Season two of Better Call Saul wrapped with the finale, “Klick,” and the hardest part about predicting what will happen in season three is that it hasn’t been written yet. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould treat each season as a separate entity, and even they will admit — and have — that they’re as excited about the next season as anyone because they don’t know what’s going to happen until they figure it out themselves. No show, however, writes themselves out of a corner better than Saul, and that has a lot to do with the fact that they spend six months in the writer’s room to write 10 episodes.
At the end of season three, they have both written themselves into a corner and opened up a number of possibilities. With Mike in particular, the possibilities are endless with Tio and the arrival of Gus Fring. The only problem is, they can’t kill off Tio, although they can somehow induce a stroke. With Jimmy, they haven’t left a lot of wiggle room. Chuck has him dead to rights with the tape-recorded confession, but we also know that Chuck probably doesn’t turn him in because Jimmy did not get disbarred. The biggest fear I have is that Chuck somehow uses it to take down Kim, and the saddest thing that could happen to Better Call Saul would be the loss of season two breakout star, Rhea Seehorn.
What we can almost be certain of, however, is that Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould will crack some great storylines and that season three will be every bit as good as this season, because Gould and Gilligan don’t fail. They don’t allow it.
Here, however, are a few things from the finale you may have missed, and a couple of hints at what we will see in season three.
Fring’s Back
Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould confirmed to Vanity Fair that the “Fring’s Back” anagram that we wrote about a couple of weeks ago was accurate, though they did not expect anyone to figure it out.
In fact, Gilligan and Gould also confirmed that the note left on Mike’s car at the end of the episode was from Gus Fring; if not the man himself, then at least someone under his direction (like Victor).
Giancarlo Esposito
Not so fast. Yes, Fring is now officially a part of Better Call Saul, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Giancarlo Esposito will be in much of season three. Esposito is a busy man (he’s in a new Netflix series from Baz Luhrmann), recurs on Once Upon a Time and appears frequently in films. Plus, it wouldn’t make sense for Fring to be around, according to Gilligan:
Just because Fring’s back — technically speaking, if not literally — it doesn’t mean that folks should assume that they’ll see him at the beginning of Season 3. This is a character who is very circumspect. Very cautious. He does not reveal himself easily. He makes people work to get to him as we saw him make Walter White work very hard and jump through a great many hoops to get to face-to-face with him in Breaking Bad.
Who else is coming back?
It’s not just Fring who will return. “Any character from Breaking Bad could come back in season three,” Vince Gilligan told Deadline: “We came to realize that from the Breaking Bad universe, anyone (returning) is fair game. That’s where I have to leave it.”
However, I would not expect either Walter White or Jesse Pinkman to appear because they are not part of this storyline yet, and Gould and Gilligan have been very careful about not using Breaking Bad characters unnecessarily. For instance…
Betsy Brandt
Before the season finale, Vince Gilligan said that they had the “perfect opportunity” to bring in a Breaking Bad character in the finale, but that Gould had talked him out of it. TVLine took that to mean that Gus Fring would not be making an appearance in the finale. I guessed that he was talking about Marie, who is an X-Ray technician and could show up to give Chuck a CAT scan.
We were both right. They had envisioned plans of bringing both into the finale, and neither appeared. They ended up not using Betsy Brand because it would distract from the moment, according to Vince Gilligan in EW:
[It wasn’t because] they don’t love Betsy just as much as I do but it would have distracted the viewer in the moment. It was a big moment in which we wanted to stay squarely inside of Chuck’s head as he goes through the terror and the agony of the scan. If our attention was diverted by Betsy, it would sort of dull the moment as it were, dramatically.
That’s probably why neither Bryan Cranston nor Aaron Paul will appear next season. They wouldn’t serve the story, and cameos would only distract viewers.
Writers’ Room
Heather Marion — Gilligan’s writer’s assistant — wrote the teaser and the first two acts of this episode. It was the first episode she’d ever written. Not bad for a rookie. Turns out, Marion used to be Jeff Garlin’s personal assistant. Gilligan met her at Garlin’s podcast, and a few weeks later, Garlin called Gilligan and asked if he’d consider hiring Marion because she was looking to move up. Gilligan did it as a favor, and that favor paid off. Marion will be a member of next season’s writers’ room.
Klick
The title of the episode, in addition to giving them the K they needed for “Fring’s back,” is also military slang for kilometer, which was about how long the Mike’s sniper shot was, or at least how long it felt. Also, “klick” could also be the sound of Chuck’s tape recorder when he turned it off.
The Sugar Shack
The original plan was to have the shack that Tio and Nacho took the ice-cream truck out to be the same house where we met Tio for the first time in Breaking Bad, “Grilled.” Unfortunately, that house had been abandoned, the roof had collapsed and it’d been vandalized. It would’ve taken too much money and time to fix it, and it wasn’t a very cinematic area, anyway. So, they built their own shack for the scene.
Sniper Scope
Every single shot from the sniper was actually shot through the sniper scope.
Ad Lib
For the intense ER sequence, Gilligan wanted to do something he’d never seen before, which was why they shot Chuck upside down on the gurney. Much of the dialogue during the ER scene was also improvised with the assistance of one of the actresses on hand, who had training as a nurse. The choice was also made to have the medical staff act calm and collected (rather than frantic as in most television ER scenes) because it’s much more realistic.
Background: Better Call Saul Insider Podcast
