Better Call Saul Writer Explains Gene’s “Upsetting” Phone Call

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Monday’s “Breaking Bad” episode. Who did Gene call on Better Call Saul? In the episode titled “Breaking Bad,” which takes place during and after the events of Breaking Bad, Gene Taković (Bob Odenkirk) is laying low in the post-Bad timeline of Omaha, Nebraska, 2010. Weeks have passed since meth manufacturer Walter White (Bryan Cranston) died in Breaking Bad and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) fled Albuquerque for Alaska in El Camino, leaving criminal lawyer Saul Goodman — a.k.a. Gene, a.k.a. Jimmy McGill — as the “hottest” suspect from the Heisenberg empire left for the police to pursue. 

At 3:01 pm on November 12, Gene telephones his former assistant Francesca (Tina Parker), who promised to pick up the call arranged back in a Breaking Bad-era cold open in Saul Season 4 episode “Quite a Ride.” From a payphone outside an abandoned rest stop somewhere in New Mexico, Francesca reveals that Saul Goodman is still “hot” months after “shit hit the fan” in Season 5 of Breaking Bad. 

All of Saul’s assets — the nail salons, the vending machines, even Laser Tag — have been seized by the Feds. S’all gone, man. 

Francesca also gives Gene the lowdown on his former criminal associates, disclosing the fates of Huell (Lavell Crawford) and Walt’s wife, Skyler White (Anna Gunn). Then she drops the bombshell: she’s heard from Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him after their “fun and games” led to the death of Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian). Kim called to check up on Francesca after Saul Goodman was implicated in the DEA’s investigation into “Heisenberg” — and she asked about him. 

Gene phones Palm Coast Sprinklers in Titusville, Florida, looking for Kim Wexler. The operator connects Gene to someone, but the person on the other end goes unheard: the audience sees Gene in a heated conversation with someone, the noise drowned out by passing semi trucks, ending with a raging Gene smashing the phone booth, Goodfellas-style. 

“I don’t want to give anything away, but we don’t hear the phone call,” producer Thomas Schnauz, who wrote and directed the episode, told The Hollywood Reporter. “So we don’t know exactly what Gene is told. It’s something very upsetting. It’s something that upsets him a lot. So I think we have to wait and see exactly what went down on that phone call, and we will hear the details of it in a future episode.” 

Whatever Gene hears on the end of the line, it’s not to do with money: Schnauz noted that Jimmy/Saul/Gene is still sitting on a stash seen in previous black-and-white flash forwards to the post-Breaking Bad timeline. Instead, after low-level scheming with cab driver Jeff (Pat Healy), the phone call was enough to push Gene into breaking bad when he’s supposed to be laying low. 

“He’s not desperate for money. He still has all the diamonds in a little Band-Aid case, and Francesca mentions all that money he got away with and he kind of sloughs it off. So he is not desperate for money. He’s not doing this for money at all,” Schnauz said. “He’s doing this because something about that phone call brought up a lot of pain and hurt. And as we know from the past — and all that went down with Howard Hamlin, and Kim hiding the truth about Lalo and the reasons why she did it, and the breakup that happened — it all caused a lot of pain that pushed him into going full Saul Goodman.”

Schnauz continued, “He’s been Gene for a while now, but he had a little taste of Saul Goodman or Slippin’ Jimmy or whatever you want to call it, in episode 610 [“Nippy”] with the mall scam. He was able to push that aside, but something on that phone call upset him so much that the pain welled up again and he had to go back to his drug of choice, which is Saul Goodman, to numb that pain. So he’s doing none of this for money. I don’t think he gives a crap about any of the money.”

“As we see in the montage, he just shoves it in a hole and leaves it there. The money is really secondary,” he added. “I mean, it’s part of the game. It’s how you keep score. How much money you earn during these scams is a way of scorekeeping how successful you are. That’s the only reason he cares about the money. It’s like, ‘How many points did I score today?’” 

Better Call Saul next airs its penultimate episode, “Waterworks,” on August 8; the series finale, “Saul Gone,” airs August 15 on AMC.