‘Better Call Saul’ Series Finale Review: The Time Machine

Games ‘Better Call Saul’ Series Finale Review: The Time Machine Erik Kain Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about video games, entertainment and culture. New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Aug 16, 2022, 06:00am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Better Call Saul Credit: AMC I write this review fresh from watching the series finale of Better Call Saul, an episode so profoundly powerful and well-crafted, I can think of few hours of television that compare. This was the perfect finale to a show that, with only the rarest of exceptions, has earned its place among the greatest of all time. By the end of ‘Saul Gone’ I found myself moved to tears, affected deeply and profoundly in ways I don’t yet fully understand.

As I type this now, I admit that feeling hasn’t yet passed. What a rare thing these days, in this crowded TV landscape littered with every imaginable kind of entertainment, to find oneself weeping over a keyboard. Sure, like everyone else I’m sad that this show has come to an end.

But it’s more than that. There was something about that final scene. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) sharing one last cigarette in the prison meeting room, film noire bands of light and shadow cascading down around them.

Everything black and white save for the flame of that shared cigarette, passed back and forth like a kiss, drawing us back to their strange romance that kindled, in fits and starts, all the way back in Season 1. Jimmy and Kim Credit: AMC And then Kim leaving the prison, strolling across the yard. Inmates playing basketball in the cold.

Jimmy, standing behind the fence, ever the joker. He makes pistols with his fingers, shoots and blows smoke from the barrel of his pointer finger. Kim just stares at him and then she walks away, and Jimmy looks on after her until he’s gone from the frame, lost behind the prison wall.

MORE FOR YOU ‘Demon Slayer’ Season 2 Finally Has An Actual 2021 Release Date Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Not A Sure Thing, Says Director ‘Genshin Impact’ Still Refuses To Increase Anniversary Rewards, Despite Fan Outcry I don’t know why I find that so damn sad, but I do. It’s just this terribly emotional moment and yet so still and so quiet and so utterly subdued. Jimmy got his comeuppance.

It’s what he deserved. I’m not sad about that. It’s what he wanted in the end: Not the deal he eked out of the Feds.

He wanted to confess, in the end, not to the state or the judge but to Kim. Finally, after so many years of running from himself and justifying his mistakes and rationalizing the terrible things he did to others, Jimmy owned up to what he had done. Kim just showed him the way.

That’s when Saul Goodman died and Jimmy came back to life. And sure, it’s a life in prison. 86 years instead of 7.

Locked up in the mountains and the cold instead of North Carolina in Wing D with his mint chocolate chip ice-cream. Still, it’s not so different a prison than Cinnabon and Omaha. At least here he can be at peace and be himself.

He can still bake bread in the prison kitchen and, if his ride on the prison bus is any indication, he’ll have plenty of friends inside. The inmates, once they recognized him, began a chant: “Better— stomp— Call— stomp stomp— Saul! Better— stomp— Call— stomp stomp— Saul!” Buy he’s Jimmy now, mostly. He heads to prison surrounded by admirers chanting his cheesy lawyer slogan against the hollered declarations of the guards.

That’s more than he had on the outside leading his dreary shadow of a life as Gene Takovic. Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman Credit: AMC Three Flashbacks There’s a lot to unpack in this episode, but I think we’ll talk about Jimmy’s three flashbacks here. All his ghosts of Christmas past.

Each of these three ghosts was with a man who had a major impact on the trajectory of Jimmy’s life—the influence of each person he flashes back to increasing in significance with each scene. And, of course, Saul played a part in each of their deaths, too. Mike Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut Credit: AMC The first flashback brings us back to Mike (Jonathan Banks) out in the desert with Saul after the cartel ambush.

Saul suggests they take the $7 million they retrieved for Lalo (Tony Dalton) and run. They can split the cash and make new lives in some far-off place. In retrospect, it might not have been a bad idea.

“It’s not ours,” Mike says. Saul suggests they could use the money to build a time machine. Then he asks Mike what era he’d go back to if he could travel in time.

Mike tells him he’d go back to the first day he took a bribe, implying heavily that he’d make a different choice. Then he’d jump ahead a few years to check on some people that needed checking on. For Mike, it’s all about the things he’d change in his personal life, not going to some exotic past era.

For Saul, though, it’s all money. He’d go back and get in on Berkshire Hathaway stock right when Warren Buffet, the Sage of Omaha, took over. For Saul, there’s no facing his regrets.

