Saul Goodman, Scapegoat at Law
“There’s no shame in going back and changing your path.”
I know the series finale of Better Call Saul aired four months ago (so long ago that Atlanta has also now bid a heartfelt farewell), but it took me a lot of time to think about it and organize my thoughts on “Saul Gone.” The series finale of Breaking Bad, while not artistically slight, was still straightforward and distinctly satisfying. The series finale of The Sopranos gave you only two options for inference. The series finale of The Americans would have only taken a while to consider because its initial impact was emotionally devastating. Better Call Saul, though? I kept turning it over in my head, again and again. How am I supposed to feel? What am I supposed to imagine for these characters? What was this show’s thesis statement? Did the finale adhere to it? Was “Nippy” necessary? (Yes, it was perfect.) It took a while. But I’m ready.
Few elements of television have been written about as much as the medium’s “prestige anti-hero” era. The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men. An era of upended expectations for the average, casual, at-home viewer. Stories didn’t wrap in twenty to forty minutes. Characters weren’t obvious and easy to root for. While plenty of anti-heroes still exist on television today, this prime era lasted until around 2013-ish (The Americans dangled afterwards). These shows were elevated above “Characters Welcome” shows like Franklin and Bash or wannabe prestige dramas like Suits or the network dramas (which did not change their course, aside from slightly more serialized storytelling) like Hawaii Five-O or Person of Interest or The Event. In fact, Better Call Saul essentially starts at the end of the “prestige anti-hero” era of television, even though it might be the most defining example of what I’m talking about.
Debuting in 2015, Saul existed in the new era of challenging stories through the lens of known quantities. We knew about the O.J. trial before American Crime Story. Damon Lindelof pivoted from The Leftovers to Watchmen, based on the comic. Game of Thrones, For All Mankind, Rings of Power, even another lawyer show now like She-Hulk (which began near to when Saul wrapped). Sci-fi, fantasy, genre, IP, and the most popular franchises in the world dot the small screens, just as they do the big screen. So while Saul existed among them, it was always a vestige. A vestige of a time when Walter White (who’d be nothing without Saul, mind you) and Don Draper did whatever they wanted and suffered consequences — eventually. Saul Goodman would’ve never fit into Westeros or the TVA, but he reminded us of television’s nonexistent ceiling when those crafting the form operated at the peak of their talents
What makes Saul feel like a weightier, more defining example of what this television era sought to represent can be framed simply: Kim Wexler. In 2015, Saul was focused on legalese and doc review, but it ingratiated itself to Bad devotees by depicting itself as existing of a piece with those shows of the bygone era (initially by doling out small, in-universe cameos and Easter eggs and eventually by developing an entire second part of the show dedicated to Albuquerque’s drug trade — complete with arcs for Mike Ehrmantraut, Gus Fring, and a school of Salamancas). (In an interview with Alan Sepinwall, creator Peter Gould explained the show’s treatise, “Ultimately, the question that we started with, which seemed insolvable, which is: ‘What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?’”) By introducing the character of Kim, though, audience pathos results instantaneously and the show can operate from the place of a moral center to root for, rather than the anxiety of an outsider’s lens of morality.
In 2022, though, Saul finally brought the “prestige anti-hero” era to an end by rebuking all the stories that defined it. The series finale can be called a moral reckoning, just as easily as it can be called a love story. Better Call Saul was always both: an ethics play and a romance, made apparent by Kim and Jimmy’s final transformation into the noirs they loved to watch together. You don’t need TCM-callbacks or black-and-white soaked cigarette scenes to make this evident, though it helps. You don’t need Bryan Cranston returning to hack and debase with “So, you were always like this.” Everything you need to understand the show’s status is apparent on the tired, etched faces of two people who should’ve never had it in them to do the same things Tony and Walt were capable of. As such, we see that this show rebukes their era by developing an ending where one of these shitheads actually goes to prison.
Much like the era it succeeded, Better Call Saul was a vestige in its own right. It celebrated the forgotten, everyday things that slip away as the world becomes more modern. In the past, Felix the Cat clocks, kerosene lamps, and quill pens were always destined for the Smithsonian. But because Saul was a period piece (and an eventual leap into the future, but still transpiring over a decade prior to 2022), it could lean into many of the artifacts that are less prevalent in the age of the Internet, tribalism, and a pandemic. Cinnabon, malls, college football, watercooler television, payphones. Among these mementos? Sleazy lawyers with cheap ads on local television, billboards, and bus stop benches. Better Call Saul took this idea — What are those cheap lawyers up to? How do they make their money? — and extrapolated, to us, how much more and how much depth there could be to them. We can learn and sympathize and maybe empathize until one day, they’re gone.
