palharesf

Chaos.... Thy name is Sterling Archer.

Interesting ethical conundrum faced by the inventors of potential military technology since the inception of war. If you look, historically, the inventors of everything from the Gatling gun to the Atom Bomb thought that their invention(s) would make war unthinkable, because the potential for slaughter on such a massive scale would give military leaders pause. Yet, with each advancement, they found ways to rationalize both military casualties and "collateral damage" (civilian deaths), to the point that the previous U.S. administration saw no problem with drone striking villages full of women and children, as long as there were a couple of "military aged males" (which was poli-speak for any male 12 and up) Extra Judicial assassination at a wedding? No problem. Wikileaks? As the female former presidential candidate only half jokingly quipped...... "Can't we just drone strike him?" SMH.

Even after Sterling sees first hand, the benefits the tech gave to the inventor, who was confined to a wheelchair, yet, she allowed him to try it out for himself, and, then let him to rescue his cohorts with it, (she had the kill switch with her the whole time, and could have simply watched them die) they still saw no ethical issue with just stealing it from her and leaving her there, stuck in the chair with a bunch of dead bodies. Now, while I well realize that in the spy game there is no "Prime Directive" to give moral guidance in sketchy situations, if they just thought a LITTLE outside their very tiny (mental) boxes, they could have turned the situation into a recruitment opportunity for the former ISIS / now CIA spy organization. Perhaps an arrangement could have been made for her to team up with her #1 fanboy, Krieger, and teach him the ways of the X/O Suit. But then once again they would have just used the tech for chaos, destruction, and mayhem, instead of helping the disabled live more normal lives. This is why we cant have nice things......

Nice George Taylor ( Charlton Heston) hat tip / impression by Kreiger at the end of the episode.

Fritz Lang's sci-fi godfather has been through several levels of re-cut hell over the past hundred years. Slashed by nearly an hour for its original western release, trimmed further by Nazi censors in 1936, color tinted and re-edited in the '80s (with a modern rock soundtrack) by Giorgio Moroder, then painstakingly restored for Blu-Ray in 2010, using lost footage from an old print in Buenos Aires. Up until now, my entire memory of the film comes from the Moroder version, which didn't make much sense from a story perspective but always wowed me with its wild, futuristic visions, ambitious special effects and expansive set designs.

The restored version offers improvement in both respects. Now cast in gorgeous monochrome, as intended, the art direction is even more stunning. New scenes and high-resolution scans give us new chances to admire the sprawling city, to really soak up the vast scale of Lang's concept. And the plot, naive and airy as it may be, actually moves in sensible directions now. It's incredibly slow moving and drawn-out, sure, overloaded with long shots of talking heads (which seems unnecessary for a silent picture) but at least it's headed somewhere.

As a long-time fan of the film, I'm glad to have finally seen the full thing. It's an iconic marvel, an artistic triumph that's, somehow, just as hypnotic now as it must've been in post-WWI Germany. That said, actually wading through the scenes without some sort of huge, dazzling art deco set piece, well, it can feel like work. I needed four sittings to get through this two-and-a-half hour behemoth, and I was personally invested before it hit my media shelf. First-timers will, no doubt, find it smothering. Deeply influential as a production, astounding as a purely visual showpiece, but critically flawed as a whole. Now excuse me while I revisit a few tunes from the 1984 release.

Where did Din pull the Beskar staff out of....? I dont think I want to know......

That has to be the most convenant airlock into space I have even seen in TV/Movie history. I'm in awe
That's a worse design flaw then the orignial death star........

The girls being completely (sorry to use the term) Mary Sue beyond anything I've seen made me cringe.
It was not entertaining to watch at all.

Din has to be the most gullible, over trusting bounty hunter in the galaxy.

Another first, The whole "To claim the darksaber you must defeat whomever in combat" has to be one of the worst excauses
for conflict in a show I've ever seen.
They REALLY could not do any better? Also bo-katan really does not seem to care about mandalore tradidtions, so why she's so keen about this one I'm confused. No one in the room would peep.

The Luke revial was some GOD TIER fan service I'm not going to lie. But his voice sounded so robotic. Kind of weird

I have no idea if I really want to watch this show anymore if the Grogo storyline is over.... It really kept me watching and made me feel fuzzy inside. I didn't want them to drag out the story line forever but I feel it was too short.

Also since Grogo went with Luke I guess we can assume he died with all the other Jedi Knights Luke trained?

Another good episode and whatever could have been done good or wrong with it, this was going to be an easy win in the end just because the return of a Star Wars icon like Boba Fett was destined to steal the scene anyway.
Still I didn't like the gratuitous violence that (as usual) Rodriguez felt so necessary to tell his part of the story, I mean all those slashing and armors fragments flying al around, and especially a couple of shots where the camera indulged few seconds too much on a smashed helmet or a dead stormtrooper body. Pulp Wars uh..?
Melee combats have always been a Star Wars trademark, still coreography and visual storytelling never needed graphic violence to bring to life the most epic Star Wars fights, action and pathos. We have been through mutilations and body slashing before in this universe, but always with a certain narrative style.
Besides the fact that this is still a show and a franchise for the whole family, little kids included, gratuitous violence remains just that. Not sure why the production let this pass without any apparent restriction, but at least Rodriguez spared us some blood splatter so in the end should we even be thankful somehow I guess?
Plus I found some other weaknesses in the screenplay that gets streched a bit too thin for me in the central part of the story, where the more stormtroopers lands, Mando goes back and forth from Grogu always getting bounced back by the Force field, etc...well this is just what keeps happening for like ten minutes and to be honest is not exactly great writing, felt more again, like an excuse to have Rodriguez to carry on his smash and bash thing, which we all knew how good he is at..if only it didn't felt so misplaced in a Star Wars story. I remain with the feeling that this episode has been largely saved by the charisma and weight of a powerful character like Boba Fett that luckily managed to eclipse all the rest.

[8.1/10] For the entirety of this season, Kim Wexler, and the audience, have been waiting for Jimmy McGill to genuinely deal with his brother’s death, to confront it in some way, rather than moving on as though nothing happened. From the season premiere, where he brushed off Howard’s tortured confession with a happy air, to last week’s raging out, we’ve seen Jimmy sublimate his feelings about Chuck and his brother’s death. We’ve seen him repress them, run from them, and act out because of them, but never really face them head on.

Those feelings are at the core of “Winner”, the finale of Better Call Saul’s fourth season. The latest scheme from Kim and Jimmy requires Jimmy to cry crocodile tears at Chuck’s grave on the anniversary of his death, to get earnestly involved in the scholarship grants made in Chuck’s name, to loudly but “anonymously” throw a party for the dedication of the Chuck McGill memorial law library and seem too broken up to enjoy it. It’s all a big show, to attract as many members of the local bar as possible, in the hopes that word will get back to the committee judging his appeal for reinstatement as a lawyer.

It is an effort to put on grief, wear it like a mask, for self-serving purposes. The knock on Jimmy, the thing that held him back in his first hearing, was a lack of remorse or concerning or mournfulness about his brother. So he and Kim send every signal imaginable to the legal community, in lugubrious tones, that Jimmy is a broken man still shaken up by his brother’s passing, only withholding mention of Chuck because the memory is too painful to bear.

As usual, it’s a good plan! It’s hard to know for sure whether the signs of Jimmy’s faux grief make it back to the review board, but they at least seem to be effective on his immediate prey. And Kim is there by his side, shooting down his more outlandish ideas, workshopping his speech to the committee, and helping her partner mislead people in the hopes of regaining something that was taken away from him.

But the key to it all working is Jimmy’s speech to the review board. He goes in with a plan to recite Chuck’s letter to him. Jimmy wants to let his brother’s eloquence and feeling carry the day so that he doesn't have to put on that mask of true feeling and seem insincere. But he departs from the script. He improvises. He offers what sounds like an honest assessment of his relationship with his brother, the reasons why he became a lawyer, the difficulty of gaining Chuck’s approval, the truths about Chuck’s demeanor and the hardships their sibling relationship faced at times.

The the impact of those words is heightened by the karaoke cold open that shows Jimmy as needling but caring, Chuck as condescending but proud, and the two of them as loving siblings. It clearly moves the review board. It causes Kim to wipe away a tear. And you’d have to be made of stone to sit in the audience and not feel something as Jimmy offers what sounds like a heartfelt and honest eulogy for his brother and their relationship.

But it’s a canard, a put-on, a lie. It is an echo of similar faux-sentimental assessments from Chuck, and once again, I almost believed it. Jimmy revels in having put one over on the review board. His cravenness about tugging their heartstrings astounds Kim, underlining her worst fears about the man she loves. After tearfully echoing the passage from his brother’s letter, about his pride in sharing the name McGill, Jimmy asks for a “doing business as” form to practice under a pseudonym instead. Saul Goodman, scruple-free lawyer to the seedy underbelly of Albuquerque, is born out of the ashes of his brother’s life and name.

There was no truth in Jimmy’s seemingly sincere pronouncements. There was no outpouring of grief or real feeling in that confessional moment, or if there was, it was anesthetized and calibrated to be used for dishonest purposes. For ten episodes, we’ve been waiting for Jimmy to acknowledge what his brother meant to him in some genuine way, and instead, he gives us, the review board, and most notably Kim, what turns out to be just another performance.

It is, in a strange way, a negative image of how Mike behaves in this episode. When he speaks to Gus about Werner’s disappearance, he seeks mercy on his friend’s behalf, trying to avoid a mortal response from his employer. He pleads caution, forgiveness, the possibility of correction. But when he speaks to Werner himself, he’s colder, angrier, more taciturn and practical in the way we’ve come to expect as the default for Mr. Ehrmantraut. He too has a divide between the face he presents in his profession and the one he presents to his erstwhile friend.

But at least “Winner” gives us some good cat-and-mousing in that effort. For all the heady material in Better Call Saul, it’s hard not to enjoy the petty thrills of detective work and chases gone wrong all the more. Seeing Mike pose as a concerned brother in law, and piece together where Werner’s likely to be is an absolute treat. And the way he manages to loses Lalo Salamanca -- with a gum in the ticket machine ploy -- is a lot of fun.

Lalo himself, though, really drags this portion of the episode down. He’s a little too cartoony of an antagonist on a heightened but still down-to-earth show. The fact that he crawls through the ceiling like he’s freaking Spider-Man was patently ridiculous. And his single-minded pursuit of Mike and ability to ferret details out just as well veered too far into the realm of contrivance. I appreciate the promise of greater friction to come between Gus and Mike’s operation and the Salamancas, but the bulk of Lalo’s business in this one was unnecessary, and kept Nacho, who’s been underserved in general this season, on the sidelines.

Still, it leads to a tragic, moving, heartfelt scene between Mike and Werner where what needs to be done is done. Between Werner’s naive requests to see his wife, Mike’s matter of fact resignation about what needs to happen, and Werner’s slow realization of the position he’s in all unspools slowly and painfully.

The upshot of it is simple though. Mike found a friend, and he has to kill him. There’s sadness in Mike’s eyes, evident beneath the anger that it came to this. There’s pain in Werner’s, and for yours truly, when Werner tells Mike that he thought his little escapade would result only in frustration but ultimately forgiveness and understanding from Mike, because they’re friends.

There’s not room for friends in this line of work, at least not under Gus Fring. Ultimately, it’s not up to Mike, and underneath the stars of New Mexico, at a distance, with a spark and a silhouette, we see him have to end the life of someone he’d rather let go, because it’s his job. Werner is the first man that Mike kills for Gus, but he won’t be the last. And it all starts with a man who made one mistake, that can’t be forgiven, because the powers that be would never allow it.

That’s what ties Mike’s portion of the episode to Jimmy’s. Jimmy delivers what is basically the Saul Goodman Manifesto to a young woman who was denied one of the Chuck McGill scholarships since she was caught shoplifting. He tells her that chances at respectability like that scholarship are false promises, dangled in front of lesser-thans to convince them they have a shot when they were judged harshly before they even stepped in the door. The system is stacked against you. The rules are to their benefit. So don’t abide by them. Make your success without them. Do what you have to do. Rub their nose in your success rather letting yourself be cowed by something unfair and biased against you. The world will try to define you by one mistake, but fight back and don’t let them win.

