Fatshark, the developer and publisher of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, have announced the release of the next map update as a part of the Curse of Drachenfels storyline. This map is available right now and will automatically be downloaded on steam for users who have Vermintide 2 already installed.
Inside the Enchanter’s Lair
After making your way through the previous two maps, Old Haunts and Blood In Darkness, the party has finally reached the Castle Drachenfels where the Enchanter is waiting. Inside the Enchanter’s Lair it seems that the enemy is ready and waiting for you, so beware.
The Enchanter’s Lair is the third map in the Curse of the Drachenfels campaign, which is part of the Season 2 content roll out. The first and second Season content is free for all owners of Vermintide 2 owners and includes Daily and Weekly Quests for players to earn Shillings. This currency can be spent on cosmetics in-game. Shopkeeper Lohner has more cosmetics for players to purchase in the Emporium of Wonders.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has outlined the bonuses and discounts for Red Dead Online this week, and anyone looking to tackle the Moonshiner missions will be rewarded handsomely. Rockstar has announced that from March 24 to 30 players will receive a 50% Role XP Boost on every Moonshiner activity, including sell, bootlegger, and story missions.
You’ll need to be Trader Rank 5 or have completed a Trader sell mission before jumping into the Moonshiner specialist role, but if you’ve done that you’re good to go. You’ll also receive a 10 gold bar discount on all Moonshine shacks this week, so it’s a great time to make some headway on the Moonshiner role.
On top of this, there’s a 40% discount available on all roadster horses and the same discount for band expansions. Furthermore, players who manage to fill all seven Outfit Slots this week will get a free off-hand holster, and they’ll be able to choose from any below rank 70. You can also get a bonus of RDO$100 by completing three role challenges for any role.
The Last Stand Showdown series will also run during this time. It’s a new variant on Last Stand, where players spawn next to a random weapon and then fight to be the last player still alive. The maps for this series are Annesburg Mine, Armadillo, and Cemetery.
Finally, various rank rewards are active from now until June 1. Every ten levels up to Rank 60 you’ll earn new bonuses, including discounts and new items. Twitch Prime users can also get a Collector’s Bag, a Polished Copper Moonshine Still Upgrade, and 5 Moonshiner Role Ranks, while PlayStation Plus subscribers will be given three free Ability Cards.
Tripwire Interactive has released a new update for Killing Floor 2 called Neon Nightmares The free update includes a new map and two new weapons to use.
The new map, Biolapse, takes you deep into an abandoned laboratory filled with zombies, where players will have to take advantage of traps to survive against the horde of undead. Biolapse is playable in both Survival and the weekly game modes.
The two new weapons will let you try out some new strategies. The HRG Incendiary Rifle can light an entire horde of zombies on fire, a fitting weapon for the Firebug class. Equipped with both incendiary rounds and grenades, the HRG Incendiary Rifle is a weapon made for crowd control.
On the other hand the new Compound Bow is made for single target kills, which is perfect for the Sharpshooter class. You can switch between two types of arrows: sharp and cryo. Sharp arrows penetrate through enemies and can be collected off dead bodies to be used again. Cryo arrows explode on impact, freezing anything in the small radius. Arrows can be held down for longer range and more damage.
Killing Floor 2: Neon Nightmares is available on PS4, Xbox One and PC right now. This update is free if you own Killing Floor 2 on any of these platforms. Take out some of those pent-up emotions on hordes of zombies now with Killing Floor 2: Neon Nightmares.
Steve Carell’s Michael Scott character was the foundation of The Office. So when it was confirmed that he would be leaving the show, it was huge news. The show was never the same without him. But why, exactly, did Carell leave the show? New details on this controversial topic have now come to light.
Boom operator/sound mixer Brian Wittle says in the book that the April 2010 interview that Carell gave to the BBC is where it all began. In that interview, Carell offhandedly said Season 7 of The Office would “probably be my last year.” Wittle said that Carell told him that he “didn’t plan on saying it out loud and he hadn’t decided anything” about staying on the show. He was merely “thinking out loud” during the interview, Wittle said Carell told him.
Carell’s comments made news, of course. However, those in higher-up positions for The Office didn’t bring this up to Carell. Wittle said in the book that no one called Carell and said, “What? You wanna leave?'”
