Critics, Public Rave Over Mediocre Better Call Saul Season 6.5
Better Call Saul Season 6 has a score of 95 on the aggregate critic review website Metacritic. It has a 99% positive rating on the Tomatometer from critics on Rotten Tomatoes with a 95% audience score. The series finale, “Saul Gone,” has a rating of 9.8/10 from fans on IMDb. If the consensus were accurate, this last season of Better Call Saul would be a masterpiece. It would be one of the best shows ever. This, however, is far from the truth.
While the second half of Season 6, released almost two months after the first half of the season, isn’t quite the trainwreck of the first seven episodes, it’s definitely not the television masterpiece the majority of TV viewers seem to think it is.
Why Is Better Call Saul Getting Such Fantastic Reviews?
It makes sense that the more invested viewers get in a television show, the more lenient they become when it comes to assessing the quality of the show as it progresses over multiple seasons. Unless a TV show completely jumps the shark, people will be pretty forgiving of later seasons since they’ve been following the show’s characters for so long and are just so enveloped in the show’s universe. As a spinoff of Breaking Bad (a show that most people loved), this is amplified even more with Better Call Saul.
By Season 6 of Better Call Saul, many viewers of the two shows are so taken with the criminal underworld that Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have created, that the show simply being “fine” in its last few episodes, seems to them a masterpiece.
One thing that I think allows people to just go along with the show and think that it’s great involves the man playing Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk. I think that Odenkirk is a great actor and that many people are so impressed with his acting that they disregard a lot of the problems with the show as a whole.
There are plenty of issues with this final season, but the decision that feels the weirdest to me requires taking a broader look at the final season and the show’s entire run.
**Major spoilers for Better Call Saul below.**
The Structure of Season 6 Feels Off
The main issue I have with the show’s last few episodes is that they feel more like an epilogue to Breaking Bad than a part of the series that was Better Call Saul. Sure, Better Call Saul revealed glimpses of Saul’s future in a few season openings, but they were just that—glimpses. To have the show’s final four episodes occur primarily post-events of Breaking Bad in black and white feels very separate from the series’ first 59 episodes.
Better Call Saul introduced us to a variety of new characters over its run, like Kim, Nacho, Howard, and Jimmy’s brother, Chuck. With the exception of Kim (leading a basic/boring life in Florida) and a Chuck flashback, they’re gone now though. We’re introduced to new characters in Saul’s life, like a cab driver, a man with a dog who helps with the con they’re running, and Carrol Burnett as a token old crotchety lady named Marion.
I wasn’t a fan of the direction the show took earlier this season when episodes focused on Saul and Kim’s bonkers and totally ludicrous scheme to convince everyone that Howard was a cocaine addict, but at least it still felt mostly like an episode of Better Call Saul. This feels like a four part special where Gilligan and Gould answer the question, “What happened to the lawyer from Breaking Bad?”
Having scenes with Walt and Jesse as flashbacks in these final episodes also felt off to me, and sort of not necessary. They felt more like, “Look who it is!” moments since they never appeared on the show prior. The scenes with Jesse also totally took me out of the show since you’ve got Aaron Paul, who is now very much a 42 year old man, playing someone supposed to be in his early 20s. I kept thinking of that “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme with Steve Buscemi in his scenes.
The Ending of Saul
I thought the ending of Saul’s story, with him going to prison for 86 years, but redeeming himself in Kim’s eyes by admitting his wrongdoings to the judge, was just alright—not great, but not awful either. It makes sense that Saul would want to change for Kim in the end, but the notion that Saul would forgo a plea bargain that would have him out of prison in seven years just so this could happen feels pretty farfetched.
The scenes with Hank’s wife, Marie, were also sort of weird to me. I get she’s upset at Walter White for her husband’s death, and that Saul is associated with Walt, but Saul didn’t kill Hank. Walt didn’t even kill Hank, it was those biker gang guys. Would she have been as mad at whoever the lawyer was for those biker guys or some random criminal associate of theirs? Again, this just all feels very Breaking Bad and not Better Call Saul.
In the end, I think I became mostly disinterested in the mystery of what happens to Saul and Kim, which probably says a lot about how unlikeable the show made the two characters as it progressed. Having Saul go to prison makes sense, but it wasn’t a revolutionary ending or anything—I definitely wasn’t blown away.
Overall, I enjoyed Better Call Saul less and less as the seasons went on. At this point, I think it’s time to put an end to the whole Breaking Bad universe, but judging by the success of this show, I doubt that’ll be the case.
Grade: 5/10