Category: better call saul

It’s difficult to judge season finales in serialized shows such as this one on their own merits. You can talk about individual scenes or developments, but unless they actively tie up storylines as opposed to introduce new ones or continue existing ones, you’re left in a sort of narrative limbo.

Some Better Call Saul finales do wrap up storylines, most notably season one’s “Marco.” There, it may have been written with the thought that the show might not get a second season. It didn’t show us Jimmy’s complete transformation into Saul, but it could arguably have showed us enough that we could fill in the blanks. Here, in “Something Unforgivable” (as in the past couple of seasons), the show knows it’s coming back. The writers are able not only to keep their momentum, but to leave things so artfully unresolved that audiences will be left anxious for the next season.

All of which is to say, there’s not much I can discuss from a story standpoint. Last week’s episode brought a number of threads to acceptable ends, even if it did so temporarily. This week was untethered. It could do whatever it wanted to do without having to live with its own consequences. There must have been a giddiness to that writing process. I certainly thought I could feel it.

“Something Unforgivable” follows two main stories, both of which hinge upon their own unforgivable somethings.

For Eduardo, that’s Nacho inviting assassins into his compound and telling them exactly where to find him. Does Eduardo know that this happened? He at least suspects it, and when he sees that the lock on the gate was jimmied (ha ha) from the inside, that will seal it. This represents a massive betrayal, and it’s not as though Eduardo was ever the forgiving kind.

I love Eduardo. Tony Dalton is rivaling Rhea Seehorn as Better Call Saul’s best casting choice, which is all the more impressive since he only joined the show toward the end of season four. The guy is so much fun. He positively bursts with personality, and the show keeps finding new ways to explore his strange, scary playfulness. In this episode, he plays a joke on one of the guards at his compound by pretending to be an intruder himself, only to roll down the window and smile into the barrel of the gun. Funny guy!

We see him with his “family,” with his boss. We see him both at work and at rest. And we see that he’s a bit more wily than we probably believed, leading his own assassins in circles to get the drop on each one of them in turn.

Also, Gus says these assassins are the best in the business. He says this to Mike, the actual best in the business. Mike, who has a sniper rifle and has demonstrated many times that he knows how to use it. Mike, who didn’t get the chance to put a bullet in Eduardo’s head last week and would certainly be more than willing to do it this week.

Gus, you fucking bozo.

The episode ends with Eduardo alive, though Gus will be led to believe he’s dead. This frees him up to set into motion whatever form of revenge he deems fit, and we end “Something Unforgivable” as he stomps away from his compound, pulsing with anger. This is a guy who is dangerous enough when he’s happy.

Then, of course, there’s the Jimmy and Kim plot. Their unforgivable something isn’t done by either to the other, but planned instead for Howard.

If they can erode the confidence Howard’s clients and peers have in him, they decide, they can force an earlier settlement with Sandpiper — remember season one? — and Jimmy will finally get paid for his role in the case. He’ll end up with about two million dollars, splitting it with Kim so that they’ll each have one million.

And here’s the brilliant part: When something happens on this show, we can often flash ahead in our minds to Breaking Bad to know how it pans out. Mike and Saul are lost in the desert? They’ll get home, because they’re alive in Breaking Bad. Nacho wants Hector out of the picture? One way or another he’ll get his wish, because the guy is an invalid by the time of Breaking Bad. Jimmy faces any kind of ethical conundrum whatsoever? He can go either way today, but we know where he’ll land tomorrow.

In this case, though, anything could happen. We don’t know if their big coup will succeed or fail. Either result could fit. We know Kim is gone — however we have to end up defining that word — by Breaking Bad, but that’s it. Is she gone because this attempt on Howard’s career derailed her life? Or was it successful and she took her million dollars to open the law firm she dreams of in this episode? We don’t know. Is Jimmy operating in a strip mall in Breaking Bad because he didn’t get his million, or is he only there because the million allowed him to afford the startup costs? We don’t know.

That’s exciting, and it sets up an unknown battle that can play out in the show’s final season, just as Eduardo storming off does. One might have understandably expected Better Call Saul to become necessarily more predictable as it approached Breaking Bad, but season six — the final season — could well be the least predictable of all.

That’s a good trick.

