Better Call Saul S6 E9: Fun and Games

She’s right, you know—Kim and Jimmy are trouble for everyone. “Other people suffer because of us. Apart, we’re OK. But together, we’re poison,” she tells him. Jimmy says he loves Kim and Kim says it back, but as she concludes, “But so what?” It’s harsh but fair. These two love each other but like some other married couples, they find the marriage can’t work and they can’t live with each other. Of course, most other married couples don’t fall out shortly after a team of drug cartel cleaners has sanitized their house’s floor of the blood shed by their former boss, whom they indirectly got killed.

 

So Kim decides she wants out of all of it—the marriage, the law, the schemes. She tries to do as Mike asked and go about her day after Lalo kills Howard. She compartmentalizes things and does what she has a passion for—defending poor clients—and makes it through the day, at least until they both come home to the scene of the crime. Jimmy tries to move on, too, redecorating his law office with the familiar blow-up Statue of Liberty. But as the opening montage makes clear, with Howard’s blood on their floor dissolving into Jimmy’s red takeout sauce, the seedier side of their life is permanently blended with the upstanding side.

 

What seems to break Kim is having to “continue telling the lie you’ve been telling” in Mike’s words, this time to Howard’s widow Cheryl at his memorial service. A mess of emotions plays subtly across Rhea Seehorn’s face, seeming to indicate Kim knows she must steel herself and lie one last time about Howard’s cocaine problem to throw any suspicion off her and Jimmy. This lie is what costs her. She resigns from the bar, in a decisiveness typical for her, perhaps realizing she can no longer act ethically with all she’s done.

 

It was all fun and games until someone got killed. Kim Wexler knew people could get hurt with her scams but didn’t stop because, as she says with devastating self-loathing, “I was having too much fun.”

 

With a sob, she goes back to packing, and Jimmy listens to the stark sound of packing tape ending this part of their story. In the next scene, he is fully Saul Goodman. It’s an indeterminate point in the future, with Saul living in his garish mansion full of Technicolor suits, sleeping with someone who isn’t Kim, and rolling in dough from his office packed with clients.

 

In cutting from Kim leaving directly to a fully formed Saul, Better Call Saul makes it clear: Her leaving is what completed his transformation. At a lot of points this season, Jimmy seemed taken aback at how amoral Kim was acting, but in a way, she was also his safeguard against becoming something even worse.

 

Who knows how far in the future we are. The rest of the episode is a little housekeeping and some nice character touches. Mike visits Nacho’s father to tell him about his son’s death. It’s a decent thing that he didn’t have to do, but Manuel’s reaction makes it clear that Mike is no better than the gangsters. Gus flirts with a waiter but then realizes he can never really let his guard down, maybe because the homophobia in his world would leave another vulnerability for the Salamancas to hurt him. These two are pretty much who they become by the Breaking Bad timeline, so I think their story has been told.

 

There are still four episodes and some story to flesh out (not to mention Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Carol Burnett), but that abrupt cut to the future spelled it out: Kim’s leaving broke Jimmy.

Better Call Saul S6 E8: Point and Shoot

Lalo Salamanca, one of the best and most charismatic villains of Better Call Saul, dies while laughing with a mouth of blood after Gus shoots him. The drug cartel half of the show is now mostly resolved. This leaves five episodes left to resolve the other huge question of this series: What happened to Kim Wexler? 

 

That was a thriller, with Lalo and Gus battling it out to see who can be more clever. Lalo sets up Jimmy and Kim, ostensibly to kill Gus, but really to leave the laundry/superlab unprotected. Gus sees this and goes to the superlab, but he makes a mistake, getting his underlings killed. Cornered, Gus then unloads on the Salamanca family and calls Don Eladio a “greasy, bloated pimp.” Then Gus pulls a move very much like Walter White, distracting Lalo with some kind of sparking device, grabbing a gun and shooting him.

 

Take a bow, Tony Dalton. I hope the Emmys remember you.

 

It was a well-done scene, even though there could only be so much tension in watching Gus held at gunpoint, when we know how he dies, years from then, at the vengeful hands of Hector Salamanca. However, it was so dark I could barely see the shooting (I hate when TV shows are too dark). Afterwards, Gus recovers from his gunshot wound, blunted only by body armor, but still has the presence of mind to call Los Pollos Hermanos and tell the manager he’ll have to open and close in the owner’s absence. This is one more confirmation of the fastidious lengths Gus has gone to so he can begin his meth empire, and how Walt will someday barge in and wreck it all.

 

There are still some questions to be answered about the cartel side of the show, such as how the relationship among Mike, Gus, and Jimmy evolves by the time of Breaking Bad. In his introduction, Jimmy/Saul will ask if Lalo was involved in his kidnapping, even though Mike already told him Lalo was never coming back. I love the idea that Jimmy is so rattled by Lalo killing Howard in his home that Lalo will always be the boogeyman, out there to menace Jimmy, with Jimmy never quite believing he’s dead.

 

With the physical danger passing, the McGill/Wexler marriage is still very much in danger. I assume the last few episodes will answer the question of how they can still live together after Kim hides her knowledge of Lalo being alive from Jimmy, how their lies led to Howard’s death, and the general trauma of Kim nearly having to kill Gus to keep Jimmy alive. This was an acting clinic by Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn. Jimmy knows he has to get Kim out of the house to keep her alive. The two know this is a death sentence for Jimmy. He is unnaturally calm while she is rattled to her core (the Emmys yesterday finally nominated Seehorn for what is my favorite performance on TV).

 

I wonder if this all breaks Kim and she leaves, or if Jimmy leaves because she didn’t tell him Lalo was still alive. I’m sure we’re in for something strange and unpredictable in these last few episodes. Maybe they’ll jump forward to the Breaking Bad timeline and we’ll see Kim was behind the scenes the whole time, or maybe they’ll show us Saul’s post-Albuquerque life.

 

Better Call Saul has often been bifurcated into the legal side and the drug cartel side. This week, these two finally met, with the bodies of Lalo and Howard buried together under the superlab. The entire time Walt and Jesse were cooking meth for Gus, they were literally doing it atop the remains of the men who died to get them there.

Begging for Gay Scraps From Marvel

Thor: Love and Thunder was “super gay,” director Taika Waititi promised viewers when promoting the Marvel movie. “So gay,” echoed star Natalie Portman. We saw it last weekend and I can assure you the movie was not gay. Not really at all. There was a slightly lavender tint to a few fleeting scenes, but that was it. The January 6 hearings had more gay subtext.

 

Here is the sum total of gay moments in the “so gay” Thor sequel: Valkyrie kissed a woman’s hand and later made a few stray comments about loving a woman in the past. The non-humanoid character Korg mentioned that in his species, the males reproduce, so he had two dads. And that’s it. These were all scenes that were isolated moments that can be cut for screening in Qatar. There was supposed to be a story about Valkyrie finding a queen, but no sign of it, and Tessa Thompson was backtracking from the character’s sexuality, doing that “It shouldn’t define her character” tapdance that gay audiences are familiar with over the past few decades when something gets a little too gay and someone has to walk it back. So Waititi and Portman were just bullshitting the audience about how LGBTQ their movie is.

 

In 14 years of Marvel movies, here is the sum total of LGBTQ characters or moments. Some rando in Avengers: Endgame makes a throwaway reference to a boyfriend during a support group meeting. In Eternals, the character Phastos kisses his husband. America Chavez wore a pride emblem and had two moms in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Loki once alluded to a boyfriend. And beyond some footsie in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that would have been daring in the ‘90s, that’s it. The Phastos thing was along the lines of what I wanted to see—an LGBTQ character presented frankly, just living life as in our reality—but it was a moment for a character that I couldn’t pick out of a lineup even after 40 years of reading Marvel. The moment in Endgame was a blink-and-miss-it moment for an unnamed character. All this could easily be cut, so Marvel wouldn’t have to not release the movie in an easily offended foreign country, and could get the full $1.5 billion per movie instead of scraping by with $1.2 billion and a same-sex kiss.

