Damn, it must really suck to have been snapped while being on a plane.
Pros:
Cons:
6/10
[8.1/10] For the entirety of this season, Kim Wexler, and the audience, have been waiting for Jimmy McGill to genuinely deal with his brother’s death, to confront it in some way, rather than moving on as though nothing happened. From the season premiere, where he brushed off Howard’s tortured confession with a happy air, to last week’s raging out, we’ve seen Jimmy sublimate his feelings about Chuck and his brother’s death. We’ve seen him repress them, run from them, and act out because of them, but never really face them head on.
Those feelings are at the core of “Winner”, the finale of Better Call Saul’s fourth season. The latest scheme from Kim and Jimmy requires Jimmy to cry crocodile tears at Chuck’s grave on the anniversary of his death, to get earnestly involved in the scholarship grants made in Chuck’s name, to loudly but “anonymously” throw a party for the dedication of the Chuck McGill memorial law library and seem too broken up to enjoy it. It’s all a big show, to attract as many members of the local bar as possible, in the hopes that word will get back to the committee judging his appeal for reinstatement as a lawyer.
It is an effort to put on grief, wear it like a mask, for self-serving purposes. The knock on Jimmy, the thing that held him back in his first hearing, was a lack of remorse or concerning or mournfulness about his brother. So he and Kim send every signal imaginable to the legal community, in lugubrious tones, that Jimmy is a broken man still shaken up by his brother’s passing, only withholding mention of Chuck because the memory is too painful to bear.
As usual, it’s a good plan! It’s hard to know for sure whether the signs of Jimmy’s faux grief make it back to the review board, but they at least seem to be effective on his immediate prey. And Kim is there by his side, shooting down his more outlandish ideas, workshopping his speech to the committee, and helping her partner mislead people in the hopes of regaining something that was taken away from him.
But the key to it all working is Jimmy’s speech to the review board. He goes in with a plan to recite Chuck’s letter to him. Jimmy wants to let his brother’s eloquence and feeling carry the day so that he doesn't have to put on that mask of true feeling and seem insincere. But he departs from the script. He improvises. He offers what sounds like an honest assessment of his relationship with his brother, the reasons why he became a lawyer, the difficulty of gaining Chuck’s approval, the truths about Chuck’s demeanor and the hardships their sibling relationship faced at times.
The the impact of those words is heightened by the karaoke cold open that shows Jimmy as needling but caring, Chuck as condescending but proud, and the two of them as loving siblings. It clearly moves the review board. It causes Kim to wipe away a tear. And you’d have to be made of stone to sit in the audience and not feel something as Jimmy offers what sounds like a heartfelt and honest eulogy for his brother and their relationship.
But it’s a canard, a put-on, a lie. It is an echo of similar faux-sentimental assessments from Chuck, and once again, I almost believed it. Jimmy revels in having put one over on the review board. His cravenness about tugging their heartstrings astounds Kim, underlining her worst fears about the man she loves. After tearfully echoing the passage from his brother’s letter, about his pride in sharing the name McGill, Jimmy asks for a “doing business as” form to practice under a pseudonym instead. Saul Goodman, scruple-free lawyer to the seedy underbelly of Albuquerque, is born out of the ashes of his brother’s life and name.
There was no truth in Jimmy’s seemingly sincere pronouncements. There was no outpouring of grief or real feeling in that confessional moment, or if there was, it was anesthetized and calibrated to be used for dishonest purposes. For ten episodes, we’ve been waiting for Jimmy to acknowledge what his brother meant to him in some genuine way, and instead, he gives us, the review board, and most notably Kim, what turns out to be just another performance.
It is, in a strange way, a negative image of how Mike behaves in this episode. When he speaks to Gus about Werner’s disappearance, he seeks mercy on his friend’s behalf, trying to avoid a mortal response from his employer. He pleads caution, forgiveness, the possibility of correction. But when he speaks to Werner himself, he’s colder, angrier, more taciturn and practical in the way we’ve come to expect as the default for Mr. Ehrmantraut. He too has a divide between the face he presents in his profession and the one he presents to his erstwhile friend.
But at least “Winner” gives us some good cat-and-mousing in that effort. For all the heady material in Better Call Saul, it’s hard not to enjoy the petty thrills of detective work and chases gone wrong all the more. Seeing Mike pose as a concerned brother in law, and piece together where Werner’s likely to be is an absolute treat. And the way he manages to loses Lalo Salamanca -- with a gum in the ticket machine ploy -- is a lot of fun.
Lalo himself, though, really drags this portion of the episode down. He’s a little too cartoony of an antagonist on a heightened but still down-to-earth show. The fact that he crawls through the ceiling like he’s freaking Spider-Man was patently ridiculous. And his single-minded pursuit of Mike and ability to ferret details out just as well veered too far into the realm of contrivance. I appreciate the promise of greater friction to come between Gus and Mike’s operation and the Salamancas, but the bulk of Lalo’s business in this one was unnecessary, and kept Nacho, who’s been underserved in general this season, on the sidelines.
Still, it leads to a tragic, moving, heartfelt scene between Mike and Werner where what needs to be done is done. Between Werner’s naive requests to see his wife, Mike’s matter of fact resignation about what needs to happen, and Werner’s slow realization of the position he’s in all unspools slowly and painfully.
The upshot of it is simple though. Mike found a friend, and he has to kill him. There’s sadness in Mike’s eyes, evident beneath the anger that it came to this. There’s pain in Werner’s, and for yours truly, when Werner tells Mike that he thought his little escapade would result only in frustration but ultimately forgiveness and understanding from Mike, because they’re friends.
There’s not room for friends in this line of work, at least not under Gus Fring. Ultimately, it’s not up to Mike, and underneath the stars of New Mexico, at a distance, with a spark and a silhouette, we see him have to end the life of someone he’d rather let go, because it’s his job. Werner is the first man that Mike kills for Gus, but he won’t be the last. And it all starts with a man who made one mistake, that can’t be forgiven, because the powers that be would never allow it.
That’s what ties Mike’s portion of the episode to Jimmy’s. Jimmy delivers what is basically the Saul Goodman Manifesto to a young woman who was denied one of the Chuck McGill scholarships since she was caught shoplifting. He tells her that chances at respectability like that scholarship are false promises, dangled in front of lesser-thans to convince them they have a shot when they were judged harshly before they even stepped in the door. The system is stacked against you. The rules are to their benefit. So don’t abide by them. Make your success without them. Do what you have to do. Rub their nose in your success rather letting yourself be cowed by something unfair and biased against you. The world will try to define you by one mistake, but fight back and don’t let them win.
