Better Call Saul
 

Couldn't find an official thread, so...

What do you all think of Better Call Saul so far?

I really wish they'd used this as its intro :P:



I'm loving the show so far, particularly the most recent Mike episode - who knew there was so much more to his character?

I also like how each episode (except #5 for some reason) is one word and ends with an "o" - Uno, Mijo, Nacho, Hero, Five-O, Bingo, Rico, Pimento, Marco...

I really like it. I really enjoy the slow build to Jimmy going from good to Saul. I love that it's taking him a lot longer to "break bad" than it did for Walt.

This show is God-tier, & I love what they're doing with Mike. He was my favorite character on Breba, so having a ton more of him just makes my day.

I agree, it's great. Very happy to get to see where Mike came from. I also like how the intro doesn't take longer than few seconds in every episode.

I guess I'll give this a watch eventually. I mean his real name is Jimmy McGill....his alias at the beginning of the series is Gene...by names alone i'm 2/3s obligated to watch this show.

Calling it that is a thing? :P

I like this so far. The pacing of the episodes is much different than other shows besides Breaking Bad. Getting Mike's back story is a big plus.

That was a good finale. Not as emotional as last week's, but it built up Jimmy's "breaking bad" moment well.

Also, I loved the Breaking Bad callbacks.

Haven't seen tonight's episode, but "Pimento" was great. Love seeing Mike in action.

Same and same.

Mike has always been my favorite character and that one liner cemented it :lol:

I found the finale lackluster. A great series overall, though, & I can't wait for more.

I missed the second half of the finale, owing to helping a friend with his homework, but I really enjoyed the first half. I definitely wasn't expecting for Chuck to be the real villain in Jimmy's lack of career movement, or for Howard and Jimmy to get along so well after the whole fiasco.

I'm glad I'm not the sole member of the Mike fan club. Love the character to pieces.

I think it suffered from lack of a B plot. Still, good overall.

Yeah, that's exactly it. I guess there wasn't much they could do with Mike that wouldn't need further development, but still. Anything would've helped. The bingo & scam sequences felt way too long, as well. A finale shouldn't feel like filler (which this kinda did, to me).

Thought both were fun, if a little long.

Were the 2 girls that Jimmy and Marco conned a jab at 2 Broke Girls...which also airs on Monday nights?

I think that's a reach, homie.

They were a reference to a story Saul tells Walt on Breaking Bad. He tricked a woman into thinking he was Kevin Costner because HE believed it!

I'm really enjoying the show so far. In some ways it's more serious then Breaking Bad. Although not as violent as Breaking Bad, it's themes and stories are dark and really interesting. The only thing I'm a little bummed out about is the fact that the seasons are a little short. Unless it's the mid-season finale.

This comes back with season 2 in about an hour, y'all.

Excite!

This show is great. It has me hooked by wondering what a damn switch does.

It kills a random stranger & replaces them with a portion of jelly beans, according to Vince Gilligan, who said so on "Talking Saul". :tlol:

Damn, I should have put that to record, as well.

Don't fret, it was pretty damn boring.

The only real benefit was a 30 second clip of next weeks episode at the very end:

I dunno. I had fun seeing Jimmy and Kim ruining KENWINS's day once again. Or technically, the first time.

I was talking about Talking Saul.

Haven't watched the premier yet, didn't know it was back.
Looking forward to catching up tonight.

Yooooo, that one really long shot of was really impressive and well done.

Now they just need to tell me what that switch does.

The return of the show last night for season 5 was good. The annual Gene stuff was pretty nerve-wracking... very well written. You finally start to feel like, "PHEW! Guess it's all a false alarm for Gene" and then BAM. And soooo awkward/uncomfortable.

3 episodes in... so, so good. This last one was basically Kim's own Breaking Bad. Very well done.

#1: This cinches it. She's become like Jimmy and she loves it.

#2: The guy Lalo is making Crazy 8 snitch out... it's got to be Tortuga, right? It can't be Gus' people or any of the Salamancas... so who else could it be?

I'm almost done with Season 4 on Netflix.

Really feel like Kim shouldn't have pulled the scam in Lubbock. I'm predicting she ends up disbarred as an outcome of this scam being discovered further down the road...

Anyone watch the finale? Lalo is out for blood.

Also looks like Kim is going to be the reason Saul becomes what he is in Breaking Bad. I don't think she is going to die, it just wouldn't fit Saul to keep doing what he's doing in Breaking Bad if he lost her. I actually think she's still with him now in the Breaking Bad timeline just doing things behind the scenes. But obviously something bad will happen eventually post Breaking Bad's last episode that has Saul working in hiding in Cinnabon.

Yeah, I saw it. I LOVED the few episodes before it, and I dug the tension at Lalo's house during the invasion... but I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping for something punchier, since it'll likely be like 2 years before we see season 6. Like, I was fully expecting Nacho to pop in at the end and shoot Lalo, or something crazy. And MAN, that episode with Saul and Mike in the desert? Wow, that was awesome. That's probably on par with the best Breaking Bad episodes. Pound for pound, probably this is the best Better Call Saul season overall.

I keep watching that scene with Saul in the desert with Walt and Jesse for clues.

"It wasn't me, it was Ignacio (Nacho)!"

"Lalo didn't send you?"

That implies that Nacho does something big that Saul is worried about blowing around back to him from the cartel(s). It also implies that Lalo survives Better Call Saul, though Gus's later comment to Hector that "the Salamanca line dies with you!" in Breaking Bad implies otherwise.

