But this review, the last of this extraordinary season of television, isn’t, not just yet. There’s one more scene I want to discuss, one I believe is key to the entire thing.

Between the library dedication ceremony and the appeals hearing, Jimmy joylessly participates in a meeting of the charitable foundation Chuck set up to fund scholarships for promising young students with an interest in law; his spot on the board is one of the few things the elder McGill left him. Writers Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz and director Adam Bernstein take an innovative approach to the proceedings: Within a second or two of each student beginning to answer one of Howard Hamlin’s jovial questions, they crash-cut away to the next one, as if the nature of what they’re saying means nothing compared to the nature of the process itself.

After all the interviews have concluded, Howard is prepared to offer the fund’s three scholarships to the three highest vote-getters. Then Jimmy interrupts. It was he, he says, who voted for the student who only received a single vote. “That’s the shoplifter,” one of the other board members replies, referring to the girl’s run-in with the law from a few years back. Jimmy points out that it’s precisely that experience that gave her an interest in the law in the first place, and that both her academic career and her personal essay have borne out the promise they’d be ignoring if they let that one event define the kid’s life.

Which they do. The three winners take home the scholarship, and young Kristy Esposito, shoplifter, gets the shaft. But when Jimmy races toward her outside the office to speak with her, we don’t know that yet. He breaks the news, and does so with gusto. “You didn’t get it. You were never gonna get it… You made a mistake, and they are never forgetting it. As far as they’re concerned, your mistake is who you are. It’s all you are.”

But she has an option, he tells the flabbergasted kid: beat them. Cheat. Cut corners. Hustle. Don’t play by the rules. Be smart. Be hated. “You rub their noses in it. You make them suffer… Screw them! The winner takes it all.” She walks away, the effect of this warped monologue on her uncertain.

Then a surprising thing happens. Back down in the parking garage where he used to loiter in his days working for Howard and Chuck’s firm, Jimmy’s car breaks down… and then he breaks down too. “No, no, no,” he sobs, crying for real for the very first time this season. Is he mourning his brother? The notion that his brother was right about him all along? The notion that he’s right about the hopeless odds facing him and the scholarship kid and anyone else who’s less than perfect? The idea that he’s become a person who shouts at children, encouraging them to become dirtbags and do whatever it takes to get one over on the so-called good guys? The fact that the law doesn’t benefit everyone equally, and that some people will get away with everything no matter what? That the law can be fooled? That amoral monsters can wield it as they see fit? That his life, and the lives of everyone he cares about, are slowly sliding into disaster?

Good questions, aren’t they? After the events of the past few weeks, weeks in which Better Call Saul aired its best season ever, do they sound familiar?

I reviewed Better Call Saul’s backbreaker of a season finale for TV Guide. A great season of television.

SPOILER WARNING

People believe what they want to believe. That’s as true for the audience of Better Call Saul as it is for the characters. Chances are good that as you watched Monday’s episode unfold, you assumed disaster would befall Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and his German construction crew. You likely pegged Werner (Rainer Bock), the gentle team leader who misses his wife of 26 years and always refers to Mike with a kindly-sounding “Michael,” as the victim. You probably thought Kai (Ben Bela Böhm), the cocky young demolitions expert who’s butted heads with Mike over and over, would be the culprit.

So when Werner goes back down into the subterranean depths to check on a faulty fuse laid by Kai the night the team is scheduled to blow up one last gigantic rock with dynamite — a rock spraypainted with “WIEDERSEHN,” the German word for “goodbye,” no less — you were probably nearly as nervous as Werner himself. Note: The episode is titled “Wiedersehen,” and it was written and directed by Breaking Bad top dogs Gennifer Hutchison and Vince Gilligan, respectively. You’ve heard of Chekhov’s gun? This is like Chekhov’s arsenal.

But it was all a bait and switch; indeed, the entire German subplot might have been. Werner fixes the fuse. The detonation goes off without a hitch. The teammates toast to a job well done, with Kai himself pouring a cold one in Mike’s honor.

Now the goalposts get moved once again. Could Werner, who all but begs Mike to be allowed a brief trip home to visit his beloved wife but puts on a brave face once Mike declines, be despondent enough to kill himself? His lengthy goodbyes during the extra phone call he gets allotted instead of a vacation indicate that yeah, he just might be.

Instead, the owlish little guy sabotages the security cameras, cuts through the padlocks, evades the security team, and escapes the secure facility where he and his team have lived in seclusion for months. He’s fleeing home… and given what we know about his drug lord boss, he’s risking not only his life, but Mike’s, the guards and the entire construction crew’s in the process. He may have disabled the cameras, but the real blindspot was Mike’s, believing his friend knew the stakes and could be trusted not to do anything reckless. On this show, trust doesn’t get you very far.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. I liked unraveling this particular multi-episode fakeout.

Even the most well-oiled machine needs a trip to the shop for a tune-up now and then. Better Call Saul, I suppose, is no exception. This week’s episode, “Coushatta,” is the first time that the show’s tremendous fourth season has hit any significant storytelling hiccups. They’re hardly deal breakers — the show is simply too good for that at this point, it seems — but for once, it felt like Jimmy McGill and company are playing for time.

