‘Better Call Saul’ Series Finale: Co-Creator Peter Gould On Saving Souls, “Seeing ‘Breaking Bad’ Differently,” Kim Wexler Spinoff Hopes & Sticking The Landing

Dominic Patten

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details of the Better Call Saul series finale. 

“As soon as we land, I want you to tell the other side that I’ve got more to trade,” a busted but still hustling Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) tells his lawyer on a flight from Nebraska to New Mexico in the Better Call Saul series finale. “I just remembered something that’ll make their toes curl,” the shameless lawyer born Jimmy McGill aka Gene Takavic asserts in the “Saul Gone” episode.

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Toes do curl, plea deals are struck, and hard truths are certainly revealed in the finale, directed and written by Peter Gould, that brings BCS’ increasingly acclaimed six-season run on AMC to an end August 15.

Having carved out its own distinct path since its 2015 debut, the Breaking Bad prequel from Gould and Vince Gilligan finds Odenkirk’s savvy but reckless character captured at last for the crimes he committed with Bryan Cranston’s Walter White and Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman. Of course there are several sleights of hand as Saul aims to prove confession is good for the soul, but bad for keeping out of the dark hole that is the American justice system. To that end, throwing his love and once fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) under the proverbial bus for the death of rival Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) earlier in the season, Goodman tries to escape decades behind bars with a mix of coercion, Heisenberg victimhood, and a big roll of the dice.

As the likes of Cranston, Jonathan Banks and Michael McKean show up from past Breaking Bad and BCS episodes, Saul almost pulls off getting a mere seven-year sentence in a sweet deal with prosecutors and serving it at the near country club environs of FCI Butner in North Carolina. Yet, there’s no easy resolution to be had here.

Bob Odenkirk On Bidding Adieu To ‘Better Call Saul’, Thanks Fans & Co-Workers In Emotional Video

As the reality of the pain and legal suffering about to be unleashed on the fidgeting Wexler is made clear to Goodman by former Albuquerque Deputy D.A and now defense lawyer Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth), things take another turn amidst talk of time machines and regrets. Dressed in Saul’s ostentatious outfit of loud suit and louder tie plus  uttering his “it’s showtime” inspiration line pulled from All That Jazz, Odenkirk performs a full masterclass to transform a bland court hearing into a mixtape of therapy, performance art and admission.

The first BCS episode to be both directed and entirely penned by showrunner Gould, the layered finale seeks and satisfactorily achieves resolution for the title character in a yarn that intertwines the color of the past with the black and white of the ultimately-confining present. Saul does receive his comeuppance, but actually ends up pulling triumph out of tragedy, as only he can. In that, after pushing the narrative rock up the hill to the conclusion for most of this last 13-episode season, Gould’s fifth Better Call Saul directing effort reaches the Olympian heights achieved by the Newhart and Six Feet Under finales.

While the series closer does leave open several doors for more on the Emmy-nominated Seehorn’s now Sunshine State-set Kim Wexler after a final jailhouse noir-ish meet-up with the 86-year stint-serving Goodman, true closure may be in the redefining of the 2013-ending Breaking Bad. Which is to say, solidly bookending the flagship show narratively, Better Call Saul completed its final season journey with precision and poignancy.

As Gould prepared to meet up with Odenkirk, Gilligan, Seehorn and other cast and scribes to watch the nearly 90-minute finale together in L.A., the showrunner spoke with me about the final episode, and both differentiating and forever linking it with Breaking Bad. Gould also addressed how Better Call Saul made it over the finish line and transforming the advocate into the client.

DEADLINE: So, Jimmy McGill is now king of the correctional facility, facing life behind bars, but he came clean in the end, kind of…

GOULD: I could buy that. I could also buy saying that, you know, he got his soul back, you know, however, tarnished it may be. He certainly can’t take back all the things he’s done. You need a time machine for that (LAUGHS)

DEADLINE: Season finales are hard, and series finales are very hard. You guys have been putting this puzzle together for a while now, been leading up to this…

GOULD: It’s a scary thing to end a show. It puts a lot of pressure on the 63rd episode. There’s almost too much to talk about.

DEADLINE: How do you mean?

GOULD: The best thing is that people are watching it and thinking about it, and arguing about it, and so that the show lives on that way. That would be wonderful.

DEADLINE: Well, my argument is with so much packed in, so much back and forth, I now feel that Better Call Saul is not a prequel to Breaking Bad, Breaking Bad is the hidden midseason to Better Call Saul. Was that the intent?

GOULD: I love it. I love it. Well, you know, my hope was always that you would end up seeing Breaking Bad differently, at the end of all this. Also, my hope is that the shows can be enjoyed separately but that they would be in conversation with each other and enrich each other. My concern honestly is that people who haven’t watched Breaking Bad might be completely lost but hopefully not. Hopefully, if they’re lost, they’ll be lost in a pleasurable way.

DEADLINE: Peter, I doubt there are very few people who watched the Saul finale who didn’t at least get a Breaking Bad refresher if not binge to get this far. However, having said that, what do you mean when you say you hope viewers would end up seeing Breaking Bad differently?

GOULD: Well, you know there was a physical violence in Breaking Bad. The character Walt ends up carrying a gun, he ends up using a machine gun to kill a lot of people. Saul Goodman never picks up a gun.

DEADLINE: Well, he has one…

GOULD: Yes, on Breaking Bad it’s revealed he has a gun in his desk, but you’ve never seen the guy pick up a gun. Maybe he threatened people once by hitting them like piñatas, but that was about as far as he would go. So, the ending was always going to be different, even though this is a show about a guy who, in some ways, bears just as much responsibility for the events of Breaking Bad as Walt does.