 

Yet people cheered these moments. Doesn’t the fact that we get so excited about these gay crumbs Marvel is throwing us just emphasize that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is basically lagging behind every form of American pop culture in terms of LGBTQ representation?

 

Almost everything else is lapping Marvel in this. The list of LGBTQ characters in movies and TV is almost too long to get into. You trip over us in these mediums. The Marvel TV shows are a little better, with a few lesbian characters in Runaways. The DC TV shows do a pretty good job in representation—you have Sarah, Talia and Mr. Terrific on Arrow, and probably more, since we’re many seasons behind on these shows.

 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is also lagging behind its own comic books by several decades. Northstar, the first Marvel superhero to come out, did so in 1992. This was after years of innuendo, since the Comics Code Authority forbid any depiction of homosexuality for decades. Still, a lot of writers were able to slip gay stories under the radar and show some sensitivity and maturity. There’s no such Comics Code binding the movies but Marvel is still censoring itself. Marvel Comics has a ton of LGBTQ characters, including the recently married Hulkling and Wiccan, America Chavez, the bisexual Hercules, and many more, since I don’t follow everything these days.

 

The X-Men have always been gay as hell, and you can read the story of their separation from society as an allegory for any marginalized people. Iceman came out a few years ago and that was a big deal, since he is a founding X-Man who has been a prominent character since 1963. Mystique and Destiny were always intended to be lesbian, introduced in the early ‘80s as two women raising their foster daughter, Rogue. Nowadays, they are long since a married couple. In the days when anything LGBTQ was forbidden, Marvel had to rely on heavy innuendo, and X-Men characters such as Kitty Pryde, Illyana Rasputin and Rachel Summers were heavily coded (and still are) as gay. Chris Claremont wrote a few stories about Storm that had screaming subtext.

 

That’s how Marvel had to get around the censors years ago, but now they can be more open if they want. So the MCU is in 2022 where the comics were in about 1983, and that’s disheartening.

 

I don’t need a two-hour drag show or a treatise on gender identity but given that Marvel has always tried to ground itself in the real world, it would be nice to see a significant gay character going about their business (or a transgender character, since they’re completely unrepresented in the MCU). If Marvel doesn’t want to do this, fine—but don’t bullshit your audience into seeing content that just isn’t there. You can’t do next to no work on something and then expect a great employment review at the end of the year.

Pain at the PumpAAAARRGH!!!

If you watched the local or national news last week, you’d discover that gas prices are so far through the roof that nobody can afford to drive anymore and that people are simultaneously doing so much driving that the roads were all parking lots for the Fourth of July.

 

When gas prices jumped about 40 cents in a short period of time, Action News and the other outlets were hair on fire with stories about “pain at the pump” and graphics showing how expensive it was to drive. Every day there was some update about how high prices were. There was reporting about how gas prices set a new record almost every day (!!!) for a month. (Yes, that’s how it works when prices go above a certain previous high watermark—every rise becomes a new record. This is not shocking as much as it is basic math.) Of course, there were a glut of interviews of people appalled to be paying $50 a tank to fill up, all gathered at gas stations right off the interstate so reporters would not have to go out of their way.

 

Now, after prices recently declined about 30 cents in a short period of time, you don’t hear as much about it. I watch the local and national news in the morning and we have it on during dinner, and declining gas prices are a footnote. I think that quiet is very illustrative of how TV news works.

 

The way I see it, if it was newsworthy when gas prices spiked, it’s just as newsworthy when they decline about the same amount in the same period of time. You could say, “Yeah, it’s down from $4.99 a gallon but big deal—$4.69 is still pretty expensive.” But doesn’t that work the opposite way? If the decline is no big deal because gas is still expensive, the initial rise to $4.99 shouldn’t have been as big a deal because prices were still $4.69 before they started climbing in June. Know what I mean?

