Better Call Saul Season 6, Episode 13, “Saul Gone”

"Saul Gone,” the Better Call Saul series finale, is certainly one of the best episodes of either Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, and might even be the very best of either series. Not only does it satisfyingly resolve the story of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, but in doing so, it also brilliantly implements an analogy to time machines. This implementation takes many forms. For one, “Saul Gone” is about Jimmy/Saul’s attempts to go back and fix the mistakes and crimes of his past, not by literally traveling through time, but by finally being honest about their nature, atoning for them, and facing up to their consequences. Interspersed throughout are many flashbacks to different parts of Jimmy’s life, which is a narrative device that somewhat resembles a time machine, allowing us (if not the characters) to revisit the past. What’s more, these flashbacks not only retrospectively enrich previous parts of Jimmy/Saul’s story by further revealing his capacity for introspection and his attempts to wrestle with his own moral quandaries, but the characters in these flashbacks also literally fantasize about how they might use time machines to change things that they regret about their pasts. Finally, the time machine analogy is also worked into the fabric of the episode both through the reappearance of a copy of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (which itself acquires new significance), and through the many parallels “Saul Gone” creates with previous parts of the series, most powerfully in the final scene between Jimmy and Kim. All of these temporal loops and whorls, both literal and figurative, layer on top of one another, resulting in a tremendously complex, highly emotional, and spectacularly executed series finale. “Saul Gone” is one for the ages. 

Better Call Saul Season 6, Episode 12, “Waterworks”

“This guy, any good?” This is the question that Jesse asks Kim about the competency of Saul’s legal practice when she runs into Jesse outside of Saul’s office in a crucial flashback scene in “Waterworks.” It’s a wonderful moment, not just because it’s a bonus Jesse cameo, or because it represents yet one more fleeting intersection between Kim and other elements of the Heisenberg-verse (akin to her encounter with Mike in “Hit and Run”), but also because the question can be easily interpreted as being about the quality of Saul’s character, hilariously boiling down Better Call Saul’s central concern into four simple words. Is there anything morally good about Saul Goodman – any vestiges of the good person Jimmy McGill used to be, still tucked away inside of Saul – or is he rotten to the core, having fully become the jaundiced, law-bending clown we know from Breaking Bad? The extended time we’ve had with Gene these past three episodes in the wake of everything that happened on Breaking Bad suggests that the answer is complicated, and that we might not be able to make a final judgment until the series finale. 

Better Call Saul, Season 6, Episode 11, “Breaking Bad”

“Breaking Bad” is a masterful episode of Better Call Saul. Not only does it deepen our understanding of why Saul got into business with Walt and Jesse in the first place, but it also draws parallels between Gene’s behavior in the present and Saul’s actions in the past, and perhaps most remarkably, somehow it does these things while also withholding a key piece of information that would better explain Gene’s actions throughout the episode, namely his decision to seemingly “break bad” himself by committing more scams with Jeff and Rick, even after Gene put it all behind him in “Nippy.”