“Better Call Saul” begins its fifth season, per established practice, with a black-and-white, vérité-style peek into the grim future of the shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). Fearing that his cover as an anonymous fast-food manager has been blown, he’s descending into paranoia, camped in his dark apartment, peeking through the blinds.

These season-opening scenes serve as a kind of narrative relief valve, alleviating some of the sense of determinism inherent in a show that’s a prequel to a series, “Breaking Bad,” whose events and characters tended to have big, bold outlines. This time around, though, the flash forward offers an unexpected bit of fan service: an appearance by the vacuum cleaner repairman Ed Galbraith, played, as he was in “Breaking Bad” and the film “El Camino,” by the great character actor Robert Forster, who died in October.

Forster’s brief, characteristically businesslike turn in “Better Call Saul” is like a blessing, and it reinforces a tone: laconic, no-nonsense, amused by life’s absurdities but rarely taken by surprise. As with so many of Forster’s roles, you suspect he is there to show you how the creators (in this case Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould) would like to see themselves and their story.

So in Season 5, which begins Sunday on AMC, the best thing about “Better Call Saul” is still its minimalism, its quiet spaces, its willingness to linger on details, like a frazzled prosecutor’s struggle to get a bag of chips out of a courthouse vending machine.