Speaking of which, we don’t meet Saul in Breaking Bad until season two. That means it’s possible that some of Better Call Saul’s final season could overlap Breaking Bad’s first. After all, Saul mentions Eduardo and Nacho when we meet him in that show, suggesting they’re pretty fresh in his mind. We’ll see.

Otherwise, before we part, just a few tiny observations: Kim turns the finger guns on Jimmy, whereas he turned his on her at the end of season four. Mike argues to Gus that they owe Nacho his freedom, something he wasn’t able to argue for Werner. Jimmy tells Kim that she’ll feel differently when her head clears “in the cold light of day,” a suggestion I made in my review of “Namaste,” proving that the Better Call Saul writing staff reads my reviews and adjusts their plans accordingly.

And, most importantly, Jimmy hammering on Mike’s door just for the guy to drive up behind him and ask him what the hell he’s doing cements these two as the greatest comedic duo of our time.

Scattered thoughts? Certainly and appropriately. “Something Unforgivable” scattered a lot of things. We’ll see how season six, the final season, goes about picking them up.

Thank you once again, sincerely, for taking this trip with me. I’ll see you sometime in 2028 for the final stretch.

First of all, kudos to “Bad Choice Road” for actually ending. Eduardo showing up at Jimmy’s door must have been a very tempting “Executive Producer: Vince Gilligan” moment, but we got to see the entirety of the confrontation that followed. I know I praised “Bagman” for withholding the ending of its story, and I stand by that as being the correct decision, but it’s not something this or any show should do weekly.

It’s tempting to talk about nothing but that ending, but I’ll try to hold off as long as I can.

The rest of the episode was pretty good. Not great, but after “Bagman” I think any episode would have difficulty looking great.

We got a lovely opening sequence showing the contrast between Jimmy and Kim — at least for now — set to a hummed version of “Something Stupid.” Which I found hilarious, because saying “I love you” can’t even register on the stupidity scale for Jimmy anymore.

Then we’re back. Eduardo gets his bail, Jimmy gets his money. It’s not an easy return to normalcy but it’s a necessary one and it’s going to happen. The most interesting thing for me is something the episode didn’t fully explore: Jimmy’s PTSD.

“Bagman” introduced and explored it a bit, we got some flashes of it here and had a great conversation with Mike (“I can’t believe there’s, like, over a billion people on this planet and the only person I have to talk about this to is you.”), but not much else. That’s okay; later episodes may explore it. At the very least, the day Jimmy wakes up and goes about his routine and realizes he hasn’t thought about it will be a crucial, possibly final step on his journey to becoming Saul Goodman full time.

Jimmy quickly breaks his oath of honesty to Kim, which he believes he’s doing to protect her. I think he has a good argument there, but it’s an important moment. Ditto Kim letting him withhold the truth. She tells him that she knows he’s lying, and that’s it. She doesn’t press him. Even during the ending — when she has a valid and well-deserved reason to press him — she doesn’t. He broke his promise and she let him do it. That’s important.

Does she need his protection, though? Jimmy lashes out at her when he learns she visited Eduardo in jail, because it puts her in danger. He’s proven correct when Eduardo shows up at their apartment late in the episode. But, in the end, it’s she who is protecting Jimmy.

See, here’s the thing. We’ve seen Jimmy working criminals before, but he’s usually in a position of some kind of control. Not always, but usually. He has his confidence, his wit, and his charm to fall back on. He’s within reasonable distance of having the upper hand. Here, though, with Eduardo literally breathing down his neck, he flounders. He stumbles. He can’t come up with any kind of way to gain control of the situation and he talks himself uselessly in circles.

That’s important, too. Jimmy can’t immerse himself in the criminal underworld if this is the way he deals with implicit threats. Saul Goodman, as we’ve seen in Breaking Bad, is much better at it. So what gets Jimmy to Saul in this regard? What helps him evolve from a frightened victim to one who can at least maintain the illusion of control?

We might have seen it. If he were paying attention, Kim just showed him how to do it. You push back. You don’t allow them to intimidate you. You force them back into line.

And that confrontation — between Kim and Eduardo — was Better Call Saul’s clash of the titans. The show’s two best actors and most interesting characters staring each other down, while Jimmy stands silently, letting the consequences of his actions unfold (and possibly resolve) without him. He goes from being a target to a bystander as Kim fights his battle for him.

What a battle, too. I’ve spoken about Eduardo before, regarding the way he upsets the unspoken rules of the game. He’s frequently given answers that are meant to shut down further questioning, and he questions further anyway. He speaks openly about that which everyone would prefer he’d remain quiet. He refuses to accept that the answer he gets is the only answer he can get. And he does it all with a big, goofy smile and an undying flair that keeps everyone off guard. He’s not an idiot, but he can play off his breaking of the rules as though he were one.

We see it a few times in this episode, from personally checking the veracity of Jimmy’s car-trouble story to disregarding the aide in the nursing home who wants to bring Hector into a birthday celebration. (The sight gag of the aging kingpin in a party hat was marvelous.) And then, of course, with his tapping on the fishtank.

That’s who Eduardo is, in one sentence. Eduardo is the guy who taps on the fishtank.

He knows he isn’t supposed to do it, and he does it anyway. He knows that tapping on the fishtank gets a response. Maybe it’s a negative one, sure, but it’s a response, and that’s more than he would get if he didn’t tap. Everyone around him silently agrees not to tap the fishtank. That’s fine for them. He’s the one who taps anyway.

Kim is the only one so far who doesn’t take that shit.

We’ve seen Eduardo bend powerful men when he breaks the rules. He’s given an answer. He asks for more. He’s told the same thing. He asks for more again. He gets more.

It’s Kim who wrangles him, and she does it so successfully and unexpectedly that he’s left speechless. Eduardo is not a man left easily speechless. He’s met his match, at least for now. He doesn’t like it, but I think there’s some degree of actual respect there. How do I know? Because he doesn’t pretend to have respect. He doesn’t toss off an, “I like this one!” or a, “She’s feisty,” sort of platitude.

He shuts his fucking mouth and walks out the door. No stomping. No slamming.

He gives Kim what she wants. He leaves without incident.

At least, once again, for now.

This would have been, I think, a pretty decent season finale, but there’s still one episode to go. That’s good news, precisely because I don’t know what to expect.

“Bad Choice Road” leaves these characters at what I think are perfect, clean, end-of-season terminal points. Eduardo is free and heading to Mexico. Nacho is still trapped, and Gus makes a genuinely good argument for keeping him there. Mike reveals himself once again to be a big softie, which never, ever ends well. Jimmy is freed from facing repercussion for what he’s done. Kim is back to pro bono work and has established herself as the show’s secret badass.

This is where the next story for each of them can begin.

But the show still has one last set of curveballs to throw us. These are just endings…for now.

I have no idea what to expect, but Better Call Saul didn’t give us a series of false endings here for nothing. It did it for what I’m confident was a very good reason. I’m excited and anxious to learn what that will turn out to be.

Is it even worth mentioning that this was Better Call Saul‘s best episode? Maybe I’ll change my mind with time, but as of now it’s easily keeping company with “Five-O” and “Chicanery” at the very top of the ladder.

Something occurred to me after posting last week’s review. In that episode, Eduardo spots the JMM on Saul’s bag, and he asks what it stands for. Saul replies, “Justice matters most,” which was the on-the-spot backronym he coined with Kim in the first episode of the season. Eduardo suggests that it could instead stand for “Just make money.”

Pretty clear distinction between the two interpretations, which is probably why I didn’t read much further into it. Later on, it occurred to me. They were discussing what “JMM” stands for, in terms of three letters standing in for three words. But, silently, the question assumes another meaning: What does JMM — as in James Morgan McGill — stand for?

What does Jimmy represent? What does he care about? What is important enough to him that he’ll die for it?

“Bagman” proposes an answer to that question. Maybe not a definitive one — we have a whole season to go after this one wraps — but it’s definitive enough to give JMM a huge shove toward letting himself become Saul Goodman.

The episode is fantastic, and also about as simple as it could possibly be. In fact, its very basic plot — Jimmy retrieves $7 million from the cartel to get Eduardo out of prison — isn’t even resolved before the episode ends. We get a beginning, a middle, and punch in the throat for expecting an ending.

