Better Call Saul's "Bagman" episode shows how Vince Gilligan and his team have become better at telling stories since Breaking Bad

Rolling Stone

Monday's episode is "the latest and clearest piece of evidence in an argument I’ve been building in my head for a while: Breaking Bad tells the more fundamentally interesting (or, at least, more exciting) story, but (Peter) Gould, Gilligan, and company are at this moment better at telling stories in this world after so much time doing it," says Alan Sepinwall. "Saul can get hemmed in by the demands of being a prequel, particularly on the drug side of things (which has of late become the majority of the show), but its individual moments can feel even deeper and more artfully crafted. Which is not something I could have imagined when this show started. (Nor, as they’ve admitted, could Gilligan and Gould.)" Sepinwall adds: "What an hour from everyone involved, but especially from Bob Odenkirk. These last few episodes have been huge in terms of the series’ primary character arc, and he’s been more than up to that challenge. We’ve long passed the point where his gifts as a dramatic actor are surprising, but the raw physicality of what he does here seems beyond anything he’s done in the past, even at what seemed like his very best."

ALSO:

• If "JMM" was a full expression of all the ways Better Call Saul has become its own unique entity, "Bagman" feels a bit like an undiscovered Breaking Bad scroll
• "Bagman" is an all-time great episode, a culmination of what this season is all about
• "Bagman” is biblical, through and through
• "Bagman" may be the equivalent to The Sopranos' "Pine Barrens"
• Tony Dalton was surprised by one aspect of "Bagman"
• Vince Gilligan says filming "Bagman" was "just pure hell": "I went from the best day of directing of my life, in a desert, to the worst stretch of weeks and months or however frigging long this thing took," he says. "It was like forever. I’m not exaggerating, this was the hardest directing I’ve ever done."
• Gilligan says Bob Odenkirk tried to be "very Method-y" shooting in the desert, but he changed his mind by the end of the first week