Better Call Saul season 2 finale review: A beautifully slow ending to a frustratingly slow series
And a tantalising tease of another major Breaking Bad character.
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Your support makes all the difference.The term ‘slow burn’ seems to have an exclusively positive connotation, and you’ll find it in myriad Better Call Saul reviews from the first two seasons.
As a technique it’s been used to varying effect this season however, which has frustrated at times in its lack of event and padding out of simple plot points to entire episodes.
Fortunately, that’s not the case with the final episode, which aired on AMC last night, hit Netflix this morning and is riddled with tension.
It opens with a flashback of Jimmy and Chuck by their mother’s hospital bed (and later death bed), a scene that mirrors Chuck’s subsequent hospitalisation from his fall in the photocopying shop. Jimmy - still lacking the steeliness of Saul - can’t help but pity his brother no matter how much of an asshole he’s been all season, and puts their legal squabbles to the back of his mind to look after him. He, of course, should have known better however, and the final scene of the series sees him confess the Mesa Verde address switch to Chuck, who feigns a confidence crisis in order to get it out of him and secretly tapes the whole thing.
It’s a beautifully acted scene by both Michael McKean (who’s becoming a fantastic villain) and Bob Odenkirk, and really sets this show up to be a story about two brothers flawed in very different ways, but most viewers probably saw the tape recorder coming, and it’s hard to swallow that Jimmy didn’t.
Running entirely parallel to this story is that of Mike Ehrmantraut, who is getting reluctantly drawn deeper and deeper into the quagmire of cartel activity.
The finale episode saw an incredible sniper scene that built tension and capitalised on it without a single shot being fired. Mike had the The Cousins firmly in his sights but (though he seems conflicted about pulling the trigger anyway) is distracted by the horn on his car sounding, which leads him to find a note on his windscreen that simply reads ‘DON’T’.
If you didn’t pick up this Breaking Bad reference (and fair enough, it was very subtly done), it almost certainly mirrors the time The Cousins were on the verge of killing Walt, only to receive a last minute text message simply saying ‘POLLOS’ from Gus. I think we’re to infer that Gustavo Fring also left the note, and while this twist does trade off Breaking Bad a little too much, as previous ones with Tuco and Hector have, the prospect of learning more about Gus’s backstory in season 3 is pretty tantalising.
Headlines circulating like 'Better Call Saul Is Better Than Breaking Bad' and 'Better Call Saul caps a near-perfect season with a chilling finale' might be going a little far, but the finale leaves me more positive about next year's batch of episodes.
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