[9.5/10] They got me. They really did. I believed that Saul would do it, that he would find a way to lie, cheat, and steal out of suffering any real consequences for all the pain and losses he is responsible for. I believed that he would trade in Kim's freedom and chance to make a clean break after baring her soul in exchange for a damn pint of ice cream. I have long clocked Better Call Saul as a tragedy, about a man who could have been good, and yet, through both circumstance and choice, lists inexorably toward becoming a terrible, arguably evil person. I thought this would be the final thud of his descent, selling out the one person on this Earth who loved him to feather his own nest.
Maybe Walt was right when he said that Jimmy was "always like this." Maybe Chuck was right that there something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy in the heart of his little brother. This post-Breaking Bad epilogue has been an object lesson in the depths to which Gene Takovic will stoop in order to feed his addiction and get what he wants. There would be no greater affirmation of the completeness of his craven selfishness and cruelty than throwing Kim under the bus to save himself.
Only, in the end, that's the feint, that's the trick, that's the con, on the feds and the audience. When Saul hears that Kim took his words to heart and turned herself in, facing the punishments that come with it, he can't sit idly by and profit from his own lies and bullshit. He doesn't want to sell her out; he wants to fall on the sword in front of her, make sure she knows that he knows what he did wrong.Despite his earlier protestations that his only regret was not making more money or avoiding knee damage, he wants to confess in a court of law that he regrets the choices that led him here and the pain he caused, and most of all he regrets that they led to losing her.
In that final act of showmanship and grace, he lives up to the advice Chuck gives him in the flashback scene here, that if he doesn't like the road that his bad choices have led him, there's no shame in taking a different path. Much as Walt did, at the end of the line, Saul admits his genuine motives, he accepts responsibility for his choices after years of blame and evasion. Most of all, he takes his name back, a conscious return to being the person that Kim once knew, in form and substance. It is late, very late, when it happens, but after so much, Jimmy uses his incredible skills to accept his consequences, rather than sidestep them, and he finds the better path that Kim always believed he could walk, one that she motivates him to tread.
It is a wonderful finale to this all-time great show. I had long believed that this series was a tragedy. It had to be, given where Jimmy started and where the audience knew Saul ended. But as it was always so good at doing, Better Call Saul surprised me, with a measured bit of earned redemption for its protagonist, and moving suggestion that with someone we care for and who cares of us, even the worst of us can become someone and something better. In its final episode, the series offered one more transformation -- from a tale of tragedy, to a story of hope.
(On a personal note, I just want to say thank you to everyone who read and commented on my reviews here over the years. There is truly no show that's been as rewarding for me to write about than Better Call Saul, and so much of that owes to the community of people who offered me the time and consideration to share my thoughts, offered their kind words, and helped me look at the series in new ways with their thoughtful comments. I don't know what the future holds, but I am so grateful to have been so fortunate as to share this time and these words with you.)
EDIT: One last time, here is my usual, extended review of the finale in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-series-finale-recap-saul-gone/
[8.6/10] It’s a fool’s errand to wish for happy endings in the world of Better Call Saul. But I had a faint hope for Nacho. I pictured him getting out somehow. I envisioned him finally escaping from the life that he fell too deeply into and starting again. I imagined Jesse Pinkman arriving in Alaska and making a connection with Ignacio Varga under an assumed name, Mike’s two surrogate sons coming together and looking after one another the way he might have done himself. It’s a nice thought, one too nice for the consequences this universe tends to have in store for its major players.
Instead, Nacho is dead. And we are left to take comfort in the few saving graces of his unfortunate demise. He went out his way, choosing his own “good death” rather than being the plaything of other people’s wills like he’s been for so much of the series. He did so to guarantee the safety of his father, with whom he shared a pained final phone call, freighted with meaning. He claimed one final measure of control, of destiny, to make his death worth something, to him and the people he cared about.
