Warning: this story contains spoilers for Better Call Saul’s “Waterworks” episode. “In the end, you’re gonna hurt everyone around you,” esteemed lawyer Chuck (Michael McKean) once told younger brother Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). “You can’t help it, so stop apologizing and accept it. Embrace it.” By the time of Better Call Saul’s penultimate episode, set in the post-Breaking Bad timeline of November 2010, criminal lawyer Saul Goodman turned wanted criminal Gene Takovic (Odenkirk) has done just that. After Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) death and the collapse of the Heisenberg meth empire, the mustached manager of an Omaha Cinnabon was laying low — until an upsetting phone call with ex-wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) triggered Gene into breaking bad all over again.
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As part of an elaborate identity theft scheme with accomplice cab driver Jeff (Pat Healy), conman Gene has been posing as “Viktor,” drugging and duping drunk men before breaking into their homes and ripping them off — none the wiser until it’s too late. But in “Waterworks,” after Kim told Jimmy/Saul/Gene to turn himself into the police, Gene grows more daring (and more reckless) as he pursues the cancer-stricken Mr. Lingk (Kevin Sussman).
Helping himself to the drugged man’s expensive watches, Gene lingers too long as Jeff fumbles his way into a run-in with a police car outside. When Mr. Lingk suddenly stirs awake, Gene considers making his escape by bludgeoning the man with an urn containing his beloved dead dog’s ashes — but Mr. Lingk stumbles off, allowing Gene a chance to stealthily slip out the back.
It’s not a clean break. Jeff’s plugged-in mother, Marion (Carol Burnett), grows suspicious when her jailed son uses his phone call to phone Gene. Searching “Albuquerque con man” on Ask Jeeves, Marion stumbles upon Saul Goodman’s TV ads.
Gene menaces Marion — first verbally, then with a phone cord tightened in his grip — stopping only when the elderly woman tells him, “I trusted you.” She then presses the button on her Life Alert necklace, alerting the police to the wanted man in her kitchen: “And his name is Saul Goodman!”
Gene’s contact with Kim “is such a painful phone call, like the scene in Saul’s office with the divorce papers is painful,” Vince Gilligan, who wrote and directed “Waterworks,” told AMC.com. “And boy it puts stuff into motion because then Gene hangs up, he kicks in the plate glass on the pay phone, and then I think what he’s saying in his mind is, ‘Screw it. I’m going to go break bad. I’m going to make some real money and do some real crimes.’ It’s like — does he want to get caught? He’s acting like a maniac.”
The almost-violence against Mr. Lingk and Marion are “very similar scenes,” Gilligan said. “Is he actually going to hurt or maybe even kill both these people to escape detection, to escape arrest? The first time he does it with Mr. Lingk… it starts off kind of lighthearted. I mean, you’re thinking, ‘What in the hell is he doing?’ But it’s kind of funny, and the urn he picks up that he’s going to smash the guy’s head in with – that is the ashes from the guy’s beloved pet dog and it’s just so wrong! He’s coming down those stairs and you’re thinking, ‘My God, what is happening to this guy? This is not the guy we love. This is not the guy we recognize. It looks like he’s really going to stove this guy’s head in and probably kill him, and all for what? What is he doing?’”
But might Gene might have hurt his victim? “Luckily he doesn’t have to do it then, but I think he would have,” Gilligan said. “But that’s for the audience to decide. I don’t want to tell the audience what to think.”
In the closing scene where the audience is left to question whether Gene will strangle Marion with the phone cord, Gilligan revealed Burnett improvised the line that may have saved Marion’s life.
“I think that was a line Carol made up on the set, I don’t think it’s in the script. I think we were on the set and I think it felt like something was missing and she might have said, ‘What about if I said, ‘I trusted you?’” In that moment – which was a great addition – the clouds part for him and sanity prevails, thank God,” Gilligan explained. “And you see it on his face. Bob does such a great job in that moment – as does Carol – but you see it in his eyes this look of horror of ‘What was I thinking? How did I get here? How did I come to this? This is insane. I’m going to kill this nice old lady? What have I been doing here?’ And sanity floods back in and he runs, instead of assaulting her or killing her. But. Yeah. I think that’s what we want the audience to be asking themselves: ‘What happened to this guy?’”
The Better Call Saul series finale, titled “Saul Gone,” airs Monday, August 15 on AMC and AMC+.
