Better Call Saul Season 4 Final Review

Spoilers below for You better call Saul season four.

"All right, man."

This is the starting shot of You better call SaulThe fourth season, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is taken away from his partner Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) to sign papers that will send him back to the field. "Good" is a concept that Jimmy has moved away from during the series, and the way he wins his victory has no merit. Kim's reaction to his insincerity revelation – the same quality that pushed a different court to reject him the week before – is heartbreaking in part because it appeals to viewers who love Jimmy and want to continue to see redeemable qualities. at the same time as his incredible film. installation for con games and improvised bullshit. It's hard to see Jimmy go the other way before the end of the show, no matter when. Kim's face at the end is heartbreaking: deep disappointment, sinking into the nausea of ​​what Jimmy has become an empty-minded manipulator.

The other characters end the season in morally precarious places – Mike (Jonathan Banks) more than anyone else, after running the German engineer on the run Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock). This is the first time we've seen Mike commit cold-blooded murder: a household with a gun instead of a mop. He was already on the gray scale when we met him, but the situation seems much darker now. Meanwhile, Mike's boss, the wise individualist Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), is about to be completely absorbed by the Salamanca empire. I prefer not to say how this story will be solved. breaking Bad, as more and more people tell me they are watching BCS Although he has never seen the frame of the other series – and the captain of Salamanca, Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), faces what appears to be a purgatory phrase, reflecting Jimmy's season a bit of pass of permit. He is forced to face a new Salamanca, Eduardo and Lalo (Tony Dalton), shortly after trying and failed to kill another one (Don Hector of Mark Margolis, to whom Lalo presents the office bell that will become his auditory signature).

Only Kim seems to have incorporated the outlaw tendencies into an otherwise ethical framework, so as to give him a head start over his opponents without causing irreparable damage to his decency soul. The audacious "Miracle on 34th Street" strategy she designed to rescue Jimmy's right-hand man, Huell Babineaux (Lavell Crawford), of the prison, as brilliant as a tactical maneuver, is fraught with fraud. All these fictitious letters of support that Jimmy hired foreigners to write on a bus crossing the country, then posted from the post office in Huell's hometown of Louisiana, could come back to haunt Kim in a coming season; this series, as breaking Bad, record the rope as diligently as a bird building a nest.

But for the moment, Kim is still the closest thing You better call Saul has a voice of conscience, his attraction to Jimmy an Achilles heel inseparable from his attraction to danger as well as his sentimental attachment to victory in seemingly impossible business. The switcheroo she made with the architectural plans of the Mesa Verde branch in El Paso could also put her in trouble, delighted to team with Jimmy again in a scene that could have been deleted. The bite. Her hands are dirty, that's for sure, but she has not smeared herself from head to toe in the mud like Jimmy, nor has she knowingly plunged deeper into the swamp like Mike. But, in one respect, Kim's position may be the saddest of all, because she must be able to look at a person who is interested in her and who in turn believes that she is colder and more manipulative over time, with no reasonable hope of bring it back in the opposite direction.

It's a hard blow, even if you knew that Jimmy McGill was to become Saul, that his corruption would be a subtle process and that, as on breaking Bad, the series that created Jimmy / Saul, as well as Mike, Gus and others BCS regulars – this would not be the kind of analysis that you could analyze, then display with each layer named and labeled. Saul was still present in Jimmy, just as Heisenberg was still present in Walter White. On the merits of both series, the writing, staging and staging have given you a lot of information to deal with, but tend not to tell you exactly how you are supposed to read it.

None of this dulls the deadly sadness of You better call Saul & # 39;s fourth season finale, capping at the best and darkest season of this excellent drama comedy. This series of episodes has married the bifurcated nature of the series, which has always spent about half of its time in the expensive world of white-collar crime and the other half among drug traffickers and the physically abused street criminals – so well embraced it, in fact, we often had the impression that we were watching two broadcasts in one, with three central protagonists (Jimmy, Mike and Kim) and many Major support players, all slipping on the moral spectrum between pure and corrupt, each approaching end.

