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While most of the attention of the last 24 hours has been focused on Community, let us not forget we’re also getting more of another Sony show that ended before the Internet was ready. Better Call Saul is set to debut the first of its two promised seasons next year, and we already know that it will feature appearances from Breaking Bad characters we thought we lost, before we learned that nothing stays dead anymore, ever since we moved all our TVs over this Indian burial ground. And according to a new interview with executive producer Peter Gould, those possibilities are endless, seeing as Better Call Saul exists outside of time, like all immortal beings.
“One of the great things about having a timeline which is flexible is that perhaps some of it takes place before Breaking Bad, during Breaking Bad and after Breaking Bad,” Gould said of the show’s philosophy of eternalism, in which scenes will alternate back and forth over several decades, rather than just taking place in the 1980s as initially suspected. In Saul’s world, all of the events before, after, and even during Breaking Bad are happening simultaneously, all of their awful consequences looping endlessly across the infinite. And like God himself standing outside the block universe, this means no one is truly dead to Peter Gould—not even Walter White, who he believes will return in some capacity, simply because he wills it.
Still, having watched Breaking Bad, even Gould knows that such absolute power can have terrible consequences, so he doesn’t plan to abuse it by having Saul to lean too heavily on its predecessor. “We want to make a show that stands on it own, is its own story and is a brand extension,” Gould said, before disappearing into the fourth dimension.
In light of Gould’s remarks, Aaron Paul’s apparent indecision as to whether he will or won’t be returning can actually be seen as an expression of the uncertainty inherent in measuring exactly where Better Call Saul will be along its fluid Breaking Bad space-time continuum. Let’s call this the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” which we just came up with.