![Better Call Saul REACTION 6x10 [Edited - Early Access]](https://img5.xaiju.com/storage/6/wn/kn/d38796-019e8c3b-5ff6-7ed8-8efb-053a3b4cd4ee.jpg)
Better Call Saul REACTION 6x10 [Edited - Early Access]
Added 2025-05-09 18:32:36 +0000 UTC
Comments
That is a fantastic anaylisis, and as you said, it completely holds up, in retrospect. When Bob Odenkirk first appeared as Saul in the "Better Call Saul" episode of BB, it was a fantastic performance, but a rather Surface level, Sketch Comedy-style way. As the show went on we saw Odenkirk try to find the actual person behind the Saul mask, but the show gave him precious few oppurtunities to give us any glimpses as to what, if anything, lay beneath. One of my favorite moments that gives us some small hint is actually during the last Meth-Cooking monatage, when Walt's Distribution corridor to Eastern Europe is making him more money & faster than he ever imagined, but we see him seem to lose enthusiasm & grow tired of it all. Saul appears in just one quick bit, where we see someone plop yet another huge bag of money on his desk and in response we see him reach over to the liquor decantor & pour himself a good, stiff drink. This is not a drink in celebration of the cash he's getting, this is clearly a drink to help numb the pain of...., well, at this point we can't possibly imagine of what, but it's a surprising hint that there actually is something churning beneath the surface of Saul after all, and even more surprisingly that money does apparantly nothing to aleviate whatever it is.
Brian Gonigal
2025-05-12 04:36:12 +0000 UTCThe ultimate reveal of Breaking Bad is that Walt didn't *become* Heisenberg; In some sense, he always was Heisenberg deep inside. The persona merely gave him permission to indulge his id, to pursue his power fantasies and take out his resentment and humiliation at losing Gray Matter on the world. The ultimate reveal of Better Call Saul is the reverse: Going in, we are set up to expect a prequel about how this new character of Jimmy became Saul Goodman. But the twist is that he *never* becomes Saul Goodman, because Saul Goodman is not a real character that exists in the ABQniverse. The Saul we met in Breaking Bad was always just Jimmy putting on a mask. Having lost everyone he ever cared about, Jimmy retreats into dissociation and denial, turning his life into a 24/7 work of Brechtian performance art in order to escape from his real self and real feelings. Saul is not an expression of Jimmy’s dark innermost desires the way Heisenberg is for Walt. Rather, Saul is Jimmy actively suppressing his real personality, pretending to be callous and glib, pretending not to care what other people think of him, because in reality he is extremely sensitive and deeply wounded by what other people think of him. Heisenberg is Walt’s self-idealization, the powerful badass he wishes he was. Saul is the opposite: a manifestation of Jimmy’s self-hatred. The Saul persona is essentially just Jimmy doing an extremely mean-spirited impression of himself, Jimmy “being himself” in quotation marks. Jimmy bitterly and sarcastically saying to the world, “Everyone says I’m a scumbag— Well fuck you then, this is me being a scumbag!” If he can’t have positive attention, he’ll settle for negative attention; If he can’t be good, then at least he can be evil in style. Gene misses being Saul not because he was truly happy as Saul (he was clearly miserable), but because Saul was his distraction from the pain of having to be alone with his own grief and guilt and trauma. The smash cut at the end of *Fun and Games* shows us that Saul is on his bluetooth headset from the moment he wakes up in the morning, he has prostitutes in his bed all night, and he is abusing a powerful cocktail of anti-anxiety and sleep medications. Saul is a live-action Looney Tune, a whirlwind of constant bullshit and flimflam, which is designed to keep Jimmy’s real thoughts and emotions at bay. What’s so striking to me about this radical reinterpretation of the character that BCS offers is that it’s remarkably compatible with what we saw in BB. In fact, it’s actually a *better* explanation of who Saul is in BB. Everything we see of Saul in BB is compatible with the interpretation that he is an extremely extroverted, people-pleasing theater kid, desperate for love, attention, and approval, who is pretending to be way more callous and cynical than he actually is as a defense mechanism. Saul presents himself as totally mercenary and emotionless, motivated only by money, but this is so manifestly not the case. If you analyze his behavior, he’s lowkey one of the most loyal and dependable characters in BB. He’s totally ride or die for Walt in a way that is not adequately explained by self-interest. Jimmy in BCS is so earnest and exuberant, with sugary, childlike emotions and huge physical reactions to everything; He literally pouts like a little kid when his feelings are hurt, lmao; He’s an extremely emotionally transparent and vulnerable character; Saul by contrast is emotionally detached and opaque; He feels uncanny and surreal, and his motivations don’t really make sense; But he also has these abrupt, inexplicable flashes of warmth and sincerity that retroactively feel like Jimmy breaking character and momentarily forgetting to conceal his real personality. Obviously none of this was intentional originally, but it’s clear that the writers went back and mined Bob Odenkirk’s performance in BB for these moments. They took what was previously unintentional or subtextual, and made it into the main text. If you go back and watch BB, you’ll notice that Saul becomes subtly more Jimmy-like over the course of that series. He becomes, in some weird, covert, subconscious way, emotionally attached to Walt and Jesse, because (retroactively of course) he identifies himself with Jesse and Walt with Chuck. Jimmy is trying to fill the Chuck-shaped hole in his heart with Walt. Saul is loyal to Walt, not in spite of Walt’s judgemental, condescending, impossible-to-please attitude, but *because* of it. He is still on some level seeking Chuck’s approval. With Jesse, he alternates between weirdly kind of caring for him and callously betraying him to Walt. This makes perfect sense when you realize that Jimmy identifies with Jesse as a young fuck-up and petty criminal (like Slippin’ Jimmy) who also craves Walt’s (Chuck’s) approval. Jimmy sympathizes with Jesse because he reminds him of himself, but he also hates himself, so he treats Jesse as disposable. Anyway, sorry for writing a novel here. My point is that is that BCS is a masterpiece that both plays on many of the same themes as BB, and also turns them on their head to extraordinary effect.
Francesca Langer
2025-05-11 23:26:11 +0000 UTCOk, now that I finished watching - Gene didn’t need to go back to the security guards a couple more times to make it believable after the scam because it actually was perfect: he cried in front of the one guy, “making an embarrassment” of himself, so it would be believable to that security guard that Gene wouldn’t wanna show his face again after that vulnerable moment (especially between 2 men). That’s how I interpreted it.
Tatyana Zinger
2025-05-10 22:34:10 +0000 UTC
