Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 13 has just released
on Netflix and AMC, and in the finale, we get an episode about regret with Saul Goodman
embarking on his final journey and suffering the consequences for everything
that he has done in the past.
In this spoiler review, I'm going to be giving you my recap of the Better Call Season 6 finale,
entitled Saul Gone, alongside discussing my general thoughts
towards it.
But before I get into it, if you want to see more videos on the ending of Better Call Saul,
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But without further a do, lets dive into my recap and review for Better Call Saul Season
6 Episode 13.
So Better Call Saul has made quite the closing statement about it's place in the pentheon
of TV, and it goes out in the most fitting way possible.
We see a lot of shows fail to capture the perfect ending, or to be me more truthful,
the right ending, and now with this prequel show, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have
stuck the landing twice in a row.
No one would have thought back in 2015 that Better Call Saul
would have gone on for 6 seasons, delivered such a masterful final run, and be placed
alongside Breaking Bad as one of the best shows ever
made.
Only a few shows have managed to reach this quality, and it's ending is one that is going
to keep people watching and talking about it for many years to come.
But before I continue with my thoughts on the show's conclusion,
it's time to breakdown everything that happened in the buildup to this ending and discuss
what it all means for Jimmy McGill, who's reached the final stage in his journey.
The series finale of Better Call Saul begins with a flashback to Season 5’s Bagman episode,
one of my favourite of the entire show, and we get a conversation between Jimmy and Mike
after they struggle through the desert and find a water tank to drink from.
They take a moment during their walk back, and Jimmy suggests to Mike that they run off
with the $7 million they’re carrying across the desert.
Mike of course says no to this, but it leads to Jimmy mentioning about using this money
to build a time machine.
And with that, he asks what Mike would do if he was able to travel back in
time.
Mike's first reply is December 8th, 2001, which is the day his son was murdered, but
then he soon changes that to March 17th, 1984, which
is the day he took his first bribe.
And this is of course the first of many decisions that eventually led to his son's death.
He continues saying that he'd also go forward in time to
check on whether others are doing ok, presumably hinting at his granddaughter and Stacey.
And after those heartfelt answers, we then turn to Jimmy and get an idea of what this
episode is going to truly be about.
In his answer, he’d go back to the day Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway and he'd
invest in it so he’d now be super rich.
Mike asks him, “Is that it?
Money?
Nothing you’d change?”
And Jimmy walks off without answering, making this the perfect opening to really get us
thinking about whether Jimmy would ever change considering
everything he's caused and been through.
And it's also just great to see a reflective final scene with Mike, knowing everything
that goes down with his character after this moment.
But after this cold open, we then come back to the Gene timeline, which continues after
that eventful ending with Marion last week.
Gene escapes on foot following Marion's call to the
police in which she reads out the license plate of his car, and he goes straight home
as quickly as he can, grabs his secret shoebox, and escapes via a window after spotting cops
at the front of his house.
He makes a run for it, but then sees a helicopter scanning the area, and is ultimately forced
to hide in dumpster when he sees morecops on the ground in the
surrounding area.
And we come to what that teaser prom for the episode was actually alluding to.
He opens the shoebox and is about to call Ed the disappearer, but while he practices
his lines and gets out his diamond stash, he ends
up dropping the box and what's inside to the bottom of the dumpster.
There's no escape for him now and after rattling around in there,
trying to find what he dropped, we hear a knock on the bin and the cops have finally
caught him.
Once at the police station, there are cops watching his Saul Goodman commercials,
trying to confirm that they indeed have found the right person and Gene uses his one call
to tell an employee at Cinnabon that they are going to need a new manager.
He's soon in a jail cell, and on the wall is written, “my lawyer
will ream your ass", leading him to ball out laughing in a scene that reminded me of Walter
White's laugh from crawl space, but it also places an idea in his mind.
He demands another call, and rings Bill Oakley, who we saw referenced a few episodes ago,
and he offers him the role of advisory counsel.
Gene initally sees this as an opportunity to soften the consequences
coming and like always, he sees a way out of a bad situation.
But we soon learn that his best bet is an extremely reduced prison
sentence.
That's because Bill goes with Gene to a meeting with the feds, and to our surprise, Marie
Schrader is also present.
They offer him 30 years if he’ll plead guilty, and Marie
tells him face to face, how much issues he's really caused alongside how brave Hank and
Gomez were, before they died.
In reference of Walter White, she tells him, “You helped the
two-faced poisonous bastard behind it all.
You did it all for money.”
But even as things are incredibly unwinnable for Gene, he wants to try to move that sentence
even more.
He offers her his condolences for Hank and says, “You
and he are victims… and so am I.” He proceeds to give fake motivation as he reflects on
the moment that Walter threatened him at gunpoint, and
says that he only went ahead as his lawyer because he feared for his safety.
