Saul Goodman is back. Better Call Saul, the spinoff prequel to Breaking Bad, has returned for a fifth season after a two-year hiatus. The show follows Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), a petty con man turned attorney. He is the younger brother of Charles McGill (Michael McKean), a partner at a prestigious law firm who has turned into a recluse. Charles casts a long shadow, and Jimmy is a devoted brother. And despite his old habits and unorthodox methods, Jimmy is a brilliant lawyer who tries to do the right thing.
When Jimmy’s character is first introduced on Breaking Bad, it is under his alias, Saul Goodman. Saul is sought after because “when the going gets tough, you don’t want a criminal lawyer. You want a criminal lawyer.” In the new season of Better Call Saul, we finally see Jimmy, eager for a new start free of his brother’s name, adopting the Saul Goodman persona.
Despite the two-year break, 2019 was not without Breaking Bad content. Fall saw the release of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which, despite being announced mere weeks before its release, was a hit with critics and Breaking Bad fans alike. Still, Breaking Bad made its mark through episodic, long-form storytelling, so it is welcome to see the extended universe back on the small screen.
The season premiere opens with Jimmy getting his law license restored after a yearlong suspension. In the interim, he’d been working at a cellphone shop under the name of Saul Goodman, presumably to create some distance between that work and his life as an attorney. But after a year of using his natural talents of persuasion to draw in clients, many of whom were exactly the sort of people who could use a defense attorney, he decides to adopt the alias for his law practice as well. “Sooner or later, every last one of them is going to find themselves in a back of a squad car. How do I get them to call ‘Jimmy McGill’? I don’t. I stay ‘Saul Goodman.’ They call the guy they already know.”
Jimmy’s spur-of-the-moment decision to go by “Saul” opens up new avenues for his practice and begins to bring the future Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad into better focus. Without the McGill name attached, he clearly feels freer to lean into his heterodox, even unethical, methods.
Jimmy sets up a pop-up shop for his remaining phone stock, plastering his new name over everything. He gives the phones away for free while announcing his legal services and letting customers know he has preloaded his number on speed dial. As he tells one customer, “Why call the cellphone guy? ‘Cause I’m not just the cellphone guy. I’m the lawyer who’s going to fight for you.”
The phones go quickly, so Jimmy offers the rest of the crowd a 50% discount on legal fees for any nonviolent felonies — a strategy that his lawyer girlfriend, Kim (Rhea Seehorn), warns him against because it might risk encouraging reckless behavior. This retail-style approach raises eyebrows, but it also brings Jimmy a steady stream of clients. “This isn’t about your clients. This is about your wallet. You’re looking for turnover. You want to churn through more clients, make more money,” says the assistant district attorney, rejecting Jimmy’s request to move their meeting forward by a week. Never one to settle, Jimmy pays a custodian to disable an elevator so he can get “stuck” inside with the attorney. While inside, he manages to get all 16 of his cases handled.
Jimmy’s transformation into Saul is not the only Breaking Bad set piece that this season establishes. Whereas crime early in the series was often of the street-level variety, here, we see the backstory of the Juarez Cartel and Gustavo Fring’s industrial-scale drug empire, which both figure largely in the plot of Breaking Bad.
While the difference in scale between this storyline and Jimmy’s personal journey could be a jarring tonal shift, the writers avoid this by telling the story of the drug traffickers through the personal experiences of two characters, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), both of whom have been part of the show’s narrative from the start. In an echo of Jimmy’s own inability to escape from his brother’s shadow, both end up where they are due to a sense of familial obligation.
The personal framing of Better Call Saul makes it, in my book, even better than Breaking Bad. While the latter’s epic account of Walter White’s criminal rise and moral fall is rightly acclaimed, the prequel’s tighter focus on Jimmy gives its characters more room to breathe. Even though it’s inevitable that Jimmy will transform into a “criminal lawyer,” his attempts to do things the right way, which fail due to sabotage by his beloved brother, are both painful and relatable. Whereas Walter seems to have moved into a life of crime mostly as a result of his own pride, Jimmy more or less stumbles into it — even though, unlike the buttoned-down Walter, Jimmy started out as a delinquent.
Even well-made prequels and spinoffs often feel unnecessary. Better Call Saul does not. It is at its core a character story, and the world-building it does for the original series, though interesting, is incidental. No, Better Call Saul is not another Breaking Bad — but that is precisely why it is so successful at what it does.
Jibran Khan is a freelance writer and researcher. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.
