Better Call Saul Season 4
Some are saying Better Call Saul is a better show than Breaking Bad, though it hasn’t been quite the cultural sensation. This may be due to the fact that Better Call Saul has been somewhat of a long slow burn in its first 4 seasons. Better Call Saul season 5 promises to be a reward for those who have stuck with it.
This is one of the best shows on television, created by experienced and imaginative storytellers. It is well worth the time spent watching and even re-watching it. Season 5 is sure to be filled with more electric tension between characters, unexpected Breaking Bad Easter Eggs, and the kind of quirky humor show creator Vince Gilligan has become known for.
If you’ve forgotten some details from previous seasons of Better Call Saul, it’s understandable since season 4 was almost 2 years ago, due to the crew and several of the cast members taking time off to film El Camino, the Breaking Bad sequel movie. Or if you got behind and never watched all of the episodes, there’s good news: all 4 of the previous seasons are on Netflix (season 4 just dropped on Sunday). But keep reading for a bit of a catch-up and some predictions.
I’m going to do a very quick summary of seasons 1-3 and a more detailed summary of season 4.
Better Call Saul seasons 1 through 3
Better Call Saul is the story of Jimmy McGill, the real name of the character known as Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk, in Breaking Bad. At the end of Breaking Bad, Saul fled town and assumed a new identity. At the beginning of each season of Better Call Saul, we see where Gene Takovic (his new name) is, as the manager of a Cinnabon in a mall in Omaha, Nebraska.
But for most of the show, we see him as Jimmy McGill, younger brother of Charles Lindberg McGill, Esquire, brilliant attorney. Chuck and Jimmy have a complicated relationship, and a lot was left unsaid when Chuck died suddenly at the very end of season 3. Some of the scenes between Jimmy and Chuck are the best of this show and you should really watch them if you haven’t. At the end of season 3, Jimmy has yet to learn of Chuck’s death and has been suspended from practicing law for one year.
Jimmy’s girlfriend is Kim Wexler. She was Jimmy’s co-worker in the mailroom at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, and now they are both lawyers. Kim disapproves when Jimmy plays fast and loose with the letter of the law, but part of her is really turned on by the scams they pull together. Kim was corporate lawyer for a chain of banks and overworked herself to the point that she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed at the end of season 3.
But the show is not just about Jimmy/Saul. It’s also about Mike Ehrmantraut, another Breaking Bad character. A retired ex-cop, Mike is fascinating to watch. A man of few words, he makes the viewer puzzle out what he’s up to. His main goal is to provide for his grand-daughter and her mother, the widow of Mike’s late son. He gets involved with Gus Fring, another Breaking Bad character, and we see him moving further and further into the criminal underworld.
Gus Fring seems to be a local businessman, owner of Los Pollos Hermanos, a chain of fast food chicken restaurants. He uses the restaurant as a front to hide his involvement in meth distribution. He has goals to increase his profits by also manufacturing meth and cutting himself loose from his involvement with the cartel and the Salamancas.
Nacho Varga is another main character. He’s one that wasn’t in Breaking Bad, so we don’t know how his story ends. He becomes second-in-command to Hector Salamanca, one of the leaders of a drug cartel and kind of an adversary to Gus Fring. Nacho’s father is unhappy with his son’s involvement with the cartel, and Nacho fears for his father’s life, so he plots to kill Hector by replacing his nitro pills with ibuprofen, a medication that is contra-indicated for heart patients. It leads to Hector having a non-fatal stroke at the end of season 3. Quick-acting Gus performs CPR and revives Hector, and though he doesn’t say anything, he clearly thinks Nacho had something to do with it.
Better Call Saul Season 4
The season opens with Gene the Cinnabon manager passed out on the floor of the bakery area of the Cinnabon. The ambulance comes and takes him to the hospital. Turns out, he probably had a panic attack or dehydration or something. He’s told he didn’t have a heart attack, and he can go home. There’s a tense moment when the admin says the computer keeps kicking back his identification numbers, but it turns out she typed the letter O instead of a zero, which seems highly unlikely to me, but he’s free to go. He gets in a cab to go back to the mall where his car was left, still recovering from the near-miss at the hospital.
But it’s out of the frying pan into the fire, as he notices an Albuquerque air freshener hanging in the cab, and sees the cab driver looking intently at him in the rear-view mirror. Finally he tells the driver to stop on a residential street and Gene gets out. The cab doesn’t drive off, and Gene hurries around the corner looking over his shoulder. That’s where we leave him. The song playing during the beginning, when he’s being wheeled out by the EMTs, is about “my echo, my shadow, and me,” referring to his three personas: Jimmy McGill, Saul Goodman and Gene Takovic.
