re: Official Better Call Saul Season 3 Episode 1: Mabel

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9 more episodes left

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Warning: This story contains spoilers for Monday's season-three premiere of Better Call Saul, "Mable."

The second-season finale of Better Call Saul ended with Jonathan Banks' Mike wondering who left the note "Don't" on his car to warn him against taking an unnecessary violent action.

It also ended with Chuck (Michael McKean) prepared to leverage Jimmy's (Bob Odenkirk) data fabrication against him toward unknown purposes.

And after Monday night's third-season premiere…we're still in the same general place, but in Better Call Saul fashion, the screws have been tightened. Mike, after a long and protracted search of his car, knows he's being tracked and is on the trail of his pursuer (whose presumed identity is known to Breaking Bad fans). And Jimmy thinks he's OK with Chuck, but he doesn't know Chuck recorded him and has begun to set something in motion.

Patience is everything when it comes to this Breaking Bad prequel, and series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould got on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about the show's unique tone, whether or not they're sympathetic toward Chuck and how much of Mike's taking apart a car is the right amount.

They also weigh in on what happened to poor Gene from Omaha in the season-opening black-and-white sequence set after the events of Breaking Bad and whether we're really going to have to wait until the fourth premiere to find out if Gene is OK.

Gene from Omaha has been a once-a-season character, but surely you're not going to wait until next spring to follow up on where things were left in the premiere?

Vince Gilligan: (Laughs.) What's the best way to answer that?

Peter Gould: I don't know if there is an answer to that.

Gilligan: Just that we're more sadistic than we look. The good thing about the fans of Better Call Saul and the fans of Breaking Bad before that is that we trust them to be in it for the long haul. Fans keep tabs on story details and plot points and little snippets of detail and information. I'm not sure most other shows have fans quite like ours in the sense that our fans really do have an extreme amount of patience and attention to detail and God bless 'em for that. We don't think of it as punishing them by making them wait a long time for certain threads of story to pay off. In my mind, I think of it as rewarding them for their intelligence. Maybe I'm looking through the wrong end of the telescope, but think of it as people's attention being paid off, although sometimes later rather than sooner.

Can you at least tell me if it's the stress of pent-up self-denial or something more serious that's wrong with Gene?

Gould: I hate to close down any possibility. I think he's shocked himself in that scene. I think that's fair to say. I don't think that he was expecting that he would stand up and make a spectacle of himself and draw the attention of the cops the way that he did and that certainly had a big impact on Gene. I will say, I find Gene fascinating. Like you, I'm already waiting to see more of Gene. I love the way Bob plays the character and there's something fascinating about this guy who's such a survivor, but he's scurrying around like the cockroach after the apocalypse. He's trying to hide from the big feet getting ready to stomp him. I find that fascinating and I find it fascinating that he's still got — I guess — a little touch of either Saul Goodman or Jimmy McGill that made him yell to that kid.

Gilligan: And then now maybe he's paying the consequences of that huge adrenaline rush that just went through him. Or maybe it's possible that we just watched him drop dead and that's the end of that story. I didn't see him breathing at the end there. Maybe he's dead.

Gould: It's after Breaking Bad, so he could die.

Gilligan: I don't think so, though. I think we're being goofy.

For the first two appearances, I interpreted Omaha as almost purgatory for Gene/Saul/Jimmy. Watching this time, though, is it possible that it's really more hell?

Gilligan: I think any of those things are possible, but maybe ultimately through purgatory or even hell, lies salvation. Who knows? Maybe it's a lot of different things and maybe it's gonna appear to be different things at different times to him and to us, the audience. This new world, this black-and-white world he finds himself in, it really is fraught with possibilities both good and bad. Not to be overly coy, but if and when we see more of that world — and as one of the first fans of the series, I'm hoping we do — I think we've got a lot of field to plow in the post-Breaking Bad/Omaha world. We've got a lot of story possibilities arrayed before us.

"Sugartown" is such a good match for "Address Unknown" and "Funny How Time Slips Away" as this season's Gene/Omaha song. When do the specific songs come into the process?

Gilligan: We were in the editing room and the scene was already edited together. Editing-wise, we try to do things a little differently than some shows and some movies do. A lot of times a movie or TV show will cut to what's called "temp music," temporary music that's…. Oh hell! I'm talking with The Hollywood Reporter. Everybody reading this knows what temp music is! We usually don't cut to temp music. We're real editing room Nazis. In a good way. If there is such a thing as a good Nazi, which there isn't, so we should probably find a different analogy. We're real strict. We're real drill instructors in the editing room.

We follow rules and one of our rules is, "It damn well better work without music." So we'll edit without music. We'll edit dry. So this thing was completely cut together before we picked a song. And then, and only then, did we go about the process of looking for a song and at that point we enlist the very talented Thomas Golubic, our music supervisor, and he comes up with ideas. At that point, "Sugartown" was floated among some other really good songs and we picked that one.

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So is he setting Ernesto up?

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You're right but do we need this storyline for another full season? 3 years of this is enough in my opinion.

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