Posted on 02/22/2020 10:39:56 AM PST by silent_jonny
WARNING!
The two-night fifth season premiere of Better Call Saul begins Sunday night @ 10pm Eastern, immediately following the mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead on AMC.
The premiere continues Monday night at it's regular time, 9pm Eastern.
Church!
Question: We know that this season Jimmy will officially be taking the name of Saul Goodman and using it for his practice. Would you say he’s finally in his own skin?Peter Gould: I don’t know that Jimmy sees it that way to start with. I think he’s taking this name for very functional, professional reasons because he already has this clientele that knows him as Saul Goodman and so why not translate those folks into legal clients. Tell me if you agree, Vince, but I don’t think all the things that come along with being Saul Goodman are all that clear to him and they’re certainly not clear to Kim, but, having said that, he’s certainly enjoying himself a hell of a lot.
Vince Gilligan: It seems to me it’s for very specific business reasons that he takes this name, but then it’s perhaps going to take on a life of its own in this season and perhaps more so after this season. You could maybe make the argument that once he’s truly Saul, the Saul we know from Breaking Bad, the show is over, even though [the writers] would figure out a way to make it fascinating no matter what.
PG: It’s one thing to put on Superman’s cape. It’s another thing to be able to fly.
Question: Will this feel like more than just a name change for those in his life?PG: I think so. I think especially for Kim. I don’t know if she could put it into words, but I think she definitely senses it’s more than just branding. And it’s a peculiar thing — there’s that old saying, be careful what you pretend to be because you become it. Maybe that’s one of the things that’s going on in the back of her mind.
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Question: Kim is clearly shaken when she learns the truth about Jimmy’s “performance.” What is going through her head when she sees Jimmy flip the switch like that? What impact do you think this moment has on the pair moving forward?
Tom Schnauz: It’s a stunned reaction. You think you see something and it’s not what you believed at all. She’s numb and processing right now.
She loves Jimmy and she says to him, before the hearing, “I’m with you.” So, what does that mean? Does that mean he turns into Saul Goodman and she’s still with him? Or she promised herself to Jimmy McGill? It’s a very sharp turn. ... He’s tapped into something. He’s saying, about the judge, “that asshole actually had tears coming out of his eyes.” Well, so did Kim.Peter Gould: She’s had the rug pulled out from under her. What she’s going to take from that is still a question at the end of the season.
It's (not) all good, man.
Peter Gould:Are they going to stay together? It’s funny because, when I watch the show, in some ways I’m rooting for them to stay together and in a lot of ways I’m rooting for Kim to get the hell outta there. I’m a little torn because the two of them, they are so much fun together. But not all fun is good for you.Vince Gilligan: I can’t help but wonder how far this relationship of theirs could stretch before it does break.
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Another man in transition is Howard, who seems to have a new outlook and will reach out to Jimmy this season in some capacity. “He had really been broken and rebuilt himself,” hints Fabian, “so we’re going to see Howard using his newfound sense of oneness with the universe and see how long that facade can last in this world.” Offering up another hint that could tilt his story in intriguing directions, Fabian quips: “Kim Wexler just may get what she deserves from Howard this season.”
... Things come apart at the seams in season 5,” ... “It is challenging because we all know where it’s going — and yet we don’t know where it’s going. And so consequently, every script felt fraught with, ‘Is this the beginning of something that I don’t necessarily want to see going on?’ And that all drives back to the idea of Jimmy really being Saul, because Saul behaves in a completely different way. It’s an amoral universe that he lives in and we’ve created a nice little house where things may be kind of okay when they’re not. We left season 5 on a real high note work-wise. We all were thrilled with what we got, but it was trying and brutal in a lot of ways.”
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Question: Last we saw Mike he was struggling with having had to put down Werner. Will he be able to start fresh, or is he forever changed?Peter Gould: I don’t think Mike’s ever going to get over killing Werner. Mike has killed before. There’s always been a justification. Mike killed because of passion. He killed to avenge his son.
Vince Gilligan: He probably killed in war.
