A new idea that this last episode explored was Saul's influence in "creating" the monster that was Walt. The more I think over their characters with this in mind, the more it just makes a lot of sense and feels super organic with how they've told both stories.

Imagine being Walt -- a man who has always felt he was worth more than others thought and locked away his pride under complacency and fake niceness. You now find yourself going full savage mode after a few months in the game -- threatening a local celebrity by kidnapping him and digging him a hole in the desert. The outcome is.....the man poaches you at your place of work and tries to convince you to join forces with him. Naturally, an explosion of unchecked ego and bottled up pride ensues. You MUST be the man, right? I mean, this bus bench low life fool is practically begging you to squad up, AFTER you kidnapped him? You're totally made for this life, and any doubt you had that you weren't - is long gone....

Then you have Saul, who through a mixture of allure and the need to distract himself from unresolved pain, wants to take on Walt as his pet project. In fact, Saul's quickness to team up and take control of the situation could also be in part just from unconscious shame of being made the mark so easily by them and wanting to recontextualize his dynamic with Walt (we all know how Jimmy feels about being a sheep). But what seals the deal is when Saul learns that big, bad, elusive Gus doesn't really care about Walt and Jesse's operation, just "small potatoes" to him, and doesn't see what he sees in these two scrappy fools. I feel like that unlocks his whole "Chuck and the big boys at the elite firms will never let me into their club" complex, and the rest is history.

And even then, when you think of overall arc of "Better Call Saul", its basically been showing us how Jimmy falls into these unhealthy, codependent relationships with those that are close to him. That gray area that exists within these unhealthy dynamics created some of the biggest themes of the entire show -- Was Jimmy a bad influence on Kim, or were we just seeing her finally reveal her true self? Did Chuck cause Jimmy to become Saul, or was he simply correct about him? Was Chuck's illness related to the way he felt about Jimmy?

So in the final stretch of episodes, contextualizing Saul's relationship with Walt as just another one of these codependent pacts of self destruction, just another Chuck or Kim for Jimmy to try and use to help himself find solid ground, or distraction from pain, is brilliant. It forces you to ask the same questions that you asked about Kim or Chuck, but about Saul and Walt. Did Saul desensitize Walt to losing all morality, was it the other way around, or a mixture? Would Saul have wound up on the run if it weren't for Walt, or was that always going to be his fate? Would Walt have wound up dead without Saul's connections and penchant for legal deceit?

Both shows feel like two planets with overlapping orbits, all with the goal of showing how these two men came into each other's lives at the absolute worst (but also most entertaining and drama-fraught) moment possible.