Better Call Saul Season Finale Review: Winner (Season 4 Episode 10)
It’s been building and hinting all season, but Better Call Saul has finally reached a tipping point.
We’ve been seeing increasingly large hints throughout Season 4 that Jimmy is ever-closer to becoming Saul Goodman. On Better Call Saul Season 4 Episode 10, “Winner,” Jimmy took a humongous leap toward becoming the Breaking Bad criminal attorney.
The entirety of Better Call Saul has been about Jimmy’s struggle between his good heart and the criminal life that people in his life have projected onto him. “Winner,” in many respects, is a culmination of those stories.
Jimmy: S’all good, man!
For one, “Winner” smartly uses flashbacks with Chuck as a catalyst for the rest of Jimmy’s actions. Sure, he pretends to honor Chuck through the law library and serving on the scholarship board, but we all know that Chuck’s ultimate rejection of Jimmy is driving his actions. It is clear that the brothers McGill loved one another, but perhaps stronger was their propensity to outdo the other.
Jimmy loses his first appeal because of failure to mention Chuck, but he does not make the same mistake twice. Instead, he pulls perhaps the most elaborate con-job he’s pulled yet, swindling not only the appeal board, the legal community, and Kim, but even viewers at home.
Yes, even I was briefly fooled by Jimmy’s emotional appeal that caused Kim to shed a tear. Bob Odenkirk does not get enough credit for the way he switches seamlessly between good-hearted Jimmy and the scamming Saul Goodman.
Odenkirk has been nominated for an Emmy several times, but surely his performance in “Winner” makes for his best case yet. He slyly slips back and forth between kind-hearted and malicious, empathetically reaches out to one of the scholarship applicants who was not selected, shed his grieving tears away from the rest of the world, and duped even the sharpest in the legal profession, all in such a real, believable way.
Elsewhere, it turns out that what fans thought was a story about building the underground superlab, is actually a story about Mike Ehrmantraut and how he breaks bad. Instead of ending the season with a superlab, we end it with Mike ending someone else.
Mike has done some shady things, but he has never before killed anyone in cold blood. This is a crucial stepping stone to the fixer Mike becomes on Breaking Bad.
Season 4 is over, and it is one of the most stunning seasons of television in recent memory. Rarely have slow burn television shows been this compelling, especially when (in most cases) you know where the characters end up.
A few stray thoughts:
- Now that we’ve met Lalo, my mind keeps drifting to Walt and Jesse’s first meeting with Saul, when he thinks he’s been kidnapped by Ignacio (Nacho) and Lalo. I can imagine Season 5 will further pave that road.
- Odenkirk deserves a lot of credit for his performance, but perhaps the best moment was Kim Wexler’s face as he walked away saying “S’all good, man!”
- I’m worried that we won’t see much of Howard Hamlin going forward, either. I would love to, but I can’t figure out his place in the story.
- A delicious encore from Gale Boetticher. I hope they find a way to include him in the show more, too.
- Idea: I would like to see Season 5 catch up to the Breaking Bad timeline, and then Season 6 switch back and forth between Cinnabon Gene and Saul when he’s not counseling Walt and Jesse.
- Shoutout to Michael McKean for another outstanding encore as Chuck McGill.
What did you think of this episode of Better Call Saul? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Better Call Saul airs Monday at 9/8c on AMC.
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Nick Hogan
Nick Hogan is an experienced podcaster and writer (particularly on media topics), who loves discussion and analysis of TV and is always looking for new shows to watch. He is also a parent who loves buffalo wings, blowing raspberries, and his beloved Cincinnati Reds.