Breaking Bad

AMC’s Better Call Saul has seen a number of connections with its Breaking Bad roots in Season 2, with fans uncovering some compelling evidence one of the biggest “Bad”s of them all will return for Monday’s finale. Yes, the Chicken Man may return, but don’t get your hopes up for the finale just yet.

The breakneck pace of Breaking Bad’s final episodes worked diligently to wrap up most each and every dangling thread, though a few mysteries of Walt’s past were unfortunately left to the back burner. Now, creator Vince Gilligan answers a long-standing question of Walter White’s time at “Gray Matter,” which eventually set him on the path to Heisenberg.

Lest you think AMC had in mind to abandon the journey from Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad midway through Jimmy McGill’s transformation, there’s no need to call a new lawyer just yet. Bob Odenkirk will continue breaking bad through a third season of Better Call Saul, creative team and all.

Better Call Saul stands on its own from Breaking Bad, even if Bob Odenkirk himself gets tired of the comparison, though a few familiar faces never hurt here and there. The latest popped up in Monday’s “Rebecca,” as Mark Margolis dropped by to reprise his role as Hector “Tio” Salamanca, and not as we’d ever seen him. Check out the scene for yourself.

Recently, AMC Preacher executive producer Seth Rogen shared some of our first photos of the core trio, but even more news will arrive from the comic drama’s SXSW premiere. To wit, we now know that Breaking Bad’s composer will score Preacher, which now eyes a formal May premiere.

Prequels often afford the ability to trace history of fan-favorite characters, even if certain backstories are best-left unexplored. Case in point, Better Call Saul has lent plenty of depth to Bob Odenkirk’s erstwhile Jimmy McGill, though the actor himself wants fans to “stop hoping” that Bryan Cranston’s Walter White drops by for an appearance.

Early into Better Call Saul’s inception, Bob Odenkirk puzzled fans with news that the prequel lawyer drama wasn’t actually a prequel at all, but a hybrid of events before and after Breaking Bad. Last night’s Season 2 “Switch” premiere briefly returned us to Saul’s post-Bad life as “Gene,” but writers eventually intend to tell an entire episode in the sequel Breaking Bad timeline.

Bob Odenkirk‘s Jimmy McGill is a character of continually shifting morals. In the first season of Vince Gilligan‘s ‘Better Call Saul’ we got to know the man who would go on to become ‘Breaking Bad‘s shady criminal lawyer Saul Goodman. Circa 2002 in Albuquerque, New Mexico Jimmy was a nobody working as a public defender, a one-man law firm who (mostly) tried to do the right thing. But the first season also hinted at his underlying con man persona, Slippin’ Jimmy, the nickname given to him as a kid for faking car accident injuries and conning drivers into paying him to keep quiet. In the season two premiere of ‘Better Call Saul’ we see even more fragments of a man riding ethical lines, further revealing Jimmy as the most complex character to emerge out of the ‘Breaking Bad’ universe next to Walter White.

The legacy of Breaking Bad is challenging to live up to, even as the acclaimed Better Call Saul heads into its second season in a few weeks. Still, its parent series looms large, as AMC collects all the Breaking Bad references in one Better Call Saul video before Season 2.

The first time around, Breaking Bad’s scientific approach ended up floundering on the Mythbusters, disproving both Walt’s famous mercury blowout and the iconic acid tub. Now, creator Vince Gilligan finally scores a “Plausible,” as Mythbusters tests the Breaking Bad finale’s famous M-60 rig.