Better Call Saul: The Epic of the Cockroach, the Cracks in the System, and the Tragedy of Not Being Able to Be Good
There is a legitimate prejudice against sequels and spin-offs: they are almost always born as minor byproducts designed to milk the success of a greater work. After the unbeatable aftertaste left by a dramatic monument like Breaking Bad, approaching Better Call Saul provoked natural resistance. Even more so when its protagonist was that loud, cynical, and at times frankly unpleasant lawyer who served as comic relief and criminal facilitator in the original series. It took effort to enter his world and required more than one attempt. However, throughout its six seasons and 63 episodes broadcast between 2015 and 2022, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould achieved a dramatic miracle by completely inverting the premise of their previous work: if Walter White was an apparently respectable man who craved becoming a monster, Jimmy McGill was a good-hearted con artist who desperately tried to be accepted by "decent" people, yet whom the system itself—and the contempt of his older brother, Chuck—pushed back into the mud time and again. That man who initially repelled us ends up winning us over and, even more, moves us to the core in all his human poverty and his painful inability to overcome his own flaws.
The Survivor’s Delirium: "Last Night I Was Kevin Costner"
Unlike Walter White’s chemical explosion, the story of Jimmy McGill—before slipping into the gaudy suits of Saul Goodman, played with absolute mastery by Bob Odenkirk—is the chronicle of a delirious, pathetic, petty, yet prodigiously creative human being. He is the eternal hustler nicknamed Slippin' Jimmy, a man capable of conjuring money out of thin air or helping the elderly at a nursing home with genuine tenderness, yet doomed to sabotage himself.
Nothing defines his audacious pathos better than that famous joke born as a throwaway line in Breaking Bad—when he claimed he once convinced a woman he was Kevin Costner simply because he believed it himself—which Better Call Saul turns into a memorable scene at the end of its first season ("Marco"). After a night of heavy drinking, the woman looks at him in the daylight and furiously snaps that he is not the Hollywood heartthrob; far from shrinking back, this man who knows himself to be the washed-up, ugly version of the actor replies with all the nerve in the world: "I was last night!". It is right there that the viewer drops their guard and recognizes themselves in him: because against the cold monsters of crime or the arrogance of triumphant elites, Jimmy embodies our own weaknesses, the urgent need for approval, and the terror of failure.
The Cockroach in the Cracks of the American System
Although the plot connects at precise moments with the parent series and brings back fundamental figures from that universe—such as the imperturbable Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the calculating Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), or the bloodthirsty Salamanca family—the work possesses a completely distinct aesthetic and moral personality, sustained by the protagonist's luminous and tragic bond with Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn).
The great underlying theme is how the survival instinct of an outsider strips bare the rot of a country as crazed and corrupt as the United States. Here, there are no "good guys": high-end corporate law is just as ruthless and hypocritical as the cartel, only dressed in black tie. The legal and economic system is riddled with fissures, and it is in those cracks that an ingenious "cockroach" like Saul finds his ideal ecosystem. No one else could turn the street-corner sale of disposable cell phones into a criminal telecommunications network in broad daylight, or seize the dead 3:00 AM slots on local television to advertise his terrible—or surprisingly brilliant—legal services. His methods are circus-like and deceitful, yet they work because the American Dream itself operates as one big con.
When Nothing Works Anymore: The Final Collapse and the Paradox of Success
The tragedy of Saul Goodman is that everything works like a charm for him until, inevitably, nothing works anymore. In its final episodes, filmed in a bleak black-and-white that takes place after the events of Breaking Bad, we see the chameleonic lawyer reduced to a gray ghost under the false identity of Gene Takavic, baking cinnamon rolls in a snowy Nebraska shopping mall. Unable to contain his compulsive nature as a con man, he falls back into his old ways until he is discovered by an elderly woman—played by the legendary Carol Burnett—and ends up captured by the police.
Even in the abyss, his indestructible cockroach instinct seems to triumph one last time: in a masterful negotiation with federal prosecutors, he manages to whittle a life sentence down to a ridiculous seven and a half years in a luxury prison. However, in the series finale ("Saul Gone"), upon learning that Kim Wexler had the moral courage to confess her past sins, Jimmy makes the biggest decision of his life. Right on the courtroom stand, he sabotages his own plea deal, confesses all his crimes as well as his weight in his brother's suicide, buries the grotesque disguise of Saul Goodman forever to reclaim his true name—James McGill—and accepts an 86-year sentence in a maximum-security penitentiary. He ends up collapsed and locked away for life, yet redeemed in his human dignity before the eyes of the only person he ever loved.
It is deeply ironic that the fate of the series within the television industry mirrored the life of its protagonist so exactly. Just as Jimmy McGill was never accepted by the elite legal establishment despite his brilliance, Better Call Saul starred in one of the most unusual statistical paradoxes in television history: despite achieving an astonishing 98% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and sweeping prestigious honors such as the Peabody and Critics' Choice Awards, it accumulated a historic record of 53 Emmy nominations without winning a single statuette. Perhaps this work fell just a millimeter short of being declared an absolute masterpiece only because it was not born as an autonomous piece, but in the shadow of a giant; yet that Academy injustice only confirms its greatness: that of a rebellious, moving, and deeply human gem that shone from the margins of the system.
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