Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 10, “Winner”

The season four finale of Better Call Saul, “Winner,” is aptly named, as it offers up a great finale to another ultimately strong season of television. This season has had lagging moments, but when firing on all cylinders like it is here, even previously lackluster or mixed bag plots like the construction of the super lab come to life in new and exciting ways.

Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 9, “Wiedersehen”

One of the questions Better Call Saul has raised, and that “Wiedersehen” addresses explicitly, is the actual effectiveness of Jimmy’s powers of persuasion. Just how charming is Jimmy supposed to be? On the one hand, his folksy shtick goes over really well with the elder care clientele he courted in seasons two and three, and many of the cons he’s run over the course of the series have been successful. Moreover, we’ve also seen him be an effective salesman, most recently in his burner phone business. Yet on Breaking Bad, Saul’s attempts to charm people always came off as smarmy and half-assed, and were often much less successful. Take, for instance, his transparent attempt to flatter Skyler upon first meeting her, and then his patronizingly explaining money laundering to her. Here and elsewhere (there are many examples), Saul fails to read his audience, which begs the question: How can we reconcile Jimmy’s charm on Better Call Saul with Saul’s smarm on Breaking Bad?

Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 8, “Coushatta”

“Let’s do it again.” With this line of dialogue, Kim completely upended my expectations about where her story is headed, and where some of the tragedy of Better Call Saul rests. Throughout this season, I was certain that Kim and Jimmy were headed toward a break up, that Jimmy’s slow transformation into Saul, and his willingness to bend the rules and play dirty would be too much for Kim, and that the eventual emergence of Saul Goodman would become all the more tragic because it would come at the cost of Kim’s love. I could not have been more wrong.

Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 7, “Something Stupid”

Season four of Better Call Saul has found its stride. “Something Stupid” marks the third strong episode in a row, this time by showing substantial developments in the deterioration of Jimmy and Kim’s relationship. It’s aided in no small part by an outstanding split screen montage sequence at the start of the episode (perhaps the best of many on this series), which not only shows us various ways in which Jimmy and Kim’s evolving careers push them apart, but also advances the story clock, moving past the uneventful passages of Jimmy’s suspension and landing us a month before he can resume his law practice (various date indicators suggest that the montage covers roughly seven to eight months, ending in January of 2004).

Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 6, “Piñata”

For the second week in a row, Better Call Saul delivers another strong episode by paralleling Jimmy’s past with his future, this time showing how Kim is central both to Jimmy’s decision to become a lawyer, as well as his decision to commit further to his criminal tendencies in the process of becoming Saul.

Better Call Saul Season 4, Episode 5, “Quite a Ride”

In my write-up of the previous episode, I expressed impatience with the repetitious nature of Jimmy’s plot this season, and the slow pace of his transformation into Saul. “Quite a Ride” corrects for this slow pace and then some, thrusting Jimmy ever closer toward becoming Saul, and offering my favorite episode of the season thus far. It helps, of course, that we actually – shockingly – see Saul for the first time on Better Call Saul (outside of Gene watching his old TV commercials). The episode opens with a flash forward to a scene set near the end of Breaking Bad, with Francesca shredding documents and Saul scrambling to pack his things and arrange a meeting with Robert Forster’s fixer character.

Sharp Objects, Back Half of Season 1

I wrote a piece on the back half of Sharp Objects for Cultured Vultures, focusing on character psychology. Check it out here: https://culturedvultures.com/sharp-objects-character-psychology/