The question has loomed overseason 4ofBetter Call Saul.
Was there a sense of closure in a way?
PETER GOULD: I don’t know if it’s closure.
Credit: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
The weird thing is, it feels like the beginning of something rather than the end of something.
Sometimes in the writers' room, we run it together and call them Kimmy.
I’m very attached to Kimmy, and I’m very worried about where this takes them.
Was it hard to finally let that moment happen?
And why is now the right time?
I never felt like we were delaying it.
It always felt like we hadn’tearnedit.
What we started with was, what is the problem that becoming Saul Goodman solves?
I don’t think he’s exactly the Saul Goodman we met onBreaking Badyet.
Not by a long shot.
I don’t think he’s ready to suggest murder to his clients, for instance.
But assuming that separate identity is going to give him a lot of freedom.
And I think he craves that freedom.
We’ll see if he can have it both ways.
Does their relationship ever really recover from that moment?
That’s a great question because Jimmy has never fooled Kim before.
He’s never scammed her.
And now he has scammed her.
But I will say two things that give me a little bit of hope for their relationship.
First of all, that was an awful fight on the roof.
But also, maybe it’s a door to a more honest relationship.Possibly.
I think they’re in a different place.
There’s a little bit more honesty there because Jimmy especially has expressed his fears about the relationship.
So it’s a question.
I think it can go either way after an argument like that.
He was scamming the members of the board.
But there’s another way to look at it: maybe Jimmy never would’ve become Saul GoodmanwithoutKim."
It’s a partnership.
It’s a kind of dance that these two have.
And for better or for worse, it’s always brought them together.
And they bring that out in each other on some level.
There’s a chemistry there.
Oh, boy there’s so much chemistry, isn’t there?
There’s so much self-loathing going on with Jimmy.
Is Jimmy’s fear justified that Kim loves him as a boyfriend but not as a lawyer?
So much of this is about Jimmy’s fears about who he really is.
“If she understood who I really am, she wouldn’t love me.”
It’s not a crazy thing.
A lot of us have gone through that.
Maybe Jimmy’s just a little bit more extreme than the rest of us in some ways.
In that argument, they both say some terrible things.
Jimmy is much more aggressive and nasty than Kim is.
But there’s also a lot of truth there and we’ll see what they do with that truth.
Maybe he even surprised himself with the emotion and used it to his advantage.
I’m hoping people take [those layers] out of it.
I think those layers are there in Bob’s performance.
In a weird way, Jimmy has become a much better actor.
In fact, you see it in this finale.
In other words, he’s become a really good actor.
[Laughs]
In this episode we see him at his most vulnerable.
He’s crying when his Esteem won’t start, which is such an amazing metaphor.
We’ve never really seen him cry like that.
It’s a long-overdue cry.
There’s a lot of reasons he might be crying in that scene.
I think he’s hitting bottom, and he’s hitting bottom by himself.
And he doesn’t tell Kim about it.
He’s never going to get accepted.
And maybe he doesn’t deserve to be accepted.
That leads to anger, which leads him to this “screw you” choice that he’s making….
I think there’s still good in this guy.
And we’ll see if he has a shot at redemption.
What stood out to you about the karaoke moment?
Of course it’s Michael McKean and Bob Odenkirk, as these characters, singing together.
We’ve never had him sing.
And we were also thinking we have to lure Michael to make the flight to Albuquerque for a day.
Anytime you’re able to have Bob sing, it’s money in the bank.
Part of the reason Bob is so funny when he sings is that he sings with such abandon.
And he’s not afraid to sound bad.
That’s very endearing.
And then it’s followed by that very intimate, funny scene.
Tom Schnauz wrote that whole teaser.
He and I wrote the script together, and that was his, through and through.
He wrote a wonderful, wonderful teaser, and I love every word of it.
It’s just so harsh.
That’s a dark moment.
It’s a dark moment.
So that’s bad.
I think a little bit depends on what she takes from it.
It’s something we all do when we’re talking to teenagers and to young people.
I think that there’s a whole mix of things going on in there.
He’s definitely talking to his teenage self.
He’s kind of talking to himself right now, too.
He feels rejected, he feels overlooked, and he’s afraid that maybe that’s all justified.
What’s of course interesting is that he says that to someone he’s never met before.
But he hasn’t saidanyof that to Kim Wexler.
Stop apologizing, embrace it."
As I think of the final image of this season, I see him embracing it.
Was there an element of fulfilling destiny there, that Jimmy is subconsciously or consciously embracing it?
You put your finger on it.
In some ways you could look at it and say Chuck is prescient.
In another way you could say he’s putting a curse on Jimmy.
“I’m going to be the guy Chuck was always afraid I was.”
There’s a lot to unpack.
There’s a lot of anger there.
There’s a lot of pain.
And hopefully there’ll be some comedy.
Nothing spells comedy like anger plus pain.
So we may have some comedy ahead of us.
In a way, did Mike just break really bad?
We were pretty sure he was in Vietnam as a soldier.
We know he’s killed out of revenge.
We know he killed the men responsible for the death of his son.
The Mike we met onBreaking Badwas Gus Fring’s right-hand man.
He was a hired killer.
And Mike as we’ve seen him up to now is not that guy.
We’ve been wondering and struggling with the question of, why would he kill?
[Laughs] Because this Mike is a tricky guy because he’s not materialistic at all.
And he is really smart.
But he is a Salamanca, and we can see that he deeply respects his Uncle Hector.
And we will hear more of him.
I was so excited by Tony’s performance in every scene that he had this season.
He has such great chemistry with Michael Mando [who plays Nacho].
And the two of them are fantastic, and I would love to see him together with Mike.
All I can say is we definitely haven’t heard the last of Lalo Salamanca.
Obviously the superlab is large part of theBreaking Badworld.
But why did you decide to spend such a significant time on the creation of the lab this season?
We are fascinated by how Gus built his empire.
And we also asked ourselves, why does Gus need Mike in particular?
Gus has plenty of hired killers.
He has an operation; it’s a very well-oiled machine.
But Mike Ehrmantraut has a whole different set of skills.
He’s able to operate in the above-ground world and in the underworld.
What is Gale’s purpose in the story right now?
Will we see Gale attempt to help launch the lab early next season?
Well, I love David Costabile, so I’m always so happy to have him on the show.
There’s a relationship that Gus has with Gale that he doesn’t seem to have with anybody else.
There are so many characters and so much story to service on this show.
What was your biggest frustration on that front where you wished you had more time to explore?
For example, we didn’t see Howard [Patrick Fabian] that much this season.
Oh, there’s so much.
Boy, I could just go on.
We always knew that Lavell Crawford was terrific on screen.
He’s never had as much to do as he did this season, and he wasgreat!
I want more of Lavell Crawford.
I’m still pining for the Kettlemans from season 1.
What’s your one-sentence tease for season 5 that fans can ponder during the long hiatus?
We know who Saul Goodman is, but who is Saul Goodman to Kim Wexler?
For more on theBetter Call Saulfinale, read whatstar Bob Bob Odenkirk had to say.
