The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Better Call Saul' Season 6, Episode 13 Recap

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Ben and Joanna begin their review of the series finale of 'Better Call Saul' by sharing their individual podcast preparation rituals and analyzing the episode's promo art. They then discuss Gene's escape attempt, his transformation back into Saul Goodman once he's in jail, and Marie Schrader's cameo (10:24). Next, they go over Gene's cinematic scene with the prosecuting lawyers and use callbacks from the series to talk about the reappearance of Kim Wexler and Jimmy's climactic trial/confession scene (26:40). After the break, they dive deep into the trio of flashbacks that feature Mike, Walter, and Chuck, while thoughtfully evoking storyline comparisons to H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine" and Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (41:18). They then pivot to final scenes between Jimmy and Kim, and theorize possible future scenarios for Wexler's character (1:08:34). They end the pod by comparing the 'Better Call Saul' finale to some of their other favorites, and offer their final thoughts on the series (1:25:26). Hosts: Ben Lindbergh and Joanna Robinson Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? Are you tuning in to the Challenge USA on CBS? Well, tune in to me, Tyson Apostle, as I break down each and every episode with my co-host, Amelia Weddemeier. I'm also a contestant on the show, which gives you all the insider scoop. Amelia, how stoked are you to do this? Tyson, I'm freaking excited. I cannot wait to sit my butt down every single week to watch the show, then come here and recap it with you on The Ringer Reality TV podcast. Welcome back into the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson and joining me now fresh off a shift in the prison bakery.

It's Ben Lindberg. Hi, Ben. How are those loaves doing? Joanna, I would take the time machine back to April and experience this season anew with you. Oh. Yeah. Before we started recording, you're just talking about how sad we are, the podcast has to end along with the series finale of Better Call Saul, which is what we're here to talk about. And I guess I'm just going to say, before we get into all of that, Ben knows already how much I've loved doing the show with him.

But I've loved doing the show. I've loved the emails we've gotten from you all listening has made it just part of this big conversation that I really loved. Chris Sutton, who's been our producer, has done an incredible job. So it's just been a real joy and a treat and delight. Yeah. When Chris just told us to have a good pod for the last time, at least talking about Better CallSall right before we started recording. got a little choked up. Me too.

Almost like the last Kim and Jimmy scene. It's tough. I mean, when I watched the finale, I felt like the series and the larger Albuquerque journey

weren't quite over because we still had a podcast to record. And now we're here with one last job. So it's starting to sink in. I'm excited to discuss Saul gone with you,

but the melancholy is creeping in. I'm breaking sad suddenly. Oh, no. Yeah. Our bittersweet ending of a podcast. I know. Yeah. End of a series.

End of a franchise for now at least. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, my gosh, when Breaking Bad began in 2008, I was still in school. I hadn't met my wife. I don't think I was a published writer, let alone podcaster.

There barely were podcasts. It was just a different world for me and for you. And I imagine most of our listeners. And this TV world that Gilligan and Gould created, that was a constant. So it's tough to let go, even if it feels like the right time. I also wasn't in this profession yet. And I don't think I started watching Breaking Bad until, I think season four is when I started.

So shout out to my friend Seth Freilich. I texted him last night and reminded him that he's the one who told me. He's like, Joanna, why aren't you watching Breaking Bad? It's ridiculous that you're not. So thank you for starting at this. You weren't always like this. People can change. Yeah.

Wow, this is the theme of both Westworld and Better Call Sol's week. So let me just say right now, Better Call Saul did it way better. Okay. So last thing I'll say in that sort of macro sense, I guarantee is not the last time Ben Lindberg and I will be covering a show on the Prestige TV podcast feed. Fingers crossed. If you have any, I'm just going to, I'm just going to fully Saul Goodman and say it with complete gusto.

Imagine me in a shiny suit. Like, if you have any thoughts or feelings about a show we should cover. that feels like it fits the Prestige TV umbrella, which is a wide umbrella, and fits like what you like to hear us talk about. Listen, Kim Waxler lives at Gmail.com is going to be alive and well, but I will still be reading your email,

so you can send suggestions, and then we'll see about making our case. But we're going to press pause for a little bit. Just in a larger PrestiGTV podcast feed, wrapping up Westworld this week, wrapping up Better Call Saul. There's some other stuff going on. We've got coverage of industry.

is happening since Sopranos Hall of Fame. But for me, I imagine you won't cure me for a little while on here because little shows like Rings of Power and House of the Dragon are going to be sucking away my TV watching time. I'll be covering those over on the Ringerverse and

trial by content and elsewhere. But I love this feed and I love covering these shows, especially love covering them with Ben. So I assure you I will be back. But here we are. Talk about. Season 6, episode 13, Sal Gone, written and directed by Peter Gould.

A long runtime, 68 minutes, I think is what I heard somewhere. Yeah. Should we start with this promo art, which is only we were doing the last couple weeks. This is a really fun one, if you guys haven't seen it. The poster promo art for this episode is Sal Gone, is Blackfield, and then it's the stylized yellow scales of justice from the logo without the rest of the logo. So Saul is literally gone from this and only justice remains. What's your interpretation of this image? Well, the scales have tipped all the way over, right? Far enough that he finally made the right choice, it seems like, in the end. So it took a lot for him to get there,

but he's not trying to do the balancing act anymore. He's not trying to juggle multiple personas, at least to the same extent. There's still some Saul there, as we will discuss. But he's back to being Jimmy and maybe he's finished with committing crimes at least at the level that he has been to this point. Yeah, at least at that like very damaging level to other people. And I like, we'll talk about this a little bit more, but something that Peter Gould has said in a couple different places is this idea that he sees Jimmy McGill as a creature of the legal system as the phrase that he used. And so this idea that he ends incarcerated, that, you know, We end with a courtroom scene, all this sort of stuff, felt very important to the story they were trying to tell about this guy.

So, you know, the fact that the scales of justice are here is part of all of that. Saul's gone. It's all gone, man. Yep. So usually, this is coming to you all a little early, right? We're recording this on a Tuesday morning. Usually we get to do these cold takes on a Wednesday morning. So we're here to give you a lukewarm take.

Not a piping hot one, but a lukewarm take. on a Tuesday morning, just because it's a finale. We figured let's not drag it out. Let's get it out there. That means we haven't had sort of the luxurious opportunity to dig into. And there haven't been a ton, a ton, a ton of interviews or et cetera. But Ben, last night you told me what your usual tradition for getting prepped for this podcast was.

And I found it really charming. And now I'm going to make you tell all of our listeners what it is. Yeah. Well, after I watched the episode for the first time before a rewatch, I go on a late night, middle of the night bike ride. That's my post-s-sal tradition to prep for this podcast. And I listen to the watch. I listen to the Better Call Saul insider pod. I digest what I have seen. I mull it over. As I am peddling, I periodically pull out my phone to try to touch something in the notes app without crashing that I remember that I want to say in the upcoming episode. But I tend to go just in the

the dead of night under cover of darkness. I live in Manhattan all the way west over by the Hudson River, and there's a bike path that goes all the way up town and all the way downtown, and I just ride down to the bottom of the island and back again. And if I time it right, I can just listen to Saul all the way up and down. And it's just sort of a serene, reflective Saul time. And I'm going to miss it. I had to go in the morning this time because the insider pod wasn't putting. It was posted immediately after the episodes, so it wasn't quite deserted and it wasn't quite dark. But I really value that time because how do you digest the ending of a story so monumental in less than a day, even if you've had some time to prepare for it and you know it's coming, but it's still a lot to chew on.

And there's still so much to discuss. And I think they wanted it to feel earned. And in the end, I think it did. It was measured and restrained and subtle, as always, no Nazis or machine guns. just Jimmy and Kim the way it was meant to be. Oh, my God. I also love this finale. I loved this finale.

This is, like, going to go up there in the pantheon of, like, finalees that I already, so my process is, you know, listening to the podcast, reading the interviews, and then occasionally I'll rewatch an episode. I've mentioned them here or there. Like, and I have the advantage of her Ben in that I'm on the West Coast, so the episode drops earlier for me than it does for him. He has less time to, uh, to cram than I do. But also I'm nocturnal.

It's true. It makes up for it. too. But so, yeah, I usually watch a couple episodes. And so I watched Bagman, which we get like sort of a snippet of in this episode with the the mic flashback that opens the episode. I watched Gliding Overall, which is the Breaking Bad episode where the prison massacre occurs that is referenced by Saul. I'll call him, Saul in that scene. Saul in his showdown with Marie. Wild. And I watched a bit of winner.

this is actually a listener's suggestion. I watched a bit of winner, which is a season four finale, which is when Saul is sitting on a scholarship committee, and the scholarship committee sort of rejects a young woman out of hand because she was a shoplifter, and Saul gives her this, like, or Jimmy at that point, gives her this really upsetting speech about how they'll never give you another chance to be anything other than you are,

so you'll just have to take it and, you know, make them regret it and all this sort of stuff. And that was really, instructive as we talk about an episode that has to do with this question the show's been asking this season, which is like, can someone ever change? Is he always going to be this guy? Right. And if he's going to change, what's it going to take to get him there? So I went back to Granite State and Fulina again, just for the compare and contrast. Very good. Very good. Yeah, I had just rewatched those, so I let them play. But yeah, those are really good ones to watch. So we are going to break it all down, relative to. in order, I'm just going to save the trio of meetings for like one section. So we're going to start at the beginning which is Gene on the Run.

Comedy legend, Carol Burnett, say, like, get him. Yep. And he winds up in a dumpster, like the cockroach that Lalo says he is. How did this opening work for you, Ben Lindberg? You think there's going to be a big

manhunt, right? There's this pulse pounding music. There's almost the North by Northwest sequence with the helicopter. And then he just spills the diamonds, which while I was watching, you can see that he leaves the open. I mean, I had the same. No, why would you do?

