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"La familia es todo"
Chuck
Chuck
Better Call Saul Season Thread - Season Six - April 18th
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**** Chuck bruh...
Straight up... He a *** for that..
Letting jimmy go into the conference room and look stupid...
Meanwhile this ***** looking like a breakfast burrito and scared of garage door openers.
I wonder what Chuck will do without Jimmy
And yes, the season was a little too short
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View media item 1475809
Posted April 3 2015 — 11:51 AM EDT
What the hell is Better Call Saul? Remember back in the series premiere, when it was the kind of show where twin ginger skateboarders got their legs broken by Breaking Bad fan service while Michelle MacLaren swan-songed out of TV by shooting the New Mexico desert like Sergio Leone homaging Salvador Dali? Remember when Jimmy bought a billboard and the Kettlemans went camping and Better Call Saul transformed into a USA network wacky-procedural—Burn Notice with a sunburn, Royal Pains with more pain—complete with a wacky HQ and a wacky suit and a wacky emphasis on the wacky brother with his wacky psychological malady? Remember when Better Call Saul suddenly coughed up a great episode that felt entirely different from everything else and focused specifically on the guy who isn’t Saul?
This hasn’t been not entertaining. Lead producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould know how to make television. They’re working with talented actors and talented writers and a talented crew—mostly inherited from Breaking Bad. Thus, Better Call Saul is one of the most meticulous messes in recent TV history. There are awesome scenes that come out of nowhere and stay there. (Saul—sorry, Jimmy—chats with a separatist loon who already printed separatist currency.) Like its predecessor, the show has an eye for snazzy visuals. The sun doesn’t shine on Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque; it attacks.
But unlike its predecessor, the show has no obvious narrative progression. Nacho’s important, or he’s not; the Kettlemans are half the show, or maybe we should care about Sandpiper. There are flashbacks to Jimmy’s past where Bob Odenkirk is playing either 25 or 57—a savvy criminal or a neophyte screw-up. In the lead-up to Better Call Saul, there were theories that the show would be funnier than Breaking Bad (maybe a sitcom?) or more procedural than Breaking Bad (maybe The Good Wife for bad boys?) or more episodic (like X-Files with lawyers!). None of that is true, and all of that is true. It’s interesting, but not the way great TV is interesting. Better Call Saul reminds me more of Treme or John From Cincinnati: post-masterpiece meanders.
Maybe this week’s season finale will click all the chaos into place. For me, though, the defining moment came in the pentultimate episode. The least convincing and most spinoff-y part of this spinoff has always been Brother Chuck the Unelectric Man. The revelation that Saul—sorry, Jimmy—had a Bizarro-Successful Duplicate Alpha felt too easy, the upmarket cable-drama version of when every soap opera/comic book/Japanese videogame reveals the good guy has an evil long-lost brother/clone/alternate reality duplicate.
Michael McKean spent the season stranded in the gorgeously appointed shadows of his mansion-cavern. It seemed like Chuck’s role was to try keeping Jimmy on the straight and narrow—the Skyler to Jimmy’s Walt. But as the season progressed, it became clear that Chuck was actually the guy holding Jimmy (and THE SHOW) back. Chuck didn’t like Jimmy’s style; he didn’t respect his swagger; he didn’t like anything that makes Jimmy Saul. The show literalized that in this week’s ep, revealing Chuck was the guy who wouldn’t let Jimmy join his fancy law firm. This is the worst kind of surprise, in that it retroactively made Chuck even more annoying.
Better Call Saul was co-created/is vaguely co-run by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. Gould created the character of Saul in an all-time-great season 2 episode of Breaking Bad. Gilligan stuck around from Bad for this first season: He directed the first hour, co-wrote it with Gould. You could look at this first season as an extended hand-off from mentor to protége—Gilligan hasn’t taken a writing credit since that first hour, while Gould wrote and directed this weekend’s finale.
