SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details from tonight’s “Breaking Bad” episode of Better Call Saul. Let’s just say the title is a bit of a giveaway.
“I said, no details,” Bryan Cranston’s Walter White insists to Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman in tonight’s penultimate episode of Better Call Saul. “It’s a need to know,” the partially ski-masked high school science teacher and would-be drug lord tells his colleague as a savvy Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) stands before the Breaking Bad duo in his famous meth lab. RV aka the Krystal boat.
Heading into its Aug. 15 series finale, the Vince Gilligan-Peter Gould-created spinoff wove back and forth Monday on the periphery of the seminal events of Breaking Bad in the Thomas Schnauz-written-directed “Breaking Bad,” titled 11th episode of the sixth and final season. from Better Call Saul.
In almost any other series, the long-awaited arrival of White/Heisenberg and his minions mid-episode would be the big showstopper. But this being Better Call Saul, there was a much bigger reveal in the slippery cards. If the Michael Morris-directed, Ann Cherkis-written July 18 episode of “Fun and Games” described Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler’s heartbreaking exit from her life, aside from Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill/Goodman, ” Breaking Bad” tonight revealed its fate after the parent show’s bloody downfall, which ended its multi-Emmy-winning run in 2013.
Kim Wexler lives on.
Indeed, as a call to a Nebraska roadside phone booth from an undercover Goodman, as Cinnabon manager Gene makes clear, Wexler is alive and well and working at Palm Coast Sprinklers in Florida. Beyond that, at least for now, we don’t know much more about Seehorn’s Wexler life in the Sunshine State. What we do know is that his conversation with Odenkirk’s now-character Gene, his former lover and literal partner in crime, did not go well.
After the line of “Hello, I’m looking for Kim Wexler, I think she works there,” there was a wider shot of the pay phone and the noisy trucks passing by. We don’t hear anything of the conversation between the two, but it’s clearly boisterous and engaging, to say the least, with Gene’s snow coat-clad body moving his head and body in the confined space of the old phone booth of the school. As with many things involving the former couple, the call ends badly with a close-up of Odenkirk’s character smashing the phone against the case in a way most of us haven’t seen since the mid-1980s . Walking through the snow outside the phone booth, the man known as Saul Goodman then shows his grip on his lack of impulse control and breaks one of the glass panels with a well-placed kick.
That’s all the Kim we’ve got for now, but with two more episodes to go, it’s highly unlikely that’s the last we’ll see or hear from her. The same can probably be said for Cranston and Paul as well.
Not that getting them here and placing them naturally in the sometimes-upheaval world of BCS was a cakewalk as Schnauz told Deadline today. “Linking to that moment in Breaking Bad where Saul yells, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Ignacio!'” has been talked about forever as a goal that we had to achieve, and I was lucky enough to get my episode because it be a lot of fun to do,” Schnauz said of finding the perfect space for Cranston and Paul.
“So much work, but so much fun,” added Gilligan’s longtime collaborator. “It was over too fast. I only had Aaron and Bryan for a day and a half in April 2021 while Vince was directing episode 602. I had to write that scene and be ready well in advance of when we shot the rest of the 611 because those dates were The only time we got to get the boys together due to other commitments they had. Bryan and Aaron slipped back into those roles so easily, and watching them try to handle Saul was be very funny.”
So, back in their toxic “Laurel and Hardy vibe,” to quote Goodman riding shotgun in the trailer later in the episode, Gilligan and Gould wouldn’t have waited so long to bring the famous duo into the world of BCS only to have them disappear in a puff of drug-tainted smoke, so to speak. Additionally, the near finale of the “Breaking Bad” episode sees Goodman enter JP Wynne High School to confront science teacher White, after getting the skinny on Jonathon Banks played by Michael Ehrmantraut, who has a benign cliffhanger drawn throughout.
Along with the Swing Master product placement, there’s also another drama playing out in tonight’s exquisitely crafted episode of BCS. Beginning with former Saul Goodman & Associates secretary Francesca Liddy reappearing in her post-Breaking Bad life, if you can call it that, “Breaking Bad” furthers Odenkirk’s Gene’s descent into a life of crime , scams and double crosses. . In this, in addition to the introduction of Tina Parker, Carol Burnett is also back in what could be a much bigger role than her debut in “Nippy” last week indicated.
Jumping from the vivid colors of the Breaking Bad timeline and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the black-and-white dampness of Gene’s under-the-radar existence in Omaha, Nebraska, Schnauz’s prepared episode features a complex and lucrative scam to drug the deep-pocketed residents of the city. Cornhusker State. Although the endgame is not yet painted, the tactic is to get taxi driver Jeff (Pat Healy) and his friend to enlist in identity theft.
Once Burnett’s somewhat repulsed Marion watches her new friend Gene and son Jeffy have a late-night powder in the garage, it seems like a pretty safe bet that some wild cards are about to be put on the table for to the last two episodes
Whether that means more Kim, more Walt and Jesse, or a final reckoning, it would certainly fit the profile of Better Call Saul. For now: “No details,” as Walter White said.
