Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Joe Harrod's avatar

This is a very enjoyable piece, with a lot of truth, but I suggest you are missing one key point here, or at least you never allude to it. Breaking Bad is about a man facing death, and fighting to do something for his family. Better Call Saul (which is probably the best piece of TV from the golden era of big budget Netflix, it is astonishingly good) is at its heart a love story. That courtroom confession saves Kim from a civil suit, and fixes her reputation completely - and more importantly, it proves to Kim that Jimmy can redeem himself and face up to his wrongdoing, as you say. We are an important witness to that, but she is the ultimate witness and that final cigarette between them is one of the most meaningful scenes in any show ever. To realise after all the gang banging, long cons, bravado and legal bluster that I had sat through ten seasons of a very touching love story... well I was blown away.

Expand full comment
Jonny Mullins's avatar

I disagree for a few reasons.

Primarily though, it's this: for a show that's chiefly an extensive character tracing, Better Call Saul leaves little evident cause for Jimmy's act of repentance. Halfway through the finale he's still playing his usual game with his usual flair of rhetoric, indifferent to the suffering he's been involved in causing, and after having two days earlier physically threatened an elderly woman because she threatened his cover. Winning an astoundingly generous plea deal, he finds out in a heavy-handed scene that Kim, a woman he hasn't seen in six years, spilt the truth about her involvement in Howard's murder; and all of a sudden, he walks into court and confesses, under oath, to his history of related and unrelated crimes and other moral wrongs, which the viewer is given no reason to surmise will have any effect on the civil lawsuit that Kim might or might not be subject to, ripping apart his bargain deal into what will now be a life sentence. Because?

Redemption is a noble thing but it's not a cause. Epiphanies, moral and otherwise, do happen but they too have causes. And when you've spent sixty two and a half episodes sketching out the causes of a character's descent, to suddenly have this protagonist commit a wildly sacrificial noble act, inconsistent with previously and very recently known truths about him, and as a result of unspecified and impenetrable causes, is an obvious and remarkably unsatisfying failing. Unsatisfying it is also that they partially undercut the nature of this sacrifice by contriving to show him revered by his fellow inmates at the end, presumably to soften the blow of his sentence to the viewer or to allow some light into the customarily melancholy ending.

Both shows were excellent, almost peerless, at drawing causality, either evident or implied. In the few cases where the causality is weak or awry, its glare is thus brighter and harsher than it would be on other shows. The initial thrust of Better Call Saul's final season is founded on Kim acting wildly out of character to lead the horrific attempt to destroy Howard's life, something much more treacherous and perverted than what is implied as just a larger scale version of her pranks with Jimmy in earlier seasons. Ending the finale on what I can only call a character cheat made the final season frustrating to me, if still scattered with some excellent television.

Breaking Bad makes no such mistake. Walter's pathetic empire is annihilated -- the family he thought he did it all for are wrecked shells trying to build some semblance of structure from the remaining debris of his destruction; the brother-in-law he continually tried to protect is dead; the son from whom he desired respect and adoration despises him; the cancer he fought riddles him still worse by the day, sucking the life from his body; and the money which symbolised power and pride to him is no longer in his grasp. He has spent the last months of his life alone, left to consider the towering nothingness he has to show for his work.

In the Breaking Bad world, where causes, actions, and the effects of those actions collide, the finale is not about Walter being vindicated nor redeemed, but about the dying, beaten Walter being handed over to pass everyone else the drink of their own actions; that Gretchen and Elliott, the 'beautiful people', are no longer able to pay off their conscience, now dirtied by drug money, that Lydia is left to die from a silent killer, that the neo-nazis are brutally extinguished by gunfire; and that Jessie is finally freed, Skyler finally hears the truth from her husband, the wives of Hank and Steve Gomez will know where their husbands' bodies are, and Walter Jr will receive the money he is due. And by the last act, all that remains is for Walter Sr to die unintentionally from a machine off his own making.

Must stories have redemption? I don't think for every character, no. That doesn't symbolise hopelessness or indifference -- just that stories for now can only reach their end within a particular point in time. Must stories have redemption? No, but they must have cause. And for this, the finale of Breaking Bad stands up far stronger than the finale of Better Call Saul.

My apologies for the length of this comment. It evolved unintentionally.

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts