6x04 Hit and Run

[7.5/10] Actions have consequences. That may be the abiding theme that stretches across Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. You make one small decision, and it pushes you in a certain direction. Then you make another and are pushed a little further. Then another, and another, and another. And before you know it, you’re a long way from where you started, finding yourself looking over your shoulder, worried about what’s lurking in your wake.

Gus decided to take out his business rival. Now he’s wearing bulletproof vests and ankle holsters in his own home and constantly monitoring his neighborhood for fear that vengeance will come. Saul decided to become a “friend of the cartel.” Now he’s got every scruffy-looking hump in New Mexico seeking to retain the legal services of “Salamanca’s guy.” And Kim decided to stay with Jimmy, to tolerate and even enable his coloring outside the lines. Now she’s living in fear of one drug lord while the goons of another are following her.

It’s one of the things I love most about Better Call Saul. (Not people being watched and pursued by drug-runners.) The mark of good storytelling is people making choices that stem from who and what they are, and then navigating the ripples and reactions of those choices. Everything has a cost. Everything has trade-offs. Every decision made means opening some doors and closing other. There may be no show on television more acutely aware of that fact than this one.

That gives “Hit and Run”, a calmer and more sedate episode after the grand events of last week, a bit of thematic oomph even when the show’s at slack tide. There’s comparatively few dramatic events in this installment. Nobody dies. Nobody has a white-knuckle confrontation. Nobody faces down mortal threats or serious peril. Everyone just stews in the messes they’ve made, or are still making, over the last handful of episodes.

Gus is properly paranoid. He divined from Hector’s reaction that Lalo lives. So despite seeming to have settled the most immediate threat with Nacho’s demise, he’s constantly worried that his rival will return with lethal impulses. He has Mike stretching his team thin, working guys for eighteen hour days, setting up an elaborate neighborhood farce to provide cover for his surveillance operation, and fretting over a car that follows his for a mere three blocks.

It took some finagling, but Fring seemed to pull off his big scheme. He arranged for the death of the only young man who would spill his scheme, and his enemy is presumed dead. But he can’t rest easy. The audience knows his fears are justified. But to his crew, it feels like chasing ghosts. Even the meticulous Gus isn’t able to buy himself any peace, with an equally cunning, if less subtle foe still potentially on the board.

Jimmy’s consequences aren’t quite so dire (at least not that he realizes). His interactions with Lalo result in a far more mundane consequence -- nobody at the courthouse wants anything to do with him. The security guard makes him run his belt and shoes through the scanner. His once-friendly clerk gives him the cold shoulder. The prosecutor he traded horses and snacks with thinks he’s gone too far. Whatever temporary advantages dealing with Lalo provided, they’ve left him ostracized by an ecosystem that he used to flit through with a hummingbird’s effortless grace.

Frankly, it’s a touch unbelievable. Maybe everyone in that courthouse draws a line between representing the occasional lowlife and pushing the limits to do so versus advocating for a killer and drug lord, but it’s awfully quick and seemingly coordinated. And yet, I don’t mind the convenience because it succinctly conveys the bridges Saul burns as he sidles up to the cartel.

He’s building new ones though. Doing business with Lalo didn’t just net him a duffle bag full of cash to fund his and Kim’s escapades. It gave him a reputation with, shall we say, a certain type of person who both admires Lalo Salamanca and might have the type of legal troubles that require a man of the...caliber to help a drug lord skip out on a murder rap.

It’s amusing to see Jimmy once again managing clients over the protests of his nail salon-owning landlord. Watching Bob Odenkirk ply his comedy chops once more, shuffling potential clients with his glad-handing, slick ways is a hoot as always. But at the same time, we can see the life of Saul Goodman starting to take shape, and the life of Jimmy McGill steadily slipping away.

It’s a life that includes running scams in his spare time. The most high-octane part of the episode comes as soon as the intro wraps up, as Kim and Jimmy complete the next step of their scheme to convince Clifford Main that Howard Hamlin is unreliable.