That’s a comforting worldview, one that lets the viewer off the hook to some degree. We want to like Jimmy. He’s affable. He’s fun. He’s good at what he does. It’s easy to buy in Jimmy’s own sublimated self-assessment -- that the white shoed system is unwilling to overlook less credentialed but hard-working individuals who’ve had missteps but overcome them, so he has to fight dirty. It’s tempting to buy into that narrative -- that the people with the power aren’t playing fair, so why should he? Why shouldn’t scratch, claw, fight, and cut corners along the way to getting what he deserves?

But the truth is that “the system” hasn’t done much to keep Jimmy down. Howard Hamlin wanted to give him a job after he became a lawyer. Davis & Main gave him every opportunity to succeed. Even the disciplinary committee is not unreasonable in questioning Jimmy’s penitence when he offers no remorse for the person he hurt with his scheme. Jimmy’s made plenty of his own mistakes, but it’s not “them” trying to hold Jimmy McGill down; it’s “him.”

That’s the trick of this season finale. Despite all the put-ons and subterfuge, Jimmy does genuinely reckon with the death of his brother, he just does it in the guise of unseen forces set against him rather than a cold body in the cold ground. It’s Chuck who tried to keep Jimmy from being on the same level as him. It’s Chuck who instigated the disciplinary proceedings that continue to be a thorn in Jimmy’s side. It’s Chuck who judged his younger sibling solely on his mistakes, who overlooked his hustle, who saw those missteps as all that Jimmy was or could be. When Jimmy rails against the system that he sees as holding him down, when he uses that as an excuse to color outside the lines, he’s really railing against the brother, and his feelings of anger and pain and grievance, that no longer have a living object of blame to sustain them.

Because Jimmy has to be the winner. If Jimmy is denied his reinstatement, if a young woman with a checkered past but a bright future can’t earn a scholarship in his brother’s name, if it’s ultimately judged that someone like Jimmy isn’t allowed to be in the profession of someone like Chuck, then it means that Chuck won, and Jimmy can’t bear that.

Despite the loss of his sibling, we only see Jimmy truly cry once this season. It’s not in front of the review board. It’s not in a quiet moment with Kim. It’s in his car, by himself, when the engine won’t start, when he feels stymied, when it seems like the forces Chuck set in motion will pull him under for good, cosmically confirming his brother’s harsh assessment of him.

There is grief in Jimmy McGill, pain caused by a severe loss. But that loss didn’t happen when Chuck died. It happened when Chuck broke his heart, turned him away, told him that he didn’t matter. As with others on T.V. this year, death didn’t mean the loss of a confidante for Jimmy; it meant the end of the possibility of approval, of pride, of the sort of family relationship Jimmy had always wanted and thought he might one day gain.

There is truth in those tears behind the wheel of an off-color sedan, a mourning in private to contrast with the show he puts on in public. And Saul Goodman -- the real Saul Goodman -- is born. Because if Jimmy couldn’t earn his brother’s love, then at least he can win, he can try to become what Chuck never thought he would, reach heights his brother never reached, no matter what lies he has to tell, what corners he has to cut, or who he has to hurt or deceive to get there. That’s Jimmy’s truth now; that’s his response to his Chuck’s death, and that’s the force that moves him from the decency and concern of the man we meet at the beginning Better Call Saul to the amoral, win-at-all-costs mentality that comes with the new name that distinguishes him from his brother.

[9.8/10] One of the kindest things you can say about Better Call Saul is that it rarely feels like Breaking Bad anymore. Sure, there’s still stories that intersect with the cartel, and a prequel to the war between Gus and the Salamancas, and the time-honored practice of writing your characters into a corner and forcing themselves to figure a way out of it. But despite its roots, Better Call Saul has become its own thing, with its own voice, own world, and own style that’s connected to the story of Walter White, but distinct from it.

And yet, something about “Bagman” feels distinctively Breaking Bad-esque. Maybe it’s that Vince Gilligan is in the director’s chair. Maybe it’s so much time spent beneath the New Mexico sun. Maybe it’s the tale of an uncommonly common schmuck crossing paths with drug-runners and getting more than he bargained for. Whatever it is, stranding Saul and Mike in the desert wouldn’t feel out of place on Better Call Saul’s predecessor.

The sand-swept isolation calls to mind Walt and Jesse’s similar struggles in “4 Days Out.” The small scale personal story told within a larger moment makes “Bagman” feel strikingly like “Fly.” Hell, for folks whose prestige television memories run back twenty years ago, the episode has a whiff of Christopher and Paulie stuck in the Pine Barrens.

There’s a reason television shows, not just Breaking Bad, return to these sorts of stories of struggle and isolation and mutual survival. They give creators the chance to put characters through hell, challenges that they may or may not be prepared to face, and in those challenges, reveal them.

Because the episode reveals Saul Goodman. It humbles him. It both brings him down to one of his lowest points, his willingness to die and give up and fail in a way the crafty huckster never has before, only to build him back up when he’s reminded what’s at stake. This episode isn’t Jimmy McGill’s finest hour, but it may be Better Call Saul’s.

The setup for the episode comes from an off-hand comment in last week’s outing. Lalo needs seven million dollars to make bond and taps Saul to pick it up for him. There’s a logic there. The Cousins are too hot to avoid suspicion from the Salamancas’ competitors. Nacho is reliable, but Lalo correctly intuits that this kind of money would be enough to send him packing. Jimmy is too plain, too apart from these internecine squabbles, to arouse that kind of suspicion, so he’s nominated for the job.

He doesn't want it though. He knows it’s dangerous. He told Kim he wouldn’t do it. But he bargains his way to a hundred thousand dollar commission and can’t bear to turn that kind of money. Jimmy tries to break it to his wife gently, plying her with fajitas and old el paso (exotic!), except that Kim knows better. She is aghast. She practically demands that he back out. She all but pleads with him, please that Jimmy, naturally, ignores.

And why wouldn’t he? Saul Goodman is invinceable. He has never found a scrape or a tight spot that he couldn’t wriggle his way out of. He is, as he told Howard last week, a god. So why not ramble into the desert, take a pick-up from murderous crime bosses, and drive away crooning a bastardized version of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? No fuss, no muss.

Until, of course, everything goes pear shaped.

The striking thing about “Bagman” is not just that this plan goes horribly wrong. It was practically destined to. Rivals, or simple opportunists, tipped off by a mole in a Salamanca safehouse, ambush Saul, there’s a firefight that leaves him cowering and in shock, until Mike saves the day. This isn’t the first exchange of gunfire on Better Call Saul or the first scheme that hit a major bump for Jimmy.

What stands out, though, is how ill-equipped he is to handle this. Normally Jimmy is the expert, the resourceful planner, who uses his silver tongue and conman instincts to work something out. Here, though, he has nothing to fall back on, nothing to do, but contemplate his own hubris. Bullet barrages are not his game. Survivalist treks through the desert are not his specialty. Saul is, in short, completely out of his depth, in a way we’ve never really seen before.

But Mike isn’t. Mike is very much in his element. One of the great features of episodes like this one is that forcing two people to work together like highlights the differences between them. Mike is, in his own way, just as talented and resourceful as Jimmy is. As his Private Investigator routine showed, he can even pull a con just like Saul can.

The difference is that Mike is tough. He is determined, with a background in special forces that makes him resilient in these circumstances. He came prepared for this in a way that Jimmy didn’t. He was ready for contingencies and failsafes that Jimmy wasn’t. And even he is tested and pushed to his limits. What does that leave for a softie like Jimmy McGill?

It leaves a man to be brought low by his failure to realize what he’s getting into. Gilligan uses the tricks of the camera not only to once again show us the scenic beauty of the New Mexico landscape, but to contrast this colorful shnook, at home in the circles where he operates, from the harsh environs he now finds himself wholly unprepared to deal with.

Gilligan shows The Cousins looming on either side of a close up of the back of Jimmy’s head, creating the image of intimidation. He gives us Mike and Saul wandering through a valley as the clouds sweep overhead, communicating how small they are in the far stretches of this place. He uses glow sticks to light their faces in different colors, providing high contrast so we see every weathered line. He puts the camera in the field of vision of a cactus, a shoe, or a hole in the ground, forcing us to look upon our heroes from unnatural angles, dwarfed by what’s around them. He highlights the unforgiving, if gorgeous, features of this arid deathtrap that threatens to tear down the seasoned vet and the hapless civilian in turn.

In the midst of that struggle, the show stealthily nods to little symbols, little pieces of who Jimmy and Mike have been and what led them to this moment, as so many of them end up either lost or just what the pair need in a given moment.

Mike saves Jimmy’s life with a sniper’s rifle, presumably the same one he bought to kill Hector in “Klick.” When he packs up what’s worth scavenging from Jimmy’s car, he takes the gas cap, likely having used it to track Jimmy just as Gus tracked him in “Mabel.” The Mike we see resolutely trudging his way through the desert is the product of so much, some things we’ve seen, and a great deal we haven’t, but those things have made him better able to face this moment.

Instead, Jimmy sees the things that have defined him slowly stripped away. His mismatched colored Suzuki Esteem ends up flipped into a ditch. The “Second Best Lawyer” mug Kim gifted him, one he’s desperate to hang onto, ends up with a bullet through it. He sweats through one of his colorful suits and strips it for protection against the penetrating rays of the sun. His perfectly manicured image and visage of self-assured confidence gives way to a blistered, sunburnt wretch, laid low and shown what he cannot simply bluff his way through.

But the ties to events past go beyond the tools that Mike and Saul lose or use in the process. There’s a brotherly vibe about the two of them together, Mike grumpily herding Jimmy along like a pestersome younger sibling he’s reluctantly responsible for. The glowsticks the two share while “camping” help set a mood, letting Gilligan up the contrast and show the weathered lines of each of these men’s faces. But it also conjures the image of Jimmy and Chuck as young boys, lit by a similar light in “Lantern”, and comparison that becomes all the more salient when Mike wraps himself up in a “space blanket” to save off the cold, something that Jimmy can’t bring himself to partake in for obvious reasons.

There’s a deeper connection there too, though neither of them fully knows it. Saul tells Mike that Kim will be worrying about him, and Mike is aghast that Saul let his wife in on what he’s up to here. Jimmy protests that Kim’s smart enough not to do anything rash (a faith Kim echoes to Lalo), but Mike just gives him an incredulous look. Mike tells Jimmy that he’s made Kim a part of the game now, something that Kim identifying herself to Lalo reinforces.

That’s scary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, for seasons now, Better Call Saul fans have been on pins and needles hoping that Kim survives. The fact that she’s implicated, even tangentially, that Lalo knows her by sight, makes her survival of the series that much more perilous. It’s scarier, though, because Mike knows full well that you can’t just be lightly involved and float above this kind of muck. He watched his son try to be in it without being a part of it, and saw where that leaves you and them. His skepticism is an admonition and a cosmic warning for Kim.

But when Jimmy’s latest shortcut has failed, when his effort to work smarter not harder has left him losing packs of hundred dollar bills, pulling spines out of his foot, and melting in the sun, it’s the thought of Kim’s well-being that keeps him going.

Mike gives him what can only become his signature speech of the series, about not caring whether he lives or dies, but choosing to go on because there’s people whose lives he wants to make better. Mike has been through some shit, crawled his way out of it, and had every reason to tap out on the other end. But he has Stacey and Kaylee, and he has been willing to dirty himself and fight through the muck, to keep them safe and supported. It is as clear a statement of purpose as we’re likely to get from the famously taciturn survivor.

Jimmy takes the critique to heart. Rather than hide or give up, he swallows his pride and wraps himself in the space blanket, gaining the attention of the criminals trying to hunt them down. This is not a slick con or a clever ruse. It’s a desperate ploy, one where Jimmy is willing to make himself bait, to put his life on the line, in the hopes that it will see him through this and get him back to Kim, hopefully with the money and wherewithal to make her life better too.

The sequence that follows is incredible. Despite knowing that both characters survive, Gilligan draws out the tension and terror as a car bears down on Jimmy and Mike lies in wait with his rifle. A missed shot, a swerving car, an upturned chassis, and a newly-determined foil-wrapped man who can’t even look at any of it, leads to the heart-pumping catharsis of an episode’s worth of character choices bound up in a rollicking climax.

In the end, Jimmy is willing to face his lowest moments, debase himself to make it through this, because Mike reminds him of whom he’s doing this for. He’ll swaddle himself in the shining memories of his dead brother to catch the gangsters’ eye. He’ll drink his own urine out of a water bottle branded with the law firm he swindled. He will make himself bait, the last resort of a man with nothing left to offer. And when it works, he will trudge on, having shed the niceties and pretensions and pride that made him think he was better than this, or capable of this.

The stock and trade of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad is change and self-realization. More than the arid trappings, more than the isolated chance for two characters to measure themselves against one another, that is what makes “Bagman” of a piece with our first televised journey to Albuquerque. Amid sand and blood and piss, Jimmy receives one last wake up call, one last chance to change his path, one last chance to remember who it’s worth making that choice for.

[9.0/10] It’s just supposed to be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. You don’t get sentimental. There are practical reasons to do this thing, reasons that, coincidentally, involve your continued safety and freedom.

But then you look at the person standing across from you, a person whose joy or pain matters to you, and suddenly you can’t pretend that this is all just a ministerial act, just a necessary concession to the gods of bureaucracy or the legal system. Instead, it becomes something meaningful, something personal, that has an emotional import and connection that makes it more than just business as usual.

So yeah, Kim and Jimmy are married now. After fans reeled from last week’s cliffhanger, it turns out their union isn’t a last desperate act of mutual self-immolation or an impulse borne of bad family lessons. It’s a means of protection, so that if Kim is implicated in Jimmy’s lies once again, she can never be compelled to testify against him as her husband.

And yet, my favorite moment in an episode not short on great moments comes when the two of them face one another in some dingy courtroom, enduring the world’s least romantic wedding ceremony and, against all odds, they’re both moved by it. It’s an outstanding piece of acting from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who hardly say a word in the scene, but whose faces and subtle changes in expression let slip that however much these two people themselves this wedding is a practicality, it is actually a fleeting moment of romantic transcendence for two people who, whatever their problems, do genuinely love one another.

It sets the tone for “JMM”, an episode where people try to keep things professional, detached, and calm, until it’s contrasted with something much more personal, much more piercing, that wins out.

That’s certainly true for Kim. The episode doesn't spare us the aftermath at Mesa Verde in the wreckage of Saul’s stunt last week. “JMM” involves Kim and Rich low-key groveling before a miffed Kevin Wachtell, all but ready to fire their firm. The partners do the respectful, deferential thing, evincing the sort of demeanor that’s expected between lawyers and their clients, and take responsibility for the failures that led to Wachtell and his company getting fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars by Saul. And all it gets them is a dismissive, perturbed kiss off from Kevin, along with the admonition that Kim can do better than her shady beau.

But after walking out the door, Kim decides that she won’t take that lying down. She barges her way back in and is frank with Kevin, about how she really feels, in a way her deferential act wasn’t. She tells him that time and again they advised him against every step that led down this path, and he rejected their advice and barged ahead. It’s not entirely true (or at least omits how much fuel Kim threw on the fire), but she challenges Kevin, approaches him candidly and directly and, most important of all, personally. He respects that and, with a terse but telling response that he’ll see her on Thursday, lets her know that she’s keeping the business.

That directness matters. It builds on a frankness, a realness, that Kevin respects in Kim far more than all the fancy degrees and smarty pants advisors he low-key loathes given his faux-blue collar roots. Truth and honesty gets to him in a way that the usual routine in this situation doesn't and wouldn’t.

There’s a similar contrast between the professional and the personal in Gus’s part of the episode. His first appearance in “JMM” is in a bland boardroom meeting, where fast food CEOs are golf clapping over quarterly percentage increases and plastically delighting over the unprecedented advent of spicy curly fries (which, in fairness, do look pretty tasty).

But the tenor of the conversation changes when we see Gus, Lydia (!), and Peter Schuler behind closed doors. Breaking Bad fans will remember Herr Schuler as the Madrigal exec who had an...unfortunate reaction to the DEA’s investigation. “JMM” plants the seeds for that fatalistic response to external pressure. Schuler is deep in the muck on this, helping to fund Gus’s operation and far enough into it to know and worry about the threat posed by Lalo and the cartel. He’s panicked over auditors, desperate not to get caught, and ready to throw in the towel.

That is, until Gus makes it personal. I don’t want to speculate too deeply about the friendship that Gus and Schuler share, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy to their interactions back at the hotel. Gus persuades his benefactor to stay in the fight by holding him by the arm, looking him (and by extension, the audience) in the eye, and calling back to a shared history together. It’s that gesture, that remembrance, that keeps Schuler mollified enough to give Gus a little more rope, a little more time, far removed from the practiced smiles of the boardroom.

It’s personal for his mole too. Nacho ends up helping Gus burn down one of his own restaurants, under orders from an imprisoned Lalo, to keep the pressure on for the Salamancas and to keep up appearances for Fring. It is, as always, a cool and cathartic sequence on this show, and Gus’s chicken slide grease explosion (which he cooly walks away from, naturally), is a visual highlight.

But for Nacho, however cool this may be, it is something he does not out of loyalty or anger or a sense of rivalry, but because it’s just his job. It’s the necessary evil to protect the thing he actually cares about -- his father. In his meeting with Mike, he tells his new handler that he wants out, that he wants to whisk his dad away somewhere that the cartel can’t get him, because the separation from his “career” and his family is getting thinner by the second.

At the same time, Mike is finding peace on that front. If it weren’t for Kim and Jimmy’s strange but endearing wedding, Mike’s interludes with his granddaughter and daughter-in-law would be the sweetest thing in the episode. He reads to his son’s little girl. He reminisces with Stacey about his boy’s elementary school age antics. And he tells her that he’s better, that he’s accepted what his professional situation is and doesn't want to fight it anymore. More than anyone in the show, Mike is able to find equilibrium by accepting the “hand he’s dealt” in his job, and enjoying the private, personal things that job (hopefully) exists far away and apart from.
He does, however, still have a job to do, and right now that means getting Lalo out of prison so that Gus can force him south of the border where it’s harder for Lalo to call the shots. (And hey, if it gives Gus a chance to take the guy out, all the better). That leads to Mike crossing paths with Saul for the first time in a long time, feeding Saul the dirt (which Mike himself created), to get Lalo out on bail and back to Mexico.

Jimmy is genuinely conflicted about it. As ready, willing, and able as he’s been to represent the, shall we say, less than reputable members of the community, becoming a “friend of the cartel” is a horse of a different color. He says as much to Kim in a heartening moment of honesty and candor between them. He thinks about the money, “ranch in Montana” money, but when she asks him if it’s what he wants, he says no. It’s about the thrill of the chase, and about making a life for and with the people he cares about with Jimmy, not necessarily the size of the bankroll. Money’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself for him.

Still, Mike shows up on his doorstep, notes a mysterious benefactor, and between that and the intimidation of a scary crime lord telling him it’s better to be in front of the judge than the cartel, he does what’s expected of him as a zealous advocate and professional. He uses the info that the prosecution’s star witness was coached by “some P.I.” to cast the judge’s ire on the state, and deploys a phony wife and family to show ties to the community. It works! Despite facing a murder charge, Lalo receives a bond and can afford it despite a hefty price tag.

But something’s eating at Jimmy through all of this. In contrast to the fake fiance and moppets he scares up to sway the judge, Jimmy looks across the aisle at the real family of the victim. He sees a poor kid’s mother crying in the courtroom, where he’s helping a cold blooded killer evade justice. Even when it’s done, he peaks at them from around a corner, with his reflection on the marble helping to represent the duality of him in this moment.

It’s too neat and clean to divide this man into Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. There’s elements of each in the other. But there’s always been a side of the man whose born initials are “JMM” that wants to win at any cost, and a side of him that genuinely cares for people and can feel their pain. There are so many exit ramps in Jimmy’s life, so many places where he could have changed directions and not become the shyster we met in Breaking Bad, and this moment, where the palpable, deeply personal pain felt by this poor family cuts through his typical mercenary craftiness is one of them.

But it’s not to be. Howard Hamlin intervenes, revokes his job offer, and calls Jimmy out for his recent antics with bowling balls and prostitutes and other schemes to mess with Howard’s life. To say that Saul reacts poorly is an understatement. He lashes out at Howard, accusing him of killing Chuck, declaring that a job at HHM is beneath him, loudly and publicly promoting himself as a god, whose stature and grandiosity are so great as to make Howard’s piddling little offer to him infinitesimal.

That’s the thing about Jimmy. He didn’t become a lawyer because of a supposed deep respect and admiration for the law like Chuck. He didn’t do it as a way out and a way forward like Kim. His reasons were always personal. He wanted to impress his brother. He wanted to make Chuck proud. His business life and his private wants were always mixed and matched.

Only here, that motivation has changed. There’s still good in Jimmy, the impulse to gaze at the mournful expressions of a victim’s loved ones and have it give him pause over whether he’s doing the right thing. But the polarity of the personal has changed for him. He’s no longer just in the legal business to earn Chuck’s respect or make a living or fund his dreams with Kim. Now he wants revenge, to show Chuck’s ghost, and every living manifestation of the people and institutions and norms that have made him feel “less than” and looked down upon his whole life that he’s better, and more important, bigger than everyone who once thought less of him.

For Jimmy it always starts out as business, as a transactional thing he does without real consideration. Then, time and again, he has that moment of pause, that moment of restraint, when he thinks about the emotional impact of his choices. But then, inevitably, his personal grievances, his perceived slights, the personal baggage he’s carried for so long, shoves him back toward being Saul Goodman. No deep look into someone’s eyes can change that, however much we might want it to.

[9.4/10] Really enjoyed this one. On the one hand, you have a just balls-to-the-walls Rick adventure. Him turning himself into a pickle, and having to climb to the top of the food chain by brain-licking his way to cockroach-based mobility, assembling a rat-based super-torso, and then make it out of the sewer is the kind of sci-fi weirdness I love from this show.

But then, Roiland & Harmon turn it up a notch, with Rick then finding his way inside some combination of Die Hard and Rambo, having to escape a secret and illegal compound run by a generic evil boss aided by a generic badass named “The Jaguar.” It’s the well-observed trope mashup and creativity that this show does well, mixed the inherent silliness that our hero is an ambulatory pickle. To top it off, it had the right details, like the enemy goons having superstitions about a pickle monster, and the Rube Goldberg traps Rick sets to defend itself.

The best part, though, is it’s not just empty violence or insanity for insanity stake. It’s a testament to how far Rick will go to avoid doing something he doesn’t want to do, particularly something he thinks is beneath him, and especially something he thinks might force him to confront the ways in which he’s created problems for his family.

Getting Susan Sarandon to play the counselor is a complete coup, and the writing is perfect, as Dr. Wong quickly teases out exactly what’s wrong with The Smiths’ family dynamic, Beth deflecting the real issue, and the kids being cautious but wanting to identify the problem. It’s the show coming clean about its psychological perspective on its characters, which could be a little too direct, but feels right with the tone of the episode.

After all, Beth idolizes her father and so justifies everything he does despite the fact that, as Dr. Wong points out, he doesn’t reward emotion or vulnerability and emotion and in fact punishes it, making Beth worried to call him to the carpet for anything lest he run away again. And Dr. Wong’s also right about Rick, the way he’s caught between his brilliant mind as a blessing and a curse and incapable of doing the work to be good or get better because it’s just that -- work, which bores him.

But what’s great and also terrible is how that accurate diagnosis doesn’t change anything. Morty and Summer both meekly suggest that the school-mandated session was helpful and they want to do it again, and Rick and Beth completely ignore them, the same way they ignore all their problems and opportunities to make things better, when their status quo is unpleasant but comfortable and more importantly familiar. It’s another episode that shows how well this show knows its characters and their hangups, while inserting fecophilia gags to lighten the tone, and a gonzo set of action sequences that actually manages to dovetail with the deeper, darker message of the episode.

It’s all part of the amazing balancing act that Rick and Morty pulls off on a weekly (or at least biannual) basis, and this installment stands out for its frankness about the problems facing two of its main characters, its creativity in dramatizing them, and the sadness of the rut they allow themselves to be stuck in, dragging poor Morty and Summer down with them. But hey, the Jaguar saves the day in the tag from the Con-Chair-To, so there’s hope yet!

