Better Call Saul - Love, Death, and Drugs In The Age Of Regret
Kim - You had them down to seven years.
Saul - Yeah I did
Kim - 86 years?
Saul - 86 years…But with good behavior, who knows?
A great series is like a great book in that I think the best writers and visionaries see the last moment in their heads before going back and telling it all from the beginning. It could be wishful thinking, and everyone’s process is different but I find it hard to imagine Vince Gilligan didn’t see this final line by Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman in lights in his head and think, well, this is really the only way it can end. It’s just too depressingly perfect.
As Saul/ Jimmy (we’ll call him Saul from here on out, it’s how he’d want it) stands with Kim in the prison interview room, a decidedly noir-themed environment down to the black and white and simple music, it’s all just too on the nose. The unspoken love between these two characters who’ve literally been to hell and back together. Their crystal clear understanding of the situation they’ve put themselves in (Kim is sentenced to her own psychological prison). The fleeting memory of what could have been. And the wishful ignorance that Saul’s 86 years could be lessened with just a little good behavior, something he’s completely incapable of. It would be funny if it weren’t so heartbreakingly tragic.
In a show highlighted by Saul’s ability to break bad at every turn, how could one believe he isn’t going to die right there in that prison? There will be no good behavior, there will be no lesson learned, he’s there among his people (they chanted his name on the bus after all), and the only real dream is the one where things could have turned out differently if it weren’t for a little good luck. Regret really has fuck all to do with it. And don’t be confused, there are few regrets here.
Distilling this series and the Breaking Bad universe down to its core isn’t easy. Vince Gilligan and company created a masterpiece of characters, story, background, chess pieces, meth labs, dealers, money, science (yeah Mr. White. Yeah Science!) and everything and everyone else that got sucked up, ground down, and spit out in the end.
But at the core of their struggle is that the struggle became innate with each person’s relative goodness (or badness). None of them got caught up in the game unwillingly. And those who ended up there have almost no ability to see where it all really went wrong. If they had, they wouldn’t have been there, to begin with. That’s the rub. Even posing the question has very little use. No one here was really learning any lesson. No one really wanted to change.
The beautiful entropy of this situation, the somewhat closed loop of Saul’s life is that the chaos was orderly and complete for a time until it all began to unravel. Except that it was all kind of always unraveling from the beginning.
No one, once they found themselves in “the game” had many illusions about the rules within this system. There was no real looking back and no lessons to learn. The energy had to come from somewhere, and it was often born out of the way they actually saw their own situation.
With regret as a theme, in the finale, each character has a chance to look back at their own situation for a chance at relative salvation. They all fuck it up.
When discussing the possibility of a time machine to change the past and “fix” the present, Mike changes his answer to when he took his first bribe as if that would have really changed his whole course (it wouldn’t have).
Walter laments his leaving Gray Matter as if that would have kept his life perfect (it wouldn’t have, more on this in a sec).
And yet Saul’s answers are somehow even worse (he would invest with Warren Buffet, he wouldn’t have pulled some meaningless con). For regret to function properly, to even have a chance at salvation, there must be a certain willingness to admit wrongness. Some are closer to others here, but none are all that close.
There’s a certain comedy to the exchange Saul and Walter have in the basement of the Vacuum repair shop when they are starting their respective journeys on the lam. Saul poses the question of time travel and what would be done differently. Walt scoffing at the idea having no scientific basis and eventually deciding that his leaving Grey Matter was the worst choice he made. And then Saul looking back to a scam he was pulling that caused him to hurt his back.
Two men, dressed in their underwear, rotting in a basement with no hot water, on the run from the cartel and the authorities, literally the worst situation they could have created for themselves; the regrets should pile up. But instead, both offered answers that had almost no bearing on their current situation. It’s a willfully ignorant moment in which each admonishes the other for choosing wrong. You should hate these dudes and it’s still impossible.
Is Saul Goodman a good person? No, but even wondering it has been the central question to the entire series really. This is the paradoxical issue with a character like Saul. He’s simultaneously the best guy most people have ever met right up until the point he is the worst and by then it’s too late. It’s a trait that’s been the same throughout his arc of the series. And it played out like clockwork. Every. Single. Time.
Every person he interacted with in this series, and presumably over the course of his fictional life, ended up way worse off than before they knew him. Most just ended up dead, and those who somehow lasted often did so begrudgingly. Does he view that as a function of his own badness? No, of course not. He’d explain each time why it wasn’t really his fault.
There isn’t moral salvation woven into the story of Saul Goodman, he’s way too far down the hole to see the light on that one. Extending his prion sentence well beyond what he’d originally bartered was a steep and pretty unnecessary penance. It was an attempt at moral absolution and a whipping that didn’t even really impress Kim in the end; brutal seeing as how she was the person he really did it for.
Like a lot of the other things he did over the course of the show to “make up” for the serial wrongness of his character, it fell mostly flat. He loved her enough to think it would maybe save him, but really it just made things worse.
And even Kim, who understood the dark regrets of her actions and sentenced herself to her own prison, an auto parts chain and mayonnaise debate-filled existence in Florida, tried to really lay it all bare. And what did it get her? Jack shit except having to live the rest of her life in a hazed stupor of despair after losing it in a heartbreaking scene on the airport bus. Even doing the “right” thing, in the end, doesn’t undo anything.
Saul Goodman should be a reprehensible character if taken just at face value. He’s mixed up with murderous drug lords. He lies and cheats at every turn. He makes other people’s lives around him much worse. Kind of everyone he knows ends up dead or ruined because of things he did. And yet, you cheer for him because I think we see ourselves in his struggle.
Are we con artists with ties to the criminal underworld? No, but we are all flawed and we all make bad choices without a full understanding of the down-chain effects that will happen later. We all tell ourselves stories, at times, that will save us from the worry that we might not have an implicitly positive impact on the world. Are we criminals, no? But none of us are perfect either.
So when it gets to the end for all of us, if we have regrets about our life or are asked to pick something we would change we’d almost all give the wrong answer. We don’t see ourselves the way the rest of the world does no matter how self-reflective we think we are.
If we have regrets, there’s some decent chance they are the wrong ones, or at best they are only tangentially related to the right ones (if there’s even such a thing). This is the true Saul Goodman experience. It’s probably a lot easier to break bad than we think.
And if it’s easy to see ourselves in Saul then it’s easier to understand those final moments. Standing with the only person who ever really understood and loved you right up until they didn’t. Looking somewhat longingly through a chainlink fence in the moments following that one last smoke after the storm. It’s in that moment you can sit and wonder what could have been or what you would have done differently because it no longer matters. It is what it is. There are no regrets. It’s all part of the game.