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We’re just six months away from the slated November debut of Better Call Saul, both the prequel to Breaking Bad and the sequel to all those years we spent agonizing over it, scrutinizing every set photo and minor production detail for something to worry about needlessly. And right on cue, the first of these things to overanalyze has arrived to coincide with the start of principal photography in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have returned to be welcomed back to the city where they first boosted the local meth and guacamole industries. Let’s begin.
As you can see from the first leaked set picture below, Better Call Saul’s pilot will feature a scene set at a skate park—likely where the casting call’s “twin skateboarder” characters, Zak and Luke, hang out.
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Based solely on this photo and limited information, you can now safely assume that, in this prequel series, Bob Odenkirk’s younger Saul Goodman is a brash, skateboarding lawyer, known for delivering his closing arguments while grinding the rails of the jury box. “The defense bails!” Saul probably says as his catchphrase. Our artist’s rendering is below.
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Also released this week is the below photo of a script from the first-ever Better Call Saul table read, noteworthy not only for confirming that Gilligan will direct the pilot, but also for reviving Gilligan’s use of symbolic color. As you can see, the script is pink—and as we learned over years of analyzing Breaking Bad, pink is the color of death and tragedy. We can now safely assume that, in Better Call Saul, everyone dies in the very first episode.
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With all the many details involved with getting Bob Odenkirk up to speed on his skateboarding, and the needless waste of introducing all of these characters just to kill them off, it’s hardly a surprise that Better Call Saul is already behind schedule. Gilligan recently told The Hollywood Reporter that the show is a week to two weeks behind, and candidly aired some of his worries about attempting to follow-up Breaking Bad at all.
“If it’s After M*A*SH rather than Frasier, it won’t be for lack of hard work and wishful thinking and a lot of smart people doing their best, but you just don’t know until the world takes it,” Gilligan said, adding, “It may turn out that this was a mistake to do this.” Still, Gilligan acknowledged that these aren’t things he can “fixate on” right now, and that he just has to push through and believe in what they’re doing—which is, as we now know, introducing a totally rad skater Saul Goodman, then immediately killing him. That’s Better Call Saul.