'Better Call Saul' Keeps Steady Pace in Season 3

In Better Call Saul’s third season, viewers watch as a character agonizes over whether to use a period, semicolon, or emdash. They see a lengthy sequence of electrical and mechanical work for unknown purposes, involving such thrills as shopping for car parts and letting a battery pack run down. A major plot development is indicated by the method with which someone peels masking tape from a wall during a paint job.

All of which raises a question: Are these particularly detail-oriented characters, or is this just a particularly detail-oriented show? Two seasons into the Breaking Bad spinoff it’s clear creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are as patient and fastidious as Chuck McGill; Gilligan says it’s a “luxury” to go more slowly than any other show might. But it’s also becoming clearer that Saul is in part about patience and fastidiousness: “the devil is in the details” elevated to mythology.

The first two seasons shaded a fine portrait of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill, a screw-up whose efforts to make good in the legal profession had been secretly sabotaged by his older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean). Jimmy got his revenge by, naturally, messing with minutiae: switching digits in legal paperwork to make it appear as though Chuck had committed a fatal typo. For Jimmy this was less fraternal score-settling than penance for his girlfriend Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) suffering as a result of his actions. But Chuck took it as an act of war. In Season 2’s finale, he conned Jimmy into confessing while secretly taping him.

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