And that, for this story, at this point in Jimmy’s life, as an illustration of the way in which “resolution” for him is getting farther and farther away, that’s perfect. It’s not a trick you can always get away with — in fact, I struggle to think of too many more examples of this working — but it was the right way for “Bagman” to conclude. Jimmy has made his decision, and he’ll have a long way to go before finding any kind of relief.

It’s going to get worse, in other words, before it gets any better. Debatably, it never does get better.

Which is the whole point. Soon after picking up the money, Jimmy is ambushed and very nearly executed. He’s saved by Mike, but their vehicles are damaged in the shootout. Mike and Jimmy hoof it back to civilization, one of them clearly handling the situation better than the other.

Jimmy asks Mike how he manages to keep going, and Mike gives a nice little speech about what’s important to him…what’s important enough to him that he would willingly put himself in this exact situation. For him, it’s his family, and leaving them in comfort whenever he happens to go. That’s enough for him to push through whatever it takes.

What is it for Jimmy?

We don’t know. The romantic answer would be Kim; he’ll push through as much as he can to make her happy, perhaps. But we know — and Jimmy knew — that she wasn’t happy with this situation, so that suggestion falls at the first hurdle. He did this in spite of her very rational objections. In that moment, at least, we see him arrive at a more practical answer: $100,000.

He could make Kim very happy by saying he won’t go through with it. He chooses to do the opposite. To paraphrase Mr. Burns, he’d be happier with the one hundred thousand dollars.

At least, he thinks he would be. He certainly isn’t happy with it in the desert. Mike is able to push through because he cares enough about something that keeps him going. Jimmy isn’t and doesn’t.

And this is going to represent a serious turning point for him. We’ve seen Jimmy navigate ethical dilemmas before, and he’s always been able to rationalize his behavior. Last week, for instance, he used a fictional family to gain sympathy for Eduardo while the actual family of Eduardo’s victim mourned in the courtroom. That’s a shitty thing to do, and Jimmy knows it, but he can also rationalize it. It’s his job. He’s playing the game. He needs to do what he can for his client. He’s being a good lawyer.

In short, he’s able to separate his job from other people’s tragedies. One may lead to the other at times, but he has one role to play and he can’t get caught up in worrying about what might or might not happen to others as a result.

But he can’t use that internal defense anymore. Not after this. Not after watching man after man fall around him. Not after being threatened with death and then splashed with his executioner’s blood. Not after having to be pulled out of shell shock by Mike. Not after this continuous, days-long, still-compounding trauma.

He can’t play dumb. He can’t argue that his actions don’t have consequences, that he shouldn’t be held accountable for them, or that he can ignore them.

He’s living them, here, now. He’s acutely aware of just what he’s done. From here on out, every time he weighs an ethical decision, he will do so with the conscious knowledge of the damage he could cause.

We know where he ends up. Breaking Bad — whose “4 Days Out” is obviously complemented by “Bagman” — makes it very clear that Saul Goodman will eventually know the damage he is causing to other people and will continue to cause it. What this episode shows us is the moment he becomes conscious of it.

It’s painful. It’s traumatic. It’s horrifying.

And still he’s going to choose to push through it. Because there’s something he cares about deeply enough to keep him going. Here’s a hint: Jimmy wishes it still came in $1,000 denominations.

Last week I alluded to the fact that if they did indeed get married, Kim would be Saul’s first wife. Only, y’know, that wasn’t a fact at all.

Commenter Meister Eder referred me back to a scene in season one’s “Marco,” in which Jimmy rants about a number of things during his bingo-night meltdown. One of those things is an ex-wife.

Watching the clip he provided in isolation was a strange experience. I’d seen that episode, obviously, and if you had asked me about that scene I’d have told you I remembered it pretty well. But while I was paying attention to one thing — Jimmy, overcome with frustration, gradually losing control — I missed another.

It’s sort of like that video of the basketball players. You watch it and try to count the number of times they pass the basketball to each other. Afterward you watch the same video again and you see a man walk across the scene in a gorilla suit — even pausing to pose for the camera — which you didn’t notice the first time because you were focused on something else.

In short, Better Call Saul did in an early episode what I thought it hadn’t done yet as the show nears its end. The existence of multiple ex-wives for Saul was one of the few bits of history Breaking Bad gave us about the character, and Better Call Saul has more or less gone down the list of everything we knew about the man, proving each of them true in turn. (For a shyster, that Saul Goodman sure was honest!)

