4x02 Breathe

[8.2/10] One of the most interesting questions to ask, both about real people and characters on television, is why they choose to do things they don’t have to. Life and circumstance often force a person’s hand, causing people to do what they feel they must. But there are situations in which there’s no external force, no rules or sticks or carrots, just a raw choice to be made. It’s these sorts of choices that can reveal who a person is, and what they’re going through, in a way that’s clearer than for choices muddied by need and force and inertia.

Those are the types of questions that “Breathe” is interested in. Why is Gus Fring not only trying to keep Hector Salamanca, a man who inflicted unspeakable pain on him, alive, but also moving against those who tried to kill him. Why is Kim Wexler attending a meeting to determine Jimmy’s share of Chuck’s estate when Jimmy himself is blowing it off? Why is Mike Ehrmantraut determined to run his “security consultant” routine on all of Madrigal’s outposts over Lydia’s objections? And why is Jimmy McGill ready to sabotage himself out of a job offer, one he’d just hustled like crazy to earn?

It's the first question that interests me most – why Gus would go to the effort and expense of trying to ensure Hector survives when, as his lieutenant notes, it would be far easier, and perhaps more just, for Gus to let him die.

I write most of these reviews assuming that the average Better Call Saul-watcher is at least roughly familiar with Breaking Bad, and I suspect Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and the rest of Better Call Saul’s creative team work in the same way. There’s too many hints and callbacks and Easter eggs (see also: the Salamanca twins) for that not to be the case. But oddly enough, Gus’s story here makes the most sense if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad.

Without the prior series’s flashback to Gus’s first encounter with Hector, you might assume that Gus and Hector are just standard issue rivals in a dangerous business. You could read Gus’s preservation of Hector’s life as him protecting the cartel from what he suspects to be an outside attack. You can read Gus as disliking Hector as a rival who treats him with disrespect, but not wanting his erstwhile ally dead. You can read him as a man of principal, who believes that the captain of an organization should be protected, even if he’s not especially fond of one of his peers.

But if you have seen Breaking Bad, Gus’s behavior is all the more puzzling, precisely because you know exactly what Hector has done to Gus, and how easy it would be for him to let Hector perish. Keeping Hector alive, let alone with the help of someone from a renowned medical facility, is absolutely something that Gus does not have to do, especially when mere inaction would allow this dastard to meet his maker without Gus having to take the risk of enacting his revenge himself.

Lydia has a similar, if not quite the same, sort of confusion about what’s motivating Mike to inspect the Madrigal facilities as part of his made up job as a security consultant, and maybe that helps shine a light on Gus’s perspective as well. Despite my sharing a similar puzzlement over Mike’s behavior in the last episode, Mike explains himself here – telling Lydia that this is a way of covering his tracks, of making sure that if anyone asks about this “rounding error,” he’s been seen. Lydia (gently but firmly) encourages him to reconsider, but he won’t be deterred.
When she raises the issue with Gus, he’s not exactly sympathetic. Instead, he inquires as to whether Mike’s causing a real problem, and when she admits that Mike isn’t, he leaves it at that. Gus and Mike are birds of a feather, who recognize something in one another – a combination of a particular sort of honor, a meticulousness, and a sense of pride in their work. “The man has his reasons” seems to be Gus’s thought process, and if he deems that good enough for Mike, he may deem it good enough for himself.

Or maybe it has to do with wanting the chance to do right by someone. That seems to be Kim’s motivation for representing Jimmy as Howard is administering Chuck’s last will and testament, something Jimmy himself seems to have no interest in. As a final insult, Chuck leaves his little brother $5,000 dollars, enough to let any reviewing judicial body that Jimmy wasn’t overlooked, that he wasn’t disinherited in a way that would leave the will open for Jimmy to contest, a way to make sure that his good-for-nothing little brother doesn’t get anything but the most meager slice of Chuck’s estate despite how much time and effort and love Jimmy put into looking after his brother.

But that’s not the insult Kim is worried about. In a powerhouse performance that, if there is any justice in Tinseltown, will help Rhea Seehorn get the Emmy recognition she’s deserved for some time now, she turns her recriminations on Howard. Kim is a little inscrutable in her motivations too. There is the sense that she means what she says when she chastises Howard for telling Jimmy about his theory that Chuck killed himself, for “putting that on” Jimmy. She’s seen the effect Chuck’s death had on Jimmy, the sort of hardship that he’s dealing with under his surface-level calm, and it’s possible she genuinely blames Howard, at least in part, for complicating Jimmy’s grief.

Still, while Kim isn’t necessarily mercenary enough to try to strongarm Howard into doing something more for Jimmy than Chuck did, there’s the sense that she’s also frustrated with Chuck, frustrated with this situation, and maybe even a little frustrated with Jimmy. But you can’t yell at a dead man; you can’t yell at a situation; and if you have a shred of decency, you can’t yell at a grieving man.

