Better Call Saul season 5: What’s on Bob Odenkirk’s wishlist?

Better Call Saul season 5 is going to be coming onto AMC at some point next year and while there’s no official season 6 just yet, it feels almost like a foregone conclusion. Nobody’s out there shouting that season 5 is the final season and based on where we are in the story at present, it does feel like there’s still room for at least something more to explore.

Of course, not everything we explore has to be in the present! We’ve said this about two trillion times already, but it’s still worth repeating that we’re eager to see Gene in a larger capacity. To this point, Future Jimmy has only been featured in black-and-white flash-forwards, ones where we’ve seen that despite his new life, there’s still a little bit of Saul in this man. He’s tortured and sad and alone and we want to believe there is something more. Even though we recognize that Jimmy has done some terrible things, we like to think that there is hope for at least some sort of redemption mixed in here.

Luckily, it doesn’t seem as though we’re the only one with a hankering to see more Gene on the show; after all, series star Bob Odenkirk feels the same way! Speaking in a new interview with GoldDerby, here is some of what Bob Odenkirk had to say on the subject:

I’d like to find out what happens to Gene, the character he is after “Better Call Saul,” after “Breaking Bad,” but I feel like the way [Vince Gilligan and Peter gould] tell a story, I feel like maybe two seasons [is the right length]. Maybe. I also like when the story speeds up. I respect how good they are at picking things apart and slowing them down but I like when things go a little faster, so for me, I feel like two seasons would be the outside of it.

Note that Odenkirk handled the subject of the show’s future differently from Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring), who suggested that it’s almost certain we’re going to be getting two more seasons and that’s it. We don’t think anything is fully confirmed just yet, but it makes sense to do two more seasons. This makes Better Call Saul last about as long as Breaking Bad proper, but it doesn’t overshadow the original show. It also gives them a chance to show more of Breaking Bad era Saul if they want, and maybe spend some time with Jimmy.

For the final season, here’s our hope: Maybe about five or ten minutes of Gene at the start of every episode, and maybe make the majority of the finale episode about him. Until Better Call Saul tells us otherwise, we refuse to think that Kim Wexler disappears from Jimmy’s life forever. There’s still a chance they reunite in Omaha … unless of course Jimmy becomes so terrible that there’s no redeeming in her eyes. Maybe he can find it somewhere else, but there’s no reason why she has to take an apology from him or see him as something different.

Photo: AMC