That’s a comforting worldview, one that lets the viewer off the hook to some degree. We want to like Jimmy. He’s affable. He’s fun. He’s good at what he does. It’s easy to buy in Jimmy’s own sublimated self-assessment -- that the white shoed system is unwilling to overlook less credentialed but hard-working individuals who’ve had missteps but overcome them, so he has to fight dirty. It’s tempting to buy into that narrative -- that the people with the power aren’t playing fair, so why should he? Why shouldn’t scratch, claw, fight, and cut corners along the way to getting what he deserves?
But the truth is that “the system” hasn’t done much to keep Jimmy down. Howard Hamlin wanted to give him a job after he became a lawyer. Davis & Main gave him every opportunity to succeed. Even the disciplinary committee is not unreasonable in questioning Jimmy’s penitence when he offers no remorse for the person he hurt with his scheme. Jimmy’s made plenty of his own mistakes, but it’s not “them” trying to hold Jimmy McGill down; it’s “him.”
That’s the trick of this season finale. Despite all the put-ons and subterfuge, Jimmy does genuinely reckon with the death of his brother, he just does it in the guise of unseen forces set against him rather than a cold body in the cold ground. It’s Chuck who tried to keep Jimmy from being on the same level as him. It’s Chuck who instigated the disciplinary proceedings that continue to be a thorn in Jimmy’s side. It’s Chuck who judged his younger sibling solely on his mistakes, who overlooked his hustle, who saw those missteps as all that Jimmy was or could be. When Jimmy rails against the system that he sees as holding him down, when he uses that as an excuse to color outside the lines, he’s really railing against the brother, and his feelings of anger and pain and grievance, that no longer have a living object of blame to sustain them.
Because Jimmy has to be the winner. If Jimmy is denied his reinstatement, if a young woman with a checkered past but a bright future can’t earn a scholarship in his brother’s name, if it’s ultimately judged that someone like Jimmy isn’t allowed to be in the profession of someone like Chuck, then it means that Chuck won, and Jimmy can’t bear that.
Despite the loss of his sibling, we only see Jimmy truly cry once this season. It’s not in front of the review board. It’s not in a quiet moment with Kim. It’s in his car, by himself, when the engine won’t start, when he feels stymied, when it seems like the forces Chuck set in motion will pull him under for good, cosmically confirming his brother’s harsh assessment of him.
There is grief in Jimmy McGill, pain caused by a severe loss. But that loss didn’t happen when Chuck died. It happened when Chuck broke his heart, turned him away, told him that he didn’t matter. As with others on T.V. this year, death didn’t mean the loss of a confidante for Jimmy; it meant the end of the possibility of approval, of pride, of the sort of family relationship Jimmy had always wanted and thought he might one day gain.
There is truth in those tears behind the wheel of an off-color sedan, a mourning in private to contrast with the show he puts on in public. And Saul Goodman -- the real Saul Goodman -- is born. Because if Jimmy couldn’t earn his brother’s love, then at least he can win, he can try to become what Chuck never thought he would, reach heights his brother never reached, no matter what lies he has to tell, what corners he has to cut, or who he has to hurt or deceive to get there. That’s Jimmy’s truth now; that’s his response to his Chuck’s death, and that’s the force that moves him from the decency and concern of the man we meet at the beginning Better Call Saul to the amoral, win-at-all-costs mentality that comes with the new name that distinguishes him from his brother.
The movie that propably had the most impact on my life.
I was little over 10 at the time I saw it first. My dad brought it home on VHS. From the first second my eyes were glued to the screen. Immediately after it was over I rewound the tape and watched it again which up to today, close to 35 later, I haven´t done with any other movie. I recorded it on audio tape so I could listen to it, even wrote down the whole thing on paper (that was well before the internet, folks). We re-ennacted the scenes, I had memorized every line. I cannot recall how many times I`ve seen it since then.
I would give it 11 if possible.
The funny thing is that after the episode ended, I came here to give it some stars.
I will start my review by saying that I never saw the original South Korean Oldboy film. My intention was seeing the original before seeing this american remake or even thinking if I wanted to see the remake or not because all of the negative comments about this new one. The thing is, I won tickets for the premiere and as a huge addict in films I couldn't refuse it. Many people told me not to see this despite not having seen the original but man, it's stronger than me!
The story of this film JEEZ! What an amazing story! But I have to admit that one of the things that I am certain (and from hearing the reactions of some people after the film finished) is that for more amazing that this story can be, unfortunately this film make it a little predictable. At the middle of the film I was already suspecting how it would end and in the original film (as you all say) the perfect pacing and the perfect atmosphere will keep you completely blank about what will happen until the very last minute.
Josh Brolin wasn't entirely bad for the role, he was intense and emotional but in my point of view he hadn't all of the intensity required for that role and he hadn't all of the emotion required for made me feel totally heartbroken for that poor father that learned a life lesson in the worst possible way.
Elizabeth Olsen wasn't bad, she is a promissing actress and Shalrto Copley is a good villian! He surprised me as a villian earlier this year on Elysium and he surprised me again. I think he has all of the creepiness required of this kind of characters.
Overall, I can't say that it was a horrible film because for me, mostly because of the shocking story, it was a surprise and I enjoyed. Although, some things didn't worked well for me.
After all I think it was better for me not watch the original film before because I had nothing to compare. Now I am still very curious to see the original Oldboy and take my conclusions.
Many of you might criticize my rate about it but I can't lie. It entertained me and I was totally stunned by the story.
The movie is way too unrealistic. No one plugs in a USB cable on the first try.
Honestly, I'm not feeling it. This "drama" just seems so contrived at this point that I've started to stop caring. I need my badass 8man back who'll trample all over people's feels. And where are my dank memes?
Iroha is da best girl tho.
This is the most emotional anime that I've ever seen in my life. Probably my favorite anime ever so do what ever you can to watch this ASAP.
Sometimes you have to cross a line. Sometimes, you do everything right; you do everything the way you believe that it should be done, and you still lose. Your forbearance, your good deeds, your extra effort to do the right thing, only enabled the bad guys, only let them profit from their misbehavior. So you have to make compromises. You have break some of the rules yourself; you have to sully yourself by playing their game; you have to be like the bad guys to beat the bad guys, for the greater good.
These are the thoughts motivating Mike Ehrmantraut as he wraps his hands around the rifle he'd previously shied away from. But they're the same ones going through Chuck's head as he tricks his brother into incriminating himself on tape.
