Better Call Saul finds another gear in its fifth and best season

It's hard to imagine feeling so right now, but Better Call Saul seemed like a monumentally bad idea when it was first announced.  Spinoffs are, more often than not, creatively bankrupt cash grabs and making one for a beloved series like Breaking Bad ran the risk of souring people on the whole franchise.  Luckily, the series has proven that no matter what challenge you put in front of this creative team they'll churn out great television.

Though while it was always terrific on a purely technical and objective level, the show never was able to engender the kind of intense fervor that its predecessor was able to for me.  I've always really liked Better Call Saul, but I loved Breaking Bad.  All of that changed in the former's excellent fifth season, which just concluded its thrilling ride earlier this week.

Saul has always been two shows in one, with Jimmy and Kim living out their morality plays in one corner and Mike and Gus embroiled in the power plays of the Albuquerque drug trade in another corner.  Both were pretty compelling, though the drug half often suffered from prequel-itis more than its counterpart, simply going through the motions to put things in the place of Breaking Bad's starting point.  Now that those two halves have merged, season five felt like the series was finally humming along and realizing its full potential.  Previously the show's two modes conversed with each other only on a thematic level -- the entire universe is populated by people chiseling away at the list of things they are unwilling to do -- but it's way more electric when they're actually intertwining on a literal level.

Last season saw Jimmy finally adopting the Saul Goodman moniker, and this year his slide into the inevitable accelerated at a rapid pace, becoming a "friend of the cartel" and getting tangled up with wildcard Lalo Salamanca.  The intersection of the legal and cartel hemispheres of the world led to one of the season's best episodes, "Bagman," where Jimmy's mission to pick up Lalo's seven million dollars of bail money turns into a grisly shootout, followed by a long sojourn in the desert with Mike.  It's an episode that recalled Breaking Bad's classic "4 Days Out" -- surely not a coincidence that Vince Gilligan, who has ceded day-to-day control of Saul to Peter Gould, returned to direct this hour -- blending all of this creative team's strengths together.  It's at once full of nailbiting tension, atmospheric patience, and ingenious plotting.  One of the things that's admirable about Better Call Saul is that it has thoroughly staked out its own identity, so it almost feels wrong to praise the show for injecting some more Breaking Bad into its veins, but it's hard to deny that it sings when working in that style.

The fact that it's a prequel has always loomed over the show narratively.  At the end of the day, we know where the show's going to end up.  A problem that frequently plagues prequels is that it's hard to invest in what you're watching since it's all in service of a known endpoint.  Better Call Saul has circumvented this in two ways.  The first is simple: it has made the audience savor the journey through its sheer craft and leaning into the clockwork fatalism that was even baked into Breaking Bad instead of running away from it.  But more importantly, it knows that because we're largely aware of how things end, it can wring out tension and emotion from homing in on the unknown variables in the equation.

It's not a surprise that this season Kim, Nacho, and Lalo were the most compelling characters to follow.  We know the broad strokes of what can and can't happen to the likes of Jimmy, Gus and Mike, which makes the open possibilities of anything involving Kim, Nacho, Lalo feel all the more gutwrenching.  Lalo's status as a chaos agent is amplified by the fact that he's an invention of Better Call Saul and we therefore have no idea what he'll do next.  Meanwhile, Nacho's role as a double agent and his desire to get out of the game has even higher stakes knowing that he may not be long for this world.

Where this pays the biggest dividends, however, is with Kim.  She's been the show's best character from the outset, partially because it's hard not to be when Rhea Seehorn is giving a pantheon performance playing her, but Kim's only gotten more fascinating as the show has gone on and toyed with our perception of how things could turn out for her.  Most people just assumed in the beginning that things would eventually end poorly between her and Jimmy once his full evolution into Saul Goodman was complete.  What season five did was reveal a failure of imagination within all of us.  From suggesting that she and Jimmy get married once he gets involved with the cartel to her confronting Lalo head-on when he imposes on them in their home, Kim was constantly upending our expectations.  It seemed as if truly anything could happen with her in these 10 episodes.  Would she leave Jimmy after he finally did something to cross the line?  Would she get killed right on the spot when Lalo shows up at their doorstep?

The actual answer is simpler and more tragic.  Though she's always found thrills in Jimmy's grifting game, Kim has also been the closest thing the show had to a moral center.  But really, when we thought we were watching Jimmy's process of "breaking bad," this whole time we were slowly watching Kim's.  That feeling that something very obvious is being revealed before our eyes is what makes the scene where she's suggesting to Jimmy that they illegally sabotage Howard to force a resolution to the Sandpiper case makes it so heartbreaking, even more so because Jimmy seems to understand she's past the point of no return too.  The moral corrosion was always within her, Jimmy just provided the activation energy.

With next season being the show's final one, this year was the ideal penultimate season, perfectly ramping things up and setting everything in motion for an exciting conclusion.  And with the end nearing, Saul is pulling out all the stops.  We thought we were going into this show with a full map, but the brilliance of it is that it has proceeded to reveal all sorts of hidden rooms and passages we never could have imagined.