We know that's not the case after the last few episodes and Gene tells them that he only
needs one member of the jury to help him, trying to negotiate
with them to bring sentence down even more.
The feds eventually bring this down to seven years, and go ahead with the prison of his
choice.
He tries to push his luck even further and asks for premium ice cream every day while
he’s inside, and in turn, he'll offer more info on Howard Hamlin’s death.
But that's where he comes up stuck as the feds tell him that
Kim has already told them everything about Howard, which is what got a suggestion of
in last weeks episode, and in turn, Gene is quite rattled.
It's the moment that I think he truly realises that Kim has owned up following her regrets,
but it's also an illuminating moment that allows him to know, that Kim is the only one
who has a chance of getting out free.
He's gone well beyond that and hasn't changed for the better, since those slippin jimmy
and saul goodman days.
And this brings us to the second of three flashbacks in this finale, and we finally
get the anticipated scene between Walter White and Saul, set during the time of the Granite
State episode from Breaking Bad, while they are
both waiting to be shipped off with new identities.
I did predict in my video that we might get something around this Breaking Bad episode,
and I think what we did get was a continued evolution
of that opening scene with Mike.
Saul once again asks the time machine question to Walter, and while he ignores that question
as scientifically impossible, he realises that
the true question is about regrets.
Walt's answer focuses on the critical moment with Gray Matter, in which he blames them
for influencing him to leave his own creation and how he now
could have been extremely rich if he’d stayed.
Saul's answer this time is that he’d go back to when he fell outside a store and really
hurt his knee.
Walter laughs in response and says, “so you were always like this.”
And that's the second of these flashbacks with impactful figures in the Breaking Bad
world, who are surprised that he would neither not have a
proper regret or that he wouldn't change something that led him down bad choice road.
Where Walter White's story was about change following a
set of previous events, Jimmy's is about how changing is hard, how he degraded through
the influence of family and how he ultimately attaches too those bad impulses.
The reverse Breaking Bad if you will and a story that
has definitely changed the way we see that show because of how the smaller details build
to produce the consequences we see unfold.
But moving on, we now come to the foreseen court scene that ends this show as a sort
of reflection to how it started.
Before we get to that though, we do get a scene with Saul and Bill
on a plane to Albuquerque, and Gene asks him what will happen to Kim.
We learn that the D.A.
probably won’t file charges, but Bill says that she is facing civil litigation from Howard’s
wife.
Gene offers to tell the feds more about Howard than Kim, and while Bill says that it could
put more pressure on her, he's says that the feds are gonna like this.
And that's where we stop in with Kim, who we learn is volunteering
at a free help service in Florida.
While there, she she gets a call from Suzanne Ericsen, who tells her that Saul was arrested
and that is going to be giving a testimony that affects
her.
And in comes that court trial scene, which is in my opinion, one of the best scenes of
the entire show.
Kim is present, watching Jimmy show up for his hearing, wearing a Saul
Goodman-esque suit and quietly telling himself in a reverse to the beginning of the series,
“It’s showtime.”
It's soon clear to us that Marie and Gomie’s widow are also there too,
and once seated, the judge immediately questions why Jimmy is getting such a small sentence.
So he takes the stand after convinving the judge,
and offers to clear things up.
He intitially gives the story he gave before about being Walt's prisoner but then he decides
to change.
After swearing in, he admits that he helped build
Walt’s drug empire and he says that he lied about Kim’s involvement because he wanted
her to come to this trial and hear him tell the truth.
He says, "I was more than a willing participant, I was indispensable.
Walt would’ve soon been dead or in prison without me, Hank and Gomez would stil be alive.
Walter White couldn’t have done it without me.”
He looks directly at Kim and then continues, choking
up on what happened to Howard, and then says that Kim did good for starting her life again.
He says that he's the one who ran away and then
proceeds to talk about his brother Chuck, with one of the best uses of cinematography
I've seen in this show.
We cut to the courtroom’s exit sign, reminding us of that final shot of
Chuck in court before he commited suicide, and Jimmy goes on to call him the best lawyer
he ever met.
He blames himself for not helping him and says, “instead, when I saw a chance to
hurt him, I took it.”
And after Bill tries to insist that what happened to Chuck wan't a crime, Gene says that it
was and tells all of them that he wants to be called Jimmy McGill.
He turns back to look at Kim one last time in
the courtroom and the rest of them continue to argue over giving him the maximum prison
sentence.
So Jimmy has confessed his regrets and told the truth about it all, choosing to do the
right thing.
And in that mention of Chuck in the trial scene, the following sequence actually gives
us one final flashback between Jimmy and his brother, set just before the series premiere,
with Jimmy bringing him groceries and telling him
about his small clients.
