Where to start with Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) in Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s playful prequel to Breaking Bad? Not at the start of season five, though it does mark the point where charming huckster lawyer Jimmy McGill formally changes his name into a slogan for his services (“it’s all good, man”).
Regular viewers of Better Call Saul will know that it has been a long, painful slide, as the character has morphed from Jimmy into Saul, but the series has a tentative relationship to the present tense. Each episode begins with a flash-forward.
This one jumps beyond Saul to a future in which the character is sheltering under a further new identity in Omaha. His name, now, is Gene Takovic, and he is in the process of being outed by Jeff (Don Harvey), a cab driver who remembers him from the past.
This is not an innocent moment. The cabbie is menacingly insistent, prompting Gene/Saul/Jimmy to make an emergency call to a man called The Disappearer (the late Robert Forster). He demands a new identity, utilising a code in which he talks only of spare parts for vacuum cleaners. And then he changes his mind. He’ll sort this out himself.
Shall we call this bad man Saul, just for simplicity’s sake? Saul is, by profession, a poster boy for getting away with things, and the beauty of the character is the way he is defined by his haplessness. There are a number of very bad people in the show, killers and drug dealers, but Saul inhabits a kind of dramatic purgatory where he shows signs of remembering what the right thing is, even if he doesn’t always do it.
Flashing back from the flash-forward, we are where we were. Saul has moved on from selling burner phones to openly touting for the legal business of freaks. He simultaneously disappoints and charms his legal pulp moll, Kim (the great Rhea Seehorn), who is involved with him despite her better judgment. And in the world of organised drug psychopaths, there is friction about some diluted methamphetamine, and that plan to build a giant underground drug lab.
As ever, there are two shows at play. Saul inhabits a light-hearted surface reality, where his chaotic misdeeds are measured against the more pensionable life he could have if he would only stop lying and settle down with Kim. Beneath this, there’s a gangster western in which the menacingly calm car-park attendant, Mike (Jonathan Banks) traverses the nursery slopes of hell.
Better Call Saul is streaming on Netflix now.
