Last week I wrote a little bit about the final set of episodes of BETTER CALL SAUL. The rest of this week I want to try to finish that off by talking about a couple things relative to the Gene-verse, that is the present day black and white universe that we've gotten glimpses of throughout the series, where Jimmy is hiding out as a manager at a Cinnabon.
I'll be honest, while watching them I did not much like the first two episodes that were set almost entirely in the Geneverse. And here's why: the character of Jimmy is so completely different from the guy we left behind that it's hard to connect with him. In the first he's sort of our Jimmy, right? He pulls a scam with that kid in order to get the kid to leave him alone.
But then in the second he gets so dark he is pretty much unrecognizable. The thing about the Jimmy we've followed all these years is that he is never able to go full Walter White evil. He can do some terrible things, but there's always a cost to him, a sense that he knows down deep that he has completely fucked up. What he and Kim do to Howard might be the worst thing he's ever done, but it's very much Kim that is driving that train.
What allows Jimmy to become the monster version of Gene is in part the horrible tedium of his life. But it's also very much everything he went through in BREAKING BAD. The show even names this episode where Jimmy goes Full Dark "Breaking Bad."
Now I'm going to write about how the Geneverse story plays out. But the thing I want to highlight today is just the courage of the writers. This is where they saw the show going, and so they went there, even though it risked losing the audience a bit at this incredibly important moment. It's another version of the thing I'm always writing about the SAUL writers: they are unafraid of being painted into a corner. They have such enormous trust in themselves as a group and no doubt in their showrunners, too, they're not afraid of the hard things.
Maybe it's also that they trust in their audience to stick with them even when things suddenly disjointed. That might seem obvious. You have to trust your audience, right? But I actually don't think it happens that much. Writers might want that, but networks are so afraid of losing anyone, it's hard to take any risks.
Did the team even know that they were going to have to shoot multiple episodes black and white at the end, because they had set that conceit up? I don't know. I want to believe they thought it was a great technique, but it wasn't until later that they realized what it was going to mean for their ending. But then they trusted that it would work out
If there's one thing I should have staring at me every day when I write, it's those two words: "Courage" and "Trust."
