Adios Mi Amigo — A Tale of Perfected Fiction

Better Call Saul. Season six. Please watch it before reading. Please. Now on with the spoilers.

There are few pleasures in this world. No matter how much I try to expand horizons or get into a new hobby or a particular film or television show, the greats keep coming back. They keep coming back hard. And they succeed. One of these things is Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul. Now, I’ve already talked about how this show is better than its predecessor: Breaking Bad. And now this show has reached its finish, this is still a hundred percent true. So much care is put into every single frame and every camera movement. Each actor is on top of their game. The music is well-fitting and perfectly timed. I’m going to go through each character and take a look at where they ended up, what I liked, and what I didn’t. I also would have cut the final episode a tad earlier but we’ll get to that later.

A quick shout-out to the small cameos, mostly towards the end of the season, from Breaking Bad characters that were not major Better Call Saul characters like Walt, Jesse, Marie, etc. Although it is fairly evident that a few of them have aged (appropriately I might add) over the years long gap since the last episode of Breaking Bad, it isn’t too off-putting and all knock it straight out of the park like they had never left.

First off is one of the newest characters in Jeff, the man who recognises Saul in Omaha. I generally am not a fan of recasts as it usually throws the show off a little and can prevent you from getting fully immersed but sometimes they are simply unavoidable. In this case, it worked out pretty well. The original actor may have also done a good job but Pat Healy played the character brilliantly. Every scene in season six, the character was permanently on edge and Healy accomplished this with his wonderful eyebrows giving that constant state of worry the punctuation point to his performance. Although it went on for a little longer than I hoped, the post-Breaking Bad story was incredibly fun and a great look into Saul’s post-Walter life.

Stacey Ehrmantraut was always going to be a big favourite of mine simply due to the fact that she is performed by Kerry Condon. Unfortunately, we did not get to see very much of Stacey in the last season but overall, I do think the character requires a shout-out as she is not simply just a thing for Mike to worry about but actually has her own storylines and character arcs (although a little limited due to the show’s focus) that revolves around her family. This is one of the characters I would have loved to have seen more from but understandably you can only fit so much into the show.

Then we have Saul’s brother, Chuck McGill. Again, not much in this season after he died at the end of season three but he still pops up every now and again, and this season in particular we get, including some with other characters, a flashback scene where they talk about regrets. It’s more done for theme than the actual story but fits wonderfully. I was actually surprised how much this season was about Chuck with only having one flashback scene in the very last episode. Every small moment of reflection for Saul was to realise how much he missed his brother and how it was his fault for most of the unfortunate events happening to other people around him. Chuck was the ghost of the last season more so than seasons four and five.

Howard Hamlin was a big shock as to both what happened to him and how the season’s and show’s story was heavily influenced by him. There was the cute, but horrid, harassment of Howard by Saul and then later both Saul and Kim with various things starting as pranks eventually leading up to a horrendous plan that basically left him where his career could collapse at any second. And then Lalo happened. It was one of those scenes where you first see it and don’t believe it as these characters had never interacted and I suspected before the season that they never would. But there they would. Then I expected for him to be knocked out or told to run out the house. But instead we got one of the best mid-season cliffhangers ever. I was so glad that I binged the entire season where I didn’t have to wait a month or two to be able to see the new episodes. But it still very much made the impact it wanted. It would have been nice to explain a little more as to why both Saul and Kim went on the tirade of harassment against Howard before he got shot in the head by Lalo but it still provided some great scenes and a wonderful point in the story for Saul and Kim to develop their characters some more.

One of the returning characters that had a fair amount of screen time was Gus Fring. It was always going to be hard to develop a character that exists not to develop themselves but the others around them but the last season has managed to help a little bit with it. Gus has always been a particularly cautious character and although there is little difference in his caution in this show compared to Breaking Bad, this last season gave Gus a reason to double down on his cautiousness and be extremely careful in who he trusts. Again, Lalo is the one to push this character further as he hunts down Fring and his secret after the failed attempt to kill Lalo at the end of season five. Because of this setup, we see Fring become more and more cautious and more and more measures were put in place to protect him and potentially catch Lalo. In the end, Lalo manages to lure Fring out from his hiding place and after nearly dying, Fring continues his high cautiousness. It’s a storyline that isn’t that necessary for Fring’s character but simply adds to his character for future rewatches of either or both shows.

Lalo Salamanca, as we’ve already described, is the most influential character of this last season. The whole season for Lalo is one of revenge. He escapes the attempt on his life and spends the rest of the season planning to kill Fring whilst also exposing his plan to build a secret meth lab to Don Eladio back in Mexico. Lalo is that pure embodiment of chaos that I talked about in an article about villains in film and television. He is a little less like the typical chaos villain, in that he had an actual plan, but still commands the scene and reduces characters to still and mutes messes of human beings just because of the chaos and destruction that he can cause on a whim. The actor for Lalo, Tony Dalton, has that smile that just simply puts the cherry on top of the character. I wasn’t expecting the character to be this important when he first showed up in the show, and I initially wasn’t too fond of the character, but he proved to be a wonderful foe for many of the characters in the show and a terrifying presence for the audience.