Yeah I mean, it is very much that movie. If you want my unfiltered opinion: it's glossy & loud, it's discount Tarantino/Ritchie, it's engineered to be forgotten about almost instantly, it's very Youtube reviewer friendly, it’s edited for people with no attention span, it’s postmodern and cringy; it's all of that. It's aiming to be a 6, and I was kinda expecting it to hit that target given how much I was into David Leitch' previous directorial effort. Unfortunately, this is hampered by the fact that it very much feels like a product of the pandemic. I'm pretty sure everything was shot on sound stages, and you can really tell, because the effects are dogshit. The same goes for the action, most of it feels like it was choreographed based on what was possible for the day. It's a shame, because good visuals and punchy action are two of the key ingredients if you want to make this kind of movie work. Now, its biggest saving grace are the characters and some of the comedy. I think most of the characters are quite well done and colorful (props to the writing and actors), especially the duo played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree-Henry (again, even if they feel like they walked straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie). It did make me laugh occasionally, but there's also a lot of cringe in it, especially with its obnoxious use of bathos and cameos by people I didn't need to see. I'm also getting pretty sick of the Marvelization of movie dialogue, I could’ve sworn some of Pitt’s lines in this were written with Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in mind. The story itself is a mess pretty much right from the start and completely flies off the rails in the third act (no pun intended). I'm not sure if that's due to the writing or editing though. In true Tarantino fashion it's told out of order, but here it doesn't enhance the experience in a positive way. I don't know, I'd wait for this to appear on streaming, it's only occasionally fun and not really worth of the big screen.

4/10

[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.

Could not take it seriously with the robots' abilities that don't even exist in the year in which this was set, let alone the slew of appliances with "PAL Chip installed" that could do completely ridiculous things. Not one of these devices should have been able to pose a threat, unless they were intentionally manufactured with features that would never apply to any intended use of the product.*

I can ignore little details that are embellished or ignored for the purpose of telling a better story, but when the entire premise of a film set in the present rests on impossible and unrealistic technology? Pass.

Even better, no one thought of just… finding another PAL retail store when the mall's router was destroyed with the upload at 98% complete? This film's entire spectacle rests on its characters' poor decision-making and lack of forethought—including the defective robots that join the gang and tell them about the solution.

I'll admit that the story is a bit heartwarming, but it's nothing new. It's also trying too hard regarding commentary on the influence of technology in today's world. Several lines of dialogue are extremely heavy-handed, as if the writers expect the audience to understand nothing and need to have the "moral" of the story handed to them.

Ugh. I wanted to love it. At least I can steal some playlist entries from the soundtrack.

* — See: Furbies that spit plasma beams, laptops that could close on your hands and crush them, refrigerators that walk… I could go on and on about that mall scene.

[8.4/10] We live in the finite. Everyone reading this has a limited amount of time on this plane of existence. Maybe you believe there’s an eternal paradise waiting on the other end. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you believe that we’re simply waves whose essence is returned to the fabric of the universe. Whatever you believe, almost all of us can agree that whatever we have here, our fragile world and fragile bodies, are not built to last.

That is both terrifying and maddening: terrifying because, like Janet, none of us truly knows what’s on the other side, and maddening because there is so much to do and see and experience even in this finite world, and given how few bearimies we have on this mortal coil, most of us will only have the chance to sample a tiny fraction of it.

So The Good Place gives us a fantasy. It’s not a traditional one, of endless bliss or perpetual pleasure or unbridled success. Instead, it imagines an afterlife where there’s time enough to become unquestionably fulfilled, to accomplish all that we could ever want, to step into the bounds of the next life or the next phase of existence or even oblivion at peace. The finale to Michael Schur’s last show, Parks and Recreation, felt like a dose of wish fulfillment, but with this ending, The Good Place blows it out of the water.

Each of our heroes receives the ultimate send-off. By definition, nearly all of them have found ultimate satisfaction, a sense of peacefulness in their existence that makes them okay to leave it, having connected with their loved ones, improved themselves, and accomplished all that they wanted to. If “One Last Ride” seemed to give the denizens of Pawnee everything they’d ever wanted, “Whenever You’re Ready” makes that approach to a series finale nigh-literal for the residents of The Good Place.

And yet, there’s a sense of melancholy to it all, if only because every person who emerges from paradise at peace and ready to leave, has to say goodbye to people who love them. Most folks take it in stride, with little more than an “oh dip” or an “aw shoot”, but there’s still something sad about people who leave loved ones behind, and whom the audience has come to know and love, bidding what is, for all intents and purposes, a final farewell.

But The Good Place finds ways to make that transcendent joy for each of our heroes feel real. Jason...completes a perfect game of Madden (controlling Blake Bortles, no less). He gets loving send-offs from his father and best friend. He enjoys one last routine with his dance crew. He inadvertently lives the life of a monk while trying to find the necklace he made for Janet. It is the combination of the idiotic, the sweet, and the unexpectedly profound, which has characterized Jason.

Tahani learns every skill she dreamed of mastering (including learning wood-working from Ron Swanson and/or Nick Offerman!). She connects with her sister and develops a loving relationship with her parents. And when it’s time to go, she realizes she has more worlds left to conquer and becomes an architect, a fitting destination for someone who was always so good at designing and creating events for the people she cares about. Hers is one of the few stories that continues, and it fits her.

Chidi doesn't have the same sort of list of boxes checked that leads him to the realization that he has nothing more to do. Sure, he’s read all of the difficult books out there and seemingly refined the new afterlife system (with help from the council) to where it’s running smoothly, almost on automatic. But his realization is more from a state of being happy with where everything is, with what he’s experienced.

He has dinner with his best friend and Eleanor’s best friends and has so many times. He’s spent endless blissful days with the love of his (after)life staring at the sunset. His mom kissed Eleanor and left lipstick on her cheek, which Eleanor’s mom wiped off. I love that. I love that it’s something more ineffable for Chidi, a sense of the world in balance from all the bonds he’s forged rather than a list of things he’s done. And I love that he felt that readiness to move on for a long time, but didn’t for Eleanor’s sake.

Look, we’re at the end of the series, and I’m still not 100% on board with Eleanor/Chidi, which is a flaw. But I want to like it. I like the idea of it. And I especially like the idea of someone being at peace, but sacrificing the need to take the next step for the sake of someone they love. The saddest part of this episode is Eleanor doing everything she can to show Chidi that there’s more to do, only to accept that the moral rule in this situation says that her equal and opposite love means letting him go. Chidi’s departure is hard, but his gifts to Eleanor are warm, and almost justify this half-formed love story that’s driven so much of the show.

Unfortunately, no matter how much peace he finds, Michael cannot walk through the door that leads to whatever comes next. So instead, he gets the thing he always wanted -- to become human, or as Eleanor puts it, a real boy. Ted Danson plays the giddiness of this to the hilt, his excitement at doing simple human things, the symbolism of him learning to play a guitar on earth, on taking pleasure in all the mundane annoyances and simple fun and things we meat-sacks take for granted. Each day of humanity is a new discovery for Michael, and there’s something invigorating about that, something heightened by his own delight at not knowing what happens next in the most human of ways.

The one character who gets the least indication of a next step is Janet. We learn that she is Dr. Manhattan, experiencing all of time at once. We see her accept Jason’s passing, hug our departing protagonists, and take steps to make herself just a touch more human to make her time with Jason a little more right. But hers is a story of persistence, of continued growth, in a way that we don’t really have for anyone else.

Along the way, the show checks in with scads of minor characters to wrap things up. We see the other test subjects having made it into The Good Place (or still being tested). We see Doug Forcett deciding to party hard now that he’s in Heaven. We see Shawn secretly enjoy the new status quo, and Vicky go deep into her new role, and The Judge...get into podcasts! As much as this show tries to get the big things right for all of its major characters, it also takes time to wrap up the little things and try not to leave any loose threads from four seasons of drop-ins across the various planes of existence.

That just leaves Eleanor. She takes the longest of any of the soul squad to be ready. She tries, becoming okay with Chidi’s absence. She overcomes her fear of being alone. But most importantly, she does what she’s come to do best -- help people better herself. There’s self-recognition in the way her final great act, the thing that makes her okay with leaving this plane and entering another, is seeing herself in Mindy St. Clair and trying to save her. The story of The Good Place is one of both self-improvement and the drive to help others do the same. Saving Mindy, caring about her, allows Eleanor to do both in one fell swoop.

So she too walks through the door, beautifully rendered as the bend between two trees in a bucolic setting. Her essence scatters through the universe, with one little brilliant speck of her wave, crashing back into Michael’s hands, reminding him of his dear friend, and inspiring him to pass on that love and sincerity back into the world. It is, as trite as it sounds, both an end and a beginning, something circular that returns the good deeds our protagonists have done, the good people they have become, into some type of cycle that helps make the rest of this place a little better.

Moments end. Lives end. T.V. shows end. The Good Place has its cake and eats it too, returning to and twisting key moments like Michael welcoming Eleanor to the afterlife, while cutting an irrevocable path from here through the crash of the wave. It embraces the way that the finite gives our existence a certain type of meaning, whether we have a million bearimies to experience the joys and wonders of the universe, or less than a hundred years to see and do and feel whatever we can. And it sends Team Cockroach home happy, wherever and whatever their new “home” may be.

In that, The Good Place is a marvel, not just because it told a story of ever-changing afterlife shenanigans, not just because it tried to tackle the crux of moral philosophy through an off-the-wall network sitcom, but because it ended a successful show, after only four seasons, by sending each of them into another phase of existence and made it meaningful. There’s a million things to do with our limited time on this planet, but watching The Good Place was an uplifting, amusing, challenging, and above all worthwhile use of those dwindling minutes, even if we’ll never have as many as Eleanor or Chidi, Michael or Tahani, Janet or Jason, or any of the other souls lucky enough to be able to choose how much eternity is enough.

[8.7/10] The close of “Something Beautiful” makes me think of a scene from “Nailed”, the penultimate episode of Season 2. In that episode, Chuck McGill confronts his brother and Kim about his suspected switcheroo with the Mesa Verde files. He impugns Jimmy’s character and says Kim should open her eyes. And he tells Kim that Jimmy did it for her, that it was a “twisted romantic gesture.”

But Kim defends Jimmy. She admits that he’s not perfect, but essentially argues that he’s a good person, a person she pities for how much he wants his brother’s love, a love that he’ll never get. She chastises Chuck for denying him that and judging him, for threatening to inflict such consequences on Jimmy, denying his theory as crackpot. But when she’s alone with Jimmy, she betrays her true feelings. She punches him in the arm. She expresses her frustration, because she’s no fool; she knows he did it, and she knows Chuck’s right -- he did it for her.

So when Kim returns to the offices of Mesa Verde, the crown jewel of her ill-gotten gains, and sees their vaunted “models” of their expansion plans, it’s overwhelming for her. The camerawork and editing is tremendous, zooming in on this miniature world and making it larger than life, especially with Kim’s place in it. She sees a tiny man and woman in front of the building, the sounds and the feelings rush back, and she can’t help but remember how this all started. It started with this man that she loves taking revenge on his brother on her behalf. That’s not something Kim Wexler can shake as easily as Jimmy seemingly can.

Sometimes you start something, and you don’t know how big it’s going to get, or the difficult places it’s going to take you. “Nailed” is also the episode where Mike knocked over one of Hector’s trucks. In a bitter echo of that scene, “Something Beautiful” opens with Gus’s henchmen recreating that tableau with Nacho and the dead body of Arturo, to make it look like the same goon who attacked Hector’s soldiers before have struck again. It is, in keeping with Gus’s M.O., a meticulous job. No detail is left unattended, and to complete the cover-up, they shoot Nacho in the shoulder and in the abdomen, leaving him to bleed in the desert with nothing but a phone call to the twins to potentially save his life.

There too, the scenes are beautiful, but harsh, as director Daniel Sackheim uses Nacho’s injury and rescue to show both the efficient brutality of Gus’s plan and his goons as Nacho is left to bake and bleed under the desert sun, and the impressionistic resplendence of the flashes of night-lit faces he sees on the operating table of the same veterinarian who associates with Mike and Jimmy.

