JIMMY MCGILL’S LAST STAND

THE ‘BREAKING BAD’ prequel’s final season gets off to a slow start with its first two episodes. With most series, this would be a problem. But even more than its parent show, Better Call Saul has made its patience into an addictive virtue. The more deliberately the story moves, the more exquisite the agony.

It’s been two years since we last saw Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), and friends, but only a few hours for them. Season Six takes a while both to refresh the audience’s memory and move the pieces around the board for the series’ endgame. This means another montage of fixer Mike ( Jonathan Banks) ransacking someone’s home for clues, another intimate Jimmy-Kim argument, and another example of Lalo (Tony Dalton) carefully charming his latest victims to death. But it never feels like Saul is repeating itself, as the characters keep making huge shifts. The new episodes, for instance, find Jimmy struggling with the role reversal in which Kim is now the ruthless con artist while he’s the soft touch constantly worried that they’re going too far.

Even this late in the run, you can sense the reluctance of Saul creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to let sweet Jimmy transform once and for all into Breaking Bad’s hollow, amoral Saul Goodman. Throughout both shows, they have painted themselves and their characters into inescapable corners, then found the most thrilling routes out of them. They should be hemmed in by our knowledge of what happens to Saul, Gus, and Mike once they meet Walter White, yet these episodes still feel alive with possibilities. Bad times are surely coming for all of them, but it’s hard not to bask in the energy of spending these final months in the Heisenberg-verse.