Mike has a code. He doesn't want to kill people. His shaky hand after his run-in with Hector's henchmen shows he doesn't even want to hurt people. And he certainly doesn't want an innocent person to come to harm because of a choice he makes. But as Asimov explored in the short stories involving his Three Laws of Robotics, sometimes these principles conflict; sometimes they pull a person in different directions and force them to make some hard choices.
The eminently capable Mr. Ehrmantraut tried to abide by his no-kill policy, and still deliver a blow to his erstwhile rival. He tried to exact his vengeance on Hector in a way that would take the crime boss out of the picture, but also keep the innocents out of harm's way, and insulate himself and his family from the Salamancas' reach. Instead, it all goes sideways. Bad luck keeps the cops off of Hector's trail. A Good Samaritan loses their life in the exchange. And the man Mike went to great lengths to leave still kicking is summarily executed in the desert.
Mike tried. He tried very, very hard to have his cake and eat it too, to earn the money that he thinks will help him buy his soul back after the death of his son, to dip his toe in the mud without getting too dirty. He tried, and he lost anyway.
So it's come to this -- a sniper's nest overlooking a Salamanca hideout in the harshness of the New Mexico desert. His silent vow not to take a life, his distaste for snuffing out another man's existence, have to be put aside. More harm will be done--at least in the final tally--if he doesn't violate that code. He buys the sort of weapon he turned down the last time he considered killing a Salamanca. He sets up from his far away vantage point, to where his enemies seem to be in miniature -- tiny lives off in the distance. He lines up his shot. And he waits.
Then, that pesky moral code comes back again. At the moment of truth, Nacho stands between him and Hector. The greater good says do it. The pure utilitarian says that Hector will continue to inflict misery and pain, that Nacho isn't exactly an angel himself, and that a semi-innocent man will be killed regardless of whether Mike shoots or doesn't, so he may as well take out the real bad guy in the process. The retributivist says that Hector deserves it, for threatening a little girl, for ordering the death of an innocent person, for having a man killed who may not be nearly as innocent, but whose only crime in Hector's eyes was succumbing to Mike's scheme.
But Mike can't. He just can't. It's the reason he caught a beating instead of taking a life in the first place. It's the reason he gave Nacho half of his money for taking the rap for Tuco. It's the reason he's spurred on to right this wrong in the first place. Only the people who kill the innocent--Hector Salamanca, Matty's murderers--deserve to die, and Mike just doesn't have it in him to stomach the collateral damage that would come along with preventing Hector from hurting anyone else. The moment passes; another undeserved death takes place, and Mike waits once more.
Until the sound of his car horn calls him away. He finds a branch lodged between the seat and the steering wheel, calling his attention to a note with a simple message -- "don't." Someone is smart enough to know what Mike is up to, and has a different plan. Who is that someone? [Speculative Spoilers here -- an enterprising redditor found that if you take the first letters of all the episode titles in Season 2, they make an anagram for the phrase "Fring's Back."] We don't know for sure yet. But it's someone who wants to stop Mike from going through with it. Mike is ready; he's been pushed past his limit and he's ready to do what needs to be done, but his conscience and outside forces keep him from crossing that line.
Chuck has no such limitations, either from within or without. But the episode's cold open gives us a window into what drives him, what's shaped the way he looks at his brother. Chuck has tried to be an upstanding man, at least from his own perspective. While Jimmy is reminiscing about a crazy time at their mother's birthday party, Chuck only remembers everyone else having to clean up Jimmy's mess, literally and figuratively. While Jimmy strolls off to grab a sandwich, Chuck waits dutifully with his comatose mom. And when he's alone, he breaks down. Chuck may seem heartless at times, but he is still a man of feeling, and his quickly recovered demeanor when the nurse comes in suggests that, like Hamlin, he may put on a mask to project the image he thinks he needs to uphold, regardless of how he really feels.
Then his mother lurches back to life for just a moment, and Chuck is captivated once more. But with her final breath, does she call for the son who stayed by her side? The one Who made something of himself? The one who was there to help his parents rather than exploit them? No, she calls for Jimmy. The hurt, the jealousy in Chuck's eyes looms large. This is the final insult, the last thumb in his eyes that for all Chuck's good deeds, for all his effort to do right, to be right, everyone, even his own Mother, loves the personable Jimmy McGill just a little bit more. Chuck keeps their mother's final words from his brother--better to keep him from enjoying the fruits of his misbegotten labors--but their sting lingers.
(Incidentally, it's a great little swerve to show Jimmy waiting beside at the hospital, only to then reveal his brother sitting next to him, letting the audience know that this is a flashback and not the aftermath of Chuck's incident at the copy shop.)
That's how Chuck processes these events, and that's what's lurking in the back of his mind when he realizes that Jimmy has sabotaged him. Jimmy can't be allowed to him win. He can't continue to prosper and benefit from stepping outside the lines just because he knows how to work a crowd. He can't be a bad actor and still be rewarding by living so large and so well on the back of so many lies and cheats and shortcuts. As Jesse Pinkman so memorably put it, he can't keep getting away with it.
To prevent that, to expose Jimmy for what Chuck thinks he really is, he has to take a page out of his brother's playbook. Chuck's plan to entrap his brother into confessing his misdeeds on tape is nigh-Machiavellian, but also feels like the sort of scheme that Jimmy himself would cook up.
One of the interesting things about Better Call Saul as its developed over the course of two seasons is the way it's explored the idea that as different as Chuck and Jimmy seem on the surface, there's a great deal of common ground between them. Chuck's shown a certain duplicitousness before -- in how he's used Howard as his hatchet man or pushed his partner to punish Kim as a way of getting to Jimmy. But this is something different, something more elaborate and even sinister. The layers to to Chuck's ruse, the misdirection, the orchestration, the cleverness in how he pulls it off all reek of Slippin' Jimmy. The younger McGill brother may be more personable, but there's a craftiness that he and Chuck share. Chuck may not have his brother's golden tongue, but he still knows what buttons to push when it comes to the CEO of Mesa Verde, and he knows how to pull off a plan as meticulous, manipulative, and perfectly-calculated as any of Jimmy's.
What's ironic about is that at the same time Chuck is becoming more like the man he misguidedly believes his brother to be, Jimmy is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. "Klick" may be the most overtly moral and upstanding we've ever seen Jimmy be. He rushes into the copy shop and starts directing traffic to get his brother some help, even though it will expose his attempt to cover his tracks. (And kudos to Michael McKean, who was amazing throughout the episode, but was especially good in his wordless but meaningful reaction when he sees Jimmy as he regains consciousness.) He stays by his brother's side throughout Chuck's recovery. He draws a line in the sand that despite everything that's happened, he won't commit Chuck, because it's not what he brother would want. He agonizes over subjecting Chuck to those tests even if he believes it's in Chuck's own best interests. He gives up his temporary guardianship even if it would leave Chuck, as he puts it, right where Jimmy wants him. He has a look of guilt when he watches the commercial he worked so hard to make and realizes he hasn't quite lived up to being the paragon of honesty and virtue he presents himself as.