After that vet gives Nacho his diagnosis and medical advice, he leaves Nacho with one last instruction -- “leave me out of this.” The vet says that the work with the cartel is too hot for him, and he wants out. It’s another bitter irony, because Nacho wants out too. He told his father he was trying. He wanted to keep his family from getting involved deeper with the Salamancas, deep into this morass. But like Kim, he’s too far into it now, and he’s suffering the physical and mental consequence of something he can’t escape from, that’s happened because of him.
And yet, as much as Nacho desperately want out, there are those who desperately want in. Gus, ever the mastermind, has made it so that the Salamancas are without leadership and supply on the streets is running thin. He gets to play the reluctant subordinate to Don Bolsa, agreeing over feigned protest that, if he must, he’ll find an alternative supply of meth with the Salamanca’s pipelines shut off for the time being, a contingency he has clearly been planning for some time. His almost undetectable smile while on the phone with Don Bolsa betrays it. While everyone else is scrambling, in too deep, Gus knows how to play the hand he’s dealt.

But this new situation requires him to go Gale, the latest Breaking Bad alum to appear on Better Call Saul. Gale is as delightfully geeky and puppy dog-like as always, singing along to a rondelay of chemicals sung to “Modern Major General”, reporting his results from the tests that Gus had him run, and practically begging for Gus to let him be the official Pollos Hermanos meth cook.

Gale is one of this universe’s more endearing inventions, to the point that his presence is a welcome little joy in an otherwise fairly heavy episode. It even makes me forgive the show’s increasing, and frankly kind of cheesy, willingness to dip back into the Breaking Bad pool. But here that crossover quality works, because we know Gale’s fate, and what lies in wait for him on the other side of that desperation to join up, the harsh realities that Nacho is facing as he wants out of what Gale wants into.

Sometimes, though, that life on the other side of the glass is just too appealing. That seems to be the case for Jimmy, who returns to the sort of small time hustles we saw him running with Marco back in the day. This time, it means replacing the secretly valuable hummel figurine owned by the copier salesmen he rejected in the last episode with a common, otherwise undetectable replacement, and pocketing the profits.

The ensuing sequence -- where Jimmy’s hired goon tries to make the swap, and inadvertently gets trapped hiding from the company’s owner, who’s in the doghouse with his wife -- is one of the funniest in the show so far. (It had echoes of “squat cobbler” with its absurdity.) The humdrum, almost cliché problems of the owner buying his wife a vacuum cleaner, listening to self-motivational tapes, and ordering pizza in the middle of the night while the would-be thief hides under a desk is a brilliant and hilarious setup, made funnier by how much patience Better Call Saul shows with it. And the coda, with Jimmy misdirecting the owner and rescuing his accomplice with little more than a coat hanger and a car alarm, is the icing on the cake.

But there’s more going on than just comedy here. Mike recognizes that when he turns down the job. He realizes that Jimmy’s after something else, something beyond just an easy score, and that’s a complication Mike is smart enough not to want to get involved in. Unlike Nacho, and unlike Kim, Mike knows when he’s walking into a briar patch he might never walk out of, and he’s been reminded recently enough that few things in the circles he runs in are as clean or “in and out” as he might hope. There’s warning signs going off about Jimmy, and though we know they won’t keep Mike away from the once-and-future Saul Goodman forever, they’re enough to keep him away for now.

And maybe that’s the same sort of realization that Kim is starting to have. At the end of the episode, Jimmy sees the piddling distribution Chuck left for him, reads a mildly condescending but still genuine and heartfelt letter from (so Jimmy knows it’s really from Chuck), and yet he’s nonplussed. Yet again, something that would seem to provoke some outpouring of emotion from Jimmy gets bupkus, while it’s Kim who breaks down and tears up and needs a minute.

Chuck’s letter talks about he and Jimmy’s bond as brothers, about the connection they share despite their differences, about the resilience and hustle Chuck admires in his younger sibling. And there’s two ways to take Kim’s wounded reaction to that.

One is a sense of guilt for having been the thing that motivated the rift between the McGills. Chuck told her it wasn’t her fault back in “Nailed” but he also told her that Jimmy did all this for her. As I’ve mentioned before, part of the larger story Better Call Saul has told thus far is of Kim slowly but surely replacing Chuck as the major person in Jimmy’s life. Maybe being reminded of what led to her getting Mesa Verde, of the bond between brothers that was severed on her account, is too much to bear.

But the other is that she realizes she picked the wrong side. The last time Kim was in Mesa Verde’s offices, she told her counterpart that all that had happened with Chuck at Jimmy’s disciplinary hearing was the tearing down of a sick man. In that scene in “Nailed”, Kim took Jimmy’s side over Chuck’s. Whatever the truth was, she believed that Jimmy’s heart was in the right place, that he was the victim, and that he was a good man.

Now, in the wake of Chuck’s suicide, maybe she’s starting to see his decency, maybe she’s starting to reevaluate the set of events that led her to this place, and her choice to be with a person who seems fine with them all. In “Something Beautiful”’s final image, we see only half of Jimmy’s face, the other half obscured by Kim’s closed door, and there’s symbolism in it. As perceptive as Kim is, she didn’t see the whole picture with Jimmy; she didn’t see the whole picture with Chuck. Now that it’s coming into focus, she finds herself so immersed in something awful, so bound up in it, and all she can do is buckle and try to bear it.

Breaking Bad has already shown us the fates of so many of these characters, how Jimmy, Gus, Gale, Mike, are all sucked in and battered by this world. But Better Call Saul leaves us people like Kim and Nacho, who we can only hope escape this terrible orbit in better shape than Chuck did.

[7.4/10] Jimmy McGill’s role in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first scenes in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee -- the mundane tasks of his life in the interregnum of his suspension. And in his last scene in the episode, he does the same things, remarking on his fish’s voracious appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.

The catch is that between that first feeding and the second, he found out his brother is dead.

I don’t know what Jimmy is feeling between those two moments. Better Call Saul and writer/showrunner Peter Gould play it close to the vest. He cries no tears. Despite his usual loquaciousness and bombast, he is uncharacteristically taciturn and reserved. And while he sports more of a hangdog expression than usual throughout the episode, he is something of a blank slate in the wake of such foundation-rocking news.

“Smoke” leaves you to wonder what’s going on between its protagonists’ ears. That is, as I’m fond of saying, a feature not a bug. There’s not a lot of talking in Better Call Saul’s Season 4 premiere. Instead, there’s a lot of mulling, a lot of concerned and affected faces, of siblings who look like they’re in shock, of culprits swallowing their anxieties, of bald heads bobbing over cubicle walls and sporting the same half frown that speaks authority and disdain with one downturned crinkle of the lip.

This series takes the time to show its characters thinking, and to let the audience fill in the gaps, or wonder what’s going on rather than explicating in heavy-handed terms what’s going through each and everyone’s heads.

That’s particularly true for Jimmy here. There are signs that Chuck’s death got to him. He sees the electronics scattered in the backyard and knows the events that felled his brother were part of a relapse. He shares in the once celebratory but now palliative shots that he once offered Kim, but still can’t sleep. He seems almost in a place of catatonia, of processing the enormous shock of his brother’s grim departure, in a state that could indicate numbness or contemplation or being overwhelmed or any number of the complicated emotions that attend grief.

The episode plays similarly coy at what’s motivating Mike Ehrmantraut. He quits his job as a parking attendant, seems poised to spend more time with his granddaughter, and has all the time in the world to sit at home and watch baseball games in his newfound spare time. But when he gets that first check from Madrigal for being a “security consultant,” something clicks inside of Mike, and he can’t leave well enough alone.

What follows is another one of Better Call Saul’s superlative sequences, where Mike proves that all you need is a badge, a clipboard, and the air of innate authority to go anywhere and do pretty much anything. It’s a visual feast as Mike skulks through a cubicle farm, rumbles through a maze of industrial shelves, and observes and corrects a host of Madrigal employees like he owns the place. It’s a sequence where the show’s dry sense of humor comes out, with Mike overhearing a breakroom debate over who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali before providing his eye roll-fueled but definitive answer. Whoever wins, Mike isn’t content to sit idly by, but uses his misadventures to advise the nearest Madrigal outpost on what and where it’s going wrong.

“Smoke” leaves it characteristically hazy why Mike is doing all this. Maybe Mike is, true-to-form, scoping out this arrangement. Despite Lydia’s warning that his “salary” is a rounding error, it’s possible that Mike wants to make sure both that he’s seen doing some security consulting in case anyone starts asking questions, and also wants to make sure the people he’s getting into bed with on this are on the up-and-up. It might also be that sense of honor, that if he’s receiving a service and paycheck from these people, he wants to do the job he’s being paid for, and perhaps even show Lydia (and by extension, Gus Fring) what they’re getting.

Or it may just be that Mike cannot sit still. We know from Breaking Bad that Mike stays active in his line of work, one way or another, for a long time to come. Even if we didn’t, he doesn't seem like the type of man who would be fulfilled by or satisfied with watching baseball and drinking beer all day for very long. Mike is good at what he does, and when you have a talent like he does, not to mention someone who seems to appreciate it, it’s hard to let it go to waste.

And Gus might be in need of Mike’s services very soon. The part of the episode involving him and Nacho is the most “Breaking Bad prequel” portion of these proceedings. It’s the straightforward conclusion to Nacho completing his plan to induce a reaction in his boss. It gives Gus the chance to artfully try to fill in the power vacuum that Hector’s incapacitation creates, lest war follow. And his henchman’s scoping of Nacho ditching the evidence suggest he’ll have an angle to play.

These scenes are fairly slight, doing more to clean up after Hector’s reaction in the previous episode and hint at what might be the offing than moving things along. They’re about teasing a war in the New Mexico drug scene, but more about Nacho’s state of mind. You feel his jangle nerves, his concerns about the storm that might be ahead, his worries that Gus or Juan Bolsa know what he did. The episode spend a great deal of time just letting the viewer watch Nacho grow anxious and stew.

The truth is that not much happens in “Smoke.” A hell of a lot happened in last season’s finale, without much, or in some cases any, time for denouement or for the show to catch its breath. So a good chunk of this premiere is purposefully light on incident, more about the fallout of those series-shifting events and the effect they’ve had on Nacho, Mike, and Jimmy than about the next big bang in the Better Call Saul timeline.

That timeline seems to be speeding up though. The Jimmy McGill we meet at the end of “Smoke” seems closer to the man we meet in Breaking Bad. For most of the episode, he is almost inscrutable, with it unclear whether he’s stunned or unaffected or somewhere in between in his flat affect throughout the proceedings.

But the episode contrasts him with Howard, who is clearly broken up about this, and it presents a strange flip. Howard seems like the family member, while Jimmy seems like the staid business partner. Howard reads back an admiring obituary, and Jimmy doesn't even want to listen to it. At the funeral, Jimmy is shaking hands with all of Chuck’s colleagues and contemporaries, while Howard is comforting Chuck’s almost widow.

And the clincher of all of this is how Howard waits for Jimmy after the funeral, so he can offer a confession. Howard blames himself for Chuck’s death, knowing that someone as deliberate as his former partner didn’t let the lantern erupt by accident. Howard is broken up over his belief that him forcing Chuck out of HHM set him down this path, and he is trying to bare his soul and clear his conscience by confiding in the brother whom he imagines would be most hurt by this.

But unbeknownst to Howard, that confession only confirms to Jimmy that he was the superseding cause of his brother’s demise, that Jimmy’s own tip off to the insurance company is what set this whole thing in motion. And yet, Jimmy doesn't care, or at least doesn't want to be seen to outwardly. In a move that prompts a brief but palpable moment of disbelief from Kim, Jimmy starts whistling and going through this day, the day his brother was laid to rest, like it’s any other day.

Who knows if this is Jimmy giving into the man he’ll eventually become, the one who won’t accept blame for anything and has a casual obliviousness to those who stand in his way. Who knows if this is the sort of thing that slowly but surely pushes Kim out of his life. Who knows if Chuck’s last words to him truly obliterated whatever sort of affection Jimmy might have had for his brother, or even convinced him to be the amoral slimeball that Chuck told him was his true nature which he should embrace.

