Noiseless Chatter Archive

There are good deaths and there are bad deaths. A main character has died. Someone who has been with the show from the start is no more. A man who, just a few episodes ago, probably believed he could find a way out now knows that there is no way forward. His story is over. This was his final chapter. He saw the end closing in on him, and he let it come, because he made all of his decisions long ago and all he’s left with are the consequences. He only has one decision left to make. There are good deaths and there are bad deaths. He can’t change the end of the story, but he can choose how to punctuate it. Last week, I spoke about the way in which Better Call Saul often feels like a series of disconnected stories. I wondered if those stories would all be brought together for the show’s climax. I also wondered if, instead, they wouldn’t, and they’d all just resolve themselves separately. “Rock and Hard Place” proves that the show is willing to let them resolve separately. I...

“Carrot and Stick” didn’t just make me understand “Wine and Roses” better; it was a strong, funny, interesting episode in its own right. I’d have loved this to have been the season opener instead but, for many obvious narrative reasons, that couldn’t have happened. What it made me understand about “Wine and Roses” is that the increased length of season six (13 episodes compared to 10 in previous seasons) is giving things a little more time to come to a boil. My assumption, at first, was that those extra episodes would be used to give us a longer boil, when we got to that point. More of an ending as opposed to more of a beginning, basically. I think that that would have been the obvious way to go, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with turning up the temperature more gradually. This was still the stronger episode, but I see now that “Wine and Roses” wasn’t a slow start in a race; it was the show warming up before the race even began. “Carrot and Stick” also calls back to...

Hey, everybody! It’s me! And Saul! We’re back! I was hesitant to commit to reviewing season six of Better Call Saul on the grounds that…man, everything is really, really, really, really, really hard. So forgive me if I end up lagging a bit. I’m going to do my best, but I think we can all agree that enough has happened between this and the end of season five to eat up our mental bandwidth. I love this show, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t pretend that I’ve been spending my time waiting for it to come back. I don’t want my entire review to be a list of things that have kept me distracted over the past two years, but if you’re curious about my experience watching “Wine and Roses,” it was basically me thinking to myself, “Oh, right, that happened.” That’s not the show’s fault, to be clear. It’s nobody’s fault. There have been more important things going on in the world. Add to that the fact that I haven’t kept up with any information about the show that’s come out since — ...