Is it possible to psychoanalyze some of that master-pupil relationship onto the Chuck-Jimmy relationship? I’m not saying Gilligan and Gould disagree; Gilligan is, by all accounts, the nicest guy to ever make a serialized descent-of-the-American-Dream tragedy. But is it possible to wonder if two similar-but-different men had similar-but-different perspectives on what this show should be? And don’t you wonder if the guy who first wrote the words “Better Call Saul!” maybe wanted a show called Better Call Saul to be about a guy named Saul?
This is where we need to discuss a fundamental prequel problem—what I have come to call the Wolverine Origins Conundrum.
After the first three X-Men movies, it was clear that everyone loved Wolverine, and clear that everyone would be very excited to see a movie about Wolverine. Wolverine was badass, and mysterious, and troubled by amnesia that led him to drink and rage. Who wouldn’t want to see a movie about that guy?
Except that instead, the studio made X-Men Origins: Wolverine—or Wolverine Origins as everyone accidentally calls it. Wolverine Origins is not a movie about Wolverine. Wolverine Origins is a movie about a pretty boring dude named James who cries when his dad dies and cries when his girlfriend dies. Like Saul’s Jimmy, James has an older brother who keeps holding him back. Like Saul’s Jimmy, James just wants to be a good guy and live a relatively peaceful life, which is a nice personal aspiration but is a horrible character goal when you’re making a movie that thinks it’s a superhero movie or you’re making a TV show that thinks it’s a descent-into-darkness character study.
There’s an idea that Better Call Saul is somehow intrinsically tragic because we know how Jimmy ends up. I get that, but it feels lazy. It locks the character on rails; the best parts of Saul feel very open-world. It also feels like a backhanded compliment: “Oh, Better Call Saul is way better after you watch Breaking Bad!”
But there is unmistakably a combustible element in Saul’s chemical compound. That element is Mike Ehrmantraut, played by the great Jonathan Banks with a stone face that suggests Buster Keaton playing a depressive Michael Mann safecracker. You might have thought that exporting Mike backwards into the prequel meant he’d be an essential part of Jimmy McGill’s transformation. Instead, Mike has spent this entire season off in his own cinematic universe. Everything about the show changes when he’s onscreen. The dialogue seeps away; the camera lens goes wide; the ******** attorney-speak fades into no-******** noir quietude.
Does Better Call Saul want to be a show about Mike? It was hard to get over that idea, after watching “Five-O.” Essentially a dead-sea-scroll episode that could’ve fit anywhere in Breaking Bad season 5.1, “Five-O” was the Mike equivalent of Gus Fring’s origin story in “Hermanos.” Everything about “Five-O” worked: the train-POV opening, the veterinarian crime doctor, the mean-streets murder of two dirty cops. It was a great episode of Better Call Saul that felt nothing like Better Call Saul.
In the same way, Mike’s first-day-on-the-job as a security badass on this week’s episode resulted in a couple great scenes that felt completely different from the scenes around it. Quick, which is more fun: The elaborate demi-corporate power struggles of whiteshoe law firm Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill, or Mike standing in a parking lot, waiting?
I’m not saying Better Call Saul should become Or Maybe Just Call Mike; I love Bob Odenkirk’s wild desperation, and only want to see more of it. But I do think that this is a show built on weird dissonance, between old and new, the Coenesque noir quirk of early Breaking Bad and the spaghetti western myth-making of late Breaking Bad, the urge to make a show about Saul Goodman and the urge to avoid ever actually getting to Saul Goodman. Just because the dissonance is fascinating doesn’t mean it’s not dissonance.
And what works about Mike on Better Call Saul is how the show keeps building out what we knew about him from the previous show. It doesn’t matter that we know that Mike winds up dead—just like it doesn’t matter that Ripley dies in Alien 3, or that Hannibal will almost certainly wind up in prison on Hannibal. With Mike, Better Call Saul is indulging its instincts towards mythmaking. “You thought Mike was cool on Breaking Bad?” the show seems to be saying. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” That’s a lot different from the pitch on the central character: “You thought Saul was cool? Meet Jimmy!”
