Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
Written by Peter Gould (6.01) and Thomas Schnauz & Ariel Levine (6.02)
Directed by Michael Morris (6.01 and Vince Gilligan (6.02)
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
New episodes airing Mondays on AMC

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

A couple of months ago, during a Better Call Saul full-series rewatch, I wrote in my notes, "The only thing I really don't want this next season is Walt and Jesse. This isn't their story and it would be a mistake to shift the focus to them this late." As of last week, their appearance is the only thing any of us knows about the final fourteen episodes of the best show on TV.

Ideally, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman will pop up and disappear almost immediately. The camera will hold on a parking lot after Bob Odenkirk exits frame, Bryan Cranston will drive by and we'll realize the guy sitting on a bench in the background is actually Aaron Paul. They're brilliant actors playing rich characters, but Better Call Saul isn't about them and I can't imagine them showing up as anything but fan service.

The thing about this, as I try to open a review of Better Call Saul's last season, is that I trust Saul's writers. They're smarter than I am. They've handled their show expertly. I have a single worry about it, and yet I know that even that is based on fears I've had about other art. I've watched writers bungle the ends of novels, TV shows, and movies. I've built my defenses up, but those writers weren't this good. Watching Better Call Saul is a pleasure because I don't know what will happen, but I know everybody, from the actors to the writers to the person in the art department who picks out paintings for Nacho Varga's condo walls, is going to deliver. I'm excited for this season, I'm excited to write about it here and discuss it with you.

A quick note that I will absolutely spoil Breaking Bad over the course of these reviews. If you haven't finished that but intend to, come back later! Discussing its prequel series, which has major character overlap and a high body count, makes spoilers a necessity. And I don't like to try to "solve" shows like this, but that format demands some speculation from the viewer. As the first new episode of Better Call Saul in two years began, I had these three questions about how the end of this show bleeds into the next (I've listed them in order of personal importance):

1. What happens to Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn)?

2. What happens to Nacho Varga (Michael Mando)?

3. What is Saul's black and white "present day" footage leading up to?

By the end of Saul's first season, the show had four protagonists. One, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), died in Breaking Bad. Another, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), survived it but wound up cornered and in a terrible situation. The other two, Kim and Nacho, never appeared, their whereabouts completely unknown. I care what happens to Jimmy and Mike, but I've spent the past five seasons of Saul having heart palpitations anytime Kim or Nacho seemed to be in danger.

There are other great, fascinating characters exclusive to Saul, namely Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) and Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), but their absence from Breaking Bad makes perfect sense. I'm happy to see more of Howard in the coming weeks, but I don't worry he'll die or wind up in jail. Tony Dalton does such a good job with Lalo that I actively hope the character dies (for one, it would dramatically up Nacho's life expectancy). Kim and Nacho are connected enough to other Breaking Bad characters that their nonattendance there is conspicuous. I'm rooting for them both.

Nacho is an especially complicated case in the context of the show. In many ways, Saul is about stand-in father figures. Jimmy and Howard both had Chuck McGill (Michael McKean), whose suicide rocked each man in totally different ways. Mike is literally a father who thinks he failed his son and has done what he can to redeem himself by protecting and providing for his daughter-in-law and grandchild. Nacho had two Salamancas, first Tuco (Raymond Cruz) and then Hector (Mark Margolis), both of whom he had to take out to protect himself and his actual father. As the new season begins, Nacho is on the run in Mexico, a pawn for Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) in his long, personal fight to wipe the Salamancas out. In a show that does so much to highlight its hierarchies and the ways the people on top can keep the people below them down, Nacho is the character who has done the most to break out of his. He's also been punished hardest for his efforts.

And so Nacho is making his way across Mexico on foot, burned and barely alive, chased by Lalo, the rest of the Salamancas and the federales. Mike, the only person who cares whether he lives or dies, is running a failing campaign to get Gus to help Nacho. By the two premiere episodes' end, after drinking from sewer pipes and laying low in a motel, Nacho is captured by the Cousins, two mostly silent Salamancas who stand out as exceptional terminators in a series with more than a few of them. We know for a fact that they survive the events of Better Call Saul. If the show kills Nacho, it'll make the past five seasons totally miserable. We'll have watched a man do everything he can to keep himself and his only family member safe, and we'll finish his story like an evangelical Christian fable about the dangers of doing and selling drugs.

Saul is also, like almost every show on TV, about people trying to transcend their given stations. As with any story about capitalism, you have to cheat. You have to be Slippin' Jimmy and you have to spy on your competition and you have to recognize they're out to get you. Because they are and even with all of your foresight, you can fail.  Even then, you can get absolutely destroyed by the people who have more power than you do. Capitalism only works if everybody plays fair.

As Nacho struggles, first to make his drug business safe and then to get out of it altogether, Jimmy has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and continually gets denied any progression. In one of the first arcs of Saul's first season, Jimmy dealt with a family rich off white collar crime. They offered him a bribe to forget he saw a particularly egregious indiscretion (they faked their own kidnapping). He turned them down, offering instead to represent them in court. They didn't take him up on it. "You're the kind of lawyer guilty people hire," one of them said. She was, again, guilty as hell. But she was, in that moment, the kind of rich person who didn't think she deserved punishment.

Jimmy was too good for them, but he lives in a world exactly like our own, and that means he'll never be on their level. That is the pile of bullshit nearly all of his problems were fertilized in. Howard Hamlin, Jimmy's true nemesis, used a family connection to create a career, buy a gated home and a dumb car. The system rewards people like Howard.

In these new episodes, we meet the white collar criminals again. They're broke and running a tax scam in a double-wide trailer in the desert. But we're meeting them after Jimmy's transformation into Saul Goodman. He's accepted that he has to cheat to get ahead. He's a good guy and he's been screwed more than he's screwed other people over, but he's fully embraced cutting corners and pocketing extra cash. He's gained the upper hand and can use them to ratfuck Howard, but he got there - he elevated himself - by being a shifty person. All the bootstrapping in the world would have kept him in that nail salon backroom if he hadn't supplemented it with some cheating.

He's fine with it. As a viewer, I'm fine with it. The Jimmy-to-Saul transition was inevitable and I still find the character likable and compelling. What he and I are both a little wary of, though, is Kim's decision to start employing some Saul tactics. It's one thing for her to implicitly approve of his underhanded moves, it's another to cheer him on, and it's another after that to use them herself. When Saul looks at Kim, he's worried his worst qualities are rubbing off on the person he loves. He can debase himself, but it hurts to think he's debased her. When I watch Kim, I'm worried this is the beginning of whatever kept her out of Breaking Bad. It's possible Nacho was damned the moment he started working for Tuco Salamanca and now it's possible we're going to watch Kim get the same damnation, handed down the second she got involved with Jimmy McGill.

As season six begins, we get a black-and-white fakeout-- we aren't watching Saul in Omaha, we're watching a team dismantle his old house in Albuquerque, and as they load a chest of drawers into the back of a van, the camera zooms in on the iconic cork of Zafiro Añejo tequila. It's a trophy from the time Kim helped Jimmy scam some creep at a bar. The bronze desert plant design of this universe's most expensive drink drops into the gutter and serves as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman's "rosebud." We'll have to see whether it's gained that significance because the couple have separated, or because Kim is no longer alive.