After six seasons, Saul Goodman’s strange journey comes to an end.
Here’s an interesting thing about H.G.
Wells’sThe Time Machine: it’s notreallyabout time travel.
Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), then, was something like a Morlock who dreamed of transcendence.
Not really, not for long.
It was thaturge, so insistent, so fundamental to his nature.
He could live among the Eloi, but he never stopped wanting to eat them.
The thing is, Saul has never been on top.
As Chuck (Michael McKean) once memorably and accurately observed, he’s Slippin' Jimmy.
He just wants to dump out his thermos of urine, fill it with water, and move on.
The amazing thing is, he almost does it.
Is it purely altruistic, that he still loves Kim, and still wants to protect her?
Is she the one person for whom he’s willing to sacrifice himself?
Or does some small part of him want this not for her, but forhim?
Maybe it’s just that this cannot be how they get him.
Maybe if Saul Goodman is going toget got, it’s going to be on his terms.
And maybe it’s all of the above, and Saul himself doesn’t even know.
But here’s what happens: He tells the truth.
Saul tries to demur.
He tries to tell them his name is McGill.
He tries not to smile.
But look, the man is who he is.
In the world ofBetter Call Saul, what is going to happen has also already happened.
It could never be any other way.
“You got them down to seven,” she says, with matter-of-fact admiration.
That was before his little stunt at the sentencing hearing: now he’s serving 86 years.
They finish the cigarette, in that room where the barred window is nothing but a shadow above them.
But when Kim leaves, he’s there again.
He lifts his hands, thumb and forefinger cocked, the way they used to.
He mimes shooting, and blowing smoke from the pistol barrel.
Kim watches Saul for as long as she can, and we watch with her.
But then she passes beyond the prison wall, and we don’t see him anymore.
