With each successive season of Breaking Bad, one could clearly she the
steady progression of Walter White into the monster that became known as
Heisenberg. Even as the third season of Better
Call Saul, Vince Gilligan's increasingly brilliant prequel series, it is a
lot more difficult to see the changed that will turn Jimmy McGill into Saul
Goodman, Walter's long suffering consigliere.
What is clear is that one can
clearly see Jimmy trying to rise above the mess that he is being dragged into,
and with each successive episode, we can see him sinking a little deeper. This
season, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk, who continues to astonish with each new episode)
has now reached a breaking point with his older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean,
demonstrating another level of Emmy worthiness with each season) After going so
far as to Scotchguard his entire house in order to get Jimmy to confess to a
crime critical to the later episodes of Season 2, Chuck demonstrated that, even as far
psychologically gone as he may be, he is as mentally sharp and manipulative as
his younger brother will be one day. By using a tape recording, he managed to
manipulate his assistance, which led almost like dominoes falling to his
brother throwing all caution to the wind, angrily confessing everything,
something that will almost surely land him prison. (The viewer, of course,
knows he'll walk away, but it sure looks bad.)
Things are in an even darker place
for Mike (Jonathan Banks, stoically outstanding) who in the last moments of his
storyline, where he was about to assassinate someone in the Salmanaca clan,
when he was stopped and told he was under surveillance. He's spent the last two
episodes trying to figure out who and why is doing this, which has led to long
stretches of silence, eventually leading to the fast food restaurant, Los
Pollos Hermanos. This led to a very well-done sequence where Jimmy went into
the restaurant, spent five minutes watching a certain man, and trying to find
something he couldn't, all leading up to a brief moment where he interacted
with the head of the chain. In any other series, we could see this as just
another excuse to bring a Breaking Bad favorite,
but Gus Fring is no ordinary character, even within a universe of memorable
ones, and to see him in the opening minutes, you almost forgot how miserable he
made Walter's life. Just for a moment. I'm sure we'll be reminded of this soon
enough, considering Giancarlo Esposito has agreed to come back.
Better
Call Saul is one of the more astonishing series to come over the last few
years. It's still nowhere near the level as Breaking
Bad is, but considering that the series has been ranked by experts as one
of the five greatest shows ever created in TV history, nothing could, even if
it came from Vince Gilligan. But what the series manages to do is something
that very few prequels can manage: it makes you forget the ultimate fate of the
characters involved. And it works a lot better as a character study than so
many of these kinds of shows manage to do. The performances are universally
superb, and the writing is so good, it makes you even more amazed how many
sequences there are that are just long stretches with no dialogue. I don't know
how long Better Call Saul will be on
the air, or what the future is for so many of the other characters we never saw
Jimmy/Saul with (what will happen with Kim, Jimmy long-suffering legal
colleague/girlfriend?), but even if we know, from the black and white sequences
that open each season, what Jimmy's inevitable fate is, you find yourself
hoping and praying for Saul Goodman, a man you never thought was worthy of it,
and maybe didn't think so himself.
My score: 4.5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment