Better Call Saul series finale review: Jimmy’s all good, after all!

4/5

Story: On the run from the cops in Omaha, Nebraska, Gene/Saul can’t make it far enough. In custody and looking at charges amounting to punishment nearing life plus 190 years, at least, he’s able to talk them down to a plea deal of seven years only and weekly ice-cream delivery to his cell. He thinks he can sweeten the deal a tad more, by throwing in some information about the ‘suicide’ of Howard Hamlin. But Kimmy’s already beaten him to that with her signed confession about the events that led to his death, which has opened up to the possibility of a civil suit being filed against her by Howard’s widow. Will Saul rub salt in Kimmy’s wound or will Jimmy resurface and make good?

Review: Six seasons in seven years; it’s finally curtains on Better Call Saul. Many moons ago, when we were introduced to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), on another iconic show, we met a sleazeball of a lawyer, who jumped at the chance of milking his new cash cow, Walter White/Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston). Of course, good things don’t last forever and Saul had to disappear, when his involvement, or rather knowledge of, pretty much every awful thing that happened since Walter and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Pinkman) decided to set up their little meth shop, came to light.

In Omaha, Nebraska, under the assumed name of Gene Takovic, Saul’s mundane existence revolved around running a local Cinnabon store, until someone recognized him from his days in Albuquerque. Before he became Saul Goodman, and more precisely the version of him that was in Breaking Bad, there was a man called Jimmy McGill, who just couldn’t catch a break, unless he schemed and scammed his way out.

Better Call Saul was that story – how Jimmy McGill became Saul Goodman and, eventually, Gene Takovic. It’s the story of a rather likeable man’s descent to despicability and his last-ditch attempt to salvage any last morsel of the man that he once was.

When the final episode began, for a moment, I wondered if I was watching the right one, because it opened with the scene of Saul and Mike (Jonathan Banks) from Season 5, trudging through the desert with the bags containing Lalo Salamanca’s (Tony Dalton) 7 million bail money. There’s an interesting conversation that plays out between Saul and Mike about what they’d do if they could time travel. It’s a pertinent moment, because later on in the episode Saul has a similar conversation with Walter too. These conversations sum up what Jimmy/Saul/Gene have been about – cons and money.

And when he’s finally caught by the cops, it is vintage Saul who’s able to negotiate a deal that literally cannot get any better. One fickle jury member is all it takes to fall for the sob story he presents of his first meeting with Walter and Pinkman, he reckons. It could, however, get even better if he were to also throw Kim under the bus too for her ‘involvement’ in Howard Hamlin’s (Patrick Fabian) death. Instead, he chooses to have a last hurrah before accepting the punishment he deserves, in declaring, "Walter White could not have done it without me."

Given how close Saul, as Gene, came to resorting to violence in the last few weeks, and how the last episode of Breaking Bad played out, perhaps, a bloody end was what was expected. But what we got today, was far from that, it was bitter-sweet, where Saul not only got a chance at redemption and being the version of Jimmy McGill he likes, but also a happy ending, if one can call that.

Verdict: Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan wrote and directed the penultimate and final episodes of Breaking Bad respectively, an order that they reversed on Better Call Saul. Both times, they struck gold. A saga spanning 14 years ends today and boy are we glad it was on such a heart-warming note. Now would be a good time to start planning re-runs of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, given that at least one of them is going away from Netflix in early 2025.