From the start, Better Call Saul tried to have its cake and eat it. The series billed itself as a Breaking Bad prequel; a way for viewers to gorge on the high-energy exploits of its breakout character, the sleazy criminal lawyer Saul Goodman. But the show came with its own miniature prologue. A black-and-white sequence, set in a branch of the bakery Cinnabon hidden away in a Nebraskan shopping centre.
It was here that we saw Goodman, formerly Jimmy McGill, hiding from the fallout of the explosive Breaking Bad finale under the assumed identity of Gene Takovic. A simple prequel would have been one thing – showing us how an essentially decent lawyer could chip away at his moral centre until all that was left was a howl of unscrupulous greed – but this prologue set up another problem. Who is Gene? What’s his story?