DEADLINE: But you pull focus in Saul’s final season, spinning Breaking Bad’s narrative out to be the story of Walter White and Saul Goodman equally …

GOULD: He might have worn a suit, he might have sat in an office, but Saul made a lot of Breaking Bad happen, In the real world, you see that’s true, too, and you see that sometimes the people who don’t actually personally wield violence can be just as responsible for all the pain of the world as the ones who pull the trigger.

DEADLINE: For this story, how does that redefinition play out?

GOULD: We wanted to put the spotlight on Jimmy/Saul’s role in everything that happened in Breaking Bad and to understand what was going on in his head and what was going on in his soul.

DEADLINE: I know you played around with scenarios for the end over the years, how did you settle on this particular conclusion to the show? was this always how you wanted it to end?

GOULD: Look, we didn’t know how it was going to end for many seasons.

DEADLINE: Really?

GOULD: Yep. Then, in Season 4 and 5, we started thinking what is the right ending to this It felt very much like Saul spent so much time defending clients, that maybe it’s the moment for him to be a client Maybe it’s the moment for him to be a convict, maybe it’s time for him to be on the other side of those bars, and maybe it’s what he deserves after everything that he’s done.

DEADLINE: Speaking of people or characters getting what they deserve, Vince said at the virtual TCA last week that this is the end of the line for the Breaking Bad universe from you guys, but as Kim walks out of that prison, that last look at Saul. Sure looks like, with all we’ve seen of her bored in her Florida life, volunteering at a legal aid clinic, she’s walking into a spinoff – in the new few years?

GOULD: Look, I can’t contradict you. I think I would be really interested seeing what happens to Kim, but right now, we have no plans in that direction.

DEADLINE: Certainly Kim’s found a freedom in Jimmy taking the full fall for everything, including Howard’s demise, but he’s also a full-on Saul Goodman, the king of the joint. After the process of becoming Saul becoming Gene, the call to the cops from Marion, the arrest and the courtroom drama, how did he get there, psychologically?

GOULD: That was the idea that we had way back when about the ending of the show. Ultimately, even if he becomes Jimmy McGill again in his own mind and to himself, to the outside world, he’s always going to be this two-dimensional cartoon character that he made. Saul Goodman’s going to be something that he has to live with for the rest of his life, and that’s his own kind of purgatory.

Of course, when he comes into the meeting room with Kim, she calls him Jimmy, and you can see the vulnerability in Bob’s face when she does that. You can see the tenderness and the generosity of calling him Jimmy, at that moment, because she knows she’s seen the guy that she loved.

DEADLINE: Yes, but amidst all the bows you tie up here, Kim’s story is left noticeably unresolved. She has never changed her name, she still has the hussle for the legal life, she is clear of a lawsuit from Howard’s widow even after her affidavit and confession, so who is Kim Wexler at the end, the true main character here and figuratively, the last living soul?

GOULD: I mean, my hope and my dream is that you would spin the story in your head.

DEADLINE: Oh, you don’t really want that …

GOULD: (LAUGHS) No, but it seems to me that she’s living this life in Florida, where she’s hiding from responsibility and from making decisions in Albuquerque. Then Jimmy’s call, in a way, the call from Saul, liberates her. That liberates her to actually face the music and face the music legally, which, you know, she goes to New Mexico and presumably, talks to D.A. Ericsen, and does a complete written confession, and she also goes to Cheryl, the woman that she and Jimmy lied to at the memorial earlier in the season. Kim looks her in the eye and stands there strong while all Cheryl’s righteous rage comes out behind that table.

In this finale, you see that she no longer feels satisfied hiding.

Yes, she’s back at lunch with her friends, and she still can’t quite bring herself to recommend a restaurant, but then she something finally shifts. She takes off at midday of work, and where does she go, she goes to a legal office, and she’s going to volunteer there. And, boy, I don’t know.

DEADLINE: Peter, you know.

GOULD: Hopefully, the audience can put two and two together and realize that she’s not going to be satisfied with just answering the phones in that office for very long.

DEADLINE: Well, I would say, and this has spinoff stuck all over it one way or another, she also isn’t going to be satisfied not playing the game. This is the woman who quit being a lawyer and literally scammed her way into a penitentiary with a legal bar card that turned out didn’t have an expiration date on it.

GOULD: Dominic, to me, there’s a long distance between using your bar card to visit a prisoner and scamming to make Howard Hamlin look like he’s got a drug habit.

DEADLINE: True.

GOULD: I think she’s through with scamming. I don’t think she’s going to bake a file into a cake for Jimmy or anything like that. I think she’s going to be on the up-and-up for the rest of her life.

DEADLINE: So, there’s the rest of your life too, after years and years on this journey, over two acclaimed series, in an award season that is sparkling for almost everyone on Better Call Saul. Where are you at now the world is learning how it all ends?

GOULD: You know what, I don’t know what I feel yet.

DEADLINE: No? 

Maybe that’s why I have such identification with this character of Jimmy, who delays his emotion and maybe turns his back on what’s really going on inside him. You know, when his brother, Chuck (Michael McKean) dies, it takes a long time for Jimmy to feel what he’s feeling, and maybe I’m the same way because I haven’t quite got my head around it.

DEADLINE: I sometimes think that’s the true series finale is the one the creator, the co-creator experiences as it ends …

GOULD: Yeah, because I feel like we’re going to go start working on the next season of the show. I also feel very sad because I’m not seeing my co-workers every day the way I have been. I think that’s really going to sink in, you know, a month or two from now when I’m back pitching shows, pitching shows from the ground up trying to get the next thing going. I’m going to be very sad to be out there with so few people, but my real hope is that we all get to work together again in different configurations.

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