Ranking drama series finales

The Ringer ran a fun piece this month, since revised, ranking the forty best series finales by TV shows of any kind—bar miniseries—since the turn of the century. Some of the choices were head-scratchers, though. Parks and Rec? Lost?? New Girl??? The Good Place???? They also included both comedies (Friends, 30 Rock) and reality/other (Nathan For You, The Hills). But the move to limit the options to the post-Sopranos prestige/peak TV era was smart. And they ranked a couple episodes usually overlooked in these debates (though they missed one big one). Overall it’s a solid list.

Here’s mine, following the conclusion to Succession Sunday night. Like many, I’ve soured on the TV hype over the last few years. Partly just because I want to spend my time doing things other than keeping up with the latest shows. But mostly because Peak TV was excellent at creating B-level series with A+ production and unreliable at creating A+ series of any kind—especially ones that made it to the end, rather than starting with a bang and ending with a whimper.

With the end of Better Call Saul last year and Succession this spring, I expect to limit my TV viewing going forward to occasional/pure-fun shows: basically, blockbusters or popcorn fare that involve cooking, spies, or galaxies far, far away. And any series that gets a lot of attention out of the gate, I’ll wait till the start of season 4 (I’m looking at you, Last of Us and House of the Dragon). If everyone still swears by it at that point, I’ll give it a look.

Having said that, the following is a list of shows I don’t regret watching, because each of them stuck the landing. Though first some criteria followed by honorable mentions.

First, I’m only ranking dramas.

Second, I’m only considering finales aired after the year 2000.

Third, I’m considering the finale in the context of the final season. No “good” finale of an otherwise dispensable or poor final season qualifies.

Fourth, while I’m not prioritizing unhappy endings, I am giving the nudge to conclusions that avoid the sitcom trap of giving everyone an (unrealistically) happy ending, because these are people we (and the writers room) love, and we can’t allow ourselves to imagine them unhappy once we say goodbye.

Fifth, I’m also (and therefore) giving the edge to finales that simultaneously (a) work as episodes of television, (b) conclude the overall story of the season/series, and (c) do not in any way swerve from the story the show was always telling, but are clearly an organic and fitting and thus (in the Aristotelian sense) necessary way of completing the story.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen whole seasons of Girls, Atlanta, Half & Catch Fire, and Deadwood, but not finished any of them. I’ve not seen more than a scene or an episode of Six Feet Under, Dexter, Sex & the City, Barry, and Ozark. I’ve always heard wonderful things about the SFU finale, as well as Deadwood’s. Perhaps one day I’ll make it to the latter; I doubt I’ll ever get around to the former.

Honorable mention: Battlestar Galactica (a wild ride, but a bit too hand-wavy even for this Christian Luddite), Mr. Robot (somehow successful, if dragged out there in the final episodes), The West Wing (good for CJ! But all around too much, even for this show), Parenthood (melodrama is as melodrama does), The Expanse (an action-packed blast, but too premature—given how much more story there was to tell), Boardwalk Empire (so good! Almost cracked my top 10), Breaking Bad (excellent, obviously, but still too happy and action-hero-ish for Walt), Mad Men (one or two seasons too late, and too enamored of its two leads to see them as the sad, artless, tragic souls they always were), Hannibal (off the deep end … and also in need of that Clarice sequel!)

Dishonorable mention: Lost + Game of Thrones (no comment necessary)

Now to the top ten … (Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ve tried to be vague.)

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10. Friday Night Lights. Unlike all that follow, this one partakes of the happy tradition of TV dramas and sitcoms giving everyone the happy ending the audience wants them to have. But because that was always the nature of this show, as a high-production soap opera about high school Texas football and the perfect marriage at its heart, this was never going to be the wrong call. Our heroes ride off into the sunset—the bright lights of Philly, that is.

9. Rectify. Somehow not on The Ringer’s list! The best TV drama of the 2010s. It ended in just the way it ran from the beginning: beautiful, ethereal, contemplative, ambiguous, honest, hopeful. This is the only show I recommend to anyone without reservation. A lovely and humane work of art.

