Better Call Saul hit moments of perfection in its third season.
Full spoilers for Better Call Saul: Season 3 continue below.
Three seasons in, and Better Call Saul is fully hitting its stride. There's no better time for it, too, as the series is creeping ever closer to Jimmy McGill going full Saul Goodman.
My biggest problem with what was otherwise an excellent Season 2 of Better Call Saul was balance issues: this drama is inherently two series combined into one, with one track following Jimmy's moral struggles and relationship drama, and the second following Mike's higher stakes criminal dealings. Though Season 3 did have a few episodes where we felt the divide between these two narratives, overall it succeeded in resolving those balance issues between its two sides and putting the focus back on Jimmy. It also gave us our first scene of Mike and Chuck together, which was an added bonus.
That's especially impressive considering Season 3 marked the Better Call Saul debut of Breaking Bad fan-favorite villain Gustavo Fring. Instead of letting the addition of Gus dominate the season, his addition actually helped tie together the Mike, Nacho and Hector Salamanca thread that was introduced and fleshed out in Season 2. Michael Mando had some great material this year as we began to understand much more of Nacho's side of things and, most interestingly, his complicity in Hector becoming the wheelchair-ridden man we meet in Breaking Bad. And Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito and Mark Margolis all delivered the high-caliber performances we've come to expect from the Saul/Bad universe. There's a necessary subtlety you get from having this great of actors together, like that small moment when Gus casts Nacho a look after Hector's collapse, that adds so many more layers to what is already an excellent series.
But as I mentioned earlier, it became very clear this year, especially in the latter half of the season, that this show is back to being Jimmy's story. Picking up from the cliffhanger of Chuck recording Jimmy's confession, the first half of Season 3 focused on Kim coming to Jimmy's aid as Chuck took his younger brother to trial. The Jimmy/Chuck conflict has been at the core of this series since the beginning, and honestly I felt like they'd mined everything they could get about this fraught relationship. But Season 3 proved me wrong, especially with the standout episode "Chicanery." Jimmy's public evisceration of Chuck was a major turning point for the series and for those two characters, and to me marked the moment where everything in this season clicked into high gear.
It's all part of this thread of Jimmy finally leaning into his "Saul Goodman" persona. We've known for years that Better Call Saul would include the explanation for how trying-to-do-right Jimmy would become criminal-lawyer-for-hire Saul Goodman, and a big part of Season 3 was setting the seeds for that. It's a credit to Bob Odenkirk that his performance captures the small moments that push Jimmy toward the darker version of this character, be it when Jimmy is just exhausted after being unable to sell his commercial screentime, or when he goes for the jugular when he decides in a spur-of-the-moment decision to out Chuck's mental illness to the insurance company.
By the end of Season 3, we start to see the path of how "Jimmy" will become "Saul," though there are plenty of unknowns still up in the air. The first is Kim, who is back by Jimmy's side by the end of the season and continues to fight alongside him as a partner. We see Kim losing her tight grip on her career as much as we see Jimmy spiral downward, and Rhea Seehorn gave an absolutely knockout performance in Season 3 as we see Kim finally snap after her accident. (Bonus points for the Blockbuster cameo.) With Kim seeing that there are shades of gray to keeping yourself afloat in this world, the question is what role will she have to play in Jimmy embracing Saul?
The other major unknown is the fate of Chuck. After "Chicanery," we see him fighting to get healthy, but the fight goes out of him by the season finale when he attempts to commit suicide. (The outcome of that fire is still unclear.) Will Chuck's death after the horrible final words he said to Jimmy be the tipping point for the younger McGill? As much as Chuck has been the most hatable character on Better Call Saul, McKean's performance elevates him from just being a villain to being one of the most well-rounded and interesting, despicable yet heart-breaking characters on the show.
And that in and of itself is Better Call Saul's strength. Especially in Season 3, we understand the moral complexity behind every character and every decision on this show. We sympathize with Hector Salamanca when he feels his grip on the drug trade in Albuquerque slipping, and we sympathize with Nacho when he practices to kill Hector to protect his father. We're angry at Chuck when he does everything within his power to make Jimmy lose his license to practice law, and we're angry at Jimmy when he outs Chuck to the insurance company simply to get revenge. From Howard to Mike and everyone in between is a well-drawn and realistic character who help make Better Call Saul one of the best dramas currently on the air. The writing and performances -- not to mention gorgeous direction and cinematography -- elevate Saul among its peers.
The focus on the backhalf of the season smartly shifted away from Mike and the Gus storyline, but one of the most interesting developments was Mike's decision to take a job with Gus. That is a big carry over from Breaking Bad and didn't get explored much in Season 3's later episodes, but the position puts Mike in a very interesting situation moving forward. There will be interesting parallels between Mike trying to find the moral balance in his own life, similar to what Jimmy has been facing the past few seasons. Gus helped balance out the Mike and Nacho arcs instead of prompting them to overpower this season, and it's definitely welcome to have the character who showrunner Peter Gould calls the most brilliant person in the Breaking Bad universe back as a major player on TV.
The Verdict
Better Call Saul: Season 3 puts the focus back on Jimmy McGill in all the right ways. While there's still time for a focus on Mike and the story gets fleshed out by adding new (and sometimes familiar) characters, it's Jimmy fighting his way through the world that seems stacked against him that is the core of this season. But the writers also mine into the rich world around Jimmy, from Kim's slipping into a dangerous workaholic trend to Chuck's fight to get healthy to Mike becoming embroiled in Gus's drug enterprise. Season 3 captured the balance of Jimmy's story with these other threads, making this the strongest season of Better Call Saul to date.
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