We don’t know what’s going on in Jimmy’s head during “Smoke.” All we know is that it ends with a version of Jimmy McGill who seems closer to Saul Goodman than ever, who seems ready to brush off his own brother’s death because that’s just the way things are, who is calm and cool and unbothered by any of it. And we know that it begins with a Cinnabon Gene who is anything but, who is unnerved and frightened by something as simple as a mistyped social security number, or an Albuquerque air freshener.

We still know the beginning and what seems to be the end game for Jimmy McGill’s adult life, and we know the beginning and what seems to be the end of his mourning for his brother. But Better Call Saul honors the complexity of, and trusts its audience to figure out, what happens in between.

[9.1/10] If you graphed Walter White’s transition from mild-mannered science teacher to Heisenberg, there would be a few peaks and valleys, but it would pretty much be a straight, diagonal line. There were always these inciting events, these decision points, that pushed him further and further into becoming the man he eventually became. But the line between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman isn’t that neat. It’s more like a series of deepening parabolic arcs, where time and again, he reaches the brink of giving in, of becoming the shyster running cheesy ads on daytime television and linking up with criminals, and then he pulls back.

Because Jimmy has been fortunate enough to have wake up calls, to have people who pull him toward the light. Whether it’s Marco’s death or Chuck’s episode or Kim’s crash, there are moments that tell Jimmy he’s gone too far, that he needs to feed his better nature rather than settle into his Machiavellian talents. Those have been enough to keep him in the realm of the (at least mildly) righteous. Each time, some setback emerges that prompts him to gradually drift back to his flim-flamming ways, but time and again, he has the presence of mind to recognize that he’s in a bad place and hold back.

That’s one of the nice things about “Lantern,” the finale of Better Call Saul’s third season. It doesn’t overplay its hand on these sorts of moments. Kim doesn’t have some big monologue about how she’s been pushing herself too hard and it’s all Jimmy’s doing. Instead, she responds to Jimmy’s apology by declaring that she’s an adult and chose to get into the car. She comes close to jumping back into the breakneck schedule that brought her to that point and chooses to rent ten movies and actually relax and convalesce instead.

By the same token, Jimmy doesn’t have any long, drawn out confession or apologia. The look on his face, the held hand between him and Kim, the way he dotes on his friend and partner, says it all. “Lantern” plays the remorse, the realization, in Jimmy’s actions, not in the words he uses so often to bend and blister the truth. After fighting so hard to keep the office going, Jimmy immediately has a change of heart and says it doesn’t matter, setting that dream aside after seeing what it did to the woman he loved.

There’s a good deal of repentance to Jimmy here. He tries to make amends with Irene, to set things right with her and her friends, and continually comes up short. Until he reaches a strange epiphany. He admits to Kim that he’s only good at tearing things down, not at building them up, but then realizes that he can fix things by turning that quality against himself. So he uses that Jimmy McGill cleverness, this time setting up a ruse (that takes us back to chair yoga) and hot mic so he can stage a confession with Erin, the young Davis & Main associate we met back in Season 2. Jimmy applies that same manipulative quality to his own detriment, and it proves to be a clever solution to his attempts to correct his mistakes.

It’s not like Jimmy to be self-sacrificing, to make a move that will not only make him look bad, but effectively screw up the elder law niche he’d carved for himself in Albuquerque. That has the benefit of foreshadowing how Jimmy will need to find a new racket whenever his license is reinstated, but more importantly, it shows the lengths Jimmy is willing to go to, the surprisingly selfless moves he’s willing to make, for Kim and for Irene, in an effort to straighten out and fly right.

(Amid all of this fascinating, unexpected, but largely internal drama, it’s notable that Nacho’s portion of the episode is downright straightforward. The episode pays off the dummy pills it set up in “Slip”, and Hector’s debilitating infuriation at having to put his lot in with “The Chicken Man” established in “Fall”. There’s some minor tension in the scene where Nacho’s father seems poised to stand up to Hector but relents (with a great performance from Juan Carlos Cantu), a bit more when Nacho shows himself willing to train a gun on his boss rather than risk Hector hurting his father before his pill plan works, and the knowing look Gus offers after Hector succumbs. But for the most part, this is where the show simply dutifully knocks down what it previously set up.)

It ties into the symbolism that the episode is steeped in. “Lantern” opens on a young Chuck McGill reading to his brother by lantern light. He’s still supercilious (and it’s a great vocal mimic from the young actor), but the whistle of that gas lantern symbolizes the connection between the two siblings, the fact that despite Chuck’s issues, there is a light still burning for him.

That’s the difference between Chuck and Jimmy. Chuck manages to systematically alienate anyone and everyone who cares about him, from pride, from overconfidence, and from self-centeredness. We don’t know exactly what happened with Chuck and Rebecca, but we know that Chuck pissed away a promising chance for reconciliation rather than admit his condition. We see him push away Jimmy, the one person who really loved Chuck, giving him the devastating pronouncement, “you never mattered all that much to me.”

And when he goes to shake Howard’s hand, with the expectation that he will be welcomed back with open arms, Howard not only rebuffs him, not only sends him off from the firm he helped start, but he reaches into his own pocket to do it. He is so ready to be rid of Chuck, so tired of his crap, so devoted to the good of his firm, that he is willing to pay personally to be done with his erstwhile partner.

That is a wake up call of a different sort of Chuck, one that severs his last connection to the world, that sends him on a downward spiral away from the progress he’d made on coping with his condition. In “Lantern”, Jimmy admits that he’s not good at building things, only tearing things down, a pathology that seems to affect both McGills. For Chuck, that becomes more literal, as he methodically tears his own house apart trying to find the source of the electricity that is driving him deeper and deeper into his insanity.

“Lantern” revels in this, taking the time to show the escalation in Chuck’s madness when he realizes he is truly and utterly alone. It starts with simply shutting off the breakers, then checking the switches, then tearing at the walls, and finally ripping the whole place apart. We’re back to “Fly” from Breaking Bad, an unscratchable itch, an unattainable goal, that stands in for deeper issues the character can’t bear to confront directly. Better Call Saul holds the tension of these moments -- the threat that Chuck will fall off the ladder in his light-bulb snatching ardor, that he’ll electrocute himself grasping at wires buried in drywall, that he’ll cut himself on the shattered glass or sparks of his smashed electricity meter. Instead, it’s Chuck’s own deliberate hand that seemingly does him in.

The last we see of Chuck is him sitting delirious on in his torn apart living room. He is in a stupor. The whistle of the gas lantern returns. And throughout the scene, there is the knock, knock, knock of Chuck kicking at the table where it rests. Chuck’s descent is a straight line, a gradual peeling off of all the people who would give a damn about him. The lantern symbolizes his connections to other people, the quiet hum of the other lights in his life, that he continually had to snuff out to make sure his shined the brightest. That is, in a symbolic and more literal sense, his undoing. The distant crawl of flames that ends the episode sees to that.

And yet, once again, he is right about his brother. That’s the inherent tragedy of Better Call Saul. There’s room for decency in the parts of Saul Goodman’s life we never see in Breaking Bad, but whatever strides he makes here, whatever changes he commits to, we know that eventually, he backslides into becoming the huckster who helps murderers and criminals take care of their problems by any means necessary.

Before he descends into his mania, Chuck offers one last, unwittingly self-effacing assessment of his brother. He asks Jimmy why express the regret, why go through the exercise of pleading remorse and trying to change. Chuck tells his brother that he believes his feelings of regret are genuine, that he feels those feelings, but that it’ll never be enough to make him change, that he will inevitably hurt the people around him. There’s the irony that Chuck himself is scelerotic, that he is just as un-self-aware, incapable of overcoming the lesser parts of himself, but he isn’t wrong. The audience knows that and knows where kind-hearted Jimmy McGill ends up.

That’s the idea this season opened up with, and maybe the theme of the whole show -- you cannot escape your nature. Cinnabon Gene has every reason to keep his mouth shut when a young shoplifter is taken in by local cops, but he cannot help but yell out that he should ask for a lawyer. There are parts of Jimmy that he will never tamp down. Maybe, if his brother had truly loved him, had helped him to channel those parts of himself in a good direction, he could have used his charming, conning ways in service of helping old ladies with wills or other injustices. But there is a part of Jimmy always ready to slip, always ready to go to color outside the lines, to go to extremes, to get his way.

When he does that, people get hurt, people like Chuck. Jimmy is not to blame, at least not solely to blame, for his brother’s (probable) death. Chuck has brought more than enough of that on himself. To paraphrase Kim -- he’s an adult; he made his choices. But Jimmy had a hand in the catalysts for what happened to Chuck, in the things that drove him apart from Howard, that threw a monkey wrench into Chuck’s recovery, that made it impossible for him to return to practice and the life he once knew, the prospect of which seemed to energize and inspire him.

That is going to haunt him. The one thing Jimmy wanted almost as much as his brother’s love was his brother’s respect. Chuck’s likely last words to him will be essentially that he never really loved Jimmy and that he’d only really respect him if he embraced the harmful person he is deep down, and owned it, rather than fighting it. Jimmy won’t learn what happened to his brother and wake up the next morning as a fully-formed Saul Goodman, but that final thought, that warning and proclamation, will linger with him, eat him, even as he makes these grand gestures in the name of being a better man. It’s Chuck’s last awful gift to his little brother.

The changes that happen to people as they grow and evolve are rarely as neat or clean as Walter White’s elegant descent into villainy. They are an accumulation of little moments, stops and starts, peaks and valleys, until another person emerges from the slow tumult. Few people turn into monsters overnight or have one grand moment where they change completely. Instead, for most, it’s just that little by little, moment by moment, person by person, the light goes out.

The best part is that it isn't even over!
The Bar now has proof that Chuck indeed has it out for his brother (via his meltdown under oath), now Kim and Jimmy can show that Chuck was entrapping him. The Bar believes Chuck has a mental illness, and will likely buy into Jimmy's story. They claim the tape Jimmy destroyed was "evidence" but they made a copy, which is what was destroyed (a copy can't be evidence). Everything points to Chuck getting absolutely destroyed in the next episode or two.
Then that's what I believe will happen: Jimmy wins the Bar hearing. Chuck becomes the subject of the hearing (or a new hearing) due to his mental illness causing poor judgement and trying to entrap his brother to try and make him lose his license. Chuck loses his license. Simultaneously to Chuck losing his license, things are progressing with Kim and Mesa Verde, she has to make a decision, her career or Jimmy. She looks back on the things Jimmy has done and acknowledges that he can only hurt her career in the long run. She cuts ties with Jimmy, and Jimmy goes to check on Chuck to find him dead at home having killed himself.

Saul Goodman is born.

Sometimes you have to cross a line. Sometimes, you do everything right; you do everything the way you believe that it should be done, and you still lose. Your forbearance, your good deeds, your extra effort to do the right thing, only enabled the bad guys, only let them profit from their misbehavior. So you have to make compromises. You have break some of the rules yourself; you have to sully yourself by playing their game; you have to be like the bad guys to beat the bad guys, for the greater good.

These are the thoughts motivating Mike Ehrmantraut as he wraps his hands around the rifle he'd previously shied away from. But they're the same ones going through Chuck's head as he tricks his brother into incriminating himself on tape.

Mike has a code. He doesn't want to kill people. His shaky hand after his run-in with Hector's henchmen shows he doesn't even want to hurt people. And he certainly doesn't want an innocent person to come to harm because of a choice he makes. But as Asimov explored in the short stories involving his Three Laws of Robotics, sometimes these principles conflict; sometimes they pull a person in different directions and force them to make some hard choices.

The eminently capable Mr. Ehrmantraut tried to abide by his no-kill policy, and still deliver a blow to his erstwhile rival. He tried to exact his vengeance on Hector in a way that would take the crime boss out of the picture, but also keep the innocents out of harm's way, and insulate himself and his family from the Salamancas' reach. Instead, it all goes sideways. Bad luck keeps the cops off of Hector's trail. A Good Samaritan loses their life in the exchange. And the man Mike went to great lengths to leave still kicking is summarily executed in the desert.

Mike tried. He tried very, very hard to have his cake and eat it too, to earn the money that he thinks will help him buy his soul back after the death of his son, to dip his toe in the mud without getting too dirty. He tried, and he lost anyway.

