Saul keeps sunny side — for now
Breaking Bad prequel shows good guy losing his dream
TORONTO — Spoiler warning: This story contains details from the season finale of AMC’s Better Call Saul.
Better Call Saul ended its first season with conflicted hero Jimmy McGill rejecting the very thing he seemed to be clamouring for all along — a prestigious law partnership that would impress even his accomplished brother Chuck.
It’s the kind of move that might be considered a twist, if not for the fact that fans of Breaking Bad know Jimmy (played by Bob Odenkirk) is destined to end up in a very dark place as Saul Goodman.
Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould says Jimmy’s decision puts him one step closer to becoming the morally bereft Saul, but there’s still a long way to go.
“To be honest, I think we thought Jimmy McGill would be way closer to being Saul Goodman at this point in the story,” Gould says. “The road to Saul Goodman is much more convoluted and filled with a lot more pain and a lot more energy than we thought it would be.
“And in some ways we’re realizing now that it’s a tragedy. Because Jimmy McGill really is a decent person, at least he’s trying to be a decent person.
“He has a lot of wonderful qualities and in order to become Saul Goodman, you have to wonder where did those qualities go? And so we’re seeing there’s a little bit of a darkness to this transformation. More so than we expected.”
Just two episodes earlier, Jimmy was practically jumping out of his skin to secure a partnership at Chuck’s firm, Hamlin Hamlin & McGill, Gould notes.
Everything changed once he learned Chuck was behind a crippling decision to shut him out of his own legal case, a prospective multi-state class-action lawsuit that would have defined his career and put him side by side with his older brother.
“And it’s all taken away from him. His dreams kind of turn to ashes in his mouth. So the question is: What does this guy really want? Is what he really wants a law career? Was it a connection with Kim? A connection with Chuck? Or is it something else?” says Gould, who created Saul for Breaking Bad’s second season, to guide budding drug lords Walt and Jesse through the criminal underworld.
“And now that some of those things seem out of reach, who is he really now? And those are all questions that we’ve thought about a lot, but one of the things that we realized is this is not him — going in, working at a conventional law firm is not really going to suit this guy.”
Gould says these questions are already being hashed out for the show’s second season.