Of course, but it has to happen, right? And then he wrestles with the clamshell packaging like Larry David on curb. And then he gets caught in a dumpster. As you said, like the cockroach, another callback to season one in the dumpster where he dives to find the shredded sandpiper files. So that was one of the Mr. X in this episode. I think if you are expecting the APB and everyone hunting down Saul and he's going to be on the run from the cops and it's going to be adrenaline inducing and maybe it was in a way, but not in that way, in sort of that stereotypical series finale way. It still had high stakes, but they were emotional stakes, right? And ultimately, it wasn't about avoiding punishment, but embracing it, really. Yeah. I love the, I also wrote North by Northwest in my notes, and I also had the same, I was like, don't leave. Don't open the tin at all. Oh, no, you've opened it. Okay, we'll close it. And then he started wrestling. I was like, oh, motherfucker. His diamonds are going on the bottom of the goo. Like, I can't believe it. But of course, classic, classic Jimmy move, honestly. Cudos to Omaha PD. They were all over it. Johnny on the spot with that. And also, I love that once he is, college, He calls Krista at the Cinebon like Gus calls Lyle after his showdown with Lalo.

It's like these guys, you know, they have their priorities straight. I mean, they're facing death. They're facing imprisonment. But really, yeah, someone's got to set the duty schedule for the following week at your fast food joint. So I really appreciate that they're not leaving Krista and Lyle hanging, even with everything else that's going on in their lives. Something we talked about last week. So everything that happens with Gene and the last.

last, you know, a few episodes pops off because of this phone call that he has with Kim or the taste that he got from the great Sinabon Heist, et cetera. And how our read on the situation was that he was sort of trying to get caught in the increasing recklessness and sloppy behavior. And Bob Odenkirk said something similar on the insider podcast. He said he's kind of backing himself into a corner intentionally, kind of wants to blow up his situation because it's, untenable. Kim says, turn yourself in.

He's like, hell no, but this is sort of his, his sort of better angels in the back of his head doing it for him, the only way that a Saul gene can.

And I thought, I thought that was really interesting. And then also this Gene to Saul transformation moment in the holding cell. Yes. I know that you read, as I did,

Alan Sepp-Mwell's conversation with Peter Gould over in Rolling Stone. Do you want to talk about this like page from the script and what they described here? Oh, gosh. Yeah, so that's been kind of a constant throughout this that, as you've noted on earlier episodes,

they have delayed and delayed referring to him as Saul in the script or, you know, they've tried to be accurate to who he is in each scene. So they finally switched over to Saul when he has the breakup with Kim. And then we fast forward to immediate Saul. And so SEPinwal gets an email from Gould here, who shares an actual page from the script, this scene where he's in the whole. holding cell here and he's really beating himself up literally, right? He's punching the wall. He's Jean in that moment. He's beaten. He's caught. He's cornered. But then he looks up and he sees the etching on the wall, right? My lawyer will ream your ass. And that reminds him of who he is or who he's been. And suddenly he transforms into Saul. He's Saul. He's banging on the door now not in

frustration and impotence, but he's the one holding the cards now. He thinks he's suddenly in command again. And as soon as he gets on the phone with Bill, poor hapless Bill, he is Saul. He's calling the shots and he sees it ending with him on top, like always. If you've never read a TV script and you're interested in like how TV is made on a granular level or maybe becoming a TV writer at some point in your life, I really recommend you spend some time reading TV scripts. There's a huge collection of them at the WGA Library in Los Angeles. If you ever have an afternoon, it's really fun.

You could just check out an iPad and read a ton of TV scripts. But something that I've noticed, I used to read a lot of lost scripts when I was covering that show on a podcast. There's this sort of oddly jocular TV screenwriter thing where they love to go like, it's fucking Saul Goodman, which is what Google does. And it's like all caps and isolation market. You got to throw an F bomb in there so people know it's a big script moment, you know? And it's just like it's this weird, like almost machismo in the script writing. That stands in contrast to the delicacy of what I would consider this actual finale script.

But like they just like got to amp themselves up in the stage directions of a TV script, I find. They're not always as detailed as the Sall scripts, right? I mean, there are two lines of diet. on this page of the script, right? But it's all just sort of scene direction and what is going on in Gene slash Saul's head in this moment. And it's Gould really specifying exactly what he thinks is happening in this moment. And of course, Bob Odenkirk brings something to the scene himself. But Gould is not leaving anything to chance here. You know, it's not necessarily just read between the lines. He is really specifying this transformation. I mean, it's very detailed, right?

He's laying out exactly what's going on in his head in this moment. So I think that's maybe just indicative of the care and the level of detail and attention that they bring to this series. Yeah. And some script writers are tremendous dialogue writers. And some script writers are tremendous everything else writers. And some people are both. And I would say Peter Gould is both. And a director too.

And I like how they mention in, I think it's the Saul versus Marrador. scene that when Odenkirk asked to do more takes of that scene, they wound up stripping more lines of dialogue out. And there's a lot of stripped out dialogue in like a lot of moments and interactions in this episode where a worst show would have over explained with dialogue, what was going on here, or had characters communicate to each other exactly what their thought processes were, specifically, of course, between Jimmy and Kim. And I think it speaks to the confidence of the show, the confidence in these actors, that they can convey all of that with these looks. We get many looks between Kim and Jimmy, but we don't get a, why did you do that?

Or this is why I'm doing it. You know, I love you, damn it. You know, like, none of that bullshit. And that's what makes this such a masterpiece. Even in the Cheryl scene with Kim in the previous episode where we never get to see her answer to why are you doing this. And maybe she doesn't give one. We have to figure out what's going on in her head ourselves. Saul says something on the phone to good old Bill Oakley. He says, where do I see an ending with me on top like always? A real like cockroach kind of answer. But my question for you, Ben, and this is, you know, maybe getting ahead of ourselves.

But like, do you feel like in a certain way Jimmy lands on top in this episode? How do you feel about that? There is a way in which you could interpret that way. I think just in the sense that he's on top of himself. He has gotten command of who he is. He has returned to himself. So in a sense, it's Saul surrendering control, right? And allowing Jimmy to resume control.

I guess you could also say he's sort of on top within the prison population, right, just because he is still hailed as Saul by his fellow inmates. And clearly they are treating him like prison royalty to some degree. So even though this is. like the Supermax prison where he did not want to go. Yeah. Seems like he has it pretty good, all things considered. Relatively.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe conditions there aren't quite as bad as they actually would be in the real life equivalent of the prison that he's talking about. But he's baking. Everyone's saluting him as he goes by, right? So he's still sort of in control. And really, he's more in control than he's been in quite a while at that point in the timeline

when he has surrendered himself to Saul. now he is regaining control. So I don't think he's back on top in the way that Saul meant during that phone call. But there is a way in which, yes, I think we could say he is back on top. Yes, it's been so interesting. Obviously, we'll get into this in a little more detail at the end, but it's been so interesting to me to see the wide range of responses. This is something that Gould and company were nervous about,

that this would be a divisive ending, that some people wouldn't like it. This happens to me all the time where I'll walk out of a finale. I'll be like, well, surely, no one can have. issue with that. And then of course, I mean, I actually haven't spent as much time on Reddit overnight as I usually do because, I don't know, the shorter time span. But on Twitter alone, I saw a lot of people say they hated the finale. And it's wild to me, you know, and some of the critiques I saw were too depressing, and I found it actually very uplifting. So we'll talk about all of that. But by the standards of this series of this franchise,

this is not even a happy ending. This is a fairy tale ending for Gilligan and Cool. So Bill Oakley, Chekhov's, you know, Ben Chad, or Chekhov's Francesca mentioning Bill Oakley on a phone call. I guess we should have known Bill was coming back, but it definitely surprised me that A that he was here, B, that he was here so much. And C, according to Peter Cool, like he considers Bill Oakley our POV character in this episode. A tremendous come up for our guy, Bill. How did you feel like he was used here? I thought he was great. I mean, he's been great all along, really, but he's comic relief in some of these scenes, right?

And he's also just the guy sitting by Saul's side just marveling at his audacity. And then also his self-destruction, in a sense, in the courtroom scene. So I see what he means about the POV character. I mean, at this point, we've spent so much time with Jimmy and with Kim that clearly we're identifying with them more than we are with Bill. But I see that Bill is sort of like an actual lawyer, your standard lawyer, who might be. be in this situation and is just jaw dropping constantly at what he is seeing being in this situation. It's interesting that Saul even calls Bill. Like, is this charity? Is this trying to give him a little boost because he's sort of following Saul's career path in a sense? Or does he just

sort of need a Patsy, need someone to sit next to him? Because clearly, like, he's not deferring to Bill's legal advice. Now he does get some insight from Bill. from time to time. So I guess he just needed someone who was on the scene in Albuquerque just to feed him information. But clearly he's not taking his legal advice here. And often he's directly going against it. Well, I think also, as far as I understand it, the diamonds are in the goo and the dumpster. And like, at any rate, all that stuff would be confiscated as like evidence, right?

He would have access to the stacks of money under his sink or, you know, whatever. So it seems like he convinced. is Bill to do this free of charge. Bill says, who's paying for this? And he says, you're doing it for the publicity. We'll pay you an exposure. Right. So there's a good old freelance writer's line.

