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[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/

Jimmy doesn't have a bad heart. It's just how he is. It's just his nature. He takes advantage of people. He leaves people holding the bag. It's in drips and drabs, but it's what he does. That's how Chuck sees his brother. And maybe it's how Kim is starting to see him too.

It's not hard to see why there would be a rapport between Chuck and Kim, even if they're very different people. There's a sense of righteousness to both of them, even if Kim's is much humbler and more genuinely committed to that than Chuck is. They're people who've worked hard for what they have, without trying to take shortcuts.

The easiest way to see that in the episode is the wonderfully realized montage of Kim busting her hump down in the dungeon of document review and using every spare moment to drum up leads and land a big client to raise her stock at HHM. The multi-colored post-it notes on the clear glass in the stairwell, the wide shots of Kim calling in every contact she's ever crossed paths with while the rain pours outside the parking garage, her awkward moments trying to avoid detection in the bathroom, are all great images that, with a Spanish version of "My Way", convey the way in which Kim's method differs markedly from Jimmy's.

Jimmy is the king of the big idea. He's the one who comes up with the hail mary play, the crazy scheme that will set things right again, the grand gesture that will make everything better. But that's not Kim's way, as she memorably tells Jimmy when he tries to play knight in shining armor. Kim's way is to fight and scratch and claw and depend on herself, on her sweat and gumption and elbow grease to win the right way, to bet on herself and put in the time and effort to make that a winning bet.

It's not hard to see Chuck as cut from the same cloth, at least at one point in his life. In the present, we see Chuck in some state of obsolescence, still trying to come back from his psychosomatic illness (possibly brought on by the death of the wife we meet in the cold open?). We see him depending on other people, whether it's the kid from the mailroomclerk who brings his groceries and chauffers him to HHM's office, or the security guard who shuts off the lights opens the door for him, or even Kim who's effectively forced to make his coffee.

But we know a few things about Chuck that suggest he wasn't always this way. Even now, he's excited about the complexity of the case Kim brought in, of the work it will entail. And while we don't know about his exact path to becoming a big time partner at a firm with his name on the building (or at least on the flag in front of it), the fact that he reached those heights where the likely breadwinner in his family ran a local corner store suggests he had to do a great deal of scratching and clawing himself to get where he is, even if he's gotten fat and happy in the intervening years.

That's why it's not a stretch to watch that final scene and think about how Chuck sees himself in Kim. He sees someone who who put in the hard work both to the point that she's been up all night doing doc review and still managed to land a $250k client as a fourth-year associate. And he also sees her as someone else Jimmy has hurt by making them trust him and then betraying that trust.

One of the wonderful things about Better Call Saul and its forebear are the way it plays with perspective, literally (in terms of its shots), but also figuratively. We don't know if Papa McGill was truly the paragon of virtue Chuck made him out to be. It's not hard to imagine Jimmy telling a very different story about the man who raised them. But there's a plausibility to the tale that Chuck tells, of Jimmy bilking his own father -- not robbing him, not meaning ill, just taking a little here and there because it's who he was, because honest work didn't get him where he wanted to go as quickly as he wanted to get there. And it's easy to see how that could make Chuck furious with his brother, endlessly mistrusting of his brother, and sympathetic to a hardworking, motivated young woman whom Chuck sees as another one of his brother's victims.

Erin, the young associate babysitting Jimmy at Davis & Main after his misbehavior with the commercial is the living embodiment of the idea that Jimmy needs a guardrail to keep him from giving into his worst impulses. She's an annoying character--she's meant to be--and one who feels a little more cartoonish and stock than BCS usually brings to the fore, but she serves a purpose here.

She shows that Jimmy would rather duck out of the office than spend the time to learn the house style, that he has a little bit of Chuck's arrogance to where he's dismissive of learning anything from an associate who's junior to him, and that he's apt to "finesse" rather than play by the rules. Sure, the beanie baby is a pretty minor hill for Erin to die on, but Jimmy's conversation with the prosecutor in the bathroom is another reminder of how lucky Jimmy is to be where he is, and how he still can't help but bristle at the restrictions being in that place entails.

Jimmy is our protagonist. He's one of the breakout characters from Breaking Bad and the one we see doing a great deal of scraping of his own in the first season and we can't help but enjoy watching him work his magic and know that he means well. That makes us sympathetic toward him, makes us root for him. But Chuck's right to worry that there's something in him that can't be trusted, and Kim's right to rely on herself rather than take a leap on a person who's shown he can't necessarily turn off the part of him that has to push the limit of whatever situation he finds himself in.

Rhea Seehorn's stellar throughout "Rebecca", but her best work comes in two scenes in particular. The first is when she gets a phone call from her acquaintance at the Mesa Verde bank and ventures out into the parking lot for the privacy to confirm the deal. Her moment of triumph and exuberance, of all her hard work paying off, is infectious and delightful, and a wonderful culmination of that expertly-constructed montage of her cold calls.

The other is the moment where, after sticking the landing with Mesa Verde's CEO, she offers to take the helm on the case, and Hamlin coldly rebuffs her. The look on her face, the realization that all her effort wasn't enough to lift her out of the doghouse by her own bootstraps is devastating. In both scenes, the camera cuts to a wide shot--one where she's framed on all sides by the outline of the parking garage, and one where she's dominated in the frame by the HHM flag. In both of them, she's very small, signaling the sense in which despite her yeoman's work, she's treated and seen as a minor cog in Hamlin's machine.

Hamlin himself is an interesting character, though like the surprise appearance from a wheeling-and-dealing and subtly intimidating Hector Salamanca, we only see a bit of him in this episode. The first season paints him as the bad guy, almost cheesily so with his pressed suits and mustache-twirling needling of Jimmy, but eventually reveals that he actually always liked Jimmy and was doing his best to honor Chuck's wishes, putting him in a different light.

The scene where Chuck and Hamlin confronted Kim about Jimmy's commercial suggested that Chuck was goading him into punishing Kim from his brother's transgressions (or what he thought was her complicity in them). But Hamlin's "we'll see" response to Chuck's assumption that landing Mesa Verde will put Kim back in his good graces, and Kim's observation that Hamlin pulled the same schtick when things went South with the Kettlemans suggest he's not simply a decent guy trying to vindicate his partner. As Chuck posits, Hamlin was burned by Jimmy too, and he blames Kim for it. Hamlin doesn't have Chuck's experience with Jimmy to know and appreciate that this is just what he does, and so lacks the same sympathy for Kim that Chuck seems to have in the end, and which appears to bring Kim closer to Chuck's view of his brother than the other way around.

But while Kim's view of Jimmy, and to a lesser extent Hamlin's, is informed almost solely by seeing him given a golden opportunity and nearly squandering it after being warned of the deleterious effects it would have on the people who put their necks out for him, Chuck's is informed, at least in part, by jealousy and resentment. The opening scene of "Rebecca" is an extraordinary little story all it's own, and one of the best parts of it is the way it shows Chuck as envious of Jimmy's easy way with people.

When Chuck describes their father (and this is a bit of a leap on my part), it seems like Chuck inherited the work ethic of a man who wanted to become his own boss and run his own business, and Jimmy inherited the personable nature of a man who was beloved by the neighborhood he serviced. For all Chuck's accomplishment, in his mind his screw up jailbird of a brother can waltz into his home, rattle off a bevvy of lawyer jokes, and entertain and engage with his wife easier than he, or his non-sequitur attempt at the same type of humor hours later, are able to muster. There's disappointment in his expression, indignation, that what Jimmy can manage without having to struggle for it is just unfair.

There's a number of hints at what lurks in Chuck's psyche during those scenes. His advice to his wife about dealing with an unsatisfactory individual in her orchestra, that it's "her reputation too" shows how he views Jimmy and his good name and the appropriate tactics for preserving it. As Mrs. Bloom observed, the first image we see in the episode is Chuck screwing in light bulbs, and it coincides with the first appearance of his wife. The very deliberate way in which their scenes are lit suggest that she is a light in the darkness to him, and that her being absent, whether because of an untimely death or because Chuck lacked Jimmy's easy charm and she left him, had a profound effect on him.