It’s just opportunity and money and all the things he uses to paper over his guilt and shame. Walter White Bryan Cranston as Walter White Credit: AMC The second flashback brings us to the room Walter (Bryan Cranston) and Saul shared briefly waiting for their separate escape routes while the vacuum man prepared their new identities. Walter is his weird, grouchy OCD self, tinkering with the water heater pilot light, pacing and making noise.

Once again, Saul asks the question: What time would you go back to if you could travel in a time machine. This gets right under Walter’s skin. He’s a scientist and a very literal-minded person and he gets agitated explaining that the laws of thermodynamics make time travel impossible.

What you’re getting at, he eventually snaps, is regrets. If you want to talk about regrets, let’s talk about regrets. So Saul asks him what his regrets are, and of course Walter doesn’t think about the way he ruined his family’s life or the many other lives he had a part in snuffing out, including his brother-in-law’s.

He doesn’t think about his actions at all. His regret is leaving Grey Matter, but even that isn’t his fault. Walter is angry and bitter, even now, that Elliott and Gretchen manipulated him out of the company and stole his inventions and made a fortune off of his work.

That’s not regret, Walter. That’s just pride and bitterness festering forever in that cold black thing you call a heart. Saul doesn’t bring up Warren Buffet this time.

He talks about Slippin Jimmy, his early persona, back in the day. When he was 20, he tried to do a “slip and fall” and cracked his knee on ice. It’s never been the same, he says.

“A slip and fall?” Walter asks. “Yeah, it’s how I put myself through bartending school,” Saul answers. “So,” Walter says, exasperated.

“So you were always like this. ” Once again, Saul ignores his actual regrets, his actual guilt, in favor of a stupid story about hurting his knee decades prior. Chuck Michael McKean as Chuck McGill Credit: AMC And so we come to the man who had the biggest and most crucial impact on Jimmy’s life, back before he ever donned the name Saul Goodman.

The man whose tragic death finally tipped Jimmy into taking on that persona, much like Kim’s leaving pushed him further into a life of crime and decadence. Chuck McGill (Michael McKeen) is in his dark house with his gas lamp, suffering from his EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) at least in his mind. Jimmy brings him supplies.

Food to put in his cooler. Ice. No Financial Times but maybe next time.

Chuck invites him to stick around and talk, but the talk quickly becomes bitter. Jimmy is defensive when his brother asks about his clients. But Chuck insists that each of them, no matter how crooked, deserves a vigorous defense in a court of law.

Then Chuck tells him: “Jimmy, if you don’t like where you’re heading, there’s no shame in going back and changing your path. ” “When have you ever changed your path?” Jimmy replies. “Hey think on it.

” “We always end up having the same conversation, don’t we?” Chuck says. Jimmy leaves, and Chuck picks up his lamp. And his copy of H.

G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The Capture And Death Of Saul Goodman, Attorney At Large Bob Odenkirk as Gene Credit: AMC There’s not much of a getaway for Gene, now living in Omaha not so far, one imagines, from Warren Buffet whose money he regrets not having a piece of so badly.

He makes it home to his apartment and gets some money he’s stashed there, but the cops show up outside so he flees out a back window. At first he’s confident that this isn’t such a big deal. That all disappears when he sees the police helicopter.

Soon, he’s hiding in a dumpster trying to call the vacuum man, but the cops find him and take him to jail. Gene’s first call from jail is to the Cinnabon telling them they’ll need a new manager, which is nice of him. His second is to his old colleague Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) who he wrangles up as his advisory counsel.

Soon, he and Oakley are facing down a room full of federal lawyers. The Feds have wracked up two lifetimes worth of charges against him, but Saul isn’t worried. And he’s not interested in their offer of 30 years behind bars.

He invites in the widow of Hank Shrader (Dean Norris) and we get our first major cameo of the finale: Marie Shrader (Betsy Brandt). She’s been watching through the two-way mirror and she comes into the room and lays into Saul. So Saul lays it on thick.

He gives his whole BS spiel about how he was forced to work for Walter White at the point of a gun. He regales the lawyers with tales of murder and fear. “Do you think you’ll get a jury to buy that?” they ask him, disbelievingly.

“I only need one,” he replies. And so the wheeling and dealing begins. He gets them down to 7.

5 years, even picks the low-security prison he wants to stay at, and the wing of the prison he wants to stay in. But he pushes his luck when he requests a tub of ice cream each Friday. He tells them he’ll sweeten the deal if they give him what he wants.