The ploy to steal Howard’s car and make it seem like he’s erratic and consorting with sex workers, conveniently within the eyeline of Clifford, is a thrill. The sheer absurdity of seeing Jimmy in his Howard-esque getup for the first time since the first season delights. The way Kim’s lunch with Clifford and Jimmy’s grand theft auto slows coalesce until the point of their seemingly disparate actions emerges is expertly crafted. And the mere involvement of Wendy, a familiar face from Breaking Bad, as their accomplice, makes the bit that much more of a sop to the fans.

The peak, though, comes when it always does -- when things start to go awry. Jimmy’s effort to return Howard’s car runs into a snag. Some inconsiderate jerk removed the traffic cone Jimmy left to save the spot and parked there. Watching Saul improvise -- heaving a parking sign out of the ground and moving it to make his questionable alternate car placement plausible -- adds joy and extra competence to the clockwork scheme. And the comic timing of the sign falling down mere seconds after Howard pulls out is perfect and uproarious.

But there’s a moment of pause there too. Each of the plays we’ve seen so far have skirted on the edge of discovery and disaster. Jimmy had to strip to his skivvies to avoid detection in the premiere. Huell had to rush the locksmith before a devoted valet went back for the keys. Saul had to scramble like mad to pull the car “borrowing” off without detection here.

Our protagonist and his allies are getting lucky. More to the point, they’re pushing their luck, with riskier and riskier plays that come closer and closer to blowing up in their faces. Better Call Saul likes to zig when we expect it to zag, but more in more, it seems like they’re skirting catastrophe, moments if not seconds away from everything blowing up in their faces.

Maybe that's why Kim feels uneasy about all this. She’s thinks she’s doing the right thing, as the diversionary lunch with Clifford turns into a genuine funding possibility for her pro bono efforts. But as Jimmy suggests, there’s a disbelief that, as Jesse Pinkman might put, they keep getting away with it. When you’re on a run of good luck, the sense that it could run out, that there’s some karmic comeuppance or at least reversion to the mean awaiting, puts a psychic weight on you.

That weight helps prompt Kim to spy the men following her (with an assist from Wendy, naturally). It gives her the gumption to walk up to them and call them on it. And it gives her the sterner stuff to earn a visit from none other than Mike Ehrmantraut for catching on.

Let’s be real, after five seasons, it’s a thrill to see two of the show’s major characters sharing a scene for the first time. The two could just talk about the weather, and it would still have the electricity Kim and Mike sitting across from one another after orbiting each other for so long. It doesn’t hurt that Kim’s sharp enough to deduce that Mike was the man with Saul in the desert, or that Mike intuits the steel behind Kim’s eyes that makes her steady and strong enough to deal with his frankness about why she’s being followed. That scene too is a bit of a sop to the fans, but a welcome one.

And it serves a purpose. Mike effectively tells Kim that they are not out of the woods, that Lalo Salamanca might still be on the loose, that he might be coming to them for answers, and that if he does, it might put them on the radar of a rival drug lord. Whether it’s Mike’s men or Lalo’s pursuit or the authorities, she’s now caught in the web of greater, potentially deadly forces.

It shakes her, as it would anyone. She can handle it, even if it leaves her uneasy about what might be around the next corner. But she doesn’t think Jimmy can. Especially when he’s reveling in what the association with Lalo netted him, she can’t burst his bubble, frighten him with the possibility of a side effect from a past decision coming back in a bad way.

He will though. Lalo is the Sword of Damocles hanging over this season. Gus isn’t wrong to be paranoid. Kim isn’t wrong to be frightened. Jimmy might be vulnerable in his blissful ignorance. Sometime, someplace, Lalo will emerge from his desert hideaways and strike, even if his path and target remain obscured.

But the choices these people made led them here. They may not have intended this outcome, but no one is here by accident. The choice to orchestrate a hit on your counterpart, the choice to stop representing run-of-the-mill defendants and help out a true bad guy, the choice not to tell your spouse about the danger that might be coming for them, have all had consequences. And while this moment is calm, the rules of Better Call Saul dictate that, sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost.