Redemption versus vindication

Better Call Saul had a better ending than Breaking Bad

(NB Huge spoilers for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul)

1 The World Of Vince Gilligan

Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul were conceived and overseen by the same writer - Vince Gilligan - and set in the same universe. They have several overlapping main characters, and explore many of the same themes. Breaking Bad has a more frenetic and insistent pace, with a constant sense of looming peril and danger. The tension is often unbearable. Unlikely meth distributor Walter White lurches from crisis to crisis, usually finding some solution to the (often terrifying) dilemmas in which he finds himself, but committing horrible deeds in the process, and storing up more and worse problems for the future. The writers have a superb understanding of how evil choices constantly embroil you in further evil choices, even if you remain at some level a well-meaning person.

Better Call Saul is a slower burn. I remembered it as being quite a bit longer than Breaking Bad, but having checked, this is wrong - it only has one more episode. I think it feels longer because of the leisurely storytelling. The main plot strand follows “Slippin’ Jimmy”¹ McGill, superbly played by Bob Odenkirk, a one-time Chicago conman trying to make an honest living as a poorly-paid public defender in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but constantly tempted to return to the easy pickings on the wrong side of the law. Anyone who has watched Breaking Bad knows Jimmy is not going to break free of crime and sin, and will become an indispensable part of Walter White’s drug operation - Better Call Saul features flashforwards to his post-Breaking Bad life, living in hiding under an assumed name after White’s death. Saul Goodman is inevitable. Nevertheless, the writing is good enough that there are moments where you almost believe that he might not be.

But there are several other subplots, not least a major expansion of the history of Mike Ehrmentraut - arguably the single most tragic figure in the entire saga - and a deeper exploration of the tensions between Gustavo Fring and the Salamanca crime family (an important narrative element in the middle seasons of Breaking Bad). The latter incorporates the story of Nacho Varga, an intelligent gangster who might once have been a good man, and dreams of escape from the world of organised crime. And of course, there is Jimmy’s curious relationship with Kim Wexler, whom he eventually marries.

2 Broken Very Bad

When it came to conclusions, the shows took noticeably different approaches. In the final episodes of Breaking Bad, Walt’s frantic manoeuvring finally fails and his world collapses. He is indirectly but undeniably responsible for the death of his brother-in-law Hank Schraeder and his partner Steve Gomez at the hands of a white supremacist gang. After killing Hank, the gang steal almost all of Walt’s vast fortune and kidnap Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s long-time collaborator. He flees the family home after a dramatic physical confrontation with his wife and son, briefly kidnapping his baby daughter Holly, and finally calls Ed Galbraith, the “Disappearer”, who for a substantial fee will create an entirely new identity for those who need one. In the penultimate episode, ‘Granite State’, Ed smuggles Walt to the wilds of New Hampshire, almost 2000 miles from Albuquerque. There he stays for several months, miserable and defeated, slowly dying from cancer, the diagnosis of which was the catalyst for the events of the show. Eventually finding this intolerable, he walks to the nearby small town, where he phones his son Walt Jr from a payphone. Walt Jr. - now going by the name “Flynn” - angrily rejects his offer of money, leaving Walt in such misery that he decides to hand himself in. But a chance viewing in a bar of an interview with his former friends Elliot and Gretchen Schwartz² angers him sufficiently that he decides to return to Albuquerque to settle things once and for all.

In the very last episode, ‘Felina’, he has final meetings with many key characters, including the Schwartzes, his treacherous former business partner Lydia, and his wife Skyler. He watches Walt Jr. from a distance but cannot speak to him without risking capture. He then makes his way to the white supremacist compound, where he massacres the gang using an ingeniously customised machine gun and rescues Jesse. He fatally shoots the gang leader Jack Welker at point blank range, just as Jack previously did to Hank.

Emerging from the compound, he has a brief phone conversation with Lydia during which it is revealed that he has fatally poisoned her. Jesse leaves, having refused Walt’s request that he shoot Walt³. We then see that Walt has in any case been hit by a bullet himself; he staggers into the Welker gang’s meth lab, admiring the equipment, before collapsing and dying as the police arrive.

The striking thing about the climax here is that Walt is presented as - well, not winning exactly, but going out on a somewhat triumphant note. His meeting with the Schwartzes was to establish a mechanism by which several million dollars will one day reach his children. He rescues Jesse. He wipes out the Welker gang. He dies a free man, from an unlucky ricochet from his own gun, not from cancer. He tells Skyler, in a now-famous monologue, that his main motivation was not, as he had repeatedly insisted, the financial security of this family, but his own ego and ambition: “I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really…I was alive.”