Chuck tells him, “If you don’t like where you’re heading, there’s no shame in going
back and changing your path”.
And he says this while holding onto the H.G. Wells Time Machine book, giving us a quite
reflective end on this episodes flashback scenes.
That book is not really about time travel, in
fact, it's actually about class struggles and the nature of ones being.
Saul Goodman was someone who had big plans, and once he got that life of wealth and saw
it all crumble, he was confronted with the one thing that sent him
down this path.
The loneliness that comes in the consequences.
Jimmy McGill was genuine to others he cared about and Saul Goodman was more
self-concerned, but they were part of the same being.
There's that central theme of regret but then there's also the one of the inevitable, with
there being no other way that this could have gone for Jimmy.
His idenities were all linked to one being and that person is now at peace with himself
following a confession to truthful regrets.
And this is better exemplified by the final scene of this fantastic show.
Jimmy is on a prison bus, on his way to the prison that he didn't want to go to, specifically
nicknamed “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
Other prisoners recognizes him as Saul Goodman, and while he initally tries to tell him his
name is McGill, the whole bus erupts in chanting “Better call Saul!”,
and Jimmy does give a small smile in response.
Once in the prison, he's baking just like he did at Cinnabon and a prison guard tells
him that his lawyer has come to see him.
Jimmy goes to the room to find Kim there, and she tells
him that her New Mexico bar card doesn’t expire.
He's uncuffed and they both have the room to share a cigarette together, in a shot against
the wall that reflects the opening moment with Kim in the very first episode.
Kim, in the most Wexler of ways possible, says to him, “you had them down to seven
years,” and now that has become 86 years.
He says, “but with good behavior, who knows?”.
We know that's probabaly not going to change, but Kim's admiration not just of slippin Jimmy's
ways as we've see before but also of him doing the right thing and
following her in the truth, makes this moment all the more powerful.
It did need that final scene between the two them to really make it
perfect and to see them repeating their first moment in a new context is really satisfying
to see.
And this is only heightened even more when we reach the final few shots between them.
Kim eventually leaves the prison, and she spots Jimmy on the nearby basketball court
watching her through a chained fence, and he gives her the famous finger guns.
It's a heartwarming bit of reflection to their relationship, but
also an acknowledgement in what either of them have become.
They’re standing on the opposite sides of freedom, and they have become exactly
what they always we're going to.
Kim admires Jimmy's ways and associates with that herself when they are here together,
but she's also made changes on the outside for the better, always
being the more morally grounded of the two.
And Jimmy has owned up to his regrets, made it right with Kim, and he's exactly where
he should be.
He deserves to be a prison with other criminals who admire the Saul persona, being
a bittersweet touch on this whole journey.
So what are my overall thoughts of this final episode.
Well, Saul Gone is a masterful ending to a consistently engaging storyline and I think
we ultimately got the right ending.
Saul is a show about the degrading nature and influence
of family, and how an individual can in turn, attach to their worst impulses.
It then evolves by showing how change is hard and how
connecting moments can impact that cycle.
This is the apparent end of Gilligan's Breaking Bad world and it's satisfying and appropriate
that Saul Gone is not just a love letter to the
central stories and characters involved in it all, but that it's also a very artistic
endpoint.
Balancing the flashback conversations with the downfall in the Gene timeline, truly
illuminate that some of the most affecting characters in Jimmy Mcgill's life all focus
on regret.
It tells us who Jimmy is, who he has always been, but then makes even clearer, how
important Kim Wexler was in changing his heart.
And the final moments put such a brilliant book end on all of it.
Jimmy doesn't take the 8 year sentence, he comes at peace with himself
and does the right thing, and he wanted Kim to see that.
And when we're given a look at his prison life, Jimmy seems to be at home in running
it and the other criminals essentially look up to him.
It's a bittersweet ending with Jimmy getting exactly what he deserves.
He's locked away but he course corrects with Kim, with no regrets.
A lot of popular shows change their identity in favour of the bigger ending,
but Better Call Saul has remained true to it's smaller impactful decisions, that once
explored, become that much more effective.
Many people may have predicted that he goes to
jail but none of us could really put our finger on the meaning of that consequence and how
it would eventually be used to critique the person
he is and how that effects others.
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have given us so many memories and fanatstic examples
of storytelling, and I must admit, it's quite sad that it's
now all come to an end.
But we'll always remember it and we can revisit these stories as time passes.
Vince and Peter have raised the bar multiple times and in the end, they did it
their way.
But that was my spoiler review and recap for the Better Call Saul finale.
I'm giving it a rating of 10 out of 10.
But to those who have already seen this episode, what are your thoughts
on the final episode and was there other things that you picked out surrounding the fate of
Jimmy.
Let me know down below in the comments section and stay tuned for more videos on this
finale coming in the next few days.
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But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.