Better Call Saul

Killed off in “Breaking Bad,” Mike Ehrmantraut had a long second act in “Better Call Saul.” Banks said playing Mike made him “a little more silent, ...

And part of his misery is that he can read “The Little Prince” with Kaylee, and then he’s going to go do something that he knows is not good. In spite of all his fears and trepidations, the world is good for a moment with that innocent child and that innocent book. I have a quote in my kitchen — I’m going to take you over here with me so I can read this to you. It’s a passage where the little prince says, “My flower is ephemeral, and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world.” What do you think this scene means for Mike? I love “The Little Prince” so much. The first thing that comes to my mind is in “Breaking Bad” when Mike left his granddaughter in the park and had to escape. I still have a tough time with Mike leaving his granddaughter in the park. And I was going, “No, Mikey would never leave his granddaughter.” And of course, the reasoning is, the police department — they’re there in the park. In the Sunday comics, there is “find the six differences in between two photos or two drawings.” I have difficulty with that. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. Morally conflicted, with plenty of wrinkles but little mirth, Ehrmantraut was mostly a blunt, coldblooded crank — with a soft spot for his granddaughter — in “Breaking Bad,” arriving in the second season and getting killed off three seasons later. The last scene that Bob Odenkirk and I had together in the desert, and where I say to him, “You regret nothing?” — Mike was still looking for the humanity in this guy.

Following the series finale of Better Call Saul, Rhea Seehorn discusses six seasons spent getting inside the head of the inscrutable Kim Wexler, ...

Because he had some rehabilitation to do, I actually shot at least a week and a half of stuff that was always supposed to be without him: the walking up to Gus’s house, the driving scenes. It’s just how I work, that I do a lot of homework so that I am free to let it all go when I get there and then be organic and respond to whatever. Her final look to him, Peter and I talked about it and Bob and I talked about that there’s great compassion, fear, love, worry for him in that moment when he exits the courtroom. So I just tried to go about thinking like, “Okay, saying goodbye to somebody is a very real thing that one can use, but even more so the idea that she can’t let it go right now. You said something that I absolutely knew that Kim had to be playing, and that the audience would know she was playing, which is, “Is this real this time?” Someone that’s a professional scam artist, it’s like, “How do I know when he’s not bullshitting me?” I would rather him articulate exactly what he found was the shift, but to me, when he came back and did it again, there needed to be that question of like, is he contrite? They showed me the route we were going to take, so that was a bit of a rehearsal for me to just understand, “Where are people going to be near me and what will I be able to see in front of me?” And that way, I can rehearse it to the degree of understanding, “Okay, on each take, when we come around that corner and I see that skyline, let that skyline inform the life I could have had. You can’t rehearse it in a traditional way, but I did a lot of thinking about it and then gave myself some tactile markers that I knew that I could have as a reminder of my starting point each time when I get on the bus. I literally just put the things physically that we have all felt in extreme shame in our lives or extreme pain in our lives and then try to not let them come all the way out. It is not fair for her to be the one that has to be consoled in any way, which is why I’m so stoic in those scenes. She’s crying for the entire Shakespearean tragedy of Jimmy McGill and of Kim Wexler and of their relationship and of Chuck and of Howard and of people that try to be a good person and how hard that fight could be in day-to-day real life. I had not thought of that but I’m sure it’s among the infinite interpretations that Peter wants there to be.

The 59-year-old actor posted a heartfelt video thanking fans for sticking with Better Call Saul through its season finale on Monday night.

But, could not be prouder to share the exquisite ending that #PeterGould wrote and directed. 'I will be forever grateful to have been part of the epic story telling of the #BetterCallSaul & #BreakingBad universe. She admitted that she was '0% ready for this. We were given a chance, and hopefully we made the most of it. Better than expected: 'Thanks for giving us a chance,' he continued. 'We came out of maybe a lot of people's most favorite show ever, and we could have been hated for simply trying to do a show.

6. Howard Hamlin. There has perhaps never been a more shocking and undeserving death in modern television than when Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) fell victim ...

Nacho will forever be a legend to all of us, and one of the most likable antiheroes in Breaking Bad lore. The death is deserved, both from the perspective that Lalo is a horrible person who didn’t deserve to live, and that his arch-nemesis throughout the series was the one who got him. As we got to see Nacho’s relationship with his father, his unique code of ethics in the cartel game, and his friendship with Mike Ehrmantraut ( Jonathan Banks) blossomed, he became a fan favorite on par with Jesse Pinkman. [kicking a lantern over in his house](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/better-call-saul-season-3-episode-10-review-lantern/), it is clear that Chuck’s pure contempt left nothing left to live for. He’s a man doing his job, and he becomes a cog in the cat and mouse game between Mike (Jonathan Banks) and Lalo. His scathing monologue that laid waste to the Salamanca name, along with calling out Gus on his cowardly act before shooting himself in the head was the high point of the beginning of season six. He’s a man who is doing something criminal, but he doesn’t really understand the entirety of his situation or the misdeeds he’s performing. The friendship that developed between Mike and Werner also served a great purpose in Mike’s character arc. He could be a mean person in his life outside of his job. He also treated Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) with some disdain that seemed a little petty at times, but he paid a price that was completely unnecessary. Now that the show has wrapped its run, we thought it would be a great time to recap which departed characters got the most and least deserving fates. Did their death signify a turning point in the story, or could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould give these people more of a dramatic farewell?

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Breaking Bad carried the mantle of prestige television for six years, but in 2015 Better Call Saul picked up the mantle and ran with it. Instead of replacing Lalo with, say, a QAnon gang, the series watches Jimmy and Kim get eaten up by their own guilt, showing the different paths the two characters take. Kim is also an excellent addition to the series and Rhea Seehorn was perfectly cast in the role. So the writers just introduce a load of neo-nazis. Saul wrestling with his own conscience feels more tense, and is far better writing, than having Walt machine gun some nazis - although I’m not denying that that scene was badass. But even when Breaking Bad was still airing, and Better Call Saul was not even a twinkle in Vince Gilligan’s eye, many fans agreed that Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman was the best character in the series.

A subdued but cathartic finale with a powerhouse performance from Bob Odenkirk does justice to a series that has silenced pretty much all doubters.

The show has always excelled at visual storytelling, trusting its audience to notice and interpret the various symbols and mirrored images without overexplaining things. Interspersed with scenes of Jimmy in custody – shot, as all the “present-day” sequences have been, in black-and-white – are a series of flashbacks. Sometimes, letting things just calmly play out can be the most affecting, satisfying end there is. [Terms of use,](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/user-policies-a6184151.html) [Cookie policy](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/cookie-policy-a6184186.html) and [Privacy notice.](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/privacy-policy-a6184181.html) For a bit of extra legal firepower, Jimmy hires his old peer Bill Oakley (the ever-amusing Peter Diseth), who makes an enjoyable return in the most low-key of several victory-lap cameos. This inevitably doesn’t last for long; for the last half-season, Jimmy has acted like a man who transparently yearns to be caught. After being dobbed in to the police by Marion (Carol Burnett) at the end of last week’s episode, “Saul Gone” starts with our man on the run. While Breaking Bad’s bullet-sprayed finale pleased a majority of viewers and critics at the time, its reputation has faded in the years since. The only word more ominous to viewers than “spinoff” is “prequel”, and Saul was both. This was true right up to the end. [Bob Odenkirk](/topic/bob-odenkirk)) face up to his many, many misdeeds. Conceived as a spin-off to [Breaking Bad](/topic/breaking-bad) at the height of the [AMC](/topic/amc) crime drama’s popularity, Saul never felt like a premise that could work.

Understandably, Odenkirk was emotional about the Breaking Bad spin-off coming to an end after six seasons, and 63 episodes. It's a character that has lived with ...

It’s too many moving parts and they fit together too beautifully and it’s a mystery to me how it even happened.” “I did nothing to deserve this part but I hope I earned it over six seasons,” Odenkirk added. “It’s a mystery to me how it even happened,” he said in a video uploaded to Twitter.