Better Call Saul Season 6 is a Train Wreck
The midseason finale of the final season of Better Call Saul just aired this past week, and while reviews for the show are overwhelmingly positive (100% fresh from critics on the often unreliable Rotten Tomatoes website), I can’t think of many shows I’ve found less enjoyable over the past year or so.
I think that after a few good seasons of a TV show have aired, people are often so excited for the final season of a program that when it comes out they’re willing to overlook the show’s shortcomings. Because despite how positively its been received, Better Call Saul Season 6 is pretty bad, both in terms of making sense in the world of the show, and on a more personal level to me when it comes to the enjoyability factor.
So what’s wrong with this final season? Here are four major problems.
**Major spoilers for the first six episodes of the final season.**
Jimmy And Kim’s Plan/Getting Howard
There are two main storylines for the first half of this season and I think they’re both pretty weak. The first storyline involves Jimmy and Kim trying to discredit Howard so that the Sandpiper lawsuit is quickly wrapped up and Jimmy can receive his cut from the settlement sooner rather than later. (The second main storyline is the Gus Fring vs. Salamanca family cartel which we’ll get to later.)
Better Call Saul has always had some wacky elements to it, but the parts of episodes where Jimmy and Kim are doing things to make Howard look bad feels less like it’s connected to a show like Breaking Bad, and more like it’s straight out of a comedy show like Curb Your Enthusiasm. We’ve got scenes like Jimmy planting cocaine in Howard’s locker after flooding a toilet to distract the attendant and Jimmy, sporting a fake tan and wig in a silly attempt to look like Howard, throwing a hooker out of a car in front of one of Howard’s associates. It’s all so outlandish and goofy.
This plan is going to result in lots of high jinks!
Still, all of this silliness would be at least somewhat acceptable if Jimmy and Kim’s plan even made any sort of sense, but it doesn’t, mainly in terms of their desire to carry it out. Jimmy makes good money as a lawyer, and since he’s now associated with the cartel, he’s doing better than ever before. Kim is having success helping people as a public defender and has an opportunity for a dream job working with a foundation that’s being set up. They have no real necessity for the Sandpiper money now—it’s definitely not urgent for any explained reason.
After the pair are ultimately successful in making Howard look like a deranged drug addict and forcing the settlement, Howard confronts them and points this out. They’re not doing this for the money. This leads into the second major problem with this season of Better Call Saul...
Jimmy and Kim Have Become Huge Jerks/Kim’s Character
The only explanation that makes sense for why Jimmy and Kim go after Howard is that they enjoy it. They both like scheming and feel like Howard is getting what’s coming to him. But Howard really doesn’t deserve any of this—sure, he’s unlikeable at times, but he’s never done anything truly awful to either of these characters.
Jimmy has always operated in a grey area of right and wrong, but this feels really over the top. And for Kim to be super thrilled to go along with him makes absolutely no sense, even when considering the moral cliff her character seems to have fallen off of.
Pictured: Awful human
Kim’s character motivations make absolutely no sense when you consider everything we’ve learned about her over 5+ seasons. Kim quit a high-paying job where she was a partner at a big law firm because she wants to help people.
But when she gets a job opportunity that’ll let her make a difference in more people’s lives than ever before, she’s willing to turn the car around and not go to the meeting about the position since Jimmy’s hit a snag in their ridiculous Howard plan. Getting one over on Howard is more important than everything we’ve been led to believe is important to her character. None of this makes sense as to how Kim has been written over the course of the show.
The Cartel Plotline is Completely Weakened by Breaking Bad Connections
What was once a strength of Better Call Saul, its connection to Breaking Bad, has become a major weakness. When the Better Call Saul story was focusing on a time further in the past from the start of Breaking Bad, it was interesting to see where some of our characters started out. Now though, particularly with the cartel storyline, all of the suspense with the show is gone since we know what’s going to happen with the characters.
Is a Los Pollos Hermanos spinoff coming next?!
This entire season so far has built up the Gus Fring vs. Lalo Salamanca feud. When will Lalo make a move against Gus (who he knows tried to have him killed)? But we already know the outcome of this conflict. Whether Lalo is killed or disposed of in some other way doesn’t really matter—he’s not in Breaking Bad, so we know Gus ultimately wins out. We also already know what happens to Gus and his righthand man, Mike, so there’s no real drama there. This feels like the boring middle bit of a story we, the viewer, already have the beginning and ending to.
By having Nacho Varga, the last remaining likeable character on the show, die in the season’s third episode, there really isn’t much interesting that can develop from this entire storyline that we don’t already know.
Mean Spirited Direction
This entire season just feels very mean spirited in a way that the show hadn’t been before. It’s fine if a creator wants something bad to happen to one of their characters if it makes sense in terms of the story, but it feels here like the writers were favoring creating memorable, shocking moments as opposed to giving characters they’d established over several seasons their due sendoffs.
This is particularly the case with Nacho and Howard. Nacho’s death—by way of shooting himself in the head—feels like a pretty brutal and cruel end for the character. You could argue that Gus has no other choice but to arrange for Nacho’s death after the failed assassination attempt on Lalo since Nacho can finger Gus as the instigator. This isn’t absolutely the case though.
Gus uses Nacho’s father as leverage to get Nacho to agree to being killed. Gus could use the same leverage to force Nacho to leave the country and go to some faraway place and never come back. He knows that the Salamanca family will still be coming after him regardless and that he’ll have to ultimately deal with them no matter what happens with Nacho. Is it easier for him just to have Nacho dead? Probably. But this feels a lot like the writers just going with a bad, shocking ending for the sake of it.
This feeling is amplified times a hundred with poor Howard. Having Howard get shot in the head by Lalo for no reason other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time is pretty brutal. It feels totally like a shocking moment at the end of the midseason finale for the sake of having a shocking moment at the end of the midseason finale.
Better Call Saul has become a show about awful characters doing awful things to one another. Since we already know what happens to most of them, they’re not all that interesting either.
Grade: 3.5/10