But every moment that he's tugging on his ear, there's the sense that he's tired of Jimmy's routine, of the way he ingratiates himself to people as the first step toward taking advantage of them. Kim is beginning to see this side of our chosen champion as well. Kim is someone who, as the episode goes to great lengths to show, has to earn everything she has and fight even harder to keep it. Chuck's story suggests he was once the same. And now, as they seem like unlikely allies, a dissenting view of the nascent Saul Goodman emerges, that the king of quick fixes, that the man who can talk his way out of any problem, is not above uses the people he cares about for his own ends, not because he's bad, not because he's cruel, but because it's the only way he knows how, and the people who enable him are left to bear the brunt of his failures.

So I found myself here because I read somewhere that this was a project that was growing on the Aaron Sorkin family tree of writing; memorably, I distinctly recall a direct comparison of it with The West Wing. I don't know if I rise to the level of "fanboy," but I have a decidedly soft place in my heart for Sorkin's body of work (save for Sports Night, that one just didn't do it for me). Sadly, I must report that this did not have any of the hallmarks that I associate with his approach to storytelling, having none of the witty, charismatic characters, razor-sharp prolonged colloquies, and non-linear timelines that he uses to great effect. The opening sequence certainly seemed to telegraph a "somebody call the fire department" kind of pace that would've worked well for that, but what followed was more of a political intrigue "slow burn" that in several ways hearkened back to House of Cards, though HoC's storylines came injected with greater intensity.

Now for the good… Headliner Keri Russell brings all of her wonderful gifts for authenticity and dynamic expression to bear on her role as the newly-minted U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, looking frumpy and out of place as she confronts a drastic change of plans for her career in the midst of an international crisis. Her efforts are simultaneously amplified and thwarted at every turn by husband Rufus Sewell, himself an erstwhile ambassador whose career has been put on ice thanks to his penchant for gaming every person and situation he encounters like so many pieces on a chessboard. The standout of the cast in its maiden voyage was David Gyasi, a face I hadn't seen since 2014's Interstellar, who here as there plays a supremely competent (if often dry) cog on the gear keeping the whole story in motion. There seems to be a good deal of potential here if they manage to get better at finding the tension in the plot, which so far they only managed to do only weakly via exposition.

I'm going to give it a shot out of respect for what I know both Russell and Sewell can do when given good material, but I hope it manifests sooner rather than later. More than anything, I want to figure out where I read that bit identifying this show as a scion of the Sorkin writing tree and have a long talk with the author about such topics as storytelling devices, due diligence and the accurate taxonomizing of teleplays.

[8.3/10] I could write an entire review just trying to decode all the little images that “The Guy for This” deposits. One of the things that set Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul apart is their penchant for that type of symbolism, letting the visual convey as much of what the audience is supposed to take away as the dialogue. So when an episode opens with ants slowly but surely descending on Jimmy’s ice cream cone, and ends with the aftermath, you know it’s supposed to mean something.

The easiest interpretation is that it’s a visual metaphor for the slow degradation of what Jimmy has. You’re enjoying something sweet, something good, and then the unexpected happens to turn it all upside down. Then one scavenger shows up to take a cut, then they tell a few more, and a few more tell a lot more, until eventually, the whole hive is there. Finally, you return to find what you had melted, with nothing but insects wanting their taste crawling around.

You can stretch that to Jimmy’s plot here, where his connection to one little bit of crime with Tuco led him here. You can stretch it to his broader arc this season, where his new practice colors outside the lines, but is mostly on the up-and-up, until he gets involved with the cartels and suddenly finds himself surrounded by them. Or you can read it as his story across two shows, where ever since he earned his law degree, his inability to put Slippin’ Jimmy to rest opened the door for bloodsuckers to come to him and lead him into this swarm.

Or maybe it’s just a cool shot of melted ice cream.

Either way, whatever that sequence means, it's cool to see the plot mechanics spin into place. The thing that really drives Better Call Saul is its incredible character work, bolstered by outstanding performances, which connect to piercing themes and an aesthetic bent. But it also knows how to spin a twisty plot that leaves you on the edge of your seat waiting to find out what happens next. As much of a stupendous slow burn as this series usually is, when it starts tying things together, it makes you bite your nails waiting for the boom.

Here, that results in a series of scheme that tie all corners of the show together, and even ties into Breaking Bad. It starts with Nacho’s suggestion that Lalo bring Saul in to handle the situation with Krazy 8. Lalo actually has a pretty good plan, which involves getting Krazy 8 back on the street by ratting out to the police, but about Gus Fring’s operation rather than the Salamancas. It’s a clever way to solve two problems at once: keeping a low-level guy who’s never done jail time from cracking in the joint while also using the police to put pressure on a rival.

The only catch for the title character is that he doesn't want to be involved in this. What’s particularly interesting about this interlude is how Saul’s brought in because Nacho has seen his resourcefulness first hand. Lalo even comments on his “mouth” in the same way that Tuco did. And yet, while Saul can use his gift of gab to get out of plenty of situatiions, he can’t manage to avoid doing this job. Even when he tries to offer alternative solutions or price himself out of the proffered task, Lalo pushes past it.
So he gets in and works his old Slippin’ Jimmy charms. Not only does he coach up Krazy 8 about what to say to the police, but he helps grease the wheels of justice when his “client” actually has to face them. And those police turn out to be...Hank and Gomey!

It’s a nice way to integrate them into the world of Better Call Saul. I’ll admit, for a show that’s already gotten a little too cute with its connections to the world of Breaking Bad (see also: the origin of Hector’s bell), I don’t know that we really needed this pair back in action on the spin-off. But if they’re going to be included, this is a great way to do it. Not only does the show nicely reintroduce the pair of DEA agents, hinting at who’s arrived before their faces fill the frame, but it makes them formidable opponents for Jimmy’s efforts to make good on his, shall we say persuasive, clientele.

That’s because Hank sniffs out the ruse. Even when Jimmy does the whole “lawyer trying to prevent his client from giving away the game” routine, Hank doesn't buy it. The show nicely walks the line with Hank, making him still the crass bulldog of a man he was before we found him sympathetic, but showing some solid police instincts with him. His banter with Gomey is still on point, but he’s also smart enough to go toe-to-toe with Jimmy and extract some concessions in his usual hard-headed way.

The plot means that Jimmy needs to mainly come out on top here. He gets Krazy 8 out on the “contingency” of the cops finding something based on his information and making arrests. He secures safe passage for his client so that he doesn't get fingered as a rat by his criminal associates. And he even tries to protect Krazy 8’s well-being by limiting his police confidential informant status to these two cops and these two cops only, giving Better Call Saul a convenient excuse to keep our favorite DEA special agents in the fold.

The one catch is that Jimmy tries to make this a one-time deal and can’t. He tries to beg off after laying out the terms of the deal to Lalo and Nacho, pleading that he has too busy of a schedule to keep up, but Lalo says he’ll make time. The ants have swarmed, the ice cream is melted, and he’s a part of this now, whether it was in the plan or not. That’s what Nacho tells him -- it doesn't matter what he wants -- when you’re in, you’re in.

It’s just one of many lines of dialogue in this episode said to one person and meant for another. Nacho is nominally talking to Saul about how he’s stuck with them now, but he’s really talking to himself. Whether Nacho wants to be in a life of crime or run away, he doesn't have a choice. He’s in too deep now, and there’s little, if anything, he can do to extricate himself.

That’s because he has to play all sides at this point. He tries to help fix things with Lalo, to continue ingratiating himself to his boss, by getting Saul to solve the Krazy 8 problem. But that just leads Lalo to trying to sic the DEA on Gus, which means Nacho needs to warn Gus about what’s coming, which mean he continues to be in the precarious position between two dangerous crime bosses who are trying to take one another out.

And yet, the most powerful scene in the episode comes when Nacho is confronted by his father. Mr Varga shows up to Nacho’s apartment to tell him about an offer he received to buy his store. But Nacho’s father is smart too, and like Lalo and Hank and even one recalcitrant would-be homesteader, he sees through the bullshit.

Mr. Varga knows that his son is fronting the money, trying to get his dad to leave town. But he refuses to leave. He refuses to take dirty money. He has a principle, and he won’t bend it for his son. You feel for Nacho, because he’s trying to protect his father through all of this. Whatever he wants or doesn't want, he doesn't have a choice at this point. The ants have swarmed him too, but he’s doing everything he can to keep his dad out of the muck. Mr. Varga is just too much a combination of stubborn and honorable to take the deal.

That puts Nacho and Kim in strangely similar positions. Her goal in this episode is to get an old man to move off his property, because it’s in the way of a major Mesa Verde development a la Up (or, Kelo v. New London if you’re legal-minded). She too tries to play nice with the old man standing on ceremony, offering him money, trying to make him see reason, only to be rebuffed due to the principle of the thing.

He’s only the second of three stubborn old men in “The Guy for This” though. The episode only briefly checks in on Mike, who’s drinking himself to death as he continues to mourn Werner. While the bartender tries to get him to leave, telling him he’s had enough, Mike won’t budge. He turns over his keys and orders another. He demands the bartender take down a postcard of the Sydney opera house, with the implication that it reminds him of Werner’s yarn about his father’s involvement in. He’s ready to inflict pain on random toughs, because he himself is raw. Mike is frustrated at what he’s had to do as part of his job, and it’s eating him up in that old familiar stoic-but-wounded Mike Ehrmantraut way.

That, again, oddly puts him in line with Kim. One of the big themes of “The Guy for This” is what people will do for money and how much of their soul and principle it costs them in the process. Kim is trying hard to maintain hers. She’s excited at the prospect of doing nothing but pro bono cases for a day. She is perturbed, to say the least, at her boss pulling her away from them to do less-meaningful but more lucrative work for her firm’s biggest client. And what sets her off, makes her play hardball with the homesteader, is when he accuses her of being all about money, despite what she tells herself. She hits back because it’s an accusation that clearly hit home with her and hurts.

It hurts especially because she’s been trying to distinguish herself from Jimmy here. Her retort to the homesteader is that he thinks he’s special, that he thinks the rules don’t apply to him, and that he’s wrong. Just because he doesn't like the outcome doesn't mean he can just set aside the law. Like Nacho’s words, those words are offered to one man but meant for someone else. She refuses to express these sentiments to Jimmy, sentiments she deeply believes, so she vents them to this man, safely in this situation, when her own mettle is tested.

(As an aside, my prediction for the series is that the breaking point -- if you’ll pardon the expression -- for Kim and Jimmy is going to come when Kim’s pro bono clients start leaving her for Saul Goodman because he can get them better results using nefarious means.)

So Kim tries to prove herself to this stubborn man, who refuses to leave his property despite a contract that says he has to. She tries showing him homes he could move into. She offers to help him move. She tries to explain how she’s more like him than she thinks, someone from a poor background who never owned anything and understands the value of having something that’s yours. She tries to prove that she’s not the type of person he thinks she is, only to be rebuked with his pronouncement that she’s someone who’ll say whatever it takes to get what she wants -- someone like Jimmy.

The ants are not the only bit of visual symbolism in the episode. Early on, Jimmy comes home to see Kim drinking on their balcony. He meets her there with two fresh ones, resting her empty on the railing. Kim gazes at the bottle as it sits there precariously, representing a certain recklessness in Jimmy that she’s tired of. She doesn't say anything, because she can’t. But when she goes inside, disgusted after hearing Jimmy talk about how this is the most profitable day Saul Goodman’s ever had, she grabs it, representing her rejection of that ethos.

And yet when she comes home after the verbal skirmish with the homesteader, the tables are turned. She joins Jimmy on the balcony. She shares a smoke with him, a continuing symbol of their bad kid camaraderie. Jimmy doubles down on his prior bottle-based recklessness, playing loose-and-catch with an empty of his own.

But Kim doubles down. She stops pussyfooting around and just throws her drink into the parking lot. Jimmy follows suit with his current beverage. And from there, they just take turns yeeting their full beers for the hell of it, until some unwanted attention sends them back indoors.

That image carries some potency too. Kim tries. She doesn't want to be swarmed like the others have. But no matter what she does, no matter how well she means, the world seems to treat her like Jimmy anyway. So if that’s the outcome no matter what she chooses, if she’s in this whether she wants to be or not, she might as well enjoy it. Pour one out for Ms. Wexler, and then toss it over the side. Let it mean whatever you want it to.

Mare of Easttown turned out to be all about mothers and sons, a powerful character study about grief, family and resilience of women, and not so much about the killings. The finale was entertaining, certainly very emotional. There are some missing pieces but overall, it was well done.

• The whole murder weapon storyline was disappointing. I'm definitely no gun expert but why would an ex cop keep a loaded gun in a shed in his backyard? And if Mr. Carroll is so forgetful, how would he remember how many bullets were in there? He knew 2 bullets were gone, did nothing, and continue to keep the gun in the shed?

• How does Ryan was able to leave the party to get his bike, stop by to get the gun, and ride his bike to Brandyville park, which is 13 miles out of town, and still beat Erin in an hour and ten minutes?

• I can't settle with how Deacon Mark left Erin in a park, alone, in the middle of the night, without her bike. His last scene in the church was framed as somehow uplifting moment, which felt wrong. Everyone thinks he's a pervert but the minute it turns out he didn't kill Erin, this proves he's innocent of all previous accusations. Super heavy to just dismiss, given the history of the Catholic church.

• If John bought the locket for Erin and why did he put Billy's name on the receipt? If he wanted anonymity, why not put a totally different and random name?

• Why would Lori get custody of DJ after lying to the police? And the family raising DJ is just weird - they killed his mother, tried to cover it up, and on the top of that, he is a child of incest. I feel like DJ should have been adopted by another family so he could have a normal childhood. This brings me to the next problem - at what point did Lori find out John was having sex with Erin and not Sandra? John started preying on Erin when she was just 14-years old, and they were related. A few words from Lori about how freaking messed up it was would have been nice. It seems like everyone had at least one good thing going for them, no matter how depressing their lives are, except for Lori. I have to praise Julianne Nicholson for the harrowing performance in this episode. The scene of Ryan running and clinging to his mom was very heartbreaking. John may not have pulled the trigger, but he may as well have.

• I'm glad we saw Katie Bailey and her family for a few seconds, but what about the other girl? They introduced such a dark theme - kidnapping and raping two girls, wrapped it up in 15 minutes, choosing a random character with no association to the town as the kidnapper, and then kind of forgot about this storyline. It just felt unfinished.

• The last shot was pure poetry.

All in all, the finale was good, but not as great as the other episodes. Maybe that's problem with all mystery shows though - they build up the mystery so carefully and then finish not nearly as strong as one was hoping for.

[7.5/10] You’d like to think that Kim knows right from wrong. She tries, or at least tried, to hold Jimmy back from his worst impulses. She has regrets over the lengths he goes to on her behalf and the people he hurts in the process. She genuinely fights for the little guy, giving up a lucrative practice to provide top notch legal services to those who can’t typically afford it. She turns over unhelpful evidence to prosecutors because it’s the right thing to do. She is, in a world of hucksters and crime lords, a good person.

But she didn’t have the best role model growing up. In some ways she’s the opposite of Saul. The young Jimmy McGill watched his scrupulous-to-a-fault father and saw the sucker he never wanted to become. The young Kim Wexler watched her unreliable screw-up of a mother and saw a cautionary tale that set her on the straight and narrow. And yet, whether we want it or not, whether we rebel or not, parts of the people who raise us seep into our future selves and can’t help but influence who we become.

So when “Axe and Grind” opens with a flashback, we see a miniature ruse pulled off by Kim’s mom. Beth Hoyt cuts an incredible vocal and physical likeness of Rhea Seehorn, which adds force to the way the elder Ms. Wexler’s false protestations to get her daughter off the hook pave the way for Kim’s later skullduggery. The chance to instill some morals is lost, the dressing down a facade. It ends with a mother who seems proud of her daughter’s coloring outside of the line, who shoplifts the earrings Kim was caught for swiping as a reward, and who tells her only child that it’s all okay, so long as she gets away with it.

There’s not much in the way of a grand unifying theme to “Axe and Grind.” As a prelude to the mid-season finale, it is more of a tapestry, a chance to check-in with all the major players and move the pieces into place for next week’s “D-Day.” But it represents one more choice for Kim, one opportunity to vindicate the moral best that she’s capable of, or to decide that vengeance masquerading as justice is more important. Given the tragic nature of the show, it’s hard to guess which one she’ll pick.

But along the way, we get a chance to see glimpses of other major characters and storylines moving apace. My favorite is Mike watching his granddaughter and daughter-in-law from afar, refusing Tyus’ insinuation that he should remove the hired protection he has watching their house. It’s a reminder of what Mike is doing this for, the reason he got into business with someone as cold-hearted as Gus Fring, and what he’s unwilling to sacrifice in the name of getting the job done.

There’s a grim efficiency to Mike, a cool competency in scenarios that would rattle the best of us. But it’s counterbalanced by the heart of the man, his connection to his loved ones and loved ones past who were hurt by their association with him, the type of loss he never wants to see happen again.

Speaking of Gus, the head of the Fring organization doesn’t appear in this episode, but Giancarlo Esposito is in the directing chair. It’s a great outing for him and the team, with sharply-composed shots that are not showy, but come with a visual panache that makes less-than-explosive scenes still hold the viewer’s focus. The performers all do strong work, and it speaks to how naturally the show’s castmembers have shifted into directing when the opportunity arises.

Of course, none can top Saul Goodman when it comes to directing, and in this final season, we get one more return for his makeshift film crew! It’s nice to see the trio in action as part of Kim and Jimmy’s scheme with the mediator, and it’s nearly as nice to see another Mr. Show alum, John Ennis, make a cameo. For all the grand moral questions and lethal encounters among drug runners features in Better Call Saul, there’s a supreme joy and comedy to seeing Saul orchestrating his audio-visual masterpieces. There’s an alternate universe where he’s an under-the-radar but industry-lauded force behind the camera, and not the conman-turned-jurist-turned conman we know and love.

But if that were the case, who knows what would become of Francesca, Saul’s assistant, interior decorator, and reluctant accomplice. It’s nice to see her get a little bit of shading, showing genuine excitement to see Kim again and genuine enthusiasm for her chance to redecorate Saul’s office. Only the depths of what she’s committed to soon become apparent, as the her boss’s clientele wreaks havoc on her upholstery and “water features”, while the man himself makes her complicit in his dirty deeds re Sandpiper. We know from Breaking Bad that she continues to hitch her wagon to Saul’s train, but it’s easy to see how her enthusiasm wanes amid such...difficult circumstances.

Still, her unfortunate circumstances are nothing compared to the ones now facing one of Werner Ziegler’s “boys.” Lalo uses the gift from last week to track him down in the middle of the German wilderness, and seems poised to interrogate him in a half-Audition, half-Misery situation.

I’ll confess, the Lalo sections of Better Call Saul often feel like they come from another show. I really enjoy Tony Dalton’s performance, and there’s a shark-like menace to Lalo that makes him a formidable opponent for sharp players like Gus, Mike, and Nacho. But sometimes he seems larger-than-life in a way that's out of step with the show: Spider-Manning his way through a ceiling, sneaking out a suburban window without detection, and besting a hired good holding an ax with little more than a hidden razor blade. I prefer seeing characters in this universe succeed thanks to their wits or their determination, not via incredible physical feats, and Lalo’s had more of the latter of late.

Still, there is some down to earth trouble to deal with in “Axe and Grind”. The episode goes out of its way to make Howard seem sympathetic before Kim and Jimmy unleash their plan to ruin him. We watch the lengths he goes to in order to prepare the perfect, nigh-literal peace offering of a cappuccino for his wife, who callously dumps his artistic coffee creation into a travel mug. Her casual aloofness for how much Howard is trying to accommodate her, to have her care about him, to see that he’s trying, only to be politely but coldly rebuffed at every turn is quietly heartbreaking. It is a reminder that there are layers to each of these characters, struggles each is going through beyond what Saul and Kim are privy to, that make us wonder if Hamlin deserves the full-fledged ruination that waits for him, no matter what mistakes he may have made in the past.

Kim is the author of that ruination (with Jimmy’s buy-in and assistance of course), but she may not be there to see it happen. Clifford Main shows up to watch her argument and offers her possible entry into a significant equal access to justice program that only sterling “up-and-comers” gain admission to. He probes whether she might have something to do with Howard’s protestations of interference from Jimmy and his allies, but she says the right things, speaking highly of Howard and HHM in a way that reassures Clifford nothing’s afoot.

The most wholesome moment in a less-than-wholesome episode comes with Jimmy’s genuine excitement for his wife at hearing the news, and encouragement that Kim be excited to. They kiss. They celebrate. They tell one another that Kim need not be there for the events that will destroy Howard Hamlin. She can have both. Kim can be the crusader for justice who travels to Santa Fe to rub elbows with the biggest names in legal aid, and she can mastermind a scheme to take down a professional rival and white shoe jerk in Albuquerque.

Except she can’t. In one of those coincidences that shouldn’t work, but clicks because it works against our heroes rather than for them, Jimmy goes to buy a celebratory bottle of tequila, the same kind he and Kim scammed Ken Wins out of in season 2. Only he spots the actual mediator for Sandpiper, who’s sporting a full cast, an unforeseen wrinkle that will destroy the plausibility of the staged photos necessary for their plan.

Saul winces in defeat. He calls Kim en route to her big pro bono meeting and tells her it’s time to pull the plug and live to fight another day. Kim has a choice. She can keep driving and decide that this opportunity to do right by the underserved who’d be helped by the resources she could marshal in Cliff’s organization, or she can turn around and try to put out this fire. She can take extreme measures to bring down one man or do some professional pitching to help countless.

In an earlier scene, Kim and Jimmy run into the veterinarian who’s helped Jimmy and Mike find jobs in the past. They need to secure some chemical assistance to help pull off their latest ploy. But in the process, they find out that he’s giving up his life as a black market gatekeeper, devoting himself to his real work full time. Jimmy’s aghast that he would sell his “little black book” (which features a business card for a certain vacuum company), a source of low-risk, high-yield passive income. Kim retorts that it doesn’t matter when you know what you want.

Kim’s given up quite a bit to choose the life that she has. She gave up the associate grind at HHM to find some place she could fly higher. She gave up great progress and recognition at Schweikart & Cokely to pursue her pro bono work full time. She has repeatedly given up the life of traditional traditional success in order to pursue a higher calling, a greater type of justice, than she could achieve greasing the wheels for Mesa Verde or climbing the corporate ladder. She wanted those things, and she sacrificed quite a bit in service of that calling.

But she also knows the kind of skills she can deploy elsewhere when she needs or want to. She saw in her mother how to sell moral indignation as a cover for getting what you desired in the first place scot free. She saw how to break the rules and earn a measure of approbation for not getting caught.

Kim Wexler knows right from wrong. She genuinely wants justice and equity for the people she represents and thousands more who deserve a fighting chance. But at the end of the day, she knows what she wants, and she wants Howard Hamlin’s head more.

Better Call Saul is great when it comes to contrasts, especially when it comes to its two most significant characters (who are, incidentally, its two legacy characters from Breaking Bad). "Amarillo" shows Jimmy as a man trying to do the wrong thing, or at least the underhanded thing, and being pushed to do the right one by those closest to him. It also shows Mike as a man trying to do the right thing, the right way, and having him pushed back toward crime and the seedier side of his new home because of those closest to him.

We know that Jimmy McGill tends toward the con, toward the misdirection, toward the razzle dazzle in an "ends justify the means" sort of way. So when we see him pay off a bus driver from a local Sandpiper nursing home in Texas (with a beautifully shot opening of our hero dressed in white against the Lone Star State's flag painted on the side of a building to boot), it's par for the course. There's something intoxicating for Jimmy, and for the audience, to see him work his magic on that bus full of seniors. Sure, there's something a little underhanded about it--even part from the payoff, it feels like he's manipulating them more than a little bit with his "send your nephew to talk to the manager routine--but he's so damn good at it! If there's one thing viewers love and admire, it's talent and competence, and Jimmy is a talented, more than competent client outreach specialist.

I promise, at some point I will stop comparing this show to Breaking Bad, but it's hard not to see the parallels between Walter White and Jimmy McGill here. I'm not suggesting that there's the same sort of pride or evil lurking within Jimmy that there was as Walter slowly let Heisenberg out of his cage. But both Walter and Jimmy are very good at something (making meth and talking their way into/out of anything respectively) and that makes them each loathe to give up plying their trade even when the rules make it a dangerous proposition. Each knows where their talents lie, and know what got them to where they are, and each is unhappy, if not afraid, of the idea of letting go of that and risking ending up back where they started.

Besides, when it comes to Jimmy's situation here, what's the harm, right? It might not be totally above board to walk the line between following up on a mailer and soliciting, but he's not taking advantage of these people. He's trying to help them! Sure, he's helping himself at the same time, but there's no real victim here.

