'Better Call Saul' Postmortem: Peter Gould Talks Where Jimmy Will Be in Season 2

Spoiler alert: This interview contains storyline and character spoilers for the “Marco" episode of Better Call Saul.

“Epic” is not an overstatement for describing Monday’s Better Call Saul finale, as the episode not only so satisfyingly tied together backstories from throughout the season and put our hero Jimmy McGill on a decidedly new path for Season 2, but it also included a nice cache of Breaking Bad Easter eggs.

And, we now have the official definition of what a Chicago Sunroof is.

Better Call Saul co-creator, writer, executive producer, and director Peter Gould — the man who created the Saul Goodman character on Breaking Bad — talks to Yahoo TV about what that finale’s ending meant (warning: don’t “assume anything you didn’t see,” he says), and where we’re going to find Mr. McGill at the beginning of Season 2.

Have we just seen the official, or unofficial, birth of Saul at the end of “Marco”?
That’s a very good question. Is Saul somebody who is birthed all at once, or is it an evolution? I think probably we’ll find that Jimmy’s progress to Saul — progress or descent, depending on how you look at it — into becoming Saul Goodman is not something that’s going to happen all at once. It’s like how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The road to Saul Goodman is paved with frustrations and also, oddly enough, some very positive intentions.

Related: Get Caught Up With Our ‘Better Call Saul’ Recaps

At what point did you plan that this is where Season 1 would end?
I wish I could say that we had every aspect of it in a master plan, in a binder somewhere. The truth is, we had a lot of ideas about where we thought the show was going to go, and some of them happened and some of them didn’t. I’d say the two biggest changes from what we expected versus what we ended up with, the first one was that we thought Jimmy would move to becoming Saul, as we know him on Breaking Bad, a lot faster. But the more we got to know Jimmy, the more puzzling it became… the more it felt almost tragic, this guy who has such good intentions, who has a good heart, who is at his core, a decent guy. How did he become Saul Goodman, who’s rushing to advocate for murdering people and for building a drug empire? We realized as we went along that there was a much more convoluted, challenging journey than we had thought.

One of the other big surprises to us was all the other characters, but especially Chuck. We conceived of the character very much as someone who was helpless, someone who Jimmy had to take care of. That helped us to understand Jimmy, because he cared about Chuck and wanted to take care of him, make sure that he was OK. As Michael McKean started playing this character, he brought to him such a sense of pride… Michael McKean plays Charles McGill as a truly imposing character. That changed our view of the relationship between these two guys. Whereas, I think, in the beginning, we thought of Chuck as strictly the voice of morality, perhaps. We started thinking about what the relationship was between these two, going back to childhood. We started seeing that there is a competition between them.

And then a third thing that surprised us was Mike Ehrmantraut. We started off thinking, well, we know who he is, he’s this hired gun. We also had the idea that he had said in Breaking Bad that he had been a Philadelphia cop. So we started asking ourselves, how did this Philadelphia cop, a guy with so much ability, as Mike clearly has, how does he become a criminal? As with Jimmy, that turned out to be a more complicated story than we thought, and especially because Mike, as we understand him, is somebody who is not materialistic. It’s easier to understand how someone would go through that drug world if it’s someone who is materialistic, who wants things. Mike, on Breaking Bad, he clearly doesn’t really care about having things. He drives an ancient, terrible car, he lives in very modest surroundings, so we had to really think a lot about how he got to be who he was.

Those were the things that took us by surprise. The temptation when you’re under a lot of pressure to write quickly is to breeze by some of the contradictions inside your characters, go past some of the things that make them unique or maybe block you from doing some of the big set teases that you have in mind for the show. The great advantage that we have is we have a little bit more time in the writers’ room, or maybe a lot more time in the writers’ room, than most shows, and so that, combined with the willingness to drive ourselves crazy, changed the story in places that we didn’t expect.

Can we assume Jimmy didn’t go into the meeting with the Davis & Mayne people at the end? Because he whipped around out of the parking lot, as Mike said, very quickly…
I don’t think it’s safe to assume anything that you didn’t see. That’s all I can say.

Related: Vince Gilligan on the Classic TV Episodes That Inspired ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul’

OK, given his reaction then, when Kim tells him Davis & Mayne is interested in him, his first response is, “Chuck wouldn’t like it.” If he has decided not to go into that meeting, is it more because he’s kind of embracing who he really is, especially after his vacation with Marco? Or is it more about — whatever he may feel about Chuck right now — he is unwilling to show Chuck up with this potentially huge new job?
I love everything that you’re saying. [Laughs.] And I love the fact that you’re taking into account Jimmy’s remaining love and affection for his brother. Having said all that, I think that if you look at the season, there are clues as to how we are thinking in the scene, like [Marco’s] pinky ring that Jimmy is now wearing, and the song [“Smoke on the Water”] that he’s singing at the very end. Those, I think, would lead you to believe that he’s got a new idea for who he’s going to be, and it doesn’t include being at Davis & Mayne.

Having said that, we reserve the right to reinterpret that scene with new information or to go back. This is, what you’re talking about, is one of the things that we spent the most time with at the beginning of the season, of Season 2, to understand truly what Jimmy is thinking and what his next move is going to be. I have to say, the answer that we came up with surprised me, and I think is pretty perfect, but you’ll have to wait for a year to see, so that shouldn’t be too much.

A year? Ooof. You mentioned the pinky ring… Marco is a great character, and Mel Rodriguez was just fantastic and heartbreaking. Obviously we won’t see him in any more new appearances in Jimmy’s life, but could he pop back up in more backstory?
It’s absolutely possible. We love Mel, and we love what he did with the character of Marco. Everyone would love to have a good friend like that, somebody who truly believes in you, and who encourages you, and who is just like your biggest fan. Mel is so vulnerable, he’s so funny, I would love to see him again. I will tell you this, the crew loved him so much that people kept coming up to me and pitching me that he wasn’t really dead, that maybe he was going to come back to Albuquerque [with Jimmy]. They were pitching me many, many ideas, because everybody loves Mel and loved so much what he did with that character. It’s my sincere hope that we will see him again.

OK. the Chicago Sunroof. People had been coming up with their own ideas — none successful — about what it was since it was first mentioned in “Nacho.” It had its own Urban Dictionary entry even before “Marco.” Was this a real experience for someone?
[Laughs.] I’m happy to tell you that it was made up. We were, at the very beginning of Season 1, we were talking about Slippin’ Jimmy and what kind of trouble he would have gotten into. Someone had the image of him taking some kind of very childish revenge on someone by pooping through the sunroof of a car. Somebody else named it a Chicago Sunroof, and that stuck. In fact, our office here in Burbank, it has no nameplate on it, it just has the office number. When we first moved in, the building asked us if we wanted a nameplate, and for a hot minute I really wanted to put Chicago Sunroof as the name of our office. Then cooler heads prevailed when folks reminded me that eventually people would see the episode and would know exactly what we’re referring to.

But we loved that, and I think it’s one of the wonderful things that we’re able to do because AMC and Sony give us so much lead time. We were able to have that in mind in episode three and then pay it off in episode 10.

Related: ‘Better Call Saul’ Finale Review

And it was just part of the payoff of Jimmy’s fantastic bingo rant. We also got the little scoop about him having an ex-wife, and why he was so grateful to Chuck and so willing to drop his life in Chicago and move to New Mexico.
That’s so true, and Bob did such a tremendous job on that. There’s a world where he could easily have done that, that whole thing, in a single take, without a cut. We felt obligated to cut to the folks in the bingo game reacting, but Bob just brought so much that day, and he did that speech, I believe, word for word with what I wrote. I couldn’t have been prouder of it and prouder of how Bob Odenkirk did a barn burner like that. He really did a tremendous job.

Actually, I think he did add four words at one point… at the end he adds the words, “That’s why I’m here.” The way he delivers them really nails it home. I think it was another terrific contribution. He just works so hard on the show. He makes it look easy, which is the trick, but Bob has more dialogue in any single episode of this show than most actors have probably in a whole season.

We mentioned earlier that Jimmy and Chuck’s mom died. In Breaking Bad though, Saul says his second wife was caught having an affair with his stepdad. Is that going to tie in somehow next season or further down the road?
Oh my God, I hope so. Boy, people like you make our lives wonderful and really difficult, because you have really paid close attention. Believe me, that’s something that’s come up.  I don’t know that you’re going to ever see, for sure, that you’re going to see the answer to your question, but I love the fact that you’re watching that closely, and that you care.