When Breaking Bad ended and Better Call Saul began, many fans of the show were watching trying to imagine how creator Vince Gilligan could possibly make his new show about Walter White’s crooked lawyer Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill anywhere close to being as good as Breaking Bad.
As Better Call Saul enters season four this August, the prequel is well on its way to being as good as its competitor. Vince Gilligan and fellow creator Peter Gould have done a masterful job at pacing this show out and giving us the gradual evolution of Jimmy devolving into Saul. Kind of like how Walt went from a chemistry teacher to a drug kingpin.
Each season, viewers get a little more of the Breaking Bad environment. And while we have Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut and Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring, we’re all waiting for the moment where we see Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul come back as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Gilligan really wants to have Walt and Jesse back but he knows the situation needs to make sense and he can’t rush things.
“I desperately want to see both of them on Better Call Saul,” Gilligan tells EW. “Peter wants it, the writers do, the actors do.”
Gilligan believes that enough time has passed — and so much anticipation has built — that a brush-by may not quite do the trick. “It wouldn’t feel as satisfying if it was just a cameo or an Alfred Hitchcock walkthrough,” he says. “I think we’ve waited long enough. We damn well better have a good reason for them to show up. I just hope we figure it out because I’ve got to hear, ‘Yeah, bitch!’ one more time.”
Cranston and Paul are down for this as well.
“My attitude towards it is the same I had from when Better Call Saul first started,” Paul says. “If Vince decided to put Jesse in Better Call Saul, it’s going to be for a reason, and that reason’s going to be very satisfying for me. I trust in Vince. I don’t think he would just do that to satisfy the fans. It would have a purpose, and whether or not he decides to find that purpose or searches for the purpose, I don’t know. But if he does find that purpose, I’m happy to jump on board.”
Cranston seems to be on that same page of possibility. “If he asked, I would just say yes,” says the actor, who notes that he has a “couple of ideas” that he will pitch to Gilligan and Saul co-creator Peter Gould. “[Vince] takes such meticulous care of his characters and the story, and he changed our lives. ‘Yes’ is the answer. Even if it’s just a brush-by. A quick little something. We’ve come to know people who we’ve seen before but we don’t know that we’ve seen them before, because we were in the store and we just passed by them. Or we might even have a word or two. ‘Oh no, please go ahead.’ ‘Thank you for holding the door.’ And then five years later, you would never remember that. So something as minuscule as that could be very interesting in the fabric of the whole thing.” He adds: “We have those kind of encounters every day, and I think that would be fun for the audience — and the most honest.”
So it seems like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fans will see Walt and Jesse show up in Albuquerque at some point, it’s just a matter of when.
[Entertainment Weekly/Photo: AMC]