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Post by Jeremy on Jul 26, 2022 16:53:13 GMT -8
Decided to dig up this thread to talk about the last few episodes of Better Call Saul. Good to isolate it from the "Whatcha Watchin?" thread since there will likely be spoilers.
Case in point... BETTER CALL SAUL SPOILERS BELOW!
I'm really digging this final season, in part because of how effectively Gilligan and Gould are toying with expectations. Every episode of Season 6B this far has functioned as a finale/coda of its own. "Point and Shoot" wrapped up the Lalo storyline (and the overarching conflict of the last two seasons) much more quickly than anticipated. "Fun and Games" wrapped up the Jimmy McGill story and brought us to the point of Saul at the start of Breaking Bad. I assumed that the last four episodes would predominantly focus on the Gene Takovic flash-forwards, but then last night's excellent "Nippy" seemed to put a bow on that as well. With three episodes left (and nothing known outside of the fact that Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul will appear in at least one of them), it's anyone's guess where the show goes from here. I'd be willing to bet this isn't the last we've seen of the flash-forwards, but the unpredictability heightens the anticipation.
Great show that has gotten stronger and more entertaining with time. Very much looking forward to seeing how it wraps up.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 26, 2022 18:28:11 GMT -8
Yeah, it's been excellent thus far this (half-) season, I honestly think I may slightly prefer this show, overall, to Breaking Bad, even though BCS took longer to hit its creative stride, To me, it's a more artful refinement of BB, with fewer melodramatic moments, and less navel-gazing (see: Jesse Pinkman's extended self-destructive, drug-fueled despondency arc in BB).
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 27, 2022 13:28:22 GMT -8
I think I'm going to like this season more in hindsight, when we don't have the artificial tension of waiting for the W.W.-bomb to drop, or (more gratuitously) having a major character death happen before a two-month Emmy-baiting midseason "break."
"Nippy" was a really interesting episode - not the least of which because, jeez, CAROL BURNETT?? She has to be the biggest guest star on either show, right? (Maybe Danny Trejo outranks her, just in terms of his casting being a very deliberate and cruel "stunt.") But I thought it was neat because it got me thinking that the show is really riffing on Breaking Bad's power fantasy elements in a way that BB didn't, because the idea of the show is that cons are exhilarating but ultimately bad for the people who do them, and I think that the show is set up to maximize our joy in watching Saul carry out scams, as well as our cringe for enjoying them (as with Howard's, spoilers, widow at his funeral).
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 28, 2022 18:00:23 GMT -8
Carol Burnett's appearance was one of the few details of the final season that was revealed beforehand (though her specific role was kept under wraps). I thought she was well-used, and the story wasn't upstaged by her celebrity status. (A lot of prestige dramas seem to shun the idea of major guest stars, since they risk breaking the show's internal realism. But the Breaking Bad-verse has been blazing its own trail for almost fifteen years, so it's earned some leeway.) I was more distracted by the recasting of Jeff, but that appeared to be an unavoidable detail related to production scheduling.
I'd have to revisit Breaking Bad (have not watched the series in several years) to make the assessment myself, but at this point I can certainly understand someone preferring Better Call Saul as the better show. It's certainly an incredible drama on its own merits, even if in the grand TV conversation, it may never fully break away from its parent series.
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 29, 2022 13:51:00 GMT -8
So I just watched the animated Better Call Saul spinoff Slippin' Jimmy, which focuses on the wacky misadventures of Jimmy McGill when he was still a boy. (Yes, this is a real show.)
It's... bad? Leaving aside the fact that it's an obvious cash-in with little connection to the source material (the only characters from the parent series are Jimmy and Marco - cast here as the stereotypical dumb and roly-poly best friend - and Chuck, who puts in a brief appearance), the show is very cheap and hacky, with unfunny jokes and unappealing animation. The stories play out like brief comedy sketches that never got past the first draft; they lean far too heavily on reference humor, with most episodes being a parody of a famous film or genre. One episode is a sendup of Sergio Leone's filmography; another is a Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton riff; still another takes on Cool Hand Luke. None of these references are particularly funny, and they generally feel like placeholders for original jokes.
The good news is that the show is extremely brief - six episodes, each of which runs about nine minutes. It's scarcely longer in total than a standard BCS episode, but still wears out its welcome very quickly. It's sad to see the Breaking Bad universe resort to such an obvious cash grab, and while I'm likely to forget it rather fast, it does leave me worrying that - a la The Walking Dead - AMC may eventually run the franchise into the ground.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 29, 2022 18:28:09 GMT -8
Breaking Sauliverse be slippin', Jer'my.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 2, 2022 5:15:46 GMT -8
So they really did an episode called "Breaking Bad." And they buried Bryan Cranston's and Aaron Paul's names in the closing credits, because there's no way we would guess that those two would appear in an episode called "Breaking Bad." Okay!