[…]

The opening letter-writing montage is set to as impeccable a deep cut as ever, in this case Les McCann’s funk-inflected barn-burner “Burnin’ Coal”, but the music feels like an excuse to make the filmmaking less interesting, not an impetus to get innovative. Better Call Saul obviously thrives on depicting the tedium of crime in an innovative way, but there’s nothing particularly interesting about a series of straightforward shots of a guy writing postcards on a bus as a hot piano tune plays. If the cinematography had been bolder, sure. Hell, if they’d gotten rid of the music entirely, and just let us sit on that bus with Jimmy for five minutes, soaking in the repetition of it all, that would have worked too. The choice the show made, neither fish nor fowl, feels like junior-varsity Saul at best.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. It was the first one this season that felt less than essential to me, but it’s still Better Call Saul. I’m proud of that analysis of the musical montage, for what it’s worth.

Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) are living separate lives together, and Better Call Saul is using every trick in the book to prove it.

“Something Stupid,” the seventh episode of the show’s outstanding fourth season, kicks off with a musical montage set to the song of the same name. Made famous by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, it’s a meticulously constructed tune, its verbose lyrics and complicated two-part harmony embodying the fear of being really close to someone but holding back because you’re worried about revealing you’re more into them than they are into you. (It’s made slightly awkward by the fact that Frank and Nancy were father and daughter, but this is the Nicole Kidman/Robbie Williams version, so no harm done.) It’s one of the most astute soundtrack selections in the history of the BCS/Breaking Bad universe, and that’s saying something.

The imagery accompanying the song is equally effective. Using a split-screen effect — one that takes a few seconds to get going so that at first all you see is half a screen before the second image kicks in — it chronicles Jimmy and Kim’s daily routine. They brush their teeth, eat breakfast, go to work. Kim moves into her new office as a partner in the firm of Schweikart & Cokely; Jimmy plays handball against the window of his empty cellphone store. Kim racks up commemorative trophies for Mesa Verde branch openings and clients for her sideline as a pro bono public defender; Jimmy piles up visits to his parole officer and stacks of cellphones for sale to his less-than-legal clientele.

But the split screen stays in effect even when the two are right next to each other, eating dinner or getting into bed. Sure, Jimmy might reach across that black bar to pour Kim some wine, or Kim might stretch a leg across to drape it over Jimmy as she sleeps, but it’s always there. And in the end, after the song fades away, Kim’s side of the split screen fades away too, leaving Jimmy alone in the dark. Writer Alison Tatlock and director Deborah Chow conveyed the slow death of a relationship in the form of a music video, basically, and it’s beautifully sad to watch. A later scene, in which Jimmy wows everyone at Kim’s company party with his gift of gab except for Kim herself, only underscores the initial point.

I reviewed episode seven of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. This show can take your breath away with what feels like no effort at all.

I’m in awe of Mike Ehrmantraut, the way only a guy who has to make plans days in advance to do the dishes watching a senior citizen smoothly transition into running OpSec for a billion-dollar drug cartel can be. Sure, Mike (Jonathan Banks) is a guilt-ridden murderer who blames himself for his son’s death and will eventually die in disgrace, but in the meantime his hyper-competence is an absolute joy to watch when you’re feeling less than competent yourself. And despite being a comedown from the lethal tension and emotional turmoil of recent episodes, this week’s installment of Better Call Saul (“Piñata”) offers this particular pleasure in bulk.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. Like I said, it’s kind of a time out from the mounting terror.

It probably goes without saying, but at this point Better Call Saul never takes a day off when it comes to quality. This show is humming along like a freight train, gliding effortlessly yet with unmistakable power from moment to moment, scene to scene, sequence to sequence, character to character, episode to episode. Its destination is death. As Saul (Bob Odenkirk) himself puts it in this episode’s cold open, “Quite a ride, huh?”

I reviewed episode five of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. This is the best show on television at the moment.

“He wanted me to talk. I talked.” God, did he ever.

Titled “Talk” after this characteristically terse bit of dialogue from Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the fourth episode of Better Call Saul‘s fourth season continues the show’s ongoing study of how vivid a picture it can paint of the moral collapse of its characters in as few brushstrokes as possible. Mike, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), and even Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) spend the episode essentially taking turns sliding a few more rungs down the ladder toward their respective eventual fates. For Jimmy and Mike, this means a life of crime that will end in disaster when they’re drawn into the orbit of one Walter White a few years later. For Nacho and Kim… well, we don’t know what happens to them, not yet. But this installment makes the case that they’re just as broken down as their Breaking Bad co-star counterparts, and seemingly just as unlikely to be able to put the pieces back together.

