6x01 Wine and Roses

[8.0/10] One of the scenes from Breaking Bad that has most stuck with me is Walter White’s “perfect moment to die” speech from “Fly”. It’s the rare bout of regret, dare I say humility from Walter. For one fleeting instant, he recognizes that things have gone too far, that he has and will hurt too many people, and most importantly, that there was an exit ramp somewhere in the rearview mirror that he wished he’d taken.

We know where the roads from Better Call Saul lead, more or less. Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman becomes Cinnabon Gene. Mike Ehrmantraut dies by the side of a riverbank at the hands of a man he loathes. The fates of Kim and Nacho and Lalo are more opaque at this juncture, but there’s enough hints, if only by their conspicuous absence later in the timeline, that things don’t go perfectly for them.

But I can’t help but wonder if Jimmy and Mike will look back at the events of “Wine and Roses” and have the same evanescent epiphany Walter White did. When Jimmy sits across the table from Kim, she starts to spill on her plans for how to tear Howard Hamlin asunder. The con would achieve a faster settlement of the Sandpiper case, thereby giving her the cash she needs to fund a pro bono practice to give the little guy a chance against the interests supported by attorneys like Howard Hamlin.

For a moment, Jimmy hesitates. He doesn’t want Kim to fall back into this muck. He worries about the path he walked down, the “Bad Choice Road” that led to him evading bullet fire and wandering for days in a scorching desert. He fears the harm that heading that same way could inflict on the woman he loves. If only for a second, Jimmy wants to shut it down, to keep her out of this, to shield her from the worst of it.

He can’t though. Maybe he worries that turning her down would be shutting down the thing that brings them together, that gives them that spark. Maybe he’s afraid that saying no would be pushing her away. Maybe he just can’t resist the allure of a good con. Whatever the reason, he goes along with it, despite that twinge, that small inkling in the back of his mind, that his could be one of those off-ramps.

And you know what? I’m complicit in it, because as much as I wince in anticipation of how all of this blows up into the flamboyant life of Saul Goodman, it’s just such a joy to watch the two of them work. The slow-spun effort to plant doubts about Howard in the mind of Clifford Main are a trip and a treat. These are two masters of their game, and the way they pull off the con they planned, while also adjusting on the fly, is brilliant.

The binoculars trained on the fourth hole of a golf course to estimate just the right amount of time. The pretext of a tour to get into a country club. The chance to run into Kevin Wachtell and spin it into spurious but hilarious charges of antisemitism. The message to abort when the linksmen wrap up early. The stopped up toilet that distracts the attendant just long enough for Saul to spy Howard’s locker number. The ridiculous but strangely plausible ploy to avoid Hamlin’s notice by posing as one of those weirdos who hangs out au naturale in a locker room. (I half expected Howard to say, “Jimmy! I’d know that bare behind anywhere!”)
So much of Better Call Saul is heartrending and gut-wrenching. The whole series is a slow motion car crash, where good people end up dead and folks who, under the right circumstances, could have been good, steadily fall to the dark side. In the wake of such misery, it’s easy to forget how gosh darn fun it can be. To some extent, you can’t help but be on Kim’s side, if only because the tension and thrills of their master plans pulled off to perfection are infectiously entertaining.

There’s symbolism to it too. It’s no coincidence that the setting of Kim and Jimmy’s planting of cocaine to undermine their adversary is a country club. There’s hardly a greater symbol of the class that Jimmy resents his rejection from and Kim hates the influence and injustice of. Tripping up the well-coiffed, moneyed foe in such fancy confines comes with extra relish.

It’s a far cry from the grim realities on the other side of the border. Nacho has been made. Don Bolsa knows that he’s a rat. The cartel is looking for him. The Federales are looking for him. He can’t even see a handful of “regular people” walking by without hiding and panicking that this is the end. Nacho is in a paranoid state, with good reason, unable to rest or go anywhere without looking over his shoulder. He too is someone who pulled off a grand con, albeit not one of his own design, and the blowback is potentially severe.

Especially when that blowback comes in the form of Lalo Salamanca. “Wine and Roses” offers a bit of catnip for Breaking Bad fans. Hector Salamanca furiously rings his bell. The Cousins silently stalk through the grisly scene where innocent people were burned to death in the name of taking Lalo off the board. The Salamanca family is poised to take their vengeance.

