4x08 Coushatta

[8.5/10] Better Call Saul is a show that zigs when you expect it to zag. As a prequel series, it makes its bones as a tragedy, where the events are all the more sad, all the more pitiable, because (most of) the audience knows the opprobrious ends waiting for the show’s heroes. And yet, the series still has an impressive ability to surprise, to delight, to lead the viewer down one path and make you think you know where things are headed, only to take a sudden left turn toward something you might never have expected.

Which is to say that the last episode made it seem like Kim and Jimmy were headed for an irreconcilable split. The slow disintegration of their relationship, the frosty air between the two of them, suggested a grinding down of something that had once been beautiful and a source of strength and solace for both. “Coushatta” starts out pointing things in that direction. Even as Jimmy and Kim are prepping their scheme together, Kim is quietly unperturbed by Jimmy leaving for the night. She’s unbothered by him staying late at his office. She barely seems to notice or care that he’s gone.

It’s enough that Jimmy’s landlord even notices and, in a rare act of kindness, pours him a drink and tells him to make it right. But Jimmy himself admits that it might be too late for that. Maybe their relationship is too damaged. Maybe the people that they are, the things they want out of life, are too different for them to work over the long haul. It’s sad, but Jimmy seems to be slowly but surely accepting a tough truth.

But even if the couple aren’t on the same page personally, they’re still a formidable team when t comes to accomplishing whatever the two of them set out to do. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good scheme on Better Call Saul, and the one “Coushatta” features for Jimmy and Kim is a doozy.

The pair mount a multi-pronged attack to get Huell off the hook. It starts with Kim’s idea to send an avalanche of letters that cast Huell as a hometown hero from a small hamlet in Louisiana. It goes deeper with her “shock and awe” tactic of bombarding the prosecutor with motions and discovery and potential countersuits to try to make the case too much of a hassle to deal with. And it crests with Jimmy, ever diligent when he needs to be, using his array of drop phones and hiring his old film crew to pose as all the concerned citizens of Huell’s homeland, thereby convincing the prosecutor there’s a groundswell of grassroots support for the man.

The whole damn thing is just delightful. This has been a pretty heavy season of Better Call Saul, and rightfully so. Chuck’s death hit several people in a variety of different ways, and it’s worth exploring that. But it’s also nice to get to see our protagonists simply be good at what they do, in a way that makes you laugh. Everything from the joyous pictures of Huell on the “church website,” to the judge complaining that he must be Santa Claus with all the mail he’s getting, to Bob Odenkirk busting out his old Senator Tankerbell accent, drips with the show’s great comic chops.

Better yet, the plan works! After all the meticulous but enjoyable steps “Coushatta” shows our heroes taking, it also gives them a victory. The prosecutor is flummoxed, and Huell gets off without jail time. The episode toys with the audience a bit, letting us share Jimmy’s anxiety and anticipation as he watches Kim jaw with opposing counsel. But Better Call Saul delivers the news in the best and most unexpected way -- a kiss from Kim to Jimmy that packs all the passion and enthusiasm that’s been drained from the frame up to this point. Right at what seems like the brink of a break-up, there is that spark and joy that brought them together, even as another empty bedside suggests this may be more of a blip than a save.

But the surprises aren’t limited to the flim-flam that the team of Jimmy and Kim cooks up. Just as their frosty relationship turns suddenly warm, the friendly rapport between Mike and Werner suddenly takes a turn for the curt and business-like.

That shift proves a swerve within a swerve. “Coushetta” sets the audience up to expect that the mutual admiration society of Mike and Werner will keep on humming, while the continued bad behavior of Kai will prove the sticky wicket between the German workers Werner is supervising and this corner of Gus’s empire that Mike is overseeing.

And initially, it seems like that will be the case. Mike and Werner both skip out on the strip club-centered “R&R” that Mike’s graciously provided for the boys to blow off steam. The two men bond over brews, with Werner affectionately detailing the achievements of his architect father, Mike lamenting the useless of his, and Werner reassuring his new friend that Mike is his father’s legacy and the best thing that Papa Ehrmantraut left behind. Their moment of camaraderie is popped by Kai’s predictable misbehavior, but Mike is adept, as usual, at quelling these sort of monkeyshines, and what could be the spark that ignites the problem turns out to be an easily snuffed out cinder.

The rub, however, is that gentle, gregarious Werner turns out to be the problem. Werner, having had a few too many hefeweizen, strikes up an architectural conversation with a few locals, and has scribbled a rudimentary design of Gus’s lab on a coaster, threatening to let word of this top secret project leak. Mike whisks Werner away, and confronts him about it the next morning. There’s apologies and efforts to minimize, but the damage is done. A relationship that had grown friendly is now one of employer and potential liability (never a good position to be in under Gus Fring). But sadder yet is the sense that Mike had once again grown close to someone, had some sense of equilibrium, only to see it disturbed once more by his business.

