“Like a chimp with a machine gun.” - Exploring the genius of Better call Saul, and the relationship with its Big Brother →

There’s a sequence in “Witness”, second episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, where everything stops. Ominous music starts playing and the camera zooms out, slowly but relentlessly, until we see something we recognize, something we were all been waiting for: a fast-food restaurant sign, depicting two friendly looking chicken with sombreros, standing shoulder to shoulder. Everyone familiar with Breaking Bad squeals in excitement as they know that, where there is a Los Pollos Hermanos Restaurant, Gustavo Fring, one of the most compelling villains ever to appear on television, is probably not too far away.

This moment, building off a cliff-hanger from the second season, is not the only contact point between Breaking Bad and its critically acclaimed prequel/spin-off. During its first two seasons, the show featured the appearance of more than one recurring character first seen in Breaking Bad, but nothing can quite compare with this reveal. As well as being extremely iconic and recognizable elements of the series Better Call Saul spawns from, Gus Fring and his restaurant represent a drastic incursion of the world of Breaking Bad in Saul Goodman’s story: an incursion that the episode puts an accent on by making shrewd choices of framing, colour, and direction. These aspects make “Witness” an excellent starting point for this analysis, alongside the numerous familiar faces and call-backs strengthening the bond between the two shows in unprecedented ways. What makes these references so relevant for this analysis is the way the writers implemented them in the plot without losing touch with the main narrative, making them integral to the story and turning Better Call Saul in one of the best spin-offs on Television.

In today’s competitive world of entertainment, the choice of reincorporate Los Pollos Hermanos into the narrative is likely motivated by the necessity of Brand Recognition. As Paul Grainge points out in his book Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age: “companies seek to integrate and disseminate their products through a variety of media and consumer channels, enabling ‘brands’ to travel through an integrated corporate structure”; he also observes how “branding creates the reproducible iconography that can help extend the experience of consumable entertainment” (Grainge 2008: 10). Gus Fring’s fried chicken is an example of such iconography. To promote the release of the third season many temporary restaurants popped up in major cities, complete with enticing slogans that reference the show. This inventive campaign is a blatant cry for attention, dictated by a network that aims to achieve the same numbers Breaking Bad did during its later seasons. This approach speaks volume about Better Call Saul’s status as a TV Show: without Breaking Bad, it would not exist. A quick look at the landscape of entertainment media will reveal an over-saturation of sequels, prequels, soft and hard reboots, and spin-off series: The Hobbit, Fantastic Beasts, a third version of Spider-Man in less than fifteen years, and more Star Wars than the fans could have ever hoped for (or actually needed). TV is no exception: in the article Spinoff City published on the Atlantic a few years back it is stated that Television “also relies on the replication and repetition of successful formulas as a central part of its production strategies. Although this process of creative theft is central to capitalism itself, it is […] a generally denigrated process, as if the entry of capitalism somehow contradicts the possibility of art” (Klein, Barton Palmer 2016). Derivative art is basically a contradiction. for every Frasier that succeeds in changing the formula, there is a Joey that fails spectacularly. These are all examples of what the industry is after: popular, recognizable worlds that audiences are eager to return to. Better Call Saul is no exception, of course, but while many of these new iterations fail because too tied to their predecessors, it is in branching off and pursuing something different that this show succeeded in finding its own identity.

When it first came out, Better Call Saul very cleverly presented itself as a self-sustaining story. The ties to its older brother were evident but minute in the economy of the first season’s overarching plot. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, the two main writers behind the show, clearly did not want to heavily rely on the success of their previous work. They created a prequel that, even if undoubtedly rooted in what came before, is perfectly enjoyable by viewers who were not familiar with the original series. What we got was a clever Dramedy centered around the misadventures of the small-time lawyer James "Jimmy" McGill, six years before his appearance on Breaking Bad as Saul Goodman; in the series, Jimmy struggles to prove his worth as a lawyer to his brother Chuck, builds a relationship with his long-time friend Kim Wexler and tries to strike a balance between his passion for the Law and his inherent tendency to work around it. The show also brings back the beloved character of Mike Ehrmantraut, a stern ex-police officer who, as fans of the show anticipate, will end up working for Gus Fring. Events after the original series are also briefly explored: usually cold opens, always in black & white and often mute, these sequences show a Saul in hiding, trapped in a dull, procedural job at a mall’s bakery. These moments feature a completely different Jimmy: silent, gloomy, frequently filmed in wide angles to highlight his feeling of insignificance, uneasiness, and lack of self-worth. Every each one of these sequences not only directly informs us on characters and events unfolding in the rest of the show, but also hints at the possibility of Better Call Saul’s ending taking place after Breaking Bad’s story-line. As Julia Turner cleverly puts it in her analysis: “the show skips forward and backward in time with nimbleness and purpose, revealing incidents as they shed light on key players without undue deference to chronology” (2016). It is one of these cold opens, more precisely the one in the third season’s first episode, that gives us the first big hint of what is to come.

In this scene, Saul is working at the Cinnabon like we have seen him doing so many times before, when he collapses to the floor. This mirrors Walter’s sudden fainting in Breaking Bad’s Pilot, and provides us with a visual cue that solidifies the parallel between the two characters. The path Jimmy and Walter walk on is different, but comparable: while the latter goes on a downward spiral that disclose the egotism and the selfishness inside of him, the former trudges on a road filled with obstacles that brings out “Slippin’ Jimmy”, the part of himself who is intrinsically dishonest. This is the origin of the show’s main conflict: that between Jimmy and his older brother Chuck, who could not be more different from him. Cultured, well-mannered and sophisticated, Chuck made himself an irreplaceable member of the HHM Law Firm, thanks to his competence and integrity. The Law and its functioning are something he holds sacred. This unforgiving approach to his job is what lead him to believe that someone like Jimmy, someone with a loose sense of what Justice really is, should not be allowed to be a lawyer (“Slippin’ Jimmy with a Law degree? It’s like a chimp with a machine gun!”). When we first meet Chuck, he is suffering from a peculiar condition that forces him to be housebound, some sort of allergic reaction to objects with an electromagnetic frequency, a disease that is later revealed to be mostly a product of his imagination.

Despite the subtle enmity between the two, Jimmy takes care of his brother daily, bringing him everything he needs, from food to newspapers. This selfless behavior is another element that informs us on his character, and that feeds in the plot line we are about to discuss: as much as Jimmy is inherently deceitful, he is also inherently kind. His ambitions and desires come second to the love for the ones around him: The Mesa Verde debacle that takes place towards the end of the second season is an act of love towards Kim, and the confession of his crime to Chuck in the season finale is made out of concern for his mental state. Turner notes how Jimmy is a character “who wants to help those around him, but whose oddball ideas about how to do right have bad results as often as good ones” (2016). The decisions he makes all backfire when it is revealed that Chuck “exaggerated the symptoms of his disease to extract the truth” (as he confesses in season 3’s fifth episode) secretly recording Jimmy’s admission on tape to then use it as proof. His goal is to get his brother disbarred for his criminal behavior, at a time when Jimmy’s career is finally taking off.

This is a prime example of the show’s strength. Its nature of prequel prevents the writers from playing with our expectations on the characters’ fate: we all know Saul and Mike will make it through, because they have prominent roles in a story that has yet to unfold. This forced Gilligan and Gould to build tension around the consequences of their actions on the relationships they hold dear: how does Jimmy McGill become Saul Goodman? How does Mike find himself working for Gus? The writers decided to shift the focus on a character from Breaking Bad that was generally seen as comedic, flat and two dimensional, and created a powerful story about the torturous attempts of a con-man trying to go straight; attempts that, as we all know, will sadly fail. The result is a show that has that same sensitivity Breaking Bad possessed, that same look and feel, but an indubitably more cohesive and relatable core narrative. This is where “Witness” comes into play.

In the second episode of the third season we follow Mike as he investigates the origin of the tracker hidden inside his car: his research brings him to tail a man from a rendezvous point in the middle of nowhere to the eagerly anticipated fast food restaurant. When he asks Jimmy for help, the lawyer exhibits a keenness to be involved in something shady that hints at the character’s lack of satisfaction in his current life: Saul Goodman is slowly emerging from Jimmy McGill, in an episode already notably chock-full of familiar faces and call-backs. As a matter of fact, “Witness” sees the return of Victor, one of Fring’s henchmen, and Francesca, Saul Goodman’s future assistant: these are all characters that fans of Breaking Bad will find extremely familiar. Moreover, halfway through the episode Kim asks Jimmy to give her one dollar for client confidentiality, a blatant call-back to one of the first encounters between Walter White and the shifty attorney, where Saul makes the same request to him. The connections, of course, do not end here. Beside the already mentioned reveal of the Restaurant’s sign, the episode features many references in the form of choices of directing and framing: one of the most apparent is the shot of the car approaching the parking lot in front of Los Pollos Hermanos, which is the same as the one in Breaking Bad. In this scene, Jimmy enters the restaurant to keep an eye on the man Mike have been following, who he knows being responsible for placing the tracker in his car: he suspects that the henchman has been meeting with his employer in the restaurant, and wants Jimmy to find out as much as he can. Jimmy goes in, orders a meal, and waits. We, the audience, wait with him.

This is the moment we have been waiting for since that cliff-hanger at the end of Season Two gave us a hint of Fring’s involvement with the Salamancas. This is also the moment where the show reinforces its unique identity through the most glaring proof of craftsmanship yet: Gustavo Fring’s first appearance in Better Call Saul is as an element of the background, out of focus, unimportant, as Jimmy attentively observes the henchman consuming his burger. To Jimmy, and therefore to the show’s narrative, Gus is not a threat: he is a looming presence, scrubbing the floor and getting progressively closer to our protagonist. The character is integral to the plot and the right emphasis is put on his reappearance minutes later, but the scene is played in a way that doesn’t take away from the focus of the show (quite literally) for a mere moment of fan-service. From that moment, Los Pollos Hermanos and his manager become part of the story, giving the fans a long-anticipated return and the network something recognizable to advertise the third season with. The branding works with the story, and not against it, because the writers found a way to integrate this moment without damaging the delicate balance between Jimmy’s story and Mike’s.

Countless are the examples of shows and films that lose touch with the story they are telling to give the audience that moment of excitement derived from brand recognition, with no regards for continuity and internal logic. These moments are often put there to tease the spectators and nothing more: they feel cheap, sloppy, and not at all intelligent. From the constant name-dropping of Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts, to the confusing finale of Prometheus that tries to introduce an alien resembling the popular Xenomorph, these moments are symptoms of an unhealthy relationship between the product’s branding and the product itself. Better Call Saul manages to link its narrative to that of Breaking Bad without it ever feeling forced or an end in itself. This undivided attention to details and understanding of the material are what make Better Call Saul a perfect example of a prequel done right.

It is not a coincidence that “Witness” contains yet another moment of brilliant visual storytelling, maybe the best one so far. Towards the end of the episode, Jimmy is giving the final touches to the Wexler-McGill logo in his new office’s reception room. A long piece of tape covers the big “W” and “M” (“the M is a little crooked” Francesca notices earlier in the same episode) as the paint on the wall dries. Jimmy starts removing the tape, gently rolling it with his thumbs, left and then right: this immediately brings us back to the previous episode, where we witness Chuck showing that method to Jimmy as they remove the space blankets from the library. In this moment, Jimmy is trying to get rid of the tape like his brother would: carefully, patiently. Having just learnt that Chuck recorded his confession, he is understandably frustrated: in a fit of rage, Jimmy rips off the tape in one violent stroke, irreparably damaging the paint. This moment can be interpreted in many ways: Jimmy is now doing things as he deems appropriate, and wants to stress that by literally ripping off any existent tie with Chuck; it is also a way for the show to highlight his independence from its “big brother” in an episode where the line separating the two stories is especially labile. Jimmy will never be like Chuck, exactly like Better Call Saul will never be the same as Breaking Bad, despite the inescapable connection they share.