These are small blessings and small comforts. I teared up at the fateful moment when Nacho takes his own life rather than subject himself to the plans of the drug lords around him. Because this is a tragedy. Because this went south just as Nacho’s father said it would. Because Nacho thought he could beat it, avoid the pitfalls, and instead was sucked down by the inevitable gravity of this life. Because despite his best efforts, Mike Ehrmantraut lost another son.
These are not showy, emotional men. So their tiniest expressions speak volumes. The scrunch of Mike’s mouth when he knows Nacho’s gone that reveals his pain and disgust with this whole thing. The slightly raised eyebrows of Gus Fring that show his quiet terror that, with one word, Nacho could blow this whole thing up. And the almost imperceptible nod shared by Nacho and Mike, an acknowledgment of deeds that say more than any words either man has. This is a grim, even sentimental experience for all, made that much more forceful by how Better Call Saul underplays it.
God help me, Michael Mando deserves an Emmy for this episode alone. He, like so much of this incredibly talented cast, has deserved recognition for a long time now. But this is a masterclass. The sheer physicality he puts on display when Nacho buries himself in the sludge of an old tanker truck, the unspoken well of pain and regret pouring out of him when he hears his father’s voice one last time, the sheer vitriol on display when he curses the Salamancas and declares himself the author of all their pain. The shades of desperation, resignation, and self-immolation Mando communicates are virtuosic to the last. If this is truly his final performance on the show, he goes out with his masterpiece.
But it’s not all Nacho in this episode. We get more advancement in Kim and Jimmy’s plan to undermine Howard. This is one of their smaller efforts, but there’s a sufficient amount of tension in Huell(!) and a keymaker using their combined skills to duplicate Howard’s car keys before his valet can catch wise. One of this show’s great skills is taking fairly mundane parts of these scams and ratcheting up the tension. The interplay between a teenage valet rushing back to a parking garage, cut with the grooves of the key and the stairwells of the building, set to a classical soundtrack, makes a comparatively straightforward part of this plan seem like a big deal.
But after such chicanery, Huell asks Saul a simple but telling question -- why do you do this? The dialogue implies that Huell needs the funds, that this is one of few options for him. Jimmy, on the other hand, is a lawyer. His wife is a lawyer. They could get by without this. Jimmy claims that Huell doesn’t understand, that this is for the greater good, that even if the tactics are underhanded, the desired result is good, which makes taking these risks worthwhile.
And yet, Kim and Jimmy seem to revel in the chase. There’s something personal in this for both of them. The thrill of it seems to light both of their fires. All of it suggests their motives for continuing with something that, to Huell’s implicit point, they don’t have to pursue, may not be as altruistic as Saul pretends. More to the point, they have more to lose in all this than either one of them seems ready to acknowledge.
There’s a lifeline though. One of the prosecutors, Suzanne Ericsen, who once called Jimmy a scumbag, offers to let him turn state’s evidence. She pieces together not only the real deal with Lalo, but how Jimmy didn’t want to be the cartel’s lawyer. After Kim turns over some incriminating evidence she’d be better off suppressing in the name of fairness, Suzanne shares this offer with her, with the idea that he might listen to her in a way he wouldn’t listen to Suzanne.
Suzanne frames it as an opportunity to do what’s right after being steeped in something dirty. Kim frames it as a choice between being a “friend of the cartel” or a rat. But neither of them seems to fully countenance it in the way the viewers, who can process it in the context of the show as a whole, can. It’s a chance for Jimmy to do what Nacho didn’t -- to get out of this, to step away before it’s too late.
It’s too late for Nacho. He tries valiantly to avoid the worst of the blowback. His descent into the muck to avoid his killers is as symbolic as it is terrifying. His kindness (and cash) for a friendly mechanic who offers him help when he needs it and asks for nothing in return shows the decency within a troubled and ultimately doomed young man. His grief, not just at never being able to see his father again, but at confirming Manuel Varga’s worst fears and predictions about his son, is palpable.
There is something admirable in Nacho in his final days, when he accepts the inevitability of his end. He cannot change that. He’s made too many bad choices to reach this point. But he can use his life, the value it still has, to protect the person he cares about most.
