5x08 Bagman

[9.8/10] One of the kindest things you can say about Better Call Saul is that it rarely feels like Breaking Bad anymore. Sure, there’s still stories that intersect with the cartel, and a prequel to the war between Gus and the Salamancas, and the time-honored practice of writing your characters into a corner and forcing themselves to figure a way out of it. But despite its roots, Better Call Saul has become its own thing, with its own voice, own world, and own style that’s connected to the story of Walter White, but distinct from it.

And yet, something about “Bagman” feels distinctively Breaking Bad-esque. Maybe it’s that Vince Gilligan is in the director’s chair. Maybe it’s so much time spent beneath the New Mexico sun. Maybe it’s the tale of an uncommonly common schmuck crossing paths with drug-runners and getting more than he bargained for. Whatever it is, stranding Saul and Mike in the desert wouldn’t feel out of place on Better Call Saul’s predecessor.

The sand-swept isolation calls to mind Walt and Jesse’s similar struggles in “4 Days Out.” The small scale personal story told within a larger moment makes “Bagman” feel strikingly like “Fly.” Hell, for folks whose prestige television memories run back twenty years ago, the episode has a whiff of Christopher and Paulie stuck in the Pine Barrens.

There’s a reason television shows, not just Breaking Bad, return to these sorts of stories of struggle and isolation and mutual survival. They give creators the chance to put characters through hell, challenges that they may or may not be prepared to face, and in those challenges, reveal them.

Because the episode reveals Saul Goodman. It humbles him. It both brings him down to one of his lowest points, his willingness to die and give up and fail in a way the crafty huckster never has before, only to build him back up when he’s reminded what’s at stake. This episode isn’t Jimmy McGill’s finest hour, but it may be Better Call Saul’s.

The setup for the episode comes from an off-hand comment in last week’s outing. Lalo needs seven million dollars to make bond and taps Saul to pick it up for him. There’s a logic there. The Cousins are too hot to avoid suspicion from the Salamancas’ competitors. Nacho is reliable, but Lalo correctly intuits that this kind of money would be enough to send him packing. Jimmy is too plain, too apart from these internecine squabbles, to arouse that kind of suspicion, so he’s nominated for the job.

He doesn't want it though. He knows it’s dangerous. He told Kim he wouldn’t do it. But he bargains his way to a hundred thousand dollar commission and can’t bear to turn that kind of money. Jimmy tries to break it to his wife gently, plying her with fajitas and old el paso (exotic!), except that Kim knows better. She is aghast. She practically demands that he back out. She all but pleads with him, please that Jimmy, naturally, ignores.

And why wouldn’t he? Saul Goodman is invinceable. He has never found a scrape or a tight spot that he couldn’t wriggle his way out of. He is, as he told Howard last week, a god. So why not ramble into the desert, take a pick-up from murderous crime bosses, and drive away crooning a bastardized version of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? No fuss, no muss.

Until, of course, everything goes pear shaped.

The striking thing about “Bagman” is not just that this plan goes horribly wrong. It was practically destined to. Rivals, or simple opportunists, tipped off by a mole in a Salamanca safehouse, ambush Saul, there’s a firefight that leaves him cowering and in shock, until Mike saves the day. This isn’t the first exchange of gunfire on Better Call Saul or the first scheme that hit a major bump for Jimmy.

What stands out, though, is how ill-equipped he is to handle this. Normally Jimmy is the expert, the resourceful planner, who uses his silver tongue and conman instincts to work something out. Here, though, he has nothing to fall back on, nothing to do, but contemplate his own hubris. Bullet barrages are not his game. Survivalist treks through the desert are not his specialty. Saul is, in short, completely out of his depth, in a way we’ve never really seen before.

But Mike isn’t. Mike is very much in his element. One of the great features of episodes like this one is that forcing two people to work together like highlights the differences between them. Mike is, in his own way, just as talented and resourceful as Jimmy is. As his Private Investigator routine showed, he can even pull a con just like Saul can.

The difference is that Mike is tough. He is determined, with a background in special forces that makes him resilient in these circumstances. He came prepared for this in a way that Jimmy didn’t. He was ready for contingencies and failsafes that Jimmy wasn’t. And even he is tested and pushed to his limits. What does that leave for a softie like Jimmy McGill?

It leaves a man to be brought low by his failure to realize what he’s getting into. Gilligan uses the tricks of the camera not only to once again show us the scenic beauty of the New Mexico landscape, but to contrast this colorful shnook, at home in the circles where he operates, from the harsh environs he now finds himself wholly unprepared to deal with.

Gilligan shows The Cousins looming on either side of a close up of the back of Jimmy’s head, creating the image of intimidation. He gives us Mike and Saul wandering through a valley as the clouds sweep overhead, communicating how small they are in the far stretches of this place. He uses glow sticks to light their faces in different colors, providing high contrast so we see every weathered line. He puts the camera in the field of vision of a cactus, a shoe, or a hole in the ground, forcing us to look upon our heroes from unnatural angles, dwarfed by what’s around them. He highlights the unforgiving, if gorgeous, features of this arid deathtrap that threatens to tear down the seasoned vet and the hapless civilian in turn.