I don’t know if the show needs to change; I’m okay with a weird mess of a show that occasionally coughs up an awesome episode. (In my ideal world, John from Cincinnati never ended.) But I do think the show needs to embrace its own weird wild heart. Dump Jimmy McGill; let Saul be Saul, so Saul can be Saul.
Also, kill Chuck.
Posted April 3 2015 — 11:51 AM EDT
What the hell is Better Call Saul? Remember back in the series premiere, when it was the kind of show where twin ginger skateboarders got their legs broken by Breaking Bad fan service while Michelle MacLaren swan-songed out of TV by shooting the New Mexico desert like Sergio Leone homaging Salvador Dali? Remember when Jimmy bought a billboard and the Kettlemans went camping and Better Call Saul transformed into a USA network wacky-procedural—Burn Notice with a sunburn, Royal Pains with more pain—complete with a wacky HQ and a wacky suit and a wacky emphasis on the wacky brother with his wacky psychological malady? Remember when Better Call Saul suddenly coughed up a great episode that felt entirely different from everything else and focused specifically on the guy who isn’t Saul?
This hasn’t been not entertaining. Lead producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould know how to make television. They’re working with talented actors and talented writers and a talented crew—mostly inherited from Breaking Bad. Thus, Better Call Saul is one of the most meticulous messes in recent TV history. There are awesome scenes that come out of nowhere and stay there. (Saul—sorry, Jimmy—chats with a separatist loon who already printed separatist currency.) Like its predecessor, the show has an eye for snazzy visuals. The sun doesn’t shine on Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque; it attacks.
But unlike its predecessor, the show has no obvious narrative progression. Nacho’s important, or he’s not; the Kettlemans are half the show, or maybe we should care about Sandpiper. There are flashbacks to Jimmy’s past where Bob Odenkirk is playing either 25 or 57—a savvy criminal or a neophyte screw-up. In the lead-up to Better Call Saul, there were theories that the show would be funnier than Breaking Bad (maybe a sitcom?) or more procedural than Breaking Bad (maybe The Good Wife for bad boys?) or more episodic (like X-Files with lawyers!). None of that is true, and all of that is true. It’s interesting, but not the way great TV is interesting. Better Call Saul reminds me more of Treme or John From Cincinnati: post-masterpiece meanders.
Maybe this week’s season finale will click all the chaos into place. For me, though, the defining moment came in the pentultimate episode. The least convincing and most spinoff-y part of this spinoff has always been Brother Chuck the Unelectric Man. The revelation that Saul—sorry, Jimmy—had a Bizarro-Successful Duplicate Alpha felt too easy, the upmarket cable-drama version of when every soap opera/comic book/Japanese videogame reveals the good guy has an evil long-lost brother/clone/alternate reality duplicate.
Michael McKean spent the season stranded in the gorgeously appointed shadows of his mansion-cavern. It seemed like Chuck’s role was to try keeping Jimmy on the straight and narrow—the Skyler to Jimmy’s Walt. But as the season progressed, it became clear that Chuck was actually the guy holding Jimmy (and THE SHOW) back. Chuck didn’t like Jimmy’s style; he didn’t respect his swagger; he didn’t like anything that makes Jimmy Saul. The show literalized that in this week’s ep, revealing Chuck was the guy who wouldn’t let Jimmy join his fancy law firm. This is the worst kind of surprise, in that it retroactively made Chuck even more annoying.
Better Call Saul was co-created/is vaguely co-run by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. Gould created the character of Saul in an all-time-great season 2 episode of Breaking Bad. Gilligan stuck around from Bad for this first season: He directed the first hour, co-wrote it with Gould. You could look at this first season as an extended hand-off from mentor to protége—Gilligan hasn’t taken a writing credit since that first hour, while Gould wrote and directed this weekend’s finale.