Then, we run into Chuck, sitting across the table from his brother and pouring cold water on Clifford and Jimmy's good news about the number of clients Jimmy managed to sign up. It's a wonderful sequence in the episode, and one of the things that makes it interesting is the way that Hamlin and Clifford both realize this is a family feud and try to stay neutral, diplomatic, and supportive of both sides in the argument.

And it's quick, but it's a hell of an argument. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister once describes his own sibling as more than capable of using true feelings for something false. In that vein, I love situations like the one presented here, where Chuck is 100% right about the concerns he expresses about Jimmy's outreach efforts, and yet not exactly for the right reasons. Jimmy's brother isn't wrong when he points out that any questions about the way their legal team obtained their clients, especially with seniors, leaves them vulnerable in a way that could torpedo the case. And he's also not wrong to be suspicious of Jimmy wrangling 20+ clients while following up on a single mail-in response, particularly given what he knows about Jimmy's past behavior and what he (rightfully) suspects about his current behavior.

It's a risky, arguably foolish thing that Jimmy did. And Chuck's rightfully pointing that out, but coming from him it feels petty. Chuck's made it clear that even if it's bound up with his own sense of pride in his work and accomplishments, he can't shake his skeptical, dismissive view of his brother. Chuck may very well be legitimately and earnestly concerned that Jimmy is going to poison this whole deal. Maybe Chuck even thinks that given Jimmy's financial stake in the outcome, he's saving his brother from himself on that front. But it also can't help but feeling like he's trying to just knock a brother he doesn't believe in down a peg, to try to show that he doesn't belong here. The contrast between those two things--asking the right questions but for the wrong reasons, with so much bad blood there--makes it an endlessly interesting little scene.

Jimmy, of course, uses the same skill he did his fellow attorneys that he did with those seniors. He comes up with a plausible story; he sells it to the assembled with little trouble, and a despite the uncomfortable air between them, he managed to shut his brother up. But Chuck is, no doubt, unconvinced, and neither is the only other person in that room who knows Jimmy well enough to smell his B.S. In contrast to the last time the two of them were in the boardroom together, Kim moves away from Jimmy's advances under the table, because even if she doesn't say it, she agrees with Chuck.

And as sorry as I am to go back to the well of Breaking Bad, it makes me worry that she'll receive the same kind of reaction that Skyler did. Without delving into the thorny issues of sexism, at base, people don't like to see their protagonists thwarted. Jimmy is the main character of Better Call Saul. We get the show through his perspective, and that means that, consciously or unconsciously, we're psychologically on his side. We're with him on this journey, even if in the back of our minds we can acknowledge the actions that he takes as morally questionable. Storytelling is constructed to make the listener sympathetic to the person the story's about. That creates a risk that someone like Chuck, with sketchy motives, comes off worse despite the legitimacy of his concerns, and between this and the end of the prior episode, it risks turning Kim into something audiences like even less -- a scold.

Kim has more or less replaced Chuck as the cricket on Jimmy McGill's shoulder, as the person in his life who keeps him aspiring to be better and do better. Chuck's admonition at the table doesn't move Jimmy; it just gives him cause to strike back. But Kim's response causes him to interrupt and emphasize that yes, in fact, all of his client outreach will be above board.

And when we see Kim push back against Jimmy after the meeting, she offers a damn good reason for why she took Jimmy's news with the same skepticism that Chuck did. She put her neck out for Jimmy. He is, if not a nobody, than a hustling public defender who would have otherwise had to spend years in the pit before he ever had a chance to so much as sniff a partner track job like the one Kim finagled for him. She put herself out there for Jimmy, with her boss, with her colleagues, and with her own reputation and prospects at stake. She's absolutely right when she says that everything Jimmy does in this job reflects on her and her judgment, and that Jimmy doesn't just have himself to worry about when he's scheming and flim-flamming his way into more clients.

There it is. Suddenly that incredibly amusing, downright charming scene with Jimmy on the bus seems a little more sinister, a little less harmless. While adding more wronged individuals to the class seems like a good thing on the surface, if it's done in a way that doesn't pass muster, it could mess up a good portion of the case and leave the HHM/Davis & Main team playing from behind when trying to pursue justice for these people. And if it goes wrong, if Jimmy is chastised for stepping outside the lines, it could also screw over the person who stood up for him and put him in a position to have a seat at the table, the person whom he seems to love.

But what's great is that the show does the opposite with Mike. Mike is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. He's trying to do right by his son, by his daughter-in-law, by his granddaughter, and that, ironically, pushes him to use his skills and talents in a way that he's not necessarily inclined to -- to help criminals. Mike is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

And what's so striking about it is that Mike knows he's being taken for a ride. When Stacey left a pregnant pause after telling Mike about her money troubles back in Season 1, it was a nod toward the idea that she wanted support from him, but there was enough ambiguity as to whether or not she really meant it, whether she was specifically trying to guilt Mike or, rather, just venting her anxieties to a sympathetic ear without any ulterior motives.

But that wiggle room pretty much goes out the window in "Amarillo". The question now is whether Stacey is deliberately and intentionally playing on Mike's guilt, or whether it's merely something subconscious. But the phantom bullet mark, not to mention the token resistance she puts up to Mike's suggestion that Stacey and her daughter come live with him before immediately agreeing to it suggest the former rather than the latter.

That makes Mike seem noble even as he slowly but surely starts heading down a path that we know will lead him to "big time jobs for big time pay." He doesn't want to be a criminal, at least not at a lethal level. What's more, he knows he's being taken advantage of in some sense, that, at a minimum, Stacey isn't just being straightforward with him and asking for help and support, but laying on guilt trips and making up stories to get him to intervene, with the knowledge that he's too broken up about his role in what happened to Matty that he can't resist. So Mike compromises some of his principles. He steps back into a world he seemed to be trying to avoid, all in an effort to do the right thing.

Nobility comes less naturally to Jimmy than it does to Mike, but poked and prodded or not, he too tries to do the right thing. It's heartening to see Jimmy using his creativity to succeed within the rules rather than to find clever ways to get around them. Again, his idea of a targeted commercial, based on his intimate knowledge and diligence about the schedules of the folks at Sandpiper, is fairly genius and perceptive.

When we see him constructing the commercial, it shows his innate understanding of human nature, of how to affect and have an impact on his target audience. The fact that he's channeling it into something legitimate, that he's succeeding even when boxed in a bit, is an encouraging sign. By the same token, it's hard not to feel proud for him when Kim watches the commercial, put together by Jimmy and a couple of college students, and walks away impressed with him. She is, after all, a big reason why he's doing this rather than continuing his less-savory ways of finding clients, so her approval is big.

It's also heartening to see him try to work his magic on the phone system, just like he did when sequestered in the back room of the nail salon, and see the results of his work roll in. There's such a great bit of tension in the air in those moments where we wait to see whether Jimmy's ad-buy scheme is going to work. His frantic dissecting of the gameplan with his subordinate conveys how anxious he is about the whole thing, how much is riding on this play for him. That makes the moments where the phones start lighting up, where it all falls into place, that much more exciting, for Jimmy and for us.

But that excitement is short-lived. Even when Jimmy's doing right; he's doing it wrong. He doesn't run the ad by Clifford. He thinks about it. He comes close. But at the end of the day, he just can't face the risk of failure or rejection. He can't face the possibility that he has this brilliant thing he put his heart and soul into, and that someone could tell him no. That's Jimmy's game -- do whatever you think needs doing, and bet on the fact that the results will justify whatever actions you took to get there.

The problem is that Jimmy isn't just betting on himself here. He's gambling with Kim's reputation, with his brother's I-told-you-so's, with whatever ethical rules for attorney advertising he may or may not have paid particularly close attention to when making the ad that could, again, jeopardize the case as a whole. Jimmy is trying. He is trying so hard in the best way he knows how to both keep things above board but achieve at what he sets out to do, and that's why he's sympathetic but also complicated.

And yet even as he tries, there's a piece of Slippin' Jimmy still left in him, a part of him that thinks the best way to show Kim and Chuck that he's worthy of their love and respect is simply to succeed, and that the ends will justify the means. The tragedy is if that effort, motivated by a desire to show those close to him what he's made of, is what drives them from him, and turns him into the relatively scruple-free huckster we come to know down the road.

