“Where do I see it ending? With me at the top, as always.” — Saul James Morgan McGill and Walter White join forces one last time midway through “Saul Gone.” It’s a flashback to the two of them hiding in the basement of the vacuum shop around the episode “Granite State” Breaking Bad, they each wait for Ed to hide them in their new lives under assumed identities. Their conversation is a reminder of Walt’s arrogance, as well as his disdain for Saul: When Saul suggests he could sue Gray Matter on Walt’s behalf, Walt dismisses him as the last lawyer he would ever use for such work. He would laugh in disbelief if you told him that the man he knows as Saul Goodman brought a successful multi-million dollar lawsuit against another company on behalf of defenseless seniors. Mostly, though, the conversation is there as part of a dialogue that runs throughout the season-spanning series finale. As he explicitly does with Mike in the opening prologue (set right after the events of “Bagman”), and as Chuck (in a flashback set sometime early in the first season or perhaps shortly before the series begins) implicitly tries to is doing with Jimmy, Saul asks Walt what he might try to change if he had a time machine. Walt, the science snob, calls this for what it is, an opportunity to examine regrets. Walt begins to admit that he was wrong to leave Gray Matter, but as always, everything bad that happened to him is someone else’s fault, and Gretchen and Elliott “artfully ran” him out of his own company. (I also imagine they might disagree about the percentage of their Walt discoveries versus their own.) The best Saul can find for himself is a slip and fall that permanently injured his knee. A disgusted Walt takes his lawyer’s measure and says, “That’s the way you’ve always been.” This could be it Better Call Saul version of the best and most important scene from the Breaking Bad finale, “Felina,” where Walt finally admitted to Skyler that he did all these monstrous things not out of concern for his family, but because he enjoyed doing them, was good at them, and they made him feel alive. At that moment, Vince Gilligan was definitively acknowledging that circumstances did not turn Mr. Chips into Scarface, but reveals that Scarface has always been hiding just beneath the surface. Like Chuck, Walt decides in this scene that Jimmy/Saul/Gene has always been an immoral huckster, no matter how he’s tried to pass himself off as something else over the years. “Saul Gone” has other elements in common with “Felina”. It also brings his protagonist back to Albuquerque for a showdown with his bitter ex-wife and allows him to undo some of the damage he left in his wake when he left town after “Ozymandias.” Tonally and thematically, however, it is something else entirely. First, it’s more muted than “Felina,” with the biggest fireworks here being the verbal ones at Saul’s sentencing hearing, compared to the remote-controlled machine gun Walt used to kill Uncle Jack and the Nazis. But more importantly, the sacrifice our protagonist makes here, and what it ultimately says about him and his journey, couldn’t be more different. Walt finishes Breaking Bad on his own terms. He knows he has very little time to live and manages what he still has: by leaving money behind for Flynn and Holly, he gets Skyler out of legal trouble, allowing Marie and Blanca Gomez to properly bury their murdered husbands them and killing Jack, Lydia and most of those who once wronged him. He also frees Jesse, though that wasn’t part of his original plan, and then he dies relatively quickly from a bullet wound rather than the lingering indignity of cancer ripping through what’s left of his body. While he confesses his true motives to Skyler, he nevertheless dies as he lived, master of all he investigates. Saul Goodman faces a much tougher choice. He successfully pulled off one last Slippin’ Jimmy scam, maneuvering federal prosecutors into giving him a plea deal by presenting all of his crimes as things he did out of fear of what Walt, Jesse, and their many accomplices would do. not played together. (Like every elaborate lie Walt or Saul has told in their respective series, it starts from an honest position before twisting to serve the needs of the person telling it.) To the horror and disbelief of Marie Schrader (still less than a year removed from her husband’s disappearance and just months after his body was discovered in the desert), she will serve seven and a half years in a quiet federal prison. He may have lost his entire fortune, but he will no doubt be able to use his notoriety to build a new one upon his release. All good, man, right? But in his quest to further embarrass the feds – and get delicious ice cream served to him every week locked up – he learns about the statement Kim gave to the DA about Howard’s murder. Worse, he realizes he led her into it during his phone call during “Waterworks,” and as poor, bedraggled Bill Oakley tells him on the flight back to New Mexico, Cheryl Hamlin is likely to sue Kim for what she’s worth. So Jimmy McGill decides to shed the hollow greed of Saul Goodman, as well as the bare desperation for freedom of Gene Takovic, and make a genuine sacrifice to get what he really wants. He will provide a true account of his crimes, however long his sentence (which goes from 7.5 years to 86), in the hope that Kim will stop hating him .