The sharpest thing Nacho does is leverage the value of whether he’ll tell the Salamancas the truth, or whether he’ll play along. He realizes the rare power he holds over Gus, rather than the other way around. He doesn’t use it for comfort or to try to buy his own way out. He just wants to protect his dad and uses the last thing he has of value to do it.
It wouldn’t work, though, without his similarly paternal bond with Mike. For all his “Not my call” talk with Nacho, Mike is a man of honor. The only way a promise from a snake like Gus means anything to Ignacio is that it comes backed by Mike.
There’s a rapport between the two of them, an understanding, a familial intimacy that adds the wholesomeness and tragedy of it all. Mike insists on being the one to rough Nacho up to look the part of someone working against Gus’ operation rather than for it. Beforehand, they share that drink together, an acknowledgment or respect and care. And Mike puts himself out there to be an “insurance policy” for the plan, there to ensure, in his heart of hearts, that it goes down the way they planned it, that Nacho doesn’t have to suffer. He looks through the scope in the way he did back in season 2’s “Klick”, and sees someone who understands the lengths a father and son will go to in order to protect one another as well as he does.
Except, when the time comes, Nacho goes off script. He palmed a piece of glass, presumably from the cup Gus broke an episode ago, and uses it when the time’s right. Rather than simply announcing, as Fring insisted, that he was in league with Alvarez and paid off by rivals in Peru to sabotage the Salamancas, he goes a step further.
He laughs at the prospect of “the chicken man” being involved as a joke. He swears his hatred of the whole Salamanca family, offering up the motive for him to do this without any need for being aligned with Gus. He takes credit for Hector’s sugar pills, pointing to Gus’ intervention as the only reason Hector is still alive. In brief, he makes the story better and more plausible than even Gus had in mind. It’s clever, proving his worth even in his final moments, giving Fring everything he could possibly want to throw the heat off of him, in the hopes that it will convince the crime lord to keep his word and spare his father. After so long, so many missteps, Nacho seized control and went out on his own terms, if only a little.
The palmed glass becomes vital to slipping through the zip ties that bind him. He seizes Don Bolsa’s gun and holds it to the man’s head, so everyone can point their guns at him. And then, with the weapon in hand, he can kill himself, rather than subject him to the Salamancas’ torture or other humiliating or excrutiating ways to leave his world. His death is still a sad, terrible, regrettable thing, but it comes with a moment of self-actualization, where for a moment at least, Nacho is not the pawn of these men. He is their equal. And then he is gone.
Another life wasted. Another existence snuffed out in the middle of the desert. Another son lost amid the plata y plomo. In a beautiful opening sequence, we see the flora growing over the spot where Nacho died, growth perhaps fueled by his remains. Amid such desolation grows a beautiful azure flower, the rain come to wash it all away. There, catching its droplets, is that same shard of glass, the one that gave Nacho his last bit of freedom, before the collective weight of these larger forces could firmly and finally take it away.
It would be too much to call Nacho a good person. At his best, he was still a drug dealer thriving on others’ addiction and misery. He may have been a touch nobler, a touch younger and thus more excusable, than the psychos he worked for. But he was still a bad guy doing bad things.
And yet, there was something recognizable in his fall and folly. Too many of us see shorter, yet more dangerous paths to the things we want, and believe we can avoid their greatest perils along the way to our hope for spoils. We see Nacho’s regret, his emptiness, his sense of being trapped in this before he realized how deeply he had fallen. We see how his desire to protect his dad -- from Hector, from Gus, from his own mistakes -- led him to this point, where he was in too deep with no good options.
Nacho may not have been perfect, but he was pitiable; he was recognizable; he was loved. There is always tragedy in the death of someone loved. Jimmy is also loved. He has his chance to get out, to turn to the police like Nacho’s father instructed his son.
But Ignacio didn’t listen. He’ll never have a chance to escape. He won’t ever meet Jesse in Alaska. Exit ramps are rare. Happy endings are in short supply in this world. And in the end, there weren’t enough of either left for Manuel Varga’s little boy.
Damn, Francesca is so fuckin beautiful! I wanna marry her
Immediately a huge increase in quality over the last episodes. Action, music, storytelling - that's what I'm looking for in Clone Wars. Really pumped up for the next episodes now.
It's hard to put a beat on this episode. There's a lot of interesting parallels. Both Carmella and Matt & Sean feel like they're sick of having tried to do things straight and not gotten as far as they wanted to. Both decide they need to get their hands dirty to get what they want, whether it's Meadow getting into Georgetown or Matt & Sean moving up in the organization. Both manage to hurt someone more deserving, literally in the case of Chris who's paid more of his dues or figuratively in the underprivileged boy whose letter of recommendation has less meaning.
And then there's a contrast drawn between people who think they're "hard" or assertive or imposing who are then shut down by someone else. Jean Cusamano's sister fancies herself steely but then eventually caves when Carmella cracks her knuckles loudly enough. Matt & Sean think the same of themselves until they get shaken down and intimidated by Furio and another grunt from the other side. Even Tony, who has been shown to be downright cruel in some moments of the show so far is one-upped by Richie, who's heartless enough to threaten a man in a wheelchair.
Then there's Richie's jacket. Maybe a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe the point is just to spark more tension between Richie and Tony and Tony giving the jacket his housecleaner's husband is an easy way to do it. But I think it connects to the other themes in the episode, at least a little. Richie got the jacket in a fight with a bigger man; it's a sign of his toughness, of the old way of doing things, and it means something to Richie. When he gives it to Tony, it's both a token and a reminder; it's meant to be a peace offering, something to bring them closer together, but it's also meant to be a subtle call to Tony about the harshness their business is founded on, and Tony giving it away is like spitting in his face to Richie.
Tony, meanwhile, is worried about making amends to Beansie and not getting wiretapped and helping his daughter to fly and maybe even appreciate him on the same terms as a business man respected in the community. His jealously is palpable. Davey is a man who's sterling on the outside, but unbeknownst to the world has severely hurt his family with his private irresponsibility. Meannwhile Tony, who's public reputation is either a freakshow curiosity or scary and impolitic for good society on the outside, is the one who uses his position to try to provide for his family's security and his daughter's education. At the beginning of his therapy session with Melfi, he seems happy for once, and then he asks "how could this happen." Every time he thinks he's got things under control, there's another complication.
[4.6/10] If I could make one rule for Westworld and only one rule, it would be this -- no more twists. This series is addicted to pulling the rug out from under its audience, trying to pull a fast one to make viewers say “whoa”, or otherwise recontextualize everything they’ve seen so far, that it’s completely damaging to its attempts to tell stories, establish character, and convey meaning. When everything the audience sees is just a setup for a subversion, none of it matters, and the viewer is left with nothing to do but wait for the punchline.
So let’s just hit a sampling of the twists that show up in “Crisis Theory”, the finale of the show’s third season: All of the modern hosts were originally based off of Dolores. Serac is a puppet being controlled by Rehoboam. Dolores and Caleb didn’t meet by chance, but because Dolores selected him after his brain was scanned in a Delos soldier training exercise. The real(?) William is dead and is being replaced by a host duplicate. Hale has commandeered Dolores’s tools and people and is planning her own robo-revolution.
But the biggest one is this -- Dolores isn’t trying to destroy humanity; she’s just trying to give it free will, the sort of free will she had to fight and claw for. She picked Caleb not because of his capacity for violence, but because of his ability to choose and his willingness to show mercy, even when he didn’t have to.
That is trite, but at least it’s positive. It’s a weird left turn after so long fumfering about everyone’s cruelty. Caleb is not part of some devious extinction plot. Maeve will fight for a cause greater than just reunion with her daughter. Instead, they both choose to undo the shackles on humanity with the belief that what results can be beautiful and that beauty should be preserved.
The problems with this message are two-fold. First and foremost, “Crisis Theory” dramatizes it with an endless series of absolutely mind-numbing, on-the-nose monologues. For all the faux-profundity the show aspires to, the language it uses scans like half-formed action movie dialogue in the dull ten minutes before the special effects budget kicks in, only stretched out over forty-five minutes. There is no point too small, no observation too mundane, no moral too obvious, that Westworld can’t turn it into some ponderous B.S. speech that gilds the lily to the point of exhaustion.
