Better Call Saul Kim would like to marry Jimmy if she doesn’t leave him. Lalo would like to destroy Gus if he doesn’t kill him. And Mike plays private eye. In the history of romance, there have no doubt been plenty of ultimatums of the sort that Kim delivers at the end of this episode.
What sets this one apart is its preamble. Right before Kim states that she and Jimmy need to either break up or marry, she catalogs Jimmy’s shortcomings, and it’s a pretty compelling list. He’s a liar. He’ll always be a liar.
He snookered her in front of her peers and managers. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. So … let’s get hitched?
OK, love is not rational. Neither is yelling at your boss in front of everyone in your law firm, as Kim did in the previous episode, a very public misstep she apologizes for in this one. A shrink might look to the opening scene of “Wexler v. Goodman,” as this week’s episode is called, for some clues about Kim’s behavior.
In a flashback, we see firsthand that Kim was raised by a mother who makes awful choices. She arrives late to pick up her daughter from junior high, so late that it’s dark and young Kim is alone. Mom is driving drunk, apparently not for the first time. We’ve heard about Kim’s upbringing before, in particular about how she and her mother were evicted from a variety of homes so often and so quickly that she barely had time to put on her shoes.
Now we have seen that childhood with our own eyes. The adult version of the junior high schooler who chooses to walk home instead of ride with a drunk mother is bound to bear mental scars. Kim might present as the picture of professional stability, but it’s an act of will. She comes from chaos.
No wonder she finds Jimmy appealing. The guy is nothing if not unpredictable and protean. He comes to the showdown with Kevin Wachtell and his armada of lawyers with an audacious bank-shot of a plan. He is going to use the copyright claims of a Native American photographer to force Mesa Verde to cough up real money for his client, the unmovable Mr.
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Acker. The plan unfolds as designed. Even the somewhat cartoonish blackmail element — the threat of television commercials featuring spurious testimonials by aggrieved “customers” of the bank — is taken seriously. Or seriously enough.
He ends up shaking hands in a parking lot with Wachtell and settling the matter right there. Jimmy has a point when he tells Kim, at home, that he had to blindside her for this scheme to work. Her exasperation needed to be authentic. And it was.
Somehow the ensuing rage prompts Kim to demand a drastic change in their relationship: Split or get hitched. Advice to Jimmy: Get hitched. This Saul Goodman schtick might work for lowlifes and clients in need. It has a limited appeal with women.
On to the other bank-shot in this episode. Mike is going to exploit the power of the police and the legal system to sideline Lalo Salamanca. It’s an inspired idea, and Mike has done it before with a different member of the family. You might remember that when Mike and Nacho wanted Tuco out of the picture, back in Season 1, they conspired to get that short-fused psychopath captured by the cops as he assaulted Mike.
Tuco went to prison. The question now is whether prosecutors will be able to make murder charges against Lalo stick. He killed the clerk at Travelwire, which is where the lovelorn Werner Ziegler went during his ill-fated attempt to reunite with his wife.
“Right now, there’s enough evidence to suggest that Lalo’s car might have been at the scene of the crime, as well as at the scene of the parking lot mayhem that preceded the crime.”
Is that enough to convict? Not if Lalo hires a good lawyer. Saul Goodman, come on down! You think you were talking fast back when you persuaded Tuco not to kill you in the desert?
Let’s see what happens when Lalo beckons. The complexities here are easy to imagine. With Jimmy defending Lalo, he will get crosswise with both Gus and Mike, who will do everything in their power to put Lalo behind bars. Win or lose, Jimmy will have a very dangerous group of people angry at him.
It’s just a question of which group. Jimmy is about to find himself in a pickle that is all too familiar to Nacho. In a tautly scripted scene early in the episode, Nacho reports to Gus that Lalo has a full-scale attack in mind against Gus’s operation, one that even includes sickening customers of Los Pollos Hermanos, Gus’s fast-food chicken chain. (Lalo, we need to talk about boundaries.
) The briefing ends as Gus tells Nacho to report everything to Mike, who has apparently recovered from the beating he took a few episodes ago. The most poignant moment of the episode is Nacho’s appeal to Mike’s conscience. “You know who you’re working for, right? ” he asks Mike, once Gus has peeled away.
The sort of people who shoot you and leave you to die by the side of the road, that’s who. Mike is unmoved. He warned Nacho not to challenge Hector because reinforcements were inevitable. And the very efficiency and ruthlessness of Gus’s operation has, for Mike, produced a very different experience.
Mike was bleeding to death by the side of the road, too, after being stabbed by some thugs. Gus and his minions intervened and saved his life. That said, Mike fully appreciates that Gus is a mostly wicked man. So why is he working for him again?
He seems to have a strong sense of right and wrong. Killing Werner Ziegler depressed him, and it seemed like a turning point. I’m not sure the show has done a good job of explaining Mike’s change of heart from last week, when he sounded witheringly skeptical about Gus’s moral compass. Maybe he just likes action.
Helping to build a giant meth lab may simply seem like a more scintillating way to spend your retirement years than getting blotto in a bar and picking fights with strangers. Closing Thoughts: Last week, we pondered why Kim smiled when she saw the photo of the horse-riding cowboy in Wachtell’s house. The smile meant she’d found a jackpot in her efforts to dig up dirt on the guy, though how that image amounted to dirt was then unclear. Now it’s clear.
She instantly knew that Wachtell was vulnerable to a copyright claim by the person who took that shot. The question is, how? What about that image said, “This photographer was not fairly compensated”? I don’t get it.
The oddest plot strand in this show’s history may well be Jimmy’s continuing vendetta against Howard. It started with his tossing bowling balls at the guy’s car. This week, he dispatches a pair of hookers to embarrass him at a restaurant. It seems utterly gratuitous, the whole conceit.
And its goofy, sophomoric tenor seems to belong in a different show. Is there some point to this harassment campaign? For now, it’s sole purpose appears to be the amusement of Jimmy. To be clear, the above nits are picked only because the rest of the show is so remarkable.
And I’m really looking forward to watching Lalo turn on the charm as he interacts with the U. S. legal system. What are you looking forward to most?
Let us know in the comments section. And remember, if the smell is coming from under your porch, it is most likely a possum.
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