That aside, this was another strong episode, and the first from Season 6B which really suggests what the endgame of the series is. Although there were some flashbacks to fill in a few gaps of the parent series (and more helpfully, embellish BB storylines by showing them from Saul's POV), much of the driving force remains in the B&W flash-forwards, which will likely remain in focus for the final two episodes.
I was also a bit suspicious at Carol Burnett's all-too-brief appearance in last week's episode, and it now appears her role is larger than initially thought. The heist sequences, montage and all, wasn't the show's most inspired, but they do reflect how Jimmy/Saul/Gene has grown coarser and more desperate with time (his response to learning that his latest mark has cancer is pretty harsh). Another sign that the walls are closing in.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Aug 3, 2022 12:26:11 GMT -8
Carol Burnett's appearance was one of the few details of the final season that was revealed beforehand (though her specific role was kept under wraps). I thought she was well-used, and the story wasn't upstaged by her celebrity status. (A lot of prestige dramas seem to shun the idea of major guest stars, since they risk breaking the show's internal realism. But the Breaking Bad-verse has been blazing its own trail for almost fifteen years, so it's earned some leeway.) I was more distracted by the recasting of Jeff, but that appeared to be an unavoidable detail related to production scheduling. I'd have to revisit Breaking Bad (have not watched the series in several years) to make the assessment myself, but at this point I can certainly understand someone preferring Better Call Saul as the better show. It's certainly an incredible drama on its own merits, even if in the grand TV conversation, it may never fully break away from its parent series. I think it's about as good as prequels get. It could have been a fairly standard antihero morality stuff, but it's really elevated by its meticulous attention to detail and emotional depth (which is much greater than I think anyone expected from a show about Saul Goodman). There's very few instances in Saul where you have to turn your brain off. It does have a couple flaws, mainly that it has a tendency to meander for no real reason and that the Mike stuff in Seasons 2-4 were a real drag, even though they've been smoothly integrated into Jimmy's world in Seasons 5 and 6. But one of the greats? Yeah, I can see it. After all, Breaking Bad had a few things wrong with it as well.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Aug 3, 2022 15:03:10 GMT -8
So I just watched the animated Better Call Saul spinoff Slippin' Jimmy, which focuses on the wacky misadventures of Jimmy McGill when he was still a boy. (Yes, this is a real show.) It's... bad? Leaving aside the fact that it's an obvious cash-in with little connection to the source material (the only characters from the parent series are Jimmy and Marco - cast here as the stereotypical dumb and roly-poly best friend - and Chuck, who puts in a brief appearance), the show is very cheap and hacky, with unfunny jokes and unappealing animation. The stories play out like brief comedy sketches that never got past the first draft; they lean far too heavily on reference humor, with most episodes being a parody of a famous film or genre. One episode is a sendup of Sergio Leone's filmography; another is a Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton riff; still another takes on Cool Hand Luke. None of these references are particularly funny, and they generally feel like placeholders for original jokes. The good news is that the show is extremely brief - six episodes, each of which runs about nine minutes. It's scarcely longer in total than a standard BCS episode, but still wears out its welcome very quickly. It's sad to see the Breaking Bad universe resort to such an obvious cash grab, and while I'm likely to forget it rather fast, it does leave me worrying that - a la The Walking Dead - AMC may eventually run the franchise into the ground. I'm surprised the show seems so hated, because it doesn't strike me as all that different from any number of mostly-animated, mostly-bad featurettes that Breaking Bad used to do all the time as promotional materials - I guess those weren't promoted as "shows," but they could have been!
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 3, 2022 20:19:25 GMT -8
They still do some of those featurettes to promote BCS - like those Los Pollos Hermanos training videos on YouTube. The difference (apart from those being clips rather than a full show) is that those clips feel like they're a natural part of the Breaking Bad universe, while this animated series truly doesn't.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 12, 2022 13:43:30 GMT -8
It was probably no surprise that the Gene sequences have become the main focus of BCS' home stretch; each season-opening teaser steadily heightened the suspense and precariousness of Future Saul's predicament over the one before it, and it was only a matter of time before the present caught up to the future (or the past, as these scenes are still set about a decade ago - but let's not get into that).
Still, BCS has proven time and again that no matter how inevitable certain things may seem, it's still a thrill to watch them play out. Even after shedding its prequel format to become a true Breaking Bad aftermath story (a la El Camino), there were still some inevitabilities going into this week's episode - Saul's cover was going to be exposed at some level, and Carol Burnett's character would have a hand in it. It was almost certain that we'd see Kim again. And we'd get at least one more surprise cameo (even if it's a repeat from the prior week).
But it didn't matter, as all the elements fit together excellently, and have been a thrill to watch snap in place as the show draws to its end. Kim's attempts to reconcile with her past are heartbreaking, and her flashback with Jesse provided a fitting coda for her prequel-self. The latest heist-gone-wrong was by turns suspenseful and hilarious (I laughed unreasonably loudly when Jeff crashed the car). And the final scene with Odenkirk and Burnett (who I have to assume will be up for the 2023 Guest Star Emmy) was terrific.
