Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
6.13 “Saul Gone”
Written & Directed by Peter Gould
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
Complete series streaming on AMC+

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Last Monday at 9pm, something like 9 million people said “Oh, come on” at their TVs. We were a frustrated chorus of disbelief as AMC introduced its biggest night in nine years with the zen koan “There is no season in the show.”

That’s what the AMC app on my TV was telling me, at least. The AMC+ app on my phone—a totally different service, because we live in an air-conditioned nightmare—simply wouldn’t log in. Better Call Saul was ending and the thing I use to watch it was failing.

As I restarted the apps continuously for a little over an hour, I felt lucky that my especially fussy newborn hadn’t snapped awake and started crying. He’s two months old and if my wife and I can get through a meal without one of us having to get up and feed him, we consider our spot on the luck spectrum somewhere between “lottery winner” and “Stephen Baldwin.” But here our baby was, giving us the time to finish the best piece of art of its kind.

Jasper was just born in June, and my wife and I will have been together for 11 years in October. The first thing we did together, before we had begun dating, was sit in her townhouse in Washington, DC and watch Breaking Bad. I didn’t get AMC in my apartment, so I'd go over with some cookies—that’s how we initially became close. My wife’s landlord would turn out to be pretty evil, ultimately threatening to take a bunch of people to court over a lie she had told and then gotten caught in, but I can be thankful she sprung for a cable package that included AMC. Even landlords have to indulge in prestige television.

Breaking Bad premiered 15 years ago. When I tell you I began dating my wife four years after that, and we now take turns feeding a tiny baby who still can’t sleep through the night, I am telling you that that show and its (superior) follow-up, Better Call Saul, have been constants in our lives. I am 33 and this thing has been around for almost half of my life. And it will stay there forever—I'm sure I'll run through it all again in a couple years—but the story only ends once.

As I waited for AMC+ to pull itself together, I realized Saul couldn't die in this finale. Everything was up in the air, but Walter White died at the end of Breaking Bad and the writers don't repeat themselves that explicitly. They make call-backs, they insert mirrored moments, but they don't wholesale recycle major plot points.

An hour after airtime, the app did its job and I watched the end of something great.

Some magic tricks in "Saul Gone," the last hour of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul we're likely to ever get:

• A few months ago, the show's creators announced incoming cameos from Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston. That instantly started a timer, and it was a little distracting, spending each episode wondering if Jesse Pinkman and Walter White were around the corner. They finally showed up two episodes ago, which made Jesse's appearance a couple weeks back and Walt's appearance last week feel like genuine surprises. Their first cameo was insubstantial, partly a recreation of something we'd already seen, but it cleared the air and served as a misdirect to give Walt's bigger part here more weight.

• The other flashback cameos, to Jonathan Banks's Mike and to Michael McKean's Chuck, were grouped with Walt's, in a recurring discussion around regret. They all worked in the context of the story and never felt too much like fan service. McKean, in particular, was a shock to see, but his quasi-tenderness toward his younger brother, the closest to warmth he was ever capable of, wasn't pandering. It didn't scan like wish fulfillment, partly because it was so well crafted and partly because no part of me has ever wished Chuck would be nice to Jimmy. Halfway through season one, I think we all started to assume that he'd never pull his head out of his ass. And this scene didn't change what we know about Chuck. It didn't make him more complicated. It just showed what Jimmy reflected on when he looked back at the second most important relationship in his life.

• When Jimmy walks into his big trial, everything is shot in black and white but you can tell he's wearing one of his bright, garish shirts.

• In that scene, Jimmy gives himself an "It's showtime," with the hand movement, for the first time in several seasons and from then you know without a doubt that he's "Jimmy" and not "Saul."

So many shows opt for a two-hour-long finale, and I'm sure Gilligan and Gould have the cache to get extra time—but they didn't. This was a tightly packed episode of Better Call Saul, no longer than any of the previous installments, and it still took plenty of time for the quiet that fills so much of its normal space. To open on Jimmy's crashed car, a space blanket, and $100 bill stuck to cacti is to make that intention immediately concrete. The previous episode ended with Jimmy/Gene running from Marion as she called the police and busted open his carefully constructed fake life. "Saul Gone" is not about a big chase. It's more important for Jimmy, and the long-dead Mike, to have a conversation about their failures.

They're in the desert, you'll remember, because Lalo had all but forced Jimmy to carry $7 million across the border, and Mike had followed Jimmy to keep him safe. The flashback picks up with the men looking half-dead, resting near a well, as Jimmy suggests using $6 million of the cash to build a time machine. Mike says (without directly saying so) that he would use time travel to save his son's life, and then corrects himself and goes further back: He'd stop himself from ever taking a bribe. He'd keep his hands clean, which would have kept his son's hands clean. A life still would have been spared, plus Mike wouldn't feel tainted. And he doesn't know it in that moment, but rejecting a bribe would have almost assuredly steered Mike away from ever meeting Walter White. He wouldn't have been shot in the gut a few years after clearing the desert.

Jimmy can't, or won't, self-reflect. He says he'd use the time machine to invest in Berkshire Hathaway right before Warren Buffet took over. He'd make money. 