The creators of the Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan series and their unrivaled writing crew (composed of among others Gennifer Hutchison, Alison Tatlock, Ann Cherkis, Thomas Schnauz, Heather Marion and Gordon Smith) have created an almost immaculate series in its construction. the form of a montage, a sequence or a clearly arranged theater-style scene – a scene that usually takes place at a much slower pace than that of television, thus leaving room at breaks, pregnant inputs and outputs and at times when we can only stare at the face of a character who is considering what he is about to do, what he just done or what will happen to him. (Werner's way of letting his friend Mike pull it alone is devastating: she announces how much he loved the great night skies of New Mexico, then went to the desert for another look at the stars .)

But at the same time, the show is unlimited in its possible meanings. Viewers with different philosophies about what constitutes good and bad, and how far a person can go into darkness without becoming irremediably bad, can look at the same dilemmas (like Mike's distress over Werner's anxiety, Jimmy's relentless pressure to recover his license, and Kim's timely balance between the bank's thirst for expansion and his second career as a defense lawyer) and culminate to different conclusions. BCS is also appealing by the way it encompasses the quality of the world it has created, smaller and slower, in stark contrast to breaking BadThe quivering weekly frenzy of plots and counter-plots, shootings and corpses. The moment of the final where Mike, trying to shake the pursuer Lalo, arrives in his glove box and grabs a pack of chewing gum instead of a pistol is a gag of sight from Steven Spielberg worthy of what we expect – as the moment The adventurers of the lost arch where Toht removes what we assume to be a nunchaku-like torture instrument, then folds it into a hanger for his trench coat – but it's also a summary of the working methods of this prequel. BCS tends to go small instead of big, then pay the small choice so as to compensate ingeniously all he has lost in noise and scale, as when Mike introduces a sheet of chewed gum wrapped in aluminum foil in the ticket office, trapping his pursuer.

The visuals are as eloquent as the dialogues and often more discouraged in their desire to judge the characters. My favorite is the split-screen editing that opens "Something Stupid", a montage in the spirit of the dissolution of the second marriage of the hero Citizen Kane, where Kane and his wife are shown further away from each other, their emotional distance reflected by the fact that they sit further away from each other at the dining table. Without an audible word between Kim and Jimmy, we see the difference in their daily lives – his Mesa Verde desk plate, juxtaposed to his name on a pee test – and we know that this relationship can not really hold up. The repeated shots of the two in bed, which often happen at different times without recognizing themselves, are rewarded by a decisive shot of Jimmy in bed without Kim, his half of the frame erasing in the dark as if a piece of Jimmy broken and fallen. The shared screen also evokes the idea of ​​dissociated lives on parallel roads, connected in theory but not necessarily in reality; or, more precisely, connected to the extent that the characters desire or are capable of connection.

By the time we get to what looks like their separation conversation in the ninth episode, the appropriate title "Wiedersehen", the show recalls this superb montage by dividing the screen into two halves resembling a mirror, using a composition to put an implicit line along the bottom. middle of the frame. Then it puts Jimmy on one side and Kim on the other, especially in a shot that recalls the split screens of Jimmy and Kim in the bathroom together in "Somthing Stupid". But here they are physically together and emotionally separated. And their reflection in the mirror is slightly mocking, like a painting of a couple who is no longer a couple.

What a sad and beautiful sight You better call Saul East. It is a lament for the wasted human potential that is too cool to use a word like "lament" and a portrait of actions and consequences that go far beyond simply reshaping the fingers, thus letting us guess why people do things, like Mike's reaction is that Werner talks about his life, or all the scenes where Jimmy denies his role in the death spiral of his brother Chuck, refusing to talk about him willingly and acting as his own. he did not want to say anything, even if he wanted to say everything. "Did you see that sucker?" Asks Jimmy to Kim right after the call, torpedoing his naive hope that his statement about his brother comes from the heart and not from the lizard's brain. "That bastard was crying. He had real tears! This series is obsessed with games of chance and magic tricks, but its greatest sleight of hand is dramatic: it allows us to laugh at its characters, then make us cry for them too.