I reviewed this week’s doom-laden episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

If experiencing anxiety-induced nausea while watching is the mark of a great television drama, then Better Call Saul is an all-timer. Bearing the bittersweet title “Something Beautiful,” this week’s episode feels like writer Gordon Smith and director Daniel Sackheim issued themselves a challenge before filming: Just how many different ways can we drop our viewers’ hearts into the pits of their stomachs? I, for one, am having a hard time recovering long enough to write about it. So, y’know, great job!

I reviewed this week’s alternately scary, surprising, and sad episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

Kim Wexler’s turn in the spotlight, meanwhile, sees actor Rhea Seehorn turn in her best work on the series to date. At the start of her sequence of scenes in the episode, she quietly watches Jimmy’s manic new morning routine, and the question of whether the man she loves is trying to put on a brave face or has genuinely been broken by his brother’s death plays out silently behind her eyes.

Next, she travels to the offices of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, the firm to which she, Jimmy, and Chuck alike once belonged. She’s there on Jimmy’s behalf, to sign off on the final details of Chuck’s estate, for which his old partner Howard (Patrick Fabian) is the executor. After she exchanges awkward but sincere pleasantries with Chuck’s ex-wife Rebecca (Ann Cusack), you can see her slowly build up and then release the energy to have a full-fledged freakout on Howard for his behavior.

It’s not just Howard’s participation in laying out the terms of Chuck’s will — which as far as Jimmy’s concerned amount to a kiss-off payout of five thousand dollars, a chance to claim any objects of sentimental value from the wreckage of his burned-out house, a seat on the board for a scholarship fund she accurately asserts Chuck would never have been caught dead awarding to his baby brother himself, and a posthumous letter for Jimmy’s eyes only — that bothers her. It’s his post-funeral visit to their home, when he laid out his theory that Chuck committed suicide. “I thought I owed it to Jimmy to tell him,” Howard says in his own defense… but as Kim points out, he didn’t extend this same dubious courtesy to Rebecca.

Tears in her eyes, voice breaking, and covered in visible bruises from her car accident that make her look as beat up physically as she is emotionally, Kim bellows that Howard told Jimmy that his brother deliberately burned himself to death “to make yourself feel better, to unload your guilt.” “Kim, I don’t think that’s fair,” Howard says, taken aback. “Fair?” she all but screams in response, before laying out all the extremely unfair pain that both the terms of the will and Howard’s (in her eyes) self-centered handling of Chuck’s death would put Jimmy through.

“What can I do to make it better?” Howard asks, all but begging to be told what to do, as Fabian gets teary and shaky-voiced himself, his sincerity obvious. “Nothing,” Kim spits. “There is nothingyou can do. Just stay away.” She leaves him standing alone in the office, looking for all the world like a man who’s just been given six months to live by an oncologist. Which, perhaps, isn’t that far from the mark. The deadly battle between Jimmy and Chuck is slowly killing them all.

But the most moving moment from Kim and Seehorn alike comes at the end of the day, when Jimmy returns from his farcical job hunt, bearing takeout and churning out smiley platitudes about getting solid leads and even rejecting an offer that “wasn’t a perfect fit.” As they sit down on the couch to eat and watch an old movie, she shoots him a look that is pure love, pure pity, pure desire to see a person she cares about come through his current ordeal intact. When she moves in suddenly to kiss him and have sex, it feels like the only way she can express how much she wants him to feel better. Words simply aren’t up to the task. It’s one of the realest moments of acting I’ve seen on television all year.

I reviewed this week’s excellent Better Call Saul for TV Guide. The show is digging deep into its core cast right now, and TVG is letting me go long on it, bless them.

Cinnamon rolls, stacked one spiraling wad of dough on top of another, shot in black and white like something out of modern-art museum’s permanent collection. An overhead shot of an ailing man getting wheeled through a mall on a gurney, dissolving into bright white as they pass through the doors to the outside world. The uncomfortable tedium of lying in a hospital bed as unfamiliar people poke and prod your body in an unpleasantly intimate way. The feeling that you’re just one fake ID or bogus social security number or nosy cab driver away from finally taking the fall you’ve deserved to take for years. Then a transition into the present day that begins with burning cinders, floating across the screen like snowflakes from hell.

Right from the jump, Better Call Saul‘s fourth season demonstrates why this ain’t your average crime show or anti-hero prestige drama — not even the highly acclaimed one to which it serves as a prequel. Yes, it tells the origin story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) — aka Saul Goodman, the lowlife lawyer doomed to play a pivotal role in the rise and fall of Breaking Bad’s leading monster, Walter White. And yes, it pivots off many of the artful cinematic techniques that elevated Bad to greatness: nearly abstract closeups, wild shifts in angles and colors and techniques, an unrivaled use of montage and music, to name a few.

But there’s one big difference. We know where Saul is headed: to a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska, via complicity in dozens of murders orchestrated by his client, the dreaded Heisenberg, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The brilliance of episodes like the Season 4 premiere “Smoke,” written by series co-creator Peter Gould, is how much time BCS is willing to take to get us there.

Very excited to be making my TV Guide debut with my review of the season premiere of Better Call Saul. I’ll be writing about it there all season long!