Cranston's Walter White in a scene set immediately after the events of Ozymandias. In an episode full of heartbreak, it is hilarious that Saul asks Walter if he has any regrets the day after he quite literally lost everything that mattered in his life. We meet the biggest ghost of Jimmy's past, Chuck. Set shortly before the first episode of Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy deliver groceries to Chuck. Though the older brother offers Jimmy the opportunity to stay and talk about work, Jimmy refuses, knowing Chuck would only take the opportunity to scoff at him for doing a bad job, a rare time where Jimmy was the one to turn down bond-building. First up is Mike, who answers by saying he'd go back to the day he accepted his first bribe, as that set him on a path that ended with his son dead. This feels like a retroactive attempt at making up for the way audiences continue to side with Walt in the years since the show ended. Once in custody, Gene slips back into Saul mode and manages to weasel his way out of a life-plus-190-years sentence in exchange for a brisk seven years in a comfy white-collar country club of a prison by telling a sad story about working out of fear of Walter — all while Marie Schrader (Betsy Brandt) listens in.

A great show pulls itself back from its own brink. Read our review of the 'Better Call Saul' series finale.

In the trade you call this a callback, and "Saul Gone" had a few. I greeted the last couple seasons of Saul with constant awe, and I'm not such a lapsed Catholic that I don't recognize the freedom of confession (followed by 86 years of penance). That feels like a rehearsal for something like The Third Man, a ferocious stroll with no look back. 50 episodes is a lot of time to spend rewatching, for a TV critic here at the end (?) of Peak TV. A sitdown with the Feds offers a sitdown with franchise history. He even unravels the tangled malpractice scheme that led to the suicide of his big brother Chuck ( [Michael McKean](https://ew.com/person/michael-mckean/)). Whereas Jimmy's big moment in the courtroom is precisely what it appears to be: A reclamation that's also a spiritual resurrection. She gazes upon a wall full of endless paperwork — an echo of the season 5 backlog in the public defender's office, boxes full of clients falling through the cracks of a broken system. The laughter turned into a transformation, and a rebirth. [Betsy Brandt](https://ew.com/person/betsy-brandt/)) looks Saul right in the face while she talks about her murdered husband. Here's a fairy tale for our time: a television character who discovers, to his horror, that his past lives forever in the streaming archive. And who takes down this difficult man, who rose to nasty glory in a decade that loved its difficult TV men?

The Better Call Saul finale gets a close reading from co-creator Peter Gould and stars Bob Odenkirk Rhea Seahorn.

I just felt so strongly that the right ending for Saul was to be in the system, the system that he’s made light of and twisted around for his own purposes. So some of us said, ‘What about another ending for Jesse?’ So in terms of the ‘trilogy’ of the shows, it feels very elegant that Walt dies, which he was always going to do. And of the three of them, Jimmy gets his soul back, but he’s going to be incarcerated for some amount of time. Added Seehorn: “It was the very last scene we shot of the series. But now there’s more to the story as Gould already had an inkling that Jimmy was fated for prison. Maybe it was the extra pressure of it being the finale that caused me to teeter a few times, much to the annoyance of everyone in post-production.” “It was a lot of feelings from six years of working with each other and playing these people. “It was the easiest scene we ever shot,” Odenkirk tells reporters with a laugh. For Odenkirk and Seehorn, it was the perfect way to wrap their filming experience. There was a version that didn’t have that; it ended with the two of them smoking,” Gould added. Of course, Jimmy also wanted to show Kim that the good man she fell in love was still in him, somewhere, and that he was capable of showing sincerity and remorse, something she’s wanted to see from him since he manipulated the bar committee into reinstating his law license at the end of season four. “I went back and forth on that for a while, and ultimately, having watched them both, it felt more honest to end with the two of them apart, rather than the two of them together.