None of that is to say that Better Call Saul would have done anything wrong by giving Saul his first wife this late in the game, but it would have been a rather puzzling choice; it would mean the show would either need to cram several wives in as it neared its conclusion, or it would have had to leave space between this show and Breaking Bad for more wives to come and go.

To be clear, I was wrong that we hadn’t heard tell of a previous marriage. Period. But even if I had been right, “JMM” does something the show always had every right to do: It shuffles an ex-wife into the deck.

While Kim and Jimmy are applying for a marriage license, Jimmy is asked to provide documentation of his “two previous dissolutions.” I missed the first ex-wife, but I think this is the first we’re hearing of a second one. This makes Kim number three, and she could well be his last. We’ve hit an appropriate number of ex-wives for Saul Goodman.

Which, of course, is this episode’s biggest development by far. (It also provides the episode’s biggest laugh, as Jimmy pays for their marriage license as though he’s paying for dinner.)

Elsewhere, “JMM” doesn’t do much other than shift some pieces around. Eduardo is in jail, but by the end of the episode every party involved has an interest in getting him out. Nacho confronts Mike about helping him get out of the business, but it’s not time yet. Gus learns that the Salamancas want to burn down one of his restaurants, so he does it for them. Things happen, but only two of them feel like serious developments. One is toward the episode’s beginning, and one is toward the end.

The one toward the end happens during Eduardo’s hearing. Jimmy has some of his trademark theatrics up his sleeve, bringing along a fake family to earn sympathy for Eduardo from the judge. Also in the courtroom, though, is the actual, grieving family of Eduardo’s murder victim.

Jimmy dwells silently on them both during and after the hearing, and he’s at a kind of ethical crossroads. Yes, he has to defend his client…but what next? He could continue down this path — becoming a friend of the cartel — or he could pull back a little bit and help the people who are suffering rather than those who make them suffer. It’s a dilemma explored in silence…until Howard shows up.

All of Jimmy’s internal frustrations come out again, in a setting even more inappropriate than bingo night, and he unloads mercilessly into Howard…the living embodiment of a better path forward. We know that Jimmy’s choice is between HHM and an office in a strip mall, and we know which decision he ultimately makes. But he doesn’t make that decision with a clear head; he makes that decision because he’s angry and frustrated, at least partially because he’s facing this dilemma at all.

Why would the cartel offer him “Ranch in Montana kind of money”? Don’t they know that that makes it much more difficult for him to do the right thing?

Why would Howard offer him a huge step forward professionally? Doesn’t he know that that makes it much more difficult for him to do the wrong thing?

Why does he have to make a choice? Why does he have to be responsible for his actions? Can’t he just do what he does and not have to be aware that things could have gone a different way?

He berates the one man attempting to help him make the right choice. He leans into his own unjustifiable behavior. You’re damn right I smashed your car with bowling balls; that’s who I am and you can fuck off.

Early in the episode, Huell asks Jimmy if Kim will be McGill or Goodman. He replies simply and clearly that she’ll be Wexler.

Late in the episode, Howard asks Jimmy if he will be McGill or Goodman. His reply is by no means simple, but it’s every bit as clear.

Well, that was a rollercoaster ride, for sure. It’s just that I don’t know if it crashed us directly into a brick wall or launched us into space. I guess we’ll find out where we land next week.

Shortly before this season began, the episode titles were revealed. This one, of course, was immediately intriguing. We know that by the time of Breaking Bad, Kim is out of the picture. Better Call Saul would, at some point, have to drive that wedge. “Wexler v. Goodman” was obviously a title suggesting direct conflict. (Likely, thanks to the v. instead of a vs., in a legal setting.)

But then we had “Dedicado a Max” last week, which reassured us. We had no reason to worry; that Wexler v. Goodman case would all be for show. Kim and Jimmy would be working together toward the same end, and they’d only seem to be in opposition. Whew! A complete release of tension and we could breathe for another week.

And yet here we are, and I can’t be the only one who emphatically was not breathing through much of this episode.

