Warning: This post contains spoilers from Monday’s Better Call Saul series finale.
The Better Call Saul series finale might be the last time we see Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler — but Rhea Seehorn doesn’t think it’s the last time they’ll see each other.
The Emmy-nominated costar of the AMC drama, which wrapped up its six-season run on Monday (read our full recap here), sees a future for Saul‘s central couple, even though Jimmy is serving an 86-year sentence in federal prison after coming clean about his role in building Walter White’s drug empire. “I personally am a hopeless romantic,” Seehorn told reporters during a virtual press conference for Saul‘s final episode. “So I think they continue to see each other, and that there is still a bond there, and that maybe she tries to legally figure out a way to reduce his sentence. But in a just way! Not a scamming way.”
Read on to see what other revelations Seehorn, star Bob Odenkirk and executive producer Peter Gould spilled about making the series finale:
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Jimmy and Kim's final scene in the prison was "the easiest scene we ever shot" (but also toxic)
Image Credit: Courtesy of AMC Jimmy and Kim reunited in the finale’s waning moments, sharing a cigarette in a scene that mirrored their first scene together in the pilot. Odenkirk called it “the easiest scene we ever shot,” adding that “it’s one of the few times that one of them isn’t trying to manipulate the moment [or] push some argument in some direction… They could just exist next to each other.” Seehorn noted that it was “the very last scene we shot on the series,” describing Jimmy and Kim in that scene as “without artifice, and without armor, and sort of maskless to each other, which is the best part of their relationship, that they were able to be that for each other.”
Gould, who wrote and directed the finale, said he had actually written several different versions of that scene where “there was a lot more said, and a lot more catching up.” But “it just kept getting leaner and leaner as I worked on it, because in a weird way, they don’t have to say that much to each other. They’ve come to a conclusion.” The downside, though? All that cigarette smoke. “Both Bob and Rhea were coughing, and my eyes were running. I had cigarette smoke down my throat for a couple of days afterwards… It looks so damn cool, but it’s really not good for you.”
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The finale almost ended much differently
Image Credit: Courtesy of AMC When the writers were first working on the finale, Gould revealed, they originally had Jimmy and Kim “meeting in Albuquerque before he went to prison, and the last scene was him in prison by himself, thinking. And I liked that a lot, but it seemed a little cold. I think ultimately, we all felt like ending with the two of them felt like the strongest way to go.” Also in the original version, Jimmy “was fearful about what was going to happen to him in prison, and it was a lot about the fear. This is a very different scene… It’s mostly about wistful connection.”
Gould also admitted that he “was on the bubble about the very last scene in the prison yard,” with Jimmy shooting finger guns at Kim as she leaves. “There was a version that didn’t have that, that ended with the two of them smoking, and I went back and forth on that for a while. Then ultimately, having watched them both, I felt like it was right, and it felt more honest to end with the two of them apart rather than the two of them together.”
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Jimmy's courtroom scene took an extra day to shoot
Image Credit: Courtesy of AMC The climactic scene where Jimmy confesses to his crimes in a soul-baring courtroom monologue was “very hard” to shoot, Odenkirk recalls. “It was scheduled for two days of shooting,” but they had to come back for a third day, and the actor told Gould, “‘If it’s OK with you, I want to reshoot the whole monologue.’ And everybody who overheard that little conversation wanted to kill me.” But Odenkirk wasn’t satisfied with the version they had: “It got very emotional, and I’d become more and more skeptical of gushing emotion on screen. It felt wrong in this courtroom scene, and I wanted to do it with a more restrained presentation. I just think it felt wrong… So Peter had to talk to people, because that would have been a really long third day, but we got it right.”
Gould agreed that “it was a really important scene,” so he went back and “simplified the dialogue a little bit” for the third day of shooting. They ended up using both performances edited together to get the final version we see in the finale. “It’s a tricky thing about this character because he often has a hidden agenda,” Gould notes. “He’s often trying to get something with every maneuver, and this was a moment of sincerity… It was a really intricate scene to shoot, and courtroom scenes are tough.”
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Jesse Pinkman almost stole Jimmy's thunder
Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix Years ago, when Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan was working on the Breaking Bad sequel movie El Camino, he pitched a number of possible endings for the movie to the Saul writing staff, and “one of the endings was very similar to this, except for Jesse,” Gould remembers. “I felt a little sweaty because I just felt so strongly that the right ending for Saul was to be in the system, the system that he’s made light of and that he’s twisted around for his own purposes.” He and the other writers gently guided Gilligan away from that particular ending, “and I think the ending he came up with for Jesse is exactly the right one.”
As far as Walt, Jesse and Jimmy’s respective fates, Gould says: “It just feels very elegant to me that Walt dies, really on his own weird twisted terms. Jesse suffers greatly, and he is in a prison of his own for quite a while, and then he gets away, and then starts this healing. And of the three of them. Jimmy gets his soul back, but he’s going to be incarcerated for some amount of time. And that just felt right.”
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The flashes of color in Gene's black-and-white world had a purpose
Image Credit: AMC screenshot Viewers may have noticed that Gene’s black-and-white world occasionally had a splash of color to it — an artistic flourish that dates all the way back to the series premiere when Gene is watching old Saul Goodman commercials, Gould points out. “The way I read that is because that’s where his passion is. It’s about his nostalgia for the man he used to be. It’s telling that his nostalgia is for being Saul Goodman, not for being Jimmy McGill.” Then in the penultimate episode, when Gene catches Marion watching those commercials, “it’s sort of a callback and kind of rubbing his face in it a little bit, when he’s seeing those reflections.”
In the finale, when Jimmy and Kim are smoking that cigarette together in prison, the ember on the cigarette glows in color, too. “This is the one bit of color in his world,” Gould notes, “the relationship with Kim, such as it is… She’s the one person who sees him as he is, and as he was.”
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Saul's relationship with Walter White paralleled Jimmy's relationship with his brother Chuck
Image Credit: Courtesy of AMC Odenkirk made that connection when speaking about Bryan Cranston’s cameo as Walt in the finale: “Jimmy finds himself in a f–king room with a guy who’s just like his brother Chuck, and he realizes he’s done it yet again. He’s put himself in a relationship with an older, smarter guy who treats him like s—t, and who he can’t gain any respect from. And isn’t that the way of people in real life, where they reenact these relationships they have as a child, and they think they’re moving on, and then they look around and go, ‘I just did it again’? You know, this might as well be Chuck standing here yelling at me calling me an asshole. And why do I want this guy’s f–king love?”
That scene in the finale between Jimmy and Walt “was even longer when it was shot,” Gould revealed. “We trimmed it down a little bit. It was like watching this great one-act play with those two guys together. It was just a powerhouse.”
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Betsy Brandt's appearance as Marie came together "pretty late in the game"
Image Credit: Courtesy of AMC Brandt surprised fans by reprising her Breaking Bad role as Hank Schrader’s widow Marie in the Saul finale, and Gould says she was a late addition to the script, but “I think we wanted very much someone to be the voice of the victims… of what Saul did during the years he was Saul Goodman, and that felt like the most credible character.”
He also calls Brandt “one of my favorite people in the world, and one of my favorite actors,” adding: “In my dream world, you’d do a Betsy Brandt/Rhea Seehorn TV series where they’re buddy cops or something.” Seehorn’s response? “I’m in!”