 

It's no secret that the operating principle to local news is “If it bleeds, it leads,” and it’s by definition easier to get footage of Phil from Fishtown complaining about gas prices at Wawa than to talk to people who are happy gas is a little cheaper. But between screaming about gas prices and hyping up the dystopia signified by hot dogs for your Fourth of July BBQ costing 8% more due to inflation, it’s like they’re rooting for the economy to be worse.

 

I wish the news would spend a little more time and nuance on these issues, but that would take valuable time and resources away from Action News sending Alicia Vitarelli and her family on a Disney cruise so they can promote their parent company (which, God knows, is badly in need of some promotion).

 

There was almost a lightbulb above local news last week, as they remarked how everybody and their mother was driving this summer, almost but not quite linking it with high gas prices. Maybe … maybe that so many people are still driving means … gas prices are high but … that people are shifting budgets around … to adapt to that? And if that’s true … then maybe … high prices are annoying … but not the end of the world?

 

Come on. You’re so close. You can do it …

What Happened to Us?

It is the knees that remind me.

 

The stiff, cracking ache after nothing more than standing still or whatever middle-age shift of gravity passes for dancing these days. I start walking again and groan with every step I ascend.

 

Man, what happened to us? We used to stay awake until the sky started going gray. A different bar every night of the week. We heard about our favorite band coming and we were there—no questions, no considerations.

 

Now my ears ring with the echo of rhythm guitars off underground bar. Now traffic jams and the degree of difficulty of finding a parking spot downtown add up in my head before we even go. Now we talk about going to a bar after but it’s midnight and we couldn’t possibly. Now a good book in my living room outweighs all the trouble.

 

Now we talk about refinancing and new fences and HELOCs when it used to be all album release dates and where are we going this weekend.

 

Time rarely asks for your permission before it changes you.

It's always been my dream never to have to own my own restaurant

And I’m living the dream, baby!

 

I guess my dream of never having to own my own restaurant started when I was a very young child. I loved to eat (still do!) but I had no idea what things like “point of sale,” “firing times,” or “front of house” meant. I could sense I really didn’t need to know any more about those terms. I was happy the way I was.

 

Once I started cooking for myself, I became a little more worldly. I realized I was satisfied with cooking for myself or for small parties, rather than cooking for mass amounts of demanding strangers, worrying about inventory or daily specials, or dealing with staff turnover. I just wanted to go about my dreamlike existence of not working 80 to 100 hours a week or having my hands completely covered in cuts and calluses.

 

With the rise of the Food Network, I’m even more determined to live my dream of never being burdened by restaurant management. You see people on shows like Restaurant Impossible who were living out their own dreams of owing a restaurant. This caused many of them financial and emotional trouble. Some of these people left high-stress jobs like stock trading for the high-stress job of owning a restaurant. Personally, if I were to do a lateral move in terms of stress, I would dream of moving to an industry in which there was not a 30 percent chance of my new venture failing in the first year.

 

To achieve their dreams, some of these Restaurant Impossible contestants do things like raid their retirement funds, then run the restaurant into the ground and go into $250,000 of debt, then get their parents to put up their houses to bail them out of debt. Well, my dream has always entailed solvency. Also, my Mom also likes living in her house and part of my dream includes not having her mortgage it so I can keep serving small plates in a trendy part of town.

 

The stress of owning a dream restaurant also seems to take a toll on people’s marriages and families. No thanks. I’m fine living with my husband and son in tranquility and not coming home at 2 a.m. smelling like a grease trap.

 

Then you watch Chopped and my God, the things these restaurateurs and chefs go through to achieve their culinary dream. Here’s what they tell the judges:

 

“I had six strokes on the line while making one pasta primavera.”

 

“I burned off all my fingerprints recooking a ribeye someone sent back and the guy still didn’t like it.” 

 

“One night my sous chef had a psychotic break and spiked the risotto with acid and 14 people overdosed.”