Is it possible to psychoanalyze some of that master-pupil relationship onto the Chuck-Jimmy relationship? I’m not saying Gilligan and Gould disagree; Gilligan is, by all accounts, the nicest guy to ever make a serialized descent-of-the-American-Dream tragedy. But is it possible to wonder if two similar-but-different men had similar-but-different perspectives on what this show should be? And don’t you wonder if the guy who first wrote the words “Better Call Saul!” maybe wanted a show called Better Call Saul to be about a guy named Saul?
This is where we need to discuss a fundamental prequel problem—what I have come to call the Wolverine Origins Conundrum.
After the first three X-Men movies, it was clear that everyone loved Wolverine, and clear that everyone would be very excited to see a movie about Wolverine. Wolverine was badass, and mysterious, and troubled by amnesia that led him to drink and rage. Who wouldn’t want to see a movie about that guy?
Except that instead, the studio made X-Men Origins: Wolverine—or Wolverine Origins as everyone accidentally calls it. Wolverine Origins is not a movie about Wolverine. Wolverine Origins is a movie about a pretty boring dude named James who cries when his dad dies and cries when his girlfriend dies. Like Saul’s Jimmy, James has an older brother who keeps holding him back. Like Saul’s Jimmy, James just wants to be a good guy and live a relatively peaceful life, which is a nice personal aspiration but is a horrible character goal when you’re making a movie that thinks it’s a superhero movie or you’re making a TV show that thinks it’s a descent-into-darkness character study.
There’s an idea that Better Call Saul is somehow intrinsically tragic because we know how Jimmy ends up. I get that, but it feels lazy. It locks the character on rails; the best parts of Saul feel very open-world. It also feels like a backhanded compliment: “Oh, Better Call Saul is way better after you watch Breaking Bad!”
But there is unmistakably a combustible element in Saul’s chemical compound. That element is Mike Ehrmantraut, played by the great Jonathan Banks with a stone face that suggests Buster Keaton playing a depressive Michael Mann safecracker. You might have thought that exporting Mike backwards into the prequel meant he’d be an essential part of Jimmy McGill’s transformation. Instead, Mike has spent this entire season off in his own cinematic universe. Everything about the show changes when he’s onscreen. The dialogue seeps away; the camera lens goes wide; the ******** attorney-speak fades into no-******** noir quietude.
Does Better Call Saul want to be a show about Mike? It was hard to get over that idea, after watching “Five-O.” Essentially a dead-sea-scroll episode that could’ve fit anywhere in Breaking Bad season 5.1, “Five-O” was the Mike equivalent of Gus Fring’s origin story in “Hermanos.” Everything about “Five-O” worked: the train-POV opening, the veterinarian crime doctor, the mean-streets murder of two dirty cops. It was a great episode of Better Call Saul that felt nothing like Better Call Saul.
In the same way, Mike’s first-day-on-the-job as a security badass on this week’s episode resulted in a couple great scenes that felt completely different from the scenes around it. Quick, which is more fun: The elaborate demi-corporate power struggles of whiteshoe law firm Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill, or Mike standing in a parking lot, waiting?
I’m not saying Better Call Saul should become Or Maybe Just Call Mike; I love Bob Odenkirk’s wild desperation, and only want to see more of it. But I do think that this is a show built on weird dissonance, between old and new, the Coenesque noir quirk of early Breaking Bad and the spaghetti western myth-making of late Breaking Bad, the urge to make a show about Saul Goodman and the urge to avoid ever actually getting to Saul Goodman. Just because the dissonance is fascinating doesn’t mean it’s not dissonance.
And what works about Mike on Better Call Saul is how the show keeps building out what we knew about him from the previous show. It doesn’t matter that we know that Mike winds up dead—just like it doesn’t matter that Ripley dies in Alien 3, or that Hannibal will almost certainly wind up in prison on Hannibal. With Mike, Better Call Saul is indulging its instincts towards mythmaking. “You thought Mike was cool on Breaking Bad?” the show seems to be saying. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” That’s a lot different from the pitch on the central character: “You thought Saul was cool? Meet Jimmy!”