“When he realized he didn’t get any kind of response from them, he thought, ‘Oh, maybe they don’t really care if I leave,'” Wittle said. “‘Maybe I should go do other things.’ So I think that made it easier, because when the news broke that he was considering it, the people that are in charge of keeping him there didn’t make a big effort to do so until afterward.”
Kim Ferry, a hairstylist on The Office, corroborated Wittle’s analysis of the situation. Ferry said Carell had planned to sign for “another couple of years.” However, NBC higher-ups never contacted Carell to get a deal done, according to Ferry’s recollection of the events.
During this tumultuous time, NBC changed presidents from Jeff Zucker to Bob Greenblatt. The Office producer Randy Cordray said in the book that Greenblatt “was not as big a fan of The Office as we wished he would’ve been.” Cordray said Carell might have stayed on The Office if management handled the situation differently.
Greenblatt is also quoted in the book as saying he can’t remember the specific circumstances, but he claims that Carell had already elected to leave The Office when he became the new NBC chief.
The Office casting director Allison Jones said in the book that it’s “absolutely asinine” that NBC did not come to an agreement with Carell to appear in the final seasons of The Office.
Michael Scott left The Office in the 22nd episode of Season 7, titled “Goodbye Michael.” It’s a wonderful, touching episode in which Michael says goodbye to his longtime friends one by one.
The Office ran for two further seasons. While there were some funny and emotional episodes, The Office failed to get the ratings it did with Steve Carell and the Michael Scott character.
Michael eventually came back for the series finale, uttering one more “that’s what she said” joke.
A reboot of The Office is reportedly happening, and it’s said to feature a new cast. One of the difficulties of rebooting these shows is that they would be very expensive from a salary standpoint, not to mention the production costs. “The actors want a lot more money than we’re willing to pay them,” Greenblatt explained in 2018.
The original show was adapted from the Ricky Gervais BBC show of the same name, and it ran for nine seasons from 2005 to 2013. The American show was developed by Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons writer Greg Daniels, who recently teamed up with Carell for a new Space Force show for Netflix.
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Tom Cruise is known for doing a lot of his own stunts. He even flew a helicopter in Mission: Impossible: Fallout. For his next movie, Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise wanted to fly an actual F-18 jet, but the Navy said no.
Cruise wasn’t totally shut out of flying aircraft, however, as he actually flew a P-51 plane and helicopters for stunt sequences. “He can do just about anything in an airplane,” Bruckheimer said.
The filmmakers had actual Navy pilots fly the F-18s in Top Gun: Maverick, and these scenes were filmed using IMAX cameras inside the cockpits. While Cruise and his co-stars Miles Teller and Glen Powell did not fly those jets, they did complete what sounds like a gruelling training camp.
“When you’re pulling heavy Gs, it compresses your spine, your skull. It makes some people delirious. Some people can’t handle it,” Cruise said of the training with his co-stars. “So I had to get them up to be able to sustain high Gs. Because they have to act in the plane. I can’t have them sick the whole time.”
Also in the interview, Cruise hyped up the aerial stunts in Maverick, saying the film will deliver unprecedented action.
“I said to the studio, you don’t know how hard this movie is going to be,” Cruise said. “No one has ever done this before. There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way.”
Maverick remains scheduled to hit theatres in June, despite ongoing concerns around COVID-19. Another high-profile June release, Wonder Woman 1984, was recently delayed.
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Id Software’s return to Doom in 2016 was a phenomenal update of the franchise’s classic shooter formula. It was fast and intense, full of huge monsters and scorching metal tracks, modernizing the feel of the 1990s original while adding some new-school flourishes. Where Doom 2016 brought the original Doom into the present, Doom Eternal feels like a big step forward in making the franchise something new: It’s a master class in demon dismemberment after the introductory course to ripping and tearing of four years ago. Like its predecessor, Doom Eternal makes you feel like a monster-shredding badass–not just because you’re the strongest Doom Slayer, but because you’re also the smartest.
Doom Eternal is all about effectively using the huge amount of murder tools at your disposal. Health, armor, and ammo pickups are at a minimum in Eternal’s many combat arenas, and the game instead requires you to earn these by massacring monsters in a variety of different ways. Stagger an enemy and you can tear them apart with a brutal glory kill, which refills your health; douse a demon with the new flamethrower and they’ll start to spout armor pickups; or cut them in half with the chainsaw to grab some much-needed ammo.
