It was not at all obvious, indeed it was quite unlikely, that a character appeared in 2009 during the second season of Breaking badthe chatty and buffoonish criminal advocate Saul Goodman, would become the owner of one spin off now in its sixth season and the protagonist of one of the most successful audiovisual works ever. The first part of the final season of Better call Saul has just finished on Netflix, the second will arrive on July 12, always with one episode a week, and as far as I’m concerned it will be the serial event of the year.
I foresee big debates online on how much the daughter series is even better than the mother, but in the meantime we can assume that Better call Saul has managed to resume with great success the deep structure of Breaking bad , while at the same time changing enough elements not to be an imitation at all. At the base of everything there is always the combination of a profoundly tragic story, or the transformation of a positive character into a villainand a narrative aesthetic from action-adventure: obsessive attention to the chains of cause and effect, to the deployment of machinations as perfect as they are improbable, to the Chekhovian rifles that will always fire.
Better call Saul takes this logic to the extreme, and the last seven episodes show it perfectly: the plan hatched by Saul and Kim to hit Howard is sown a piece at a time and then masterfully operated, but success is immediately overshadowed by the sudden reveal the consequences of their actions. Kim Wexler and Lalo Salamanca, characters who weren’t in the mother series, have an even more central role than before: Lalo, undoubtedly one of the scariest villains ever, was a conspicuous absence for several episodes, only to suddenly reappear. like a demon. Kim, for her part, is now the real heart of the series and has stolen the show from Saul himself. The rise of her, which will inevitably be followed by a fall, also signals one of the main ways in which Better call Saul it distances itself from its origins: the Walter White saga was founded on the crisis of traditional masculinity; here, however, the crisis concerns the capitalist myths of professionalism, work ethic, meritocracy.
Better call Saul
Vince Gilligan e Peter Gould
Netflix