In the midst of that struggle, the show stealthily nods to little symbols, little pieces of who Jimmy and Mike have been and what led them to this moment, as so many of them end up either lost or just what the pair need in a given moment.

Mike saves Jimmy’s life with a sniper’s rifle, presumably the same one he bought to kill Hector in “Klick.” When he packs up what’s worth scavenging from Jimmy’s car, he takes the gas cap, likely having used it to track Jimmy just as Gus tracked him in “Mabel.” The Mike we see resolutely trudging his way through the desert is the product of so much, some things we’ve seen, and a great deal we haven’t, but those things have made him better able to face this moment.

Instead, Jimmy sees the things that have defined him slowly stripped away. His mismatched colored Suzuki Esteem ends up flipped into a ditch. The “Second Best Lawyer” mug Kim gifted him, one he’s desperate to hang onto, ends up with a bullet through it. He sweats through one of his colorful suits and strips it for protection against the penetrating rays of the sun. His perfectly manicured image and visage of self-assured confidence gives way to a blistered, sunburnt wretch, laid low and shown what he cannot simply bluff his way through.

But the ties to events past go beyond the tools that Mike and Saul lose or use in the process. There’s a brotherly vibe about the two of them together, Mike grumpily herding Jimmy along like a pestersome younger sibling he’s reluctantly responsible for. The glowsticks the two share while “camping” help set a mood, letting Gilligan up the contrast and show the weathered lines of each of these men’s faces. But it also conjures the image of Jimmy and Chuck as young boys, lit by a similar light in “Lantern”, and comparison that becomes all the more salient when Mike wraps himself up in a “space blanket” to save off the cold, something that Jimmy can’t bring himself to partake in for obvious reasons.

There’s a deeper connection there too, though neither of them fully knows it. Saul tells Mike that Kim will be worrying about him, and Mike is aghast that Saul let his wife in on what he’s up to here. Jimmy protests that Kim’s smart enough not to do anything rash (a faith Kim echoes to Lalo), but Mike just gives him an incredulous look. Mike tells Jimmy that he’s made Kim a part of the game now, something that Kim identifying herself to Lalo reinforces.

That’s scary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, for seasons now, Better Call Saul fans have been on pins and needles hoping that Kim survives. The fact that she’s implicated, even tangentially, that Lalo knows her by sight, makes her survival of the series that much more perilous. It’s scarier, though, because Mike knows full well that you can’t just be lightly involved and float above this kind of muck. He watched his son try to be in it without being a part of it, and saw where that leaves you and them. His skepticism is an admonition and a cosmic warning for Kim.

But when Jimmy’s latest shortcut has failed, when his effort to work smarter not harder has left him losing packs of hundred dollar bills, pulling spines out of his foot, and melting in the sun, it’s the thought of Kim’s well-being that keeps him going.

Mike gives him what can only become his signature speech of the series, about not caring whether he lives or dies, but choosing to go on because there’s people whose lives he wants to make better. Mike has been through some shit, crawled his way out of it, and had every reason to tap out on the other end. But he has Stacey and Kaylee, and he has been willing to dirty himself and fight through the muck, to keep them safe and supported. It is as clear a statement of purpose as we’re likely to get from the famously taciturn survivor.

Jimmy takes the critique to heart. Rather than hide or give up, he swallows his pride and wraps himself in the space blanket, gaining the attention of the criminals trying to hunt them down. This is not a slick con or a clever ruse. It’s a desperate ploy, one where Jimmy is willing to make himself bait, to put his life on the line, in the hopes that it will see him through this and get him back to Kim, hopefully with the money and wherewithal to make her life better too.

The sequence that follows is incredible. Despite knowing that both characters survive, Gilligan draws out the tension and terror as a car bears down on Jimmy and Mike lies in wait with his rifle. A missed shot, a swerving car, an upturned chassis, and a newly-determined foil-wrapped man who can’t even look at any of it, leads to the heart-pumping catharsis of an episode’s worth of character choices bound up in a rollicking climax.

In the end, Jimmy is willing to face his lowest moments, debase himself to make it through this, because Mike reminds him of whom he’s doing this for. He’ll swaddle himself in the shining memories of his dead brother to catch the gangsters’ eye. He’ll drink his own urine out of a water bottle branded with the law firm he swindled. He will make himself bait, the last resort of a man with nothing left to offer. And when it works, he will trudge on, having shed the niceties and pretensions and pride that made him think he was better than this, or capable of this.

The stock and trade of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad is change and self-realization. More than the arid trappings, more than the isolated chance for two characters to measure themselves against one another, that is what makes “Bagman” of a piece with our first televised journey to Albuquerque. Amid sand and blood and piss, Jimmy receives one last wake up call, one last chance to change his path, one last chance to remember who it’s worth making that choice for.