Better Call Saul: Season Four: Ending Explained

Better Call Saul has finally wrapped on it’s fourth Season. Similar to the Season Finales that preceded it, there is a lot to unpack from the shows ending and throughout this video I will be discussing Episode 10 in full detail. There will be heavy spoilers so it may be worth avoiding this video for now if you want to watch the finale with fresh eyes.

With that out the way, I’m Deffinition and I ruin the show so you don’t have to.

Episode 10 Ending Explained

The biggest take from Season Four is that Jimmy McGill has finally fully adopted the pseudonym ‘Saul Goodman.’ Whilst he mentioned it in the shows first season, here he has fully taken up the moniker and is now using it as his law firms legal name. Symbolically this shows that Jimmy is now an afterthought and the sleazy, lawyer, persona that we were introduced to in Breaking Bad is now the face that most will see.

After Jimmy’s Law reinstatement hearing didn’t go well because the board believed him to be insincere, the character has put some serious time into acting as an upstanding member of the community. He and Kim spend thousands of dollars to create a library wing dedicated to Chuck and Jimmy spends the best part of a year at his brother’s headstone grieving. This is all a ruse for Jimmy to get back in the good books of the law but unexpectedly he comes clean at a hearing that was meant to clear his name. Jimmy was supposedly going to read a letter from Chuck in order to pull at the board’s heartstrings but he ends up going off script and stating:

“This letter is between me and him and it should stay that way. My brother, Chuck – you knew him. He loved me in his own way. He loved me as a brother. He did not love me as a lawyer. All I wanted to do was make him proud. And he was not an easy man to make proud. He could be a real son of a bitch. Chuck was the one who was always right. And usually he was. For a guy like me, I did lousy in school, I lacked ambition, I always cut corners. For me to live up to the standards of Charles McGill…I mean: look at me. I’ll never be as moral as him. I’ll never be as smart. I’ll never be as good. I’ll never be as respected. I’ll never be Chuck. But I can try.”

This drives several board members to tears and gets Jimmy reinstated where he begins trading under the name Saul Goodman. It’s not a complete win however as Kim realises that he delivered the speech so convincingly that she may, in fact, be in the midst of a complete sociopath. Jimmy boasts that he completely tricked the board into believing his story which worries Kim massively. The character switches on a dime and we realise that the majority of the season has been a complete act on his behalf and that the more sinister side of his personality has been driving his actions the whole time. Perhaps the passing of Chuck, who had always been a moral compass, released him from the trappings he once had of becoming an out and out sleazy lawyer and his signing of Saul Goodman on the requisite documents confirm that he is nowhere to stay.

What Happened To Mike?

Similar to Saul, Mike deals with a lot in the shows final episode. Werner, who built the Meth Lab, has been perhaps overly lax with security throughout the show because he was under the impression that Mike had his back. Due to this he took a four-day leave of absence from building the lab and also let slip to the Salamancas what Gus’ overall scheme was. This is unacceptable to Gus and in the desert Mike murders him.

Mike has always been a killer but this is perhaps a step too far as he viewed Werner as an ally at some points but he knows that the job is of the utmost importance.

We return to the Meth Lab and get another huge tie into Breaking Bad when we are reintroduced to Gale. Gale states that though the lab is incomplete he will be able to work with what they have and though we know that things will progress there, it will always represent a failing for Mike. The lab will never truly be complete and Gus will always perceive this as a failure, perhaps putting blame slightly on Mike.

What happens after this will be answered in Season 5 but I would love to be a ‘fly on the wall’ in that place. Get it….cos there was an episode…with a fly…..never mind.