Better Call Saul under the lens
The six seasons of Better Call Saul read through criminology: which theory to watch for in each, which villains from the archive appear and a question for debate. With spoilers folded away.
Better Call Saul is the story of how a good-hearted lawyer with bad habits becomes Saul Goodman, the criminals’ lawyer of Breaking Bad. It is a slow fall, made of small decisions, in which family, ambition and love weigh as much as the cartel. That makes it an ideal series for studying how a criminal identity is built. This guide walks you through it season by season without spoiling anything unless you want it to.
Season 1 2015
Jimmy McGill, a lawyer with barely any clients who scrapes by on court-appointed cases, tries to make his way in Albuquerque while looking after his older brother, Chuck, a brilliant lawyer who has shut himself away at home, convinced that electricity makes him ill. Kim Wexler, a colleague and friend, works at Chuck’s big law firm.
With spoilers
Jimmy discovers that it was Chuck who stopped the firm from hiring him: to his brother, he will always be the small-time con man he was as a young man in Cicero, near Chicago. Meanwhile we meet Mike Ehrmantraut, a former Philadelphia police officer who took his own revenge for his son’s death. By the end of the season, Jimmy decides he will never again give anything up for the sake of doing the right thing.
Listen to how Chuck talks about his brother. Labelling theorists, from Howard Becker to Edwin Lemert, argue that the label of offender can end up producing the very thing it claims to describe. Jimmy tries to be something else, and the person who matters most to him will not let him.
To debate: Does Chuck have reasons to distrust Jimmy, or is his distrust part of the problem?
Season 2 2016
Jimmy lands a job at a respectable firm, with a company car and a steady salary, but struggles to stick to the rules. Kim, torn between loyalty to Jimmy and her own career, starts thinking about going it alone. Mike, for his part, gets into trouble with the Salamanca family.
With spoilers
Jimmy airs a television advert without permission and ends up leaving the firm. When Chuck keeps an important client that Kim had brought in, Jimmy alters some documents in the middle of the night to make his brother look bad and send the client back to her. Chuck falls apart; Jimmy confesses to pull him out of it, and Chuck secretly records the confession.
Gresham Sykes and David Matza described how offenders justify themselves to themselves: nobody got hurt, the other person had it coming, I did it for someone. Write down every reason Jimmy gives himself before and after each shortcut.
To debate: If he did it for Kim, is it any less serious? And what if Kim never asked him to?
Season 3 2017
Chuck holds something that could end Jimmy’s career, and he intends to use it. Elsewhere in the city, Mike follows the trail of whoever left him a warning at the end of the previous season and arrives at a discreet owner of fried chicken restaurants: Gustavo Fring.
With spoilers
Chuck uses the recording to set a trap for Jimmy and bring him before the bar. Jimmy defends himself by proving, in the middle of the hearing, that his brother’s symptoms have no physical cause, and comes away with a one-year suspension. Kim, exhausted by overwork, has a car accident. Chuck, humiliated and pushed out of the firm, relapses and dies in a fire at his home. Meanwhile Nacho tampers with Hector Salamanca’s pills, and Hector suffers a stroke.
Cognitive criminology studies the errors of thinking that make harm seem logical and even just. Watch Chuck: he is convinced he is defending the law and never asks himself whether something else is driving him. Compare him with Gus, who calculates every step without deceiving himself.
To debate: Who does more harm this season, Jimmy or Chuck? And who admits it?
Season 4 2018
Jimmy, without a licence for a year, looks for a way to earn a living, and not always by clean means. Gus secretly starts a building project that requires engineers brought over from Germany and absolute discretion, and a new Salamanca arrives in Albuquerque: Lalo, far friendlier and far more curious than the ones before him.
With spoilers
Jimmy sells prepaid phones to small-time criminals and, when he gets his licence back, announces that he will practise under the name Saul Goodman; Kim realises that the remorse he showed the panel was a performance. Gus builds the superlab with a team of German engineers; when their leader runs away, Mike kills him on Gus’s orders. Lalo starts asking questions.
Gus is rational choice made flesh: every step is weighed by its cost, its benefit and its risk of discovery. Watch how he deals with a setback on his secret building site. And look at Jimmy, who also starts calculating, but without Gus’s discipline.
To debate: What is the cost that Gus leaves out of his accounts?
Season 5 2020
Saul Goodman now has an office, clients and a very particular way of understanding the profession. Kim is torn between her career at a big firm and the unpaid work she really cares about, and Lalo Salamanca suspects that someone in the cartel is deceiving him.
With spoilers
Lalo ends up arrested and Jimmy, his lawyer, gets him a huge bail; collecting the money in the desert almost costs Jimmy his life, and Mike has to save him. Kim marries Jimmy and leaves her firm. Lalo turns up at the couple’s flat and Kim stands up to him. In Mexico, Lalo survives the attack Gus had arranged to kill him, and Kim suggests to Jimmy that they ruin Howard Hamlin.
Robert Hare measured psychopathy with a scale of traits: superficial charm, manipulation, lack of empathy and of remorse. Watch Lalo when he is at his most likeable: he cooks, jokes, takes an interest in people. Ask yourself what he is after in each conversation.
To debate: Why is Lalo more unsettling than the Salamancas who shout and kill without pretence?
Season 6 2022
The final season settles every account: Jimmy and Kim’s plan against Howard, the war between Lalo and Gus and, at last, the fate of the man we saw at the start of the series, working under another name in an Omaha shopping centre.
With spoilers
Nacho dies to protect his father. The plan against Howard works, but Howard turns up at Jimmy and Kim’s flat just as Lalo arrives, and Lalo shoots him dead. Gus finishes Lalo off in the unfinished lab. Kim leaves Jimmy and the law. Years later, in Omaha, Jimmy goes back to scamming, is caught and, at his trial, chooses to tell the truth rather than save himself; Kim also confesses what she did. Walter White appears in several flashbacks.
Terrie Moffitt divided offenders into two groups: those who start as children and never stop, and those who offend in adolescence and then give it up. Kim fits neither: she starts late, as a lawyer without a single mark on her record, and escalates. Watch what pushes her to offend and what might make her stop.
To debate: Who pays more for what they did, Jimmy or Kim? And who chooses to pay?