So I feel like this is a patsy. This is, yeah, this is someone I can manipulate into showing up and doing this for free. And as you say, good on the scene, Albuquerque info from Bill. The other big surprising return for this episode, you know, is Betsy Brandt. Yeah. who I did not have on my bingo card, but I was delayed to see her. Do you think that, I mean,

she's used really well in the episode, and we'll talk about that. But do you think, let's put it this way, maybe they reverse engineered it, do you think that the reason Kim has long, dark hair is that there's like a split second before Marie turns around

that we think that that's Kim there at that hearing? There's no reason necessarily that Jimmy would know that her hair was long and dark at that point, but like there is a, I feel like there's an intentional moment where we're supposed to be like, Kim's here? Oh, no. That's, wow. It's Marie. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I think there are other valid reasons for her to be in this episode, but that did cross my mind for a split second. And I was surprised in the sense that I did not predict that Betsy Brandt would be back for the series finale here. But I had read

that Gilligan had wanted Marie to return years ago, actually, in the season two finale. She was going to show up and help Chuck get his cast. scan in the hospital after he fell in the copy shop. But the other writers talked Gilligan out of it on the grounds that it would have been distracting that that scene is supposed to be about Chuck. And so to have Betsy Brand show up would have really pulled focus from him. And I was going back and reading an old entertainment weekly interview about this where they informed Betsy Brandt about this because she had not known that she was considered to appear in that episode. And she said at the time, it's not her time. I hope she has her time.

So here it is. She had her time at the last possible second. Okay. I have a big question about Marie though. Okay, because, and you might disagree with me on this, but she says this thing about Hank where she was like, basically, there's been no greater human on the face of the planet. Rose-colored glasses here. My husband Hank Schrader, a saint among men. Like, Hank believed in law and order, right?

Like, Hank was not a corrupt guy. But would we call him a saint among men? I would not go that far. No, it's true that. he would show up with a smile and a joke. That was Hank. But also, he might make some racist remark at some point. And, you know, he was not spotless, not quite the hero that he was described as.

But I get it because she's grieving. She's in mourning. She's holding him up as a paragon of virtue compared to Walt, of course. And compared to Walt, he is everything she says. But she's in her post-purple phase here, right? She's still in mourning. And I think maybe the main purpose for her to be there, we get that scene where Saul is sitting across from a widow the way that Kim was with Cheryl. But unlike Kim, Saul is completely dishonest in that scene.

Or not completely, the start of his story is true. And then he talks about the prison hit, which happened. And then there's this line, you are looking at a man who has lost everything, my profession, my family, my freedom, I have nobody, I have nothing. that much is true, but he's using it to manipulate, just like when he was telling his actually true sob story to distract the security guard in the mall. So he deploys these tear-jerkers that actually do mirror his actual situation when he needs to. But we know that in this moment, he still saw he doesn't mean it. He's not really reckoning with who he is and what he's done. And of course, he's not telling nothing but the truth, the whole truth.

He's telling the truth very selectively. Yeah, the old Emily Dickinson tell the truth would tell it slant sort of thing. We've seen Jimmy do this a number of times. We've seen him do it on the stand. We've seen him do it in front of the bar association, his use of crocodile tears and pretend grief. And so I think it's important that we've seen him do it before. I like that he breaks character in this interaction. But having seen him do it before successfully in the show,

we know that when he tells AUSA, when he tells the AUSA, yeah, I just need one though. I just need one juror. Right. He snaps back. Yeah. He can probably do that. And the guy knows that he can probably do that, having watched this performance. He's very convincing.

And he beats them so thoroughly that in the end, I love that the AUSA is gloating about not having to give him the ice cream. Right. Like, that's his one victory when he finally reveals that. Kim came forward about the Howard Hamlin situation. And that actually does Rock Saul back on his heels for a second, right? Because he's completely in control. Everything he foretold is happening the way he foretold it, right? And he's going to be back on top and he's going to just bargain down the life plus 190 or whatever it was to seven and a half years. And then here's this one thing that

he was not aware of that I guess Bill probably could have given him a heads up. about that at some point, but chose not to. And really, like, he has just trounce that entire legal team. You know, it's just, it's an entire table full of high-powered lawyers who have just a mountain of evidence assembled against him. And he beats them down point by point by point to the point where at the end, they're just so happy that they have won one thing, like point 20 on his agreement, right? They don't have to give him his weekly ice cream. Yeah. And in terms of, like, shots, I think the slow pan across their faces as they're just like, this motherfucker, like all of them just like tired and pissed at Saul and Saul triumphant.

The Minship ice cream, I guess we should shout out. It's history on the show. I could be incorrect in this, but the first time we see it is this cone that that Jimmy gets that is then dropped on the ground and sort of consumed by ants when he's whisked up into Lalo's orbit for the first time. And there's that long ants devour the ice cream sequence, which I see is, I don't know, a death of some kind of innocence for Jimmy. Not that he was ever tremendously innocent, but that is a real decay of something. And then later, the end of last season when he and Kim have their sort of like middle of the night, Sunday room service extravaganza, he says, leave them in chip off the ice cream.

I don't want that. It's forever ruined by this association. So the fact that he, Saul is like ready to dive back into midshipdom. I think it just means he's closed off whatever trauma reaction that was and is like, it's good ice cream. What can I say? But I think, I mean, and as we already mentioned, Bagman kicks off this episode. The sequence, the episode where Mike and Jimmy are in the desert and barely survive.

There's a part of me that feels like Jimmy never fully came back from the desert. And it's, we saw it two weeks ago. go when we first saw Walt and Jesse and he's like not the desert any place he says this thing about Lalo and Nacho that we've been waiting, Ignacio that we've been waiting for

but also not the desert like dear God not the desert because of that trauma reaction to Bagman I think. Yeah. So the fact that the mint ship makes a return is very interesting. Right. The last thing I want to say about this sequence is that before we roll to that reveal that you just teased up

is that I think I've talked about it on this podcast specifically, but maybe not, but I just want to repeat my hard and fast TV rule, which is that if you see the dress rehearsal, you're never going to see the final performance. So the fact that we saw lay out his whole sob story here means when he starts it again later in the courtroom, it's not going to go the same way.

That's just the rule of television. Right. Another misdirect, yes. Do you want to talk about maybe the plane sequence and what happens with Bill there, Ben Lindberg? Yeah, I think in that scene, I mean, that's when he changes his mind about what to do, right? Because he finds out that not only has Kim come forward and delivered this affidavit and confessed what she did, but she hand delivered that affidavit to Cheryl. She sat in the same room at the same table, looked her in the eye, and took what was coming.

And when he hears from Bill that what's coming seems very likely to be a civil case that could take her for all she's got and all she's. ever will have, then I think he realizes what she sacrificed and how fully she faced the music. And I think he knows what he has to do. Now, it's not a case of him getting her off the hook in any way, as far as I can tell. He's not riding to a rescue here. That's also a misdirect when he says he has something toe curling to give them about this Howard Hamlin incident that is going to throw Kim under the bus. I mean, there's a second there where we think maybe. if Bill is the POV character here, certainly Bill thinks that he is ruthless, that he is just going to bury him here for the weekly ice cream. And if that had happened,

there's no coming back from that. And I know we've said that probably about several scenes this episode and maybe they did end up coming back from them. But if that was where he went, then that would be the final severing, right? And it was on the table. And I don't know that I was convinced that that was where this was going, but I think there was a least plausible chance, right, that their last phone

conversation, it got heated, they haven't seen each other in several years. Maybe he's so far gone at this point that he wants to not only stick it to the government and get his ice cream, but also stick it to Kim. But of course, we realize that that's not what he has in mind that he just wants to get her in the same room, the same courtroom with him, because he hasn't seen her. She hasn't seen him in several years at this point. And after the last conversation, they had, he probably can't pick up the phone and say, hey, let's have a chat. Right. So he has to go to these great lengths to make her think that her life, which has just started to get back off the ground, is going to get destroyed again. But ultimately, that's not what it was. He just wanted her to be there when he finally

came clean the way that she did. Yeah, and I think it's really key that similar to, I think, an easy surface us reading of why did Gene get back into, like, get into the B&E game? And a lot of people were like, oh, we needed the money. Like, that seemed like the read off of the phone call. And then, you know, those of us who spend way too much time watching the show, I'd be like, no, he's got those diamonds that he's about to spill into some dumps for goo. So he'll be fine. So it's not about the money. And then I think there's a read beyond, okay, he's going to stick it to Kim. Then the next read is, no, he's going to go save Kim. But what I like about this is that it's not actually about him saving her, right? Because what he ultimately ends up doing in that courtroom doesn't let her off the hook

necessarily. He says I lied about this, that, and the other thing. But it doesn't let her off the hook. And the show is very clear to not show that, like, okay, Kim's not going to have a civil suit. I got really irritated reading the Peter Gould, Alan Seppin-wall interview, because Peter Gould referenced one of my favorite scenes and I thought I was so smart watching it, and writing it down on my notes, but he beat me to it, which is that you don't save me, I save me, seen from the episode Rebecca, which I think is season two, where Kim's a doc review, stuck in in doc review. And Jimmy's trying to come up with all these reasons, like how he can get her out of it, right? She says, this is the full speech, she says. She says, wow, my night and shining

armor, that is some sacrifice, quitting a job that you've been trying to tank since day one. I dig myself out of this whole, you do your job, Jimmy, prove you can go one week, hell, one day without breaking the rules of the New Mexico Bar Association or pissing off your boss. Don't insult my intelligence by saying you're doing any of this for me. You don't save me. I save me. All time great Kim Wexler moment. What I love about that is that this is what happens, right?

She saves herself by going back to Albuquerque herself, by going coming clean, you know, to Hower's Widow. And then by going back and like seeking out this legal aid office where she can do some filing. And it's not, it's not Kim Wexler attorney at law. It's like I, she's still doing her penance. but it's penance in a way that is less about, you know, snuffing out who she is entirely, right? She doesn't deserve to die for what she did. She gets, she can live, but she's still doing some penance, right?

And then what Jimmy's doing is he's saving himself, you know? And I don't even think that, like, I would say that Kim saves him here, though to a certain degree she does because it's her view of him that he cares most about in this moment. Yes. But he's following that earlier part. in that speech where she says, like, without breaking the rules of New Mexico Barra, so he tells the truth

and nothing but the truth to help him God. Like, that's what he finally, finally does. And that's what she told him to do to earn her respected admiration way back in season two. Yeah, listener Will emailed us to reference that together were poison line from the big breakup scene.

