'Better Call Saul' Finally Solved A Long-Running 'Breaking Bad' Mystery
This week’s episode of Better Call Saul, “Black and Blue,” was slightly less action-packed and anxiety-inducing than its season six predecessors – with the possible exception of the scene in which Howard goes full Raging Bull on Jimmy.
As the show continues to inch towards the Breaking Bad timeline, it’s also answering some lingering mysteries from its parent series, albeit in extremely subtle ways. Some of the bet parts of the show have sprang from an effort to connect to details that were only hinted at in Breaking Bad; most obviously, arguably two of the greatest TV characters in recent years, Lalo Salamanca and Nacho Varga, were created purely because they were randomly namechecked when Saul was first introduced in Breaking Bad.
Even more granularly; remember in season four of Breaking Bad, when Walt approaches Gus Fring’s house carrying a gun, only to get a phone call from Tyrus the enforcer, sternly advising him to “go home.”
Was Walt being followed? We never find out for sure, but as we’ve seen in the past two episodes of Better Call Saul, Gus’ quaint suburban house is anything but – it’s basically an elaborate decoy; he has a underground tunnel that connects to the house next door where he lives along with a squad of armed goons and a casino’s worth of surveillance equipment.
Which, again, is another example of why this show works so well as a prequel; this reveal makes complete sense given the current storyline (Gus is expecting Lalo to attack at any moment) but it also functions as a belated explanation for a mystery you probably forgot about more than ten years ago. As producer Vince Gilligan admitted on the Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, the writers “had no idea how Gus knew” about Walt originally, but just wanted it to feel like he had “eyes in the back of his head,” adding that this recent development “explains that pretty good.” And what else would you expect from the creatives who bent over backwards to solve a pizza-related plot hole?
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Top Image: AMC
