It’s endlessly entertaining watching the montage — an old-fashioned, familiar, nearly-cliched storytelling device — and the cold open — a sort of newfangled, disorienting, “edgy” storytelling device — used to such loving and sincere effect throughout Better Call Saul. Both were hallmarks of Breaking Bad, too, from the “Crystal Blue Persuasion” cooking montage to the pesky little housefly of that third season episode. But here in Saul they’re more frequent and often more ambitious, and in “Fifi” there were multiple examples to this point.
Before we dive into those devices it’s worth noting that this is the home stretch of Saul‘s second season, and the arc has become superbly focused and compelling in ways that the earliest episodes of Season 2 (“Switch” and “Cobbler” in particular) hinted at ever-so-subtly. For a show about a guy who wears orange suits and wails on the bagpipes at the office, for a show built on flashy devices like the montage and the cold open, for a show peopled by characters as bombastic and iconic as any of the Salamancas…if the writing were equally outlandish we’d have an entirely different show. Instead, the character arcs intersect with intricacy and propel forward in subtle ways, lending no small degree of unease to the thematic undercurrent.
Motion State Review 