Better Call Saul’s 10 Best Cliffhanger Endings, Ranked
Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul has become up with seriously great cliffhangers during its run. Here are its best, ranked.
Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have done the impossible with Better Call Saul. TV spin-offs generally turn out to be disappointing in comparison to their predecessors, and the series that Saul was spun off from happens to be universally hailed as perhaps the greatest achievement in the medium of television.
And yet, against all odds, Gilligan, Gould, and co. have managed to satisfy fans of Breaking Bad while delivering a show that stands as one of the best dramas ever to hit the airwaves in its own right. Like its predecessor, Saul has blown fans away with jaw-dropping cliffhangers. So, here are Better Call Saul’s 10 best cliffhanger endings, ranked.
Tuco Kidnaps Jimmy At Gunpoint
In Better Call Saul’s pilot episode, “Uno,” a couple of skateboarding twins try to scam Jimmy by jumping in front of his car, and he ends up recruiting them to pull the same scam on the Kettlemans.
But they hit the wrong car, which turns out to be driven by Tuco Salamanca’s abuelita (referred to as “biz-natch” by the twins). When Jimmy arrives at the house to defuse the situation, Tuco kidnaps him at gunpoint. It was an explosive, gripping way to end the show’s first installment.
Jimmy Finds The Kettlemans Camping With The Bag Of Cash
When the Kettlemans go missing in the middle of the night, the police are convinced that they’ve been kidnapped. But Jimmy is sure they’ve kidnapped themselves, so he heads out into the woods in season 1’s “Nacho” to find them. At the end of the episode, he finds them camping in the middle of the woods.
As he tries to get them to come home and wrestles with Mrs. Kettleman over a duffel bag, the bag rips open and it’s revealed to contain all the cash that Mr. Kettleman embezzled from his company.
Chuck Collapses In The Copy Store
In “Nailed,” the penultimate episode of season 2, Chuck is determined to expose that Jimmy switched around Mesa Verde’s address on his legal documents, costing him the client. He goes to a copy store and gets into a fight with the clerk, who has been bribed by Jimmy.
During the altercation, Chuck collapses, smacking his head on a table on the way down. Jimmy is watching from across the street, torn between giving himself away and leaving his brother to suffer.
Jimmy Subtly Warns A Malpractice Insurance Agent About Chuck’s Health
Things didn’t go so well for Jimmy throughout the third and fourth seasons of Better Call Saul, as Chuck got him suspended from practising law for a year and he struggled to make money while keeping up his commitments to community service.
At the end of season 3’s “Expenses,” Jimmy tried to get a malpractice insurance premium refund and broke down while talking about Chuck’s declining mental health. On the way out, he smiled, giving away that the whole thing was a scam to create a concern over Chuck’s health.
Kim Crashes Her Car
Before she decided to focus all her attention of Mesa Verde, Kim overworked herself so much that it led to a life-threatening injury. On the way to meet a new client in season 3’s “Fall,” she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed her car.
The way the scene was edited, with a sharp cut from Kim nodding off in the car to suddenly colliding with a boulder, really captured the terror of the moment. And then the credits rolled, leaving fans hanging for a whole week.
Chuck’s Meltdown In The Hearing Room
The general consensus among Better Call Saul fans is that season 3’s “Chicanery” is the series’ finest hour. Chuck takes on Jimmy in a hearing room, and Jimmy stands close to Chuck with a cell phone in his pocket. Chuck figures this out quickly, but what he doesn’t expect is the revelation that the fully charged battery has been planted in his pocket by Huell.
The suggestion that his sensitivity to electricity is entirely psychological leads Chuck to have a meltdown in front of the board, who are stunned into an awkward silence.
Chuck Records Jimmy’s Confession
After Mesa Verde’s address mix-up causes them to drop H.H.M. and return to Kim, just as Jimmy planned, Chuck feigns a deep depression and tells Jimmy that he’s going to retire. Consumed by guilt, Jimmy confesses to orchestrating the scam exactly as Chuck had suspected.
Then, when he leaves, Chuck takes out a tape recorder that he turned on before Jimmy arrived, revealing that he recorded Jimmy’s confession. This season-finale cliffhanger made the wait between the show’s second and third seasons feel particularly long.
Kim Flippantly Proposes To Jimmy
Kim was furious after Jimmy pulled “the ol’ switcheroo” on her in their meeting at the offices of Mesa Verde in season 5’s “Wexler v. Goodman.” She didn’t like being kept in the dark on a Saul Goodman scheme just to protect her legally.
So, she suggests that they either end their relationship before it goes any further, or get married so that she can never be legally compelled to testify against him.
Chuck Kills Himself
At the end of the season 3 finale “Lantern,” Chuck’s mental illness takes him over the edge. He kicks a gas lantern off his coffee table, setting the house on fire and effectively burning himself to death.
Chuck was never a very popular character among Saul fans – he was specifically written to be extremely hateable – but his suicide was still a poignant, powerful moment.
Lalo Survives His Assassination Attempt
This is Better Call Saul’s most recent cliffhanger ending. Gus sent some assassins to take out Lalo in the middle of the night in the season 5 finale “Something Unforgivable,” and Nacho let them in the door.
Lalo unexpectedly kills all his would-be assassins and figures out Nacho’s involvement. Until the series’ sixth and final season premieres, we won’t know how it pans out. Either way, Nacho isn’t in a particularly enviable position.
