Better Call Saul Jimmy gets a new motto, a wife and a demanding client. Gus sweet talks a jittery partner. And Los Pollos Hermanos burns some chicken. Dearly beloved.
We are gathered here today to contemplate the nuptials of Jimmy and Kim, and to ask this question as they commence their life of matrimonial bliss: What just happened? The pair seem to have talked themselves into this union purely with professional upsides in mind. Under the law, a wife can’t be compelled to testify against a husband, and vice versa. Fine.
Thing is, nobody is compelling Kim to testify against Jimmy. Maybe one day she will, and then she’ll save Jimmy from a long stint in the pokey. But this marriage seems conceived by two people who want to get married and have collaborated on a cold, unromantic rationale for doing so. They even hash out the full-disclosure rules of their wedded life outside a courthouse, like two lawyers negotiating a plea deal.
For workaholic lawyers, this might be what passes for a bended knee and a diamond ring. Jimmy can’t even get a post-nuptials lunch. “Sorry, I just can’t get away,” Kim says, off to a meeting. Jimmy is soon face-to-face with Lalo Salamanca, newly arraigned and facing murder, arson and other charges.
After he’s denied bail, Lalo asks about the monogram on Jimmy’s briefcase, unaware that they are his lawyer’s initials from his native incarnation. Now it’s his motto, “Justice matters most. ” “Time to get yourself a new motto,” Lalo says cheerfully, after explaining that Jimmy is about going to become a friend of the cartel. “‘Just make money.
’” This seems like a good time to ask what exactly Jimmy wants from his new name and career. Riches would delight him but more than anything, he seems dead set on winning esteem. Even before he has earned a penny from the cartel, he appears to be drunk on the stakes of coming legal battles he might have to fight on its behalf. How else to explain his explosive, unhinged reaction to Howard at the end of the episode?
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With remarkable restraint, Howard asks Jimmy to explain why he’s recently vandalized his car (with bowling balls) and his reputation (with confrontational prostitutes, who implied he’s a chiseling john). Jimmy doesn’t confess to these pranks, but he does admit that he blames Howard for his brother Chuck’s death. Let’s leave aside that Jimmy has accused a man of homicide in a case that was clearly a suicide. What’s noteworthy is Jimmy’s explosion, which goes supernova when he senses that Howard is patronizing and pitying him.
Jimmy would rather face another near-death ordeal in the desert than be pitied. “I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! ” he shouts at Howard. “I’m like a God in human clothing!
” This might be Jimmy’s version of “I am the one who knocks,” Walter White’s memorable affirmation of lethal power in “Breaking Bad. ” Walter was overstating matters a bit — there were other players who knocked just as hard, and harder — but Jimmy’s monologue seems lunatic. He hasn’t even spent a full day as the lawyer for a cartel honcho, and he is already likening himself to Zeus. Only someone steeped in resentment could come up with an analogy like that.
This tirade aside, “JMM,” as this episode is titled, is essentially a series of sales pitches. The finest of them occurs after a meeting of fast food chief executives, who have assembled at the Houston office of Madrigal Electromotive, the German conglomerate and equipment manufacturer. Welcome back, Peter Schuler, the Madrigal executive who was last seen trying out “Franch” dressing in a test kitchen in Season 5 of “Breaking Bad,” then killing himself as the feds moved in to arrest him. Herr Schuler — played by Norbert Weisser, a name I have been hoping to see in the opening credits since the debut of “Better Call Saul” — is an anxious mess, and this is long before the authorities have started circling.
We see him fretting that his multimillion dollar, off-the-books construction aid to the meth superlab is going to end his career. “It’s a miracle I haven’t been caught,” he moans to Gus and Lydia during a hotel room meeting. “Last year, the auditors came this close!
“” Cue the talented Mr.”
Fring, whose gifts include sweet talking terrified upper managers. The heart of his soliloquy is an appeal to some unknown history. “Do you remember Santiago? ” Gus asks.
“The two of us, our backs to the wall. You are still the same man. ” This is the second reference to a momentous event in Santiago, presumably the city in Chile. (In Episode 1 of this season, Lalo referred briefly to an incident in Santiago, though with glee in his voice.
) Max Arciniega, Gus’s deceased partner, hails from that city, and perhaps it’s there that they started both their meth making and chicken cooking. Apparently, Schuler was present, too, and it was obviously the Salamancas who had his and Gus’s backs to the wall. Maybe there’s an epic flashback in our future. It won’t be dull.
Kim gets to make the most nuanced sales pitch of this episode. She persuades Kevin Wachtell that she and her firm didn’t fail Mesa Verde — he failed the firm by not heeding the firm’s advice. Kevin buys this spiel, which is rooted in truth. Kim simultaneously demonstrates that she is roughly three times nimbler on her feet than her boss, Richard Schweikart.
Meanwhile, Mike shows up at Jimmy’s with a win-bail-for-Lalo kit, complete with people who will appear at a hearing and pretend to be family. This is quite a tactical 180 on Gus’s part, given that he had just instructed Mike to use the police to put Lalo behind bars. Apparently, Gus didn’t grasp that even there, Lalo could make trouble — like ordering the torching of a Los Pollos Hermanos. But why spring Lalo now?
Is he less of a threat to Fring’s operation outside of the justice system? Is there something that Gus could do to Lalo as a free man that he could not do while the guy is in prison? The logic of this move seems elusive. Lalo could order even more of Gus’s restaurants burned to the ground once he makes bail, couldn’t he?
Odds and Ends To the extent we’re going to get an explanation of Mike’s decision to rejoin Team Gus, it comes during his meeting with his daughter-in-law. “Decided to play the cards I was dealt,” he says. This would seem downright Buddhist if it didn’t mean working for a murderous drug kingpin. I would like to dine at a restaurant called the Luftwaffle, a chain represented at the Madrigal meeting.
I imagine the writers’ room laughed themselves silly when they came up with that one. Details like that put this show on another level. Another worth pointing out: the otherworldly music that plays while Gus and Nacho burn down a Los Pollos Hermanos. It’s “Chuncho (The Forest Creatures),” Shazam says, by the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac.
In closing, a mystery. During Nacho’s one-on-one meeting with Mike, he asks for help. He wants Mike to save the life of his father, who lives under a death threat by Gus, if Nacho has to flee. “You got a way,” he says to Mike.
He does? What way? Killing Gus? Calling the Disappearer?
Nacho has something in mind. Please tell us what you think it is in the comments section. And finally, please celebrate avocadomania. It’s been a smashing success in participating restaurants.
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