For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our article interviewing show runner/writer/director Peter Gould about the Better Call Saul series finale from Backstory Magazine’s issue 47 – now available to read! This is not the full article – so, if you enjoy what you’ve read in this free excerpt – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by by subscribing to Backstory Magazine so you can read the rest of the piece and so much more!
Emmy Contenders
Co-creator/writer/director Peter Gould walks us through the storytelling decisions of the acclaimed series’ last episode.
By Danny Munso
The brilliant writing staffs of both Better Call Saul and its predecessor, Breaking Bad, are famous for not planning their series’ plots too far in advance, preferring to focus on breaking each episode and season to see where the story and characters take them. But Saul’s co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould started thinking about the right ending for his titular character several years ago. “We didn’t know what the ending was going to be, but we had an image,” he says. “It happened in season four. We started talking about what does it look like if he ends up in prison. What would that feel like?” The image Gould describes is Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman (né Jimmy McGill) greeted like a victorious gladiator upon his arrival in prison, as a way for the inmates to thank him for always sticking up for criminals like them. “It would be like a Roman general walking triumphantly through the city. Guys are shouting, rolls of toilet paper are flying, they are chanting his name. It was just an image, but we had no idea how we would get there or even if we would get there.”
As viewers know, they never quite got to that specific image—although there is a nice nod to that moment as Jimmy is being transferred, where his fellow inmates start chanting his name on the bus—but the idea that this character fans have followed ever since he made his debut in season two of Breaking Bad in 2009 would end up behind bars indeed came to fruition. Written and directed by Gould himself, the finale of Better Call Saul—aptly titled “Saul Gone”—eschews the bullet-filled Breaking Bad finale for something more quiet and perhaps more meaningful. After years of doing so much bad, Jimmy leaves the Saul moniker behind, accepts responsibility for his crimes along with an 86-year prison sentence. The final scenes have him reconnecting with ex-wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), who visits him behind bars to share a cigarette. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s the right one. Jimmy will pay for his crimes, but his soul has seemingly been saved.
The concluding four episodes of the series’ sixth and last season are a great example of how the overall Saul storyline evolved. The show’s premiere episode in 2015 opened with a black-and-white scene of a mustached Jimmy—now going by the name of Gene—working as the manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha. The takeaway was clear: This is what happened after Saul fled Albuquerque at the end of Breaking Bad. Each season, the show would return to this “Gene” timeline—always in black-and-white—but only briefly. “My memory of [those early scenes] is we thought they were going to be more of a tone poem—a reminder of where he was going to end up,” Gould recalls. “The first few Gene sequences were just about his situation. The first one, you find out he’s managing a Cinnabon, just as he predicted on Breaking Bad, and the second one, you see he’s too scared to leave this room when the door closes because he’s afraid to set off the alarm. They just stand by themselves.”
Though that was the original idea behind the Gene scenes, the plan shifted significantly. The majority of the final four episodes of season six all take place in this black-and-white, post-Breaking Bad timeline, as we see Gene revert to his old ways, which leads to his arrest in the finale. The idea to do more in this timeframe started to shift in season four, when in the premiere Gene encounters a cabdriver who used to live in Albuquerque and recognizes his true identity. “We had to close that up because that raises all kinds of questions we had to answer,” Gould says. “I think as soon as we had that, we knew we were going to do a lot [in that timeline]. There was going to have to be a whole segment or episodes of his life as Gene.” This important change—which, again, was never part of the overall series plan at its outset—allowed the writers to explore Jimmy’s psyche. After a heated phone call with Kim, he can’t help but devolve back into Saul and starts to commit crimes even after all that happened in Breaking Bad and the fact that he’s still wanted by the authorities. It’s also Kim’s presence that eventually gets him to confess and bring him slightly back to the light.
The final scenes of Saul are appropriately Jimmy and Kim ones: the final one—a brief exchange between the two as Kim leaves the prison—and the more significant penultimate scene, where Kim uses her old New Mexico bar number to pose as Jimmy’s lawyer for a private conversation between the two. In it, they share a smoke while leaning against a wall in the exact same way the pair did back in the very first episode. The scene doesn’t contain much dialogue and instead relies on Odenkirk and Seehorn to communicate heavy amounts of subtext without saying a word. Gould admits his early versions were a lot longer and much wordier. “I wrote a bunch of them,” he says. “There are a lot of questions at the end of the series. Is Kim going to get sued? Is she going to become a lawyer again? Does he explain to her what his situation in prison is and that it’s maybe not as bad as it could have been? I wrote versions of the scene where they addressed all of those. They were not terrible, but as I kept looking at it, it just felt like it was too late to have those discussions, so I pared it down. The great advantage I have is working with these two actors for many years, I know how much they can do with so little.”
Because of the pandemic, the writing process for this season of Saul differed in a few key ways. The biggest one is the entire season was broken before filming began, which meant Gould had a lot more time to actually pen the final episode than he normally would. Because of this and the plot machinations, the script changed more than most. “I think of all my episodes of Better Call Saul, this script went through more evolution than the others,” he says. “Of course, I had a lot more time to write than normal. Hopefully I didn’t overwrite. When you’re writing a good screenplay, you’re pulling things away rather than putting things in. That’s certainly true of this episode and of that particular scene.” In the original breaking of the episode in the writers’ room, the last Jimmy and Kim scene came a little earlier in the episode. As in the final episode, Jimmy makes his big courtroom confession—a tour de force performance from Odenkirk—and as he is awaiting transfer to the max security prison we see later in the episode, Kim visits him in the Albuquerque jail. The context was slightly different as well because in this version Jimmy is terrified of going to prison and shares that with Kim. Ironically, it was the addition of another scene that allowed Gould to recontextualize and shift this Jimmy and Kim scene to the end of the episode. “In the original version, there was no flashback to Chuck,” he adds, referring to the brief reappearance of Jimmy’s brother portrayed by Michael McKean, who died on the show at the end of season three. “I reorganized things because I felt there should be a scene with Chuck, and I struggled with that for a long time. Then I was able to get a Chuck scene that made us all happy after I showed it to other folks on the show. After that, I really felt that the Jimmy-Kim scene belonged at the end.”
The flashback to Chuck really works, as it is the final in a trio of flashback scenes in the finale that reunite the audience with characters from Jimmy’s past. The opening scene returns us to the events of season five’s iconic “Bagman” for a new conversation between Jimmy and Mike (Jonathan Banks). Midway through the episode, we get the second season-six appearance of Bryan Cranston returning to his role of Walter White. The three scenes have more than just cameos in common. They are a continuing dialogue about regret. In the first, Jimmy asks Mike what he would do with a time machine, and he asks Walt the same thing in the second scene. Both times, Jimmy doesn’t give an honest answer. “[The time machine idea] was something pitched in the room as something for Jimmy and Mike to talk about in the desert,” Gould says. “We were looking for an opportunity to get Mike in there, and we also felt like we owed a Jimmy-Walt scene because of the parallel tracks those two characters were on. It took us a long time to figure out what they were talking about and why they were talking. It was very hard to figure out what kind of conversation they would have.” The third flashback—the one with Chuck—is perhaps the most heartbreaking, as it’s a rare opportunity where Chuck is trying to genuinely connect with his younger brother. Jimmy doesn’t pick up on the cues and instead doesn’t stay for the conversation Chuck so clearly needed. As Jimmy leaves, Gould pans the camera down to Chuck’s hand, where he is holding a copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Though the time machine motif started off as almost an excuse to bring back these crucial characters for the finale, it ends up being a moving and crucial thematic throughline in the script.
As Backstory’s conversation with Gould comes to a close, the showrunner makes a pitch to aspiring screenwriters reading this piece. He uses Final Draft for the production versions of his and the show’s drafts but points out he doesn’t write them using the popular screenwriting software. Instead he notes he is a devout user of Highland, the screenwriting software developed by fellow scribe—and former Gould student while he taught at USC—John August. “I really wish he would finish the iOS version,” Gould laughs. “That would make my workflow complete.” In addition to giving budding screenwriters software advice, Gould is also facing a blank slate for the first time in 15 years, and both he and Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan have said they are both taking a possibly permanent break from the Breaking Bad universe. Gould has yet to announce his next project, though, and is just sorting through ideas. “It’s been a long time since I had to start from scratch, and in some ways that’s super exciting. But it also takes a lot of thought. Usually I can see a million reasons why an idea won’t work, and sometimes the best thing to do is will something into existence. I’m excited.”
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There’s plenty more to explore in Backstory Magazine issue 47 you can see our table of contents right here.
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