Breaking Bad was one of those rare TV shows that just kept getting better and better, right up until the end, and when it was revealed that Vince Gilligan would be following up the series with a prequel spin-off centered around Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), I was quite hesitant. How do you follow in those footsteps? How could you ever hope to top that first story? Well, Gilligan has proven me wrong as Better Call Saul has not only grown to become a worthy successor to Breaking Bad, but also a fantastic series in its own right.
A sixth and final season of Better Call Saul will conclude the series, as well as sync the story up with Breaking Bad, and co-creator Peter Gould recently spoke with THR about balancing the two objectives. "It's the devil's own Rubik's Cube because we know where these characters are and we know kind of where some of them end up," Gould said. "There are characters like Kim Wexler, whose fates are wide open. And then there are characters like Jimmy McGill, we know very specifically what he was doing for a couple of years there, or at least what he was doing when Walter White was around. So yeah, there's a lot of limitations. There's a lot of obligations. In some ways that's the fun of it. In some ways, the fun of it is trying to make it all fit together and to make Better Call Saul its own coherent story in itself. And yet also, kind of create a frame around Breaking Bad." When Better Call Saul comes to an end, Gould added that you'll see Breaking Bad in a very different light.
I think by the time you finish watching Better Call Saul, you're going to see Breaking Bad in a very different light. I think we're going to learn things about the characters in Breaking Bad that we didn't know. We're going to learn things about the events of Breaking Bad that we didn't know. And we're going to learn things about the fates of a lot of these characters that may surprise people or certainly throw them into a different light. I think we started this 2007, so that's 13 years of work that's distilled, this all has to fit together. Hopefully like a perfect jigsaw puzzle. I don't know if all the joints are going to be absolutely even. I'd sure hope so. We're going to do our best to sand it down.
Peter Gould and the writing team are in the midst of breaking episode six of the 13-episode final season right now, and they have a lot of big ideas regarding where the series will go. "I don't think anyone's done exactly this on television before," Gould teased. "So, I think we're in slightly unexplored territory and we'll see whether we find out that the world is round or whether we sail off the edge of it." Although the COVID-19 pandemic has kept production from beginning, Gould is optimistic that shooting will get underway before too long in order for the final season to debut on AMC sometime in 2021.