And in the end, he confesses to his brother. Jimmy comes clean when he believes that the chain of events he set in motion caused Chuck to retire and dive even deeper into his psychosis. Jimmy may not believe he's really risking his career or his livelihood by doing so, but he is exposing himself, making a sacrifice by playing into Chuck's image of him. Jimmy absolutely loves his brother, and after all the effort he put into covering up his misdeeds, the lengths he went to in order to prevent Chuck from confirming his suspicions, the thought of his actions wounding his brother deeply motivates Jimmy to lay it all out there for him.
What's so tragic and deplorable is that Chuck is taking advantage of that. He's using his brother's love to hurt him. In a way, he's making the same choice Jimmy did when he obtained temporary guardianship over Chuck and forced him to take those tests at the hospital. He's taking the choice out of his brother's hands, because he doesn't trust him to make the right one. But it's also cravenly manipulative. Chuck is playing on Jimmy's own deep-seated concerns for him in order to undermine him. There's something especially cruel in the poetry of that, something that feels particularly wrong about turning someone's care for you against them in such a cold and calculated fashion.
It can be hard to explain what makes Better Call Saul great because so often it comes out in the little things. It may be the direction and editing, which convey Chuck's disorientation by flipping his perspective upside down beneath the hospital lights, or communicating Kim's pride in Jimmy by putting her beaming smile in the frame as his commercial plays. It may be the small but significant performance of the doctor who looks after Chuck, who manages to be a steady and caring voice of reason between each of the mercurial McGill brothers. It may be the little bits of dry comedy in an episode as significant as "Klick," from the "no offense," "none taken," exchange between Mike and the arms who wipes his prints off the rifle, to Ernesto's beleaguered wish that he was back in the mail room. Or it may be something like the quiet moment where Ernesto explains to Jimmy why he lied on his behalf -- for the simple reason that Chuck seemed out to get him, and Jimmy's his friend.
That, more than Chuck's fierce intelligence, more than Jimmy's golden tongue, more than one brother's pride and the other's lack of shame, is what truly distinguishes the McGill brothers from one another. When Jimmy plies his trade these days, when he employs a little subterfuge, he's usually trying to help people -- sometimes himself, but also the woman he loves and people like the seniors at Sandpiper. When things go awry, when it looks like people will really be hurt, he doesn't sit on the sidelines; he acts to rectify his mistakes, whether it's by talking Tuco into commuting the death sentences of his twin collaborators in the desert, or by admitting his actions to his brother to prevent Chuck from giving up his life and his sanity. Jimmy is far from pure, but he cares and he tries, and people like Ernesto see that.
But Chuck only uses those same skills to hurt people. Sure, he justifies it by seeing himself as an agent of morality, as it being part and parcel with his self-given duty to uphold what's right and just in this world. And yet even if he thinks what he does is for the greater good, when push comes to shove, Chuck uses that craftiness to deny his brother the seat at the table that he'd earned, to punish Kim for Jimmy's transgressions since she was the only one within reach, to wrest away a client when someone more deserving had done the legwork, and to incriminate a brother whose confession he was only able to wring out because of Jimmy's love and concern for him. Jimmy serves individuals; Chuck serves some greater sense of righteousness, and unlike Mike, he cares little for who's caught in the crossfire.
Chuck has a very personal, very exacting moral code, and it leads him to hurt the people who care about him the most. Jimmy's ethical mores are much more fluid, much more apt to let the ends justify the means, but he means to do good, more or less, and to help people, especially those close to him. And Mike is somewhere in the middle, intent on protecting the most important people in his life, trying to live up to the high moral standards he sets for himself even as he gets his hands dirty, and most of all trying not to hurt anyone in the process. "Klick" wraps its characters in these little moral conundrums, and teases out the connections and distinctions between its heroes and its villains as each tries to find their way out of them, and the lines they are and are not willing to cross to do it.
I'm just watching this on the side (dubbed even) but dang, it's worse and more clichéd than I expected. Hard to believe someone would actually produce this.
As dark as what Walter did was, she deserved it. She was completely full of herself and blackmailed Walter for the money. Not to mention she was basically making Jesse's decisions for him. While she may have truly loved him, she would've definitely used that money to continue being an addict. That's most likely the very reason she even wanted the money. I'm not going to feel sympathy now that she's dead.
"Hmmm, we don't have enough lolis recently, let's add one."
My most beloved TV show got destroyed in a matter of minutes. The previous episodes of S08 at least gave me some kind of emotion, episode 05 was a flat line. This truly is a masterpiece, a masterpiece of destruction. They've destroyed everything! The character development, the story, the plot, the meaning of GOT, the writing of G.R.R. Martin. They've destroyed all the hard work put in all of these years, they've spit on everything. I'm not going to hate the show, it gave me so much, and it will continue to be my favorite, but i'm just going to pretend this last season was never made. I'm going to imagine all the possible theories, all the story plots that could have been made, and just hope the writer finishes the series some day.
Sesion 8 the waste of our time.
Watching Jimmy bring ruin to an elderly woman's social life for his own gain was flat out disgusting.
It was the first time I've ever felt genuinely disgusted with him. All the other lies and schemes - even his bar scams as shitty as they were - didn't feel as repulsive to watch as seeing him manipulate those women like that.
Pride, anger and desperation have stripped him of his moral limits. If he ever had any they're gone now. He's not Jimmy anymore, he's Saul Goodman.
[8.6/10] For a split-second, I believed him. I believed Chuck when he told the Assistant District Attorney handling Jimmy’s case that his brother has a good heart, that he would never actually hurt Chuck, and that maybe there is an easier way to end all of this unpleasantness. Perhaps, I thought, Jimmy’s speech to Chuck, uttered while sitting on the curb waiting for the cops to pick him up, had made an impression. Chuck could be remembering all that his brother’s done for him, believing that Jimmy means well, and wanting to avoid selling him down the river.
Then, Jimmy sees the deal the A.D.A. offers him. It is surprisingly light, one that would allow him to avoid jail time and, assuming he can maintain some good behavior, even keep it off his record. The catch, undoubtedly concocted by Chuck in the meeting with Ms. Hay, is that the deal is conditioned on Jimmy writing a letter of confession to the felony charge, that would lead to him losing his law license.