In order to stay alive, you can’t just run around blasting madly, expecting to tear through everything in your path; you have to run around blasting rationally to keep yourself at fighting strength. Keeping all your numbers up means continually rotating through your glory, chainsaw, and flamethrower kills while also making sure you’re using the right gun for a particular job. Many of the toughest enemies now have weak points that allow you to snipe off their most lethal weapons, and you’ll need to assess threats and knock them out quickly.
At first, it seems like Doom Eternal provides an altogether unwieldy list of things to manage. Between all its weapons and tools, their various ammo counters, and your health, it can all become overwhelming. With so much to keep in mind at all times, it takes a bit to get accustomed to Doom Eternal. And constantly pausing the action to pull up your weapon wheel to check ammo counters and decide which weapon to use on the monster about to tear your face off can feel antithetical to Doom’s run-and-gun, rip-apart-everything approach.
Once you get the hang of it, though, all of Doom Eternal’s many elements come together in a cascade of mayhem that makes you into the brainiest killing machine around. This isn’t the kind of shooter in which your twitch reactions and aiming skills will carry you through; Eternal is a game in which you have to be constantly plotting your next move, executing a calculus of carnage to keep yourself alive and make everything else dead. Every moment is about analyzing the battlefield to find the next enemy you can stagger and slice apart for health or ammo, figuring out which enemy is your top priority and what guns you’ll need to take it out safely, and where you need to head next in order to take the shots you need or keep the creatures chasing you from getting their own chance to rip and tear.
The mental math of figuring out how to keep yourself alive is a big part of what makes the game fun, but it’s the improved mobility that really lets Doom Eternal kick off a metal guitar solo and start shredding. Every big battle takes place in a multi-level arena adorned with jump pads and monkey bars that let you get around quickly, and you also have a double-jump and horizontal dash move for avoiding attacks and crossing distances. A few arenas have their irritations, especially those where it’s easy to trap yourself in a tight corner or back over a cliff, but mostly, Eternal’s level design provides plenty of opportunities to zip around like a bat out of hell, constantly finding your next target and assessing if you need to set it on fire, freeze it, cut it in half, tear it apart, or some combination of all of them. It all makes just about every fight feel like a speeding train seconds from going off the rails, with disaster only averted because you’re so damn good at killing stuff. Once you get the rhythm of Doom Eternal, it becomes a brilliant extension of what made Doom 2016 so cool.
Between battles, you spend your time using Eternal’s mobility to navigate its sprawling, twisting levels, and to uncover myriad secret locations that hide upgrades and weapon mods. There’s an even bigger emphasis on platforming than in Doom 2016, and puzzling through the environments to get around provides a welcome breather between fights. Some of the platforming can be a bit trying at times, especially when you need to clear big gaps to grab distant monkey bars or hit sticky walls you can climb. For the most part, though, navigating the environment is almost as much fun as smashing through Hell’s armies. These portions are also pretty forgiving, thanks to the fact that falling into the abyss now only penalizes you with a small loss of health instead of instant death.
The campaign took me around 16 hours to complete, and that included tracking down the vast majority of secrets and completing a lot of the optional fights that earn you additional upgrade points. Running throughout is a pretty involved story, which feels like a fundamental shift from the satirical, jokey tale of Doom 2016. Where that game put you in the Praetor suit of a Doomslayer who literally destroyed the radios trying to provide context for his endless massacres, Doom Eternal is much more self-serious, constantly spewing proper nouns and character names as if you’re intimately familiar with all the actors leading Hell’s invasion of Earth. Some of the humor of the last game remains, but the majority is all pretty tough to follow if you don’t spend time reading through the many collectible lore drops scattered around every level. Thankfully, keeping up with Eternal’s confusing plot isn’t really a necessary component of enjoying the game.
In addition to the main campaign, Doom Eternal also includes a multiplayer mode called Battlemode. It foregoes the more traditional deathmatch approach of Doom 2016, in which a bunch of players grab the Doom Slayer’s weapons and shoot each other, for an experience in which one combatant takes on the role of the Slayer, fighting a team of two opponents who play as demons.