8. Justified. Like Star Trek movies, the best Justified seasons come in evens: two, four, six, followed by five, one, three. The finale hits all the beats, while providing surprising catharsis between the star-crossed hero and villain. I’m not a re-watcher of TV shows, but I look forward to going back through this one with my kids once they’re old enough.

7. The Leftovers. Had the finale of season two been all she wrote, it would have been higher on the list. As it stands, the third season is good but unnecessary. I’ve long wanted to write something about the finale, which has something to say about religion. It’s the wrong thing, but it’s something all the same. You can’t help but cry in those final moments. And it doesn’t spoil a thing in the previous seasons. It even brings a measure of closure to both leads’ stories, along with a question mark the viewer can’t answer for himself. We just have to trust Nora’s word, too. (Or not.)

6. The Wire. Dinged for the final season going a bit haywire. But still a magnificent final two episodes. A sort of sitcom finale, except without making everyone’s ending happy. Feels epic the way the whole show was epic: a story about a city and the lives and institutions that make it endure, for all its dysfunction. And that last Irish wake…

5. The Americans. They were holding out on that U2 song. When it hits, you know why they were so patient. In a sense, this finale was “happier” than expected. But not all happy. And no corners were cut getting there. And when you realize what the leads have lost, you realize it’s not happy at all. But that final confrontation! A whole series building to one single moment in a parking garage. Marvelous performances. When The Americans was on, it was the best show around.

4. The Shield. A pitch-perfect finale with so much plot, so many storylines built into it! So brutal, so devastating. And that final scene. Haunting. An underrated show.

3. Succession. Shows four through one on this list all have perfect finales, in my view. It’s only been twenty-four hours, but Succession belongs. They stuck the landing. They knew the story they were telling. They knew the characters they were crafting. They knew how it had to happen. And they twisted the plot in just the right—and sometimes unexpected—ways, to get there. (Tom!) I wonder how this show would play for someone watching it all for the first time, binged in a week or two? Viewers have been agonizing for what feels like ages to see how it all would come to an end. And people interpreting the finale as a set-up for more seasons or even a movie have utterly misunderstood both the show and the finale. It’s done, folks! They, and we with them, were stuck in interminable infernal circles for forty episodes—and they’re still stuck. They’ve just swapped spots in hell’s musical chairs. It’s never getting better. That’s the point.

2. Better Call Saul. I’ve written about the BCS finale at length. Whether I’m right or Alan Jacobs is right (or his amended take is right), the finale couldn’t have been better. Not only were they completing Jimmy McGill’s arc, they were also bringing the entire Breaking Bad universe to a close—not to mention the excellent-but-still-slightly-missed-opportunity of the BB finale. It’s true, Jimmy-Saul gets to shine. But not because the writers couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. Because he couldn’t help himself. And whether or not he’s happy where he landed, it’s not a happy place to finish one’s days.

1. The Sopranos. This one’s been written about to death. I’ve got nothing to add. It’s still on the throne. No dispute from me. Long live the king.

Jimmy’s change

So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?

His case is simply stated. Jimmy’s volte-face in the third act of the finale is unwarranted either by the episode’s events or by the series’ narrative thrust as a whole. Who Jimmy is, deep down, has more or less always been set in stone, and that concreteness was not softened by these final episodes. Jimmy-as-Saul-as-Gene has only become more narcissistic, more reckless, more negligent, even murderous and sociopathic. Are we really supposed to believe that a single remarkable deed by Kim has the power to undo all of that, to make of Jimmy a Sydney Carton bound, selflessly, for the guillotine of a lifetime in prison?

Answer: Yes, actually. I think so. But before I defend that view, let me say why I resonate with Alan’s disappointment.

His disappointment was my disappointment with the original finale of Breaking Bad, which just about everyone else I read and know thought was perfect. It was not perfect, and for the same rationale Alan offers for BCS. Vince Gilligan loved his character too much to let him down. Though Walt had to die, though he had to be humiliated, he also had to go out in a blaze of glory. He had to earn some degree of redemption. He had to do something good, or at least something on his own terms. And thereby, all fans, not just “bad” fans, could get some measure of catharsis for watching and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering on a wicked and murderous drug dealer for five years.