I love Nacho. And I think the majority of the viewers do too. He’s one of those characters that every decision from him is entirely wrong but you still want him to succeed in his endeavours and are absolutely devastated when he fails or is set back heavily. I kinda knew the season pretty had to end with Nacho dead in some way, but I was still hopeful for the real possibility that he simply goes to jail and lives in relative comfort compared to death. Unfortunately the show dashed my hopes only a few episodes in, but even so I did not expect the manner in which they would do so. Nacho whilst on the run from Lalo, expects to be helped by Fring and his men but he eventually realises that is not going to happen. He agrees to die in order to make sure his dad will be safe and really, there’s no running away from this without his dad getting in some kind of danger. What I didn’t expect was the turn in the end. He takes a piece of glass without anyone knowing but instead of attempting to kill Hector Salamanca, which is what I expected him to do, he stabs Bolsa and takes his gun before choosing his own death and killing himself with the gun. It was going to be an emotional and shocking scene without that last twist but with it, it gained a ton more emotion and very much left me in complete shock for a number of minutes. I’ll probably end up saying this for every actor now, but the performance by Michael Mando was sublime. The character embodied the idea of regret, which later returns as a main theme for Saul in the finale, but also the idea of loving one’s family no matter what, which, although something I don’t agree with personally, is an incredibly romantic idea and put forward beautifully.

Mike Ehrmantraut was my personal favourite character in Breaking Bad and has now taken Kim’s place as my favourite character in Better Call Saul (we’ll discuss why later). He is the same grumpy grandpa from Breaking Bad but we simply get to see more of him. To be honest, there’s actually not that much to say about Mike. He doesn’t change a ton, similar to Fring, in this series but the character is still prominent and continuing the things I loved about him in Breaking Bad that simply getting more Mike is an absolute blessing.

As I mentioned earlier, Kim Wexler was my favourite character in Better Call Saul until the last season. Most of it was fine, but it was primarily the future/post-Breaking Bad stuff that had really placed her into second behind Mike. Throughout the entirety of the last season I was unsure where they were taking her until she left Saul claiming that they were both incredibly bad for each other and that only separate they may survive life. It’s a nice storyline but I feel it was a little undermined by the fact that we know where Saul is going to end up. But that actually only strengthens the later storyline for Saul. Future Kim confused me a little bit. She got this new life with the new husband in Florida and a bizarre new haircut. But she was always miserable. I know that’s kind of the point, to have her realise that Jimmy was very much the only person she needed no matter how destructive they are for each other. But I did feel it took away from her as a character and made her more of a tool to improve Saul’s character and storyline in this last season. Still, second best is pretty damn good.

Then we have Jimmy/Saul/Gene. And those three really are separate. Saul and Gene represent the two extremes of Jimmy but they never really fully give him the life he needs or wants but the best of both as Jimmy, even with his flaws, gives him the full life and love that he both needs and wants.This ties into what I mentioned in the intro where I would have cut the show a tad earlier than they ended up doing. When the two lawyers are arguing after Jimmy admits to everything and even says that without him Walter White would’ve likely been dead or in jail a lot earlier, Jimmy starts staring at Kim who is sat at the back of the courtroom. They both smile at each other in an instance of ‘Jimmy is back’. There’s no more Saul, no more Gene. Only Jimmy. And I think that would have been the perfect end to the show. Now, the ending is still great and the final shot is done with great expertise like all shots in the show, but I would have loved to have seen my variation and see how it would compare. The main downside to this is that the Chuck flashback, one that is quite important even if it is short, would be removed. But you could easily just place it in another part of the episode and it would likely still work very well. And perhaps some of the scenes of Jimmy in prison and sharing one last cigarette with Kim could be interspersed with that stare before cutting to black. Either way, they did Jimmy and the show justice with the ending and perfectly recaptured Jimmy after he realised that it was who he was meant to be and that he simply needed to accept that.

A quick shout-out to the direction and cinematography for this show. As I mentioned in the intro every shot, every frame feels perfectly chosen. It’s always nice to see directors and directors of photography actually put effort into every single part of the film or television series.

So yeah, this is the best television show of all time. That’s it. That’s the statement. Although I had a few complaints about the last season, and I suspect a couple if I looked back at the earlier seasons, it still is the best television show I have ever watched. And if you haven’t watched it yet, first why are you reading this? But second, where the hell have you been?

S’all good, man.

-Boad