So it's come to this -- a sniper's nest overlooking a Salamanca hideout in the harshness of the New Mexico desert. His silent vow not to take a life, his distaste for snuffing out another man's existence, have to be put aside. More harm will be done--at least in the final tally--if he doesn't violate that code. He buys the sort of weapon he turned down the last time he considered killing a Salamanca. He sets up from his far away vantage point, to where his enemies seem to be in miniature -- tiny lives off in the distance. He lines up his shot. And he waits.

Then, that pesky moral code comes back again. At the moment of truth, Nacho stands between him and Hector. The greater good says do it. The pure utilitarian says that Hector will continue to inflict misery and pain, that Nacho isn't exactly an angel himself, and that a semi-innocent man will be killed regardless of whether Mike shoots or doesn't, so he may as well take out the real bad guy in the process. The retributivist says that Hector deserves it, for threatening a little girl, for ordering the death of an innocent person, for having a man killed who may not be nearly as innocent, but whose only crime in Hector's eyes was succumbing to Mike's scheme.

But Mike can't. He just can't. It's the reason he caught a beating instead of taking a life in the first place. It's the reason he gave Nacho half of his money for taking the rap for Tuco. It's the reason he's spurred on to right this wrong in the first place. Only the people who kill the innocent--Hector Salamanca, Matty's murderers--deserve to die, and Mike just doesn't have it in him to stomach the collateral damage that would come along with preventing Hector from hurting anyone else. The moment passes; another undeserved death takes place, and Mike waits once more.

Until the sound of his car horn calls him away. He finds a branch lodged between the seat and the steering wheel, calling his attention to a note with a simple message -- "don't." Someone is smart enough to know what Mike is up to, and has a different plan. Who is that someone? [Speculative Spoilers here -- an enterprising redditor found that if you take the first letters of all the episode titles in Season 2, they make an anagram for the phrase "Fring's Back."] We don't know for sure yet. But it's someone who wants to stop Mike from going through with it. Mike is ready; he's been pushed past his limit and he's ready to do what needs to be done, but his conscience and outside forces keep him from crossing that line.

Chuck has no such limitations, either from within or without. But the episode's cold open gives us a window into what drives him, what's shaped the way he looks at his brother. Chuck has tried to be an upstanding man, at least from his own perspective. While Jimmy is reminiscing about a crazy time at their mother's birthday party, Chuck only remembers everyone else having to clean up Jimmy's mess, literally and figuratively. While Jimmy strolls off to grab a sandwich, Chuck waits dutifully with his comatose mom. And when he's alone, he breaks down. Chuck may seem heartless at times, but he is still a man of feeling, and his quickly recovered demeanor when the nurse comes in suggests that, like Hamlin, he may put on a mask to project the image he thinks he needs to uphold, regardless of how he really feels.

Then his mother lurches back to life for just a moment, and Chuck is captivated once more. But with her final breath, does she call for the son who stayed by her side? The one Who made something of himself? The one who was there to help his parents rather than exploit them? No, she calls for Jimmy. The hurt, the jealousy in Chuck's eyes looms large. This is the final insult, the last thumb in his eyes that for all Chuck's good deeds, for all his effort to do right, to be right, everyone, even his own Mother, loves the personable Jimmy McGill just a little bit more. Chuck keeps their mother's final words from his brother--better to keep him from enjoying the fruits of his misbegotten labors--but their sting lingers.

(Incidentally, it's a great little swerve to show Jimmy waiting beside at the hospital, only to then reveal his brother sitting next to him, letting the audience know that this is a flashback and not the aftermath of Chuck's incident at the copy shop.)

That's how Chuck processes these events, and that's what's lurking in the back of his mind when he realizes that Jimmy has sabotaged him. Jimmy can't be allowed to him win. He can't continue to prosper and benefit from stepping outside the lines just because he knows how to work a crowd. He can't be a bad actor and still be rewarding by living so large and so well on the back of so many lies and cheats and shortcuts. As Jesse Pinkman so memorably put it, he can't keep getting away with it.

To prevent that, to expose Jimmy for what Chuck thinks he really is, he has to take a page out of his brother's playbook. Chuck's plan to entrap his brother into confessing his misdeeds on tape is nigh-Machiavellian, but also feels like the sort of scheme that Jimmy himself would cook up.

One of the interesting things about Better Call Saul as its developed over the course of two seasons is the way it's explored the idea that as different as Chuck and Jimmy seem on the surface, there's a great deal of common ground between them. Chuck's shown a certain duplicitousness before -- in how he's used Howard as his hatchet man or pushed his partner to punish Kim as a way of getting to Jimmy. But this is something different, something more elaborate and even sinister. The layers to to Chuck's ruse, the misdirection, the orchestration, the cleverness in how he pulls it off all reek of Slippin' Jimmy. The younger McGill brother may be more personable, but there's a craftiness that he and Chuck share. Chuck may not have his brother's golden tongue, but he still knows what buttons to push when it comes to the CEO of Mesa Verde, and he knows how to pull off a plan as meticulous, manipulative, and perfectly-calculated as any of Jimmy's.

What's ironic about is that at the same time Chuck is becoming more like the man he misguidedly believes his brother to be, Jimmy is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. "Klick" may be the most overtly moral and upstanding we've ever seen Jimmy be. He rushes into the copy shop and starts directing traffic to get his brother some help, even though it will expose his attempt to cover his tracks. (And kudos to Michael McKean, who was amazing throughout the episode, but was especially good in his wordless but meaningful reaction when he sees Jimmy as he regains consciousness.) He stays by his brother's side throughout Chuck's recovery. He draws a line in the sand that despite everything that's happened, he won't commit Chuck, because it's not what he brother would want. He agonizes over subjecting Chuck to those tests even if he believes it's in Chuck's own best interests. He gives up his temporary guardianship even if it would leave Chuck, as he puts it, right where Jimmy wants him. He has a look of guilt when he watches the commercial he worked so hard to make and realizes he hasn't quite lived up to being the paragon of honesty and virtue he presents himself as.

And in the end, he confesses to his brother. Jimmy comes clean when he believes that the chain of events he set in motion caused Chuck to retire and dive even deeper into his psychosis. Jimmy may not believe he's really risking his career or his livelihood by doing so, but he is exposing himself, making a sacrifice by playing into Chuck's image of him. Jimmy absolutely loves his brother, and after all the effort he put into covering up his misdeeds, the lengths he went to in order to prevent Chuck from confirming his suspicions, the thought of his actions wounding his brother deeply motivates Jimmy to lay it all out there for him.

What's so tragic and deplorable is that Chuck is taking advantage of that. He's using his brother's love to hurt him. In a way, he's making the same choice Jimmy did when he obtained temporary guardianship over Chuck and forced him to take those tests at the hospital. He's taking the choice out of his brother's hands, because he doesn't trust him to make the right one. But it's also cravenly manipulative. Chuck is playing on Jimmy's own deep-seated concerns for him in order to undermine him. There's something especially cruel in the poetry of that, something that feels particularly wrong about turning someone's care for you against them in such a cold and calculated fashion.

It can be hard to explain what makes Better Call Saul great because so often it comes out in the little things. It may be the direction and editing, which convey Chuck's disorientation by flipping his perspective upside down beneath the hospital lights, or communicating Kim's pride in Jimmy by putting her beaming smile in the frame as his commercial plays. It may be the small but significant performance of the doctor who looks after Chuck, who manages to be a steady and caring voice of reason between each of the mercurial McGill brothers. It may be the little bits of dry comedy in an episode as significant as "Klick," from the "no offense," "none taken," exchange between Mike and the arms who wipes his prints off the rifle, to Ernesto's beleaguered wish that he was back in the mail room. Or it may be something like the quiet moment where Ernesto explains to Jimmy why he lied on his behalf -- for the simple reason that Chuck seemed out to get him, and Jimmy's his friend.

That, more than Chuck's fierce intelligence, more than Jimmy's golden tongue, more than one brother's pride and the other's lack of shame, is what truly distinguishes the McGill brothers from one another. When Jimmy plies his trade these days, when he employs a little subterfuge, he's usually trying to help people -- sometimes himself, but also the woman he loves and people like the seniors at Sandpiper. When things go awry, when it looks like people will really be hurt, he doesn't sit on the sidelines; he acts to rectify his mistakes, whether it's by talking Tuco into commuting the death sentences of his twin collaborators in the desert, or by admitting his actions to his brother to prevent Chuck from giving up his life and his sanity. Jimmy is far from pure, but he cares and he tries, and people like Ernesto see that.

But Chuck only uses those same skills to hurt people. Sure, he justifies it by seeing himself as an agent of morality, as it being part and parcel with his self-given duty to uphold what's right and just in this world. And yet even if he thinks what he does is for the greater good, when push comes to shove, Chuck uses that craftiness to deny his brother the seat at the table that he'd earned, to punish Kim for Jimmy's transgressions since she was the only one within reach, to wrest away a client when someone more deserving had done the legwork, and to incriminate a brother whose confession he was only able to wring out because of Jimmy's love and concern for him. Jimmy serves individuals; Chuck serves some greater sense of righteousness, and unlike Mike, he cares little for who's caught in the crossfire.

Chuck has a very personal, very exacting moral code, and it leads him to hurt the people who care about him the most. Jimmy's ethical mores are much more fluid, much more apt to let the ends justify the means, but he means to do good, more or less, and to help people, especially those close to him. And Mike is somewhere in the middle, intent on protecting the most important people in his life, trying to live up to the high moral standards he sets for himself even as he gets his hands dirty, and most of all trying not to hurt anyone in the process. "Klick" wraps its characters in these little moral conundrums, and teases out the connections and distinctions between its heroes and its villains as each tries to find their way out of them, and the lines they are and are not willing to cross to do it.

I've seen some gripes that people like Better Call Saul, but that sometimes it feels like it's two different shows hot-glued together. It's true that there's a particular storyline focused on Jimmy's trials and travails with Kim and his brother, and another with Mike getting mixed up with Salamancas. While the leads of each story bump into one another from time to time, there's not a strong plot-based connection between the two of them.

Despite that, in episodes like "Nailed," there's a strong thematic connection between the two of them. In the episode, both Jimmy and MIke have pulled a con of some kind, in the hopes of protecting someone else but in a way that benefits them. Jimmy's adventures at the copy center in "Fifi" led to Kim winning Mesa Verde back, and Mike's road obstacle is intended to draw the cops' attention to Hector and keep him too otherwise occupied to threaten his family, but also leads to Mike pocketing a nice quarter-mil. And each has the added bonus of this windfall coming at the expense of someone they have beef with. For Jimmy, it's a chance to get back at his brother, and for Mike, it's a chance for him to stick it to Hector after causing him such a headache.

And both Mike and Jimmy are pros, so they know how to cover their tracks. Jimmy is meticulous about transposing the address (as Chuck points out, he was never lazy), and removes the evidence of his forgery while Chuck is out of the house. Mike, meanwhile, wears a ski mark, blindfolds the Salamana associate he's ripping off, and makes sure he's neither seen nor heard.

But despite the fact that each of them is absolutely careful not to leave behind any corroborating or identifying evidence, each gets figured out because of who they are, because people who know them know what their M.O. is, and even if there's nothing that ties them to these crimes that would necessarily hold up in court, each incident has the trademark of the man who incited it. Chuck knows that this is what his brother does, that this is who he is, and that lets him piece together what happened. For that matter, Kim knows Jimmy too well to buy Jimmy's pleas of ignorance either. He is a huckster, and the story Chuck tells is perfectly in line with Jimmy's usual methods and motives. By the same token, even though Mike doesn't leave a trace on the road to Mexico, Nacho is able to figure out that it was him who hit the ice cream truck, because only a guy like Mike would have the stones to pull off a heist like that, but would expend such effort to avoid taking life.

And then each of them suffers an incredible setback due to the law of unintended consequences. One of the most striking parts of "Nailed" is how, for once in his life, it seems like Mike is happy. The reliable grump uses his newfound wealth to buy a round for the entire bar, and more notably, he actually smiles in the process! He flirts with the waitress at the diner, and he actually laughs! It's not a sour sarcastic laugh; it's a laugh of incredulity, of relief, that maybe things are going to work out, that maybe he can finally put all of the stress and strain he'd had to deal with since the events we witnessed in "Five-O" behind him.