But candidly, it’s not what excites me about this episode. I like Lalo. I particularly enjoy Tony Dalton’s performance. But he’s starting to feel like The Terminator or somebody else from a 1980s action movie. We get more vignettes of his brutality here. He’s willing to kill an innocent man who resembles him to throw his pursuers off his trail and make them believe he perished. He’s ready to off some coyotes simply for being rude. (Though he kind of screws over the people trying to cross the border.) He is seemingly unstoppable.

It’s understandable why Better Call Saul reestablishes him in this way. Lalo is the one man in the show who poses a threat to all the other major characters (give or take Howard). He has obvious beef with the chicken man. He’s crossed paths with Mike. He’s on the trail of Nacho. He’s suspicious of “the lawyer.” And he’s been told off by Kim. Lalo on the loose means everyone else is in danger, and especially after the series’ long hiatus, there’s good reason to remind the audience how serious that danger is, even if it verges on becoming overexaggerated.

What I care the most about, though, is Mike’s dilemma over all of this. Gus Fring believes that Lalo is dead. Don Bolsa and his superiors know that Nacho is involved. That makes Nacho a loose end -- someone the cartel could catch and torture and force to give up who he’s working with. And if there’s one thing Gus deals with swiftly and brutally, it’s loose ends.

Mike knows that. He saw it with Werner Ziegler. He foresees how Gus might deal with the young man who’s done everything asked of him. Fring points out that Nacho had no choice, but Mike has a deceptively bleeding heart. The man couldn’t save his son, but maybe he can save Nacho, speak up on his behalf, convince Gus that it’s worth rewarding Nacho for his loyalty and the risks he took in their name. Mike even volunteers to do it himself, until Gus gives him what amounts to a polite “Your point has been made” and a frosty silence.

But then the moment comes. Mike is playing with his granddaughter. He’s in the middle of one of those quiet bits of domestic bliss that mean the most to him. The hum of his cell phone pierces the quiet air. Mike recognizes the area code, surmises who’s calling. Only he doesn’t act. He doesn’t speak to this stand-in for the son he lost. He lets it go away, while someone who needs him sits alone in the scariest of circumstances in an empty motel room. The look on Mike’s face says it all, the moment of conflict that slowly settles into resignation. This is my life now, with all its compromises.

I’m not convinced that Mike will not yet act to save Nacho, even if it puts him on Fring’s bad side. If he doesn’t though, if Nacho ends up dead from his inaction, I wonder if he’ll think back to that moment when the call came through. There was an off-ramp. There was an exit. There was an opportunity to change the course of all of this for someone else, even if Mike himself is already in too deep. When you don’t take those chances, you can find yourself rotting in some underground compound, picking the bones of where it all went wrong.

Who knows if Jimmy will ever have the self-awareness to do the same once he fully embraces the flash and flair of the Saul Goodman moniker. But he seems hesitant here in a way we’ve rarely witnessed for the character. He stares up at the ceiling, still a bit troubled by what he’s heard from Kim. His hand clenches around his briefcase before he pulls his usual flim-flam routine on Lalo’s prosecutor, who’s figured out his story is baloney. He bursts into an empty courtroom to collect himself afterward, just a little bit ashamed, just a little bit frightened, at how close all of this is to being too much for him.

And yet, he sets those feelings aside and goes along with it anyway. He applies the same skills that led to the deaths of Marco, of Chuck, of other people who entered Jimmy’s orbit and ended up the worse for it. But for one moment, one casual, unshowy moment in an unremarkable Mexican restaurant, he stops and considers taking a different route, before charging ahead.

We know where that path leads. The gorgeous but garish opening sequence confirms it -- a steady crumbling of Saul Goodman’s conspicuously Trumpian faux-splendor. Despite the lack of any sign of Kim’s whereabouts in Breaking Bad, this dismantling of Jimmy’s office and abode reveals that he held onto a small token of their time together. The tequila bottle-stopper that calls to mind their scam on “Ken Wins” in season 2, that Kim held onto when she quit her last job, a symbol of the elaborate, boundary-pushing tricks they’ve pulled together, remained in Jimmy’s possession all these years.

We don’t know why Jimmy held onto it for sure. But it’s easy to imagine him hanging onto it as a reminder of her, maybe looking back and realizing where it all went wrong. Maybe he thinks back to a seemingly inconsequential chat over sopapillas, the ostensibly innocuous one that sealed their fate. And maybe he thinks to himself: there was the chance to avoid the worst of this, there was the time when we had a chance, there was the perfect moment.