1x09 Pimento

9.5/10. You got me, Better Call Saul. I bought it. I bought the twist hook line and sinker. I thought that Chuck supported his brother, despite being a little patronizing at times. I thought that Hamlin was a snake. And the show had them look the parts, with Chuck looking like something of a fumfering nerd even when he's not in his space blanket, and Hamlin with his pressed suits and elegantly coiffed hair making him seen like the high school jock poured into the mold of a barrister.

It's tough to do a good twist. Every since Fight Club, more and more works have tried to have that reveal that changes how you look at past events, that flips your expectations. Roger Ebert complained about it; J.J. Abrams nodded toward the idea in his "mystery box" TED talk; and everything from Mad Men to Game of Thrones invites us to unravel the clues to figure out the real deal.

What makes it hard is the balance. Telegraph the twist too much, throw out too many clues, and the audience guesses it too early, and the reveal feels unremarkable, eliciting a reaction of "duh" rather than "ooh". But make it too out-of-nowhere, don't leave enough breadcrumbs for the viewers to follow, and the twist feels random and forced. The sweet spot, the one that Pimento hits is where there's enough there that in hindsight everything fits together, but it's also not an obvious trajectory. Maybe I'm giving the show too much credit because the show suckered me into believing that Hamlin was the fly in the ointment. In retrospect, it seems a little too easy for a show spawned from Breaking Bad to have a character as one-note evil as Hamlin. But still, it works and it works well.

And it works, to my mind, not just because of how well the reveal (that it was Chuck who was keeping his brother from HHM, and that Hamlin was only his smokescreen) was set up, but because it's a twist based on an emotional truth rather than on a simple plot hurdle. It matters beyond the fact that Jimmy is thwarted in his attempt to work at the firm his brother founded, it matters because he is hurt to his core that he'll never realize his dream to work for his brother, not because he wasn't good enough or that he couldn't get his act together, but because his brother doesn't want it.

For a minute there, I thought "Pimento" wasn't going to go there, or at least not directly. If there's one thing that the prior episodes of the show have established it's that Jimmy loves his brother, as seen in the sacrifices he's willing to make for him and the way he protects and encourages Chuck despite the questionable nature of his self-diagnosis, and that he's willing to sacrifice his own success in order to do the right thing and help the people he cares about, as seen when he gives up the Kettlemans' case, both for their sake and for Kim's.

So for a little bit in that last scene, I thought Jimmy was going to demur. He clearly had pieced together that it was his brother who was behind Hamlin's statements about "the partners" having made a decision, but maybe he was going to see how much progress Chuck had made, how enlivened he was by the chance to do genuine legal work again, how heartened he was by the standing ovation he received back at HHM, how wonderful the idea of his brother not being trapped in his house day-in and day-out would be, and he would let it go. Maybe that's what he was trying to do in that moment where he's clearly devastated by the news, but tries to take on a c'est la vie attitude. Maybe he was genuinely attempting to put it aside and keep his pain to himself so that his brother could recover.

But then Chuck starts the lies again. Then he starts talking about working on Hamlin and trying to figure something out, with the proviso that he may not be able to do anything but that he'll do his best. And that's when Jimmy corners his brother, that's when he brings up the cellphone, and challenges the lies, and confronts him as to why, and it all comes spilling out.

"Because you're not a real lawyer." Good lord that's cold. But it's angry. And for Chuck, it's a truth. It's hard for Chuck not to seem like the bad guy here, and in some sense he is, but one of the great things about Vince Gilligan's shows is that (short of a group of neo-Nazis) there's rarely a true bad guy, just people with varying shades of perspective and motivation that lead them into conflict with one another, each seeing themselves as justified in both.

When we see Jimmy McGill, Breaking Bad fans see the craft counselor who helped Walter White out of an absurd number of jams. And even folks who (puzzlingly) only know the character from Better Call Saul see him as someone who can be more than a little underhanded, but also as someone who, as Hamlin puts it, is constantly hustling out there, in the positive and negative sense of the word. Jimmy works hard. Sometimes he plays a little dirty, but he tries, and more than once in this series, we've seen him do "the right thing" even when it went against his own interest, often out of some concern for living up to his brother's strictures.

But Chuck doesn't see the work ethic, the commitment, the changed man who goes straight, finds his niche, and by dint of his own wits and effort uncovers a million dollar case that he has every right to pursue. Chuck can only see Slippin' Jimmy. All he can see is the guy who took shortcuts his whole life while Chuck built a legitimate practice the hard way. All he can see is the guy who constantly skirted the rules while Chuck stayed on the straight and narrow. Being generous, he's only known Jimmy McGill, the changed man, for a few years; he's known Slippin' Jimmy his whole life, and it's too hard for him to shake that image of his brother. With that narrative in mind, when he sees Jimmy earning his law degree and passing the bar and building his practice, all he can see it as is just another con, just another attempt to cut in line.

And that's what makes it so powerful and so devastating. Because the only thing in the world Jimmy wants is his brother's approval. Jimmy never says that he looks up to Chuck, but everything he does to emulate his brother, to try to earn his approbation by imitating him, is to get in his brother's good graces, and he comes to find out that all of it, every bit of it beyond being the reliable mail clerk, not only made his brother scoff, but annoyed him, reinforced the idea that Jimmy wasn't worthy, and that led Chuck to undermine the only person we see in the show who seems to truly love him. It's well constructed as a narrative, it's grounded in what we know about the characters so far, and it's a harrowing, heartwrenching, incredible scene of the two of them putting it all out on the table, with Jimmy walking away more wounded than we've ever seen him.

And I haven't even gotten to the Mike story! In any other episode, that would be the main event. Sure, his scene with the mouthy racist guy and the "man mountain" reeks of fan service and an attempt to make Mike the Batman of Better Call Saul, but it still had me laughing and cheering the whole way through. His was by far the funnier of the two storylines in "Pimento" (though Jimmy's insults for Hamlin were pretty amusing), from his dry sarcastic responses to the other thug, to the bumbling suburban pill-dealer who hired him, to his usual grumpy, withering stare.

But even that story had some heft that came from Mike's speech to the dealer. Mike's philosophy has been clear in his actions, even if he's not the type to vocalize it, and in truth the speech was a little on the nose, but in truth the writing is so good, and more than that, Jonathan Banks is so good, both in his presence and in his delivery, that it works like gangbusters. There are all kinds of people on both sides of the law -- that doesn't make you a good or bad person. That comes from something else--the kind of cop you are, or the kind of criminal you are--and Mike is an honorable, and thoroughly capable criminal.

Maybe that idea works in parallel with the Jimmy and Chuck story here. I don't want to paint Chuck as a bad person just because he's stuck in a bad mode of thinking, one that's understandable from his perspective even as it's patently unfair to his brother. But Chuck is somebody on "the right side", who sees himself as noble and just and good, and yet he has done wrong by the person who loves him and admires him the most in this world. And then there is Jimmy, who is a reformed con artist, who uses billboard stunts and Matlock-inspired clothing to make his way in the world, and he's the one who sacrifices everything not only to help his brother, but to be the kind of man he thinks his brother is.

There are good and bad men on both sides of the line, and sometimes the harshest, and most hurtful thing imaginable, is to realize the difference between where you think you're standing, and where the people closest to you, the ones whose approval and respect you crave, still see you stuck. Poor Jimmy. Poor, poor Jimmy.