‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 Almost Stuffed Pat Healy Into an ATM Instead of a Box
Better Call Saul Season 6 brought back Jeff the cab driver, although he looks a little different. Pat Healy played him in the episode “Nippy,” and endured an exhausting heist for Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) as Gene Takovic. The heist could have been even more fraught if they’d gone with one of the original ideas.
Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould and writer Alison Tatlock were guests on the Better Call Saul Insider podcast on July 26. They discussed Jeff’s heist and what they almost did instead. Better Call Saul Season 6 airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on AMC
‘Better Call Saul’ brainstormed heists Pat Healey could pull off in season 6
Gene enlists Jeff to be shipped into the department store in a box. After hours, Gene distracts the security guards so Jeff can emerge and steal the most valuable clothes in the store. It’s a harrowing, exhausting run, but earlier pitches might’ve been worse.
“We spent a lot of time thinking of different ways he could put this together,” Gould said on Better Call Saul Insider. “The only other pitch I remember, I know there were a bunch of them, involved Pat’s character being curled up inside a fake ATM machine. That was one of them.”
The mall was central to the ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 heist
The Better Call Saul episode “Nippy” is the resolution to a season 4 episode in which a cab driver recognizes Gene as Saul Goodman. Gene plans the heist to keep Jeff from exposing him. Tatlock explained how they developed the heist.
We had a guy who worked in a mall. That’s all we had to work with, a guy who worked at a Cinnabon. There he is. He’s brilliant at using the tools at his disposal and this is what is at his disposal. If he’s going to f*** with these guys and shift the power dynamic, that’s what the whole exercise is about is doing a switcheroo of status, then how can he do this using what he has at his fingertips right here? He has a security guard that he alienated in a previous season. If he can turn on the Saul charm, if he can channel the Saul of it all, he’s an expert seducer. He can seduce this guy and he can use both the sugar on his tongue and the sugar in his shop to get what he wants.
Alison Tatlock, Better Call Saul Insider, 7/26/22
The mall heist will have ramifications
It took two seasons to pay off Jeff the cab driver. Now there are only three episodes left. Gould promises you haven’t seen the last of Gene and Jeff.
“I love the way Allison put that because of course, at the end of the previous episode you actually see Saul Goodman in color of course,” Gould said. “Hopefully we’re zigging instead of zagging. There’s more coming in subsequent episodes, more fun that relates to this in subsequent episodes.”