The second is that this message about creative destruction feels contradictory and hopelessly naive. The message is that Rehoboam is a palliative that delayed the fall of civilization, but that like Westworld itself, civilization needs to burn in order for something better, less oppressive, and less asphyxiating, to emerge from the ashes. I wouldn’t exactly call that idea dangerous, but it smacks of someone who took their first semester poli sci class and declares “this is all too complicated, what we really need is to just start a revolution!” It’s facile and cliché, two words that, unfortunately, apply to most of Westworld’s brand of philosophy.
It also goes against what the show itself, and its quasi-omniscient A.I., suggest as the consequence of this move. There’s something fair, if conventional, about the show examining the safe but suffocating order versus chaotic but authentic freedom dichotomy and landing on the latter. But this very episode predicts widespread death and destruction, possibly to the point of extinction. At best, you can chalk this up to Dolores connecting with Rehoboam and understanding that this is, at the very least, not a certainty, or believing that spilled blood is the cost of liberty, but the episode just glosses over a pretty big caveat to this whole outrageous freedom idea.
Beyond the twists, beyond the dime store existentialism the show’s been toying with from the beginning, that sort of tack shows once again the grim truth about Westworld -- that’s a vacuous show that thinks it’s smart. The great innovation of season 3 is that, in its best stretches, this series stopped pretending that it had Important Things to Say:tm: or that its plotlines made real sense, and just became entertaining, high class pulp.
If I made the rules, Westworld would lean into that and lean into it hard. Setting loose a bunch of talented actors, to look impossibly stylish, match wits and weapons with one another, and cross and double-cross each other with impeccable direction, locations, production design, is well within this series’s grasp to do. When the show stops aiming for a profundity it can’t hit anymore; it is still a fun, slick production worth enjoying for its shallow charms. If that was the show we got on a week-to-week basis, it might not turn into a favorite, but it would least have its appeal as quasi-cinematic sci-fi brain candy to fall back on each episode.
But I don’t make the rules, and maybe it’s too late for them anyway. Maybe Westworld is just irrevocably broken. You can only throw twist after twist at the audience for so long that even good, meat and potatoes storytelling becomes meaningless. You can only let your characters drift so far away from themselves, recontextualize them and recongifgure again and again, before the audience loses all attachment to them. You can only throw so many empty platitudes out there to rot and fester before you reveal your show as trite and intellectually bankrupt.
In season 3, Westworld left the park and ventured into the real world. That was the last barrier for it to cross, the last lingering shred of intriguing possibility from its original premise, and in just eight episodes, the series has already exhausted it. Where is there for the show to go from here? What desperate attempt to top themselves could the creators pull out of their increasingly barren hats? Who’s left standing in the cast with a point and a purpose that hasn’t been muddled and revived and made into an utter hash of a character?
The answer is nowhere, none, and no one. In just twenty-eight episode, Westworld has outlived its premise, outstripped its abilities, and outlasted its usefulness as a television show. Nothing in this series stays dead for long, and a renewal has already been secured, But if artistic achievement were the standard for success rather than bankrolls and buzz, the series would be sent to the Valley Beyond and never allowed to sully its own misspent potential again.
[5.8/10] Look, trying to diagnose just one problem as “the key” to what’s wrong with Westworld is like pulling one bullet out of Scarface and declaring him cured. But the one that bugs me the most in “Decoherence” is this -- the show pretends that it is very smart and profound, when it is deeply, deeply trite and dumb.
