4x01 Smoke

[7.4/10] Jimmy McGill’s role in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first scenes in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee -- the mundane tasks of his life in the interregnum of his suspension. And in his last scene in the episode, he does the same things, remarking on his fish’s voracious appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.

The catch is that between that first feeding and the second, he found out his brother is dead.

I don’t know what Jimmy is feeling between those two moments. Better Call Saul and writer/showrunner Peter Gould play it close to the vest. He cries no tears. Despite his usual loquaciousness and bombast, he is uncharacteristically taciturn and reserved. And while he sports more of a hangdog expression than usual throughout the episode, he is something of a blank slate in the wake of such foundation-rocking news.

“Smoke” leaves you to wonder what’s going on between its protagonists’ ears. That is, as I’m fond of saying, a feature not a bug. There’s not a lot of talking in Better Call Saul’s Season 4 premiere. Instead, there’s a lot of mulling, a lot of concerned and affected faces, of siblings who look like they’re in shock, of culprits swallowing their anxieties, of bald heads bobbing over cubicle walls and sporting the same half frown that speaks authority and disdain with one downturned crinkle of the lip.

This series takes the time to show its characters thinking, and to let the audience fill in the gaps, or wonder what’s going on rather than explicating in heavy-handed terms what’s going through each and everyone’s heads.

That’s particularly true for Jimmy here. There are signs that Chuck’s death got to him. He sees the electronics scattered in the backyard and knows the events that felled his brother were part of a relapse. He shares in the once celebratory but now palliative shots that he once offered Kim, but still can’t sleep. He seems almost in a place of catatonia, of processing the enormous shock of his brother’s grim departure, in a state that could indicate numbness or contemplation or being overwhelmed or any number of the complicated emotions that attend grief.

The episode plays similarly coy at what’s motivating Mike Ehrmantraut. He quits his job as a parking attendant, seems poised to spend more time with his granddaughter, and has all the time in the world to sit at home and watch baseball games in his newfound spare time. But when he gets that first check from Madrigal for being a “security consultant,” something clicks inside of Mike, and he can’t leave well enough alone.

What follows is another one of Better Call Saul’s superlative sequences, where Mike proves that all you need is a badge, a clipboard, and the air of innate authority to go anywhere and do pretty much anything. It’s a visual feast as Mike skulks through a cubicle farm, rumbles through a maze of industrial shelves, and observes and corrects a host of Madrigal employees like he owns the place. It’s a sequence where the show’s dry sense of humor comes out, with Mike overhearing a breakroom debate over who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali before providing his eye roll-fueled but definitive answer. Whoever wins, Mike isn’t content to sit idly by, but uses his misadventures to advise the nearest Madrigal outpost on what and where it’s going wrong.

“Smoke” leaves it characteristically hazy why Mike is doing all this. Maybe Mike is, true-to-form, scoping out this arrangement. Despite Lydia’s warning that his “salary” is a rounding error, it’s possible that Mike wants to make sure both that he’s seen doing some security consulting in case anyone starts asking questions, and also wants to make sure the people he’s getting into bed with on this are on the up-and-up. It might also be that sense of honor, that if he’s receiving a service and paycheck from these people, he wants to do the job he’s being paid for, and perhaps even show Lydia (and by extension, Gus Fring) what they’re getting.

Or it may just be that Mike cannot sit still. We know from Breaking Bad that Mike stays active in his line of work, one way or another, for a long time to come. Even if we didn’t, he doesn't seem like the type of man who would be fulfilled by or satisfied with watching baseball and drinking beer all day for very long. Mike is good at what he does, and when you have a talent like he does, not to mention someone who seems to appreciate it, it’s hard to let it go to waste.

And Gus might be in need of Mike’s services very soon. The part of the episode involving him and Nacho is the most “Breaking Bad prequel” portion of these proceedings. It’s the straightforward conclusion to Nacho completing his plan to induce a reaction in his boss. It gives Gus the chance to artfully try to fill in the power vacuum that Hector’s incapacitation creates, lest war follow. And his henchman’s scoping of Nacho ditching the evidence suggest he’ll have an angle to play.

These scenes are fairly slight, doing more to clean up after Hector’s reaction in the previous episode and hint at what might be the offing than moving things along. They’re about teasing a war in the New Mexico drug scene, but more about Nacho’s state of mind. You feel his jangle nerves, his concerns about the storm that might be ahead, his worries that Gus or Juan Bolsa know what he did. The episode spend a great deal of time just letting the viewer watch Nacho grow anxious and stew.

The truth is that not much happens in “Smoke.” A hell of a lot happened in last season’s finale, without much, or in some cases any, time for denouement or for the show to catch its breath. So a good chunk of this premiere is purposefully light on incident, more about the fallout of those series-shifting events and the effect they’ve had on Nacho, Mike, and Jimmy than about the next big bang in the Better Call Saul timeline.

That timeline seems to be speeding up though. The Jimmy McGill we meet at the end of “Smoke” seems closer to the man we meet in Breaking Bad. For most of the episode, he is almost inscrutable, with it unclear whether he’s stunned or unaffected or somewhere in between in his flat affect throughout the proceedings.

But the episode contrasts him with Howard, who is clearly broken up about this, and it presents a strange flip. Howard seems like the family member, while Jimmy seems like the staid business partner. Howard reads back an admiring obituary, and Jimmy doesn't even want to listen to it. At the funeral, Jimmy is shaking hands with all of Chuck’s colleagues and contemporaries, while Howard is comforting Chuck’s almost widow.

And the clincher of all of this is how Howard waits for Jimmy after the funeral, so he can offer a confession. Howard blames himself for Chuck’s death, knowing that someone as deliberate as his former partner didn’t let the lantern erupt by accident. Howard is broken up over his belief that him forcing Chuck out of HHM set him down this path, and he is trying to bare his soul and clear his conscience by confiding in the brother whom he imagines would be most hurt by this.

But unbeknownst to Howard, that confession only confirms to Jimmy that he was the superseding cause of his brother’s demise, that Jimmy’s own tip off to the insurance company is what set this whole thing in motion. And yet, Jimmy doesn't care, or at least doesn't want to be seen to outwardly. In a move that prompts a brief but palpable moment of disbelief from Kim, Jimmy starts whistling and going through this day, the day his brother was laid to rest, like it’s any other day.

Who knows if this is Jimmy giving into the man he’ll eventually become, the one who won’t accept blame for anything and has a casual obliviousness to those who stand in his way. Who knows if this is the sort of thing that slowly but surely pushes Kim out of his life. Who knows if Chuck’s last words to him truly obliterated whatever sort of affection Jimmy might have had for his brother, or even convinced him to be the amoral slimeball that Chuck told him was his true nature which he should embrace.

We don’t know what’s going on in Jimmy’s head during “Smoke.” All we know is that it ends with a version of Jimmy McGill who seems closer to Saul Goodman than ever, who seems ready to brush off his own brother’s death because that’s just the way things are, who is calm and cool and unbothered by any of it. And we know that it begins with a Cinnabon Gene who is anything but, who is unnerved and frightened by something as simple as a mistyped social security number, or an Albuquerque air freshener.

We still know the beginning and what seems to be the end game for Jimmy McGill’s adult life, and we know the beginning and what seems to be the end of his mourning for his brother. But Better Call Saul honors the complexity of, and trusts its audience to figure out, what happens in between.