There are certain parallels to the final stretches of BB and BCS, though they have unfortunately not translated to the ratings - Breaking Bad's finale drew 10 million viewers, and Saul will be luck to get a fifth of that. It's never been its parent show in buzz or (even at this late stage) pure adrenaline, and never will be. But it's ending on a heck of a high note, and I'm really looking forward to Monday night.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Aug 15, 2022 20:20:46 GMT -8
Recording my thoughts on this finale for posterity, while it's still fresh: it is a good finale that is just barely successful rather than merely failing as little as possible, because wrapping up both Saul and a totally different series results in some tonal whiplash, but also forces you to acknowledge the similarities between characters and compare-and-contrast in ways that make BCS look markedly inferior - e.g., clearly Cheryl Hamlin is the Marie of this show, except Marie is an actual character and Cheryl is very much not in a way that means Marie's presence retroactively makes Cheryl's deal look more like emotional manipulation of the obvious sort; and yet the Cheryl scene in "Waterworks" is much much more effective than Marie's appearance here because while we were witness to the Howard saga and thus have a great frame of reference for Cheryl's agony, Marie is just sort of Skyping in from a completely different universe. So that makes this finale a little awkward. And yet, it works, imo.
But it's confirmed for me something that I've been suspecting since at least the midseason break, which is that this show is definitely the inferior of Breaking Bad largely for exactly the reasons everyone thought this show would be a stupid cash grab. They were wrong, of course - this show is very good, far better than it had any right to be, IMO. It is astonishing to me, for instance, that the show managed to keep the Saul Goodman antics going even as it somehow made Jimmy a wildly compelling dramatic character with realistic neuroses and character failings. But it then has to be wedded to a show that - and I don't want to imply that BB was without nuance, there's a lot of subtle stuff going under the surface there - has a totally different approach to genre and vibe, built around a lot of life-or-death situations which simply cannot hold interest relative to, e.g., a guy swapping two numbers on a legal document for ten minutes.
So basically, it's impressive that the show is as good as it is because by all means it should be buckling under the weight of two different vibes, and it definitely faltered, and yet it still managed to be compelling from beginning to end.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 16, 2022 1:33:27 GMT -8
Interesting. The effect this episode's portrayal of Walter White had on me is that it reminded me that the lead character of BB had become almost completely unpleasant and unsympathetic (and borderline two-dimensional) towards the end of that series, while Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman still retained some of his charm and empathy, despite doing many despicable things. And because I found even Jesse Pinkman barely tolerable at times in the middle section of BB, I'm probably going to fall on the side of preferring BCS, even though I thought the first half of BCS's first season was fairly middling. The larger presence of Mike Ehrmantraut on this series probably puts it over the top for me as well (Jonathan Banks is a tremendous actor), in addition to greatly preferring Kim to any of the female characters on BB.
Plus, to me, it's more accomplished on a visual/technical level, as the producers learned a lot of tricks on BB that they refined here.
I need to re-watch BB at some point in the next few years, though.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 16, 2022 7:26:54 GMT -8
Considering that last night's episode had to function as both a finale to Saul and a coda to the Breaking Bad universe as a whole, I thought it did an admirable job. This is a show that managed to accomplish what many spinoffs fail to do - building off the success and capturing the spirit of an earlier series while still functioning as a great show on its own terms. However, just as there is no Better Call Saul without Breaking Bad, there is no downfall of Saul Goodman without the downfall of Walter White, and I quite liked the way these last four episodes captured the tone of latter-day BB while still feeling like a capper for the 59 episodes that preceded them.
I thought Marie's appearance in the crux of the finale was ingenious, as she was always something of a second-tier character on Breaking Bad but still arguably lost more than any of the other original characters by the end. Walt got everything he wanted, Jesse drove off into the sunset, and we're left to assume Skylar and Walt Jr. got the money they needed - but Marie lost her husband and never got any real personal retribution. So it was great to see her confront Saul, the last remaining survivor of Walt's criminal enterprise, and unburden all her emotions on him. It's a nice reminder that, no matter how many seasons we spend watching Jimmy McGill sliding into his inevitable future, he's still not the ultimate victim.
As far as the debate between the two shows go - I'd probably slightly take Breaking Bad over BCS, even if the latter has a clearer overall structure and more established visual palette (building off the already great palette on BB). But it's really close, a testament to just how good the writers have been at crafting this universe and building it in new and thrilling ways.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 16, 2022 14:20:18 GMT -8
I think a lot of my feelings relate to favouring empathy (for characters and situations) over suspense. Obviously Breaking Bad, as a whole, was considerably more suspenseful, but I cared more about the characters and story in Better Call Saul, even if the life-and-death stakes were often not nearly as high.
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