While ‘Felina’ is compelling, thematically satisfying and contains some great moments, on reflection it maybe gives Walt a bit of an easy ride. More or less everything lines up for him. He is able to steal a car in New Hampshire and drive it two-thirds of the way across the country without any mishap. He is able to arrange meetings with various old acquaintances. He somehow gets to see his family, who are under police surveillance, without getting caught. Violence and threat pays off for him once more, most spectacularly in his attack on Jack’s men (and the success of that attack itself relies on a frankly absurd run of coincidences).

It is not a happy ending - we see the absolute ruin that Walt has brought on his family, and he never reconciles with Walt Jr. - but it does appear, in some respects, to vindicate Walt’s cumulative decisions to pridefully impose his will on the world, and to abandon a quietly unsatisfactory but morally upright life in favour of one that is exciting, consequential and fulfilling, but diabolical. Walt is bitterly regretful; but it doesn’t seem like he is repentant. He doesn’t tell anyone he is sorry - not Skyler, not Hank’s wife Marie, not Jesse, not the Schwartzes. Even in the last conversation with Walt Jr. in ‘Granite State’, he doesn’t attempt to apologise, apparently thinking that getting money to his family is more important. He does briefly decide to surrender to the police after that conversation, but seemingly from abject despair rather than any clear wish to make things right, and he soon changes his mind and flees, newly determined to finish with a bang, on his own terms.

Now TV dramas are not meant to be sermons. Part of the greatness of Breaking Bad is the subtlety of its writing, and I certainly don’t demand neat moral parables from Shakespearean drama. There’s an obvious point to be made that the portrayal of the catastrophic fallout from Walt’s actions throughout the show, and his eventual fate, speak for themselves. I simply report my own ambivalent response to some aspects of the ending.

3 It’s Not All Good, Man

We find out in Better Call Saul that while all this has been going on, Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman has been living in Omaha, Nebraska, for six months, under the assumed name of Gene Takavic⁴. Unfortunately for him, he encounters someone - taxi driver Jeff - who recognises him from his Albuquerque days. To neutralise Jeff, Jimmy enlists him in a burglary, saying afterwards that if Jeff blows the Takavic identity, Jimmy will reveal to the police that Jeff was involved. This works, but Jimmy cannot resist the allure of con artistry and subsequently enlists Jeff’s help with a series of scams. However, Jeff’s elderly mother grows suspicious of Jimmy and uncovers his secret. At the beginning of the final episode, ‘Saul Gone’, she calls the police and after a brief pursuit, Jimmy is arrested, to face justice for the crimes he committed in league with Walt.

Jimmy will receive a life sentence if convicted of all charges, but uses his legal tricks and native cunning to negotiate a plea bargain, where he will make a limited admission of guilt in return for a seven and a half year sentence in a relatively comfortable prison. A moment of Luciferian triumph for the incorrigible trickster - but a brief one.

He tries playing one last card to get the sentence reduced still further. He will reveal the truth about happened to his and Kim’s old boss Howard Hamlin, who was murdered six years before. The circumstances are complex, but Jimmy and his now ex-wife Kim Wexler bear heavy indirect responsibility for his death, even though the actual killer was drug lord Lalo Salamanca, and helped to cover up what had really happened⁵.

However, Jimmy’s attempt to use his knowledge for arbitrage is fruitless. It turns out that Kim - from whom he was divorced soon after the Hamlin murder - has herself recently given a full account of the incident. This comes as a shock to Jimmy. With no additional leverage the negotiations come to an end, and he is extradited from Nebraska to New Mexico. During the flight, he is told that while Kim is unlikely to face criminal charges, Howard’s wife is bringing a potentially ruinous civil case against her. Hearing about this development seems to give him a kind of epiphany. We aren’t clearly shown what that epiphany is, but Jimmy tells prosecutors that he has testimony about Kim and that they should arrange for her to attend his pre-trial hearing.

At the hearing, Jimmy surprises everyone by admitting that his claim to have testimony about Kim was a lie to make sure that she was in court, before making a full and frank confession of his active and voluntary complicity in Walter White’s crimes, totally contradicting the version of events he gave to the prosecutors - which he had intended to tell the jury at trial - in which he acted reluctantly, out of fear of Walt and his associates. He also praises Kim for making a fresh start after Howard’s death, and confesses to his involvement in the events that precipitated his brother Chuck’s suicide⁶.

