‘Better Call Saul’ Season 4 finale review: It’s all good, man

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the Better Call Saul Season 4 finale.

For four seasons of Better Call Saul, we’ve watched Slippin’ Jimmy slip ever closer to his Breaking Bad-ordained destiny. In the Season 4 finale, “Winner,” he took his biggest step yet.

In the last minutes of the episode, Jimmy wins back his law license and announces he’s going back into business under an assumed name. When Kim reacts in surprise and confusion, he turns back at her and grins: “S’all good, man.”

Fans know by now that that phrase is where the name “Saul Goodman” came from. So unless showrunner Peter Gould and company are seriously screwing us here, this would seem to be the moment that Jimmy McGill officially transitions into Saul Goodman. Or at least, the moment right before he does. 

True, there’s still some space between Jimmy, the shifty but basically well-meaning guy we met in Saul Season 1, and Saul, the ostentatiously sleazy lawyer we met in Bad Season 2. But at this point, it’s not a stretch to say the character is more Saul than Jimmy. And Chuck, it turns out, has done more to push Jimmy in that direction than even Jimmy himself seems to realize.

All about Chuck

Image: Nicole Wilder / AMC / Sony Pictures TV

Season 3 ended with Chuck dying in a fire he set to his own home, after an epically toxic battle with Jimmy that consumed most of Seasons 2 and 3. Since that episode aired, we’ve anxiously wondered how Jimmy would react. So when Season 4 finally came around, it was both surprising and anticlimactic to see that it… barely seemed to affect him at all.

Jimmy reacted, sure, and it came up a few times, of course. But if you were expecting a big, cathartic show of emotion, Saul wasn’t giving one up. 

Until the finale, that is. During his appeal to get back his law license, Jimmy takes Kim’s advice to heart and makes a grand production out of his grief. He weeps at Chuck’s grave. He makes an “anonymous” donation to name a law library after Chuck. 

Chuck’s absence this season loomed large – so large, it was difficult at times to tell we were still in its shadow.

Most effectively, the man rejected in the previous episode for seeming “insincere” throws out the statement he’d prepared for his hearing (a letter from Chuck) to speak from the heart about the brother he once loved so much, who had such an indelible impact over him. It’s the emotional outpouring we’ve been waiting for, and it’s so powerful that people in the room are moved to tears. 

And it’s a trick, just another brilliant ploy by Jimmy to get what he wants.

Maybe you saw that coming. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe Jimmy isn’t even totally lying (as the unbearably bittersweet cold open reveals, Chuck is a big reason Jimmy is in the legal profession), but sharing just enough of the truth to make his false motives easier to swallow.

In any case, the scene brings into focus all the ways that Jimmy’s arc this season has been about Chuck – about the extent to which Jimmy’s life had been shaped by his need for Chuck’s approval, about the moral and spiritual decay left over from their vicious feud, about the way Chuck’s death has now pushed Jimmy across some point of no return. 

In retrospect, Chuck’s absence this season loomed large – so large, it was difficult at times to tell we were still in its shadow. Put another way, Chuck isn’t directly responsible for Jimmy’s theft of the Bavarian Boy, or his cell phone side business, or that chilling piñata-room threat. But Jimmy’s increasingly irresponsible and immoral behavior as a whole isn’t not about Chuck, either.

Kim is the key, indeed

Image: Nicole Wilder / AMC / Sony Pictures TV

Much has been made of Kim’s importance to Saul, but I think Guillermo del Toro put it most succinctly: “Kim is the key.” 

She is the third lead of the series, the closest thing this show has to a hero, and its imperfect moral compass. But one of her most interesting roles is as the audience stand-in.

Like us, she loves Jimmy and roots for him to be better. Like us, she thrills in his ability to pull off a con. And like us, she struggles at times to reconcile these two sides of him – think of the previous episode, when Kim enlisted Jimmy’s help for a Mesa Verde job, but then insisted that they should only use their combined gifts “for good.” 

It’s through her eyes that we’ve seen Jimmy grow more devious this season, so gradually at first that the change was easy to dismiss. (The splitscreen montage in “Something Stupid” was a slow-motion heartbreak.) After all, Kim, like us, knew this track-suited dirtbag was still our sweet Jimmy. He was just going through a tough time. He was just doing what he had to do. Surely he’d snap out of it.

He did not snap out of it. Instead, it was Kim who snapped out of it, at least judging by the stricken expression on her face at the end of “Winner.” I knew, of course, that Jimmy’s road could only go down, that he would have to become Saul eventually. I suspected that the hearing speech was largely a put-on. Yet I was as shocked as she was when Jimmy casually revealed his deception. 

Jimmy’s decision to weaponize Chuck’s death isn’t the most dramatic or damaging thing he’s done this season. He’s let Howard shoulder the blame for Chuck’s suicide, he’s stolen from an innocent man, he’s strung up and threatened the teenage thugs who robbed him. But it’s more devastating, in some ways, because it’s the act of a soulless man for whom nothing is sacred. Kim recognizes this in the same instant we do.

Where Kim goes from here – whether she ditches the lowlife boyfriend, whether she lowers herself to his level, whether she finds herself in mortal peril due to Jimmy’s entanglement with the Albuquerque underworld – remains to be seen, and it’s one of the most compelling threads Saul has to offer.

Meanwhile, in Mike-land 

Image: Nicole WIlder / AMC / Sony Pictures TV

For most of the back half of Season 4, Mike was stuck overseeing the construction of Gus Fring’s superlab. It was an origin story I doubt any but the most zealous Bad fans were waiting for, and frankly, much of it felt like Saul struggling to figure out what to do with Mike. But it paid off handsomely in the finale, as his friendship with Werner came to a deadly head.

Though Mike isn’t exactly Mr. Gregarious, he’s demonstrated throughout both shows that he has both a capacity and a desire for genuine human connection. He supports his daughter-in-law, and dotes on his granddaughter. He finds a real friend in Anita, though it’s not at all clear that she’d be able to handle the darker side of him.

“Winner” was a reminder that there are still depths in Mike left to plumb. 

But Mike works hard to shield all those loved ones from the unsavory aspects of his life, which is why Werner seems so intriguing. He’s perhaps the only colleague of Mike’s we’ve encountered who seems to care about him as a person. They seem alike in other ways, too. They’re both methodical and precise, mature and reliable. Or so Mike believed.

In “Winner,” Mike is tasked with executing Werner for running away from the superlab, and the hitman we’ve seen mow down enemies without so much as blinking, looks like he’s on the verge of tears. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Mike get emotional – “Five-O” and “Talk” let Mike express grief, guilt, and rage – but it’s rare to see him get that way over work. 

Saul has generally been stronger with the Jimmy material than the Mike material, perhaps because Jimmy has so much further to go – the distance from Jimmy to Saul is far greater than the distance from the jaded, no-nonsense Mike of Saul to the slightly more jaded and no-nonsense Mike of Bad. But “Winner” was a reminder that there are still depths in Mike left to plumb. 

Where’s Nacho?

Image: Nicole Wilder / AMC / Sony Pictures TV

One major character absent in the Season 4 finale? Nacho. Which is crazy. 

Of all the cartel characters on Saul, Nacho might be the most intriguing – in part because, unlike Gus or Mike or Jimmy, he’s a question mark even to Bad fans. What we do know is that he’s easy to sympathize with, thanks to his relationship with his father, and fun to worry about, since there’s no guarantee he’ll make it out of Saul alive. 

So it’s frustrating that four seasons in, Saul still seems to have little idea what to do with Nacho. He shows up just often enough that we won’t forget about him, but infrequently enough that he often feels like a bit character. He sits out crucial episodes like “Something Stupid,” which had the eight-month time jump, or the finale, as if the show assumes we won’t care what he’s been up to.

But I care, and I’d like to care more. Season 4 hinted that Nacho is at least considering a way out of his life for himself and his father, and also that he’ll likely get pulled in deeper by men like Lalo Gus before that happens. (If it ever happens.) Here’s hoping Season 5 will be the year all that setup, all that pent-up emotional drama and mystery, finally pays off.