The same holds for Nacho, whose quiet command of the Salamanca empire (over what we can assume to be months) seems poised to be disrupted by the arrival of someone who carries the family name. We don’t get much of Nacho’s story here, even after he’s been missing for a few episodes, but what we do get is potent.

We see a version of Nacho who calls late-series Jesse Pinkman to mind, another young man finding steady success in an ugly business who finds that success only hollows him out. The cold way Nacho tears out the earring of a dealer whose tithe was too late, the curt and confident air he takes on when chastising his lieutenant for not doing it fist, the desultory fashion in which he tosses product at his harem in a decked out apartment, suggest a man who, like Jesse, thought he wanted out, and only finds himself a deeper or more vital part of this machine.

Or maybe not. The arrival of another Salamanca cousin presents a problem, another unpredictable element in a machine that needs to work efficiently and expectedly in order to work. There is a spiritual deadening to the ghost of Nacho we see skulking through his home in “Coushetta”, but the appearance of a new cook in the kitchen might give him a way out, one way or another.

Not everybody wants out, though. The specter hanging over the show over the past few episodes has been the apparent impending demise of Jimmy and Kim as a couple. There’s been a growing disdain (or at least what seemed like it) from Kim for Jimmy’s less-than-above-board methods, given how they brought down Chuck, how they tore a sick man down because of a mutually petty (if longstanding) feud.

But what if Jimmy’s powers could be used for good? What if his talent for persuasion and suggestion and theatricality could be applied without hurting anyone? What if his skills could be used to help decent people have another chance?

Why, then, you could enjoy the con-artistry, the creativity, the performance and presentation. When Kim sits in an office with the head honcho of Mesa Verde, who wants her to pull another rabbit of her hat to help them get approval for a new building, she demurs. The old Kim would once have jumped at that chance, to put in the legwork, to pull off a miracle of filings and applications and zoning exemptions. But in the shadow of a multi-pronged scheme to pressure an opposing lawyer into letting her client off with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist with an aisle’s worth of supplies from M.J. Designs and a boatload of trickeration, the thicket of regulatory challenges can’t help but seem dull.

So when Kim asks to speak to Jimmy, he worries that it’s a death sentence for their relationship, but it’s really an invitation. Kim pauses a moment to consider the possibilities before she answers Kevin’s query. Later, she caresses the little souvenir of her and Jimmy’s first little scam. She leans on the wall, smoking a cigarette, the small vice that brought her and Jimmy together. And with those symbols and moments on her mind, she tells Jimmy, the man who’s afraid this is a kiss off, that she’s not mad – she wants more.

It’s the last thing you’d expect after seven episodes of growing revulsion and concern from Ms. Wexler. But there’s a charge to this “line of work,” a fulfillment from defending people who need a second chance combined with the excitement of using her boyfriend’s amusing and impressive abilities to grease the wheels of justice, that she can’t find in her otherwise straight life.

Better Call Saul is a show that gives you both the slow grinding pain of inevitability and harsh realization, but also those jolting, tantalizing, anxiety-boosting shifts that come as a shock, but not quite as a surprise. We know these characters – what Kim wants, what Mike wants, what Nacho wants – and the show never forgets that. When it’s time for a change of direction, each is recognizable in their denuded concerns, their disappointed resignation, and their dangerous hope to delve deeper into the world of tricks and treats that Jimmy McGill can’t help but conjure. We understand where most of these characters are headed, what much of their futures like it, but Better Call Saul still finds ways to surprise us.

Jimmy takes a bus ride out of New Mexico and spends his time writing letters and postcards with the help of other riders as well. Mike takes the Germans out to a strip club and Werner to a bar. Kai stirs up trouble and Mike goes to bail him out and Werner spills some details about the superlab to men at the bar and Mike takes him home. Jimmy comes back home and prepares his office at the nail salon to function as a call centre. The "fake" letters make its way to the judge and Suzanne insists on finding out what makes Huell so special. The phone numbers included on the letters are the phones Jimmy has and pays his filmcrew to play improv if the DA's office calls. Huell's sentence is reduced and Jimmy and Kim celebrate. Soon after, Kim tells Jimmy she wants to do something like that again. (Why Kim??) Mike tells Gus they're about halfway done the superlab but still way behind schedule. Nacho takes some time to reflect on his life before becoming part of the drug world and a new Salamanca at the restaurant makes Nacho worry about how things might change. This episode left me with a wide grin on my face stunned to think that when Jimmy has run out of ideas to do something wild, something new comes along.