Showrunners tease links to Breaking Bad
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Season 2 of Better Call Saul.
Co-creator Vince Gilligan knew the show had smart, fervent fans. But he wasn’t anticipating they’d quickly figure out a crafty clue hinting that Breaking Bad villain Gus Fring would soon be reintroduced on the prequel: the first letters in the titles of each Season 2 episode formed an anagram for “Fring’s Back.”
“The fear on our part now is that people . . . would think, ‘Wait a minute, where was Giancarlo Esposito in (Monday’s) episode? That was a little bit of bait and switch!’ says Gilligan.”
During an interview after the finale, Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould discussed the return of Gus, the similarities between Chuck and Breaking Bad anti-hero Walter White, and a near-cameo by Betsy Brandt.
Chuck is so nasty in this episode, his ruse is so elaborate. Was this a turning point in his relationship with Jimmy?
Gilligan: He did a terrible thing; he betrayed his brother’s trust at the end of (Monday’s) episode. But in the penultimate episode of Season 1 we also came to realize he had been betraying his brother’s trust for years.
It’s almost kind of like the frog and the scorpion at this point; at a certain sense that’s who this guy is and we see that he has this deep and abiding resentment toward his brother that is born of jealousy. He seems so envious of his brother and the fact that everyone seems to love his prodigal brother, and everyone forgives him for all of his sins, so to speak — and I’ve got to tell you, I feel almost sorry for the guy.
Except Jimmy is driven by heart while Chuck is driven by ego, which is harder to excuse.
Gould: Maybe the most despicable thing he does is to play on Jimmy’s love and empathy, and to put on this little show for Jimmy’s benefit. But Jimmy is a con artist and it could be argued the only way to fight fire is with fire in this case.
Are there any parallels between Chuck and Walter White?
Gilligan: They are definitely lacking in being able to laugh at themselves. They see things in terms of right and wrong, and yet within that they are both capable of doing some monstrously wrong things and rationalizing them . . . There’s quite an overlap between these two characters in that they have an amazing ability to lie to themselves and to justify their own bad behaviour, and to make sense of it and to explain it away . . . And they’re both just wickedly smart.
Too smart for their own good. Will Chuck use the tape to get Jimmy disbarred?
Gould: Chuck clearly has a plan. He didn’t make that tape capriciously and he knows the law. He’s going to have some way to use it, and maybe it’ll be an obvious way or maybe it might be something more subtle. We’ll have to see.
How much of Season 3 have you written?
Gilligan: Oh nothing yet. This is Day 11 in the writers’ room and usually we spend the first three weeks at least talking about the big picture for the season, and then we buckle down and get into the nitty gritty of the first episode and then after that the second. It takes us forever to break these things. Breaking them is the process before we even get down to the writing of them, and breaking them on average takes about three to four weeks per episode. It’s ridiculous how long it takes.
I guess it’s safe to say Gus is coming back next season.
Gilligan: We kind of screwed up with this clue. We didn’t realize just how smart and on-the-ball our fans were and we thought that a day or a week or a month from now, after all 10 episodes had aired, Peter would tweet out — maybe in the middle of the summer, maybe in the fall — “Hey guys, if you want a little something about Season 3 you might want to look for a hidden clue in the titles of Season 2.’ And we thought we could control the message that way. We were wrong . . . So all of that is a longwinded way of saying we want to get out ahead of any further damage by saying: keep in mind from what you know of Gus Fring from Breaking Bad; he is a very careful and cautious character. He’s very circumspect, he casts a long shadow, he has a great number of people working for him. We do indeed think he was ultimately behind that note that was left on Mike’s windshield, but it doesn’t mean he put it there with his own hands. And he does not reveal himself easily or lightly and so I would caution folks not to assume they’re going to see him in the first episode of Season 3.
Who else might come back?
Gould: We came very close to actually putting Betsy Brandt (who played Marie Schrader in Breaking Bad) in this finale episode. Little does she know.
What scene?
Gilligan: We thought she could be a good X-ray technician for Chuck when he was getting a CT scan, but then we thought to ourselves, she is so non-submersible as a character onscreen that she would actually inadvertently take attention away from a very dramatic moment.
I take it we won’t see Saul for a while yet?
Gilligan: It’s possible we will. I can tell you it’ll be a tragedy when he finally shows up because we like Jimmy so much and Saul is kind of a lesser, kind of a calcified version of Jimmy McGill. It’s going to be a sad day — for us, at least — when he actually shows up. I don’t know about the audience, but I’ll be sad.