The Slayer-versus-demons approach of Eternal’s multiplayer helps maintain the puzzle-like feel of its combat, while ratcheting up the challenge by giving demons the ability to strategize and work together. Demons also have a bunch of special abilities–they can summon smaller enemies to fight for them, block the Slayer’s ability to pick up loot for a short time to stop them from healing, create traps, or share buffs. Battlemode is an interesting take on Eternal’s battles, requiring you to use all your skills against intelligent enemies as the Slayer and to execute coordinated assaults as the relatively weaker demons. Playing as the demons puts things at a slower pace but captures a different, more tactical aspect of the battle calculations that are central to Doom Eternal’s gameplay.
Eternal’s multiplayer is a fun change of pace, especially with the opportunity to play as the demons, but its steep learning curve means it’s a bit alienating to drop into, particularly if you haven’t put significant time into the campaign. There’s a lot to keep in mind no matter what role you take on in Battlemode, making it a tough multiplayer experience to get good at. The mode also doesn’t add too much variety to the Eternal formula–for Slayer players, it’s mostly just a more challenging version of Eternal’s campaign. Taking on the demon role lets you try one of five different hellions, but while each plays a little differently, the gist of each is pretty much the same: Summon demons, shoot the Slayer. Battlemode is a nice diversion, but it’s not the major draw of Eternal by any stretch, and the novelty of facing off against other humans doesn’t add much to the game’s underlying formula.
Though it can take a bit to get the hang of it, the intricacies of Doom Eternal’s combat, combined with its enhanced mobility and option-heavy level design, create a ton of white-knuckle moments that elevate everything that made Doom 2016 work so well. Its combat is just as quick and chaotic, but requires you to constantly analyze everything that’s happening in order to come out victorious. Once you get the hang of the rhythm of Doom Eternal, it’ll make you feel like a demon-slaying savant.
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YouTube will default videos to standard definition starting today, Google confirmed to IGN in a statement. The effort is meant to help governments and networks minimize stress on their systems as more and more people are social distancing at home.
Last week, Google announced that it would be temporarily defaulting all videos on YouTube to standard definition in the EU. Today, that decision has been expanded worldwide.
“We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation,” a Google spokesperson told IGN.
“Last week, we announced that we were temporarily defaulting all videos on YouTube to standard definition in the EU. Given the global nature of this crisis, we will expand that change globally starting today.”
Not many animated series have captured the hearts of their fans like Samurai Jack has, and now, Adult Swim has made it available to stream completely free on its website and app. That includes the fifth season, which marked the return of the popular show in 2017. Unfortunately, the series is only available to stream in the US.
Samurai Jack follows a prince who’s gifted a sword from the gods that can be used to defeat the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, Aku. In a battle with the demon, the prince is sent into the future, a time when Aku rules the Earth. People call the prince Jack, which he takes on as his name while working toward getting back to his own time to defeat the evil Aku.
The Cartoon Network series kicked off all the way back in 2001 and was finally concluded after a 13-year break on Adult Swim. Samurai Jack stars Phil LaMarr as the titular character. LaMarr is known for his extensive voice work on shows like Futurama and Justice League as well as video games such as the Mortal Kombat and Metal Gear Solid series.
In related news, a Samurai Jack video game was recently revealed by Adult Swim Games. Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time releases for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC this year. It’s a 3D action game with one heck of a visual style, and all of the original voice actors are set to make their return.
If you’re stuck at home and need some more free entertainment, quite a few game developers have been extremely generous and made their games free for a limited time. Check out our list of all of the free games available to claim right now.
Stream Samurai Jack for free
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It feels like zombies have become scarier over time, especially since, through the decades, the idea of the undead rising to attack the living has evolved from people literally rising from the grave, to a highly contagious virus infecting people and turning them into mindless monsters. When it comes to TV, there’s no better show that combines the gore and thrills of a zombie movie with the political plotting and intrigue of Game of Thrones than Netflix’s Kingdom, which just returned with a second season.
Picking up right where we left off last season, Kingdom Season 2 throws us into the middle of an epic battle as the Crown Prince of the Joseon Kingdom, Lee Chang (Ji-Hoon Ju), his chief guard Muyeong (Sang-ho Kim), physician Seo-bi (Doona Bae), Chang’s former mentor Lord Ahn Hyeon (Jun-ho Heo), and vengeful tiger hunter Yeong-shin (Kim Sung-kyu) find themselves facing down a zombie horde right outside the Sangju Citadel. And while the disease threatens to ravage the land, those with political power only try to keep themselves safe while shutting out those who actually need help, leaving them to suffer. (Of course, any parallels to reality are merely coincidental.)