It is probably likely Lalo dies next season and Saul just never finds out, which is why he thinks he's still alive in Breaking Bad. I assumed Nacho was going to live either way, he's basically the "Jesse" of this series, in that he's the young guy who just winds up with a lot of bad luck but wants to do the right thing. Nacho is the hispanic version of Jesse.

Lalo is too good a villain I can see why they want him around for the final season of the show. Hopefully we get some more scenes with Gus too because we're not going to see anything of him after next season of course. And yes the desert episode was one of the best episodes, reminded me of the Season 2 BB ep when Walt/Jesse were stuck in the desert for 4 days in the mobile home.

Kim is also probably the best written female character of the whole franchise. Breaking Bad's weak point were the female characters, as of course Skyla/Marie basically existed just to complain/whine and cause tension whenever they appeared. And Jesse's girlfriends all existed just to die...lol.

Kim is probably the breakout female character of the whole series, that's why I don't think she'll ever be killed off. Not only is Saul too cheery and peppy in BB and her death would absolutely devastate him, but she's become too popular a character herself. I definitely think Saul/Kim are still together in BB, we just never see her.

Yeah, Kim has become surprisingly great. What a character arc.

I was hoping for Lalo's end this season, but also not. In just a couple of seasons, Tony Dalton really brought that character to life.

I've still got my fingers crossed for "FRING: A Breaking Bad Story." There's still time.

* Edit: surprising that no Hank in the finale. They made such a big deal of bringing him back and it was for like 2 episodes.

I would watch the everloving crap out of a Los Pollos Hermanos spinoff.

And yeah, Breaking Bad was pretty light on compelling main female characters, although I really dug Skyler. She was always caught between a rock and a hard place. But nobody compares to Kim.

Man, the sad thing is how much the actors have aged. I've been rewatching Breaking Bad and am in Season 2 when Gus, Saul, and Mike debut...and I forgot how YOUNG they look. Gus especially, I can't believe how much the actor aged in real life in just under a decade. Mike too kinda because he acts older and gruffer in Better Call Saul than in Breaking Bad.

I can't see any possible way they could get Gus to do a prequel, he's going to be way too old by the time Better Call Saul ends as it is. It's just so weird to watch a prequel when the actors are older than they are in the following series, you can't really watch the shows back to back for this reason.

I mean when you just watch Better Call Saul on its own you assume, "The actors always looked like this, didn't they?" Then you go back to Breaking Bad and you're like... "Wow." Good god, and these are famous actors and the shows aren't really more than a decade apart and everyone has aged tremendously.

Even Saul himself has aged a lot, especially this season... a lot of the crow's feet type stuff they could take care of, but they don't. He's supposed to be what... 38 at this point?

Not a prequel series, a one-off movie like El Camino. They could en-youngen him for something limited like that. Though I notice lately he's getting a bit of a belly?

At this point we're only 1 year away from Breaking Bad season 1, since they said Tuco gets released in a year.

Also, just rewatched the season 5 finale and I noticed something I didn't catch the first time. At the very end, when Lalo has immobilized the assassin whose face he burned with the hot grease, who he forces to call and tell his people that the hit was successful... before we cut to Lalo walking out of there, there's a shot of Lalo looking at the bottle of liquor Nacho brought out and the glasses coming into focus. Then I remembered, we never saw Nacho drink any of it. It could be he was looking at the bottle to imply he would walk over, grab it, and smash the guy with it... but why would he need to do that? Was it just to underscore Nacho not being there?

Did Nacho poison Lalo? Could episode 1 of season 6 be Lalo staggering out past the gate, then dropping dead?

Like... some kind of dark sitcom in the restaurant itself?

I'm pretty much in the popular "I don't like Skyler at all" camp. They had many opportunities to redeem her in season 4 and 5 but they would always take the opposite way.

No, I was thinking the early days of Gus and Max. And maybe frame it with black-and-white restaurant scenes.

Eh, I wouldn't say I LIKED Skyler. But I felt pretty sorry for her. Her husband was completely untrustworthy and ruined their relationship.

Why should I take Walt's side against her?

The only other type of movie I can see them making is something with Flynn/Walter Jr. as an adult with his sister Holly, but that would have to take place in the real time that passed so like 10+ years after Breaking Bad ended since the actor is old now. And even then what would you do.

Jesse is in Alaska so he is out of the picture, and well, everyone else is dead. I'm sure Saul and Kim will get some kind of ending when Better Call Saul ends so they wouldn't be considered.

Oh, I see. Yeah, at this point, if we're doing SUPER young Gus, it's got to be somebody else. Which doesn't mean that yeah, there couldn't be a narrative framework with Giancarlo Esposito as older Gus.

It's a complicated situation. Mostly I just wanted her to either come more into his corner and help him out or conversely just move out and that's that. This middle of the road "I'm not going to snitch on you (only for selfish reasons, though), I'm just going to sit here and wait for you to die and maybe sometimes cheat on you" doesn't sit right with me.

Oh, plenty. And it's crazy enough that it could work, we talked about this earlier. Though could that guy carry a SERIES on his back? I'm not sure. It'd need to have a hook. I'm sure they could if they put their minds to it.

Yeah, probably not. My guess is that some of the extra 3 episodes in season 6 are full-on Gene/Cinnabon stuff. And he finds some way to reunite with Kim, or Kim rescues him somehow. Like, when he used the Disappearer, he probably never even told her about that... he just wanted to protect her. But ever since she's been looking for him.