Time travel, finger guns, and buzzing electricity. No, "Better Call Saul" didn't
become a science fiction series in its finale. But it did give longtime fans plenty to ponder.
At the start of Season 6, a worn paperback copy of H.G. Wells' "The
Time Machine" is confiscated from Saul Goodman's abandoned mansion;
it's only fitting that in the series finale, both that book and the notion of time travel return in
flashbacks to key moments with Mike Ehrmantraut, Walter White, and Jimmy's brother Chuck.
While on their desert trek with Lalo's money from Season 5's "Bagman,"
Jimmy asks Mike what he would do if he had a time machine.
He poses the same question to Walt while they await getting disappeared by Ed the
vacuum cleaner repairman during the events of the "Breaking Bad" episode "Granite State."
Mike, unsurprisingly, thinks of his doomed son Matty and the first time he ever took a bribe.
Walt, however, scoffs at the very idea of time travel, saying:
"You are talking about regret. So if you want to ask about regrets, just ask about regrets."
Jimmy gives Mike and Walt shallow answers to his own question.
But the real answer seemingly comes in the third flashback as Jimmy stocks groceries
for his brother. Jimmy and Chuck's relationship was always contentious,
with Jimmy often straining for Chuck's approval and love while not quite getting it. This time,
it's Chuck who makes an effort to reach out, and Jimmy who refuses it.
"There's no shame in going back and changing your path."
"When have you ever changed your path?"
He leaves Chuck alone to read "The Time Machine" by lantern light.
If Jimmy had accepted that small olive branch, who knows how things might have turned out.
Wayfarer Airlines flight 515 is an important part of the "Breaking Bad" mythology. The plane's
fate was a symbol of the way Walter White's actions had terrible, unexpected consequences.
His decision to let Jesse's girlfriend Jane die leads to her father, an air traffic controller,
inadvertently causing a midair collision that rains down debris over Albuquerque.
Stylistically, the event coined many of the elements that "Breaking Bad"
and "Better Call Saul" would be known for, with evocative black-and-white
prologues flashing forward to the disaster and a secret message hidden in the episode titles.
The Wayfarer disaster was also something that Saul Goodman milked for all it was worth,
wearing a memorial ribbon on his lapel for the remainder of "Breaking Bad."
In the "Better Call Saul" finale, he is extradited back to New Mexico to stand trial for his many
crimes, flying with a U.S. Marshal aboard a Wayfarer flight. Later, he enters the courtroom
resplendent in a shiny Saul Goodman suit, complete with a Wayfarer ribbon pinned to the lapel.
The ghost of Chuck hangs heavy over the series finale.
Saul's final courtroom performance has two major callbacks to his late brother.
The most explicit comes as Saul torpedoes his plea deal by admitting that he was
not Walter White's unwitting victim, but a willing participant in his criminal empire.
"That night, I saw opportunity. A shot at big money."
Saul soon finds himself talking about Chuck,
and the shot cuts to an angle high above the courtroom behind an exit sign
buzzing with electricity. That image is a reminder of Season 3's "Chicanery," in which Jimmy proves
that Chuck's professed electromagnetic sensitivity was a psychological condition.
The meat of Saul's speech, in which he turns away from a self-serving lie and faces the truth,
calls to mind Jimmy's testimony to the Bar Association at the end of Season 4.
There, he tearfully invoked the name of his brother as nothing more than a con to
get reinstated as a lawyer, making a fool of everyone listening, including Kim. His
final performance reverses that. He praises Chuck's brilliant legal mind, acknowledges
his culpability in the events that led to Chuck's suicide, and reclaims his family name.
"The name's McGill. I'm James McGill." It is all sincere, and it is all for Kim.
Jimmy's plan all along was not to get himself off the hook, but to redeem himself in her eyes.
Jimmy's seven-year plea deal at a cushy federal prison with a golf program goes up in smoke,
replaced by an 86-year sentence in a maximum-security federal prison. But things
could be worse. He finds himself working in the prison cafeteria, putting his Cinnabon skills to
work baking bread. His long tenure as Saul Goodman has earned him the respect of his fellow inmates
and guards alike, who all refer to him by his famous alias. And thanks to an unexpected visitor,
he gets to be Jimmy McGill once again, if only for the length of one smoke. Kim shows up,
posing as his lawyer thanks to her New Mexico Bar Association I.D., which never expired. The two
of them share a cigarette in near silence, just like they did in their very first scene together.
As Kim leaves, likely for the last time, Jimmy watches from the prison yard and gives her the
same finger guns that ended Season 4 and introduced the legal world to Saul Goodman.
The same finger guns Kim gave at the end of Season 5 as she devised a plan to ruin Howard Hamlin. But
while both of those gestures signified the start of something, this one is a goodbye.