I've written before about BETTER CALL SAUL's incredible openings. Truly, nobody on television takes such care with the way they open every episode.
And episode 609 offers another great example. Kim and Jimmy have been told they must go about their normal day, with absolutely no sign of the grief they're feeling over the death of Howard Hamlin in front of them. And so we watch each of them just doing their normal stuff--Kim with a client, Jimmy at the office, while Mike and his team clean their apartment. The montage is woven together beautifully, the sequence moving from one character to another by way of shared visuals--the stain of blood becoming ketchup in a plate, a picture Kim is holding up becomes a photo of their apartment when it doesn't look like someone has been murdered within it. As usual for SAUL, there's also a perfect song to go with it, "Perfect Day" by Dresage and Slow Shiver, which ties it all together.
For me what's really fascinating about the sequence is that there's nothing in any of the characters' behaviors that at all suggests what they've been through. We don't get some private moment where they let down their guard and show their sadness, nothing. And yet it's an incredibly sad sequence to watch.
How does SAUL accomplish that? In part, it's the song, which combines a certain irony in its subject matter with a slow, dreamy quality that invites a kind of deep meditation. In part it's the repeated turn back to Mike and his team washing blood, removing bullet holes, looking for brain matter which keeps what's really going on here front and center.
But I actually think the sequence might still work without that reference, i.e. just watching Kim and Jimmy work. Because we the audience already bring that information. We come to the sequence projecting onto Jimmy and Kim a lot of feelings about what they're going through. For me, that's the brilliance of them showing nothing themselves; the performers are letting us do that work. And the human imagination being as amazing as it is, we're going to make so much more of what they're going through inside.
It's another fantastic example of a show incepting the audience. I don't know about you, but as I'm writing I'm not often thinking in these kinds of terms. But watching how effective it is, it's certainly worth asking that question: What information can I download onto the audience? And once I have, how can I let them run with it?
