SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul “Breaking Bad.” 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 third-to-last episode of Better Call Saul. “He needs to know,” the partial-ski-masked high school science teacher and would-be drug kingpin tells his sidekick as a suave Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) stands before the Breaking Bad duo in their infamous method lab. RV also known as the Krystal Ship.
Heading toward its Aug. 15 series finale, the Vince Gilligan- and Peter Gould-created spinoff wove Monday into Breaking Bad highlights on the Thomas Schnauz-written-and-directed “Breaking Bad”-titled 11th episode of the sixth and last season. of Better Call Saul.
In almost any other series, the long-awaited arrival of White/Heisenberg and his henchmen about halfway through the episode would be a brand high. But this being Better Call Saul, there was a much bigger revelation in the slip sheets. If the July 18 episode of Fun and Games directed by Michael Morris and the episode of Fun and Games written by Ann Cherkis outlined Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler’s heartbreaking exit from her life apart from Jimmy McGill/Goodman Odenkirk, tonight’s “Breaking Bad” revealed her fate after her blood. the parent show, which completed the multi-Emmy Award-winning run in 2013.
Kim Wexler lives on.
In fact, as a call to a roadside phone booth in Nebraska from an incognito Goodman posing as Cinnabon Gene’s manager 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 her conversation with Odenkirk’s now-character Gene, her former lover and literal partner in crime, didn’t go well.
After his “Hey, I’m looking for Kim Wexler, I think she works there” line, there was a wider shot of the payphone and the busy trucks passing by. We hear nothing of the conversation between the two, but it’s clearly noisy and exciting, to say the least, with Snow Coat Jean jerking his head and body around in the confined space of the school’s old phone booth. As with many things involving the former couple, the call ends badly with a close-up of Odenkirk’s character smashing the receiver into the box in a way most of us haven’t seen since the mid-1980s. Wandering in the Snow outside the phone booth, the man once known as Saul Goodman shows his lack of impulse control and breaks one of the glass panels with a well-placed kick.
That’s all we have of Kim for now, but with two more episodes to go, it’s highly unlikely to be the last we’ll see or hear of her. The same can probably be said for Cranston and Paul.
Not that bringing them here and of course placing them in the sometimes tumultuous world of the BCS was a cakewalk, as Schnauz told Deadline today. “Connecting me to that moment in Breaking Bad where Saul yells, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Ignacio!’ it was forever said as a goal to hit, and I was lucky to land my episode because it was so much fun to do,” Schnauz said of finding the perfect slot for Cranston and Paul to land.
“So much work, but so much fun,” added Gilligan’s longtime collaborator. “It was really over too quickly. I only had Aaron and Bryan for a day and a half in April 2021 while Vince directed episode 602. I had to write that scene and be ready much earlier when we shot the rest of 611 because those dates were the only ones we could to collect the children because of other obligations they had. Brian and Aaron slipped back into those roles so easily and watching them try to handle Saul was so much fun.”
So back to their toxic ‘Laurel and Hardy vibe’, to quote Goodman riding in the RV later in the episode, Gilligan and Gould wouldn’t wait that long to bring the famous duo into the BCS world just to tell them to disappear in a puff of tainted drug smoke, so to speak. Plus, the episode’s “Breaking Bad” near-end sees Goodman run into JP Wynne High School to confront science teacher White after he’s outgunned by Jonathon Banks played by Michael Ehrmantraut — who has benign cliffhangers written all over him.
Along with some Swing Master product placement, there’s also other drama playing out in tonight’s superbly crafted episode of BCS. Beginning with former Saul Goodman & Associates secretary Francesca Liddy resurfacing in her post-Breaking Bad life, if you can call it that, “Breaking Bad” furthers Odenkirk’s Gene’s descent back into a life of crime, fraud and double crossings. . In it, in addition to Tina Parker’s appearance, Carol Burnett also returns in a much larger role than indicated in her “Nippy” debut last week.
Jumping from the vivid colors of the Breaking Bad timeline and Albuquerque, New Mexico to the heavy B&W of Gene’s under-the-radar Omaha, Nebraska, the Schnauz-cooked episode presents an elaborate and lucrative drug scam for its residents. Cornhusker State. While the endgame isn’t painted yet, the tactic is to recruit his lover Jeff (Pat Healy) and his friend into the identity heist.
Once Burnett’s slightly rejected Marion notices her new boyfriend Gene and her son Jeffy getting dusted late at night in her garage, it seems a sure bet that some wild cards are about to be put on the table for the latter two. episodes.
If that means more Kim, more Walt and Jesse, or a final reckoning, it would certainly fit the Better Call Saul profile. For now: “There are no details,” as Walter White said.