He’ll tell them heretofore unknown information about a high profile missing person’s case involving an attorney. “You’re talking about Howard Hamlin?” they say, laughing. This is when he learns about Kim’s admission, and this revelation changes everything.

Betsy Brandt as Marie Schrade Credit: AMC He gets his deal, but when he discovers that Kim is facing a civil suit from Howard’s (Patrick Fabian) widow, something clicks. Maybe he remembers that phone call. Maybe he’s thinking about how he petulantly told her to turn herself in when she told him to.

Whatever the case, he’s thinking about Kim now instead of just himself. And so when he heads into the court room—having told the Feds that Kim is involved to ensure she shows up—instead of repeating his BS story to the judge, he tells her the truth. He says that he was indispensable to Walter White’s operations; that if he hadn’t gotten involved, Walter would have been dead or in jail within a month.

Countless lives would have been saved. And he made millions doing it. He confesses, but he’s confessing for Kim and for himself and for his brother.

He’s taking his lumps at long last. He’s putting the money back in the cash register. He doesn’t stop with Walter White.

He talks about the courage Kim had to move on after the tragic death of Howard, and how he was the one who was a coward and ran away—running away from his guilt and shame as he always has, always moving forward into distraction and denial, masking his true feelings with piles of money, cheap hookers and lots and lots of stuff. Then he talks about Chuck and how he hurt his brother and how his actions led directly to his brother’s suicide. Finally, finally he confronts his actions.

And it’s not performative, though he wanted Kim to be there to hear it. He needed to say it to her in a way that mattered, finally paying the price for all that he had done. “That wasn’t a crime,” Bill tells him when Jimmy walks back to his seat.

“Yes it was,” Jimmy says. His most terrible crime and his biggest regret. We know exactly what Jimmy would do if he had a time machine, and it doesn’t involve Berkshire Hathaway.

There are so many brilliant moments throughout this episode. When Jimmy first brings up Chuck in the courtroom, the shot pulls back to an exit sign above the courtroom and we hear that old familiar buzz—the infuriating crackle of electricity that gnawed so horrifically at the elder McGill. In another scene, we see Kim sitting at the back of the courtroom framed in metal from one of the benches or desks.

It looks like crosshairs, almost, but Kim is not in their center. She’s “out of the crosshairs” it seems. Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler Credit: AMC I wrote a predictions piece for this episode and published it yesterday morning, in which I discussed possible outcomes for the series finale.

I was right and I was wrong, as is so often the case with predictions. This show isn’t exactly unpredictable in that they set things up carefully and it’s not always hard to see what’s coming. But the writing is so damn good that you often only guess at a piece of it, which is certainly the case here.

I thought that Saul would get caught and go to prison and on that front I was absolutely correct. I also thought that we had wrapped up our Kim storyline, and that Jimmy and Kim would not reunite. On that front, I was only partially correct.

Kim’s story was, in many ways, wrapped up last week , with a powerful performance from Seehorn that I had to write about separately in a follow-up piece to my review . But just because her story was largely over, didn’t mean that the two wouldn’t reunite. And they didn’t reunite like many hoped, in some rekindling of their romance.

Nor did they meet across prison glass like a normal visitor might. She showed up as his lawyer and they got that one, final beautiful scene together. They joke around.

“You had them down to 7. 5 years,” Kim says, disbelieving. Now it’s 86.

“But hey, with good behavior. . .

” Jimmy says. He’s Jimmy again now. He cast off Saul in the courtroom, after his confession about Chuck.

I expected to see Saul Goodman in court, but I didn’t expect to see Jimmy McGill. I didn’t expect him to weasel out a good deal and then abandon it, either. And I didn’t expect that the final moments of this brilliant show would be so powerful and profound and heartbreaking.

But maybe I should have. I’ll miss Better Call Saul and I’ll certainly miss writing about it and talking about it with all of you. Definitely stop by my Twitter feed or my Facebook page to let me know what you thought of this series finale.

Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman Credit: AMC And if you enjoy these reviews, follow me here at this blog also . I’ll be writing weekly recap/reviews of House Of The Dragon on HBO (starting this coming Sunday, August 21st) and The Rings Of Power on Amazon Prime (beginning on Friday, September 2nd). And many other shows, movies and video games as well! Thanks for reading.

I may have more to say about this finale after I sit with it a bit longer. What a masterpiece. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have created something so incredibly special with this prequel/spinoff.

I never expected it to be this good. I’m not sure if it’s better than Breaking Bad, but in its own way it has become every bit as good. Follow me on Twitter .

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