The truth becomes clear. Chuck does not care for Jimmy’s well-being. He is not flush with the memories of the times his brother has been there for him. He just wants Jimmy out of the legal profession. Chuck still sees it as an insult, a joke, that his screw-up brother can, let alone would, be able to call himself the same thing as Chuck. That has always been the grandest affront to the elder McGill brother -- that Slippin’ Jimmy is allowed to be an officer of the court, and he aims to put a stop to it. He does not care about anything else in this, let alone his brother.
But Kim Wexler does. There is an inherent tragedy to even the kindest, sweetest scenes between her and Jimmy. We know that she is not around, or at least unseen, by the time Saul Goodman pops up on Breaking Bad, which makes every time Jimmy tries her patience or brushes her aside come off like a stepping stone to the seemingly inevitable dissolution of their partnership, personally and professionally. For the time being though, Kim is Jimmy’s best ally, the one who, unlike Chuck, truly believes that he can be good.
The episode shows that off in its name, “Sunk Costs,” a reference to Kim’s notion that she has invested too much time in Jimmy to give up on him now, but it also shows it off in its visuals. While the acting and writing are top notch every week on Better Call Saul, what sets the series apart from its peers is how much it uses its cinematography and other visual tools to tells it story on top of that. Even if it were not clear from the superb performances of Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in their characters’ responses to this news, Jimmy and Kim, framed by the glass-decked front of their office, turned to silhouettes bathed in light, holding hands, tells the audience everything its needs to know about how it’s the two of them against the world.
The same aesthetic acuity is on display in Mike’s half of the episode. Prior to any of the fireworks of “Sunk Costs” -- either the aftermath of the phonecall that teased us in the prior episode or the incident between Chuck and Jimmy -- we see a perfectly-orchestrated little scene of a Los Pollos Hermanos truck rambling through the New Mexico desert. Flanked by sharp yellow and saturated blues of the arid landscape, the shots of an old pair of sneakers, hanging on a wire, falling to the earth below, set the stage, both for the episode’s visuals, and for the trap set at end.
That trap is the natural outgrowth of what is, as far as we know, the first ever meeting of Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring. This is a momentous occasion, one that lacks any particularly grand declarations or big arguments, but shows the pair of reserved but perceptive men sizing one another up and finding each other worthy, or at least potentially useful to one another.
That’s communicated in how well each is able to perceive what the other is after. Gus has the advantage of his goons, but he’s done his homework. He knows Mike’s name. He knows what Mike’s done. And most importantly, he’s able to figure out why Mike is still at it, even after taking Hector Salamanca’s money, even after knocking over one of his trucks, even after it would seem the threat against his family has been settled.
Mike, for his part, shows that his intelligence does not just extend to piecing together how he’s being tracked, but to his ability to quickly understand the lay of the land. Fring, he reasons, is fine with Mike messing up Hector’s trucks because he’s the competition, and like that, he’s managed to peel back one of Gus’s protective layers and the veneer of respectability and mystery he keeps up to preserve himself in this business. The two men stand face to face in that desert, realizing that while they stand in different positions, their minds work in similar ways. That generates a quick mutual respect that lays the groundwork both for the working relationship we see in Breaking Bad and for the escapade that immediately ensues.
After the meeting, Mike shows off his wit and creativity once again, using the stretch of highway the viewers witnessed in the cold open to thwart Hector once again. “Sunk Costs” takes the time to show Mike being careful and deliberate -- whiffing on his first few throws of the new sneakers (a sharp contrast to Walt’s pizza-throwing adventure), and shooting his gun in the air to assure Hector’s goons that there’s just a hunter out there. When all is settled, he aims true, and dusts the same ice cream truck we saw back in [[Episode]] with enough suspicious white powder to tip off the Border Patrol's guard dogs and strike another blow against Hector. It’s an instance of two individuals’ aligned interests, and shared philosophies, coming together nigh-perfectly.
The same cannot be said for Jimmy and Chuck McGill. As Jimmy sits on the sidewalk in front of Chuck’s house, smoking a cigarette from when his car’s doors were all the same color, the depth of his hurt, of his anger, of his sense of betrayal is palpable. In a curt but devastating monologue he tells his brother one of the harshest things one family member can tell another -- that when you’re hurt, when you need help, when you’re dying -- I won’t be there.
And yet, Chuck declares that he is trying to help his brother, and as much as I look askance on his methods and his intentions and his perspective, in a way, I believe he really means it. I believe Chuck’s reasons are selfish and self-aggrandizing, that keeping Jimmy out of his domain is his main objective, whether he realizes it or not. But I also believe that Chuck really thinks it will be better for Jimmy if he’s not a lawyer, that it will help keep him out of trouble, that he’ll be happier and maybe even better.
That catch is that it’s a view that comes from a place of condescension, from a notion that everyone has a place in this world, and that Jimmy’s is under the bootheel of smarter, better folks like Chuck. To that end, Chuck can justify his actions because he’s simply putting everything back in the proper order -- him the successful lawyer, his brother the decent enough guy who does well enough to get by -- without allowing Jimmy to supersede him based on the charm and craftiness that’s sustained him thus far.
Despite a certain duplicitousness from Chuck, he genuinely believes, in his own way, that he’s doing what’s best for his brother, that is actions are a sign of caring. The problem is that they’re also reflective of a worldview, one that says he is meant to be on top and Jimmy is meant to be on bottom. Chuck may never admit that to himself, he may also cloak his prejudices in the guise of justness and righteousness, but his form of caring, his “tough love,” is the harsh, patronizing act of a man who thinks himself superior, ready to snuff out anything that would challenge that, by any means necessary.
Started off interesting and with some promise, but really went downhill in the second half. I was bored out of my mind for some episodes. And that last arc was so short and anti-climactic you have to wonder what all that build-up was about.
The animation quality is definitely above-average and there were some good scenes (mostly in the first half), but overall a waste of time really.
Fuck this show. All the deaths hurt this one since we became so emotionally invested in them, but Ali's hurt the most. He was the kindest person ever and trusted that shitty ass Sang Woo who's been terrible this entire time and it fucking wrecked me.
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.squirt!!! The end
If you love infinite panty shots, uncensored breasts and hundreds of tentacle scenes (with a splash of spectacular raunchy comedy), then To Love-Ru is the perfect ecchi show for you. To Love-Ru and High School DxD are probably the two best ecchi anime that I've seen and if you're a fan of the genre at all, this is a must watch. To Love-Ru is an ecchi comedy SOL harem that involves aliens and creatures of all sorts who lead our fateful protagonist, Yuuki Rito, into countless jaw-dropping and cringe-worthy situations over and over again. I never got tired of Rito falling headfirst into the breasts of an unsuspecting female student. And thanks to Lala's countless inventions (and the help of many alien friends/foes), the scenarios keep coming and always seem fresh. The greatest strength, by far, of the series is the cast of female characters. This is one BIG harem. There are easily 10+ women at the end (each with varying affection levels for Rito) and I can honestly say that I love them all. Each girl has a very distinct personality and ability along with different motivations and background. And they interact marvelously with each other as they try to chase Rito or fend off his unwitting sexual harassment. My personal favorites are definitely Yui, Yami, Momo, Lala, Mikan and Oshizu.
The quality definitely differs from each season by getting better and better. The first season is by far the weakest and has the least to do with the manga. It's still funny and a good introduction for most of the characters but don't drop the series just because you think the first season wasn't that great as there is plenty of quality to come. The first set of 6 OVAs after the first season revert back to the manga material and this is where the comedy starts to get good and we finally get introduced to the full set of characters (for the most part). The second season (Motto To Love-Ru) swings into full force and adopts a different format from the first where each episode is broken into 3 separate independent sections that are different stories entirely. I thought that this format really allowed the comedy to come alive and keep things fresher and interesting. Also, the ecchi really starts getting pumped up in this season. The third season (To Love-Ru Darkness) is absolutely fantastic and the best of the bunch. While Motto didn't really have an overarching story, Darkness does a great job incorporating that into the fray especially by delving into and really focusing on the characters of Yami and Momo (who are two of my three favorite characters). Also, Yui Kotegawa starts to get more and more screen time (which I love). And my god... The ecchi reaches borderline-hentai levels here and it is glorious. And the last set of Darkness OVAs just keeps on bringing the same goodness.
If you are an ecchi fan, you better watch To Love-Ru and don't drop it just because you think that the first season was a bit weak. Power on through. It only gets better. As the Darkness OVAs have just concluded, I hope that they announce a new season in the near future because I need my fill of the best harem in the universe getting caught up in tentacles.
Not the best of first episodes to be honest. MC so far has been one of the most despicable and unlikable characters I've seen. Glad he got some comeuppance this episode but he has a LONG way to go before I have anything resembling a positive opinion of him. What an arse.
They really did an episode that's just the characters being dumb and horny for twenty minutes straight and somehow it's the best episode of the year. THEIR MINDS.
I see many people here complaining that the message of this episode was blatantly obvious and simple, but I don't really think that is the point of the episode.
In my interpretation, this episode was mainly here to tell a story of a tragic character that does immoral things out of desperation whilst also showing glimpses of humanity in his actions, which in no way justify his actions. Similarly, they try to humanise each and every side of this story. Even the big CEO of the company that arguably does a lot of social evil has his big humanising moment, where he admits that it all spun out of control, and I think we can all relate to that.
There is no evil character. It is all a complex web that creates evil, and the point, as I see it, was not to bash into the heads of people to not text and drive, or to stop using social media, but simply to tell a story. A story that utilises the all-consuming technology in our society, and I think it does that job fantastically. It is suspenseful, layered, and incredibly moving.
"I don't have a clear shot." Have you tried moving a few meters to the right?
The best anime of the season, no isekai-vikings, beautifully animated, solid storytelling, character behavior looks realistic, and not exaggerated as in typical anime. The only weak spot so far is OP (which bad only at the start because it doesn't match visuals with warships and stuff).
[7.4/10] I miss the approach -- popularized by The Wire and practiced by shows as distinct from it as BoJack Horseman -- of having the penultimate episode of the season be where the major fireworks go off. It gives you a chance to recover and collect yourself, as a show and an audience, in the actual season finale. And it helps avoid the sense in the lead-up to the end that you’re getting more setup than payoff until the show pulls the trigger on its biggest events of the season.
That’s the problem with “Wiedersehen”, a perfectly good but not outstanding episode of Better Call Saul. It’s not as though nothing happens in the show this week. Lalo Salamanca starts making overtures and feints toward Gus. Werner makes a daring escape from the workmen’s facility. And Jimmy not only faces a denial of his reinstatement, but in his rage and disbelief, manages to sabotage his relationship with Kim that had otherwise seemed on the mend. But all of this feels more like setting the table for the resolution of the finale than anything complete.
Now maybe everything falls into places in this year’s finale and in hindsight, “Wiedersehen” ends up looking like a brilliant prelude. And maybe, when you load up the second-to-last episode of the season with the big happenings of the season, you just make your third-to-last episode the setup episode instead. But it’s hard not to feel like this episode amounts to one big question (or, perhaps, three subsidiary questions) that Better Call Saul only intends to answer next week.
That’s the job of television in some ways. For as daring and stylistically audacious as Better Call Saul and its predecessor series can be, they’re also both sound in terms of the fundamentals and attuned to the core rhythms of television. The show still knows how to end on a cliffhanger, on a tease, on something to leave your jaw on the floor and make you desperate to tune in again next week to see how things resolve.
Rest assured, I’ll be there next week, there to find out whether tension between Gus and the Salamancas reaches the next level, whether Mike is forced to make a hard choice after his ostensible friend flies the coop, whether Jimmy can rescue his legal career or relationship or sense of self. But “Wiedersehen” left me wishing we could just head on to those parts of the story, not just because those teases are so tantalizing, but because this week’s proceedings feel incomplete and even a little insubstantial without the other half of what’s set up here.
That’s especially true for the Nacho/Lalo/Gus portion of the show. Lalo is still a new character, introduced more than three-quarters of the way into the season. ‘Wiedersehen” makes good on the promising setup we’ve seen since early in season 4 -- where Nacho is trapped between the exacting demands of Gus’s well-oiled machine and the unpredictable, trigger-happy Salamancas.
But there’s more promise than proof in this episode. Sure, the conversation between the poised but firm Gus and the loose, freewheeling Lalo is tense and portentous. The prospect of Lalo nosing around Gus’s meth-distribution site portends significant moments for all involved in the episode to come. For now though, this feels like the beginning of the story, the introduction, rather than the culmination, or even a turning point, in the story between Gus and Nacho that Better Call Saul has been toying with this year.
