Better Call Saul episode rankings: critics' No. 1 is from season 1, fans' is from season 6 — and they don't even star the same man
Two scoreboards, one show, zero overlap. The gap between them is 45 places.
Ask IMDb's voters for the best hour of Better Call Saul and the answer is overwhelming: "Plan and Execution," the season 6 mid-season finale, sits at 9.9 out of 10 on nearly 85,000 votes — one of the highest-rated television episodes ever logged on the site. It's the hour where Jimmy and Kim's con destroys Howard Hamlin at the Sandpiper mediation, and Lalo walks through the door.
Ask the critics and you get a different decade. Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer ranking of all 63 episodes puts "Five-O" — season 1, episode 6, March 2015 — at No. 1: a perfect 100% on 25 reviews, the most-reviewed perfect score in the series. It's Mike Ehrmantraut's origin story, the Philadelphia flashback hour that earned Jonathan Banks an Emmy nomination.
Here's the part that makes the paradox structural rather than cute: on that same Rotten Tomatoes list, "Plan and Execution" ranks No. 46. Not because critics disliked it — it also holds 100% — but because so few of them were still filing weekly reviews by 2022 that it loses every tiebreaker.
"How many ways can you say 'excellent' anyway?"
— Rotten Tomatoes, explaining the episodic review fatigue baked into its own ranking
Lay the two winners side by side and they barely belong to the same show:
- "Five-O" (S1E6, 2015): written by Gordon Smith, directed by Adam Bernstein. A Jonathan Banks solo showcase; Bob Odenkirk is a supporting player in his own series. IMDb: 9.4 on ~36,000 votes.
- "Plan and Execution" (S6E7, 2022): written and directed by Thomas Schnauz. An Odenkirk–Seehorn–Fabian hour that Banks drifts through. Rotten Tomatoes: 100% — on a fraction of the reviews.
The two lists aren't disagreeing about quality; they're measuring different things. Critics scored the show hardest when it was new, episode by episode, and a Mike backstory hour was the moment Better Call Saul proved it wasn't a Breaking Bad cover band. Fans vote cumulatively, with seven seasons of hindsight, and reward the hour where every long game detonated at once.
Critics crowned the episode that proved the show could exist. Fans crowned the one that proved it was worth seven years.
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Both verdicts are defensible. Just don't average them — the result would be an episode starring nobody.
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