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.
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