(Don’t get me started on Lalo giving Hector his infamous bell, replete with painful backstory. Maybe I’m still just smarting from the fan service excesses of Solo: A Star Wars Story, but by god, not every iconic snippet or feature or accessory of a character needs an origin story. Sometimes, people just get a bell, or a pair of dice, or something practical to help them communicate, and you don’t need some writerly monologue to deliver weak exposition on how a character came into possession of whatever the object du jour is.)
The same’s true for Werner’s great escape. There’s meat on the bone in that portion of the episode, both in terms of character and scene construction. Rainer Bock absolutely sells Werner’s desperation, his simmering distress at having to remain separated from his wife, his crumbling efforts to hold it together and put a good face on things and do his job. And he also sells Werner’s cleverness, the Walter White-esque ingenuity of a middle aged nerd to find ways to be a spanner in the works for an otherwise well-oiled machine. His ability to find weak spots in the facility, and disguise camera flashes as energy surges, frames him as resourceful and desperate man, and the show manages to communicate that almost solely through the images of the aftermath of his escape.
Series co-creator Vince Gilligan’s also on board to direct this one, which means more than the franchise’s cinematographic trademarks like a shot from inside the hole drilled for the dynamite. It means extended, slow burn, tactile sequences where Werner goes very Hurt Locker in trying to check for faulty wiring. As there often is in the show, there’s a foreboding energy as this gentle man is in a tight spot. His hyperventilation, strains to hold it together, and careful efforts to fix the problem are all stretched out expertly through Gilligan’s camera’s journey through the darkness.
Maybe that’s enough action for one episode, especially one that’s leading in to a presumably eventful finale. But it also can’t help but seem like the show is saving the real excitement -- the inevitable dilemma between Mike’s understanding of and affection for Werner and the duties of his job -- until next week.
But you can make the argument that we get the majorest of major happenings on the Jimmy/Kim side of the episode this week. (Though I suspect I might feel differently after the season finale.) “Wiedersehen” opens up with Jimmy and Kim pulling off another brilliant scheme. It turns out that Kim demuring on Kevin’s request to change the Mesa Verde designs in Lubbock wasn’t a sign of her regular work seeming dull in comparison to her con artist thrills, but rather a prelude to her combining the two to pull off a miracle for her client using a less than savory method.
The entire sequence of her and Jimmy -- posing as a crutch-hopping single mom with a deadbeat brother -- earning the trust and sympathy of the Lubbock clerk and pulling the ol’ switcheroo on the plans is another enjoyable outing for the pair. It plays in the space this show has long lived in -- between wanting to pass judgment on these people for fraud and manipulation, but having so much fun watching them work. But a good con doesn't fix what’s eating Jimmy, his renewed and once-again rejected efforts to have Kim be his partner in law, not just his partner in crime.
That comes to a head when, after a trademark Jimmy McGill performance in front of the review board, his request for reinstatement is rejected. He gives all the right answers to the questions, quotes Supreme Court decisions, includes letters of recommendation, talks about what the law means to him. But he never mentions Chuck, the ghost who’s been haunting this season of Better Call Saul and proves a hindrance to Jimmy’s life even from beyond the grave.
Despite some complicated things going on under the surface, Jimmy has tried to separate himself from Chuck, to move past things, and so he expresses no remorse for what happened with his brother, what effect it had on Chuck’s life, anything specific to the man who used to be the most significant presence in Jimmy’s life. So of course he doesn't mention his brother at his hearing, and it’s what eventually dooms him.
It’s too much for Jimmy to bear. He acts out in a way we’ve rarely seen before. He feels the frustration of a year’s worth of (comparatively) good behavior down the drain, with another year in the offing. He experiences the despondency of expectations being punctured. And worst of all, he takes it out on Kim.
It’s a point I’ve probably beaten into the ground by this point, but Kim has stepped into the role that Chuck used to play for Jimmy. There’s loads of complicated consequences of that, but one of the biggest is that Jimmy projects his insecurities and his anger toward his brother onto her. He lashes out at her for seeing him as insincere, for seeing him as a “low life”, for thinking he’s not good enough to share an office with, charges he might as well be leveling at his dead brother.
Kim, to her credit, pushes back, pointing out how many times she’s been there for Jimmy, how often she looks out for him, takes care of him, drops everything to clean up his messes. There is this one pinnacle dream that Jimmy uses as the yardstick to measure whether he’s loved, overlooking all the other ways in which he has an incredibly good thing going that he sure as hell shouldn’t mess up in fit of pique after a bad disciplinary hearing.
But that’s what happens. I’m done trying to predict whether or not the Kim/Jimmy relationship will end, but after a brief dead cat bounce, there’s enough acrimony that Jimmy starts packing up his stuff. Issues that have been bubbling under the surface for both people in this couple breach here, and it’s hard to know whether things can be put back together.
The title “Wiedersehen” -- a German word meaning “meet again” or “reunion” -- suggests there’s more to come, another chance for Kim to help Jimmy become a lawyer again, through an appeal or a hail mary or whatever new scheme the duo can come up with. But damage has been done. That much is undeniable.
Even then, it feels like there’s more to the story. Season 4 of Better Call Saul has been superb as ever, but also interstitial. After the incredible build that gave us the McGill bowl and Chuck’s death in season 3, the show has been in reaction mode. It gives us the rocky road of Jimmy’s recovery, Kim reckoning with what she’s been a part of, Nacho falling into a tug of war between Gus and the Salamancas, and Mike starting his work with Gus in earnest. The former two are post scripts to stories, and the latter two seem like the beginnings of new ones. It remains to be seen whether the series will give us any resolution at all in its season finale or, like “Wiedersehen”, is waiting for something greater to come.
[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.
[8.8/10] Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because the episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of Jimmy as the Saul Goodman we met on the prior show, in the midst of his fleeing from justice. It’s just because Gus Fring seems to nail down the plans for the facility that will one day be Walter White’s laboratory. It’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and hangout where Jesse Pinkman sold meth.
It’s because this is an episode about people who are outstanding at what they do, who have near unrivaled skills, and what direction that takes them in. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a story about a man who had an undeniable talent, and who could not set it aside when the recognition and lucre came with a side of human misery, and who didn’t know when to walk away until it was too late. It’s a show that lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone so skilled ply their craft, and earned its emotional resonance from both the uncertainty and foreboding sense of where it would lead him.
“Quite a Ride” positions Jimmy in the same way, as someone who has a gift for persuasion, the ability to make an anthill sound like Mount Everest, and a lack of scruples that mean he doesn't mind skirting the law if it suits him. The difference is that Walt was running from a life he resented, whereas Jimmy seems to be running from his own grief.