In many ways, Kingdom resembles HBO’s Game of Thrones, both thematically and structurally. Kingdom spent its 6-episode first season cutting back and forth between the Crown Prince fighting to take back his throne and unravel the horrible things the Haewon Cho clan have done, and Seo-bi slowly discovering the truth behind the zombie outbreak. A big part of the series that carries over to Season 2 is the idea that corruption and official incompetence can lead to catastrophe. In the first season we saw how officials and ministers allowed the disease to spread because they focused on saving themselves rather than helping everyone, and Season 2 pulls back the curtain to show how there are always those who profit off tragedy.
From the grand-scale fight scene that opens the first episode, Kingdom kicks into high gear in its sophomore season. Stories that were merely hinted at in the first 6 episodes suddenly become integral to the plot and get proper time to breathe, while the tiniest of details from Season 1 return in huge ways. Not to be outdone by Game of Thrones, Kingdom also serves as an intriguing courtroom thriller, with a plot involving a mole, and the queen faking a pregnancy while hoping a peasant woman would give birth to a son that she could present as her rightful heir to the throne. Much like early seasons of the HBO show, Kingdom manages to give compelling backstories and motivations to its expanding cast, making even the villains at least a bit sympathetic, all while finding the right balance between action and politics.
One of Kingdom’s main strengths is its setting. From its lavish costume design, to grand palaces and vistas to the elaborate choreography, this season becomes a feast for the eyes, with cinematography that is just begging to be added to the One Perfect Shot Twitter account. As for the action, this season doubles-down on its Peter Jackson influence, with several of the epic-scale action sequences including direct nods to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The production value seems to have increased this season, as we see more sieges and battles that take place inside grand palaces and walled citadels, with endless hordes trying to break in and just a handful of soldiers with torches shining in the pitch darkness, while the blasting of the cannons fills your ears.
The season finale in particular puts Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night” to shame, making you feel like you’re on the battlefield and the characters are actually in danger. Indeed, no one is safe in this season, and main characters die left and right in the span of minutes, building up to a visually stunning last stand on a frozen lake that brings to mind the shock of early seasons of the HBO show and how it used to off fan-favorite characters in the blink of an eye, to emotionally devastating yet compelling results. That being said, Kingdom isn’t above finding humor in horror, not only in the form of comic relief doofus Beom-pal (Jeon Seok-ho), but also a fantastic yet hilarious scene where Chang literally piledrives a giant zombie into ice like he’s at Wrestlemania.
And if you think there’s nothing new to be done with the mythology of zombies, think again. Season 2 of Kingdom doubles down on the viral aspect of the zombie outbreak, exploring its natural origin, how it spreads, and most frighteningly, how it evolves. In the Season 1 finale, we found out that the zombies aren’t actually vulnerable to sunlight, but to warm temperatures. This season kept giving us new discoveries about the “resurrection plant” and actually treats the zombies as victims of a viral infection that controls their movements, rather than supernatural undead ghouls.
Netflix’s Kingdom reaches new levels of terror given the context in which it was released, but even without the real news of scary viruses, this zombie show breathes new life into the genre by combining stunning action with an intriguing political plot and compelling characters whose suffering and deaths have actual impact. Kingdom shows that the zombie genre will never really go stale.
The second golden age of TV is considered to have begun in the late ’90s with prestige dramas like The Sopranos, and continued with shows like The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and even Boardwalk Empire. These shows have certain things in common, including a morally ambiguous main character that the audience finds sympathetic despite their many acts of cruelty and evil. These antiheroes often hold relatively respectable positions–a teacher, a cop, a politician–but hide darker tendencies that come to the surface over the course of the show.
Now that these shows aren’t dominating the TV landscape, we’re seeing shows that challenge the idea of the TV antihero. And few do that as well as Better Call Saul, AMC’s Breaking Bad prequel series, which, currently in the middle of airing its fifth and final season, has now officially run as long as Breaking Bad did in the first place.
When we first met Saul Goodman in Season 2 of Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman described him as “a criminal lawyer.” Throughout that show we saw Goodman act as a complete scumbag, a man willing to sell out his grandma if it meant getting a few seconds’ head start. That said, he was also a comic relief character who served as a funny counterpart to Walter White’s increasingly grim transformation into Heisenberg.
