Better Call Saul Season 6 'Wines and Roses' Review: The Dread is Front and Center
Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist
This article contains mild spoilers about the first two episodes of Better Call Saul Season 6 “Wines and Roses” and “Carrots and Sticks”
Author Biases: I think Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the 5 best TV Dramas ever.
Most TV dramas, to put it bluntly, have good seasons and bad seasons.
Sometimes the show follows a bell curve: it starts off good in the first season or two, becomes great in the next couple of seasons, then finishes badly in the last couple seasons.
Other times, the show peaks early, being great in the first two seasons, only to fall apart trying to continue a plot arc that was only meant to last a season or two.
Then for many other shows, you might get an ok season of television, only to be surrounded by mediocrity.
And then there’s Better Call Saul, which, has such consistency of quality throughout every season you can’t tell them apart.
The start of Season 6 is no different, with two episodes: “Wine and Roses”, and “Carrot and Sticks”. Better Call Saul picks up right where we left off: plot wise, tension wise, and quality wise. Its corny to describe a 10 episode season as an 8 hour movie, but with ‘Better Call Saul’ it is true. All of the seasons have the same consistency of approach and quality; its remarkable how they are able to sustain this across 12 different seasons on two separate shows.
This particular premiere was more nerve wracking than most opening episodes, from Nacho immediately hiding from the Salamanca clan, Don Eladio’s men, and (welp) Fring’s men, to Saul accidentally dropping Lalo’s name to the police, to about 4 other scenes at least.
This wasn’t nerves quite like how I curled into a fetal position during the “Ozymandias” episode of Breaking Bad, but, for a premiere, it was quite startling, and exciting, considering we still have 5 episodes in this half season.
Outside of being tense, we also got a great look at a Kim Wexler who is starting to (or may have already completely) break bad. One of the great turns of this show was revealing the purpose of Better Call Saul to be not about how Jimmy broke bad, but how he causes others around him to self destruct, from his brother Chuck, to now his wife Kim.
At this point in the story, Jimmy is closer to his honest self than we would ever expect being this close to the end game. He’s as reserved as ever entering into shenanigans that Kim cooks up and even needlessly pays the Kettlemans off after Kim threatens the IRS on them.
What Jimmy is this? A show that promised Saul Goodman after the 1st season still treads lightly in getting to his personal finish line, but is full speed ahead to the finish line for other characters like Kim. Its genius, and scary. Most filmmakers keep the dread hiding around the corner. The BCS folks give Dread top billing.
Take for example the opening montage of cleaning out Saul’s house; it is brutal. The show knows exactly where our hearts and thoughts lie, with Kim, closing on her long held memento at the end, spilled from the moving truck. Vince Gilligan delivered exactly what we were dreading in Breaking Bad during ‘Ozymandias”, and we have a feeling with a few more seasons under his belt, now only will he deliver, but he will make sure we dread it as much as humanly possible during the remaining episodes.
We’re used to seeing good people go bad, but we get squeamish when we see bad people ruin other good people.
We have a gut feeling ‘Better Call Saul’ is going to leverage that dread to its max potential in the remaining 11 episodes.
We would say we’re not ready, but not only are we not ready, we’ll never be ready.
You can’t get better TV drama than that.
Other thoughts
We thought Giancarlo Esposito was strangely used in his initial season of ‘Better Call Saul’, leaning on his sinister side a bit much and being a bit monotone in delivery. We’re now seeing some of his best work, especially in this premiere, from some of the changes in pitch and tone mid-scene (even mid-sentence sometimes), to how Gus acted when he knocked over the glass in the trailer.
That was such a genius little bit of writing, because
a) Gus is always so careful in everything, him knocking over a glass by accident was truly shocking and showed how nervous he was
b) he still made sure to pick up every piece of little glass even during the midst of the tense conversation.
Ray Campbell, who plays Fring’s henchman Tyrus, got some lines in this episode!! Usually he talks only with his permanently raised eyebrows, and his pursed lips. We googled him to see if he did the same thing in other shows, and sadly, he did not, to the point that we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t recognize him without it. Such a great choice to be able to convey intimidation and uniqueness without saying a word.
We also love Kevin Wachtell as the Mesa Verde Bank President, played by Rex Linn. Howard Hamlin and Kevin Wachtell represent about 70% of company CEOs that we have met; kudos to them for nailing the CEO personality types so easily.
The line by Craig Kettleman telling Kim to dial 9 as she is about to blackmail them generated a legitimate howl of laughter from me in an episode that had me biting my teeth most of the time.
Closing Thoughts
We simply don’t get television like this often. We have 11 episodes left. Treasure these episodes, celebrate it, share with friends, especially those that watched Breaking Bad but refuse to watch Better Call Saul. We don’t get these opportunities often, and, as Jimmy McGill is about to experience, life happens fast, too fast.