Better Call Saul S6 E3: Rock and Hard Place

Since Better Call Saul started, the story of Ignacio “Nacho” Varga has been defined by trying to take control of his situation and better himself. He gets out of kidnapping charges early in the show. To keep his father Manuel out of the cartel, he poisons Hector Salamanca, leaving him mute and in a wheelchair. After escaping death at Lalo’s compound, he evades the Cousins, eventually hiding in an oil tank before striking a deal with Gus and Mike. He lies about Gus’s involvement in the raid on Lalo’s compound to ensure his father’s safety.

 

At the end, rather than run and submit to death by Mike’s sniper skills, he turns the gun on himself.

 

Before Nacho goes, he gets a hell of an exit scene. In an echo of Walt’s “I watched Jane die” in Breaking Bad, Nacho tells Hector, “I put you in that chair. When you are sitting in your shitty nursing home and you’re sucking down your Jell-O night after night for the rest of your life, you think of me, you twisted fuck.” That’s how you go out.

 

Hector is denied his vengeance and is reduced to having his nephews assist him in shooting Nacho’s corpse (filmed from a distance to make the scene more disturbing). As Bolsa tells Nacho, “Today, you are going to die. But there are good deaths and bad deaths.” Nacho got a good death, something close to redemption in a world where people only seem to get worse.

 

Nacho was dead the moment he made the heartbreaking call to his father, who he loved dearly. Mike has enough of a code that he would honor his promise to keep Manuel safe, but who knows if Gus will care, and the remaining tension of the show may focus on that. I will miss Michael Mando. His performance as Nacho was always understated and soulful, and I hope the Emmys finally give him some recognition.

 

On the lighter side, the delightful Huell returns to exercise his pickpocketing skill, lifting Howard’s car keys to copy them for whatever scheme Jimmy and Kim are cooking up. This was a fun echo of his lifting Jesse’s cigarettes in Breaking Bad. Wasn’t that the same parking garage where Walt planted the bomb under Gus’s car? Anyway, Huell asks Jimmy why he is doing shady work when he already makes good money from his legitimate legal career, which is a really good question. Jimmy bullshits that the shady work will help a lot of people. “We’re doing the Lord’s work here,” he says.

 

The Jimmy and Kim drama takes a backseat to Nacho’s death this week. The DA is suspicious about Jimmy getting Lalo off under a fake alias, but not yet ready to believe he is working with the cartel. “It’s not a suit that fits him,” she says in a nice pun. Kim flashes the barest relief when the DA tells her they believe Lalo is dead.

 

Kim continues to be the impetus for Jimmy breaking further bad. He asks her what he should do and she says, “Do you want to be a friend of the cartel or do you want to be a rat?” Last season, Kim incredulously asked Jimmy if he wanted to be a friend of the cartel as a wakeup call for him, a warning that he was slipping. It is telling that now she is phrasing an opposition to the cartel as being a rat. For a moral person, not getting involved with the cartel would be the right thing to do. Kim has already taken a side and it’s not the moral side.

 

In just the third episode, the show dispensed of a major development, the fate of Nacho. There is still a lot of show left to go, which makes me think the rest will be focused on Kim and her continued descent with Jimmy.

Better Call Saul S6 E1/2: Wine and Roses/Carrot and Stick

I’m forcing myself to write this. I haven’t been writing too much in this forum for awhile now, due to time constraints and a general lack of inspiration. But I always enjoyed recapping meaty TV series, so the long-overdue return of Better Call Saul will force me to get something done.

 

I’m forcing myself to write this but I’m not forcing myself to watch it. Better Call Saul has been one of my favorite shows of the last few years, digging in deep to see how small-time “Slippin’ Jimmy” McGill went fully corrupt as Saul Goodman and got involved with the drug cartel by the time of Breaking Bad. More than that, it’s the story of Kim Wexler, Jimmy’s attorney wife. She’s not even mentioned in Breaking Bad, so the huge question hanging over this spinoff is what happened to her. It’s a tribute to Rhea Seehorn’s consistent excellence that the fan base is genuinely concerned about where Kim ends up in the final season.

 

Although people might have assumed that the crookedness at the heart of Jimmy/Saul would corrupt the ethical and conscientious Kim, season five hinted that Kim might actually be the one dragging him to the dark side—and the neat trick of the show is that she had the potential to do this all along. Season six immediately picks up on Kim’s plans to get the Sandpiper settlement money by planting cocaine in Howard’s locker at the golf club and professionally ruin him. This was an amusing chance for Jimmy to slip into the club and improvise a way to get to the locker after most of the plan goes wrong. After they try to kick him out of the club, the faux-Jewish Saul claims it’s a restricted club and lays on an anti-Semitism accusation with a trowel, crying, “Five thousand years and it never ends!”

 

The golf club was a fun sequence but it seems a little—inelegant?—just to stuff coke in Howard’s locker, compared to their more imaginative schemes of the past. The scheme with the Kettlemans’ crooked tax service shows more guile, with Jimmy pretending to let the couple get one over on him, when really, he has the upper hand after arranging for the couple to plant the seed with Clifford that Howard has a drug problem. Once Betsy Kettleman catches onto Jimmy’s scheme, Jimmy offers her the carrot of Lalo’s money to buy her silence, but it doesn’t work. “Enough carrot,” says Kim, who is more than willing to use a stick to get the Kettlemans to do what she wants. She threatens to expose the tax business embezzlement scheme to the IRS.

 

In the past, Jimmy seemed very close to becoming Saul, but now he hesitates, paying the Kettlemans anyway out of guilt. This is a side of Kim he doesn’t like and maybe that makes him back away from his path to corruption. In contrast, he admires the pro bono work she does. This seems to give Kim a real satisfaction, and she describes a hectic day of working with clients as “one of the best days of my life—my professional life.” You could see Kim helping poor clients for free and exposing the Kettleman scheme of ripping off poor taxpayers as springing from the same source—the desire to work outside of the system, ethics be damned, to get justice for people. Or maybe she just enjoys the thrill, whether it’s from conning people or helping people.

 

The cold open provides the barest suggestion that Kim might still be in Jimmy’s life in the future in the form of her souvenir tequila bottle stopper, falling from a chest as the movers haul it away from Saul’s mansion post–Breaking Bad. This may mean Kim survived to live with him in garishness, or maybe it’s just a trinket from the past that he shoved into the chest and forgot. We shall see.

 

That cold open was gorgeous. Usually Better Call Saul seasons start with a black-and-white flash-forward to Saul’s time as Gene working at the Cinnabon, but now we’re placed immediately following his escape to a new identity at the end of Breaking Bad. The cascade of grayscale neckties is a fake-out, with Saul’s more colorful ties soon falling after them. We’re in glorious color this time, the better to see Saul’s gold toilet and Technicolor suits. The Saul standee floating in the pool was a nice homage to the dead William Holden in the pool in Sunset Boulevard. How did Saul acquire this much money from his chintzy law practice? Would his ties to the cartel really be this lucrative? His house was full of tacky crap, but it's still expensive.

 

The other major characters whose fate is not explained in Breaking Bad are Nacho and Lalo. The former is hiding out in a crappy motel until he can ostensibly be rescued by Gus and Tyrus, until he figures out it’s a setup and escapes in a daring shootout against the Salamanca cousins. The latter fakes his own death by murdering a lookalike. In an incredible detail, Lalo paid for this lookalike’s dental work so the two could have matching teeth and in a contingency plan, the lookalike’s body would seem to police to be Lalo’s own. While I find the Jimmy/Kim side of the show more compelling than the cartel side, Michael Mando is underrated as Nacho and Tony Dalton plays Lalo with otherworldly charisma, so I’m invested in what happens to these two.

 

So we’re off to a promising start.