Call Saul episodes since before the Season 3 finale
The McGill brothers, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Chuck (Michael McKean), are seen here in . . . um . . . well, not-that-much-happier times -- this scene is from "Klick," the final episode (No. 10) of Season 2 of Better Call Saul.
by Ken
It's kind of embarrassing that it wasn't till the premier episode of Sieason 4 of Better Call Saul that I registered the death of Chuck McGill (Michael McKean), the big brother of our new-old friend Jimmy McGill, previously known to us, in Breaking Bad, as his later self, Saul Goodman. I mean, flashing back even in my dim memory, I had to have known from the Season 3 finale that Chuck was a goner in the fire that consumed his house. Still . . . . I guess I couldn't believe that the show's creative team, headed up by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, would let go of such an extraordinary character (which everyone on the creative team has told us in interviews was heavily influenced by the extraordinary and largely unexpected qualities Michael McKean brought to the role), with so much about him still to be explored. And I guess I had enough faith in the devious story-telling skills of Vince, Peter, and their team that I wasn't prepared to believe Chuck was really gone until the proverbial last nail was pounded into the coffin.
However, from the start of Episode 1 of Season 4, it became clear that Chuck was indeed kaput, gone, good-bye. Naturally one of the first things I thought of was -- well, here's how I put it in that unprecedented Monday edition of Sunday Classics of Feb. 23, 2016, "Special late-Monday Better Call Saul edition: Chuck McGill plays the Fauré Sicilienne!" (Set in front of Chuck on his baby-grand piano was an edition of the Sicilienne for violin or flute and piano.)
Original (2/23/2016) caption: Sure enough, there's a piano in Chuck McGill's living room! Given the light level, don't hold me to it, but isn't this Howard (Patrick Fabian), the managing partner of Chuck's law firm, arriving for his "delivery for McGill" in tonight's Better Call Saul episode, "Cobbler" [Season 2, Episode 2]?
At the time I wrote in part:
If there's one thing probably none of us expected to see, it was Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) at the piano playing the piano part of Fauré's Sicilienne. But there it was, at the top of tonight's Better Call Saul episode, with something like this score page just visible to Chuck, and to us, with the little bit of natural light that found its way into his otherwise-dark living room -- Chuck can't, of course, have electric light.Eventually, of course, Better Call Saul masterminds Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould and their team would gradually fill us in, in their patented time-hopping, circuitious way, but at this point I don't think we knew much of anything except that there was all too clearly a huge something-or-someone missing from Chuck's life, and now suddenly we had him playing the piano, with the obvious indication that the missing something-or-someone had something to do with classical music, specifically either the violin or the flute -- the version of the Sicilienne Chuck was playing from was for violin or flute and piano. (It took two subsequent episodes in Season 2 and another in Season 3 to fill for us the void left in Chuck's life left by the implosion of his marriage to Rebecca, indeed a violinist. Ann Cusack, who has played Rebecca, was back for the first episodes of Season 4, in -- kind of literally -- the wake of Chuck's passing.)
And at that time we heard the Sicilienne three ways --
For violin and piano:
Krzysztof Smietana, violin; John Blakely, piano. Meridian, recorded c1993?
For cello and piano:
Steven Doane, cello; Barry Snyder, piano. Bridge, recorded in Rochester (NY), January 1992
For orchestra, with flute solo (no. iii from Fauré's Suite from the incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80):
Orchestre de Paris, Serge Baudo, cond. EMI, recorded June 1969
WE HAVE ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SICILIENNE,
BUT WE'LL ALSO NEED TO BACKTRACK A LITTLE