It's difficult to build tension and stakes in a prequel to some degree, and the problem is magnified the closer you are to the familiar part of the timeline. If you already know who lives and who dies, who has to reach a certain point of the larger narrative unscathed, it can deflate some of the excitement and intrigue of a particular storyline.

On the other hand, it can also heighten the tension in an episode, by spotlighting the mystery between the known beginning and the known ending. As Better Call Saul sets up Nacho calling a hit on Tuco, we know that Tuco lives; we know that Mike lives, and thanks to the opening scene, we know that Mike gets ridiculously roughed up, presumably in the attempt. It all raises the question of how we get from A-to-B. Does the hit go wrong? Does Mike beg off from Nacho and get a beating for his troubles? In true Breaking Bad fashion does some unexpecting intervening factor come into play that throws the whole situation out of whack? We don't know, but we want to know, and that's just part of the masterful job that BCS does in using its prequel status as a benefit and not a drawback when it comes to holding the audience's attention and interest.

It also does so by firmly establishing its characters' motivations without making them feel obvious or blatant. The closest "Gloves Off" comes is Nacho explaining why he's trying to take out Tuco. It takes a little prodding from Mike, but Nacho explains why he would want to be rid of the notably mercurial Tuco in a satisfying way that coheres with what he already know about him. Tuco is unpredictable. Beyond what we've seen in Breaking Bad, he has to be talked down multiple times in the desert with Saul, and it's perfectly plausible that he would be even more temperamental when using, which lines up with what we know of him from his run-ins with Walter White. Temperamental is bad for business, and it makes sense that somebody who seems cool, collected, and perceptive like Nacho would want that unpredictable element taken out of his calculus and his livelihood.

And then there's Mike, who is increasingly feels like the most down-to-earth incarnation of Batman there's ever been (and please, someone cast Jonathan Bank in a The Dark Knight Returns adaptation while there's still time). At some point, Mike Ehrmentraut's moral code, and his supreme ability to assess a situation and find the best option could hit the implausibility button a little too hard. But for now, it's a joy to see him listening to Nacho's (fairly well-reasoned) plan for Tuco and then poking holes in it before coming up with a better one, and eventually, an even better (if both more and less costly) one after that. There's a world-weary certainty to Mike, a sense that he's seen this all before and he knows the angles before anyone else does.

That's why the moral element to his storyline is vital and captivating. Taking a life is rarely something that's treated lightly in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. One of the most interesting aspects of Walter White's descent in Breaking Bad is the way that his killing escalated, from self-defense with Krazy-8 (who cameos here), to his failure to act to save Jane, to his more active vehicular activities to save Jesse, until making deals with neo-nazis and calling hits of his own.

But we know Mike's motivated not to do that, not to reach that point, and also that he will eventually. He doesn't have the "Mr. Chips-to-Scarface" transition that Walt does--we've already seen that he's killed the dirty cops who took out Matty--but there's a different between that and doing random hits for a big payday from various drug dealers, something the audience knows he eventually makes his peace with.

I bring up the Batman comparison with Mike because despite the difference in tone of their source material, they fit surprisingly well together. Both are gruff, both are uber-capable, and both, at this point at least, have a code against killing. There have been a lot of different interpretations of The Bat's reasons for this, but one of the most persistent is the idea that if he crossed that line, he wouldn't able to stop himself from killing every two-bit punk who crossed him, that it would be the easy solution to too many problems that required a more measured response.

But one of the interesting things about "Gloves Off" is that it comes close to positing the opposite for Mike. When Mike's going over his rifle options with the arms dealer we first met in Breaking Bad, he comes upon an old bolt-action rifle and makes clear that (in addition to his expert knowledge of rifles) that he's used one and is more than familiar with them. The scene intimates that Mike fought in Vietnam, that he he's seen the horrors of war, and likely bitten off more than his fair share of it. It's not a far leap to think that Mike killed people in war, that he was probably damn good at it, and that despite the avenging impulses that spurred him to take out Matt's killers, he has no taste for it.

When Nacho pays Mike and asks him why he would give up twice the payoff for a tenth of the effort, we already know the answer. Mike has a code. But he isn't Batman; he's already crossed that line and seen and felt what it does to a person, and that reminder, a symbol of that time, is enough to make him earn his money the hard way to avoid having to dip his toe into those waters once again. The sequence where Mike provokes Tuco, with his corny payphone accent and road rage argument is fun and it's clever and it's brutal. But it's the cumulative result of all Mike's seen and done, of who he is, and it makes those bruises we see him packing frozen vegetables onto more meaningful and important, both to the series and to the character.

It would be too much and too far to call Jimmy's story an afterthought in "Gloves Off", but his is clearly the B-story of the episode, despite the pretty significant fireworks between Jimmy and his bosses, his girlfriend, and his brother. The chickens have come home to roost from what we witnessed in "Amarillo". Jimmy is on incredibly thin ice with his employers, and also with Kim, who's been shunted down to the basement as punishment for his sins.

These scenes tease out a great deal of the core of Jimmy's character as well. One of the things I love about Chuck McGill as a character is that he is often wrongheaded or petty or unduly harsh, but there's a germ of truth to most of the things he says, even if he bends that truth to suit his needs. Chuck's not wrong when he tells his brother that he always seem to think that the ends justify the means, that if Jimmy can get the right result, what does it matter how he gets there? It's a striking moment when Clifford Main disabuses Jimmy of the notion that the partners' anger is about the money spent, or that the success of Jimmy's plan mitigates what upset them in any way.

Instead, it's the fact that he circumvented them, that he knew (despite his protestations to the contrary) how they were likely to feel about it, and rather than confronting them directly and trying to argue his case, he went with the mentality that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. That mentality blew up in his face here, and not only did the blowback threaten the promising position he's lucky to have here, but it hurt someone he loves. Jimmy cannot help breaking the rules, and his golden tongue has almost always offered him a way out of any real consequences. Here, that doesn't fly, and his bad behavior takes down Kim with him.

"Gloves Off" ties together the three big factors we know motivate Jimmy: his inability to color within the lines; his desire to be with and do right by Kim; and his jumbled up resentment, love, and desire for approval from his brother. The scene where Jimmy and Chuck confront one another, like most scenes between them, is dynamite in how it teases out more of Chuck's perspective and personality, and leans into the tremendous, complicated dynamic between the two brothers.

Is it too much to suggest that Chuck might be playing sick, or at least embellishing how bad he feels once Jimmy arrives? He seems surprised that Jimmy is still there in the morning, and it's hard to say whether Chuck is above using such tactics to avoid uncomfortable confrontations he could undoubtedly see coming. Better Call Saul has yet to dig into what specifically led Chuck down the path of his electrical sensitivity, but it would not surprise me to see it as a reaction to, and a way of avoiding, stress or trauma or something unpleasant in his life.

That's the crux of the confrontation between Jimmy and Chuck. Chuck still sees Jimmy as a shyster, as someone who bends the rules, who gooses the system, in order to get what he wants, regardless of what the risks are or whether other people have done it the hard way. And Jimmy confronts Chuck with his hypocrisy, that Chuck can't outright say that he wants Jimmy out of the legal practice and that he'd leverage Kim to put pressure on Jimmy to that effect because that would be extortion and that would be against the rules. But even if he can't say it out loud, or admit, even to himself, that that's what he's doing, Chuck has his less than savory ways of getting the result he wants too. He uses Hamlin as his proxy and hatchetman; he subtly undercuts his brother and puts the screws to him and the woman his brother cares for, all under the guise of keeping things proper. And yet, he sees himself as quite above the fray.

There's more than a bit of Jimmy in Chuck. There's a sense that Chuck too knows what levers to pull, what buttons to push, to make things happen, but while Jimmy, to some degree or another, owns what he is and not only acknowledges its utility but can't escape it, Chuck is in denial, and convinced that he is a saint simply trying to keep order with an agent of discord who's threatening to topple the applecart and make a mockery of all he holds dear. And in between them, Kim is willing to fall on the sword, even when she'll be hurt by the result, because it's the right thing to do, and despite her extracurricular activities helping Jimmy con Ken Wins, the right thing comes far more naturally to her than to Jimmy, or even the petty Chuck.

