Spoilers galore follow for the series finale of Better Call Saul
In “Second Opinion,” a season-three episode of The Sopranos, Carmela (Edie Falco) reluctantly agrees to see a therapist who tells her she must leave her gangster husband, and suggests that Tony Soprano might find his way back to humanity if he could read Crime and Punishment and sit in his “jail cell and meditate on his crimes every day for seven years, so that he might be redeemed.” It’s a course of action that could be applied to many 21st century TV protagonists—but in last night’s series finale of AMC’s Better Call Saul, “Saul Gone”, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) became the first antihero to choose that fate for himself, going so far as to argue that his assured seven-year sentence should get extended to 86.
Surprisingly, we learned that it was fellow antihero Walter White who indirectly saved Saul Goodman’s soul, even if their meeting was what originally sent the lawyer down the path to purgatory. One of the most remarkable stretches of “Saul Gone” revisited the timeline of its predecessor, Breaking Bad. Near the end of that series’ run, Jimmy, a.k.a. Saul Goodman, and Walter, a.k.a Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston), hid in a basement as the two awaited the Vacuum Repair Man, who ran an unofficial Relocation Program for the criminal underworld. The arrangement suited neither of the stressed-out fugitives, who keep finding ways to get on each others’ nerves.
Attempting to lighten the mood with the perpetually snappish Walter, Saul spun a tale of his Slippin’ Jimmy con-man days. But the charm offensive fell flat as Walter stared at him and said, “So, you were always like this.” Saul’s brash, charming mask having been so easily ripped off, Saul slumped into a pensive funk of self-recognition, the same one he seemed stuck in when the scene slowly dissolved to find him flying high in the sky years later, handcuffed next to the air marshal escorting from Omaha to an Albuquerque courthouse. Walt’s insult haunted him, but it also inspired him to lay the groundwork for the dramatic courtroom confession that served as the episode’s climax of the episode—and the series. After previously brandishing his superhuman ability to cast doubt on even the most clear-cut set of facts for a jury, he had initially spooked the prosecutor into settling for an unjustly brief jail sentence. But in the end, after making sure that Kim was there to see him, Saul admitted to all of his crimes during his sentencing, practically demanding his full punishment, essentially fulfilling Kim’s wish that he “turn himself in.” Saul knows Walt is right that he was always “that way.” But he wants to prove that he doesn’t always have to be that way.
“Anybody who studies the human beings around you, you can see that making a real change is very difficult and rare,” Saul co-creator Peter Gould recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “In drama, we always say, ‘Oh, it’s about character change,’ but it’s sometimes characters just becoming more of what they were, or they’re continuing down the tracks that they’ve laid for themselves.” The question of whether Saul has always been “like this” and if he could possibly change has been at the heart of Better Call Saul from the start. It’s an answer Better Call Saul has put off providing for a long time. Across six seasons we’ve watched Jimmy try to break away from his Slippin’ Jimmy past and never quite get there. He proved himself to be a gifted lawyer capable of tremendous compassion for his elderly clients at Sandpiper Crossing. He could still manipulate and emotionally torture those same clients, but he also felt guilt and walked away from an easy, immediate payday. Jimmy’s inner conflict made him unpredictable even if his ultimate destination was never in doubt: We knew from Breaking Bad where his legal career would take him.
Except becoming the gleefully amoral attorney we first got to know in Breaking Bad wasn’t Jimmy’s ultimate destiny. It wasn’t even his final alter ego. When Walt and Saul shared their space beneath Best Quality Vacuum, both were on their way to separate purgatories, Walt to a cabin in rural New Hampshire and Jimmy to a lonely life as Gene Takovic, Cinnabon manager in a Nebraska mall Neither stayed put for long. Walt returned to Albuquerque on a mission of revenge and rescue, finding his own sort of redemption in a hail of bullets as he set Jesse free. Jimmy, based on all evidence, seemed resigned to his life as Gene. We saw little of “Gene’s” blandly monotonous existence in Omaha beyond his Cinnabon routine and fear of being found out. His inner life was a mystery. And then it wasn’t. Better Call Saul’s home stretch revealed Gene to be just a mask for the unrepentant, unreformed con man beneath a harmless-looking mustache.
The series’ final episodes also captured much of what made the series work in compressed form. It was a pleasure watching meek Gene turn back into Saul and get away with one implausible-but-effective scheme after another. It was uncomfortable to watch him go too far, taking too many chances and pushing beyond the pale by scamming a man dying of cancer. It was tense watching him try to escape one more time, but why? Here was a bad guy who didn’t deserve to get away with it. The faint muscle-memory of morality that pulled back from following through on his threats to silence the elderly Marion (Carol Burnett) was hardly enough to redeem everything that came before.Like so many TV antiheroes before him, Jimmy inspired mixed emotions. His humanity and vulnerability, beautifully captured by Odenkirk, made it easy to feel for him even as his actions made it hard to root for his success. His behavior was often vile but his hurt and need, particularly when it came to Kim (Rhea Seehorn), remained unmistakable. Across Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad he’d followed a path from which there appeared to be no return. If Kim’s final appearance had been her exchange with Jesse (Aaron Paul) in the penultimate episode, “Waterworks,” it would have sounded like a final judgment. “This guy,” Jesse asked, “is he any good?” After taking a long drag on a cigarette, she replied in pointed past tense, “When I knew him, he was.”
That makes Jimmy’s ultimate fate all the more extraordinary. In the end, Jimmy realized he only thought he was living consequence-free in an amoral universe. But, looking around, everything from Walt’s dismissal, to the memory of his brother Chuck to, above all, Kim’s disappointed face made him understand he wasn’t, that the bill had come due, and that he could only stop being “like this” if he paid it.