There’s a version of Jimmy that could maybe have been happy, at least temporarily, working at the mobile phone store in a semi-normal way. Sure, his efforts to convince a passing customer that he can evade the taxman by buying these phones that are allegedly selling like hotcakes isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, but it’s a pretty straight job by Jimmy’s standards.
But it’s not enough, at least not when he has a moment of quiet, a moment to let his grief catch up with him. Sitting on the couch, watching Dr. Zhivago, Jimmy starts to tear up, as the pain of the events with his brother seem to flood back in a way he’s been able to keep at bay. So Jimmy turns to his drug of choice, his favorite distraction, and the thing that makes him feel better than anything else -- a nice, lucrative hoodwink.
He buys a heap of burner phones from his own store, and ventures to The Dog House to unload them to whatever criminal element is around to purchase them, in another one of the show’s sterling montages. There’s a sense in these scenes that Jimmy is both at the top of his game, but also wants to be punished for it. He doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, and seems to be pulled between the part of himself that wants to see exactly how far his talents will take him, and the part that wants to push him into something so bad that it’ll be the wake up call that snaps him out of this.
That wake up call comes. It doesn't happen when Jimmy wanders into a crowd of bikers who are enough to scare away the rest of the riff raff. It happens when the three young hoods who turned him down earlier in the night rough him up and take his spoils from the evening. He returns home, worse for wear, and after a sweet scene of Kim tending to his wounds, he agrees to go to the shrink she recommended.
He seems to realize that this isn’t healthy, and enough is enough. Just the image of Kim standing across from him, a symbol of his conscience and the better life he can have, is enough to spur him to be better and not let another night like this happen again.
Kim, however, is running as well. Instead of grief, she’s running from guilt, and instead of devolving further into a life of questionable morality, she’s hurtling herself headlong into an effort to regain her ethical moorings. That means working as a public defender in her spare time, going toe-to-toe with the same local prosecutor that Jimmy himself used to joust with. But unlike Jimmy, Kim isn’t just using subterfuge and bombast to get criminals off. She’s using prosecutorial screw-ups to hold the other side accountable, telling the young man she works out a deal for to get his life right or she won’t be there to bail him out, and goes above and beyond to help a young woman too scared to show up to court do what she needs to do.
This is all wildly successful, because Kim is damn good at what she does. She knows how to put the prosecution through their paces; she knows how to read a young screw-up the riot act in the hopes that he won’t be back here, and she knows how to be sympathetic but forceful with her clients who need both a helping hand and a little push.
The problem is that it means Kim is shirking her responsibilities elsewhere, specifically with Mesa Verde. She blows off a call from Paige, her contact at the bank, so that she can see things through with her pro bono client. It’s the negative image of Jimmy’s choices in this episode -- a decision that’s foolish and a little self-destructive, but noble, and one Kim promises never to make again. Both Kim and Jimmy are trying to regain their souls, but in very different ways, and for very different reasons, even if both use their god-given skills to great effect in the process.
Mike is employing his expert skills as well. The top of the line, undetectable meth lab that Gus is putting together is part of his grand plan, and so he needs people he can rely on. That’s why he brings in Mike to scout the architects for his place. For one thing, Mike’s shown -- through his escapades at Madrigal -- that he knows how to cover every detail to make sure that their illicit dealings aren’t found out or shut down -- something the show again conveys with a great visual sequence involving point of view shots from under a hood and communicating the passage of time through quick cut changes in sound and lighting in the back of a rocky van.
But he also knows people, like we saw last week, and he can tell when someone is blowing smoke at him and when someone’s being straight. That’s why Gus trusts him, and why Mike sends the boastful guy who claims he can build the lab in six months packing. And it’s why when Werner Ziegler, the nauseous German architect who tells his would-be employer straight up that the job is not impossible, but that it will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Mike and Gus are birds of a feather, they’re frank, thorough, and careful, and it means when taking on a project of this size, they want people who’ll treat it the same way.
We know, though, that no matter how cautious Mike and Gus are, how close they come to bringing this long-brewing plan to fruition, that it all ends in ruin. No matter how well you plan, how good you are at what you do, there are unpredictable elements that can disrupt everything. For Gus Fring, that unpredictable element is Walter White, but for Jimmy McGill, it’s Howard Hamlin.
After his incident with the burners and the muggers, Jimmy seems on the straight and narrow again. But then, during a trip to the courthouse to check in as part of his suspension, he runs into Howard in the bathroom, who looks worse for wear. This typically ever-composed individual is out of sorts, looking disheveled, complaining about insomnia, and stressing over a case that he admits isn’t particularly significant. It’s clear -- to both Jimmy and the audience -- that Chuck’s death has gotten to Howard, that’s Kim’s speech landed, that the very thought is torturing him. It’s enough for Jimmy to offer some kindness, recommending the same shrink that Kim passed on to him.
It’s then that the worm turns. Howard tells Jimmy that he’s already seeing a therapist twice a week. It’s startling admission to Jimmy, one that changes his path yet again. Howard has all the advantages Jimmy doesn't -- his wealth, his position, and his father’s name. He has lived as traditionally successful a life as someone like Jimmy could imagine, the kind of life Jimmy was once trying to emulate.
But Howard is haunted by the same grief Jimmy is, and he’s no better for all the more that he has. Howard’s visible unmooring in the wake of the same loss sends a message to Jimmy -- that following the right path, doing what’s expected of you, doing things the normal way, don’t get you where Jimmy wants to go, and don’t seem to make you better either. So when he speaks to the D.A. about his plans after reinstatement, he speaks of wanting to go bigger, go better. His refuge from grief is his refuge from everything -- to follow his talents to their apex until it either makes his dreams come true or leads to his end.
“Quite a Ride” suggests the former rather than the latter. We know the heights that Jimmy will hit: the Saul Goodman billboards and commercials running 24/7, the suitcase full of money, the cheesy but lucrative law office he maintains. But we also know his fall, his paranoid, button-down life as Cinnabon Gene, that requires him to be demure and inconspicuous, the greatest punishment there is for someone like Jimmy.
And maybe “Quite a Ride” suggests and end even beyond there. After Jimmy is laid out by the thugs who rob him, he lays on the ground in pain as the camera pulls back skyward. It’s the same shot Breaking Bad used in Walt’s final moments. It’s a visual echo and a portent, one that seems to preview what a myopic quest to make use of your own greatest talent, regardless of the ethical or practical consequences for you and the people you love, gets you. We know where that sort of quest ended for Walt, and as he veers ever nearer to going full Saul, Jimmy gets a taste of that too.
Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad, and that’s bad news for Jimmy McGill.