Even though they never interact, "Gloves Off" draws a contrast between Mike and Chuck here. Mike knows what his goal is, sees what it would cost to his soul in order to get it, and without seeking praise or understanding, suffers more to get something less, but to keep something greater. Chuck, on the other hand, won't do the dirty work. He won't demote Kim himself; he won't be direct with his brother, because he can't suffer the minor indignities even as he's trying to bring about what he sees as the greater good. Mike acts with honor even when he's on the wrong side of the line; Chuck can't let himself be the bad guy even when he thinks he's in the right, and Jimmy is stuck in the middle, trying to figure out his place in a world where he's punished if he breaks the rules, but worries that he can't succeed without doing so.

When I wrote about RICO, I talked about how much of what makes this show great is its commitment to a "show, don't tell" ethos in its storytelling. The show generally takes care not to lay its points on too thick, or be too obvious with its points and themes, preferring to let them emerge from its characters' interactions and the performances of its superb cast.

That's why I felt let down by "Marco". It's not a bad episode--it's hard to imagine any show in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul pantheon sinking that low--but it's not nearly so subtle or deft in how it communicates Jimmy's internal struggle after the revelation that the brother he loved, and sacrificed for, and emulated, doesn't respect him and actually resents his attempts at self-improvement.

At the end of the episode, when Jimmy rolls up to Mike's tollbooth, asks him why they didn't take the money stolen by the Kettlemans for themselves, you get hints at what Mike started in "Pimento", both his falling in as a regular enforcer for the bumbling pill-dealer, but also his code--that he may be a criminal, but he's also a good guy, who's just out to do the job he's hired to do. And yet when Jimmy declares that he's never going to worry about doing the right thing again, it's so on the nose that the moment meant to cap off the entire season feels like it warrants a response of "duh." Let us see what your characters are feeling about their circumstances through how they behave, or even through dialogue; but don't just have them announce the shift you've already spent the entire episode setting up.

It doesn't give me great faith in Peter Gould, who both wrote and directed the episode and, with his Executive Producer credit, would appear to be the main creative force in the show beyond Vince Gilligan. Too many scenes in the episode that are supposed to put a bow on the events we've witnessed for nine episodes feel clumsy, awkward, without any of the flair, in either dialogue or direction, that the franchise is known for.

It comes through in the Bingo scene, where Jimmy's breakdown at a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead level of recurring Bs sets him off into a semi-stream of consciousness rant about the foolish act that set him on this whole path. It's a strange, disjointed sequence that tries to lean into Bob Odenkirk's great skill as an actor, but makes so much explicit that has otherwise been subtle but palpable subtext that it just seems like an odd outburst that's tonally inconsistent with the rest of the show rather than the moment of great emotional weight and character development it's meant to play as.

The same goes for the montage of Jimmy and his old pal Marco getting back into the grifting game. The flying signs and reds and blues have the characteristics of an old cop show (it's the same kind of montage The Simpsons has parodied time and time again), and it's kind of fun in the attempt at stylized filmmaking Better Call Saul and its forebear regularly traffic in, but the sequence itself still comes off oddly flat, and the recurring lines about telling secrets and swirling images descend into the cheese rather than transcend it.

To the point, the entire storyline feels kind of rote. The idea of Jimmy learning his brother is a false idol, that the backstop that kept him from sliding back into a life of flim-flamming rubes at the local bar, that motivated him to achieve all he has since Chuck helped him out of that jam in Chicago, was predicated on a falsehood, is a good one. But the consequences feel too easy, the following events and conflicts too convenient, even cliche.

Jimmy attempting to restart his old life and finding that regardless of his brother, he feels a pull to be good, to help his clients and the people he's made commitments to, is hokey enough on its own, but kind of works. It's believable enough that in the throes of lamenting what he gave up at the behest of an implacable sibling would send him back into that familiar cesspool to blow off the steam he'd been holding in for so long, and yet eventually find that once that's out of the system, his old life doesn't have the same allure it once did. Sure, that's a pretty conventional story in a show that's made its bones from being more than conventional, but it's enough, even if it's not superb.

Then, of course, Marco wants to pull off one last con. And, of course, his trademark Hollywood cough early in the episode, pays off in a by-the-book Hollywood Death to Teach the Protagonist a Lesson™, that this is the most exciting thing Marco's life and it's a sad and pathetic thing to hang your hat on as you're dying. It's set up well enough with the audience having seen Jimmy and Marco pull off the same con episodes earlier, but again, it feels like laying the stakes of Jimmy's internal conflict on too thick. We already know he's struggling with whether to, as Mike puts it in "Pimento", be a good guy or a bad guy. We already know that his moral compass it out of whack after what happened with Chuck. And thanks to his scene in Marco's basement, we already know he's feeling the pull of the changed man he's become.

Perhaps this is all supposed to build to the subversion at the end of the episode. After all of these fairly weak and typical lessons and reminders about living right, Jimmy's still so miffed at what he gave up for his brother, or so bound to what may be his true nature, that he can't bother to follow up on Kim and Hamlin's help and make good on going straight. There's something to that, but the hamfisted way in which the episode hammers that point home in Jimmy's exchange with Mike sucks all the power from the twist.

When Better Call Saul began, there was no way to know if it would have a Season 2. Maybe the rushed nature, the flimsy finality of that this episode tries to impart is a symptom of that. If there were never another episode of Better Call Saul after this, there's more than enough for the audience to fill in the gaps and understand the trajectory for Jimmy and Mike between here and Breaking Bad, and anything more ambiguous might fail in that regard. As Season 1 of the show draws to a close, there's a clear explanation for how small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill could turn from the scrappy-if-underhanded guy we meet in episode 1 to talented huckster Saul Goodman, and how Philadelphia policeman Mike Ehrmentraut finds himself as the go-to-guy in the company of criminals. But something about that tidiness, about that blatant declaration to that effect, feels too simple in a show that thrives on complexity, and it sends a tremendous season of television out on a disappointing note.

• What's in the damn photograph?!? :question:

• Hope Siobhan gets her own spin off. Just kidding, can you imagine. :laughing: Episode 7 will finally answer the question on everyone's mind: will Siobhan go to Berkeley!! I know she is the only way Mare can deal with her grief that she has been avoiding but Siobhan's storyline feels like filler, and her scenes are bad. I start scrolling on my phone whenever her side story starts up.

• Mare going out to arrest a suspect with no backup like she didn't just lose a friend and colleague last week? :rolling_eyes: I'm kinda annoyed that she hasn't learned her lesson.

• That bathtub scene was unnecessary. Definitely a cheap suspense scene. I know it's to show Carrie is not ready and she will need Mare and her mom's help to raise Drew. I get it, but still it's was a little too much.

• When the penultimate episode of a murder mystery ends with the protagonist saying, "X character was the killer", I feel like it's safe to say that X was not the killer. John is definitely hiding something. He knew Lori would tell Mare. He is pinning the murder on Billy. I think in the next episode John is going to kill his brother and frame it as a suicide. John has to the baby's father, and the murder weapon is Mare's fathers gun that is stashed in the attic "where no one goes anymore".

• Kate Winslet and Jean Smart are an amazing team. All of their scenes, comedy or drama, are :fire:.

• Is it possible that Guy Pearce is just a normal and regular dude Mare met at a bar? Hmm. There must be a reason a random stranger shows up in the plot.

[8.0/10] Paige knows. That is huge. There other things that happen in “Stingers” -- other important things -- but they’re all overshadowed by the fact that after so much debate, so much consternation, so much hemming and hawing, Paige now understands who and what her parents are.

On the one hand, that’s an emotional breakthrough. Beyond the question of whether or not the Jennings’ kids should be brought into the program, the simple question of them knowing, was once something that drove Philip and Elizabeth’s nightmares. Philip even recounts that. To be in this life is to be constantly at threat. But the truth is, as the last season’s anxieties suggested, ignorance doesn't make that threat go away.

So when confronted by their daughter, who demands to know the truth, who says she knows that she’s been lied to and that this is not normal, Philip and Elizabeth share a knowing look of their own. This moment has become unavoidable. However much they might like to delay it, to ease their daughter into things, to avoid it entirely, they can’t put this off any longer. It is, in so many ways, the culmination of arguments that have motivated much of the past couple of seasons, and it marks a new stage of the relationship between parent and child.

