Warning: Full spoilers follow for Better Call Saul.
This week’s stellar episode of Better Call Saul often looked and sounded like an hour of its predecessor, Breaking Bad. “Point and Shoot,” the first episode after a seven-week hiatus, and the start of the last stretch for the show before it ends in August, all came down to a big showdown: Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) vs. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton).
It makes sense that the prequel would start to feel more and more like Breaking Bad the closer the show’s timeline got to the adventures of Walter White. And indeed, throughout its run, Better Call Saul’s path has occasionally felt bisected as more Breaking Bad elements were woven in. But still, this is a show that has largely avoided the prequel trap that many franchises run into these days.
Before Gus and the Salamancas entered the fray, Better Call Saul was first and foremost a legal drama about the complexities between everyday rights and wrongs and the extent of their consequences. Later seasons have felt like more of a mix of that with the building of Gus’ drug empire. But with “Point and Shoot,” and the first half of Season 6 that preceded it, it’s suddenly clearer than ever that this prequel isn’t imitating its original; rather, it’s wielding it like a weapon.
At the center of Better Call Saul has always been Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn)—foils sucked into a doomed romance in which they continue to enable each other’s worst tendencies. At this point in the story, the actions they believed to be innocent have resulted in a pile of bodies.
The last 10 minutes of “Point and Shoot” feature Jimmy and Kim sitting in traumatized silence as Mike (Jonathan Banks) doles out a series of instructions on how to cover up everything that just happened during the Gus/Lalo altercation. He doesn’t sound much different than Lalo did as he gave them orders to kill Gus at the top of the episode, still standing over a dead body.
It’s taken five and a half seasons to get to this point. Conversely, Breaking Bad was violent from the get-go. Its brief commentary on the American healthcare system quickly morphed into a Shakespearean tragedy of underground wars and competing egos that ended just about as operatically as Game of Thrones tried to.
On Saul, however, the world of Breaking Bad lurked in the shadows, only sneaking up on Jimmy and Kim after years of careful character development (compared to Bad, Saul often relished in quieter moments with the pair). Now, their world just is Breaking Bad, and with five episodes left, they have no villain to vanquish other than themselves. All that’s left, ironically, is a fight for the soul of what Better Call Saul once was.
By modern Hollywood standards, this feels like the inverse of the prequel business model: “You love this thing? Here’s every detail of how it all came to be while we give you more of the same.” Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy flubs the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel in favor of a Lord of the Rings retread that lacks any distinct identity. The Fantastic Beasts series has firmly placed its titular fauna secondary to a slew of CGI brawls surrounding Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Solo: A Star Wars Story rushes to show how most of the important things that happened to Han before A New Hope occurred over the course of a week or so. Even the recently concluded Obi-Wan Kenobi series mostly exists so that Star Wars can make just a little bit more sense.
These stories were written with the sole purpose of paying tribute to what you’ve already seen. For the most part, they don’t have a distinct soul of their own. When it comes to prequels, they are the rule. Better Call Saul is the exception.
From its first episode, it was clear we were getting a very different, even at times honorable, version of Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman. As the series continued to develop Jimmy McGill – the man we knew would eventually become Saul – what became clear is that this version of the character still in all likelihood exists when Breaking Bad begins. There’s no Anakin-to-Darth Vader threshold here. Breaking Bad simply required Saul Goodman to be one thing, while Better Call Saul requires him to be another. That they ultimately feel like the same character, and that rewatching Breaking Bad now is legitimately a different experience as a result, is a testament to the writers who have long approached this prequel with care and precision.
Now, as the show’s finale looms and its world is just naturally starting to feel more like Breaking Bad’s, the story shifts again. “Point and Shoot” ends with two bodies being buried together, one of a violent drug lord, the other of a competent lawyer. Symbolically, the two series have collided in these instances of death. Two stories, just one grave.
On a meta level, Jimmy and Kim are now simply trying to escape the inevitability of Breaking Bad and return to their simpler Better Call Saul existences. We know Jimmy fails. But what about Kim? Can the moral high ground of the series find peace? Or has Jimmy’s influence taken hold? These questions speak to the soul of this series. Having so much time to explore that soul as the transformation between shows happens ensures that Better Call Saul is far more than a money-grabbing afterthought. With Andor, House of the Dragon, and The Rings of Power all on the horizon, Better Call Saul can be a turning point for the reputation of prequel storytelling at large. All creators and storytellers should be paying attention.