Better Call Saul finale

Better Call Saul ends with a satisfying finale that provides surprises, laughs, tears, and emotional gut punches.

He gets 86 years in prison – a shoddy prison at that – but he is beloved by the inmates who recognize the legend of Saul Goodman, the man who helped countless people, no matter the crime. In comparison, “Saul Gone” is not just clever wordplay, but a thematic bookend on a show that was never really about Saul Goodman, yet felt his presence loom large over the story. As for Jimmy, we don't get an easy death scene that absolves him of his crimes while the rest of the characters are left to pick up the pieces off screen. Not only did we already know that Jimmy would one day turn into Saul, but we learned from the first season that Jimmy had always struggled with his own inner Scarface, with "Slippin' Jimmy." No matter how hard he tried to do good things, he inevitably resorted back to Slippin' Jimmy, and eventually Saul, because it was much easier to put up that front than to take the hard road and confront his mistakes. Though he doesn't say it, we get the feeling this is the moment Jimmy would travel back to in order to correct things (made clear by Chuck having a copy of H. G. Wells' book in his hand). This is undoubtedly his biggest regret: failing to try to build a bond with his brother beyond obligations. Most shocking, however, is when he starts tearing up as he talks about Howard Hamlin's death, and goes as far as confessing to causing Chuck to lose his insurance, which ultimately led to him losing his job, then his life. In the very first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter says chemistry is "growth, then decay, then transformation!" The second flashback includes a surprise appearance from Bryan Cranston's Walter White in a scene set immediately after the events of Ozymandias. In an episode full of heartbreak, it is hilarious that Saul asks Walter if he has any regrets the day after he quite literally lost everything that mattered in his life. We meet the biggest ghost of Jimmy's past, Chuck. Set shortly before the first episode of Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy deliver groceries to Chuck. Though the older brother offers Jimmy the opportunity to stay and talk about work, Jimmy refuses, knowing Chuck would only take the opportunity to scoff at him for doing a bad job, a rare time where Jimmy was the one to turn down bond-building. First up is Mike, who answers by saying he'd go back to the day he accepted his first bribe, as that set him on a path that ended with his son dead. This feels like a retroactive attempt at making up for the way audiences continue to side with Walt in the years since the show ended. Once in custody, Gene slips back into Saul mode and manages to weasel his way out of a life-plus-190-years sentence in exchange for a brisk seven years in a comfy white-collar country club of a prison by telling a sad story about working out of fear of Walter — all while Marie Schrader (Betsy Brandt) listens in.

A great show pulls itself back from its own brink. Read our review of the 'Better Call Saul' series finale.

In the trade you call this a callback, and "Saul Gone" had a few. I greeted the last couple seasons of Saul with constant awe, and I'm not such a lapsed Catholic that I don't recognize the freedom of confession (followed by 86 years of penance). That feels like a rehearsal for something like The Third Man, a ferocious stroll with no look back. 50 episodes is a lot of time to spend rewatching, for a TV critic here at the end (?) of Peak TV. A sitdown with the Feds offers a sitdown with franchise history. He even unravels the tangled malpractice scheme that led to the suicide of his big brother Chuck ( [Michael McKean](https://ew.com/person/michael-mckean/)). Whereas Jimmy's big moment in the courtroom is precisely what it appears to be: A reclamation that's also a spiritual resurrection. She gazes upon a wall full of endless paperwork — an echo of the season 5 backlog in the public defender's office, boxes full of clients falling through the cracks of a broken system. The laughter turned into a transformation, and a rebirth. [Betsy Brandt](https://ew.com/person/betsy-brandt/)) looks Saul right in the face while she talks about her murdered husband. Here's a fairy tale for our time: a television character who discovers, to his horror, that his past lives forever in the streaming archive. And who takes down this difficult man, who rose to nasty glory in a decade that loved its difficult TV men?

The Better Call Saul finale gets a close reading from co-creator Peter Gould and stars Bob Odenkirk Rhea Seahorn.

I just felt so strongly that the right ending for Saul was to be in the system, the system that he’s made light of and twisted around for his own purposes. So some of us said, ‘What about another ending for Jesse?’ So in terms of the ‘trilogy’ of the shows, it feels very elegant that Walt dies, which he was always going to do. And of the three of them, Jimmy gets his soul back, but he’s going to be incarcerated for some amount of time. Added Seehorn: “It was the very last scene we shot of the series. But now there’s more to the story as Gould already had an inkling that Jimmy was fated for prison. Maybe it was the extra pressure of it being the finale that caused me to teeter a few times, much to the annoyance of everyone in post-production.” “It was a lot of feelings from six years of working with each other and playing these people. “It was the easiest scene we ever shot,” Odenkirk tells reporters with a laugh. For Odenkirk and Seehorn, it was the perfect way to wrap their filming experience. There was a version that didn’t have that; it ended with the two of them smoking,” Gould added. Of course, Jimmy also wanted to show Kim that the good man she fell in love was still in him, somewhere, and that he was capable of showing sincerity and remorse, something she’s wanted to see from him since he manipulated the bar committee into reinstating his law license at the end of season four. “I went back and forth on that for a while, and ultimately, having watched them both, it felt more honest to end with the two of them apart, rather than the two of them together.

The series finale of 'Better Call Saul' drew the show's biggest same-day audience since the end of season three.

Elsewhere Monday, The Bachelorette led primetime on the broadcast networks with 3.29 million viewers and a 0.76 in the 18-49 demo. The episode, “Saul Gone,” also had more viewers than any episode in season five, or season four — or any Saul installment since the third-season finale back in June 2017 drew 1.85 million people on its first night. Those numbers will only grow, of course, with delayed viewing and streaming. [series finale](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/better-call-saul-series-finale-explained-interview-1235199278/) for the Breaking Bad spinoff averaged 1.8 million viewers for AMC, a same-day season high by almost 400,000 viewers (the season premiere in April had 1.42 million viewers). Fox News’ The Five was the most watched cable program with 3.6 million viewers, and WWE Monday Night Raw on USA led the 18-49 chart on cable with a 0.53 rating. The Better Call Saul finale also averaged a 0.47 rating among adults 18-49, its best mark in the key ad demographic since the season five premiere in 2020. Better Call Saul has been adding about a million viewers with three days of DVR playback this season, according to Nielsen, and AMC says the show has performed well on its AMC+ streaming platform (though as is often the case with streaming services, there’s no public data to back up the claim). [Better Call Saul](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/better-call-saul/) drew the show’s biggest audience in three seasons — a span of more than five years. [Subscribe Sign Up](https://pages.email.hollywoodreporter.com/signup/) [Share this article on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&sdk=joey&display=popup&ref=plugin&src=share_button&app_id=352999048212581) [Share this article on Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&text=TV%20Ratings%3A%20%E2%80%98Better%20Call%20Saul%E2%80%99%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&via=thr) [Share this article on Email](mailto:?subject=thr%20:%20TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&body=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/%20-%20TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Show additional share options](#) [Share this article on Print]() [Share this article on Comment](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/#respond) [Share this article on Whatsapp](whatsapp://send?text=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High%20-%20https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/) [Share this article on Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=1&url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High&summary&source=thr) [Share this article on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Share this article on Pinit](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/link/?url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&description=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) [Share this article on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool/preview?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl&url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tv-ratings-monday-aug-15-2022-1235200151/&posttype=link&title=TV%20Ratings:%20‘Better%20Call%20Saul’%20Ends%20With%20Three-Season%20High) The final episode of