Almost as soon as Jimmy sets his plan to strongarm Mesa Verde into settling on behalf of his client, Kim gets cold feet. She’s woken up — just a bit later than usual — with clarity of mind.

She asks him calmly to back off. Jimmy confirms that this is what she wants, and then agrees. There will be no strongarming. They will settle this as quickly and as cleanly as possible.

We’ve discussed Kim’s morning-after clarity and the fact that Jimmy doesn’t share it a few times this season. Now it ties directly into something else we’ve discussed, and which Nacho made clear to Jimmy in “The Guy for This”: There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Kim, after all, got Jimmy to agree that the plan was off. She got no such agreement from Saul Goodman. The wheels were already in motion.

The centerpiece of the episode is sheer emotional brutality. It reminded me of Jimmy steamrolling Chuck in season three’s “Chicanery,” but in that episode we saw little flashes of Jimmy feeling bad about what he was doing. He knew it was wrong and he did it anyway, but he had enough humanity that it hurt him to do it.

Here, there are no such flashes of humanity. There is no Jimmy in that scene. It’s Saul getting what he wants, and not caring about who he hurts. He’s dimly aware of what he’s putting Kim through, but only because her suffering is part of his scheme. He does not regret his actions. Far from it. He suggests they celebrate them.

And it ends with an even more difficult scene when Kim returns home to him that night and says “fuck you” and breaks down and nearly ends their relationship as she chokes back tears…

…before suggesting that maybe they get married instead.

And that’s the brick wall. Or the derailment of the roller coaster. I don’t know. I suspect I won’t know for a while.

I’m not entirely convinced by this. I have enough faith in Better Call Saul that we’ll retroactively justify her leap here, but as of right now it feels like someone decided the episode needed to end with that line before “Wexler v. Goodman” was written. And so it’s just sort of there, stranded at the end of a story that — to be blunt — does not build to it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a more fitting punctuation to the episode than I realize. I’m very much open to disagreement here, because I’d love to know what I’m missing.

It seems like some attempt was made to tie her suggestion into what’s happening, if only because we open the episode with a flashback to Kim as a little girl. The young actor perfectly nailed Kim’s cadence and the actor playing her mother sounded almost exactly like Rhea Seehorn, so even if it tied to nothing that would have been a really great diversion…but, narratively, I don’t know what I’m supposed to take from it. Is it just that Kim has bad decisions in her blood? Maybe it’s that her father was a deadbeat and she’s repeating the mistakes her mother made?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing at all.

One of the most difficult things for Better Call Saul to rectify with its slow pace is the fact that Saul Goodman by the time of Breaking Bad had been married and divorced several times. Yes, it’s certainly possible he lied to Walter about that detail, but firstly, that’s not something he had any reason to lie about, and secondly, many other things that this show could have waved away as “Saul was lying” have been revealed by Better Call Saul to be true.

And so here we are, past the halfway point of the penultimate season, and Saul hasn’t been married. The show has flirted a number of times with Kim being one of his ex-wives, but that’s all it was…flirtation.

Now we’re here, it’s been brought up, and the scene that could potentially have explained why Kim is no longer around is instead explaining Jimmy’s first marriage.

At least, potentially.

Maybe it’s a brick wall. Maybe we’re soaring through the sky.

Elsewhere, Nacho and Mike reconnect just briefly enough to suggest why Nacho is no longer around by the time of Breaking Bad; Mike may well help the boy get out of the business. Being as we’re this close to the end of the show, it’s good that this possibility is being raised.

Of course, that can’t happen until Eduardo is out of the picture. (Mike even explicitly says this to Nacho.) We end with Gus’ crew using the police against Eduardo’s, just as Eduardo was doing against Gus. It’s an interesting complication but we don’t get much of a sense of what it will come to.

Still, bringing the police into this gangland power struggle is a good reminder of the overlapping doublecrossing of “The Guy for This.” It’s a strategy Saul employs in his meeting with Mesa Verde, with different parties believing they are getting different things for different reasons.

Ultimately, though, as Kim says, Jimmy is the only one who really got what he wanted.

That would have been a great sentiment to leave ringing in our ears until the next episode.

Instead, the script said that Kim should suggest marriage. So that’s what she did. And the rollercoaster either crashed or sent us soaring.

I think it’s one, but I’m hoping it’s the other.