In Season 4, we learn how ruthless and vindictive Gus Fring can be. Early in the season, he kills Arturo Colon, a Salamanca henchman, and makes it clear to Nacho that he does indeed know about Nacho’s role in Hector’s stroke. “From now on, I own you,” he tells Nacho. Gus sends his personal physician into Hector Salamanca’s hospital room to ascertain his condition. Told that he could recover with better treatment than he will get in this hospital, Fring pays for an expert to come and work with Hector. She gets him to the point that he can control the index finger of his right hand, which Breaking Bad fans will remember seeing him use to ring a bell as his only means of communicating. At this point, Fring pulls the plug on the specialist, leaving Hector wheelchair-bound and unable to talk, but not before visiting him to make sure he knows who he has to thank for his condition.
Mike takes a major step towards the dark side at the end of season 4 when he’s forced to kill Werner, the German engineer he hired to build the super-lab beneath the laundry facility that becomes Walter White’s home-away-from-home in Breaking Bad. Under Mike’s watch, Werner gave them the slip to have a quick visit with his wife, but Gus says he can no longer be trusted and has to be eliminated. The excavation of the super-lab is a major plot point in season 4. As the season ends, the space has been excavated but concrete still needs to be poured and ventilation installed, as well as a whole lot of cleanup, and the German crew has been sent home now that their leader is gone.
We get a hint that Gale Boetticher, the chemist who briefly assists Walt in Breaking Bad, could be called upon to equip the lab. Gus shows him the unfinished site but tells him it’s not yet time to start cooking there. Gus has to deal with a problem first: one of the Salamancas was spying on Mike when he was searching for the missing Werner and he learned some details that will certainly cause him to keep a close eye on Gus and Mike in Better Call Saul season 5.
Lalo Salamanca is the new Salamanca in town. After Hector’s stroke, Juan Bolsa puts Nacho in charge of the Salamanca’s part of their meth operation. Nacho benefits financially from the deal, but we see evidence that he’s planning to take his father and skip town at some point. But then he’s surprised by the arrival of Lalo, who is polite and charming to his face while subtly making it clear he’s in charge and Nacho better do what he says. He and Nacho visit Gus at one of his restaurants and Lalo makes the same thing clear to Gus, and then starts spying on the chicken farm and following Mike. Mike loses him in another classic Mike Ehrmantrout maneuver that you have to see to appreciate, but it’s clear Lalo will continue to be a threat to Gus in season 5. Gus might secretly enjoy the challenge, but Nacho will likely be caught in the middle.
When We Last Saw Them
We don’t see Nacho in the Better Call Saul season 4 finale, but we know he’s in season 5 so he didn’t skip town. We also know there’s a dead TravelWire clerk left behind by Lalo, and Mike Ehrmantraut’s image will appear on the office’s surveillance camera footage, along with Werner’s, unless Gus sends people to take care of that. Mike might be getting an unwelcome visit from the police early in season 5.
Jimmy learns about Chuck’s death at the beginning of the season, and then spends the year that he’s suspended from practicing law officially working at a cell phone store. He’s there by himself most of the time, so he’s able to sneak out to pursue a more lucrative vocation, reselling burner phones to criminals under the name Saul Goodman.
Kim thinks her days as attorney for the Mesa Verde bank are over in the wake of her car accident, but a local law firm hires her to work for them and bring Mesa Verde into their client base. So she goes from working from a home filled with file boxes of Mesa Verde paperwork to having her own elegant and spacious office with a shelf full of awards commemorating new branches she helped Mesa Verde navigate the legal requirements to establish. This proves unfulfilling, however, and she takes up some pro bono work for some down-and-out clients on the side.
Along the way, Kim and Jimmy pull off a couple of elaborate scams which were some of the highlights of the season. But their relationship suffered, more because Jimmy thinks she disapproves of him and his secret cell phone business than because Kim actually feels that way.
The climax of the season is Jimmy’s hearing to get reinstated as a lawyer. He’s denied on the first pass and told some committee members felt he wasn’t sincere. He and Kim finally have the screaming match we knew was coming, but Kim is clearly committed enough to the relationship to try again, and helps him get a second chance. They conclude the key is for him to show how the loss of Chuck affected him, and that, for Jimmy at least, ends up turning into yet another scam. I don’t think Kim realizes how much of a complete act it is, how insincere Jimmy is really being, until he convinces them to reinstate him and he tells the court clerk, “Sweetheart, we’re going to need one more form, a DBA, because I won’t be practicing under my own name.” Kim is confused, and as he’s following the clerk down the hall, he tells Kim, “It’s all good, man!”
What we know about Better Call Saul Season 5
Season 5 of Better Call Saul starts on Sunday, Feb. 23, after a new episode of The Walking Dead. Then the very next day, Monday, Feb. 24, we’ll get a second episode in the show’s regular time slot on Monday nights. Season 5 will have 10 episodes. AMC has renewed Better Call Saul for season 6, which will be its last, will have 13 episodes and will air in 2021.
If you don’t want to know anything about Season 5 of Better Call Saul, you better stop reading now. But I’m not telling you any huge spoilers, just some stuff I’ve heard on trailers or put together from my knowledge of the show.
Fans are hoping that this season will show us more Gene Takovic than previous seasons, which only showed one scene at the beginning of the first episode of each season. We’re sure to see what happened next to Gene, who we last saw out of breath on a snowy sidewalk in Omaha. We don’t know whether he recognized the cab driver or just realized his stare was a threat, but since Saul Goodman commercials regularly ran on TV, it’s possible many people would recognize him who he never met in person.
In the main part of the show, we’re getting closer to years when Breaking Bad was taking place. When Season 4 ended, it was sometime in 2004. The early episodes of Breaking Bad are set in 2008. So we’re not overlapping with Breaking Bad yet, but we’re sure to see some more familiar characters popping up.
One character who we saw in trailers for this season was Hank Schrader, the DEA agent who is Walter White’s brother-in-law. Rumor has it that Hank’s partner, Gomez, will also make an appearance. Early in season 4, Gus and Juan Bolsa are discussing the fallout from Hector Salamanca’s illness, and Gus predicts that some other entity will make a move against the Salamancas, which will lead to chaos, which will lead to war, which will attract the attention of the DEA. It would seem that prediction is likely to happen in season 5.
Some quotes from promotional videos regarding Better Call Saul season 5:
“We’re encroaching on Breaking Bad territory” and there will be plots involving “some really scary people.”
“That sweet spot on the roller coaster ride when you’re hanging on for dear life.”
“We can definitely expect really really amazing Easter eggs this year.”
“More violence, more mayhem!”
“Things that happen that you never expect.”
Based on the trailer (see video below), we’ll see Jimmy dressed in his Saul Goodman wardrobe; Jimmy and Nacho spending time together; Mike showing some thugs who’s boss; Gus and Lalo going head-to-head, possibly with Juan Bolsa or Don Eladio as intermediary. And we can also expect some of these staple Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul scenes: a person (or persons) sitting in a parked car watching other people through binoculars; characters driving on dirt roads that wind through the desert; Kim in her business suit in a stairwell; and little plastic bags of meth.
We know Hector Salamanca gets his ultimate revenge on Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. But Hector and Lalo are undoubtedly cooking up something exciting if not quite so explosive. In Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 9, Lalo and Nacho visit Hector in the nursing home where he now lives. Lalo rigs up the famous bell on the arm of Hector’s wheelchair, giving him the power of rudimentary communication (one ring means Yes, no rings mean no). Lalo tells Hector, “I want to talk about the Chilean,” referring to Gus, and then he tells Nacho to go get some Jell-o. We don’t hear what they talk about, but on the way out, Lalo says, “Same old Hector. He just wants to kill everyone.” In Better Call Saul season 5, poor Nacho is going to be in the middle between Lalo and Gus Fring, a very uncomfortable position to be in.
We also know Jimmy will start practicing law under the name Saul Goodman. Will we see him open the office in the corner of the dilapidated strip mall, with the pillars and the Declaration of Independence on the wall behind his desk and the inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof? Will we get to see Francesca, the receptionist he had in Breaking Bad, who we saw briefly when Kim and Jimmy had joint law offices in season 3?
But the biggest question, the one everyone is asking, is what happens Jimmy’s relationship with Kim, and what happens to Kim herself? There’s no mention of her in Breaking Bad, and at one point Saul Goodman casually mentions having had more than one wife. He hits on Francesca and talks about the opportunities for getting a wife from Asia in exchange for a visa, so in Breaking Bad, he doesn’t seem to be attached. But we’ve grown to love the character of Kim Wexler and we hope she doesn’t come to a bad end.
Watch the trailer below. Then tell me what you’re most excited about in the comments below.
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