From Hitchcock’s classics to contemporary masterpieces, great cinema has long relied on costumes to help shape the narrative. The work achieved by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould in Better Call Saul (2015-22), the spin-off of Breaking Bad, along with costume designer Jennifer Bryan, shares the same brilliance.
Gilligan’s Breaking Bad was already famous for using a precise mathematical approach to its colour wheel and on-point clothing choices. While a similar visual investigation continues in Better Call Saul, there is one item that steals the show and locks the whole plot together: Chuck’s aluminium blanket. To understand the effect of this shiny piece as it unfolds across the plot, we first need to take a closer look at the story of Jimmy and his older brother, Chuck.
The show is not just about a slippery, rule-breaking man trying to make a place for himself in the world; it is about the trauma and rivalry between two brothers reacting to an absent father figure in completely opposite ways. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and his older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), are the sons of a weak, naive father who failed to protect his auto upholstery shop from simple con artists. Facing this powerless father figure at a young age, Jimmy develops a survival mechanism where any shortcut is justified to protect himself from a dangerous world. Although he is fundamentally a decent person, he judges right and wrong by his own momentary, personal standards. For Jimmy, lying, cheating, and manipulation are not just manners of communication; they are a coping mechanism. In essence, he remains a child.
Because his character is not bound by paternal authority or societal rules, this flaw allows his creativity to leak out like toxic chemicals seeping from an old battery. These noxious behavioral leaks quickly stain Jimmy’s reputation, his relationships, and everyone around him. To replace his (symbolically) absent father, Chuck matured early, built his identity around a sense of duty, and became a lawyer, where he holds a prestigious position at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. Unlike Jimmy, Chuck has a serious, introverted personality. The defining feature of his persona is the strict ethical values he seeks to embody through his profession.
Shiny Comfort
Chuck suffers from severe anxiety, which manifests as a belief that he is hypersensitive to electronics. To protect himself from electricity and electromagnetic waves, he wraps himself in this shiny aluminium blanket whenever he needs to step outdoors. As his anxiety worsens, managing daily life becomes too much to handle. Jimmy constantly comes over to check on him, running the errands Chuck is terrified to do himself. Yet, for years, Chuck had been a highly successful and respected attorney.
The first layer of meaning behind Chuck’s iconic space blanket reveals a fragile, uncontained part of him that never got the chance to be a child. This literal “protective shield” does something unexpected: despite his successful career and imposing physical stature, it gives Chuck a safe space to shrink, almost offering womb-like comfort. Here, the roles of two brothers are reversed: Jimmy becomes the protector, while Chuck becomes the child. The shiny aluminium space blanket wraps around a buried part of Chuck’s identity, taking away the heavy burden of his adult responsibilities.
The space blanket also cleverly connects Chuck’s anxiety to the sibling rivalry that drives Better Call Saul. While Jimmy ignores rules and responsibilities, he has a cheerful and warm personality; a smooth talker with a lot of charm. These traits open doors for him, but Jimmy somehow always ruins these opportunities. Chuck’s personality is proper and orderly, and his relationship with life looks dull.
In short, even though Chuck has a complete ethical framework and seems to have a much stronger personality than Jimmy, he lacks the creativity to show it. Over time, this lack of charm turns into a repressed anger and envy toward his brother. Ultimately, Chuck’s harsh superego, unable to face the feelings caused by all these heavy childhood burdens, makes him mentally sick. This is where the creators show their fashionable genius.
Chuck actually longs to be seen and shine just like Jimmy. In a brilliant move by the writers, when Chuck puts on this aluminium blanket, he receives, through his illness, the attention he never gets in his reserved form. Indeed, when Chuck wraps himself in this space blanket, perhaps for the first time in his life, he shines as much as he subconsciously always wanted.