 

“I had to sell my house to make payroll for my staff and had to move into the restaurant’s walk-in fridge and then the restaurant failed and I ended up on the street doing tricks with poached eggs for money.”

 

You know what? I’ll pass. I’m already living my dream of working in my field for the same company for the last 20 years, with a well-funded 401k, sitting at a desk all day with the freedom to slack off online occasionally and getting home every night for dinner. I’m basking in looking at the hell restaurateurs go through and saying, “I don’t have to do that.”

We Have to Save Ourselves

How much more of this can America endure? An 11-year-old girl plays dead by smearing her murdered friend’s blood on her face. A man treats himself to an AR-15 for his 18^th birthday and tells a teacher “Goodnight” before using the weapon to shoot her dead. Two little girls have to call 911 repeatedly while the 19 police officers—one for each murdered child—who are supposed to help them wait in the hallway for a janitor to bring them a key to their classroom. The obscenity of all that.

 

Who knows if anybody is coming to save us. I think we have to save ourselves. There’s a saying people invoke in a time of crisis, “Look for the helpers.” Mr. Rogers said that and while he had a lot of wisdom, that saying is still aimed at children. They’re the ones who need to look for helpers; we adults should be the helpers rather than look around for other people to rescue us.

 

Look at how many systems failed to help the schoolchildren in Uvalde and so many others. The police stood outside for crucial minutes while the parents begged them to save their kids. The part-time SWAT team was nowhere to be seen, probably off shooting another macho photo session in the desert. The politicians, particularly Senate Republicans, have consistently failed to do anything to keep kids from being killed. This is why Ted Cruz refuses to see this as a political problem—if he did see it that way, he'd have to acknowledge that as a politician, he has a responsibility to try to solve the problem. Yet he and others are happy to make this political when the gun lobby makes political contributions to them. Most of all, my generation has failed my son’s.

 

While we may not be able to help stem the tide of gun violence on our own, we can push the people who can help to do so. For my part, I’ve been emailing senators asking them to support the common-sense gun laws that have the support of the public. (Senators hear from me a lot on many issues.) They don’t respond to people from out of state, but I’m hoping some staffers will see my email and at least at it to the tally of people who are speaking out. I’m also contacting my state reps. These emails don’t take a ton of time and it’s worth a try.

 

I also still strongly believe in voting. I’ve been voting since immediately after I turned 18—in general elections, primaries, midterms and local elections—and I will never, ever stop. It’s frustrating when politicians don’t seem to be helping but the solution to that is to vote the riff-raff out and vote the competent people in. Look at the impact your vote has: If 80,000 or so people had voted a different way in a few states in 2016, the Supreme Court would be completely different, and they might not be about to overturn Roe v. Wade, or attack the right to marriage equality or contraception. If more people had voted in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, we also might have a very different country today.

 

I think there are a lot of people who refuse to participate in the system and won’t vote and I think that’s misguided. The legislative branch is not a TV show that they’ll cancel if not enough people watch it; politicians will still get elected even if you stay home. And if you stay home, you may just be opening the door to something worse—which you’ll then complain about and refuse to vote some more. I just don’t understand how anyone can look at the last decade in politics and believe the solution is less voting.

I’d also like to do more than vote and email politicians and I’m trying to figure out what that looks like for me. I can get more involved with the party at the state and local level. I thought of running for office but I’m not a leader and would be a terrible fit. I’m much more effective behind the scenes.

 

One thing I do know is if all you have to offer are cynicism and snark, you’re doing as much to solve the problem of gun violence as the people who only offer “thoughts and prayers”—nothing. You’re doing jack shit to solve anything.

 

Even if I don’t see results from the little things I’m doing, I have to try. What we do today may have effects that won’t be apparent for some time but will be real. It looks grim but there’s a flicker of hope. That flicker won’t become a fire if all I’m doing is sitting there looking at what other people are doing and saying “And nothing will change” with a cynical smirk on my face.