#jimmy *always* loses a life in a significant way in episode four

[faerygardens]

Idk who needs to hear this but Skizz dying a couple times this session doesn’t mean the canary curse is broken, Jimmy always dies for the first time after session four (and if you wanna point to double life, it was technically Tango’s death in session one, with Jimmy being the one to die session four), the canary curse would only be broken if someone other than Jimmy is the first to die permanently

[donheisenberg]

Better Call Saul Season 5 Review

The difficult penultimate season. It is a somewhat under-discussed but common occurrence in TV drama. FX greats:  Justified, The Americans and The Shield all had near faultless runs, but in their second to last seasons stumbled to different degrees. Depending on how you break it up The Sopranos experienced its weakest run of episodes in 6A before hitting its classic final stretch.  Add to the list Six Feet Under and probably quite a few others and you can see that it resembles something of an obstacle for long-form TV drama. Why is this? In the aforementioned show they spend much of their penultimate season table-setting for their final run of episodes. It can sometimes be forgotten about because all of these shows stuck the landing (similarly Game of Thrones’ weak first half of its last season is largely forgotten about because the last 7 episodes are even worse) but nevertheless there can be a difficult balancing act between setting-up the all-important final season and delivering hours of TV that are satisfying in and of themselves. Thankfully it is a balance Better Call Saul strikes, not only managing to not falter but in fact exceeding with its strongest season yet.

So how does Better Call Saul succeed where others struggled? I think the answer is indicative of very nature of the show. Where the shows mentioned above spent 10 or so episodes, making sure all the dominos were set-up before they were to come crashing down, for BCS the end has always been in place. While Breaking Bad was a propulsive ride full of events; BCS has always been less concerned with getting to the next big moment, instead favouring the times in between. As a prequel we have always know the destination of this journey, admittedly with a couple of significant caveats.

The most significant of which being Kim Wexler. More than just the MVP of BCS, Kim is one of the most compelling characters on any TV series at the moment. Of course her story has the biggest question mark over it because she is the most major character in BCS not to appear in Breaking Bad, but through this season and in particular in the finale a whole new ambiguity comes over her arc.

Mimicking the finger guns gesture Jimmy made toward  her at the end of the last season, which had signified his identity shift to Saul Goodman (as he made it official with a name change) Kim truly turns the tables here. After a night of appearing to be jokingly discussing the ways in which they may sabotage Howard’s career, it turns out Kim may not have really been joking. Despite everything Jimmy has done to Howard this season he is taken aback by the notion Kim would actually consider ruining a man’s career and life. Where we had always thought that this was the story of all the things that break Jimmy down into becoming Saul, the question now becomes whether this is in fact the story of Kim’s transformation?

The other key strength of Season Five was the way in which the show was finally able to intertwine its two halves. My biggest criticism of BCS in the past has always been that it felt like two separate shows edited together. On the one hand you have the Jimmy and Kim show and on the other you have the Mike show. The Mike show has always felt like more of a direct prequel to Breaking Bad, sometimes to its detriment. It is not to say it hasn’t been responsible for some great scenes or whole episodes in the case of season one’s Five-0 but at its worst it can sometimes feel like it is just filling in gaps in the Breaking Bad mythology (e.g. how did Hector lose the use of his legs). In the second half of this season though there’s none of that fragmentation. By finally having the two often separate strands linked the Mike show feels more vital than ever and we get the best run of BCS episodes yet (from about 5-9 I would say).

A large part of that is certainly down to Lalo Salamanca. Breaking Bad loved a big bad, whether it was Tuco, the cousins or a certain Gus Fring, the show was populated by some of the greatest villains in TV history. BCS in its earlier seasons had a fantastic villain but of a very different variety in the form of Chuck but with Tony Dalton’s scene-stealing turn as Lalo they have a truly great out and out antagonist.

The fact he is not in Breaking Bad would seem to point to only one conclusion when it comes to what exactly his fate will be, but the question remains just exactly what havoc he will wreak on his way there. Many expected this season to end with the death of Nacho, but while Gilligan and Gould spared him for now only time will tell. The finale itself actually felt a tad underwhelming on first viewing after the above mentioned run of classic episodes. In some ways it was frustrating but in a way that is typical of BCS.

Having said that, this season BCS was more willing than ever to embrace aspects of its predecessor. This season’s outstanding eighth episode (directed by Gilligan) largely set in the desert evokes some of Breaking Bad’s best hours. At the same time though BCS always feels distinct in various ways. In the penultimate episode Kim and Jimmy are backed into a corner when Lalo arrives and are forced to work some way out of it, much in the way Jesse and Walt so often  were, but unlike Breaking Bad BCS revels in the anti-climax. No blood is shed in that scene. The finale is similar in this sense, while Lalo does admittedly massacre a small army of guys, the tragedy of this story lies beneath the surface. After their big confrontation with Lalo, Jimmy and Kim spend most of the finale in a hotel room not even discussing what had happened. Yet the show still mines a great power out of the smallest of gestures. No planes come down, no hospital rooms explode but this show never lacks in emotional depth.

While I recently re-watched Breaking Bad in its entirety, reminding myself what a clinically perfect piece of storytelling and film-making that show still is, season 5 goes some way to legitimizing the BCS vs Breaking Bad conversation. While I personally can never see myself subscribing to the view that BCS is a better show than Breaking Bad,  the quality of this season on top of the already excellent previous four  seasons, makes it seems a somewhat less outlandish claim, which I don’t believe could ever have been anticipated five years ago when this started.

Grade A