PG: I’m sure he must have, as excellent a sniper as he is. But that’s different. This is killing someone who he likes. Werner was not an innocent. Werner knew exactly what he was doing. He was, as sometimes the characters put it, in the game. But, in another way, Werner is a true innocent. Werner is not a man of violence. He’s an open-hearted, decent guy, and, I think the way Mike sees it, it’s because of his own mistakes [that] he’s in a position where he does pull the trigger, and I don’t know that he’s ever going to get over that exactly. This is another weight that Mike is going to carry and I think the question is how far down is that going to take him?
VG: I just thought of this just now — Werner Ziegler is to Mike Ehrmantraut as Gale Boetticher is to Jesse Pinkman. I hadn’t really thought of that before, but maybe — and none of us had any of this stuff in mind when we were making Breaking Bad — but it’s so funny how this show now colors my perception of Breaking Bad. In other words, in this instance, maybe Mike, when he’s silently glowering at Walt and Jesse after Gale Boetticher has been shot, then he sees how broken up about it Jesse Pinkman is down in the superlab, maybe he’s thinking back — I mean, he wasn’t at the time, but maybe now he is — he’s thinking back to Werner Ziegler on some level. Who knows? I mean, it’s fascinating how this universe is sort of an organic thing. It keeps sprouting roots and growing in interesting directions.
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Giancarlo Esposito: We start season five with [Gus] being a bit apologetic for things that have happened, and that's a Gus we haven't seen before. We move through to see him challenged by certain obstacles that come up from dealing with the Salamanca family that he hasn't really had to deal with in the same way he did in Breaking Bad by flexing his muscle. We start to see how he puts the pieces together to deal with Nacho Varga, who could actually be a great asset to him. There's some different aspects of Gus in season five that we haven't been privy to before.Now I've started to strip away layers to go backward and play a Gus who can grow to be that person that we eventually see (in Breaking Bad).
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Vince Gilligan: I love the fact that one of the most fascinating, colorful and, dare I say, charming characters in this world of Better Call Saul is a guy who exists because of a throwaway line in the first episode that Saul Goodman ever appeared in Breaking Bad, which was Episode 208 entitled “Better Call Saul,” which Peter wrote. Saul Goodman’s out kneeling in the desert, with these two masked men standing over him with guns and he says, “Oh my God, did Lalo send you?” and he starts speaking in broken Spanish.
It was such a throwaway line Peter put in there. And all it meant at the time was this guy’s got a lot of balls in the air and he’s got a lot of people out to get him. When he finds out it’s not Lalo, even though these guys have got guns to his head, he’s like, “Whew, that was close.” He’s so relieved it’s not Lalo. But it was such a throwaway and I never, in my wildest dreams, thought we’d ever even meet Lalo. I mean, we never really thought about it after that, did we, in Breaking Bad?Peter Gould: I don’t think we really did. Well, we had our hands full with Walter White and Gus Fring. I don’t think Saul Goodman’s problems amounted to a hill of beans at that point. Tony Dalton is so much fun and so brilliant in the way he plays [Lalo]. This guy, in some ways he’s the cartel’s Errol Flynn. He’s elegant. He’s graceful. He’s charming. Unfortunately, he’s also a Salamanca.
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Question: Will Nacho get any relief living his double life?Peter Gould: Just when things look like they can’t get any worse for Nacho, they always seem to get worse. Nacho, I wouldn’t call him a victim exactly, but he is a guy who made a choice a long time ago to get involved with meth and with the Salamancas and, man, he is just not able to pull himself out of what seems to be a death spiral. But, on the other hand, he is a bright guy. The way Michael Mando plays him, he is a very intelligent, responsive person. He’s not just going to take the situation lying down. This is a guy who’s always going to be looking for a new angle. But, having said that, the ground beneath his feet keeps shifting. We’ll see how he’s going to cope with all that.
And of course the real reason that he’s trapped is his father. His father who is such an inherently decent man who, in a lot of ways, doesn’t understand his son. That is Nacho’s greatest vulnerability. And as soon as you have someone in your life who you love, whether it’s a parent, child or anyone else, you are a hostage to fortune. And Nacho is a hostage to fortune because he cares so deeply about his father and his father is unbendingly ethical, which, who knows, might be his downfall.