Love Shiny Love
In one of Better Call Saul‘s most powerful scenes, in “Bagman) (Season 5 Episode 8), Jimmy’s first turning point occurs in the desert, where he nearly dies. We see him standing, wrapped in a shiny Mylar blanket. Throughout the series, we watch Jimmy run away from responsibility at every turn. Yet here, when Kim fearlessly confronts Eduardo “Lalo” Salamanca (Tony Dalton), we see Jimmy begin to truly understand and accept love and embark on his long journey of change.
The deadly Salamanca twins (Leonel and Marco) wear shiny metallic suits throughout the series, and always when they murder. While the behaviours of those robot-like twins are driven by orders from above, Jimmy used his avoidance of trauma and pain to guide his decisions.
Through this strategic fashion theme throughout Better Call Saul, the creators put Jimmy’s crimes on par with the brutal violence of the Salamanca brothers. This way, the series invites the audience to imagine their morality in such a situation and to weigh which side they may lean toward in life: somewhere between the Salamancas and Jimmy, or between Lalo and Howard? (Lalo and Howard’s personalities and life choices, by the way, are juxtaposed as they lie in the same grave in Season 6, Episode 8, “Point and Shoot”.)
From the very early episodes, Jimmy’s relationship with Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) is intentionally kept a slow burn. Instead of relying on a romantic or passionate manner, Better Call Saul grounds their bond in a professional friendship that naturally evolves into physical intimacy. The moments where we see them as romantic partners are usually limited to quick kisses; we rarely see them being intimate.
Instead, they talk about business, connecting with each other mostly through their work. Their marriage is sudden and practical, but their love is real. As their shared friendship, work, and traumatic pasts draw them closer, Jimmy’s troubled personality slowly begins to affect Kim’s life. Eventually, when Jimmy’s shady cartel dealings put Kim in danger, he is left with no choice but to finally step up and take responsibility for her safety.
Jimmy, who manipulates everyone, is caught off guard by life’s unpredictability. From this point on, his actions begin to awaken fear and a sense of duty. This is why, after being ambushed in the desert, he fights to survive solely for his love of Kim. Here, Chuck’s space blanket is brought back into the story as a direct callback to him.
When Jimmy fearlessly steps in front of the cartel member’s car, he is draped in a Mylar blanket. On the surface, he is wearing it simply to protect himself from the harsh desert weather, but when he wraps himself in this shiny blanket, something about Jimmy shifts; he takes on responsibility, as Chuck would.
Shine On
In Better Call Saul‘s future timeline, Jimmy lives as a wanted criminal under the fake name Gene Takavic, a clever wordplay on “take a vacation”, alluding to his long period of hiding. This film-noirish black-and-white chapter sees him caught by the police and facing life in prison.
At first, in the courtroom, he uses his sharp wit and knowledge of the law to convince a reduction of his sentence to seven and a half years. However, he sees Kim (now his ex-wife), who is wrecked by her deep guilt over Howard Hamlin’s (Patrick Fabian) death at the hands of Lalo Salamanca in Season 6, Episode 7, “Plan and Execution”. Looking into Kim’s eyes, he changes his mind and refuses the shortened sentence. He confesses to all of his crimes and accepts the 86-year prison sentence. As the story unravels in this scene, Jimmy is wearing a bright, metallic grey suit.
This time, the shiny fabric casts a bright light on this major decision and Jimmy’s inner transition. First, it marks a moment of facing responsibility, as in the aforementioned desert scene. By confessing his crimes, Jimmy finally follows the rules Chuck always lived by. He also speaks openly about his role in Chuck’s suicide (Season 3’s finale, “Lantern”), and in so doing, he finally faces the grief of losing his brother. Meanwhile, the texture of Jimmy’s sharkskin suit shines almost as brightly as Chuck’s Mylar blanket.
Wearing his snazzy, shiny suit, Jimmy is facing not just the judge in this scene, but also his own conscience. Thus, in the final prison scenes, as he works in the prison bakery, his life behind bars is depicted as a peaceful, healing experience compared to the dark hole he had been stuck in for years. Despite the desperate distance prison puts between him and Kim, we witness how their love still glows in the light of a burning cigarette.