Chicanery

In Part Eleven of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, original TX 15/11/1986, the evidence in the Doctor's trial is at odds with his own memory, as the footage has been twisted by the prosecutor, the Valeyard, to show him in a worse light than reality:

THE DOCTOR: I didn't do that!

THE INQUISITOR: Stop the Matrix!

THE VALEYARD: Are we to be subject to more chicanery, Sagacity?

In the fifth episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, "Chicanery", original TX 08/05/2017, Jimmy McGill has just provided the courtroom with proof his brother's electromagnetic hypersensitivity is all in his mind, hoping to provoke him into exactly the unhinged rant he ends up delivering:

CHUCK: No, no, no. No no, it's a trick, it has to --

ALLEY: Enough is enough. I submit that Mr. McGill's mental illness is a non-issue. If he were schizophrenic --

CHUCK: Schizo--!

ALLEY: -- it would not take away from the fact that the defendant --

CHUCK: I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers, I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta, as if I could ever make such a mistake! Never! Never! I just -- I just couldn't prove it! He -- he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him --

ALLEY: Mr. McGill, please. You don't have to go into --

CHUCK: You think this is something? You think this is bad, this -- this chicanery? He's done worse! That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No, he orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof, and I saved him! And I shouldn't have! I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was nine, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! "But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy!" Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer?! What a sick joke! I should have stopped him when I had the chance! And you, you have to stop him! You --

And that is how Pip and Jane Baker foreshadowed one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most acclaimed dramas of the twenty-first century.

"The Government Urges the Court to Allow Mr. Goodman to Continue!"

The final production draft of the script for the sixty-third and final episode of Better Call Saul, "Saul Gone", is available to read here, one of ten standout scripts that year submitted by their writers for the Emmys published on Deadline. There are a number of small tweaks and differences between the script and what ultimately ended up on screen. The opening flashback to "Bad Choice Road" opens a bit sooner, with dialogue from Kim over the phone that isn't in the broadcast version. There's a small addition to Gene's attempt to escape Omaha where he has an altercation with a homeowner, which was filmed and can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD. When Saul hires Bill Oakley as his advisory counsel, in the script we don't hear the start of their conversation, we only see Oakley's reaction. When the plane arrives in Albuquerque there was originally meant to be a shot of the remains of Jimmy's Suzuki Esteem in the desert, providing a link back to the "Bad Choice Road" flashback (a remnant of this idea still appears in the trailer for the episode). Various other odd lines and moments are different. There are other little touches that seem to have been thought of later on -- if you compare the establishing shots of desert scenery in the pre-titles sequence with those in the pilot of Breaking Bad you'll see how similarly they're framed, building on the final episodes' theme of things coming full-circle.

But perhaps the most important change -- at least to me -- is during the climactic scene where Saul Goodman confesses all his crimes on the stand: