Key Breaking Bad Characters Confirmed to Appear in Better Call Saul Season 5

We're just a few weeks away from the return of the Breaking Bad prequel series Better Call Saul, and AMC Networks and Sony Pictures Television made some exciting announcements about the fifth season of the series at the Television Critics' Association Press Tour today. As has been tradition, the series will see the return of some fan favorite characters from the flagship drama, this time with actors Dean Norris and Steven Michael Quezada confirmed to return as DEA Agents Hank Schrader and Steven Gomez. Though the two previously perished in the fifth season of Breaking Bad, don't forget that most of Better Call Saul takes place years before the original series, so an appearance by them is not all that strange especially since they seem to be familiar with Saul when he made his season 2 debut.

To make things even more interesting for fans, it was also confirmed that the late Robert Forster will also appear in the fifth season of Better Call Saul, reprising his role of vacuum salesman/person disappearer Ed Galbraith. Forster first appeared in the final season of Breaking Bad and later returned for last year's El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, he passed away the day that the film was released on Netflix. Co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould confirmed that Forester's scenes for the series were shot concurrently with the filming of El Camino.

Getting ahead of the question on many fan's minds, Gould once again confirmed that Bryan Cranston's Walter White and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman will not appear in the fifth season of the series. To complicate this denial, Better Call Saul also already been renewed for a sixth and final season to air in 2021, so the window of opportunity for them to appear is shrinking.

This isn't the first time that supporting characters from Breaking Bad have appeared in Better Call Saul either beyond Bob Odenkirk's Saul Goodman, Jonathan Banks' Mike Ehrmantraut, and Giancarlo Esposito's Gus Fring. Major players like Tuca Salamanca, Hector Salamanca, Huell Babineaux, and Gale Boetticher have all appeared along with small time cameos like the obnoxious banker on the phone "Ken" and Vamanos Pest owner Ira.

Better Call Saul Season 5 will debut on AMC with a special two-night premiere event with the first episode of the new season debuting Sunday, February 23 at 10 PM and the second to follow on Monday, February 24 at 9 PM ET. Future episodes will air on Mondays afterward.

Better Call Saul season 4 saw Jimmy teetering between the poles of being a good man and the bad man we know he becomes, following the suicide of his brother, Chuck. While on the one hand, Chuck's death freed Jimmy up from his brother's shadow - on the other hand, Chuck was also Jimmy's only real moral compass in life, and without his supervision, Jimmy was left to make the slow descent into the dark side. While his legal practice was on suspension Jimmy turned back to hustling on the streets; by the time of the season 4 finale, he was conning an entire review board using his dead brother as emotional leverage. Jimmy's girlfriend and longtime supporter Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) finally saw the con man for who he was in those last few scenes of the finale, as Jimmy officially changed his lawyer name to Saul Goodman. That turn has set up a major relationship conflict to come in season 5, as we may finally get to see the tragedy of how Kim exits Jimmy's life.