Better Call Saul Season 6 Will Have "Rashomon Effect" on Breaking Bad
Ever since Better Call Saul premiered, the prequel series has been charging toward the events of Breaking Bad. Some overlap has occurred over the years, with plenty of characters that appeared in the series appearing in Bob Odenkirk-lead drama and now with Bad's Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul already confirmed to appear in the sixth season of Saul. We don't yet know how these two characters will appear in the show, which is set a few years prior to Walter White's criminal career, but in a new interview Better Call Saul lead Rhea Seehorn has offered a unique tease for how they'll factor into the show, and how it will recontextualize what we know about Breaking Bad.
"I would say it's not just specific to faces and places," Seehorn told Entertainment Weekly about the connection between the two shows in Saul's final season. "It's also story lines from Breaking Bad, and understanding the peripheral parts of some of them, and some of the Rashomon effect of what was going on when." For those unaware, Rashomon was a film by Akira Kurosawa which used the storytelling device of showing a key moment from the different perspectives of various characters in the story, resulting in drastic changes to what was thought to have occurred. Recent examples of this on the big screen included The Last Duel and Knives Out.
Among the potential things this could refer to is the presence of Seehorn's own character, Kim Wexler. Officially married to Jimmy McGill aka Saul Goodman, Kim is never mentioned at all, even in passing, in Breaking Bad, so we might learn more about what she was doing off screen during that show. Her comments also line up with what Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould has previously said about its intersection with Breaking Bad.
"I think by the time you finish watching Better Call Saul, you're going to see Breaking Bad in a very different light," Gould told The Hollywood Reporter back in 2020. "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, that 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."
Better Call Saul will debuts its first two episodes on Monday, April 18 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC, airing almost two years after the cliffhanger that ended the Season 5 finale.