Hey 3.5 readers.
Your old pal, BQB here.
Can you believe it? Better Call Saul just entered the last half of its final season, and unless there’s an impending reboot or sequel or prequel we don’t know about (always possible) this will mark the end of the Breaking Badaverse.
I’ll expand later but right now, I want to predict that Saul will be Saul again. Right now, he’s Gene, hiding out in Omaha on the run from the law after being the lawyer for chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin Heisenberg.
If you check out the promos, you see Gene in black and white slipping on a red suit jacket. Meaning? “Gene’s” life is always shown in drab black and white. “Saul” was once very flamboyant. He lived for arguments and action and courtroom drama and intrigue and stacking that cheese and outwitting his opponents.
But as Gene, he just goes to work, comes home, and tries his best to go unnoticed, hoping the police won’t pick him up. The show is in color when it shows Saul’s earlier life, the one where he was a fast talking ambulance chaser and having a great time.
SPOILER – If you have seen Breaking Bad and the later Jesse-centric El Camino Netflix film, you know pretty much anyone who could testify against Saul is either dead (pretty much everyone) or on the run (Jesse). So, is there anyone left to testify against him?
He could very easily step out of the shadows and reclaim his lawyer fame, blathering about how dare the criminal justice system railroad him into going into hiding. That’s what I get out of the promo photo. For Saul, being a civilian is drab gray. Being a lawyer is color. It seems like a hint he’s slipping that lawyer coat he loves on to ride again.
The thing that always made this show stand out is how it illustrated crime does not pay. It really, really does not. Over the course of the original, Walt and friends and enemies all pay a high price eventually, even those who got too close and didn’t distance themselves before it was too late. This isn’t one of those shows that whips out a happy ending or absolves the wrongdoer. Crime is a horrible life and it catches up to you.
But Saul? Arguably in that gray area. Definitely did illegal, immoral and crooked stuff, but he’d say he did it all in the name of defending his clients. I don’t think that would fly in the real world but in the world of TV lawyers, I could see Vince Gilligan possibly letting Saul off the hook.
Then again, there’s the argument that Saul has done wrong and like all wrongdoers, doesn’t matter their reasons, if it was understandable how they got into it or if they’re even somewhat likeable, those who do bad on this show get punished.
Then again, isn’t a guy who loved to talk being forced into exiled silence enough punishment?
Bookshelf Battle 
“But Saul? Arguably in that gray area. Definitely did illegal, immoral and crooked stuff, but he’d say he did it all in the name of defending his clients.”
And who were his clients? These weren’t underrepresented unfortunates, these were criminals, the worst of the worst. How many innocent people who were harmed by Saul’s clients were denied justice because of Saul’s actions?
And does that gray area include destroying Howard’s life and directly causing his death? And the subsequent closing of HHM? And possibly ruining the life of Howard’s wife as well. Not to mention Kim’s career and life. Saul’s influence over Kim was so toxic and dangerous that he (and granted, Kim’s an adult and not without fault) managed to turn her into everything that was bad about him. And if we think about the lie she told Howard’s wife at the memorial, the final ‘you knew him better than anyone’ dig, maybe even worse. And Chuck, how far did Jimmy’s falsifying the Mesa Verde legal documents and the arguments about Chuck’s sanity go toward Chuck’s final breakdown and death?
Then flash back to pre-Saul and Jimmy as a young kid stealing so much money from his father that it led to the store closing and a little later his father’s death. And an older Jimmy scamming innocent people with elaborate ruses and then worst of all, seniors.
There’s very little that’s gray about Saul from my chair.
Yeah my overall thought was Vince Gilligan gave Walter White a sad ending because Walter deserved it and maybe he’d give Saul a happy-ish ending in that he’d go back to being Saul again. In TV land this is supposedly what lawyers do though in real life Jimmy would not have evaded jail long even with his early hijinx.
Yeah, I watch the first 2 and a half seasons religiously then let it go for many years, then finally caught all up on it this year.
I feel like the show jumps the shark after season 3. It practically lets Jimmy off the hook for Chuck. Like it seems to argue Chuck was responsible because he set Jimmy up to confess and got him disbarred. However, if you think about it, Chuck spent his entire career becoming a top attorney and Jimmy caused him public embarrassment for what? Yeah, Kim snagged Mesa Verde for HHM but clients aren’t property and if she made her pitch to come with her and they decided to stay with HHM that should have been it.
Then the whole framing Howard as a coke fiend…yeah there were parts like with the prostitutes that were funny but ultimately this seemed too evil even for Jimmy
But that might be the show’s point. These characters open an evil box and think they can control it but the evil grows, multiplies, leads to unexpected consquences, like if you invite a cartel kingpin into your life, he might shoot the guy you are framing as a coke fiend when he comes to your house to complain.
Maybe this is Vince Gilligan’s overall point, like with Walt and the airline disaster. If you start doing evil it will erupt in ways you can’t predict so dont assume you can control it.