Jimmy and Kim’s marriage takes things in a new direction
It must be a trick of Vince Gilligan’s, to be able to pull off the escalating suspense and unbearable tension that marked each progressive season of Breaking Bad, because they’ve done it again with Better Call Saul, now having completed its fifth and arguably best season yet. It could be a natural result of the two worlds finally merging as the Breaking Bad timeline gets closer, but with nearly every episode being a fine example of perfectly executed direction, acting and character building, it stands above BB, because there’s still a hint of unpredictability involved.
That unpredictability is regarding Kim Wexler of course (played by Rhea Seehorn), who has her best season yet, practically elevated to a co-lead, as she chooses to make some fateful decisions about herself and Jimmy that put her dubious future even more in flux. There appear to be dwindling options over her ultimate fate now, but I find myself wondering if even the writers haven’t quite decided what road they ultimately want to take her down. This season Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill officially becomes Saul Goodman, changing his name at the courthouse in the premiere and more or less diving straight into the sleazeball tactics that defined the character we were introduced to on Breaking Bad, but there remains one factor to his humanity that hasn’t been jettisoned, and that is of course his relationship with Kim. That relationship deepens in several ways this season, leaving us to ponder with prolonged fear and anxiety what could possibly happen going forward, as even though Jimmy’s transformation into Saul is now complete, there seemed to be no hint that he had a wife who knew all his nefarious dealings hanging around behind the scenes. Or was there? And what’s going on in those present day Cinnabon Gene-in-Nebraska prologues? There remain some distinct pathways to bringing us to the present- the question is will Gilligan and Peter Gould take the unexpected ones that make us question what we saw of Saul when Walter White was doing what he was doing.
Tony Dalton’s Lalo is a new kind of threat
In the bifurcated part of the storyline, this season we see Mike (Jonathan Banks) experience his own final transformation into the coldblooded taskmaster we knew him as, as he decides to ally permanently with Gus Fring (Giancarlo Exposito) and his quest for personal revenge against the Salamanca’s. This leads to the development of Lalo Salamanca, played with gleeful joie de vivre by Tony Dalton, and the luckiest possible outcome they could have gotten, given that Lalo’s existence stems from a singular throwaway reference of Saul’s in his first episode of Breaking Bad. Lalo however turns out to be both menacing and cheerfully devil-may-care, the most memorable villain introduced in the BB world after Gus himself. The fight between Lalo, Mike, Gus, Saul and eventually Kim (!) seamlessly merges the two worlds that have been co-existing since Season 1, priming us for the final season that will presumably take us right up to Breaking Bad and beyond. I can’t wait.
Grade: A
Gus and Mike face new problems this season
