SUNDAY PILOT OF BETTER CALL SAUL TITLED UNO

year: 2015 Grade: C

After the death of THE WALKING DEAD moral compass we get an origin of the BREAKING BAD lawyer who had no morals, and his compass aimed in one direction – and that classically crooked name wasn’t even his real one: Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman is actually Jimmy McGill...

We begin much like the last stretch of BAD when Walter White was hiding out, incognito, dead to himself and the world… Yet Saul has a menial job leading to a bland apartment with a mixed drink to save his own pathetic life... And while little happens to the character within the first five minutes, the direction is sparsely artistic with the right touch of purgatory Noir – then we zoom out of the present and into the pulse of the matter at hand…

Only catching a rudimentary glimpse of fan-favorite, Mike, played by Jonathan Banks, as a security guard at the courthouse, a desperate Saul is working out a cryptic deal with a tableful of uptight suits – and what's occurring, like in the usual Vince Gilligan fashion, isn’t quite clear until it’s just clear enough to be intriguing and suspenseful… Much like Quentin Tarantino's explanation of what others have said about his style, “You don’t know what’s going on until you know what’s going on.”

While on paper the ingredients are all intact, there’s very little edgy dynamic… Saul spent so much time and energy selling himself to Walter White that now, as the man of the hour, it’s his task to successfully present others for the audience to embrace like we already did him – including Michael McKean as Saul’s… or rather… Jimmy’s lawyer brother, stricken with some kind of fatal disease (sound familiar?) and two skateboard riding accident-fakers resembling hipster versions of Napoleon Dynamite, filling in the same punchy pocket as any of Jesse Pinkman's banal tweaker pals, only athletic. 

And so, in phase one, the stuff just isn’t there, yet… Perhaps because “Jimmy” hasn’t come into the deliciously shifty style that would make him a good/bad lawyer, which explains the lethargic courtroom scene that had potential but, like everything else, fell flat, lacking our hero's pizazz and charm while the cliffhanger is more like balancing off the side of a gutter with very little to lose until, hopefully, the next episode, the true start of the series, will make things right as wrong again… Fingers crossed, and toes too. OVERALL RANK: Jedi, Rebel, Droid, Sith...