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Better Call Saul always had a lot more to say than it originally put forth. From countless dramas in the courtroom to deeply human character analysis, the show disguised its most tender realities in plain sight.
But one discreet, monotonous motif voiced the story from the very jump — the progressively hazy, lo-fi opening credit sequence. The warning signs were always present, concealed in static, but we simply weren’t paying enough attention to grab onto them.
A disintegrating identity, encoded in VHS flicker – The Better Call Saul intros
The Better Call Saul intro sequence wasn’t made just for it to be an aesthetic pick. Every frame of its muddled, vitiated visuals resonated the slow unscrambling of Jimmy McGill’s true identity.
While fans were all caught up in monitoring his deterioration into Saul Goodman, the title sequences by this time were already hinting at what would be left in the past: not just the law, but the literal man himself.
Each season's intro sequence didn’t just grow; it depreciated, like a memory rewound way too many times on an old cassette tape.
These anomalies or glitches weren’t just a visually pleasing noise. The notion was fixed in Jimmy’s post-Saul life, where, now under the alias Gene, he fanatically rewatched his old Saul Goodman adverts. They were his ultimate link to a life lived loudly. But VHS tapes aren’t eternal now, are they?
The loud static noise, distorting colours, and rushed cuts we see in the intros are indications of a rotting past—tapes slowly wearing away under the constant task of playback. What the viewers see is not just Gene’s sense of nostalgia, but his incarceration inside these dwindling images.
The brilliance of Better Call Saul is how the show lets the intro become a part of the narrative being unfolded. The intro grows louder, more colourless, washed-out, and more unhinged over time.
Just as Jimmy slides further away from himself and deeper into depravity, the visuals keep abandoning all of the polish and clearness, slipping more and more into mere static and silence. In later seasons, the color goes out entirely — foretelling the black-and-white timeline of Gene.
The intro is meant to be purposeful deterioration. A decaying reel of identity.
Visual whispers from the past — and the future
Going beyond the VHS tapes themselves, there’s something allegorical lurking and hidden inside those glitches. They aren’t just a secret language of physical deprivation; they’re forewarnings. Warnings of a man wobbling at the verge of self-destruction.
While Saul Goodman is loud, showy, and full of pretend boldness, Jimmy McGill—the man sitting behind the mask—slowly fades by each tiny pixel, in the opening credits.
Better Call Saul doesn’t handle time like a straight line. It circles, disintegrates, and skips like a broken-down recording. And the opening credits only reflect this crumbling.
The opening sequences from Better Call Saul allude to props from Saul’s advertisement campaigns, like the Statue of Liberty
But rather than advertising anything, these images now haunt. They’re fragments of an earlier persona crumpling under the heaviness of guilt and self-denial.
What starts as a nod to fans of Saul’s marketing soon alters into an elegy. As Gene sees himself on tape, the static is no longer a physical glitch.
It’s the sound of reminiscence collapsing. He’s trying to keep Saul alive in rewind, but each watching strips the image further of color, clarity, and self.
The brilliance of Better Call Saul lies in how it not once ever spoon-feeds the audience its surprises. It's glitchy, declining intros weren’t just peculiar designs; they were red flags all along, fluttering away quietly in the storm.
As Jimmy flowed into Saul and ultimately Gene, the credits of Better Call Saul hunted down every fissure. And all this time, the audience, a.k.a., we thought they were just clever and quirky edits — when they were, in fact, the show’s most straightforward and appalling prophecy.
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