Although the decision came down to Bill telling him about Cheryl’s legal plans against Kim, Jimmy’s response is more to acknowledge why Kim would not only have confessed to the authorities, but directly to Cheryl. If he did that, he realizes, he’d have to be willing to be just as transparent and apologetic to win back even a fraction of her affections.In an episode filled with flashbacks and flashbacks, the sentencing hearing is yet another one designed to challenge everything Better Call Saul . Jimmy whispers one last “It’s show time!” before launching into a version of his performance before the New Mexico Bar Association in “Winner” at the end of season four. He plays up his guilt and shame, less because it’s the right thing for Marie, for Blanca Gomez, and for all the other people he allowed to be hurt by aiding and abetting Walt for those amazing and terrible 16 months, than because he thinks it is what Kim wants to hear. But as a frustrated Bill tries to get his confession off the record, he looks back at Kim and sees—as he did in the faces of the Bar lawyers as he prepared to read from Chuck’s letter—that what he had planned is not going to be enough. It has to go much deeper. But in this case, it eventually ceases to be an act. He talks about his guilt over Howard’s murder and notes that while Kim left town, “I’m the one who left.” He let every good instinct of his go away as a way to numb the pain of Kim leaving, Howard’s murder, Chuck’s suicide, and everyone else injured by the unbridled power of Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree. Physically, he stayed in Albuquerque, but he let what was left of his soul circulate. We know — and, more importantly, Kim knows — that he’s not faking it precisely because it’s so low-key compared to “Winner,” or other times we’ve seen him lie for his own benefit. He says these things because he believes them and because he finally understands that he must say them out loud, both for himself and for the woman he still loves. And as the judge refers to him again as Mr. Goodman, he insists: “The name is McGill. I’m James McGill.” It’s an incredible, beautiful sequence, precisely because of the patience Peter Gould (who wrote and directed the finale) and company have shown over the years, and because of their trust in their performers to say a lot with very little. As impressive as Kim’s cry in “Waterworks” was, what Rhea Seehorn does at the end of the sentencing hearing is even tougher. It’s just the tiniest, tiniest hint of a smile—really, more of a relaxation of the stony face she’d been giving her ex-husband until now, and maybe a slight nod—and yet it’s everything. Seehorn is so great at these micro-expressions (remember the tiny smile the show used early in season one to make it clear how much Kim enjoys Jimmy’s shenanigans), and the show has painstakingly established the context of why he should to hear him say these words, in this way, before forgiving him. It is all we need to see, and all we need to know. Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony PicturesDoes Jimmy’s Trick With The Judge Get Kim Out Of Legal Danger From Cheryl? Gould chooses not to answer the question in the episode, though he did offer some thoughts on the matter in an interview with Rolling Rock. But we already know that Kim has come as close to a happy ending as her sins would allow within the moral universe of these two series. Before Susan Ericksen calls to warn her that Saul might be implicating her in new crimes—really, his way of making sure he’ll see her in person at least one more time and that she’ll be present to witness his act of penance— we see she left her job early to volunteer at a legal aid office in Central Florida. She has denied herself the ability to practice law as part of her elaborate, deliberately colorless penance for Howard’s death. But confessing to the DA and the…