2x03 Amarillo

Better Call Saul is great when it comes to contrasts, especially when it comes to its two most significant characters (who are, incidentally, its two legacy characters from Breaking Bad). "Amarillo" shows Jimmy as a man trying to do the wrong thing, or at least the underhanded thing, and being pushed to do the right one by those closest to him. It also shows Mike as a man trying to do the right thing, the right way, and having him pushed back toward crime and the seedier side of his new home because of those closest to him.

We know that Jimmy McGill tends toward the con, toward the misdirection, toward the razzle dazzle in an "ends justify the means" sort of way. So when we see him pay off a bus driver from a local Sandpiper nursing home in Texas (with a beautifully shot opening of our hero dressed in white against the Lone Star State's flag painted on the side of a building to boot), it's par for the course. There's something intoxicating for Jimmy, and for the audience, to see him work his magic on that bus full of seniors. Sure, there's something a little underhanded about it--even part from the payoff, it feels like he's manipulating them more than a little bit with his "send your nephew to talk to the manager routine--but he's so damn good at it! If there's one thing viewers love and admire, it's talent and competence, and Jimmy is a talented, more than competent client outreach specialist.

I promise, at some point I will stop comparing this show to Breaking Bad, but it's hard not to see the parallels between Walter White and Jimmy McGill here. I'm not suggesting that there's the same sort of pride or evil lurking within Jimmy that there was as Walter slowly let Heisenberg out of his cage. But both Walter and Jimmy are very good at something (making meth and talking their way into/out of anything respectively) and that makes them each loathe to give up plying their trade even when the rules make it a dangerous proposition. Each knows where their talents lie, and know what got them to where they are, and each is unhappy, if not afraid, of the idea of letting go of that and risking ending up back where they started.

Besides, when it comes to Jimmy's situation here, what's the harm, right? It might not be totally above board to walk the line between following up on a mailer and soliciting, but he's not taking advantage of these people. He's trying to help them! Sure, he's helping himself at the same time, but there's no real victim here.

Then, we run into Chuck, sitting across the table from his brother and pouring cold water on Clifford and Jimmy's good news about the number of clients Jimmy managed to sign up. It's a wonderful sequence in the episode, and one of the things that makes it interesting is the way that Hamlin and Clifford both realize this is a family feud and try to stay neutral, diplomatic, and supportive of both sides in the argument.

And it's quick, but it's a hell of an argument. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister once describes his own sibling as more than capable of using true feelings for something false. In that vein, I love situations like the one presented here, where Chuck is 100% right about the concerns he expresses about Jimmy's outreach efforts, and yet not exactly for the right reasons. Jimmy's brother isn't wrong when he points out that any questions about the way their legal team obtained their clients, especially with seniors, leaves them vulnerable in a way that could torpedo the case. And he's also not wrong to be suspicious of Jimmy wrangling 20+ clients while following up on a single mail-in response, particularly given what he knows about Jimmy's past behavior and what he (rightfully) suspects about his current behavior.

It's a risky, arguably foolish thing that Jimmy did. And Chuck's rightfully pointing that out, but coming from him it feels petty. Chuck's made it clear that even if it's bound up with his own sense of pride in his work and accomplishments, he can't shake his skeptical, dismissive view of his brother. Chuck may very well be legitimately and earnestly concerned that Jimmy is going to poison this whole deal. Maybe Chuck even thinks that given Jimmy's financial stake in the outcome, he's saving his brother from himself on that front. But it also can't help but feeling like he's trying to just knock a brother he doesn't believe in down a peg, to try to show that he doesn't belong here. The contrast between those two things--asking the right questions but for the wrong reasons, with so much bad blood there--makes it an endlessly interesting little scene.

Jimmy, of course, uses the same skill he did his fellow attorneys that he did with those seniors. He comes up with a plausible story; he sells it to the assembled with little trouble, and a despite the uncomfortable air between them, he managed to shut his brother up. But Chuck is, no doubt, unconvinced, and neither is the only other person in that room who knows Jimmy well enough to smell his B.S. In contrast to the last time the two of them were in the boardroom together, Kim moves away from Jimmy's advances under the table, because even if she doesn't say it, she agrees with Chuck.

And as sorry as I am to go back to the well of Breaking Bad, it makes me worry that she'll receive the same kind of reaction that Skyler did. Without delving into the thorny issues of sexism, at base, people don't like to see their protagonists thwarted. Jimmy is the main character of Better Call Saul. We get the show through his perspective, and that means that, consciously or unconsciously, we're psychologically on his side. We're with him on this journey, even if in the back of our minds we can acknowledge the actions that he takes as morally questionable. Storytelling is constructed to make the listener sympathetic to the person the story's about. That creates a risk that someone like Chuck, with sketchy motives, comes off worse despite the legitimacy of his concerns, and between this and the end of the prior episode, it risks turning Kim into something audiences like even less -- a scold.

Kim has more or less replaced Chuck as the cricket on Jimmy McGill's shoulder, as the person in his life who keeps him aspiring to be better and do better. Chuck's admonition at the table doesn't move Jimmy; it just gives him cause to strike back. But Kim's response causes him to interrupt and emphasize that yes, in fact, all of his client outreach will be above board.