Ever since that finale first aired nearly a decade ago, I’ve proposed an alternate ending. It’s only slightly different than what occurs in the final ten minutes of the episode. Walt arrives in his car, parks it where he does, walks into the building with all going according to plan. Only: when the button is pressed and the machine gun lets loose, the bullets spray wildly without hitting anybody. The plan fails. The cowboy’s last hurrah is an anticlimax. Walt doesn’t win. Instead, once the bullets are finished, the neo-Nazis look at Walter, look at Jesse, and shrug. Then they take them both outside. First they shoot Jesse, as Walter looks on. Then they shoot Walter. They dump both in an unmarked grave. Fade to black; end credits.

That’s a bleak ending, but its bleakness matches the bleakness of the show’s story. For that story is one without any happy endings. Walt doesn’t get to save his orphaned would-be son. His outlandish plan doesn’t succeed. Such plans don’t always work. He doesn’t get to pass out and pass on in the midst of the humming chemistry of a meth lab, happy in his own way, dying as he lived. He doesn’t get to set the terms of his exit from this life. That’s the way he thought he could live. But he was wrong. And the show’s writers mistook their protagonist’s self-understanding as the show’s own inner meaning. An easy error to make, but a costly one. Not just the bad fans rejoiced at the finale. Even ordinary viewers left with a sense of cathartic release: Jesse got away, the bad guys lost, and Walt redeemed himself. Good for him.

It seems to me that Alan thinks the same (whatever his actual thoughts on the BB finale) of the BCS finale. I wondered, going into the episode, whether Gilligan and Gould would be tempted by the same error: the need to make their evil lead good by the end; the desire to make things right that can’t be made right; the pull to let Saul undo, by TV magic, what can’t be undone.

I understand why one might see “Saul Gone,” the name of the series finale, as indulging that temptation. But I don’t agree, for the following four reasons.

First, there’s a lot more going on in Jimmy’s incredible courtroom speech than breaking good, for Kim’s sake. He’s putting on a performance. That performance is Heisenberg-like in its pomposity and pride. He doesn’t want seven years in a cush prison with the world thinking he was a victim. Instead, he wants the world—the feds, the judge, his future inmates, even Kim—to know that without him, Heisenberg wouldn’t have lasted a month as a free man. The real hero of Walt and Jesse and Mike and Gus’s story was Saul Goodman. He made it all possible. After all, he’s the only one still standing. Are you not impressed? Are you not entertained?

Second, so much of what the previous 61 episodes of BCS gave us, which the 62 episodes of BB did not, is that, unlike Walt, who was rotten to the core from the beginning and just needed the opportunity to show it, there was always a goodness to Jimmy intermingled with the bad. Not only certain good inclinations, but the desire to do and to be good. Granted, that desire is snuffed out by the time he’s transformed into Saul. But we have no reason to suppose that it’s gone forever, that it’s beyond recovery. Moreover, he didn’t leave Kim; she left him. It is precisely her reentry in his life that reawakens that desire once more. On the phone, she tells him to turn himself in; he scoffs and tells her to take her own medicine. She does. At great cost to her own life, possibly bringing it to an end. I find it wholly plausible, not that her extraordinary good deed converts him from pure evil to pure good, but rather that her action, like a flash of lightning, transforms the scenery before him. It shuffles the board of his potential actions. It makes possible certain decisions that he would never have considered before. He doesn’t become a martyr. But he does tell the truth.