And he suggests that maybe, maybe not. Maybe they're actually each other's antidote in the end. And I think there's something to that in that it was that very contentious phone call that prompted each of them to end up in this situation. Not quite the way that they each told the other to do necessarily. But that was what really jarred them out of their stasis, right? And neither of them was really living a life. Neither of them had fully reckoned for their crimes and done that in a way that enabled them to move on. And so talking to each other again, that jolted them back to who they were, to some extent, at least ultimately.

For Gene, Saul, Jimmy, it took some steps. But I think they were kind of the impetus. You know, there's still a spark there, literally a spark, as we see in the last scene with the cigarette lighter in color. And, you know, the flame is still burning, right? And so I think they still have a positive part to play in each other's life, even at this. date date. Let's talk a little bit about this court and see before we get into those trio flashbacks. We get one final showtime moment, right? From Saul here. And one final foot tap from Kim and the electric exit sign with the wine bringing us back to.

Leo DiCaprio point at the TV screen and I saw the exit sign. The exit sign from chicanery and with the hum and all, the electric home and all. I loved that. But what I really love is When Kim leaves several episodes ago, and he says, I love you, and she says, I love you too, so what, right? So what? So this. So this is him saying, I love you. This matters. I will throw away everything for the slim chance that you will look at me again the way that you once looked at me.

Right. so good and powerful and juicy. Like, what a tremendous. And the looks that they share in that courtroom, again, no words exchanged other than his testimony and her watching him wordlessly. Very, very powerful stuff for me, incredible television. I agree. And he's in full Saul mode when he enters the courtroom, right?

Like his suit in court, it looks like the Salamaka cousins. Yeah, so shiny. Yeah. So if this is Saul's last stand, he's going out with full. flashiness, but he knows that he's going out. And so, you know, Odin Kirk, I read, requested that they returned to the courtroom and filmed the full scene again. They were just going to do some pickups and a few angles. And he said, no, I'm not quite happy with how I handled it the first time because he went too emotional in his opinion that he wanted to play it calmer and more composed, which sounds like

a smart choice, because we've seen his theatrics in the courtroom in the season four finale, and they weren't real, and Kim saw that performance and learned to her dismay that it was all an act. So here he can't go as big and broad if he wants to look like he means it, because initially it crossed my mind that some part of him wants to take the blame because he wants to take the credit. Remember the call with Francesca a couple episodes earlier. His empire is in shambles. Everyone views Walt as the mastermind.

So was there still some small part of him that did this so that he could be seen as the king, not the pun, which would be incompatible with true remorse, I think. And I think there is some of that in what he's doing at first as Saul, but then he looks at Kim, he turns his head, he looks back at her, and that's when he realizes that he needs to go further. He needs to go deeper. And that's when he owns up to not what he's actually going to be on trial for here, but what he did to Chuck, which is not even relevant in the situation except to him and to Kim. And so when Bill says that thing with your brother, that wasn't even a crime. And Jimmy at this point says, yeah, it was, right?

And only once he admits that can he finally say, actually I'm not Saul Goodman. I'm James McGill again. And here we get that fourth persona that you were waiting for, Ben Lindberg, which is James McGill, is what he's not Jimmy, not slipping Jimmy. Not Jimmy, our precious Jimmy, right? More distinguished. Yeah, it's like Charles and James McGill. Yes. The brothers McGill, you know.

Sounds like he could be the partner at a law firm now, except that he's been disbarred, I'm sure, but other than that. I'm wearing it truly a precious suit. And I love that line. She left town, but I'm the one who ran away. Right? That's right line. Yeah.

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this like sort of flashback visitation of sorts to a Christmas carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge famously gets visited by three ghosts. It doesn't exactly one to one track here. We're not getting ghosts of present future and past. But in you know, in

the book Dickens has Marley say you'll be haunted by three spirits without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Right. So this is the moment for Ebenezer Scrooge to save as excavate who he used to be out of the terrible, hideous costume

that he has devised for himself in the shape of Aveniser Scrooge. I don't know why it never occurred to me to think about Scrooge and Saul, but of course this is like a great, great comparison. This is also the last great return of those pre-Easter eggs that we talked about at the beginning of this.

season, when season opens with Saul's house being raided and we see all these little items that have been cropping up here and there, one thing that has been sort of poking at the back of people's minds is this copy of H.G. Wells, the Time Machine, which we saw in that sequence. And I think we saw later on Jimmy's Nightstand as well in this season. We got an email about it like this week. Someone's like, what about the Time Machine? Are we ever going to deal with that? So here we go. The Time Machine is the overall umbrella over which these three flashbacks sit. Right.

I think that's super interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one, Better Call Saul is a, it's a show about time. It's a show about, you know, change of personality over time, which is every story, obviously. But the way in which this show takes place in the past, present, and future all simultaneously, that we're thinking about Saul and Breaking Bad as we watched Jimmy, that we're thinking about the seas that they planted of Gene as we're watching Jimmy. Like, all of that is present in our mind. It's almost like, you know, we're holding three timelines in our head at all time when we're watching this character, which is an unusual way to watch a character grow and fall and rise again. There's also the very uneasy binary of H.C. Wells is a time machine. Some might even say racially problematic, where either you are a pure, there are two, like, species, and either you are like a pure, virtuous species or you are this, like, hideous.

awful, terrible species, right? This binary. And I think what this show and what this episode is invested in is like, it's okay to live in the gray, right? And you don't have to be St. Hank Schrader, you know, if he ever was. And you don't have to be hideous, Saul Goodman, you know, that there is something in the middle that is, you could just be a human and complicated and that's okay, too. Yeah.

And Jimmy builds a time machine. figuratively speaking in this episode to undo his real regret of losing Kim and losing himself and the series itself, as you said, as a time machine, it's a prequel and a sequel and something in between and if a time machine would violate

the second law of thermodynamics, as Walt said, then you would think that better callsaw would violate laws of storytelling. But somehow it worked so well and transcended what seemed destined to be its limitations. But I think starting with Mike in that scene and with the big bag of money, it's very Scrooge-esque, right, that he is clinging to this duffel bag that he's thinking of just walking away with it, which is also kind of a callback

to Hewle suggesting they walk away with Walt's money in Breaking Bad season five or to season one when Mike and Jimmy had the Kettleman money in episode seven, bingo. And Jimmy gives back the money that they had bribed him with and he can't afford to rent the office. space that he wants to share with Cam at that point. And Mike asks him what he's doing when he throws the money back in the bag. And he says the right thing in air quotes. And in this finale, he's going to do the right thing again without air quotes or as close as he can come to the right thing at this stage. And you know, I'm going to get one more mention of the bad choice road in here.

Mike wants to go back and undo the first bad choice that put him on that road. Right. So first he says he'd go back to 2001, which presumably is when Maddie got killed. But then he says, no, I'm going to go back further. That was a couple exits, you know, after I got on the road. Because what got us on that road in the first place was me taking the dirty money, was me taking the bribe and then letting down Maddie when he faced the same choice decades later. And so he wants to go back and never turn on to that road in the first place, whereas Jimmy says he only wants money, right? He wants to go back and be the first investor in Berkshire Hathaway. But not really, right? Like, you can see he's deflecting when Mike questions him about that.

And he knows better. He knows that there are other choices that he should undo, but he's not ready to reckon with that. And Odenkirk has pretty consistently said in interviews that he thinks Jimmy is more emotionally intelligent that he lets on. Obviously, he has emotional intelligence that gives him insights into others that allows him to manipulate them. But he's aware that there's stuff going on under the surface. And that's why he constructs this edifice, this new persona just to keep that all below. But on some level, he knows. And at some point, he's going to have to deal with that. And it doesn't happen until the series finale. But at least it happens before the end.

Better late than ever. Jim. I love that parsing of like Mike's two dates, right? How it veers from, it veers deeper into personal responsibility, you know, from, from, I'd stop the people who kill my son, too. I'd stop myself from all the things that put my son in that spot to die. I also think it's interesting in rewatching that episode, Bagman. I'd forgotten that. So Lalo asked Saul to go get this money from him.

for him. And so I was like, no, no way. No. Thank you. I'm a lawyer. No, thanks. No, no. And then he's walking out the door and then he stops and he turns around. And then he just says, 100,000. 100,000 I'll do it. Right. Right. So it's remarkable to me that Jimmy doesn't even have the like depth in that moment to be like, how about yesterday when I turned around and said, okay, I'll do it for $100,000. Yeah, I wouldn't be sitting on this bag of money in the desert right now. With the taste of my own urine in my mouth. Yeah. And then also, Andy on the watch this week made a really lovely little observation,

which is like, it opens with Saul slurping up all this water and Mike walks up and he says, like, stop, you're going to make yourself sick. Right. And Andy was like, that could be the thesis of this show. And I'm like, yeah, like, slow down and stop. You're going to make, you're hurting yourself. You're going to hurt yourself here with your pursuit of excess. You think, just take what you need.

Don't take 100,000 from Lolo. You don't need it. Anyway. Right. In the Walt scene, which takes place in at the disappearers basement during or around Granite State, and Walt is pretty loathsome in this scene, really as he was in the earlier scene. So this is not the legend of Walter White, who people couldn't help but root for.

