Welcome back to our weekly breakdown of the minutia of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul. While Brian Grubb provides his always excellent coverage of the series (here are his write-ups of the season’s first two episodes), here we will look at some of the details viewers may have missed, callbacks to Breaking Bad, references to other shows or movies, and theories on the direction the series is heading. We scour Reddit threads, Twitter, listen each week to the phenomenal Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, and attempt to curate the best intel about each episode.
In the fifth season’s first two episodes, Jimmy officially becomes Saul Goodman.
1. “Magic Man,” the first episode of the fifth season, kicks off with another Gene Takovic cold open, and at 13 minutes long, it’s the most time we’ve ever spent with Gene — who briefly travels across the border to Kansas to shake any cops who might be following him — and it’s the most he’s ever spoken. A few of those words are exchanged with “Jeff,” a cab driver who recognizes him and approaches him in the mall. As it turns out, Jeff has been following him for quite some time. He drove the cab that picked Gene up from the hospital in season 4, although we only saw his eyes at the time.
It remains to be seen whether Jeff is a random cab driver/fan who just happened to move from Albuquerque to Omaha around the same time that Gene did, or if Jeff has ulterior motives. As the flash-forwards are infrequent, it may be another year before we find out.
2. After being made by Jeff, Gene briefly considers skipping town. He contacts Ed The Disappearer to be relocated again, but ultimately decides against it. The late Robert Forster made one last appearance in the Breaking Bad universe in this episode, but only through a stroke of good luck and some forethought. Normally, producers would not have spent the money to recreate the Ed’s vacuum cleaner store again for one scene — we’d have just heard Forster’s voice on the telephone. However, that scene had already been written when Vince Gilligan shot El Camino, so while they had Forster there, they quickly shot this scene for the fifth season premiere.
3. We saw that band-aid box in the opening minutes very first episode of Better Call Saul. Here, we finally find out what’s inside the band-aid box: A bunch of diamonds. That is a nod to the movie, Marathon Man.
4. Up until now, the character we know best as Krazy 8 on Breaking Bad has always been referred to as Domingo. It’s the season’s second episode, “50% Off,” where we finally discover the origin of Krazy 8, when Domingo folds a hand with trip 8s because he’s scared of beating Lalo. “Off you go, ocho loco.”
5. I’d actually forgotten about Saul’s signature bluetooth earpiece from Breaking Bad, but it makes its first appearance here in “50 Percent Off.” There’s not much of a mystery to it. Having worked in a phone store for a year, Saul is familiar with the technology, and as a multitasker, it comes in very handy. It fits his personality, but it’s also utilitarian.
6. At the end of “50 Percent Off,” Nacho and Jimmy share a scene for the first time since season 1. The ice-cream is likely not a great omen. I really wanted to know if it was the same brand of ice cream that Todd gave Jessie in Breaking Bad while he was torturing him, but it appears from the looks of it that it is not.
The ice cream on the road, however, does mirror that gnome on the road that ends the cold open. The coloring is similar, too. The gnome, I suspect, is a foreshadowing nod to Gus Fring’s demise!
7. This one is a stretch and may just be a coincidence, but if it’s intentional, props to Redditor Shady_Jake for picking up on it: The time in the Kansas dinner Gene is visiting is 12:16, a number that may be familiar to viewers. “I knew it was 12:16! One after the Magna Carta.” Chuck, Season 3, Episode 5.
8. Interesting about Saul running into Howard in the courthouse and Howard asking Jimmy if he wanted to go to lunch. I wonder if that is about the Sandpiper money that Howard’s firm owes Jimmy, and I wonder if that Sandpiper money is what Jimmy will try and use to buy that house that he looked at with Kim?
9. I don’t know what the significance of this might be — if any — but Kim bought Saul a new bag monogrammed JMM for Jimmy Mcgill. “JMM” is also the title of the 7th episode of the season.
10. Finally, it’s a small thing, but on the Insider podcast, they mentioned that there’s a blink-and-miss it shot of a broken elevator that sets up Saul’s run-in with a prosecutor in the stranded elevator. It is blink-and-you’ll-miss, and It took me a few times through until I finally caught it. This, however, once again illustrates the level of detail. There’s a half-a-second shot of a broken elevator in the background of a scene that most people won’t even see, all designed to set up a bigger scene.
AMC’s ‘Better Call Saul’ has returned to Monday nights at 9:00pm.