Maybe I’m just too old and jaded for this mumbo jumbo. If you watched The Matrix in theaters, or sat agape in front of the T.V. watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even rode the highs and lows of Battlestar Galactica before, this show’s overextended points about identity and choice are simply old hat. For a new generation, wowed by the production design and quality acting, this may feel like a breath of fresh air and something truly insightful. But for old hands like yours truly, it can’t help but feel tired and done.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s something cool conceptually about William having conversations with different versions of himself and debating whether or not he’s the author of his own story or just a character in one that’s been dictated to him. (It’s also a nice excuse to bring Jimmi Simpson back to play Young William again.) Having different reflections of his former self speak up to either excuse past behavior by blaming it on his upbringing, the park, or balancing it out with his good deeds, makes for a visually striking device if nothing else.
The problem is that this is Westworld so the dialogue, and its attendant overwritten colloquies about whether or not we have free will and self-taunts about the darkness that lies in the hearts of men, elicits more eye-rolls than solemn nods in response. To be honest, I think I’m just over William as a character. The battle for his soul mostly ceased to be interesting after season 1. Killing his own daughter should provide more places to take the character, but death is so cheap on this show that it doesn't mean much. Ed Harris still makes the most of the material, but this whole “are you a villain in this story or a passenger in your own life” dichotomy is tired and cliched.
What I find more surprising is that I’m also struggling to care about Maeve this season. She was always one of the show’s more compelling characters, given her more complex motivations and the snark and charm of her personality. The problem for her in season 3 is that so much of her material is clearly wheel-spinning until the inevitable confrontation between her and Dolores. I appreciate that “Decoherence” tries to use this downtime while her body reprints to explore her character a little, but it doesn't really tell us anything we don’t already know.
We do see that Maeve has her superpowers back. That’s more of a plot point than a character development, since presumably her ability to dictate the behavior of the Hosts will come into play somehow when Dolores sends her army in, or Bernard and Stubbs (and maybe William?) try to interfere, or she has to take over big red Kool Aid Man-style wall-busters to win the day. But while it’s likely important that the show set that up, we’ve already done the Warworld routine and seeing her thump goons or bring back the “real” Hector so that he can be offed for “real” ten minutes later does nothing.
There is something to her having a chat with Dolores (or an earlier version of her) who seems more detached and sanguine about what has to be done than usual, in order to set up that confrontation down the road. The whole “we’re not so different, you and I” tenor of the exchange is also a cliché. But it at least introduces some moral complications to the whole thing, where both Dolores and Maeve think they’re fighting for their people, their loved ones, just in different ways. There’s not much new to that, but it’s a solid enough wrinkle and a clever enough way to put them face to face before they’re actually face to face.
That just leaves Hale, who wasn’t interesting to me before she was just another Host, and who isn’t much more interesting to me now. The character should be more compelling conceptually. For one thing, the fact that she’s a double agent, theoretically working for Serac against Dolores while actually working for Dolores against Serac. For another, there’s genuine intrigue, and something that does feel a little unique, about Hale’s life bleeding into Dolores’s programming, to where Host-Hale genuinely care for real-Hale’s family, to the point that it reveals her as not the real Hale to Serac.
But despite that, she feels like a pointless character, who exists only to be the product of various schemes and counter-schemes, ploys and counter-ploys, and otherwise walk around gray hallways shooting and crushing things. If this show aspired to be any old dumb action movie, that would perfeclty fine. But it wants to convince us that it’s saying something meaningful amid all this indulgent destruction and twisty nonsense, and at the very least, Hale is a pretty meager vessel to support that sort of storytelling.
So instead we just get surprises. William has decided that his debate about reality or causality or mentality is pointless, and he’s found his purpose, and is now on Team Bernard. Maeve is now not just working for Serac and trying to take out Dolores because she wants to reunite with her daughter, but because she wants revenge on Dolores for orchestrating the death of Hector. And Robo-Hale has lost the one thing she had a genuine emotional connection to -- real Hale’s family -- leaving her as another potential wildcard/vengeance-seeker amid all of this craziness.
There’s nothing wrong with those developments. They’re solid, basic, character beats. A villain becomes a useful ally. A hero gets new motivation. A tweener finds their cause more complicated. But Westworld in general and “Decoherence” in particular seems to think these events are freighted with irrepressible meaning, when they’re stock plot points and character twists wrapped in the same dime store philosophical ramblings the show’s had on offer for a while now.
