On that note then, Chuck and Jimmy’s relationship continues to get pushed further and become more frayed. You can only go so far here. Breaking Bad’s third season is when things really started to accelerate. With that show you had a set five-year plan that you more or less stuck to. Now that you’re three seasons into Saul, do you know how long this show is going to end up running?

You’re exactly right. We couldn’t really give you an exact amount of episodes. The reason being—and I’m not being coy here—it’s just hard to know exactly. But you did put your finger on something important. Just from watching this show you can tell that it’s a finite story. And we know that even further from the fact that this show has to butt up against the beginning of Breaking Bad. So there is a finite nature here. But there’s one difference in Better Call Saul’s finite nature that wasn’t there with Breaking Bad, which is that there is yet again the possibility of a whole other story to be told through the black-and-white beginnings of a post-Breaking Bad world that we’ve put at the top of each season. So while I think that there is a definite end in sight for the pre-Breaking Bad story, there still seems like there could be a lot in the post-Breaking Bad world. I’m kind of fascinated by that, simply as one of the first fans of the series. What could come out of that? No promises, but it seems to me that there’s a little more opportunity for scope there than there even was in Breaking Bad.

Where did the whole drug exchange and drop off in the hanging red shoes come about? It’s a really great idea that you’d never think to question out in the open.

We just have such fun in the writers’ room coming up with this stuff! Wasn’t that fun? I think this stemmed from the fact that I got to direct this fun scene in last season’s finale where Mike has a sniper rifle and he’s about to kill Hector Salamanca—and from what we were just talking about, audiences know that Mike can’t kill him since he’s a major part of Breaking Bad. The point of this story is that we had this sequence with a sniper rifle—and just from stories that Mike has told—we know he must be an amazing shot, and yet we never get to see him pull the darn trigger! So perhaps from impatience or desire on our part to see him fire that rifle, we put this thing together to show what a great shot he is. That’s an amazing shot to hit that sneaker as it’s swinging in the breeze on the telephone wire. So it came from this desire to just show this guy be amazing at his craft. It grew from that.

Lastly, do you feel like this season of Better Call Saul carries a certain theme to it? Is there a great overarching sort of message that’s being reiterated here?