‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 Midseason Premiere Has a Major ‘Breaking Bad’ Easter Egg
Better Call Saul fans have spent six seasons looking for Breaking Bad Easter eggs, and they’ve found them. The Better Call Saul Season 6 midseason premiere has a doozy of an Easter Egg. It ties directly into a scene from Breaking Bad. Writer Gordon Smith wrote it in there for fans to notice.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Better Call Saul Season 6 midseason premiere.]
Smith spoke with the AMC blog in an interview published July 12, the day after the episode aired. He explained exactly which Breaking Bad episode has language quoted in the recent Better Call Saul Season 6 episode. Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 midseason premiere muffles the ‘Breaking Bad’ Easter egg
Better Call Saul Season 6 picks up right where it left off. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) has killed Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian). He ties and gags Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) while he sends Kim (Rhea Seehorn) on an errand. Before the gag goes on, Jimmy is saying a line that Breaking Bad fans should remember.
“I can think of one, but it’s a big one,” Smith told the AMC Blog. “When Jimmy is getting tied up by Lalo and just as the gag is being put into his mouth, he manages to say, ‘It wasn’t me. It was—!’ And he’s going to complete the line as ‘Ignacio.’ You can kind of hear him say that through the gag, even.”
What ‘It wasn’t me. It was Ignacio’ means for ‘Breaking Bad’
Breaking Bad fans remember Jimmy, once he’s introduced as Saul, saying, “It wasn’t me. It was Ignacio.” In Breaking Bad, that was just a line. Now that Better Call Saul takes place before, “It wasn’t me. It was Igancio.” means a lot more.
“And that’s the first line that Saul says in Breaking Bad Season 2, Episode 8, when the gag comes out of his mouth,” Smith said. “He’s carried the fear of Lalo around with him all that time, from the moment this gag goes in to the time it comes out, those years of story time later.”
‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 makes ‘Breaking Bad’ even more fraught
When Better Call Saul introduced Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), fans speculated that he was the Ignacio that Saul mentioned in Breaking Bad. Lalo was also a character Saul mentioned on Breaking Bad, though he never appeared on that show. In fact, co-creator Vince Gilligan resisted casting Lalo Salamanca on Better Call Saul for a long time.
Now seen in context with Breaking Bad, it’s easy to imagine why Jimmy/Saul still panics over Ignacio and Lalo. Lalo walked into his house and shot Howard in front of him. He sent Kim on an assassination mission. Jimmy tried to pass the buck to Nacho, but he may have been underplaying his long term involvement with Nacho, or at least all the chess pieces that moved before Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) killed Lalo once and for all.