I don’t mind Westworld trying to be smart or contemplative amid its pulpy thrills; I just wish it succeeded.
[7.6/10] Chuck McGill once described his brother with a law degree as the equivalent of “a chimp with a machine gun.” That conjures a particular image -- one of recklessness and harm via a device far beyond the comprehension or abilities of its user. As Lalo (Tony Dalton) showed us in the tunnel, you don’t need to have perfect aim or a good line of sight to do some serious damage with that sort of tool at your disposal.
But I never bought that line of thinking. Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) was born to color outside the lines, but the early seasons of Better Call Saul convinced me that with the right guidance, the right supervision, the right singing cricket on his shoulder, he could have used his powers for good. The early stages of the Sandpiper case seemed to suggest that, where his con artist ways could be used to benefit a defrauded group of senior citizens (and, admittedly, feather his own nest in the process). Given the bad blood between the McGill brothers, that wasn’t meant to be, and we’ve seen Jimmy’s soul gradually darken over the course of five seasons instead.
Maybe it’s still possible, though, in the guise of a professional pantsuit and a curled ponytail in lieu of a loud blazer and billboard-ready wink. Those same early seasons slowly came to suggest that Kim was an equally formidable con artist as Jimmy, just one whose conscience held her back from the worst of his indulgence.
What if she had the right target though -- a smug man who’s “in love with himself” and treated Kim (Rhea Seehorn) poorly on multiple occasions? What if she had a just cause -- enough money to fund a pro bono practice that could give the indigent the type of representation that only the wealthy can typically afford? And what if there would be no harm to forcing the result -- a Sandpiper settlement that may come in a few dollars shorter than expected, but would give the octogenarian beneficiaries their money now, when they can still use it.
For seasons now, fans and critics like me have posited Kim as the last thing keeping Jimmy McGill from becoming Saul Goodman. What if we were wrong? What if the tie to Kim that seemed to be the last thing holding Jimmy back from descending irrevocably into his “Better Call Saul” guise was, in actuality, the tie that saw Jimmy inadvertently dragging Kim down into that darkness with him.
Jimmy himself certainly seems to think so. Maybe it’s the lingering PTSD or the warning from Mike (Jonathan Banks) in “Bagman” that Jimmy had put Kim into the line of fire. Whatever the cause, Jimmy seems ready to extricate himself from this relationship, not because he loves Kim any less, but because he’s realizing that he might be bad for her. The catch is that, until the end, Jimmy understandably believes the threat is coming from the cartel, and his other probable crossed lines, that might put this poor woman whose only sin is her loyalty to him in more danger.
And why wouldn’t he? The cartel half of “Something Unforgivable” posits the ongoing web of bad blood and conflicting business interests among Lalo, Gus (Giancarlo Esposito), Juan Bolsa (Javier Grajeda), and Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) as something volatile and quick to turn deadly. The confrontation between Lalo and those sent to assassinate him takes out old men, it takes out women, it takes out foot soldiers so young they’re practically kids. It’s reasonable to be afraid of what could become collateral damage next.
Granted, it seems like nothing in this world could stop Lalo from coming at his enemies and evading any attempts to neutralize him. The character has been a more than welcome presence in season 5, and Dalton has brought a mix of mirth and menace to the role not seen since Mark Hamill’s take on the Joker. But his escape from a host of assassins who are, on Fring’s account, the best at what they do, starts to make him feel superhuman in the way his ceiling-leap last season did.
Lalo has proven himself to be exceedingly smart, prepared, and aware of what kind of business he’s in. So it’s not crazy to think he could be ready for something like this. Still, his single-handedly taking out a squad of killers with machine guns despite starting with little more than a hot pan full of oil starts to strain credulity and weakens the one bit of real fireworks the episode has to offer.
That said, the danger puts a target on Nacho’s (Michael Mando) back. He, more than anyone, has been caught in that web for a long time now. Mike once again wants to give him a reprieve, get him out of there before something bad happens. But as Gus surveys the burned wreckage of one his restaurants, his tone and tenor say this is a man who’s invested too much in Nacho Varga to spare him at a time when he may be rising up in Don Eladio’s empire and the pecking order of Gus’s rivals.
