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Throughout Better Call Saul Season 6, all future events (after the main storyline of Breaking Bad ends and Saul lives a low-profile life in exile) are shown in black and white.

Normally, events happening in the past are shown as black and white, while events in the present or future are shown in full color.

Why does Better Call Saul reverse this common practice?

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    It gives it a cool old-fashioned film noir feel, similar to the classic movies that Kim and Jimmy would enjoy after a hard day's lawyering/scamming/selling drop-phones.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Aug 16, 2022 at 14:04

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The color change serves to immediately alert the viewer to the time jump. Generally it is the past that is shown without color, however since moments in the past are predominant in the series doing so would make viewing annoying. The lack of color highlights the fact that Saul's quality of life has declined (in a sense it is as if he is traveling backward from success to failure) and that he has had to suppress his bursting personality, which gives a depressed flavor to the scenes. Maybe when Saul makes his personality re-emerge with his flamboyant clothes and maybe he meets Kim again the colors will reappear, that would be amazing.

As noted by @aleppke in the comments, black and white is also used to maintain stylistic consistency with Breaking Bad, where in the second season this technique had already been used to depict future events.

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    Wasn't the opening scene of the show also a black and white flash-forward?
    – GammaGames
    Aug 2, 2022 at 22:43
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    Breaking Bad also used black and white to depict future events in its teasers during season 2: Source. There's a reasonable chance that they made the same decision for Better Call Saul to maintain stylistic consistency. The fade to colour occurred in BB when the events of the main story were about to catch up to the flash-forward so it is not unreasonable to expect something similar in the BCS finale.
    – aleppke
    Aug 2, 2022 at 22:47
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    I agree with most of this answer, but would you care to elaborate on black and white being “annoying”?
    – DaG
    Aug 19, 2022 at 13:44
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    I think I've first seen this in NCIS, where events happening later in an episode would appearch in a short black and white preview.
    – infinitezero
    Aug 22, 2022 at 22:32
  • @DaG The use of black and white is useful to set a nostalgic tone (as in Mank) or to emphasize a sudden change in time or emotion (as in Better Call Saul). In my opinion, however, it should only be used if it makes real artistic sense. For example, using it in Better Call Saul to visualize the past would be counterproductive, because it would give a depressed tone to the sparkling part of Saul's life and, since the past is predominant, it would be redundant.
    – Alain Bianchini
    Aug 23, 2022 at 16:49

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