Why? Because, third, what we know of Jimmy—again, from those prior 61 episodes—is that his moral psychology is not defined solely by greed or victory or successful schemes. An additional and irreducible element is his desire to please those he loves or reveres, even in spite of himself. (In this, too, he is different and, I think, a more complicated character than Walter White.) That’s the thing that made his relationship to Kim so complex. Together, they were bad. But in truth, while he made her worse, she made him better. She kept him from from the dark side, from truly breaking bad all the way. Only in her absence does does he do that. All his worst propensities, however much he toyed with them and leaned in their direction, he kept at bay so long as she was still around. That’s not to say such an arrangement would have lasted forever. But he always cared what she thought. Because he always truly loved her, as she did him. And what he is doing in that courtroom is trying to earn her approval, trying to see a glimmer of the love that once burned bright in her eyes. I have to say, this strikes me as absolutely and unquestionably psychologically and emotionally plausible. The man is a living image of self-sabotage in service of his insatiable desires. He never knows when to stop. Only now, he isn’t risking everything for the sake of some petty score. He’s forsaking a short time in prison for an indefinite one for the sake of the woman he never stopped loving, because the one and only thing that ever competed with his love for self and love for money was love for her. Which is to say, his need for her requited love. So he schemes one last performance for the ages. (Showtime!) And, as ever, he gets what he wants. It works—like Walt’s plan worked—except no one thinks him a hero, and the cost is a life sentence.

Fourth and last, it’s essential not to overlook what Gould shows us on the bus and in the prison. Jimmy isn’t in chains. His spirit isn’t quenched. He’s finally at rest. He’s among the people he always worked for and with and among. He always had their back, and now they’ve got his. They’re chanting his name. They’re fist-bumping him as he swaggers by. He’s not a fish out of water. He’s not suffering in squalor. He’s king of the castle. He’s come home. This is where he belongs. This is where he’s comfortable. This is where he was always meant to be, where his path always led. There’s not a trace of pain or resentment on his face. Not, again, because he’s a martyr. But because he’s accepted who he is and what he’s done, in an irresolvable combination (one that defined his life from start to finish) of chest-thumping pride, feigned performance, and quiet shame.

Nor is Kim’s visit an absolution. Their few words reflect the years and the distance between them. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, to rectify his wrongs. But behind bars, in the plain light of day, he can acknowledge who he is to the one person (apart from his brother) whose opinion he values, and she can accept that knowledge so long as he isn’t hurting anyone or inciting her to do the same. His quiet bravado (“…with good behavior…”) is a sign that he’s no Sydney Carton, nor does he imagine himself to be. He’s Jimmy. But then, Jimmy isn’t the antithesis of Saul Goodman, since Jimmy always was and always will be Slippin’ Jimmy. Kim, though, always loved Jimmy, and Jimmy always loved Kim. If what it took to see her again, to see her look at him like he was Jimmy, not Saul, one more time, was this—getting all the credit for Heisenberg’s crimes while serving time he always knew was coming down the pike—then so be it.

His whole life was a tissue of tradeoffs, anyway, cooking up some brilliant idea in the moment to get what he wanted most, without necessarily thinking of the long-term effects. He did it one last time. Who’s to say he’d regret it now anymore than he did in the past? In the time machine motif that haunts the episode like the ghosts of another Dickens tale, Jimmy wonders about regrets, his own and others. We know he always regretted losing Kim. His moment in the courtroom is his last chance to hop in his own personal time machine and make one single change. Not to alter the laws broken, the people conned, the lives ruined, the victims murdered. Not even—though he does regret it—to unwind his brother’s end.

No, the one change concerns Kim, having once lost her, seemingly forever. Once that change is made, he can live with the consequences.

NOPE, BCS, TOM, MCU

Some pop culture odds and ends…

Nope. I’ve got little to add to the Discourse here, just a few scattered thoughts. (I saw the film with friends and processed it with them; I’ve not done any online reading besides skimming—and being disappointed with—this article.) First, Daniel Kaluuya remains Jordan Peele’s not-so-secret super-weapon. What an actor. Second, it’s nothing but good for the movies that Jordan Peele productions have become events unto themselves. That’s a happy world to live in, even when Peele doesn’t quite hit the mark, as here. Third, the problem with Nope is the opposite of what ailed Us. Where Us worked at the visceral level of story and characters, it failed at the symbolic or metaphorical level. In Nope, by contrast, the allegory is what’s potent and compelling, whereas the literal narrative has gaps and questions. At times it feels like the plot does X or Y because that’s what the Meaning requires, rather than the significance arising organically from the story. When the allegory calls for the same signifier to mean two or more contrary things at once, the plot becomes unmoored. Having said that, fourth, a couple minor interpretive ventures. What’s up with that shoe? What came to my mind was the monolith in 2001, whose presence always signals a powerful evolutionary or technological shift in a group or species’ agency—and whose first appearance involves apes, tools, violence, and a jump to spaceships (re the last, the dad in the sitcom appears to be space-related in interests or profession). I wonder if, on a re-watch of Nope, mention or flashback or appearance of the shoe would similarly signal not only Gordy’s turn but also key turns in the narrative and/or Jean Jacket’s behavior. I’ll also add, mostly tongue in cheek, that when wondering aloud about the title of the film, what came to mind was Knope, as in Leslie. If Get Out (still his most successful film) was Peele’s rejoinder to the fantasies of well-meaning Obama-era white-liberal post-racism—though it understandably took on new force when someone other than Hillary was elected—perhaps Nope is a rebuttal of the same phenomenon, only applied to Hollywood instead of Washington, D.C. It’s Peele’s Nope to Poehler’s Knope.

Better Call Saul. I’ve been on the BCS bandwagon from the beginning. I’ve written about it briefly before, but mostly I’m just here to stand in awe. Like MBD, I anticipate these final episodes like each is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Be sure to be reading what Alan Jacobs writes about it. Even DBH is in on the glories of Saul:

I became genuinely addicted, however, to Breaking Bad, which was so much better written than any of the television of my youth—and better written than just about every studio film made since the 1970’s—that it astonished me. It was the perfect balance of Dostoyevsky and Ed McBain, with just a hint of Lawrence Sanders here and Charles Portis there. I did not even mind the somewhat fantastic conclusion of the series. When, however, its sequel (or “prequel”) Better Call Saul came out, I was hesitant to watch it, fearing it would prove to be an inferior product that would only diminish my memory of the original program. But I watched. Now, in its final season, having just returned from its mid-season break, the show is dwindling down to its end over half a dozen episodes; and I am prepared to say not only that it is the better of the two programs, but that it may be the finest wholly original program ever to grace American television (or television anywhere). Like its predecessor, it is a grim portrayal of the gradual destruction of a soul, though now perhaps with somewhat greater subtlety and nuance, and with a richer range of characters. Comparisons aside, though, the quality of the writing has proved consistently astounding, and never more so than in these concluding chapters. Anyone who has followed the story—and I will give nothing away—will know that the final episode before that mid-season break was at once shocking and brilliant. It arrived in its closing minutes at a denouement (ominously announced by the slight flickering of a candle’s flame) that made perfect sense of the entire narrative of the series up to that point, and of the current season in particular, but that was (for me, at least) wholly unexpected until the moment just before it occurred. The construction of the story was so ingenious, and its moral and emotional power so unexpectedly intense, that I was left amazed. I do not know what it tells us about the current state of our culture that good writers have more or less been banished from the movie industry and have had to take their wares instead to television; but I am glad the medium as it now exists can make room for them. I also do not know what to make of the reality that there are television programs so much more competently written than most novels today. But, whatever the case, I can at least assure my three correspondents that, yes, I do watch television, even sometimes when something other than baseball is on; and that, moreover, in the case of Better Call Saul I feel positively elevated by having done so, because the program is a genuine work of finely wrought art.

I’ll add that, though Alan Sepinwall is usually reliable, his most recent recap of the show is strange, and it worries me he might know something about the final three episodes and be unintentionally telegraphing it to readers. He’s done this in the past, where he interprets an episode’s implications in ways no normal viewer would, because screeners or confidential information tugs his mind in an unpredictable direction. All that to say, he suggests over and over both (a) that this is probably our last glimpse of Gene’s future story and (b) that it provides a “happy ending” to Jimmy/Saul/Gene’s story.

A happy ending? What could that possibly mean? Deceiving and abusing an elderly woman and her loser son with a meaningless heist that could get the latter sent to jail, thereby reminding Jimmy of “the good old days” when—wait for it—theft, fraud, drugs, and murder were part of his daily life … this is a “happy ending”? Huh? The story is explicitly and intrinsically a fall narrative, a decline into moral squander and misery. The eminently wise and trustworthy writers and showrunners of BCS may or may not have more Gene in store for us. But even if we don’t return to him, his ending is as far from happy as one could possibly imagine.

