If Better Call Saul's second season was a lighthearted and slow-paced transition, its third season is a climactic, fast-paced, consistently shocking season full of payoffs, easily ranking as one of the best seasons in both this series and Breaking Bad.
Coming after the set-up in Season 2's finale Klick, this season focuses on the conflict between Jimmy and Chuck culminating in a big trial halfway through the season. However, in spite of Jimmy's law license being at stake, the storyline feels like it's more about Chuck's slow and painful fall throughout the season. Not only does he lose the trial against Chuck, he loses his reputation, his job, and his family. As for Jimmy, this season seems to be more about him starting to do some incredibly questionable things, even more than the last two seasons. Aside from using Chuck's mental illness against him in the trial, Jimmy also turns one of his elderly clients into a pariah to motivate them to accept a settlement. There's a reason we get introduced to the name "Saul Goodman" this season, as that's easily the worst thing he's ever done. Kim also has a pretty solid subplot about being overworking culminating in the failure of her and Jimmy's firm. As for Mike, this season introduces him to none other than Gus Fring. While he's still as terrifying as always, it's fascinating to see how much livelier he used to be. We also get to see more of his job in Los Pollos Hermanos and how he hides his life of crime from his employees. Nacho is probably the highlight of this storyline, though, as his plan to assassinate Hector is tense, culminating in us finally learning how he ended up in the wheelchair.
As you can tell from the last paragraph, a lot of stuff happened this season, far more than Seasons 1 and 2. This season is incredibly fast-paced, but it thankfully doesn't feel rushed. As a matter of fact, all the buildup in the previous season, makes the many events that happened this season feel all the more rewarding and earned. Chuck's trial in Chicanery is probably the biggest example of this, an episode that had the impact it does because it's something that the show has been building up to ever since that big twist in Pimento. The fast pace of this season and constant twists of this season also made me realize something impressive about Better Call Saul, and that's the fact that it's a prequel yet the show still manages to surprise me and make me tense. If you've seen Breaking Bad, you know that Saul and Mike can't die, Hector has to be incapacitated at some point, and Chuck is probably going to bite the dust given that he's never mentioned in the original series, but this show still manages to be surprising and engaging. This is probably because of how the series focuses a lot on career which is far more flexible than whether or not someone lives and dies, but there's also the fact that you won't quite know the fate of characters like Kim and Nacho, and returning characters like Saul, Mike, and Gus instead leave you wondering how they became the way that they did.
With as much going on as this season, the highlights this time around were soaring:
Witness: You'd think that for an episode with Gus's first appearance, that would be the highlight. And as great as seeing Gus again was, it wasn't even the best part of Witness. Rather, what really made this episode a classic for me was the shocking events near the end of the episode where Jimmy learns about the tape, confronts Chuck about it, and destroys it only to allow himself to get arrested.
Chicanery: Easily the highlight of the series to date, the climactic trial between Jimmy and Chuck is a tense, heartbreaking, and consistently surprising courtroom drama, with the tables frequently turning between the two. And then there's the ending, where Jimmy uses Chuck's mental illness against him to render the case illegitimate and destroy his credibility, that's simultaneously incredibly satisfying and somewhat cruel, leaving you with very mixed emotions by the end of the episode.
Fall: This might have been the hardest episode to watch in the entire series. Jimmy's scheme to turn Irene's friends against her is ridiculously cold-hearted and sets new standards of how low he can get, but this episode also has Nacho's disastrous failure to kill Hector, Kim overworking herself into getting in a car crash, and Howard finally falling out with not just Chuck but Jimmy as well, and it's deserved too! Fall really shows that in spite of Chuck's elitism, both he and his brother are just awful people.
Lantern: Better Call Saul finally nails its first season finale, with Lantern being a jam-packed and shocking ending to the season. Jimmy apologizing to Irene and her ex-friends is painful and surprising but ultimately the right thing for him to do, Nacho giving Hector a stroke caught me off guard since his first attempt didn't work as did Gus presumably knowing what happened, and worst of all, watching Chuck slowly lose everything until he burns himself in his own house is devastating and signals a massive shift in the series's dynamics.
Overall, Better Call Saul's third season was excellent, managing to be fast-paced, climactic, morally complex, and surprising without falling into any of the prequel trappings.
5/5 Stars
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