I don’t know if the show needs to change; I’m okay with a weird mess of a show that occasionally coughs up an awesome episode. (In my ideal world, John from Cincinnati never ended.) But I do think the show needs to embrace its own weird wild heart. Dump Jimmy McGill; let Saul be Saul, so Saul can be Saul.
Also, kill Chuck.
calibeebee
Supporter
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^^ who wrote that article? It's absolutely brilliant. Very good points. Damn I wish I could write a movie or television review like that.
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I did not care for the article. Made good points about what's good about the show but a lot of the comparisons to other shows were so off to me.
Dude lost me bringing up Burn Notice and Treme but the point about it's the journey not the destination that we already not mattering was on point (bringing up Hannibal, Alien, etc.)
He seems to be impatient wanting Jimmy to become Saul already as he outright says in the end of the article. That'd be like if BB was a spinoff of another show and everybody was saying we want more Heisenberg and less Walt when this part of the show is about showing the transformation from one to the next. We need to see what makes Jimmy become Saul. That's part of the narrative that's being overlooked. Yes the overall pacing of the show may be weird in how this is being executed but it isn't difficult to recognize.
Dude lost me bringing up Burn Notice and Treme but the point about it's the journey not the destination that we already not mattering was on point (bringing up Hannibal, Alien, etc.)
He seems to be impatient wanting Jimmy to become Saul already as he outright says in the end of the article. That'd be like if BB was a spinoff of another show and everybody was saying we want more Heisenberg and less Walt when this part of the show is about showing the transformation from one to the next. We need to see what makes Jimmy become Saul. That's part of the narrative that's being overlooked. Yes the overall pacing of the show may be weird in how this is being executed but it isn't difficult to recognize.
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Wow.
His story is so tragic. And knowing where it ends just makes it crush your soul. I never felt this sorry for Walt in S1.
His story is so tragic. And knowing where it ends just makes it crush your soul. I never felt this sorry for Walt in S1.
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Michael Mckean putting on an acting clinic. Absolutely amazing.
I have a feeling Saul is gonna end up going rogue and teaming up with a Chemistry teacher and one of his students. He'll probably launder money for them.
I have a feeling Saul is gonna end up going rogue and teaming up with a Chemistry teacher and one of his students. He'll probably launder money for them.
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Potential cause of Chuck's bitterness of Jimmy
When Jimmy was in jail, Chuck is wearing a wedding ring here :
When Jimmy gets out of jail and receives his degree, Chuck no longer has a wedding ring :
When Jimmy gets out of jail and receives his degree, Chuck no longer has a wedding ring :
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calibeebee
Supporter
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INCEPTION. When he's wearing his ring, he's awake. He's in control of things. His brother is a screw up. Scenes where he's not wearing his ring are scenes where he's in a deep sleep/dreaming. Electricity hurts him, he's not working, his brother is a lawyer. All bizarre things. Leonardo Dicaprio was sent inside Chucks mind to extract secrets for a rival of HHM. IT"S SO SIMPLE!
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Expecting a great finale based off what Odenkirk said on a podcast that was posted in this thread. He said episode 6 and 10 were fantastic. If the finale is anything like Mike's episode we will all feel satisfied, except for the wait until S2 of course.
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I think he actually said episode 6 & 9. Not 10
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It makes no damn sense really. A completely baseless feeling.
So what yall saying Jimmy banged Chuck's wife?
If anywhere near true then Chuck has all the right in the world to screw over Jimmy. 
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Not sure if serious...
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The Kettlemans Voicemail >
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I'm saying that Chuck probably got divorced or something bad happened with their marrige. Maybe his wife dies from something related to electricity which causes Chuck to get this disease.. and hes taking out his anger on Jimmy.. i'm not saying that she cheated on him for jimmy btw.