And when we see Kim push back against Jimmy after the meeting, she offers a damn good reason for why she took Jimmy's news with the same skepticism that Chuck did. She put her neck out for Jimmy. He is, if not a nobody, than a hustling public defender who would have otherwise had to spend years in the pit before he ever had a chance to so much as sniff a partner track job like the one Kim finagled for him. She put herself out there for Jimmy, with her boss, with her colleagues, and with her own reputation and prospects at stake. She's absolutely right when she says that everything Jimmy does in this job reflects on her and her judgment, and that Jimmy doesn't just have himself to worry about when he's scheming and flim-flamming his way into more clients.

There it is. Suddenly that incredibly amusing, downright charming scene with Jimmy on the bus seems a little more sinister, a little less harmless. While adding more wronged individuals to the class seems like a good thing on the surface, if it's done in a way that doesn't pass muster, it could mess up a good portion of the case and leave the HHM/Davis & Main team playing from behind when trying to pursue justice for these people. And if it goes wrong, if Jimmy is chastised for stepping outside the lines, it could also screw over the person who stood up for him and put him in a position to have a seat at the table, the person whom he seems to love.

But what's great is that the show does the opposite with Mike. Mike is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. He's trying to do right by his son, by his daughter-in-law, by his granddaughter, and that, ironically, pushes him to use his skills and talents in a way that he's not necessarily inclined to -- to help criminals. Mike is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

And what's so striking about it is that Mike knows he's being taken for a ride. When Stacey left a pregnant pause after telling Mike about her money troubles back in Season 1, it was a nod toward the idea that she wanted support from him, but there was enough ambiguity as to whether or not she really meant it, whether she was specifically trying to guilt Mike or, rather, just venting her anxieties to a sympathetic ear without any ulterior motives.

But that wiggle room pretty much goes out the window in "Amarillo". The question now is whether Stacey is deliberately and intentionally playing on Mike's guilt, or whether it's merely something subconscious. But the phantom bullet mark, not to mention the token resistance she puts up to Mike's suggestion that Stacey and her daughter come live with him before immediately agreeing to it suggest the former rather than the latter.

That makes Mike seem noble even as he slowly but surely starts heading down a path that we know will lead him to "big time jobs for big time pay." He doesn't want to be a criminal, at least not at a lethal level. What's more, he knows he's being taken advantage of in some sense, that, at a minimum, Stacey isn't just being straightforward with him and asking for help and support, but laying on guilt trips and making up stories to get him to intervene, with the knowledge that he's too broken up about his role in what happened to Matty that he can't resist. So Mike compromises some of his principles. He steps back into a world he seemed to be trying to avoid, all in an effort to do the right thing.

Nobility comes less naturally to Jimmy than it does to Mike, but poked and prodded or not, he too tries to do the right thing. It's heartening to see Jimmy using his creativity to succeed within the rules rather than to find clever ways to get around them. Again, his idea of a targeted commercial, based on his intimate knowledge and diligence about the schedules of the folks at Sandpiper, is fairly genius and perceptive.

When we see him constructing the commercial, it shows his innate understanding of human nature, of how to affect and have an impact on his target audience. The fact that he's channeling it into something legitimate, that he's succeeding even when boxed in a bit, is an encouraging sign. By the same token, it's hard not to feel proud for him when Kim watches the commercial, put together by Jimmy and a couple of college students, and walks away impressed with him. She is, after all, a big reason why he's doing this rather than continuing his less-savory ways of finding clients, so her approval is big.

It's also heartening to see him try to work his magic on the phone system, just like he did when sequestered in the back room of the nail salon, and see the results of his work roll in. There's such a great bit of tension in the air in those moments where we wait to see whether Jimmy's ad-buy scheme is going to work. His frantic dissecting of the gameplan with his subordinate conveys how anxious he is about the whole thing, how much is riding on this play for him. That makes the moments where the phones start lighting up, where it all falls into place, that much more exciting, for Jimmy and for us.

But that excitement is short-lived. Even when Jimmy's doing right; he's doing it wrong. He doesn't run the ad by Clifford. He thinks about it. He comes close. But at the end of the day, he just can't face the risk of failure or rejection. He can't face the possibility that he has this brilliant thing he put his heart and soul into, and that someone could tell him no. That's Jimmy's game -- do whatever you think needs doing, and bet on the fact that the results will justify whatever actions you took to get there.

The problem is that Jimmy isn't just betting on himself here. He's gambling with Kim's reputation, with his brother's I-told-you-so's, with whatever ethical rules for attorney advertising he may or may not have paid particularly close attention to when making the ad that could, again, jeopardize the case as a whole. Jimmy is trying. He is trying so hard in the best way he knows how to both keep things above board but achieve at what he sets out to do, and that's why he's sympathetic but also complicated.

And yet even as he tries, there's a piece of Slippin' Jimmy still left in him, a part of him that thinks the best way to show Kim and Chuck that he's worthy of their love and respect is simply to succeed, and that the ends will justify the means. The tragedy is if that effort, motivated by a desire to show those close to him what he's made of, is what drives them from him, and turns him into the relatively scruple-free huckster we come to know down the road.