Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Episodes: 10
Duration: 45 minutes (per episode)
Better Call Saul: Season 5 (Blu-ray) – Series Review
Better Call Saul is already gearing up for its sixth season, but before that, we were lucky enough to take a look at the Blu-ray edition of the fifth season. This season revolves around Jimmy ‘Saul Goodman’ McGill getting his license back and making him a full-fledged lawyer once again. Of course, this will involve the necessary business practices to gain attention, for him to be back in business. While this season mainly revolves around his newfound career, we also see the underlying drug war becoming more and more intense.
As mentioned in the intro, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) has his license back, allowing him to practice law once again. While this is certainly good news, he’ll need to lure in enough clients to earn a living, as his reputation makes it hard for him to find a job at a firm. He convinces Kim (Rhea Seehorn) to use his Saul Goodman persona for his new job, as well as do discounts to lure in potential clients. While things seem to be going slow, he soon finds himself juggling clients and gaining a lot of success because of his ‘justice for all’ persona.
Things do get more serious when he is approached by Nacho (Michael Mando) to help with some cartel business. While it’s clear that Jimmy wants to ditch this ‘business opportunity’, he does play his cards right and earns a pretty penny thanks to his new client. Nonetheless, this will of course escalate to more severe things as the season progresses.
While we will mention that things sometimes get dragged out, we mainly mean the series as a whole at this point. The overall quality of the seasons is superb, and we hope it will remain as such, but we are afraid the cow will be milked dry in the near future. Nonetheless, the overall pacing of this season is quite nice. You will see Jimmy build up his ‘empire’ and actually become a force to be reckoned with. Sadly, he also attracts the attention of the cartel, forcing him to do bad things (again). That being said, he also hopes to score a pretty penny by doing these odd jobs, so the fault also lies with him. The latter is somewhat the theme of the entire series, as Jimmy is not a bad guy, he just wants to gain status, fame and money quickly to get on with his life. Of course, he then ends up paying for a lot of the things he gets himself involved with.
Most of the cast members are already somewhat set in stone and thus not much has changed. The core has been going strong since the first season, and we don’t expect to see many changes soon. Sometimes a different character gets a bit more time in the limelight, but even so, this is only to push the main characters forward.
Better Call Saul’s fifth season comes with a fair amount of special features. The bulk of the content can be found in the actual commentaries, which are available for every episode. As a staple when it comes to physical releases, there are also extra scenes and a gag reel. A fun inclusion on this Blu-ray version is Kim Wexler’s ethics instruction videos. These small videos only take a few minutes each, but this is still a nice extra. There’s also a snippet where the cast and crew make predictions about certain characters and a VFX comparison featurette that shows some scenes before and after the creative team had a go at them.
Conclusion
Better Call Saul: Season 5 is still a very nice and qualitative series and it makes sure the seasons aren’t too long. While still being a bit long-winded at times (as a whole), the story gets to the point and it handles a proper theme or issue each season. While the sixth season will be upon us in the near future, we hope the series does not get dragged out for too long, as it will inevitably lose its charm then. As for now, we are still curious to see where the series will take us.
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