You can, however, yell at Howard Hamlin, who is, at best, an accessory to the ills Chuck suffered and caused, but who’s there and willing to take it. It feels like there’s more in store for Kim and Howard than this bitter rebuke. But for now, Better Call Saul leaves us to wonder why Kim chose to stand in for Jimmy in a meeting he himself blew off – whether it’s to stand-up for someone who’s been disrespected or wounded, or to let something out that has no other place.

Jimmy’s comparatively brief, but just as potent part of the episode sees him looking for an outlet as well, but in a very different way. With his suspension still in effect, Jimmy is hunting for jobs, and his first stop of the day is to interview for a position as a copier salesman. As usual, Jimmy gives the sort of brilliant pitch you’d expect from him, where he shows that he knows the inside and out of the product, ingratiates himself to the folks interviewing him with his affable charm, and wins them over with his powers of persuasion. And when even that’s only enough to net him a very positive “we’ll be in touch,” he doubles down, makes the hard sell, and gets the job offer.

A job offer he just as soon rejects.

Jimmy doesn't have to do that. He doesn't have to throw away an opportunity that he sold like hell to get. He doesn't have to build up his prowess as a salesman and a potentially valuable member of this company just to instantly self-sabotage all of it, and go so far as to shame his would-be employers for having the recklessness to fall for his schtick.

But Jimmy wants to punish himself. He wants to test himself. No matter what face he puts on, Chuck’s death, and his hand in it, has gotten to Jimmy. So when he walks into these places, he tries to be the silver tongued devil who could talk his way into anything, but he hears his brother’s voice in his head, the one that tells him that everything Jimmy’s ever done is built on a lie, that he doesn't deserve to have any sort of success, that what he does is dangerous and dishonest. This is Jimmy’s form of self-flagellation, of self-sabotage, and it’s a tribute to Bob Odenkirk and the show’s writers how well-constructed and well-acted and well-suited the scene is to tell that story.

And maybe that’s the lesson and the connection between Jimmy’s story and Gus’s strange decision. Maybe it’s a question of punishment and of control. The final scene of “Breathe” is the most frightening that Gus Fring has seemed since he threatened to kill Walt’s infant daughter. There’s a gentility to Fring (and in Giancarlo Esposito’s performance) that makes him plausible as someone who could pass without notice in the respectable world, but that makes him ten times as scary when he let’s the hounds of the chain and speaks in clear but unnerving threats and demands. His threat is implicit in the death he orders, in his statement to Nacho that he knows what was done to Hector and by who, and his demand comes earlier in the episode.

Gus tells his lieutenant that he when Hector dies: not a stroke, not some low level soldier, just Gus Fring and Gus Fring alone. Maybe he still believes that Hector is deserving of punishment, that he deserves to suffer, but he wants to be the one to dole it out, to decide when Hector has had enough, which might not come until Hector is forced to watch Gus conquer the Salamanca empire. Gus doesn't want Hector to die, but perhaps it’s not because of any sort of mercy or professional courtesy. Perhaps it’s because he has a plan for Hector, he’s playing the long game, and death’s too good for his enemy, at least right now.

So he does something that neither circumstance nor pressure forces him to do -- he spends his money to keep a rival from perishing, just as Jimmy undercuts himself, and Mike takes on duties no one asked him to, and Kim stands up for someone she cares about. In a show centered on a man who moves the world with his equivocations and manipulations, there’s a purity to these sorts of actions, the ones that aren’t required or forced. Instead, they come from what these people really want, and show what’s important to them, what’s bothering them, and what might be worth more to them in the fullness of time than what’s in front of them right now.

BREATHE
-32-

"I deside what he deserves!"
Well, I guess this is the start of his downfall…

Jimmy knows his way around words.
Wow. But does he not take it?
He still is a laywer!
And he is loosing his hair.
Times up.
What does he plan with Mike?

"At the Moment you have Gus Fring's respect, I'd want to keep that if I where you"
He is going to go up at the top! He has the same way of thinking as Gus. Don't worry.

The Cousins are creepy as hell.
I know why the doctor was fine with trading his patient^^

"Howard is just polite."
Kim is right about what she says, but Howard couldn't do any different.
He just tries his best. He is the messenger and gets the blame.
As always.

"Lemme guess, 4000?"
Even after his death, Chuck finds a way how to show Jimmy how less he thought of him.
Sad.

"From now on: You. Are. Mine."
Fuck. Gus is no one to mess with.
Tensions are very high.
I still don't know if Nacho is still alive on "Breaking Bad".
Saul said: "It was Ignatio"
Was. Could go either way.
One thing is for sure:
War. Is. Coming.

You realise Gustavo is at the start of his power.
He gets his hands dirty.
He would be there, but wouldn't catch the guy himself.
Very subtle.