Better Call Saul Season 1 is over. While the finale, Better Call Saul Episode 10 “Marco,” provided us with a concrete vision for Saul in Better Call Saul Season 2, there were also a number of threads from throughout the season that were left hanging at the end. And while critical consensus on Better Call Saul has hovered somewhere between “pretty good” and “I’m clapping so hard all I have left is bloody bone stumps,” there will always be room for improvement.
With Better Call Episode 10 “Marco” receding into the rear-view mirror, now is the perfect time to review what the first season of Better Call Saul could have done better.
Better Call Saul Disappointments: Less Mike or More Mike
While disgraced cop Mike Ehrmantraut and Saul were able to help each other out in several Better Call Saul episodes, each also had their individual stories throughout the first season of Better Call Saul. But while Mike’s origin story is thoroughly plumbed in Better Call Saul Episode 6 “Five-O” there remains the sense that the world of Better Not Cross Mike is far less fleshed out than the world of Better Call Saul. While Saul has a rival law firm, an eccentric and traitorous brother, and some of the greatest scenes set in a retirement community since Breaking Bad’s wheelchair bomb, Mike’s world is so far confined to a generic daughter-in-law. While Mike gets some blockbuster scenes in Better Call Saul – the entire sequence with the rogue pharmacist and the Nacho drug deal is one of the best of the season – sometimes he feels like the other main character that Better Call Saul doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Better Call Saul Season 2 should necessitate less of Mike and Saul running in separate circles, but it’s hard to finish Better Call Saul Episode 10 “Marco” without feeling like Mike was a little overplayed and underserved in Better Call Saul Season 1.
Better Call Saul Disappointments: Nacho
While Better Call Saul is a different show from Breaking Bad, the ever-present criminal underworld still seeps into the lives of many of our characters. One of the best Better Call Saul additions was new character Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), a canny and ambitious lieutenant to the insane Tuco Salamanca. And while it seems unlikely that Better Call Saul will allow Nacho to kill Tuco and take over, experiencing more of Nacho’s jockeying for power could have spiced up a number of Better Call Saul Season 1 episodes considerably.
Better Call Saul Disappointments: The Future
Better Call Saul had a fantastic opening, with Saul Goodman under yet another false name, working at a Cinnabon and going home to drink and watch VHS tapes of his own “Better Call Saul!” commercials. It’s a bummer that we never returned, even briefly, to the dark future of Better Call Saul.
Better Call Saul Disappointments: More Courtroom, More Sick Shit
Better Call Saul Episode 1 had a fantastic scene with Saul psyching himself up in the bathroom before going out to do his absolute best defending teens convicted of skullfucking a dead body. There’s nothing else quite like it in the rest of Better Call Saul Season 1.
The first ten episodes of Better Call Saul built a great platform for Saul’s inevitable decline into criminality and danger. The final shot of Better Call Saul Episode 10 “Marco” offers us a glimpse of the Saul Goodman we know from Breaking Bad: a cocky, amoral goofball out to scam a quick buck. Whatever its flaws, Better Call Saul Season 1 will be remembered as one of TV’s finest character studies, with Saul’s final decision to drive away from responsibility and the chance for a clean lawyer life amounting to the death of Jimmy McGill and the birth of Saul Goodman.