This is Walter Wright, but pretty despicable and just not at all contrite. or penitent person who just cannot face his own mistakes. And, you know, in this scene, right, he's deflecting too, right? And there's the shot of when he's asked what his regrets are, he looks at the watch that he got from Jesse for his 51st birthday and it's ticking away. And you'd think that in that moment, he's thinking about all of the mistakes that he has made, the things that he has done to Jesse and so many others. And of course, that is not what he chooses as his regret. His choice is that he would go back to the beginning of a business, too, just like Jimmy, in his case, Grey Matter, the company that he helped found. And, you know, it seems like Walt is

probably an unreliable narrator when it comes to his contribution to Grey Matter. He would have you think that he was the brains. He was the Grey Matter. He was the one who was coming up with all the ideas. And then Gretchen and Elliot stole all of his ideas and pushed him out of the company. Really, when we see the interview in Granite State, the Charlie Rose interview, when they're saying that Walt's only contribution was just his name, right, was part of why they chose gray matter. And that was where it began and ended. Now, maybe that's not completely truthful either, but it's got to be somewhere in the middle. And I'd probably lean toward the Gretchen and Elliott version of events than the Walt one because Walt is an egomaniac, right? So he's looking at

that as his mistake, again, instead of the many, many, many mistakes he has made in a more immediate sense, just in the past couple years leading up to him being in this basement about to be disappeared and on the run from the law. And it's just such a resonant scene in a lot of ways just because of what he says to Saul in this moment, where when Saul finds out about this company, suddenly he's leaping to his feet and he's thinking back to his sandpiper days. And hey, We could build a case here and we could file for this and for that and we could get you a piece of this company. And Walt, just devastating, just says you'd have been the last lawyer I'd have gone to. And Jimmy is just deflated or saw in this scene, which, you know, that line has to remind him of Chuck saying you're not a real lawyer or the Kettleman saying that he's the kind of lawyer guilty people hire.

And we know that he probably could have handled it. You know, he had the skill set to do that. But everyone again, referencing that scene you mentioned earlier, people see him a certain way. And that's his own fault. He's encouraged them to see him that way. He has built that persona. But his actual abilities as a lawyer are now completely buried by that. And so when Walt says, so you were always like this, when Saul tells the story about the

slip and Jimmy fall where he actually hurt himself by accident, and that's the greatest regret that he can summon in this moment, Walt says you were always. like this. And Walt was always the way that he is, right? To some extent, he was always Heisenberg lurking inside. Jimmy wasn't always and won't always by the end of this episode. He isn't anymore. But that, again, echoes Chucks. People don't change your slip in Jimmy or this is what you are. And so that second visitation sets up the third. I think it's really smart. And I think this idea of seeing yourself the way that other people see you, using both Mike and Walt and Crucially Chuck as these mirrors in which Jimmy has seen himself. But, you know, there's the phrase like through a mirror darkly, right, which is, I think, a Star Trek episode,

but also from the Bible, both equally important. But this idea that like you're looking through a mirror, but it's obscured and you're not really seeing the truth of the matter, right? So for Jimmy say, I would go back and, you know, and then Mike says, oh, money, right? Like, that's what Mike says, which is close enough to, so you've always been this way, is, is, you know, the disappointed or, you know, condemnation that comes from the ghost of Chris's past that is Walter White, right? But Chuck complicates things here because Chuck has, of course, been that constant mirror for Jimmy. You're never, and this is something I was actually talking to Sean Fennacy about on the big picture about the film Bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies, that like sometimes when you surround people who have known you your whole life, it's really hard to feel like you can change. Because I don't know if you have siblings, Ben, but like, I have a sister and I love my sister, but also she is constantly holding up that mirror of like who I used to be. And it's, it can be, like, and it's like a younger sister, right? Like, for me, it could be like, tough to feel like, no, it's not who I am. I'm not that person, right? And for Jimmy to constantly be like, I'm not slipping Jimmy, but also to inevitably slip and slide back into being slipping Jimmy, I think it's, I think it's important that when he tells Walt about his regret,

which is after what he told Mike, he is going a layer deeper there because it's a, it's a time in his life where the con hurt him, where he literally hurt himself by his inability to pass up a con, which is the slurping of too much water again, you know, the inability, inability to walk out of Lala Salamanca's cell, the inability to leave his interaction with Walter White alone after he gets out of the desert with him when he first met him, all of that sort of stuff.

The watch is also super interesting. For the reason you mentioned, this is the gift that Jesse gave him. So, like, I have to hope he's thinking about Jesse, who is literally, like, being held by, enslaved by Nazis at this very moment.

And Walter just left him there. Something that Alan Seppinwell pointed out in his recap at this episode that I forgot is that Walt doesn't come back with like an intention to save Jesse. No, he just happens to be there. He just happens to save Jesse, you know?

Yeah. So we'll talk about Walt's ending there, but like I have to hope that he's thinking about Jesse, but also what it pinged for me, because I forgot that Jesse gave him that watch, it pinged gliding overall because in that sequence and gliding overall, when Walt orders the death of those nine people in jail,

it's a very stylish breaking bad sequence. We get, I think it's Nat King Cole, jauntily playing on the soundtrack, because all these guys are being shived. And Walt's watching his watch tick by, because it has to be done in two minutes. It's that watch, that's what I remembered. I forgot the key Jesse part, but I remember that that sequence, he's looking at that very literal watch as he's. So it's like, it contains a lot of, there's a lot of blood on his hands as it pertains to that watch.

This is an episode about time and regrets and time machine. And so like the cut to the watch is is really interesting. But Walt can't dig himself out and he never does, except for that one interaction with Skyler in the kitchen where he admits who he is. Other than that, he has allowed the luxury in the finale. This is what we were talking about last week in terms of some issues of the finale. He's allowed the luxury to just sink back into Heisenberg and come back and go full, Heisenberg as he guns down some Nazis.

And I think Jimmy's doing the much harder work of digging himself out of the Saul persona. Right. We got an email from listener Ben, a different Ben, who said in Breaking Bad, we have Walt finally admitting to Skyler that she wasn't everything to him. And in Better Call Saw, we have Jimmy giving up everything to save his image in the eyes of Kim. Just shows how different the two men are and maybe how different the two series are. So, yes, producer Chris was asking me. about what I thought about the Breaking Bad finale in comparison to this one. And I think in some ways, this is superior, even though it lacks the fireworks and the machine gun. I'm glad that they both

exist, though, just so that this one could exist in conversation with and in contrast to that one. I think they're both excellent. And for me, for my taste, for what I'm looking for, this just has more of what I want from the wrap of a story. We'll talk about that in a second. One last thing before we get to Chuck, which I just want to shout out the way that Walt is shot in a number of sequences in this scene, there is a red glow reflecting in his glasses that make his eyes almost look like red and demonic. And I just wanted to shout out that little bit of classic old school breaking about style. All right, let's talk about Chuck. Go for it, Ben. Yeah, so Gould revealed on the insider pod that originally he had not planned to bring Chuck back, that even when they

filmed the scene with Walt, which had to be shot earlier because of when he and Aaron Paul, Cranston and Paul, were available. Even then, they did not know that there was going to be a third scene. So as nice and neat as the Christmas Carol, Three Ghosts structure seems it was not originally the plan. But I think it's appropriate that we return to Chuck because, of course, Jimmy finally returns to Chuck. That's what brings him back to being Jimmy in the courtroom scene. And I've to say like this whole set was rebuilt. They had deconstructed the Chuck's house set because they didn't think they would ever be back there. So they had to rebuild it or at least some portion of it. And you know, it brought me back to the early seasons of this series. And I got to say, I think I probably

have enjoyed Saul more post-chuck than during Chuck, if anything, just because Chuck was a tough hang. I mean, that's just who he was as a character. He's kind of a prig, you know, not a prick, but a prig, maybe both at times. And that was important to spend all that time with him just to see what impact that had on Jimmy and how that contributed to Jimmy becoming solved. But it was not always easy to be in that house with him or with the two of them. But I think it feels right to be back here now. And the upshot here is that this is a scene where Chuck is actually reaching out and making some overtures to Jimmy. And he's seeing Jimmy potentially in a new light.

And Jimmy is unable to recognize it. At least that's the conceit of the scene just because they're stuck in this pattern. As Chuck said, they keep having the same conversation over and over. And this is a case where maybe they could have had a different fork in the conversation. and maybe it could have led to a different relationship. I mean, I see why Jimmy felt the way that he did, because when Chuck said what he said about, hey, let's talk about your cases. I mean, I thought the same thing, right?

That he basically wants to lecture his younger brother and say what he would do. I mean, that would be consistent with Chuck's character here. But I think he is just appreciating that Jimmy is making the sacrifice for him, getting his groceries day after day. And Jimmy's saying, you'd do the same for me when we know that. That's probably not true. Chuck would hire someone or just cut him off completely. And so when we get to the part where Chuck says, if you don't like where you're going, there's no shame in going back and changing your path, which raises the possibility. Can you drive in reverse on the bad choice road? Not really, but maybe you can turn off the road.

Maybe you can take an exit at some point and change your future, if not your past. But they were never able to do it, just as brothers. their sibling relationship, they weren't able to just take the different turn in the conversation. They got stuck in a rut and it led where it led. It led to Chuck's death. It led to Jimmy in his disgrace and transforming into Saul. I loved all of everything that you just said then. But a key detail in this scene is that, or Jimmy says, that he thinks he's hunted down a place where they're going to carry the financial times. When Jimmy first shows up to Chuck's house in season one, episode one of Better Call Saul, Chuck says, oh, the financial times. And Jimmy says,

yeah, I know how much you missed it. So this place is this probably the day before Better Call Saul starts. This is the last meeting they have before everything that kicks off in the series premiere of Better Call Saul. So we don't quite get a time machine conversation right. We see Chuck has a copy of the time machine. He says the thing that you just said about sort of changing your path. That's similar to the time machine prompt, you know, but it's not like a neat thing. But I love this read of the scene that this is actually Jimmy's regret, a regret that this is the time machine moment. Go back to this moment. Chuck's reaching out his hand to Jimmy.

