After a delay due to the pandemic, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) is finally back on AMC on April 18 with seven episodes from its sixth and final season before a brief break and the final six episodes in this incredible series returning on July 11. While it would be nice to unpack what the brilliant writers of the best drama on television have planned for all 13 chapters of the final season in a pre-air review, only two episodes have been made available for press. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this pair shows absolutely no sign of creative fatigue as “Better Call Saul” approaches a finish line that this character has been building to for years. “Better Call Saul” is still razor-sharp in its dialogue, riveting in its plotting and nuanced in its themes. TV doesn’t get better than this.
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Here’s where a review of even these two episodes gets a little tricky. AMC has kindly asked for some pretty extreme avoidance of potential spoilers, making it a little difficult to get into the details about what happens next for Saul, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seahorn), Mike Ehrmantrout (Jonathan Banks), Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). The season picks up immediately after the end of season five, and a show that has never held the viewer’s hand offers very little in the way of recap, so maybe it’s important to start with where we left off instead of where we’re going.
Season five really centered the period in his life when Jimmy McGill became Saul Goodman, turning people like Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) into more of a villain as Saul became further entrenched in the illegal operations in which he would eventually be found on “Breaking Bad.” He married Kim Wexler just as her legal work tended to the other side of the spectrum in the justice system, taking pro bono cases. As Kim learned more about her partner’s alter ego, she became even more fascinating, a woman who knows that Jimmy/Saul may not play by the rules, but that powerful attorneys like Hamlin are running their own schemes behind the protection of corporate power too. At the end of the season, after a fight with Howard, Kim basically lit a fire under Jimmy, suggesting that they could force Howard to resolve the Sandpiper case with one of Slipping Jimmy’s notorious schemes.
Meanwhile, the drug war between Gus Fring and Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) intensified, leaving Nacho and Mike caught in the middle. The season ended with Lalo taking Nacho to Mexico to meet Don Eladio (Steven Bauer), where Nacho ends up playing a role in Gus’s assassination attempt of his rival when he opens the gate to a group of assassins who basically killed everyone but Lalo, who told the one surviving assassin to falsely report that the drug lord had been assassinated.
The final season picks up immediately with all of the above. The wonderfully succinct episode description for “Wine and Roses” reads: “Nacho runs for his life. Jimmy and Kim hatch a plan. Mike questions his allegiances.” That’s about it. And all of that stems from the action of the season five finale. Without spoiling any specifics, Jimmy and Kim put a plan in motion to get what they want from Howard once and for all. Much was made of Jimmy forcing Kim to “break bad” last season, but that’s a shallow reading of the action of season five. Kim has her own reasons for wanting to strike back at Howard Hamlin and his ilk, and one of the most interesting threads in the first two episodes is considering how different the motivations may be for her and Jimmy, two people aligned by a common enemy even as it seems like they are operating on increasingly different sides of the legal system.
As Jimmy and Kim’s scheme gains steam, Nacho is stuck in the no man’s land of a violent drug war, knowing he can’t easily return home now that he assisted in the (perceived) death of Lalo Salamanca. Mike encourages Gus to maintain some loyalty to a man who has put his own safety on the line for their operation, but Fring can be a pretty selfish creature when it comes to his own skin. Mike has seen people die when caught in the middle of this operation before and doesn’t want that to happen with Nacho. Meanwhile, Lalo plans for vengeance on multiple levels as he emerges from the ashes.
While it can be very difficult to assess the quality of a season after only two episodes, it’s safe to say that “Better Call Saul” has lost none of its wit or nuance, picking up with the same level of quality that earned it the #1 place on this site’s list of the best TV of 2020. It feels like the writers are really setting up the questions that will dominate the final season. One that fans are presuming will include tragic ends for Kim Wexler and Nacho Varga—after all, they’re not in “Breaking Bad”—but this show has always remained stunningly unpredictable. It’s a testament to the quality of the writing in how easy it is to give in to the plotting as it unfolds instead of trying to predict where it’s going to go.
Most of all, “Better Call Saul” is a show that trusts its viewers to handle questions more than answers, believing that they can meet these characters and their predicaments halfway without pat explanations of their behavior. Since the beginning, the show has been building morally complex questions into the story, taking a character who could have easily been a two-dimensional conman and making him one of the most three-dimensional in history. The moral complexity in “Better Call Saul” has long been one of its greatest strengths, and, after these two episodes, it certainly doesn’t feel like the show is going to eschew that for simple resolutions as it gets to the finish line. Don’t expect easy answers. Jimmy McGill has taught us that there’s really no such thing. [A]