The Old Man. Shows like The Old Man are more or less factory-produced for my tastes: The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager, The Americans, Fauda, even season five of Homeland—self-contained, stylish cocktails of spycraft, action, and character, realistic enough to be taken seriously, unrealistic enough to be fun. Le Carré lite, in other words. I was disappointed by the finale of TOM, however, because I thought it was a seven-episode miniseries, not the first of two seasons. I also didn’t realize Jeff Bridges’ battles with lymphoma and Covid brought production to a halt multiple times. Imagine being 70 years old, cancer in remission, Covid finally beaten, and the next day you’re hanging out a window at 70mph playing grandpa-Bourne, shooting back at the bad guys chasing you (and grandpa-driver John Lithgow). Not a bad capstone to a remarkable career.

Marvel. By my count, between May 2008 and November 2025, if Disney has its way, there will have been at least thirty-nine official “Marvel Cinematic Universe” movies. By the time the fifth and sixth Avengers films come out (six months apart) in 2025, my bet is that there will have been even more than what’s currently announced, which means the number will likely cross the threshold of forty movies in a little over seventeen years. And that’s not counting any Marvel characters produced by Sony outside of the MCU. Nor is it counting the Marvel TV shows, which in the same time span should amount to at least twenty-six in toto, which on average run two to three seasons each. So again, in less than two decades, we’re talking one hundred movie hours and hundreds of TV hours.

Now look at quality. From 2019 to the present there have been nine MCU movies. Two have been very bad (Captain Marvel and Eternals), three have been middling (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Thor 4), and four have been solid (Avengers 4, Spider-Man 2 & 3, and Doctor Strange 2). People love the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, but they’re actually pretty forgettable; and although the final Avengers entry provided a cathartic conclusion to the previous two dozen films’ worth of story lines, it was bloated and even sort of boring in the middle act.

All that to say, that’s three and a half years of the world-bestriding Marvel Universe, the most successful film franchise of our (all?) time … and it’s a pretty mixed record, when you step back and look at it. Add in the deluge of Disney+ series and their even spottier quality, plus a narratively unclear and mostly uncompelling “multiversal” saga connecting these films to the coming ones in the next few years, and it makes sense that people are writing about Marvel’s “problem” or “crisis.”

Nevertheless, I think that sort of language overstated. Between one pole, which suggests the MCU will keep on breaking records forever, and the other pole, which suggests the MCU is about to crash, I think the correct position lies somewhere in the middle. When characters and properties that people love are featured in a Marvel movie, people will keep buying tickets; see Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Blade, etc. When people don’t care, or the movies are bad, people will start to drift away. Instead of seeing 2019 as a peak followed by a steep cliff, we should see it as the highest peak, followed by only very slowly diminishing returns, with many subsequent slightly smaller peaks, with a cliff awaiting only after 2025. At that point, unless they nail revivals of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which somehow spark another wave, a new generation, a seventh “phase,” and thus a third decade of MCU fandom and culture-wide mania, I think that’s when it all, finally, comes to an end—where “end” doesn’t mean “no more popular comic book movies” but “everyone and their mom ceases to reflexively see most MCU movies in the theater.”

Then again, the almighty Kevin Feige has been doubted before. He knew something no one else did fifteen years ago. Maybe he knows something we don’t today. But count me skeptical.

Kim, breaking bad

You heard it here first. To be specific, on March 3, 2020, here’s what I wrote:

A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:

I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.

In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.

This was only three episodes into season 5; the closing moments of the eventual season finale—in which Kim not only initiated an unnecessary, risky revenge-scheme (now being played out in season 6) but also wryly double-barreled Jimmy just the way he had done in the closing moments of season 4 (“It’s all good, man!”)—signaled that the writers have known this was the destination, and the overriding theme of the show, for some time.

The present two-part final season is stretching out that slow burn to the breaking point, in peerless, masterly form as usual. In Gilligan and Gould we trust.

A word on Better Call Saul

A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:

I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.

In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.