Season 2 of “Better Call Saul” begins where Season 1 did: in purgatory, which happens to be a Cinnabon in Omaha. Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), once Walter White’s skeevy lawyer, relocated there to save his skin after the bloody denouement of “Breaking Bad.” Like last year’s opening sequence, it’s a lovely, mournful short film, scored this time to the country standard “Funny How Time Slips Away.”

The song is a curious choice, because “Better Call Saul” does anything but let time slip away. It grabs on to it, jumping backward to 2002, when Saul was Jimmy McGill, a small-time con artist trying to go straight as an attorney in Albuquerque. It slows time down, stretches out key moments like taffy, as if Saul, in his sugar-glazed prison, were holding his past up to the light, trying to find the exact spot where everything went wrong.

Entering its second season Monday on AMC, “Better Call Saul” is not the best drama on TV. But it’s one of the most unusual and daring. Its show runners, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, used the capital and patience the prequel had in the bank, as a series with a built-in audience, to tell a quirkily absorbing story of a little guy’s doomed struggle to break good.

Season 1 made Jimmy into both a sleazebag and a hero, trying to parlay the flimflam skills he picked up as a onetime street hustler (they called him Slippin’ Jimmy, for a fake-accident scam he favored) into a straight career in the courtroom. Despite resistance — not least from his judgmental older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), an accomplished lawyer turned shut-in — he managed to do his weasel work for good, blowing open a case of fraud at a senior citizens’ home.