And Jimmy can't take it for the reasons that you outlined for the reasons that my own sister, older sister, younger sister trauma outlined. Right. Like you are spiky and distrustful of someone like this, someone who does often say. see the worst in you. But this is a moment and it's interesting also. This sort of circle back to our St. Hank Schrader comment. Like, maybe Chuck isn't as much of a monster as we've thought of him as, not a monster. But we've been seeing this story of Chuck and Jimmy largely through Jimmy's eyes, right? Occasionally get glimpsed to Chuck. And in that season four finale episode with the scholarship committee that I've rewatched, crucially opens with a sequence of Chuck caring for

Jimmy. He's taking Jimmy back to his hotel room. Jimmy is drunk. Like, it's this whole thing. It's a reversal of the dynamic that we've seen. We see this tenderness from Chuck. This is after, you know, Chuck dies at the end of season three. So this is after Chuck's death. This is a Jimmy memory that we had not been privy to before. And we see that Chuck wasn't always recriminating his brother, that in times he was reaching out. So this is a moment where he's reaching out. Jimmy can't see that as anything out. He can't see the hand reaching out. He can only see the potential knife behind his back, right? And it goes back to this idea of like, when he looks at how Chuck looks at him,

all he sees is the worst of himself, slipping Jimmy, precious Jimmy. That's all he can see, right? Which will eventually bring us to Kim, who is like the fourth mirror and the only mirror in which he can see like a potential good version of himself, I think. Yes. But I love that classic Chuck to always be carrying a lantern, but carrying a lantern makes him look like a particularly Dickensian ghost in all of this. But I love this idea of who decides who you are.

Ideally, you decide who you are. But if you're going to look for mirrors to help you reflect yourself back, you know, to yourself, look for the Kim's in the world and don't look for the Chuck's. As flawed as Chuck is, you know, and he does care for his brother. Like, that was just never going to be the mirror that was going to show Jimmy a path forward. But with Kim, what I love about Kim as a reflective. a reflective surface for him is that, and that obviously she's a woman in her own right,

not merely a reflective surface for Jimmy McGill, but that she's not reflecting back St. Hank Schrader to him. She's like, I see everything that you are, and I love you. And I believe that there is good and greatness there. And that's what he's running after at the end of this episode.

Right. And we should mention what happened to Kim on her own, right, because she's still in this black and white Florida timeline, but a little color's coming back into it, not literally, but we can see that the spark is returning, right? She's still at lunch with her friend. She's still completely non-committal. She's unwilling to express an opinion. But suddenly, I think she realizes that she's not satisfied with that. She leaves the sprinkler company a little early. We don't know if she's... She makes a choice to leave early. Yeah. Right. We don't know if she said nope, nope, nope to yup, yep, yep, yet at this point, but you got to think that that's coming because she's dipping a toe back into the legal world here via legal aid. And, you know, listener Dick emailed us and pointed out last week in that scene with Jesse and Kim. It's especially poignant because Kim leaving sort of seals Jesse's fate because if she were still there,

if she were still pursuing her calling and helping people, she would probably still be representing combo, right? And Jesse probably wouldn't have even made the connection to Saul, and that wouldn't have led to everything it led to. So in a way, just her being driven away from her calling, that sort of sealed Jesse's fade and started this cycle anew. And now maybe she's just starting to make a first little foray here back into legal world. and she's back in Doc Review and she's happy to be doing it.

And will she be filing for the rest of her life? Probably not, right? Like, eventually she's going to be running this place. I don't know how far she will allow herself to go and whether she actually wants to be a lawyer again or will trust herself to do that. But she's starting to take the first tentative steps toward helping people and not just with their sprinkler solutions,

but helping disadvantage people. I have a question if she's even allowed to be a lawyer again. I have a question about that. I don't know the answer, but I have questions about it. And to clarify, I think there was some confusion around this, to clarify, like, when she, we're going to talk about the prison visit in a second. And when she shows up there and she's like, my New Mexico Bar Association card doesn't expire. It doesn't mean she's practicing law again. No.

Genuinely, she's pulling a con. And she's using a document that she has to get in the door, but it doesn't mean that she's a practicing lawyer again. Yeah. And it's a little scam. It's a little echo of their old life, but it's a completely harmless one. Right? And so again, it's the gray, right? It's the middle ground to like, hey, we can play around. We can have a little fun. Maybe I can act like a lawyer for this one scene. But I'm actually not hurting anyone. This is just completely low stakes. Right. Exactly. Let's just really quickly talk about the prison transportation scene. I am with Andy and I think Chris that like the better call sell chant on the bus didn't fully work for me. But the idea that. that Jimmy is like, I'm James McGill. I'm not Saul. I'm James McGill.

And his inability to shake that, again, sort of to think back to that scholarship, Senator, right? You can't shake it, even if you try. There's positive negatives to this, right? Obviously, he gets this, like, a bit of a protection from the fact that he's Saul Goodman in prison. Peter Gould said on the insider podcast, it was important to him that this jail time not be like a hell on earth. Yeah, he's not, you know, on the back nine with Bernie Madoff or whatever, right? He's in the worst of the worst that he could think of. Still gets to bake, though. Not so bad.

He gets to bake. It's so funny, a lot of people when predicting where Jimmy was going to end up, predicted a sort of Andy Dufrein like existence for him in a jail scenario, right? That he winds up doing like tax work for the prison guards. Yeah. Prison lawyer, yeah. Yeah, so that he can, you know, enjoy fine crisp bohemian bruise on the roof with his guys or whatever. But like, key distinction, Andy Dufrein was innocent. Paul Goodman is not innocent of all the things that he's done. But yeah, there's protection there, but there's also frustration. He can't shake.

He's trying to shake the Sol thing. He can't shake it. Even the prison guards are calling him Saul. I don't know. How do you, like, do you feel like this is an upshot, a down shot, or something in the middle? I think he can't just decide to be Jimmy again and escape consequences and shed the Saul skin completely. Yes, it's a very important choice that he makes that he no longer wants to be Saul. He is James McGill again.

But everything he did as Saul is going to stick with him. And he's going to feel the consequences of that. So with the chant, I mean, yeah, does it completely track that these condemned men are so overjoyed to see Saul that on the way to prison, they're going to be chanting his name, perhaps not, but I think I liked the little half smile he gives there because part of him enjoys the chant, right? Like, even though he is trying to leave the Saul persona behind, I think there is still some part of him. It's the gray again, right? Like, there's another version of the scene where he's just completely ashamed, right? And he's despondent that people still see him as Saul and that he's unable to change and, you know, improve his reputation.

I think it's enough for him that he knows he's Jimmy and views himself as Jimmy and that Kim does. And so if other people value what he did for them as Saul and if that leads to better prison treatment, I think he's kind of okay with that because there are parts of the experience that he had either as Jimmy en route to Saul or maybe even as Saul himself. I mean, with the finger guns at the end, right? Like, there's still something from that part of his life that he savors and that even though he has renounced it and he's not going to be a scam artist anymore. I think there's something to just the joy that it brought to him and to Kim in addition to all of the damage that it did to everyone else. There's something that he can still think back on a little bit fondly, but really like prison is a perfect place for him, at least at this point, it seems like. And in a sense, he's taking his own advice to Walt in Granite State where he says, stay, face the music.

And Walt won't, but now Jimmy will. And I was also remembering in Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad episode, there's a line where Saul says, the way I see it, somebody's going to prison. It's just a matter of who, right? And it turns out that it's him. And he is the only one who is going to. And remember, the guy he hires in that episode to pretend to be. Heisenberg and take the fall. His name was Jimmy, Jimmy in and out. Could be a complete coincidence. I don't know, but appropriate. And Saul says at that time, he's actually more comfortable inside.

The outside world hasn't been too kind to him. He's talking about Jimmy, a different Jimmy, but a Jimmy nonetheless. And Jesse, in that episode, he says, you think Jimmy's actually for real, a guy who wants to be in prison? And Walter says, there's more than one kind of prison. And yes, Jimmy is entering one, but he's also escaping one in a sense. So he could have gotten out of this. He could have made it seven years in a cushy place. And he took essentially life in a not cushy place. And he's okay with that choice because of what it means. Right. And when Kim visits him in the end, Kim calls him Jimmy. And that's what matters. And that was the scene that really just hit the hardest for me. when she calls him Jimmy and you just see his reaction, his smile, his gratitude that not only did

she come all this way to visit him and used a tactic that maybe is reminiscent of their old life to get in there, but that she calls him Jimmy because remember the line last week, my ex-husband, if he's still alive, right? There's some question of, is Jimmy still out there? And now she knows that he is still alive. She calls him Jimmy. He's born again. Really beautiful, Bedlenberg. If you're us and you watch too much Better Call Saul, then perhaps as soon as you saw that certain slant of light in the cell, you were hopeful as to where this was all going to go.

Your lawyer's here. Kim's got a new look, different from her old look. And it really underscores that idea that, like, Florida Kim, who we met last week, that much like Saul's shiny suits, Like she was hiding in that sort of she's just trying to, Saul was trying to stand out. She was trying to blend in. She's trying to hide in her own way. And so she shows up and she's wearing like clothes that are more similar to what she would

wear before. Her hair is still dark and long, but it is like styled in a more flattering way. Like, you know, she's just, there's nothing wrong with brunettes. There was just something wrong with Kim's wig last week. That's all we're saying. Yeah. To preserve the piece at home, by the way, let me correct the record. last week I said that my wife and sister-in-law had called Kim's look dumpy.

Yeah. The actual word was dowdy. Okay, dowdy is... Apologies to them and to Kim. A much kinder word than a dumpy. Yes. I love the idea of you catching hell for saying that. I did.