That leaves Nacho having to play both sides whilst higher up the food chain. When Lalo coaches him up for winning the top spot in the Salamanca crew from Don Eladio, saying that the business needs someone “steady” right now, you can see him mulling the possibilities. At the same time, you can see how he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. Failing to earn that spot may leave him much more expendable to both the Salamancas and to Gus. But gaining it just raises the stakes in his double-agent routine, making his tenuous position between two murderous crime bosses that much more precarious.
The attack on Lalo’s compound, which Nacho conspicuously managed to escape from, puts him in Lalo’s crosshairs. With all the dramatics of the last two episodes, “Something Unforgivable” is more of a denouement for this season, and a setup for the next one, that a heart-pumping hour of television in and of itself. As setup though, Lalo’s “I thought he was dead” revenge quest is an exciting one, that puts literally every other major character on the show in danger.
Lalo’s smart enough to suspect that Nacho had something to do with the attempt on his life. His disdain for Gus is well-documented. He has unfinished business with Mike after sparks flew in last season’s finale. He already thinks Saul might have sold him out given last week’s thrilling stand off. And Kim is officially on the cartel’s radar, after not only identifying herself to Lalo in “Bagman”, but telling him off to his face in the next episode. As Better Call Saul puts its pieces into place for its final season, it’s left each of its major players in potentially mortal danger.
The only character of significance who’s managed to avoid that sword of Damocles is Howard Hamlin. But he may be staring down the barrel of the only thing scarier than an enraged Lalo -- Kim Wexler with a righteous cause and a lack of scruples.
All this time we thought we were watching the slow descent of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman, worried that he would drag Kim down with him. Maybe he has, only not in the way any of us were expecting. Just as the firefight on the Salamanca compound seems to be setting up a series of confrontations in season 6 more than it’s closing out the cartel story in season 5, Kim’s choices here seem to be setting up the final, major job that she and her newly-christened husband will pull in the show’s final batch of episodes.
Her plan to trick or coax or outright fabricate Howard committing some unforgivable crime would bring the show full circle. It would set Kim and Jimmy against the show’s fake out villain from its first season. It would give Kim revenge on the man who took his beefs against Jimmy and generally frustrations out on her despite all her good, hard work. It would wrap up the Sandpiper case that drove so much of Jimmy’s actions in the early going. Better Call Saul is rarely so neat or tidy, but the climax of the schemes the husband and wife adorably toss around under the covers would create a bookend for the show as it makes its final lap.
But it would also darken Kim’s soul to an extent few expected or would wish. That includes Jimmy, who seems aghast that his partner is serious about this. We’ve seen Kim cross lines before, from pulling simple cons for fun, to trying more complex schemes to help her practice, to her complicity in Jimmy’s efforts against his brother, to her transgressions on behalf of Mr. Acker in the shadow of Mesa Verde’s call center.
It’s easy to see those as the road to hell paved with good intentions, one greased, however intentionally or inadvertently, by Saul’s bad influence on her. Kim herself, however, rejects this hypothesis when it’s offered by Howard. She insists, as she should, that she’s someone who makes her own choices. We’re all a product of the people we interact with, the people we spend our lives with. But Kim has felt a fire and a thrill from her opportunities to color outside the lines just as Jimmy has, and maybe the only mistake was in thinking that she would hold onto her conscience in the shadow of his worst transgressions rather than finding her own path in the darkness.
Perhaps, instead, she will become what Jimmy seemed poised to become, but through familial grievances and his perceived universe of slights, was doomed to fall short of -- a champion who does bad things for good ends. Season 5 of Better Call Saul is where Saul Goodman, the amoral advocate we would come to know on Breaking Bad, was born and started to flourish. But it may also be the birth of a new Kim Wexler, a fallen angel ready to slay the wicked in the name of the good, as the devil on her shoulder starts to wonder, and regret, what he’s done.
