Words & Illustrations by Mark Holland
It’s a joy to see the Breaking Bad prequel back on Netflix this week and a welcome return to everyone’s favourite slippery lawyer, Jimmy McGill. The first few seasons have been a master class in slow burning storytelling and proof you could make a thoroughly engaging drama series despite knowing exactly where the characters are going to end up at the end of it. The writers on Better Call Saul have always used this to their advantage and introduced us not to Saul, the criminal lawyer we knew from Breaking Bad, but a completely different and almost unrecognisable man altogether. Watching his gradual transformation from the idealistic wannabe attorney trapped in his brother’s shadow to the crooked slime-ball we know he’s going to become is what makes the show so interesting as well as making it all the more tragic.
We’re entering the fourth season now and our protagonist is still a long way off Saul territory. We’ve seen sparks and we’ve witnessed his underlying desire to bend the rules, but for the most part the Jimmy we pick up with is still a relatively decent and honest man. The events of last season though may now mean that this finally starts to change. Where previous seasons have had the bitter rivalry between Jimmy and his brother Chuck at their core, it’s interesting to now see how the story is going to continue following Chuck’s death at the end of the last series.
His presence is still felt very strongly in ‘Smoke’ and his ghost looms ominously over Jimmy in every scene. He isn’t given a lot to say this episode as he plaintively processes his brother’s death, as well as the role that he may have played in it. Bob Odenkirk is brilliant at conveying his silent reflection, again proving there’s a lot more to him than the wisecracks and snappy one-liners. This is with the exception of one, it comes right at the very end of the episode, a fantastic razor-sharp quip directed at his brother’s ex-partner Howard that may serve as the biggest indicator yet that Jimmy is on the irreversible path towards Saul-hood.
The episode begins, as every season has, with a black and white look at post-Breaking Bad Jimmy, now managing a Cinnabun in Omaha and going under the name of Gene. These openers have always served as a cold reminder of the fate that awaits Mr McGill, a middling life on the run in the drudgery of the suburbia having to constantly look over his shoulder. This episode’s starter has our main man feeling more paranoid than ever, with the tension getting cranked up even more following a suspect encounter with a taxi driver. These short segments are powerful cues of what’s to come and contrast really well with the colourful optimism of past Jimmy in the early 00s.
Elsewhere in Albuquerque, we get to catch up with the power struggles beginning to emerge within the cartels and check in with Mike as he starts his new job as a ‘security consultant’ for Gus. It’s the cartel stuff that gives us the most interesting scenes this week though. Nacho’s bold plot to dismantle Hector as the head of the Salamanca family went as smoothly as planned, but he made the crucial mistake of underestimating Gustavo Fring. This will almost certainly serve as his downfall as we are reminded again of just how farsighted and ruthless The Chicken Man is. ‘Someone will move against the Salamancas, which brings war, which brings chaos, which brings the DEA’ is his chilling response to the demise of his greatest foe. Nacho’s fate is made all the more intriguing given his lack of appearance in Breaking Bad and given how dangerous the waters are he’s swimming in, his days are looking all the more numbered.
The writing on Better Call Saul is unparalleled; it manages to consistently offer engaging thrills whilst being patient enough to tell the story in a way that feels natural. The inclusion of recognisable characters isn’t done purely to satisfy fan service but to flesh them out and tell the back-stories we didn’t know we needed.
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