Better Call Saul has always been a bit of a Russian doll of a show - a Breaking Bad prequel that conceals a much quieter, more introspective character drama with relatively few ties to the show that got it all started. Jimmy McGill's journey has swapped drug cartels for bitter brothers with a very personal grudge, and plane crashes for administrative errors with small personal consequences, and it's been all the better for it.
It's hard to deny the thrill, however, of returning to the Breaking Bad well. While Jimmy's story has found its strength in the mundane, Mike's side of the show has been a punchy, high-stakes dip into the world that Walter White will soon blunder his way into. And with the addition of Gus Fring this season, Mike's story has forged a further link with the Breaking Bad world as Saul's story winds up towards that inevitable point of convergence.
An episode like Sabrosito, then, was the best kind of inevitability: one that fully embraced this show's conception as a prequel. The first half of this bisected episode is a story that is as close to the look, feel and tone of Breaking Bad as Saul, including its nervous early steps with Tuco, has ever gotten. Critics were worried about something like this, and not without reason. Saul has built a reputation of true originality despite its obvious Breaking Bad links, so to dip back into straightforward prequel territory could have been an exercise of fanservice above good storytelling sense.
It's hard to deny that there is a lot to enjoy here as a Breaking Bad fan. Plenty of the characters who crop up as bit-players in the cartel saga of seasons three and four, such as Don Eladio, crop up here and there, and the story gives us a chance to see the fabled rivalry between Gus and Hector Salamanca play out in a way it never could on Breaking Bad given Hector's muteness when we catch up with him.
Yet Sabrosito never trades on nostalgia. It uses its Breaking Bad roots to tell a compelling and satisfyingly close-ended character study of Gus Fring from a perspective the original show could never allow. Breaking Bad had to filter everything through the eyes of Walter White, so Gus was generally presented as a malevolent threat with frighteningly violent tendencies, despite the sympathetic back-story we eventually became a party to.
That's not the case with Saul, wherein our entry point into Gus' world comes instead from Mike - a cool-headed pragmatist for whom Gus plays a useful role. That greater sense of objectivity allows us to watch Gus without the judgement that was always implicit in Breaking Bad, and it's a fascinating new glimpse into the iconic character. Instead of acting as the antagoniser, Gus is much more of a persecuted figure here, subject to a petty round of intimidation at the hands of Hector, and his response is calm, reasoned and effective. He even bolsters his status as a folk hero to his employees with a speech that was, if a bit too stirring and eloquent for a pep talk at a fast food place, a powerful expression of his ability to inspire and bring hope. It's hard not to see him, as... well, the good guy.
It's a genuine privilege to see Giancarlo Esposito back in this role, and he clearly relishes the chance to play a much more sympathetic side of Gus. His demeanour is recognisable from Breaking Bad - placid and emotionally guarded - but Esposito makes sure those characteristics come across not as unsettling, as they could very often be in the original show, but instead as a sign of his stoicism in the face of Hector's taunts. Esposito has a tough balance to strike in keeping just enough of the familiar chessmaster Gus to make clear that this isn't a drastically different incarnation of the character, but crafting Gus into more of a protagonist figure who we're allowed a more intimate insight into than Walt's view allowed, but he achieves the task with consummate ease.
Meanwhile, over on the Jimmy side of the show, which the episode only actually returns to in the final 20 minutes, Sabrosito is intriguingly circumspect. If Gus' story is a game of chess wherein we're allowed to see all of the moves as they're made, then Jimmy's is a game taking place behind closed doors. The episode makes clear that we're seeing an intricate plan slowly unfurl - one that involves sending Mike in to take cover photographs of Chuck, and seems to be focused around proving the existence of duplicates of the recording made of Jimmy, if that last scene was any indication - but it's a guessing game for now as to just what Jimmy and Kim are up to.
That doesn't mean it's not engaging - far from it. The final hearing scene is a great example of the way in which Sabrosito dramatises ambiguity, portraying two sides who are deeply wary of one another and are quietly struggling amongst themselves to out-flank the other and gain some kind of advantage. It's here where Better Call Saul's ability to make sure its audience is attuned to the smallest details pays dividends, because, within a scene that's relatively mundane on first glance, there's a wealth of interesting and informative clues to the mystery of that plan, and insights into how the belief that one holds power warps and changes the way characters like Chuck act.
In a season that seems even more confident than the last, Sabrosito is another impressive entry that blends two drastically different stories in a way that's surprisingly cohesive, with strong character development and some intriguing twists in both Jimmy and Mike's ongoing stories. Though Saul has placed a great deal on the resolution with Jimmy's story, which plays a difficult gambit of keeping the audience one step behind the characters, dramatic gambles are proving to be this show's speciality. Even as it delves further into a familiar world, it's a relief to see that Saul is still taking risks.