Television has always been a vast expanse of fictional lawyers. Jeff Winger, Jennifer Walters, Ally McBeal, Perry Mason, Saul Goodman. Better Call Saul was supposed to be a half-hour comedy, but instead decided to go deeper because network shows can’t and their protagonists are heroes. They can’t have bathrooms loaded with two kinds of blue drugs: meth and Viagara. They can’t be willing to exploit a federal officer’s death for a reduced prison sentence. So whether it was because of the opportunity afforded to them by AMC or a desire to keep working with the same crew that made Breaking Bad a gaffer’s dream, Better Call Saul and its creative team not only demonstrated complexity of character, but they created tragedy in prequel.
I’ve said it before, but Saul is the only prequel I’ve ever truly loved. In this prequel, we got to have an all-time villain in Lalo, devote our affection for new characters with unknown fates (Nacho and Kim, both Jesse Pinkman-esque, but twisted in that their purity maintained nobility), and plum new depths for Saul, who was already a career-crazy turn for Bob Odenkirk to embark upon. He was chameleonic as he shaded himself as Jimmy McGill, Gene Takovic, Viktor St. Clair, Saul Goodman. A show about Saul Goodman starting with a Cinnabon flash-forward and a flash-back to someone named Jimmy McGill with a brother named Chuck who hated Thomas Edison? If it wasn’t a prequel, it couldn’t have been this. We couldn’t have seen the reckoning of what the world would actually mean if it looked like it did through Walter White’s eyes.
Better Call Saul always intended to keep itself grounded. With this guiding light, it didn’t need a heroic, redemptive death or a narrow escape from justice to bring a worthy ending to its lead characters. Instead, it says: this person did bad things. He is a criminal. He should go to jail. And he does. Yet, it might actually be the happiest ending of any of the shows considered to be Saul’s contemporaries. After years of running from Nebraska (Kim) and running to Nebraska (Jimmy), the only running Saul ever needed to be happy was his running the show in prison.
But it’s not only this that makes Saul have what I consider to be the happiest ending of the prestige era (Mad Men comes closest). It’s the fact that the show was authentic to the kind of character Saul/Jimmy always was. He’s the easiest anti-hero to think of as being a good person the entire time he’s on screen. At the very least, he’s the easiest to empathize with. When he bakes bread in prison — hearkening back to his Cinnabon shifts — he is himself and he is free of all the burdens laden on him through half-truths. That plea negotiation he orchestrated with Bill Oakley and the New Mexico DA began with truth (Walt’s intimidation) and was warped into weaponization. Yet, as he awaits sentencing, we witness the reverse. He was set to accept seven years in prison when he heard that Kim (whom he’d recently contacted in a fit of rage and panic) confessed her role in the death of Howard Hamlin. When he learns of this, the Saul persona melts away and falls out of the airplane like DiCaprio in the final act of Catch Me If You Can. He turns that weaponization on its head and releases his burdens.
He could have stopped Walter White at any time. He could have ended the suffering of many much earlier. He misses Chuck. He misses Kim. And he throws away a chance at freedom because if he didn’t, he’d be throwing away his chance at ever seeing Kim again. The last move he could make in his constantly-spinning mind was to end his cycle, witness the remove, and keep Kim in his life. There was no path to freedom and Kim from the minute Lalo murdered Howard. And in the end, he chose the path that led to her. A love story.
The entirety of “Saul Gone” is situated among vignettes from throughout the criminal descent of Jimmy McGill. At important inflection points in his life, Jimmy discusses with Mike, Walt, and (the original prompter) Chuck what they would do if they had access to a time machine. The structure is Dickensian, reminiscent of A Christmas Carol, as three looming specters push Jimmy towards the proper outcome. But the content revolves around change and choosing to change. We know Jimmy’s lying about what he regrets; Walt doesn’t. We know every regret Jimmy maintains because they’re laid bare when he accepts life in prison. If he had a time machine, Jimmy might try to salvage his relationship with Chuck or get back in his car in the parking lot of Walt’s school or shake hands honestly with Howard Hamlin. But we know his truth. He’d probably go be with Kim again. Running one last con. Maybe even at a tiki bar.
This framing device of “Saul Gone” takes us back to many different eras of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. In a way, it reminds us of what it’s like to move through the peak TV era again, as if we are an Emmys host cashing in a favor Jon Hamm and Steve Carell owe them. I felt a little nostalgic to witness it, knowing that this was the ultimate end for these characters, these performances, this specific cinematography, this era that television has been forever redefined by. I felt a personal relationship with Better Call Saul. I started watching it in my family’s den on the DVR, continued on through AMC tethers outside lecture halls at college, and finished it on couches in Florida and Virginia. Like podcasts, these characters can come with us around the world and throughout our lives. Better Call Saul developed one of the great series finales because it’s always been one of the great shows. We know, truly, that television will miss it.
