How Better Call Saul makes Walter White less sympathetic

Better Call Saul has been great, but it makes Walter White a much less sympathetic character.

It’s a spin-off to a beloved TV show at a similar level of quality. It’s a prequel that manages to add to the universe and the characters from the previous show. There’s only one way Better Call Saul has managed to detract from Breaking Bad. In deepening the stories of Mike Ehrmantraut and Jimmy McGill (sorry, Saul), it casts the actions of Walter White in a harsher light.

Note: Huge spoilers for both BB and BCS are going to follow. If you haven’t caught up to season 3, read on at your peril!

Mike started criminal life more wisely than Walt

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In the first two seasons of Breaking Bad, the show went to great pains to depict Walter as entering an environment that he was not suited for. Do you remember that Walt only killed Krazy-8 because of irrefutable evidence that he was going to shiv Walt? How he expected Jessie to be able to sell all two pounds of crystal meth a week by himself, without the help of a distributor or a dealer network?

Walt was an excellent chemist and a genius, but adapting to the underworld was a rough process for him. Compare that to Mike. In Better Call Saul, every illegal action Mike takes shows him applying what he learned as a police officer to his new career.

Let’s look at the episode “Pimento.” Mike has been hired as bodyguard by Daniel, a first time criminal. Daniel is selling pharmaceutical pills from his company to Ignachio “Nacho” Varga illegally. Mike doesn’t take a gun to the first drug meet, because he researched Nacho thoroughly. Mike knows that  Nacho’s deal with Daniel is a secret side source of income. From this, Mike calculates that Nacho will want the deal to go smoothly.

Mike later sums up his philosophy by saying “…if you’re going to be a criminal, do your homework”.

Jimmy was a more natural criminal than Walt, too

Jimmy McGill, attorney at law, is less experienced than Mike. However, when it comes to being able to come up with scams and hustles, he has experience, quick wits, and natural grafter charm. We see Jimmy try to be a straight arrow out of gratitude to his older lawyer brother Chuck. However, even when he was trying to defend innocent people, Slippin Jimmy’s “colourful methods” came through.

It’s all there in the second season episode “Amarillo.” Jimmy’s attempting to get clients for the class action lawsuit Davis & Main are building with Howard Hamlin and McGill (HHM).

What does Jimmy do? He bribes the bus driver of possible clients so that he can board the bus, and talk to a woman who answered his flyer. Doing this in front of an audience, he was able to get 24 clients from that one response.

Are the people he signs up wronged innocents? Yes. But he risked disbarment, and the methods he used could undermine their case if Sandpiper’s lawyers found this out.  Jimmy’s personality made him a more natural fit for a criminal lifestyle than Walter White was at first.

Knowing Mike more means hating his killer more

It was clear in Breaking Bad that all of the money Mike made through crime was going to be given to his granddaughter Kaylee.

Thanks to Better Call Saul, we now understand Kaylee’s dad was killed by Troy Hoffman, his own crooked partner. We understand Mike feels guilty for getting his own son to ‘’debase himself’’ in a futile effort to save his own life. Knowing all this makes the tragedy of Walt gunning him down in cold blood later more capricious.

Saul is a very sympathetic character

Before Better Call Saul, Saul was an enigma to us. With Better Call Saul we are learning how much he sacrificed to do a job that fit his skills and character. We’ve learned he wanted to make his older brother proud by walking with the angels. We’ve seen his efforts as a public defender.

We saw how deeply he’s stung in “Pimento” when he finds out his own brother prevents him from getting a job at HHM twice. How hurt he is that, no matter what he does, he’ll never have Chuck’s full forgiveness.

Yes, Jimmy crosses ethical lines by altering Chuck’s documents so that he fails at the Mesa Verde hearing. Jimmy does it out of a mixture of love and a genuine desire to help Kim succeed professionally. Chuck’s retaliation is to launch a campaign to get Jimmy disbarred. Flashbacks throughout season 2 reveal what Chuck resented Jimmy for most of all: The fact that everyone from their mom to Chuck’s own wife liked Jimmy more.

Knowing his brother did so much to sabotage his professional ambitions makes Saul’s success, even as a criminal lawyer, somewhat heroic.

Yet from Breaking Bad, we know he’s going to lose it all in 2009

In the Breaking Bad episode “Granite State,” Saul tells Walt “…If I’m lucky, month from now, best-case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha”.

From the very beginning of Better Call Saul, we can see his prediction came to pass. We can also see how much he hates his life now. The flash forward parts of the episodes are shot in black and white. In a way, this is an extension of how season 2 of Breaking Bad used black and white to flash forward to a terrible future. The difference is that Breaking Bad’s flash forwards were loaded with portend and foreboding. In Better Call Saul, they’re filled with soul crushing hopelessness and regret. The contrast between how silent and defeated Saul is in present day Nebraska, and how we knew him before is painful.

Roger Ebert once said Cinema was an empathy machine. That after following a protagonist around for two to three hours, we come to identify with their motives and choices at least a little bit. Breaking Bad asked us to relate to a chemist turned kingpin, and the student he gaslights into assisting him. Now, Better Call Saul asks us to spend more than 40 hours empathizing with the enforcer and lawyer whose livelihood he also incinerated.

Better Call Saul gives Breaking Bad‘s tragedy more focus

The next time I’m watching Breaking Bad, I think I’ll lose my patience with Walt sooner. Yet I consider that a plus.

Walt’s actions were poisonous, but it was so easy to get caught up in the excitement of Walt problem solving and ignore much of the human cost. Better Call Saul makes it impossible to ignore that. Greater empathy for Mike and Saul makes the toxicity of Walt’s version of the American dream clearer and more direct. With both shows, Vince Gilligan has crafted a chewy and satisfying universe of sin and consequence. I’m looking forward to seeing how Saul’s story ends.

Who else is looking forward to seasons four and five?