When the February 8, 2015 the American chain AMC premiered Better Call Saulfew expected that the spin-off of Breaking Bad was more than that: a series detached from a universe that had garnered a wide and intense fandom and that, as such, would provide the missing pieces to complete the narrative puzzle of the narcotic misadventures of the Chemistry teacher Walter White and that Sancho Panza junkie called Jesse Pinkman. Following that logic, it remained to be seen whether the lawyer Saul Goodman had survived the brutal carnage of that series finale, something that the director, writer, showrunner and alma mater of both creatures, Vince Gilligan, revealed before the opening credits of the first episode.
There he showed Goodman working in a bakery under another identity and with a paranoia that led him to distrust everything and everyone, as if he knew that the past would return to settle accounts. Sixty-three chapters later, that beginning can be read as the most complete gesture that Better Call Saul I was going to have own life. An expansive life, with a remarkable artistic flight and characters whose construction should be studied in all the script schools of the Milky Way.
The time arc of the series spanned from the late 1990s to the early 1990s. While Saul, still called Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk)tried to make himself visible and obtain the approval of his older brother Chuck, from “this” side of the screen the so-called new “Golden Age” of the series started with The Wire y The Soprano. online with them, Better Call Saul bet less on the impact and the narrative hooks that promised to be resolved in the next chapter (what in English is called cliffhanger) than to the progressive construction of a complex network and populated by men and women with nuances, in addition to an unhurried development, a complete subversion of the frenzy associated with the small screen.
With the purpose of Better Call Saul –which completes the triptych started by Breaking Bad and continued in 2019 with the feature film El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie-, It is Tuesday, August 16 on Netflix, the last bastion of an era prior to the mandate of the algorithms in which the audience had to adapt to the series and not the other way around is gone. Gilligan imagined a patient spectator, ready to surrender to a enjoyment without great peaks of ecstasy and decisions on his part a priori difficult to understand. After all, if following three minutes it was known that Saul had survived, what was left for later? What would Gilligan have on his hands to have delivered the carrot so quickly? Was the series “killing the father”, as Freud would say, in order to, in the manner of Saul, shed its previous fur and reach individual maturity?
The winks and references to Breaking Bad They were talk of the fans. But Better Call Saul might, can and will be seen without having the remotest idea of who Walter White was nor any of the characters with a presence in both series. Gilligan avoided going down the common paths of the prequels, and while much of the plot took place when Saul wasn’t even calling that, in the final season he risked a time jump by moving the actions to the same time as Breaking Bad. One of the many reasons why the Better… will go down in history is because it is the first spin-off that not only owes little or nothing to the original series, but also because it was able to to rewrite the sensations of the past making that original series become a debtor of its spin-off. A miracle that only a creator with full freedom might achieve.
It’s tempting to think that, for six seasons, Better Call Saul showed the conversion of a mediocre lawyer with a huge heart into a famous one with few scruples when it comes to meeting your goals. In structural terms, it was. What is special is that He never fell into the easy way of thinking of him as a “good” or “bad” guy. On the contrary, Gilligan negated any possibility of easy labeling by endowing Jimmy/Saul with a constant ambivalence that made the apparent conversion, in reality, a long tussle between Dr. Jekyll/McGill and Mr. Hyde/Goodman. A jerk motorized by the desire to put an end to invisibility and contempt, by the attempt to pave a path where everything was gravel and potholes. See but the relationship with his very successful older brother and the partners of the law firm where Jimmy worked as a cadet while studying Law at a distance in a middling university.
The oasis was the loving relationship, full of camaraderie, support and loyalty, with fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn)who together with the silent and ultra-efficient Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) they functioned as the ethical pillars on which the series built its moral foundation.
Jimmy’s adventures were many and varied. Small-time defense lawyer in exchange for coins, architect of crazy plans whose preparation involved keeping the principles of law deep in his pocket, a man self-conscious regarding his limitations and the ugly duckling feelinga brother who understood that in order to be who he wanted he had to respond to betrayals with more betrayals, a boyfriend willing to do anything to defend his beloved and, of course, the guy who knew how to deal with the most fearsome drug traffickers that a woman had ever imagined. fiction in a long time.
Beyond the visual games that became a hallmark of Gilligan’s style, the epicenter of Better Call Saul was always in the evolution and the emotional edges of the characters, as evidenced by the memorable scene in which Kim, now far from the legal profession, cries profusely in a bus for two minutes following signing the divorce with Jimmy. That moment culminates with the hand of an anonymous passenger leaning on her shoulder: impossible not to imagine that that hand is ours trying to contain the one who, without knowing it, fell in love with the one who has already entered the pantheon of the great tragic heroes of fiction. audiovisual.
