A few weeks ago, Better Call Saul fans noticed something suspicious about the episode titles for the second season:
On Tuesday, series co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould confirmed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the “FRING’S BACK” anagram—an apparent reference to Gus Fring, the master criminal played by Giancarlo Esposito in Breaking Bad—was no coincidence. The puzzle was meant as a clue as to the origin of the note that appeared in the series finale, which stopping Mike Ehrmantraut from assassinating a cartel leader. But according to Gilligan, no one was supposed to have figured it out yet:
In a perfect world, in our mind’s eye, the way this would have worked is people would have said, “Oh, man, who left that note?” And then weeks or months from now Peter would have tweeted out, “Hey, look for a clue,” and people would have said, “Oh, was that Fring?”
But it’s impossible to put anything over on the internet these days, and at least two people independently unscrambled the anagram before the finale aired. “I guess we really underestimated the genius and hard work of our fans,” Gould said.
It wasn’t the first time Vince Gilligan hid clues in episode titles: In the second season of Breaking Bad, the titles of the episodes that opened with unexplained shots of a scorched teddy bear floating in a pool could be combined to form the sentence “Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ,” explaining the mid-air collision that sent the bear plummeting from the sky.
Knowing the solution in advance made for a strange experience for fans watching the finale—well, for me, anyway—expecting Fring himself instead of just a mysterious note. But as Gilligan and Gould confirm in the interview, at some point in Season 3, we’ll see him in the flesh.