Right here on reddit
You know how this show is.. all these small details can foreshadow something really important. just wanted to share it
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My mistake you are correct.
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Episode today right?
My body is ready
My body is ready
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I have a good feeling we'll get a Breaking Bad character in the finale tonight...
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Chuck wants no parts of Jimmy entertaining the thought of being a lawyer, let alone a lawyer at his firm.
True, but the school you attended speaks volumes about who you are, and what you can bring to the table. We can't pretend there aren't hack lawyers out there who passed the bar also. When it comes down to it, will you hire someone that graduated from Yale, Georgetown, or American Samoa?
What is there story? First I thought she was an old flame of Jimmy's, but now I'm thinking just childhood friends that never crossed that line.
Chuck is strictly book smart, and seems socially awkard. Could be that he is jealous of Jimmy's ability to command the room whenever he enters.
If Chuck had that ability along with his intelligence, man.
Well the irony is that if Chuck wouldve let him in on the civil suit then Jimmy probably turns into a straight arrow and never becomes Saul.
Cant believe the season is over next week. Thought this would be a 12 ep season.
I agree with this. Jimmy' s entire purpose seems to be to please Chuck and make him proud of him. All he wants is for his big bro to see him doing what is right, and respect him as a colleague. That is why he hid the newspaper from Chuck.
He really wants no parts of Jimmy at all
. What does it say about Chuck, that he would allow a potential $20mil to walk out the door just to prevent Jimmy from having a part in this lawsuit. As partners, wouldn't you question his judgement? Personal feelings aside, $20 mill plus the billable hours on a case like that shouldn't even be up for discussion.If I was Hamlin, I would go behind Chuck's back and get Jimmy on it ASAP. Not sure what kind of agreement these guys have about turning away business. But I think Hamlin would win that fight.
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I do as well. But I don't think it'll be a significant character. I was going to say Badger, but according to BCS timeline they should be in Highscbool.
sonoftony
Supporter
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I'd love to see how this plays off in the finale.
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Chuck wants no parts of Jimmy entertaining the thought of being a lawyer, let alone a lawyer at his firm.
True, but the school you attended speaks volumes about who you are, and what you can bring to the table. We can't pretend there aren't hack lawyers out there who passed the bar also. When it comes down to it, will you hire someone that graduated from Yale, Georgetown, or American Samoa?
What is there story? First I thought she was an old flame of Jimmy's, but now I'm thinking just childhood friends that never crossed that line.
Chuck is strictly book smart, and seems socially awkard. Could be that he is jealous of Jimmy's ability to command the room whenever he enters.
If Chuck had that ability along with his intelligence, man.
I agree with this. Jimmy' s entire purpose seems to be to please Chuck and make him proud of him. All he wants is for his big bro to see him doing what is right, and respect him as a colleague. That is why he hid the newspaper from Chuck.
He really wants no parts of Jimmy at all
If I was Hamlin, I would go behind Chuck's back and get Jimmy on it ASAP. Not sure what kind of agreement these guys have about turning away business. But I think Hamlin would win that fight.
Didn't Kim kiss Jimmy when she found out he passed the bar? Clearly there's more to them than just childhood friends. Kim is probably so driven by her career - she doesn't want anything serious. Would explain why Jimmy was going to buy the office and try to partner up with her. It'd be easier for them to couple up if they worked together.
As for Hamlin v. Chuck - I think you're underselling how much power and respect Chuck has in the firm. Everyone loves him. Outside of respect, if he decided to cash out on his equity, the company would have to shut down. That's a TON of power. Hamlin is not gonna choose Jimmy over Chuck. 20 mil is nothing compared to what Chuck brings to the table.
silverbackhoney
Banned
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One of Tuco's cousins is going to be in the episode.
The name gives it away. Somebody posted before that his name was mentioned by either Gus Fring or someone. Can't recall, but yeah.
The name gives it away. Somebody posted before that his name was mentioned by either Gus Fring or someone. Can't recall, but yeah.
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Probably not even highschool
