SAUL SEARCHING
Season 5 of series sees shady lawyer beginning his Breaking Bad spiral
Better Call Saul Season 5 debuts Sunday, AMC
LOS ANGELES Particularly when considering the series from which it was spun off, Better Call Saul seems like a drama unusually in love with deliberateness.
The events of Breaking Bad, on which the character of Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) first appeared, happened gradually but then all at once, as its protagonist’s slide into villainy accelerated beyond what he was able, or willing, to control. Last year’s El Camino, a Breaking Bad spinoff movie more directly in thrall to its predecessor’s style, was a reminder of how propulsive the show could be, at times at the expense of credibility or of letting moments breathe.
By contrast, Better Call Saul, in the early going of its fifth and penultimate season, remains the picture of white-knuckled but real restraint. As played in this prequel by Odenkirk, Saul, who will eventually become a drug kingpin’s amoral lawyer, plays as fast and loose with certain aspects of legal ethics as ever, but he still maintains a grip on certain core tenets of his fading former self, an ambitious idealist.
Last season concluded with Saul’s having taken his new name and given up “Jimmy Mcgill,” the identity tied to his late brother, to their rivalry and to his struggle to be taken seriously by the legal profession.
This is, broadly, a great place to start, and the time it took to get there was, in retrospect, well spent. But in an episode-by-episode sense as new instalments unfold, the show seems at times to have perhaps more vision than plan: A sense of itself, but a manner of getting there too halting by half.
At times, as with the introduction of more members of the Breaking Bad universe into the series since its first season, the show almost seems to be spinning its wheels, killing time until Walter White retains Saul Goodman. The show’s molecular-level shifts in Saul’s personal ethics are too easily swamped by the intrusion of Breaking Badstyle theatrics. It wants to be a methodical moral portrait, but for some reason can’t allow itself that all the time.
This season, Saul and fellow Bad character-turned-welcome Saul mainstay Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) are once again joined by Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a character who showed us just about everything he had in his first run. Fring is fastidious and governed by a strict code of conduct that maps not a whit onto conventional standards of morality.
This was plumbed to what seemed at the time like a conclusive point in the previous decade. His presence here tends to make the show feel as though it’s dithering toward an endgame rather than setting up stakes, as he and Saul inhabit different moral universes even now, and his is vastly flashier even as it is not the subject of the show.
Other characters newly imported from Breaking Bad for extended cameos that prompt nostalgia but no new insight make the show feel more than ever as though it’s committing the sin of fan service.
That’s not unforgivable in art, but it is a bit beneath the show Better Call Saul is otherwise trying to be.
This series has built out over several seasons a dynamic that throbs with painful and vivid life all its own, and seems relentlessly set on merging it with a show that, while accomplished, has had its day exploring dynamics that are frankly less compelling. The show itself is drawn toward the easy way out of a situation that it ought not be trying to escape at all, bringing in familiar if tapped-out characters not to complete its story but to score points it hardly needs.
Better Call Saul is, already, one of the most accomplished shows of its moment. That it has tended not to find the awards success of its predecessor may speak to the ongoing simmer rather than the quick burn of its pleasures.
But it’s hard not to wish that the series, as it enters its endgame, had trusted its viewers to understand we were watching a Breaking Bad prequel while keeping the delicacy of this series’ mood intact, and trusted us to remember those with whom Saul will soon be associating without resurrecting them to diminished effect.
The mood is melancholic, wistful, glimmering with struggle and with love that we know will soon fall away. That there doesn’t seem to be room for the grandiosity of Breaking Bad is precisely the point.