In 2015, AMC launched Better Call Saul, which focused on con-man turned small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill–who Breaking Bad viewers knew would somehow go on to become Saul Goodman. Like Breaking Bad before it, this show promised to document that transformation, but from the beginning, it was easy to see that Jimmy was pretty much the polar opposite of Walter White. Even though Jimmy still had some sleaziness in him–mostly from his time as a small-time grifter known as Slippin’ Jimmy–in the show’s present time he always strived to do good and showed remorse when he didn’t.
This stands in contrast to Breaking Bad, the show that Vince Gilligan famously sold as “a story about a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips into Scarface.” When we met Walter White, he seemed like a victim of circumstance, a once-brilliant chemist trapped in a dead-end job who got a cancer diagnosis he couldn’t fight in his current economic situation. Instead of accepting help from his former business partner, he turned to crime and began cooking meth to raise money that would go to his family after he dies. But Breaking Bad quickly exposed Walter for who he really was: a man who blamed the world for the life he chose, who found any excuse to “break bad” and do horrible things as he grew his crime empire. As the audience, we ate up his increasingly problematic actions because they were portrayed as “cool,” like taking down drug lords using “science, bitch.” But Breaking Bad repeatedly offered Walter exit after exit, only for him to keep going because, as he said in the end, “I liked it, I was good at it, and I was really–I was alive.”
Breaking Bad was all about Walter White embracing his newfound life and the thrills that came with it, even if it came at the cost of his family and his soul. On paper, Better Call Saul appears woefully similar, but what makes the prequel series special is how it flips the emotions associated with the antihero arc on their head. Jimmy McGill may seem like a typical antihero because we see him slowly embrace a life of crime, but when he finds himself in a conflict, Jimmy doesn’t invent a cool way to confront his adversaries–if anything, he goes to great lengths to avoid confrontation altogether. Jimmy so far hasn’t seemed capable of putting a bomb on a wheelchair or equipping a machine gun to the trunk of a car, but he is willing to charm the pants off those who mean him harm. Jimmy may never become a crime lord, or the boss of a powerful syndicate, but by totally dedicating himself to unglamorous bottom-feeding, Jimmy McGill survives long after the antiheroes are captured or killed.
Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul
At the heart of this is the moral struggle inside Jimmy McGill. Better Call Saul does show its protagonist committing awful acts. Jimmy McGill may not think of himself as a bad person, and he always tries to make things right, even at his own expense, but he does bad things. In many ways, he is like Bojack Horseman, another character who desperately wants to be thought of as a good person, but who constantly caves to bad habits he blames on his upbringing and circumstance, until he realizes he’s become the person others think he is. Jimmy isn’t breaking bad like Walter did; he won’t become a crime lord, but we’ve still seen him embrace his new life of aiding criminals and enjoying it, to the point of rejecting offers to become a more traditionally respected lawyer seemingly because he enjoys being Saul Goodman more.
Therein lies the tragedy of Better Call Saul, as Jimmy’s descent into becoming Saul Goodman has evidently lower stakes, but the moral downfall is more poignant and emotionally impactful. With Breaking Bad the audience slowly realized that Walter White was always a horrible person, whereas Better Call Saul shows how Jimmy was always holding Saul Goodman in check. Jimmy feels like a bad person deep down–he believes what others think about him. But the events of the show really have forced him to break bad. We wanted Walter to win no matter what, but we dread the moment Jimmy fully becomes Saul Goodman.
We still get antihero stories on TV, but recent shows have made an effort to comment on the genre and offer alternative takes on it. The recently finished The Good Place and even Bojack Horseman gave us flawed to outright terrible protagonists, and followed their arduous attempts at becoming better people. Even if it wasn’t easy, if they relapsed or didn’t fully become good by the end, the shows were all about making an effort. With Better Call Saul we know there is no redemption available for Jimmy. We know how his story ends: in metaphorical black and white, on the run from the law, and completely alone. The show takes advantage of its status as a prequel to make us feel what none of the Star Wars prequels did: a real sense of dread at knowing that no matter how much we root for Jimmy or how much he tries to stay good, eventually he will turn into the sleazy comic relief scumbag criminal lawyer we met all those years ago.