All right. So you already mentioned this like very on the nose in a way that I don't mind, spark. Still aflame between them. The only color we get is the light of the lighter and then the cherry on the end the cigarette here. And her hands are trembling when she wipes a cigarette, right? And so he gets to hold them. He steadies, oh, I know. Okay, but I want to talk about this. There's a love story all along. Like, yeah, and that's what puts it at the top. Like, okay, I have so many thoughts about this. My favorite finale, series finale is, our love stories. This is like, this is giving me

the series finale of leftovers, one of my favorite episodes of television ever, an episode that I just watched sometimes. That is just a beautiful love story. It's giving me the end of justified. Like, we dug coal together. Like, it's giving me, if there is a love story here, and it can be an unconventional one, but if there's a love story here, and if, like, love conquers all is somehow the answer, but not in a cheesy way, it's really going to work for me. And that's the thing with the end of Walter White is, like, there's a love story there,

but it's a story, a love story between a man and his power and a man in his power fantasy or, you know, a man in his meth or whatever. you like. And there's something interesting there, but it doesn't grab me by the heart and squeeze, you know. Kim's trembling hands, his study, the way that he looks at her, the way that this, that this is even somehow more meaningful than a kiss between them, because it's this shared sneaky vice that they've always had together, this little secret sin that doesn't hurt anyone but themselves, takes us of course visually back to the beginning of the series. You've seen them.

Puts them in the half shadow, half light, the gray area. And just his face, when he gets what he wanted, which is just for her to look at him and call him Jimmy. Yep. Is bold me over. I was sobbing. And I don't, unlike our beloved friend, Mallory Rubin, I don't often saw my way through episodes of the television.

This one really got. Yeah. And it's just so understated. Not a lot of lines here, really. Just significant looks that mean so much to them and so much to us, having spent so much time with them. And as I said, I mean, this is what passes for a happy ending in this universe. It's a hopeful ending. It's not without consequences.

Jimmy is in prison for life, right? Probably Kim still might lose everything she has and ever will have financially at least, right? So they're still living with the consequences here. Not like they got off Scott Free, but ultimately they are back together, not in the happily ever after kind of way that we once might have envisioned or hoped for, but in a very real way. And I do love that line, but with good behavior, who knows? I love that line because he's kind of kidding, you know, 86 years, but with good behavior, who knows?

I mean, I have seen Gould suggest that he doesn't think that Saul is going to end up serving all this time. He's just too clever. He's going to find his way out. But does he want to at this point? He had the easy out and he didn't take it. So I don't know that he will try to squirm out of the sentence unless it's maybe to reconnect with Kim in a more lasting enduring way. But I just love that line because it just opens up so many possibilities for these characters. And there's just the idea that we are what we do and they've been doing bad things for years, especially Jimmy. and now they're on their best behavior again and there's a sense that it will stick. And we've seen them backslide before, certainly, repeatedly in Jimmy and Saul's case

and maybe he won't have the opportunity to where he is. But also, I think the intended takeaway is that finally, belatedly, he has learned his lesson here. They both have. And there will be good behavior. And who knows what could come of that. The spark of the lighter and the flame at the end of the cigarette, a very pleasantville moment, right? We've seen a few other, maybe the only other pop of color was the reflection of the Saul ad in his glasses.

And that's a different sort of reintroduction of color. That's the Saul. This is a Jimmy reintroduction of color, a pure thing. It also made me think of the candle that is extinguished. in the mid-season finale this year. Like the flame that goes out when Lalo walks in the door and the light goes out of the candle and that's when that happens,

that's the end of Kim and Jimmy for a long time, right, is when that candle goes out. So the fact that it's another flame reigniting. It's really beautiful. It's not the same as the days of wine and roses ending, but it is similar in terms of that. That ends with a parting and a maybe. And this ends with a parting and a maybe.

But also there's like the finger guns, right? Which is, that's a salt good move. We got a great email actually while we were recording. An email came in from someone called like Fingergun Gate, one of our listeners, which is just like a breakdown from Luke. Does Kim Flash a subtle finger gun down by her side in response to him? There's like Zabruder film-esque breakdown from Luke in our email. She's not holding up the guns. Right.

They're like down by her hip. Sure. Yeah. And so, like, you know, is that the flashing bar sign at the end of Days and Widen Roses in the window? This sort of like, this pull of like what we've been sort of. But I agree that I think ultimately the idea here is that he has finally at last learned his lesson by looking in the right mirror, the mirror that he should have been looking in all along, to find the Jimmy that we were hoping was still there.

Odin Kirk also said in another interview, I mean, he pointed out that these kids. characters. They're finally able to breathe again and a good way to show characters exhaling is to have them smoke. Oh, I love that. Handy. But also, I read Gould said and Seahorn said that they filmed a version of this scene where she does give the guns back. She flashes the full finger guns in return. And ultimately, they went with the version that they went with where she does not at least give the full finger guns back. And I think that. They said, you know, they didn't want to give the impression that they're back now, right? That they're fully backsliding that Kim is on the verge of planning some new scam now. They wanted to show that there's a lesson that's been learned here and that there's still a fondness and an affection and a connection between them. But the full finger guns are not reciprocated.

But it's not like she is completely turning her back on him forever, I don't think. she does turn her back on him in that moment, but then she turns back. And yeah, she looks at him as she walks away and finally he's out of frame. And clearly that connection has been reignited and what form exactly that will take. We don't know and may never know. And we can all imagine our preferred versions of this relationship. But I don't think it's over. I don't think this is the end of Kim and Jimmy.

I can't speak to the Sopranos ending because. as Bill Simmons recently added me on this feed, I have not seen the Sopranos, but I know what happens. But I think there's like a frustrating, ambiguous ending. And then there's just like a beautiful ambiguous ending, especially when it pertains to a love story of just sort of this hopeful maybe, which is so much more honest than a definitely yes,

this is going to work out this time. Because we've seen it fall apart a million times before. So a hopeful maybe. And then we can just sort of fill in whatever gas we want. want to fill in and write whatever fanfic ending we want to write for these characters. And the actors involved have done that. I wanted to just read a brief excerpt here from a couple of interviews that Ray Seahorn said, in my opinion, that is definitely not the last time she's going to see him.

I think she's absolutely going to try to figure out how to reduce his sentence. I don't know if they're ever going to live happily ever after, but I think she loves him and I think she intends to help him. But on the up and up, Odin Kirk said, I think she comes to see him. I think she comes to see him once a year, every other year at the least, and I think he helps a bunch of guys in prison to get out who are innocent or he helps shorten their sentences. And look, these actors have been living with these characters for a very long time. So it's perhaps unsurprising that they see them in a sympathetic light and that Odenkirk was pushing all along for some form of redemption or at least something approaching redemption. And Odenkirk calls it redemption.

He thinks that this character is redeemed and says that child. has finally been proved wrong. Gould in other interviews seems to stop short of redemption. He's shying away from that word. Yeah. Right. And, you know, in every interview, he's saying, never say never. And maybe someday we will return to this universe.

And he did drop a little hint there. He said, Kim Wexler seems like she's got more to do. That's for sure. And I was thinking about that because Odin Kirk said, I wish they'd spent their good energy and brains differently, but that wouldn't have made for a great show. we want to see people do the wrong thing. So for anyone who's holding out hope for a Kim sequel or spin-off,

I'm certainly happy to return to this universe someday and support seeing Ray Sehorne in anything. But I just don't know that I see the runway there, even if Gould says Kim has more to do. I don't know if she has more to do in this format. Because if we want to see people do the wrong thing, learn their lesson, and do the right thing again, She's already gone through that arc and that transformation.

And so her just dutifully working at legal aid or resurrecting some version of her legal career, I don't think any of us wants to see her backslide or relapse here. And so the rest of Kim's life could be boring in a way, you know, not boring in a dating, yep, yep, yep guy and going to Red Lobster every week way, but boring in the sense that maybe it doesn't support a prestige TV series, which would probably be for the best. I mean, I wish that for all of us, that our lives be so boring. Vince Gillingham cannot possibly make a show about us.

Right. We got an email from listener Abigail, who pointed out that the dice from the mural with the bluebells from season six episode four earlier that season had an 86 on it. And that's Jimmy's prison sentence here. Yeah. So that's kind of fun. Also, I want to shout out, this is just for me.

The actress who plays the judge is an actress named Barbara Rosenblatt, who's like a New York theater, but crucially, she's an audiobook reader, and she's been reading audiobook since, like, my childhood, and she was my favorite audiobook reader when I was a kid. And so whenever she shows up, I get unreasonably, it's just for me. I just get excited when Barbara, like,

I used to pick books, audiobooks from the library just if she read them because I was, like, interested in her performance. She's also in Moon Night earlier this year, so she's having a great little run popping up here and there on television. Anything else you want to say about the subsubesies? so specifically before we do sort of like a larger picture. Yeah, no, I have some closing big picture thoughts, but I think that's all I've got. I just want to request from our listeners that they make suggestions to me.

I guess it should probably be House of the Dragon themed, but Tony Dalton has been my work slack icon since Hawkeye at the end of last year. It was Tony Dalton and Hawkeye and then it's been Lalo ever since, and I feel like I need to finally retire Lalo. So folks have a great idea for what my non-Toney Dulton's Slack icon should be for my ringer slack. Let me know. And I also wanted to do something that I love doing in shows, which is shows that end, which is a recap of last looks. There's not a lot to talk about here, but this is like a fun experiment with Mad Men because when Mad Men wrapped up,

you would often like look back and say, oh, the last time I saw Harry Crane was like two episodes ago. Like what was the last time we saw some characters, right? I love that we leave Gus Fring in the wine bar. I think that's a great place to leave Gustavo Fring. Most of the other characters are, their last looks are when they died. So that's not that new one. Francesca was being sexually harassed by Saul in the workplace. What a bummer. Mike gets his last look in this episode. I'm glad that he was here. Howard, Nacho, rest in pieces. Anyone else do you want to be like, oh, that was the last time we saw this person. No, I think you hit the main ones there.