This conscious and deliberate rejection of his plea bargain results in him receiving an 86 year sentence at a maximum security federal jail. Jimmy is supposed to be about 50 years old at this point. If he’d held on to the plea bargain he’d have been a free man well before turning 60. As it is, he will die in prison. In the very last scene, Kim comes to visit him. They share a few words and a cigarette, and she leaves, perhaps for good.

4 “The Name’s McGill. I’m James McGill.”

Not long after the finale first aired, I remember reading comments from fans who said they found the ending unbelievable. Why would anyone deliberately choose to spend the rest of their life in a grim federal prison when they had the option of a shortish sentence in a much more pleasant one? The question is entirely reasonable, and we are never given an explicit answer.

The only reading that makes sense to me is that Jimmy is seeking redemption. He is finally accepting responsibility and confronting the magnitude of his wrongdoing. The script strongly implies that the example of Kim’s honesty about Howard Hamlin spurs Jimmy on to realise that, in his own words, “the court deserves the whole truth.” After a lifetime of dishonesty and avoidance, he has sought a secular version of what Catholics call “the grace of a good confession” (and Jimmy is a Catholic, albeit long-lapsed).

By accepting a fitting punishment, he has accepted justice, and the truth about himself, i.e. that he has become a terrible person - a cheat, a thief, an accessory to several murders, an enabler of violence and corruption. He has been liberated, spiritually, by his decision to turn his back on living by lies, though that entails permanent physical captivity. Crucially, by freely admitting wrongdoing in the presence of those whom he has hurt terribly - Hank Schraeder’s wife Marie is in the courtroom, along with Gomez’s wife - he also offers them an opportunity for healing and recovery. He never expresses remorse and repentance as such, but those feelings are written all over his face in several key scenes, and it’s hard to see why he would tell all to the court unless he were genuinely sorrowful about his crimes, and willing to pay his debt to society - to accept a penance, if you like.

Notably, as he completes his oration to the court, he insists on his real name. Not Saul Goodman, not Gene Takavic - not even Jimmy. “The name’s McGill. I’m James McGill”, he says to the judge. The meaning is clear: he is leaving behind all the pretence, all the artifice, all the underhand dealing that those names enabled, and represent. He is putting on the new man, by attempting a symbolic return to the person he was at the start of his largely misspent life. Reclaiming “James McGill” reflects his yearning for a kind of prelapsarian innocence, the same yearning described in John Betjeman’s poem Norfolk:

“Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.”

Such restoration is not possible - not this side of the grave. But what we can do is to honour the yearning by beginning to fix the harms we have done, to attempt to reconcile with those we have injured, and if necessary to accept the due punishment for our deeds. That way lies redemption, reconciliation, and a kind of peace, rather than guilt, turmoil, and flight from accountability.

1. The nickname arose from his oft-repeated scam of pretending to fall or trip in a shop and suing the owners.

2. In the backstory of the show, filled in piecemeal in various episodes, Walt was once good friends with Elliot Schwartz, and they founded a company - Gray Matter - together, but Walt quit the partnership, selling his shares to Schwarz for $5,000. Gray Matter is now enormously successful, and Walt is very bitter towards Schwartz and his wife Gretchen, believing that they became rich at least partly from his innovations. To make matters worse, Walt was once engaged to Gretchen, but broke it off with her because of his own insecurities about her wealthy background. Breaking Bad never makes it entirely clear whether there is any real substance to Walt’s complaints.

3. Jesse and Walt’s relationship, always tempestuous, collapsed in the final season of Breaking Bad, because of Walt’s repeated betrayals of Jesse and his eventual attempt to have him killed. In the sequel film El Camino, we see Jesse eventually escaping to Alaska with the help of Ed Galbraith.

4. In-universe, Breaking Bad takes place over two years, from 7th September 2008 (White’s 50th birthday) to 7th September, 2010, with the final collapse of the White drug empire occurring in March 2010.

5. Howard was killed because he had come to the McGill-Wexler apartment to confront the pair about their complex scheme to ruin him, not knowing that the near-psychopathic Lalo was also there and was very keen to avoid witnesses. Jimmy and Kim do not know the whole story - Howard’s body is never found because he and Lalo were buried together in the foundations of Gus Fring’s drug lab by Fring fixer Mike Ehrmentraut, and everyone involved in the burial is dead by the time Jimmy and Kim reveal the truth (late 2010 in the Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul timeline, with Howard’s murder having occurred in 2004). But they are at least able to tell the world that Howard was murdered, rather than committing suicide, and that he was not a drug addict.

6. Jimmy schemed to have Chuck’s malpractice insurance premiums raised, meaning that he was no longer able to practise with the law firm he founded. Chuck - already struggling with mental health problems - subsequently set his own house on fire.