Much of that is spurred by Pastor Tim. In the episode’s cold open, he comes to the Jennings’ travel agency, nominally to arrange a mission trip, but realistically to give Philip a lecture, or more charitably, a well-intentioned nudge to start treating Paige like more of an adult and less of a child. Paige name-checks him when she speaks about why she chose to confront her parents, and calls him after it’s done. The look on Philip’s face during all of this says, “I wish I had killed that guy,” and it’s odd in the first place that Pastor Tim would come to the Jennings after Philip’s veiled threat last season. But for better or worse, he’s a major part of the new level of honesty between the Jennings and their daughter.

The rest of the episode feels a bit scattershot by comparison, like the show is planting seeds for other things to come rather than really exploring anything in depth in the rest of it. Nina reveals that she can speak English to her target, and the show hints that it’s a way for the two of them to become close enough for the Centre’s plan to work.

And at the same time, we get confirmation that the Russian “defector” in Stan’s care is still a Russian agent. So there’s the possibility that his whole plan to expose her and then use her as a chit to trade for Nina could work. That said, this is The Americans, to expect the whole shebang to blow up in everyone’s faces rather than for the plan to go perfectly, but it at least complicates things.

Tying both of those stories together is the fact that Oleg has now been tasked with getting photos of the bomber, in order to give the kidnapped scientist what he needs to progress. Again, there’s not much substance there, but there’s a loose connection between the plotting at the Rezidentura, Stan’s handling of the defector, and Nina’s adventures in Russian captivity that gives the multiple loose strands some unity.

There’s other little details as well that seem more like checking off certain boxes for the plot than anything really fulsome. Philip goes to a party with Kimmy and gets a tape of CIA conversations involving her dad. That let’s him learn that there’s a meeting between the CIA and the ISI at a nearby hotel, where Elizabeth sinks her hooks. And we’re given to think that Stan suspects Martha as the mole after his conversation with Walter Tafet.

On the home front, there’s also an interesting thread of connection between Stan and Henry. It’s a light piece of the episode, but maybe a potent one. The two bond over football games (whether video games or board games) and Tron, and you get the gentle sense that the pair are filling a place in one another’s lives. Stan is going through his divorce, having to divide up his family’s stuff and wonder if he has a place in his son’s life. Henry, for his part, seems blasé, but has to deal with the fact that his parents are busy and gone all the time. Both may be too repressed or myopic to realize it, but in a way they’re reaching on opposite ends for the same thing.

That ties in nicely to Paige’s confrontation of Elizabeth and Philip, where she acknowledges that it’s not normal for them to be gone. She has the same feeling that Henry seems to, but rather than accepting it and normalizing it, she’s had outside influences and internal questioning that makes her challenge it. That challenge, that directness, forces the Jennings to bring their daughter into the inner circle, and to have to hope and trust that she’ll understand the magnitude and the peril of what they’ve revealed to her.

Beyond the emotional element, that adds a new level of risk from a plot standpoint. There is a sense of tension when the Jennings have to trust their daughter and abide by her wishes to be left alone, despite her father’s admonition that talking about this to anyone could lead them to go to jail for good. The editing and cinematography belabors the point a little too heavily, but there’s a sense of legitimate concern when she picks up the phone, when she nearly explains things to Pastor Tim, and certainly when she stares down Stan.

As the T.V. show on in the background suggests, Paige is in the driver’s seat now. Telling the truth to their daughter has changed the power dynamics in the relationship, given a teenage girl the potential to hold something over her parents, to force them and move them to let her have a say in what goes on. That is scary as a parent, particularly in the shadow of a lifetime of lies being spilled out onto a kitchen table. But it’s the moment where Philip and Elizabeth have to close their eyes and hope that their daughter is who they raised her to be, that she knows and understands how much they love her, and that that can be enough to get them all through this as a safe, and loving family.

[7.5/10] I believe this is the first time we’ve seen a game take up practically the whole hour. The choice doesn't fully work out. The pace is leisurely, which is good because this is a more cerebral episode that features the (apparent) deaths of some major characters for the first time in the series. But overall, I like the choice, as it gives these scenes room to breathe.

The game of marbles isn’t as riveting or full of tension as the other games so far, but the open=ended and freeform nature of the game gives it a different flavor and some additional intrigue than the ones we’ve seen so far. The fact that the players can choose their own games, set their own rules, so long as someone ends up with the right 20 marbles at the end creates more space for the players to express themselves and more importantly reveal themselves as part of the game.

There’s a recurring motif to all of these things. People seem willing to play fair and be magnanimous when they think they’re on the same side, but turn deceitful and even vicious when they’re suddenly opposed to one another. It makes the turn -- from players thinking they’re picking partners, when in reality they’re picking adversaries -- that much more dramatic.

Some of the turns aren’t shocking. Deok-su is losing at the marble wagering game and so appeals to the notion of fairness to switch to a marble throwing game where he can win it all. There’s not much to it, but it’s a testament to how self-serving Doek-su is, and there’s some sports movie excitement when the last marble toss knocks his into the pit.

The game between Sang-woo and Ali is much more compelling in my book. Say what you will about Doek-su, but he’s transparent about who he is and how he is. Sang-woo has the marks of intelligence and high-minded sophistication, but as soon as he’s losing to Ali, who is innocent and gracious to the last, he accuses him of cheating and becomes the same sort of self-serving jerk.

I’m not sure there’s anything more despicable in the game so far than Sang-woo taking advantage of Ali’s trust and good nature with a promise that they’ll get through this together, only to fool him with a bag full of rocks meant to be for “safe keeping” that is, in fact, a ruse for Sang-woo to end up with the winning marble bag by any means necessary. There’s a commentary there, that nice is different than good and that the high class Sang-woo’s supposed kindness and decency only goes so far when the chips are down. The fact that he’ll throw someone as pure and good as Ali under the bus is a stain on his character.

Gi-hun’s deceit is still lamentable, but also more tolerable. Maybe it’s because we see his kindness earlier in the episode. When everyone thinks they’re securing partners, Gi-hun gives up the chance to team up with someone his own age, because the odd man out will be killed, and he doesn’t want that to be Number 1. His altruism, in reducing his chances of victory (or so he thinks) to save Number 1 puts him in the moral win column, especially after providing his coat to the old man to help him preserve his dignity after peeing his pants.

But then he lies to Number 1 in their wager game. When by all accounts, he should lose, he takes advantage of Number 1’s dementia to cheat him, to claim he guessed right or wrong until he can take the win. It’s made that much more sad, that much more immoral, after discussions about them being best friends, “gganbu”, which provides the title of the episode. There is genuine care and compassion between them, which makes the cheating that much worse.

You can see Gi-hun’s logic more than Sang-woo’s. The old man is clearly having a crisis (or so it would seem, at least). His chances of surviving are slim to nil, and if he does, he still has a brain tumor to contend with. The old man is as innocent as Ali is, but the scenarios of what could come next are different. And yet, the most poignant moment in the show so far comes when Number 1 acknowledges that Gi-hun has been cheating him, and gives him the last marble anyway, telling him his name in the process, as a sign of that care, despite everything. The acting from both performers is superb,

And yet, the sentimental favorite here is the exchange between Sae-byeok and Ji-Young. They are the purest ones here, because rather than bickering or twisting games or bending rules, they agree to just play one game for literally all the marbles. They play this thing fair and kind in a way nobody else we see seems to. Instead, they take their last half hour to talk about their hopes and dreams, to learn about one another, to make this uncivilized thing civilized in a way others cannot.

Then, Ji-Young sacrifices herself for Sae-byeok. Despite their mutual sad stories, of mothers lost under different circumstances, Ji-Young decides she has no idea what she’d do if she got out, but Sae-byeok still has something to live for. It’s the most selfless thing we’ve witnessed in the series to date, and the contrast that choice cuts with how selfish everyone else has been makes it that much more impactful.

Otherwise, we see the grim fates of the Doctor and the workers who broke the rules in the last episode. Number 212 seemingly gets her karmic comeuppance from so much betrayal and side-switching. Though I’ll note that we don’t actually see her, Number 1, or Ali get shot; it’s just implied, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they come back. As a giant nerd, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the marble game arena has the same aesthetic as Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts 2, which probably means little to anyone but me. And we see Hwang making incremental progress, with a hint that the VIPs will be arriving soon.

All-in-all, this one is more languid and cerebral than others episodes, with fewer thrills and more conversations, but as with “Hell”, that’s a necessary break and breather from some of the other pulpier developments to date. Onto the final third of the season!