Yeah, I mean, there aren't a lot of good exits from this series. So this was the best we could have hoped for. I mean, if you had told anyone years ago when we were all on the edge of our seats, wondering what would happen to Kim and to some extent, Jimmy slash Saul as well, I think we all would have signed up for this, right? Just for those characters as an end to the series, but also as an end to characters we've spent so much time with and came to care about in the inevitable way that we do with TV characters who we just spend

so many hours watching. So I think we have to be happy. You just kind of count our blessings, I think, about the way that this wrapped up for at least these two characters and almost no one else. Let's one last time revisit those quotes that Bob and Ray gave at the Trebekah screening of Better Callsaw early this year. When asked about what they think of the final episodes, Bob said, a second life, but you don't even know what that means, and I feel like it means return of James McGill, right?

And then Ray said, provocative and psychologically disturbing. I don't know that I would call it like provocative, sure, psychologically intriguing. I don't know that I feel disturbed. I felt disturbed a bit. At times on the way to the finale, certainly. Gene was threatening National Treasure of Carol Burnett. I felt disturbed. But this ending doesn't disturb me.

I feel a tremendous amount of peace and hope in the. the ending of this series. And I know that they were really worried about the controversy that this might kick up. And as we've seen, for some folks, this isn't the ending that they wanted. They talked a good deal on the insider podcast about this debate of should we have more fire, should we fire off a big, you know, gatling gun into, it's not a gatling gun, I just like that phrase, a big machine gun into a room of Nazis. But I think, you know, what's true about Walt,

and the gun and the Nazis and all of that, is that that's the brutal violence of Walter White combined with their science, right? Like, he uses science and physics and something to rig that up in a way that it will work. Yeah. That's his superpower. Jimmy's superpower is his mouth.

And so his performance in the courtroom feels like his machine gun into a room full of Nazis moment. Yeah. And there are no adversaries remaining other than their own inner demons, right? Everyone's dead. There are no Nazis. I mean, Jesse Pinkman's out there. There are Nazis, unfortunately. But in this universe, the Nazis we know in the Breaking Bad verse, they're gone and Walt is gone, and Gus is gone, and all these guys are gone. So who is there to have the final guns blazing

shootout with other than law enforcement, I suppose? But that's not the way that Saul has ever operated. He's not the guy with the gun. I mean, he has a gun in his death's drawer, I guess, but he's the guy who hires people to do things or suggest that they do things. So that would have been out of character for him. And it would have been out of character for this series. And that's something that this series never is out of character. It is always inimitably better call Saul and its characters are always themselves. And that's something I so appreciate about this universe. And just in that same vein, I mean, you alluded to this earlier, but we're about to get a gauntlet of big budget IP, right?

She Hulk and House of the Dragon and Rings of Power and Andor. And we'll be watching and covering those things and we're invested in all of them. We have a lot of love for sci-fi, fantasy superhero epics. They mean a lot to both of us and I don't want to denigrate them in any way. But the degree of difficulty here, I think, no superpowers, no dragons, no zombies. It's good versus evil. But on a smaller, more mundane scale, Jimmy, He's not a mobster or a serial killer or a cop.

He is a two-bit lawyer in Albuquerque. It's not a high-concept series. And I know that when they're done well, those other series and franchises I mentioned, we're not watching them just for the superpowers or the force powers or the magic. It always comes back to character. But the glitz and CGI and lore get us in the door. And that a spinoff based on Saul Goodman eventually ran long. than Breaking Bad, stood toe to toe with it, even surpassed it in some respects, and at the very

least provided just as fulfilling and satisfying an arc is incredible. I mean, even now it's hard to see how it came to mean so much. And granted, it had the connection to Breaking Bad, though it also had the pressure and the expectations that were placed on it because of that lineage. But there's also the cartel side of the series, which adds some intrigue. But that was an afterthought by the end of Better Call Saul. I mean, Nacho and Lalo were both dead by episode eight. Gus has gone after episode nine.

Mike only made cameos after that point. This was Jimmy and Kim. And the stakes are this man and woman's souls. And, you know, it just worked so well despite all the obstacles, despite all the hurdles, the degree of difficulty here. And there's so much talk about how Gould and Gilligan didn't know where. this was headed and didn't have the whole plan in their heads. And I believe them when they say that, but it's almost beside the point because even if they didn't know the destination, they took such care with each individual step. I mean, how many times have we all been let down by a show because of

choices its characters made? Not necessarily because they were choices that we wouldn't make, but because they weren't consistent with those characters themselves. Or because they closed off interesting avenues and places for them to go after that. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul essentially never did that. I'm not saying that they're perfect or that we loved every decision, but because they were true to their characters and their themes, things always worked out, no matter how much it seemed like they'd written themselves into corners. And it's just, it's tough to make TV.

It's tough not to fall back on cliches or get a little lazy or rush things because of the demand. and the constraints of the medium. But for 14 years and 11 seasons and a movie, they always held themselves to a high standard of storytelling. And I'm grateful for it. And I'm just going to miss the complete trust I had in these creators to do right by their characters and their audience. It's a really rare thing.

Yeah, we're dealing with a rockier ending to the Westworld season yesterday. And Danny Hife, it's my co-host on that show, was asking me about Better Call. Saul, and he's like, where do you place your trust in those creators versus your trust in the Westworld creators? And I was like, yeah, for Saul, it's 10 out of 10. Yeah, it's absolute trust. We've been saying that this whole time, even as we were like, what is what's happening here, I trust that the writers are going to land the plane, right?

And then with Westworld, it's like closer to a six on a generous day, you know, like, because they've just dropped the ball in terms of consistency so many times. Right. And I think that to your point, this is the Gilligan and the gun. in the trunk of the car for Breaking Bad is the example. Everyone always brings up when we talk about when someone says, well, they didn't have it planned out from the beginning talking about a TV show. I'm sure I've mentioned this on this show, but it bears repeating. So what? Like, that's the part, like, you're not, you're not writing a book or making a movie. You're making a TV show. That's a,

that's a feature, not a bug. Yeah, TV show is a living, you're supposed to adjust on the fly. It's a living, breathing organism, you should change the fucking premise of your show. If you cast Ray Seahorn as Kim Wexler and she's that interesting and her chemistry with Bob Oddenkirk is that compelling, then you change your story into a love story. And you still give Jonathan Banks plenty to do, but you acknowledge at the end of the day that he is not actually the co-lead of this show, that it's Ray Seahorn. It's Kim Wexler is the heart and soul similar to what happened, again, as we've mentioned before, for with Aaron Paul and Jesse Pinkman.

So television as a medium is a living breathing, lean into what works, lean away from what doesn't work. You just have to be smart enough and Gilligan and Gould and their entire team are, but you need to be smart enough to make that all feel, doesn't have to feel perfectly planned, but it has to feel satisfying and intentional, even if you didn't know where you were going. And so when you end with your two characters. standing in slanted light, like sharing a cigarette, looping back to the first episode, that it feels so satisfying to us to watch them on this emotional journey,

land with a visual reference to the beginning. So we're like, this is how could it have ever been any other way than this? Yeah. You know? Right. And, you know, to reference our friend Mallory Rubin again, she is fond of calling things iconic. And in this case, I think this passes the bar. That shot of them in the garage in season.

one that's echoed here from the premiere. Again, they had no idea where that was headed or where it would lead or that that would be a callback at the very end here. But you have to have that craft to even give yourself the possibility, right? They could have just been standing in a garage, right? It could have been just a drab, nondescript garage, just lit from who knows where, right? But they had the slanting noir-style shadow and light in that original scene just because of the care that they devote to every shot, right, just to the cinematography.

And so that enabled them then to have this image that was just burned into all of our brains that they could bring back and have it be so significant. So again, just the attention to detail in every shot along the way gave them so many options, so many ways that they could work themselves out of jams, even though they kept working themselves into them. All right, Ben Lindbergh. Anything else you want to say? Wow, we've come to the end. I highly recommend experiencing the last season of one of the best shows of all time by talking to Joanna about it every week. I know that option is not available to everyone, but it's great work if you can get it.

And I am seriously so glad we did these pods for multiple reasons. But selfishly, it's so enhanced my enjoyment of this season and my appreciation of the series as a whole. because I've been watching Better CallSol from the start, but I hadn't been covering it except for an occasional article. I certainly wasn't recapping and analyzing every episode and watching them multiple times and reading Reddit threads and interviews and comparing notes with someone who watches the way that you do and getting feedback from brilliant listeners.

So not every series rewards that level of investment, but this one definitely does. So I picked up on so many more things just because of the process of recording this podcast than I would have otherwise. So we've only done a dozen of these pods. It feels like more. I'm going to miss them, but 10 out of 10 would podcast again. So I saw one quote, Odin Kirk said of him and Seahorn, in a way, we'll never leave that set, some part of us, and it's beautiful. So in a way, we'll never leave this Zoom session. I hope the two of us can actually team up again on this feed or elsewhere, but we will also

savor the memories of recording Better Call Saulpods on the Prestige TV podcast. But remember everyone, just as Kim Wexler will live on. Kim Wexler lives at gmail.com will live on also. So don't be a stranger. Oh my God. I am crying again. I bet that was so beautiful. Thank you.

I'll just quote Patrick Swayze, ditto. Like, this has been a great time for me as well. And I never, the shows that I love most are the shows that I've gotten to do stuff like this with where I get to talk to someone as smart and thoughtful as you and emotionally intelligent as you about something that's interesting week to week forces me to study up on it and raise my game so that I can meet you where you are. And yeah, so it's been great. Again, I feel very confident, Sean Fentasy, if you're listening, that Ben and I will come back and do another show together. Hopefully we'll get to bring the great Chris Sutton along with us for the ride. He's

been invaluable in all of this, always ready to hit record and make us sound not like idiots. Thanks, Chris, for that. And hopefully we'll see you all soon. But yeah, please do. You can continue to email us. Ben and I read all of your emails. We love them. Thank you so much.

Please keep sending them. And I don't know, we'll see you at your local synobon. You can't see it, but I'm doing finger guns right now. Bye.