‘Better Call Saul’ ‘Breaking Bad’ Episode Changed Saul Goodman’s Introduction to Walter White
The first lines Bob Odenkirk had on Breaking Bad set up not only his own prequel series, Better Call Saul, but characters on the show. Now, with one of the final episodes, Better Call Saul changed the implication of his Breaking Bad intro.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Better Call Saul “Breaking Bad” episode.]
Thomas Schnauz wrote and directed “Breaking Bad.” He was a guest on the Better Call Saul Insider podcast on Aug. 2 and explained the nuances of how the prequel reframed his Breaking Bad introduction. Better Call Saul Season 6 airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
‘Better Call Saul’ thought of many ways to try to bring ‘Breaking Bad’ back
Schnauz joked that everyone can stop asking when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) will be on Better Call Saul. Now they’ve appeared but it wasn’t the first idea they had.
“Every season we talked about how do we get Walt and Jesse into the show,” Schnauz said on Better Call Saul Insider. “Every character from the universe, we talked about and those are our two most important characters, Walt and Jesse. We kept throwing stuff at the wall and this is the one that finally stuck. We talked about the moment post kidnapping, in between the kidnapping and returning Saul back to his office so he gets the Jimmy In-’N-Out scam going. So we were filling in the gap between what happened between those two moments. It just seemed like a prime opportunity to also address the Lalo of it.”
‘Better Call Saul’ explained Saul Goodman’s ‘Breaking Bad’ lines
Breaking Bad fans were always waiting for Better Call Saul to address Lalo and Ignacio. Vince Gilligan resisted Lalo for a while, but Tony Dalton played Lalo Salamanca. The “Breaking Bad” episode began with Saul’s Breaking Bad confession but went further to explain it.
“We had this Lalo question hanging in the air,” Schnauz said. “In Breaking Bad he says, ‘Lalo didn’t send you? It wasn’t Lalo?’ It just felt like a good moment to touch on this horrible thing that happened in his history that he had suppressed so much. But the hood over his head brought him all back and he had that flashback to begging to Lalo, ‘No, no, it wasn’t me. It was Ignacio, I swear.’ He had a moment of PTSD there that he had to address.”
Saul explained Lalo to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman
The new scene came when Walt and Jesse’s RV stalls. They have time to kill so Jesse asks about Lalo.
“Then once he realized it was only Brandon Mayhew’s uncle and his friend, he came back to reality,” Schnauz said. “But when Jesse asked him, ‘So who’s this Lalo? I never heard of Lalo.’ because Lalo’s been dead for several years and Jesse never would’ve heard of him. It’s just us showing Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman has suppressed this way, way down but it leaked out in this moment of horror.”
