What I love about Better Call Saul are the little things, the subtle touches that communicate something powerful about who a character is or what's going through their minds in a clear, but artful way. When Jimmy returns to his nail salon beginnings and goes to record his voicemail, he starts off with his faux-British secretary routine. Then he stops, and tries it again in his regular speaking voice, not as James M. McGill Esquire, but as Jimmy McGill, attorney at law. It's a small distinction, but a big difference.
It is, on the one hand, a concession to Kim's way of thinking, and a sign that she's gotten through to him, if only a little bit. When she turns down his offer for partnership a second time, he's clearly hurt, but takes it as well as can be expected. He cares about what Kim thinks of him, and the fact that his "colorful" ways were enough to scare her off may not be enough to make him straighten up and fly right, but it's enough to make him forego a little piece of the trickery that rubs her the wrong way. Davis & Main was too much and too fast for Jimmy. He was never meant to be that guy, as much as he wanted to for Kim. But he can be a better version of the Jimmy we know and love.
On the other hand, it's also a small reject of Chuck and an affirmation of himself. The pretensions of having a fancy secretary, of Jimmy's strange conception of sophistication manifested in a stuffy, mildly foppish voicemail, is a strange reflection of how he sees his brother, or what being a fancy pants attorney means. By moving away from that, he's turning away from chasing his brother's shadow. That doesn't mean he's going to immediately revert to being a con artist again. But he's going to be bombastic. He's going to be rough around the edges. As the name he uses on the answering machine suggests, he's just going to be himself.
Kim has a small but meaningful moment of her own. After a successful interview with Rick Schweikart and his fellow partners, Kim says goodbye and thank you to her potential employers, and accidentally calls Rick "Howard." It's a Freudian slip, but also a sign of how Jimmy's caution that it would be a lateral move for her, that Howard Hamlin and Rick Schweikart are interchangeable, has gotten through to her as well.
In that interview, Kim explains that she left her hometown because she wanted something more, and she's starting to realize that even if that doesn't mean coloring outside the lines like Jimmy does, she's too much of a free spirit as well, too much the kind of person who's not satisfied to be another cog in one nigh-identical machine or another, that she once again wants to bet on herself.
It's little moments like these, that say so much while saying so little, that make me frustrated with scenes like the cold open. That opening flashback takes us back in time to Jimmy's childhood, while we watch his father get taken advantage of by a grifter who tells Jimmy that there are wolves and sharks and he has to decide which one he's going to be, prompting Jimmy to take his (presumably) first few purloined dollars out of the till. After all, if Papa McGill is going to be bilked anyway, it may as well go to his family.
It's not an entirely bad scene. It lines up with Chuck's description of his father, and small touches like young Jimmy pretending to sweep or hiding the Playboy behind Boy's Life or refusing to give the grifter his cartons of cigarettes before getting the money show Jimmy's savvy even at a young age. But the whole thing feels a little too perfect--not unlike the flashbacks in BoJack Horseman--when it comes to accounting for the current psychological state of Jimmy McGill. His father is a little too trusting, even for a rube; the grifter is a little too slick, especially with the corny advice he gives to Jimmy; and Jimmy himself takes the lesson to heart a little too quickly. I like what BCS was trying to do, but overall, it was a little too tidy and too blunt to work as well as it needed to.
In truth, the "Inflatable" montage that juxtaposes a loudly-dressed, obnoxious adult Jimmy and a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man who is just as flamboyant, is not particularly subtle in what it communicates either. By damn it all, the sequence is just too much fun for me to care. The De Palma-esque split screens that put Jimmy's fruit-smashing, turd-laying, bagpipe-playing antics side-by-side with a frantic, improvisational balloon creature dancing in the wind like a rainbow-colored dervish is a deliriously funny scene and speaks to how the younger McGill brother hopes to escape with his bonus intact by doubling down on his unique individuality.
And yet, when Clifford Main gives Jimmy what he wants and fires him for being a jackass instead of for cause, there's remorse on Jimmy's part. He isn't lying when he says it was a bad fit, and there's something very true and very unfortunate when Clifford asks Jimmy how they mistreated him or didn't do everything they could to put him in a good position. Cliff took a chance on Jimmy, and the fact that the arrangement was doomed from the beginning isn't his fault. Jimmy knows that, and it may not be enough to get him to sacrifice his bonus, but it's enough for him to offer to pay them back for the fancy new desk, to tell Clifford that he thinks he's still a good guy, and most importantly, to feel at least the slightest twinge of guilt about it.
Jimmy isn't the only one with regrets however. In another one of those little touches, Mike never has to say that he's disgusted to consider the fact that a sleazeball like Jimmy approves of how he handled the Tuco situation, or that he feels conflicted and even a bit concerned with what paying for his daughter-in-law's emotional blackmail will make him have to do. The fact that he finds the comparison to Jimmy unflattering, that he thinks Jimmy's approval is an insult rather than the compliment it's intended as, comes through in the way he doesn't want the pair to share an elevator, or accept Jimmy's legal services as a gift. By the same token, all it takes is a look from Mike to convey the moral calculus he's doing in his head as Stacey picks out her dreamhouse.
And all it takes is a look from Jimmy to know how he feels about Kim's proposal that the two of them share an office, but remain separate. The scene features a wonderful shot of Jimmy stuck in the frame between the two pieces of the business card that Kim tore in half. He wants the two of them to be together, to be a single unit, personally and professionally. Kim's alternative isn't a rejection, but it is, as Mike would say, a half-measure.
In the world of Breaking Bad, half-measures are often deadly, ways of both making things worse in exchange for a temporary reprieve and delaying the inevitable. On the generally less lethal Better Call Saul, the effects are not unlikely to be nearly so extreme, but the character of the results have the potential to be just the same.
There's something that brings Jimmy and Kim together, a zest for life, for self-determination, for truth to themselves that they share. But there's differences that keep them apart: Kim's professionalism, Jimmy's shadier side, and the part of each of them that says the only reason to do this is to do it their own way. It's a little difference--being separate attorneys in the same offices rather than partners, being separate people who spend time with one another rather than being "together"--but for Jimmy, even if he gives it the old college try, it's a world of difference.
Pretty disappointing episode. Sometimes it's the more specious arguments for positions you agree with that are the most irksome. Yes, Trump University is a scam, but people thinking they were going to get to take a picture with Donald Trump has little, if anything, to do with that. It's nice that Oliver tied some bits from "the playbook" to Trump's presidential campaign, but really, Oliver should have just said, "we pretty much covered this in our segment on for profit universities, and this is all just as bad." The Trump stuff is all just so easy -- I'd rather see Oliver and the LWT staff tackling something more informative and less obvious, and leave the weekly Trump sideshow for the hackier monologue crowd.
And in the same vein, I'm very much on board with the ills of the debt buying industry, and it's nice that the show purchased a big chunk of medical debt and foregave it, but scary collector calls and individual sob or outrage stories don't really explain what's so pernicious about these practices. Too often, the segment devolved into "isn't this individual event awful?" without doing enough to tie to more widespread trends and issue. It's a worthy topic and cause, but this wasn't the best exploration of it.