The time travel question is revisited later, with Walt, as he and Jimmy wait in the purgatory of the vacuum salesman's basement. Walt tries to stop a buzzing noise and has no time for Saul's hypothetical time machine, saying it doesn't have any basis in science. He's a grumpy Neil deGrasse Tyson, condescending even as he's days away from getting shipped off to a tiny isolated cabin-prison with two copies of Mister Magorium's Wonder Emporium for entertainment. Eventually he concedes and plays along. Walt would make sure he didn't get manipulated out of his share of Gray Matter, the company he founded in college. He's an empty man, with none of the grace required to recognize he was part of the problem with Gray Matter. In his head, all these decades later, he's still a victim.

Jimmy remains a few steps away from any emotional truth. He tells Walt he'd use a time machine to prevent a slip-and-fall that fucked his knee up.

In the final flashback, there is no question posed. We aren't watching Jimmy ask where another man would go with a time machine, but where Jimmy himself might go. He'd return to the beginning of Chuck's psychosis, when he helped his brother out and either didn't know, or hadn't accepted, how twisted his brother could be. It isn't really fair, though. Chuck was a bastard. He held Jimmy back his entire life, he felt so jealous of his little brother's ability to connect with people and wriggle out of problems that he pulled the rug out from under what should have been a successful law practice based on hard work and persistence. If Better Call Saul was about perfect characters, Jimmy would fix his relationship with Kim, or he'd stay away from the cartel, or he'd resist shitting through another man's car's sunroof. The show we watched, though, is about a man who never understood why his brother hated him, and never stopped trying to win his affection.

Between the flashbacks, Jimmy is caught and faces an impossible prison sentence of "life plus 190 years." He talks it down to 7.5 years, working the ego the prosecuting attorney has around a perfect case record. It's prison, so it'd be hell, but Jimmy has done his homework and makes sure he'd be put in SCI Butner, the facility Bernie Madoff went to. But he can't help himself. Jimmy drags Kim out to his trial in New Mexico and admits to every piece of dirt on him, and then some. He burns his own plea deal to confess that Saul was a bad guy, and he does it in front of Kim because he's a showman and because he knows he needs her. Even if they don't get to spend their lives together, even if all he gets is a sympathetic look from his ex-wife in court, Jimmy has to know that Kim doesn't hate his guts.

If I'm skipping over too much here, it's because summaries are useless and because you could start a weekly column on the court scene alone. There are little flourishes—the camera sits behind a buzzing Exit sign as Jimmy discusses Chuck—but it's mostly a straight showcase of Odenkirk's acting, and Peter Gould's writing. Jimmy gives up the Saul name so soon after reclaiming it. He becomes Jimmy, who he's always been to varying degrees, once again. He goes to jail. 

When we pick up again, Jimmy's on a bus to ADX Montrose, not SCI Butner. But the other prisoners worship him. Even if he's Jimmy again, they chant "Better! Call! Saul!" and stomp  their feet. Jimmy's never going to watch one of his old commercials again, but he'll get to live in their glow, and the reputation he gained with their help.

In prison, Jimmy helps bake bread. The other prisoners respect him. He fistbumps a guy who says "I got you, Saul." Kim is there to visit him. This is the scene. They share a cigarette. It's unspoken, but both know Kim may wind up in jail herself if Howard Hamlin's widow has her way.

"You had them down to 7 years," Kim says.

"Yeah, I did," Jimmy says. Even if he threw it away, he got to 7 years. He's a hell of a lawyer.

"86 years," Kim says. It's an unfathomable sentence for a child, much less a man already in his 60s.

"86 years," Jimmy confirms. "But with good behavior, who knows?" He gave up his life, but he got Kim's respect back. She's the only person who ever really believed in him and saw who he was. They lean against the visiting room wall and smoke, in a mirror of the first moment the show gave us of the two in the Hamlin Hamlin McGill garage. As Kim leaves and Jimmy is stuck behind a chain-link fence, he gives her finger guns and she looks at him, unsure. She keeps walking, but looks back, and he continues to watch her until they can't see each other anymore. This could be the last time. And if that's how they go out, or at least that's how we see them go out, it's beautiful.

Breaking Bad ended with its primary character (not necessarily its protagonist) losing his reputation and dying in a blaze of glory, and we can go back and forth on whether that glory elevated him in a way that undercut the show's themes, but he died. He accidentally shot himself in the chest with a robot-arm-car-gun. It was well-written, but it was an uneasy thing to watch. After El Camino, and now Better Call Saul, it's clear that Walt's death was the end of a chapter in the larger story. This, to me, is how that whole thing ends. Its most sympathetic character, Kim Wexler, reconciles with its most complicated, Jimmy McGill, and honesty is rewarded not with physical rewards but with a deep sense of satisfaction. Life will still be hell for these two people, but they'll always have the looks they gave each other in the visiting room at ADX Montrose. They may never meet again, but they corrected an ugly little corner of the universe. 

As the credits rolled, I got emotional for a great piece of art, for every action scene and slow conversation and long scanning shot across Albuquerque's residential neighborhoods, but I mostly got emotional over that last conversation and the finger guns. I was struck by how happy I was to live at a time when I could watch this story week-to-week, and savor every part.

And then I canceled my AMC+ subscription.