Has Better Call Saul lived up to expectations?
|
Version 0 of 1. Spoiler warning: this blog refers to season one, episodes one to six. We’re just past the halfway mark in Better Call Saul’s first season, a good point to check in with the ongoing adventures of Jimmy McGill, the fast-talking lawyer who will one day be advising Walter White on the best way to launder his meth-dollars. Has the show lived up to the expectations of Breaking Bad fans? That depends on what you were expecting. When Vince Gilligan announced that he had plans to extend the Breaking Bad world with a spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk there were mixed reactions – especially to the idea that it would be a half-hour sitcom, as he first suggested. Now that it’s here, you can see some of the DNA of this concept at work: Saul – AKA Jimmy – is a funny guy. But Better Call Saul is not a comedy; more a drama with comic moments. It’s also a much less high-concept proposition than Breaking Bad: a character piece, rather than a drama propelled by the far-fetched idea of a man with terminal cancer trying to make a lot of money in the drug business before he dies. “How did you know I’d do it?” The exchange between Mike and Jimmy after episode six’s “bump ’n’ dump” Marx Bros coffee cup routine is a good moment to unpick. Jimmy (it’s still weird to call him “Jimmy” and not “Saul”, isn’t it?) was reluctant to play along with Mike’s odd request. Pouring coffee over a cop in an interrogation room was not quite what Jimmy had in mind when he decided to remodel himself after good-guy TV lawyer Matlock. Mike refused to tell Jimmy why he was being questioned by the police so Jimmy pumped the detectives for info, getting them to spell out the case from the start. They are investigating three murders: Mike’s son Matty, also a cop, and another two detectives from the same precinct. Jimmy picks up on the subtext: Mike’s the prime suspect in the double homicide. And so, with all the charm of a natural born grifter, Jimmy plays along with the coffee ruse. Mike steps in to help clean up the coffee mess – and neatly liberates the detective’s notebook from his jacket pocket in the same moment. We’ve seen Jimmy pulling these kind of stunts through the series – teaming up with the skater twins who try to rip him off, the flashback to his fake Rolex scam, the billboard “rescue” – and we know the kind of skill-set that Mike will employ in Breaking Bad (how to clean up an OD scene, the best way to bug a house, an intimate knowledge of the best places to bury bodies in the ABQ desert). So when Jimmy asks how Mike knew he’d play along with his coffee gambit, his silence says it all: they’re a good fit. What this conversation in Jimmy’s beaten-up car gives us is a signpost for a possible direction for the rest of the series – watching them team up. They’re a good odd couple – the ex-dirty cop and the conman turned lawyer, both pushing against the pull of operating in the margins of the law. Related: Better Call Saul: how to enjoy AMC's spin-off without watching Breaking Bad Better Call Saul has also done a good job of establishing Jimmy’s world in his pre-Saul Goodman life: bringing us brother Chuck with his oddball “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”, and an ongoing rivalry with Chuck’s shady-smooth corporate lawyer partner Howard Hamlin. And then there’s Hamlin’s junior associate Kim. It’s Kim who’s given us a different side to Jimmy – they share cigarettes, he paints her nails at the nail bar – that suggests a level of intimacy much more interesting than a simple romance. Are they exes? Friends with occasional benefits? (Will we ever get to hear Jimmy’s “sex robot voice” in context? Actually, never mind.) The question is: where are they all in Saul’s life? Has he cut all ties with this past by the time we first meet him in Breaking Bad? Does everyone cut him off when he decides to change his name and become Saul Goodman for good? Or did we just never get to see Saul doing anything that wasn’t related to Walt and Jesse’s story? The show has the freedom to zip around in the timeline – basically, as far back as the wig department will allow. We’ve seen Jimmy pulling street hustles in his scamming days, and also his life after Walt, working in a Cinnabon store. The black-and-white fast-forward to Saul’s post-Breaking Bad life as “Gene”, working in a Cinnabon, suggests that he is totally alone in the future. Chuck is not coming to bail him out this time. If Better Call Saul is “about” anything, it seems to be about Jimmy becoming Saul: giving into his darker, more freewheeling side that plays fast and loose with the edges of the law; cooking up plausible scenarios to present to a judge or the police. Is this enough of a plot? Is too much of Better Call Saul’s impact (Tuco showing up, Mike sitting like a hibernating bear in the car park booth for the first few episodes) based on an assumption that the audience will have watched Breaking Bad? And does that matter? It would be interesting to know if there’s anyone watching Better Call Saul who hasn’t seen Breaking Bad. In some ways it’s quite refreshing to watch a show that doesn’t have a big arc running through it – almost a throwback to a more 1980s style of quirky, goofy characters (“Meet Jimmy. He’s a lawyer! But which side of the law is he on?!”) . But does that make the pace too slow? Do you have to already care about Saul to watch Jimmy? |