All hell breaks loose in season six of Better Call Saul

Better Call Saul is one of those shows that reminds you that you are observing an art form. Season six is as good as television gets.

Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul. Picture: Ursula Coyote/AMC.

There will be those, I’m sure, for whom the whole world of Jimmy McGill is filed in a similar place to where I myself shamefully file works of George Eliot, or the Marvel cinematic universe, or the music of BTS, or perhaps the Quran. As in, I know there must be good stuff in there because so many people surely can’t be wrong, but honestly, when to find the time?

That would be a shame, because they’ve spent a long time missing out. It is now 14 full years since that teacher first thought of cooking meth in Breaking Bad. This means that if you want fully to appreciate the final series of its prequel, Better Call Saul, which began this week, then you have – wait for it – 62 episodes of the first thing to watch, followed by one feature film, followed by 50 of the spin-off, which means if you are reading this in the paper on a Saturday morning then you really ought to have started in the middle of the night the previous Monday, and not yet slept. Which is quite an ask. Particularly if, like a few people I know, you did actually start Breaking Bad back in 2008 or so before drifting off after all that horrible stuff about dissolving the dead drug dealer in the bath.

What’s more, even if, like me, you did watch all of that, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll remember it, not least because two whole years of pandemic have passed since the end of season five.

Before this new series began, I diligently watched the 15-minute recap by the makers, and even after that I’d still slightly lost track of who it was that was shooting at Jimmy in the New Mexico desert when he went to get the $6m for Lalo’s bail at the end of the last one, or indeed why, and had to look it up on Google. And now, having remembered, I realise it doesn’t matter at all.

There is only really one plot that matters in Better Call Saul and that is the metamorphosis, or perhaps descent, or perhaps even ascent, of the once-modest, well-meaning, aspirational lawyer McGill (Bob Odenkirk) into the loud-suited, amoral borderline crook of a strip-mall, drug-lord, petty-criminal attorney that is Saul Goodman, whom we got to know when Walter broke bad all those years ago. Fifty episodes ago, I would simply not have believed that this could be a story that would take so long to tell, taking us all the way to a sixth series with our hero still largely acting as one.

A great joy of BCS, though, has always been its meandering, which is quite different from the laser-like, almost theatrical focus of BB, to the extent that it sometimes seems to be looking askance at its raison d’être.

Jimmy has always seen the lure of sharp practice.

Quite apart from Jimmy becoming Saul, we have also seen Mike (Jonathan Banks) becoming Mike and Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) becoming Gus. We had the fabulous tangent of Jimmy’s bigger, better lawyer brother Chuck (Michael McKean) and his obsessive compulsive disorder, and the sharp-suited smug legal villain Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian).

Best of all, we’ve had Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) as Jimmy’s girlfriend, then wife, in a note-perfect relationship that manages constantly to be brimming with hope despite being infused from the very start with a dread born from the certain knowledge that it can’t possibly be destined to survive. She, like Jimmy, has always seen the lure of sharp practice. Indeed, along with his heart – which is a masterstroke because in 2008 we never expected Saul Goodman to have heart – it is precisely what draws her to him. Whatever self-hatred he is due to end up with, we have always known that it must stem from whatever it is that is about to happen to her.

What, though, will it be? Death? Jail? Villainy? Does she simply leave him, or him her? How can it be that we have come so far and we still don’t have a clue?

This is a show, in other words, that has always fought hard not to get to the point. A bit like this review, you might think, so I’d probably better. Series six has Jimmy safely back from the desert with a bullet hole only in his coffee mug. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) has just survived a hit in Mexico, where Nacho (Michael Mando) is on the run, having betrayed him. This is the drug-cartel narrative that underpins this whole world stepping into gear, yet, back in Albuquerque, the everyday story of Jimmy and Kim still manages to be mainly about other things, in this case a prankish plan to discredit the rival lawyer Hamlin. Clearly these two stories are destined to intersect again, but, as ever, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, the writers, are in no huge hurry to let us see how.

Jonathan Banks and Bob Odenkirk in a scene.

The vital fact about Better Call Saul is that it is simply as good as telly gets, and in almost every direction at once. Breaking Bad was special, yes, but it was sparse and cartoonish compared with this. Without wanting to sound grandiose, it is one of those shows that reminds you that you are observing not just entertainment, but an art form, as distinct and intricate as literature. Hence, I suppose, my being able to prattle on about it for hundreds of words without scratching the surface. The scale, the richness, the way that you could imagine literally any character in this show – genuinely, literally any one – spawning a wonderful six-series spin-off of their own. And that without talking about the camera work, the angles, the scuttling insects, the desert sun.

Nor have I even mentioned the opening scene, of a lavish, glitzy multi-millionaire home – clearly Saul’s, after some future success as yet undreamt of – being taken apart by forensic removal men. When? Why? How can we possibly be only a few episodes from finding out, particularly when things move at such a deliciously glacial pace? How I have missed this. And soon I shall miss it more.

Better Call Saul is streaming on Stan.