Raise a Schraderbräu — Hank is back![The] fifth season will welcome back Breaking Bad alum Dean Norris as a special guest star, reprising his role as Hank Schrader in a two-episode appearance. ... Norris’s fan-favorite character will return alongside his partner in crime-stopping Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada) as the world of Better Call Saul inches ever closer to that of its predecessor Breaking Bad.
“To be called by the genius Vince Gilligan to play a character that changed my life, and to get to work with the great Bob Odenkirk on a show I adore, what more could I ask? I was absolutely thrilled to revisit my old friend Hank Schrader. It was particularly fun to play the early Hank with swagger. Getting time on set again with my Breaking Bad family was a cherry on top. I hope the fans enjoy it as much as I did.”
Breaking Bad fans will recall that Hank was a DEA agent who spent most of the series chasing the elusive new meth manufacturer known as “Heisenberg,” only to eventually learn that the drug kingpin he’d been chasing was his very own brother-in-law, Walter White. While Hank might have been in the dark about Walt’s extra-curricular activities, he was all too familiar with Saul Goodman, who often found his way into Hank’s interrogation room while defending Jesse Pinkman and others who’d crossed paths with the DEA.And even though it’s been several years since he played Hank, Norris says it’s like he never left. “It’s like riding a bike,” he says. I didn’t have to do anything special to get back into this character. It was just putting the orange shirt on, and I’m there.”
Question: What are you most excited for fans to see this season?Vince Gilligan: There’s not a bad moment in these whole 10 episodes. People are just going to lose their minds when they see this season. And it just builds and builds and builds, and the tension grows and grows and becomes kind of unbearable by the end of it, in the best possible, most dramatic way. If I start mentioning individual scenes I can’t wait for people to see, we’d be here all day. There’s a lot of them this year.
Peter Gould: It’s interesting because the fact that we know that the show doesn’t go on forever gives us the ability to make some very big moves this season, to pull out all the stops. I think people are going to be very surprised by what happens this season, at least I hope they will. But more than that, for me it feels right, it feels organic, it feels real. But I have to say none of that makes me less worried for the characters. It’s kind of hard to talk about what we’re most excited for people to see because it’s kind of an Ali Baba’s cave full of wonders here, from my point of view.
I just have to say I’m eager to share it with people and I hope they love it as much as we do because we are the first audience for this show and I can just say I’ve really enjoyed working on this season. The work that everyone has done, from the cast and the writers through the directors, through the art department, through everybody in Albuquerque, through our post-production team — I think everyone has outdone themselves this season. Of course it’s all built on the work we did previous seasons and of course built on the work that Vince led on the first couple seasons and on Breaking Bad. But I feel like we’ve really reached an apex here. Right now what I’m worried about is how we’re going to continue for Season 6. How we’re going to wrap it up is the big question on my mind right now.
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This is probably the 1st thread I’ve ever seen where the first 12 posts are both to and from the original poster.
Well technically it’s only 11. Post #2 went to the ping lists.
Last season's opening was particularly stunning, like a brilliant little short film. While "Gene" was lying there after a heart attack, the song playing is The Ink Spots "We Three", which perfectly mirrors Jimmy/Saul/Gene's sad existence.
"We three, we're all alone
Living in a mem-o-ry
My echo, my shadow, and me
We three, we're not a crowd
We're not even company
My echo, my shadow, and me"
I find it somewhat disconcerting that the actors are significantly older than when they first appeared in Breaking Bad, even though this is supposed to take place chronologically before Breaking Bad.
Breaking Bad debuted in January, 2008. That would make the actors 12 years older, despite the fact that this takes place before Breaking Bad.
Yeah but at least it’s a good show with some great actors.
(I’m not going to reference the stupidity of people talking themselves on a completely worthless thread. See my tagline for the hint.)
At last the long drought is over and BCS is back. If Breaking Bad is the best series ever BCS is the best prequel ever.
Now only a few weeks before March 15th when Westworld returns. Can TV get any better?
The last one was almost an episode by itself. I think it ended with a cliffhanger, where the cab driver (who seemed to have a connection to Albuquerque) was staring daggers at Gene in the rear-view mirror.
Gene got out of the cab and walked away, but the cab didn't move.
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