Then he gets that phone call from Nacho, and as always seems to be the case in Better Call Saul and its predecessor, there's some contingency, some way that the cookie crumbled, that didn't work out just right. A good Samaritan helped the driver that Mike hogtied, and not only did it throw a monkey-wrench in his plans to take Hector off the chessboard, but that good Samaritan was shot and killed for their trouble.

Mike's moral code exposed him to Nacho, and their exchange reveals that for all the effort he went to not to have to kill anyone, not to cause anyone any harm that he could avoid, his choices still led directly to someone being killed, and because he tried to avoid killing a crazy drug lord, or that crazy drug lord's much more calculating uncle, he let a completely innocent life perish. The look on his face when he hears that news shows that it wiped away whatever joy he possessed in the rest of the episode. It's replaced with an expression of utter loss, of failure, of the best laid plans leading to the one thing he was trying to avoid.

And Jimmy has the same experience, albeit in a much different way. Jimmy seems legitimately happy when he and Kim are just palling around, painting their new office and enjoying that joking rapport that makes them feel right for one another. While his feigned surprise is not particularly convincing, there's also genuine glee when he hears that Kim got Mesa Verde back. But there's two things he doesn't count on, and each of them comes back to bite him in a particular way.

The first is that Kim figures out what happened, or at least buys that even if Chuck doesn't have the whole story, or doesn't have things 100% correct, that he's right that Jimmy tampered with Chuck's work in such a way so as to benefit her. After how clear Kim made it that she wasn't comfortable with Jimmy's methods, that she wanted to do things her own way, sink or swim, she understandably feels betrayed, even if she's not yet ready to break things off with Jimmy, let alone give up her client or expose him to the risk of being disbarred or going to jail. Despite that, the scene of the two of them in bed together, and the palpable coldness between them, feels like a mirror image of Chuck and his wife sitting in bed, similarly disconnected, in the cold open to "Rebecca." Chuck's wife isn't in the picture anymore, and we do not yet know why, but that visual rhyme, and Kim's demeanor, suggests that she may not be in Jimmy's life for much longer either.

But there's a more severe unintended consequence for Jimmy as well. Jimmy loves his brother. He hates him a little bit, but he loves him. He doesn't want to hurt Chuck; he just wants to take him down a peg, to stop him from keeping Kim from what she's owed the same way that Chuck did to him. But Jimmy's actions go further than that. They torture Chuck. He begins to suffer under the electric hum of the banking commission's offices once the alleged "discrepancy" is exposed. The blistering buzz of the florescent lights at the copy shop start to take their toll on him. Chuck's clearly at the end of his rope. He's right, but feels like the world is gas-lighting him. And he's right. All at once, it's too much for Chuck, and he cracks his head on the table and crumples to the ground. Once again, Jimmy has plied his trade as best he knows how, never meaning any real harm, but someone he cares about ends up getting seriously hurt in the process. Let's hope that Chuck fares better than Marco did.

In truth, there's a great deal of coincidence and convenience at play in "Nailed." How is it that Kim gets the call to come pick up the Mesa Verde boxes from Chuck's so soon after she wins Mesa Verde back? Chalk it up to narrative convenience. Why would she bring Jimmy along to what is already likely to be a delicate situation? Maybe she knows he's there to gloat and doesn't want to deny him, but figures he'll be on his best behavior. How is it that Chuck not only realizes that Jimmy sabotaged him, but is able to almost preternaturally piece together exactly how he did it? Welll, Chuck's a smart guy, and the show tries to handwave it by having him bring up Jimmy's fake I.D. scam in high school.

So how does Kim obliquely bring up that Jimmy needs to cover his tracks just in time for Chuck to show up to the copy shop when Ernesto just happens to be there? How is it that he just so happens to have the copy shop empty except for him and the clerk with enough time for him to lay out his bribe and his story? How is it that he has the nigh-perfect vantage point to see and understand all that's going on in the shop once Chuck rolls in? Beats me.

The episode, the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the plotting, the themes, and the show are all just too damn good to care. From the wry-edged sweetness between Jimmy and Kim as they're setting up their new apartment, to the perfectly-constructed and tension-filled hit by Mike in the desert, to the hilarious scene where Jimmy talks his way into filming on a school playground, to the frenetically shot and edited final scene where Chuck loses it, to the blistering, incredible moment where Jimmy, Kim, and Chuck are laying it out on the table for one another, there is simply too much greatness in too many modes from this show to be especially bothered by any bit of narrative convenience.

That last scene in particular is an all-timer. In "Pimento," the penultimate episode of Season 1, Jimmy confronted his brother in that same room, with a similar inflammatory atmosphere and tone to their hashing things out. Here, once again only a single episode away from the finale, the show doubles down on that concept. The tables are turned -- this time it's Chuck exposing the double cross, and for that matter, "Nailed" throws Kim into the mix, both to have the other major presence in Jimmy's life represented and exposed to this, but also to stand out as the person who sees each of these misguided men for what they are.

The anger, the betrayal, the pride, the sense of pleading in Chuck's voice as he lays this all out is remarkable. He has been betrayed by the brother whom she had just thanked for looking after him despite their issues with one another. And he has Kim there not just for the boxes, but because he wants to tell her not to make the same mistake he did, of trusting Jimmy. He knows that Jimmy did it for her, but that Jimmy will eventually do the same thing to her--betray her trust, if not twist the knife in quite the same fashion--because he can't help himself. He wants to Kim to see Jimmy clearly, without the lens of affection that's blinded him and which he thinks is blinding her.

But unbeknownst to Chuck, and for that matter the audience, Kim already knows. It's hard to tell at what moment in that scene that Kim believes what Chuck is telling her. Maybe it's Jimmy's less-than-convincing denial. Maybe it's Chuck's declaration that his brother did it for love. Maybe it's just her piecing it together in the space between the accusations and the pleas of innocence. Rhea Seehorn and Kim Wexler play it close to the vest, not letting the viewer be sure what she thinks or what she understands until the moment when her frustration erupts and she punches Jimmy's arm in the car.

Before that though, she offers the frankest, truest, and saddest assessment of the McGill boys that the show has allowed us to witness. The show commits to the feint when it has Kim pushing back at Chuck and telling him that one typo by lantern light is far more likely than Chuck's accurate but paranoid-sounding account of what happens. But then she speaks the absolute truth. Chuck made Jimmy, or at least pushed him this direction. As I've said before, Jimmy idolizes his brother, and if Chuck had returned that affection, returned that trust, just a little bit, who knows where Jimmy's talents might have been put to use.

Thus far, Better Call Saul has seemed to posit that there is something essential about Jimmy that cannot avoid taking the occasional shortcut, that cannot completely suppress his conman ways. But he toiled in the mailroom long enough to make something of himself. He dredged up the Sandpiper case not through pure dishonest trickery, but by using his resourcefulness for good. Maybe Chuck will always see his brother with a law license as a chimp with a machine gun, but with a little guidance, a little help, maybe he could at least be aiming it in the right direction.

That doesn't absolve Jimmy, and neither does Kim. She's right to be sorry for both of them, that each has made awful choices to hurt the other and, meaning to or not, her. For Jimmy, those choices led him to potentially losing the woman he loves, and have left his brother in need of an ambulance. For Mike, those choices have left him with blood on his hands once more. Jimmy and Mike never cross paths, not even for a moment in "Nailed," but by the end of the episode, they're in the exact same place.

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.

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.

9.5/10. You got me, Better Call Saul. I bought it. I bought the twist hook line and sinker. I thought that Chuck supported his brother, despite being a little patronizing at times. I thought that Hamlin was a snake. And the show had them look the parts, with Chuck looking like something of a fumfering nerd even when he's not in his space blanket, and Hamlin with his pressed suits and elegantly coiffed hair making him seen like the high school jock poured into the mold of a barrister.

It's tough to do a good twist. Every since Fight Club, more and more works have tried to have that reveal that changes how you look at past events, that flips your expectations. Roger Ebert complained about it; J.J. Abrams nodded toward the idea in his "mystery box" TED talk; and everything from Mad Men to Game of Thrones invites us to unravel the clues to figure out the real deal.

What makes it hard is the balance. Telegraph the twist too much, throw out too many clues, and the audience guesses it too early, and the reveal feels unremarkable, eliciting a reaction of "duh" rather than "ooh". But make it too out-of-nowhere, don't leave enough breadcrumbs for the viewers to follow, and the twist feels random and forced. The sweet spot, the one that Pimento hits is where there's enough there that in hindsight everything fits together, but it's also not an obvious trajectory. Maybe I'm giving the show too much credit because the show suckered me into believing that Hamlin was the fly in the ointment. In retrospect, it seems a little too easy for a show spawned from Breaking Bad to have a character as one-note evil as Hamlin. But still, it works and it works well.

And it works, to my mind, not just because of how well the reveal (that it was Chuck who was keeping his brother from HHM, and that Hamlin was only his smokescreen) was set up, but because it's a twist based on an emotional truth rather than on a simple plot hurdle. It matters beyond the fact that Jimmy is thwarted in his attempt to work at the firm his brother founded, it matters because he is hurt to his core that he'll never realize his dream to work for his brother, not because he wasn't good enough or that he couldn't get his act together, but because his brother doesn't want it.

For a minute there, I thought "Pimento" wasn't going to go there, or at least not directly. If there's one thing that the prior episodes of the show have established it's that Jimmy loves his brother, as seen in the sacrifices he's willing to make for him and the way he protects and encourages Chuck despite the questionable nature of his self-diagnosis, and that he's willing to sacrifice his own success in order to do the right thing and help the people he cares about, as seen when he gives up the Kettlemans' case, both for their sake and for Kim's.

So for a little bit in that last scene, I thought Jimmy was going to demur. He clearly had pieced together that it was his brother who was behind Hamlin's statements about "the partners" having made a decision, but maybe he was going to see how much progress Chuck had made, how enlivened he was by the chance to do genuine legal work again, how heartened he was by the standing ovation he received back at HHM, how wonderful the idea of his brother not being trapped in his house day-in and day-out would be, and he would let it go. Maybe that's what he was trying to do in that moment where he's clearly devastated by the news, but tries to take on a c'est la vie attitude. Maybe he was genuinely attempting to put it aside and keep his pain to himself so that his brother could recover.

But then Chuck starts the lies again. Then he starts talking about working on Hamlin and trying to figure something out, with the proviso that he may not be able to do anything but that he'll do his best. And that's when Jimmy corners his brother, that's when he brings up the cellphone, and challenges the lies, and confronts him as to why, and it all comes spilling out.

"Because you're not a real lawyer." Good lord that's cold. But it's angry. And for Chuck, it's a truth. It's hard for Chuck not to seem like the bad guy here, and in some sense he is, but one of the great things about Vince Gilligan's shows is that (short of a group of neo-Nazis) there's rarely a true bad guy, just people with varying shades of perspective and motivation that lead them into conflict with one another, each seeing themselves as justified in both.

When we see Jimmy McGill, Breaking Bad fans see the craft counselor who helped Walter White out of an absurd number of jams. And even folks who (puzzlingly) only know the character from Better Call Saul see him as someone who can be more than a little underhanded, but also as someone who, as Hamlin puts it, is constantly hustling out there, in the positive and negative sense of the word. Jimmy works hard. Sometimes he plays a little dirty, but he tries, and more than once in this series, we've seen him do "the right thing" even when it went against his own interest, often out of some concern for living up to his brother's strictures.

But Chuck doesn't see the work ethic, the commitment, the changed man who goes straight, finds his niche, and by dint of his own wits and effort uncovers a million dollar case that he has every right to pursue. Chuck can only see Slippin' Jimmy. All he can see is the guy who took shortcuts his whole life while Chuck built a legitimate practice the hard way. All he can see is the guy who constantly skirted the rules while Chuck stayed on the straight and narrow. Being generous, he's only known Jimmy McGill, the changed man, for a few years; he's known Slippin' Jimmy his whole life, and it's too hard for him to shake that image of his brother. With that narrative in mind, when he sees Jimmy earning his law degree and passing the bar and building his practice, all he can see it as is just another con, just another attempt to cut in line.

And that's what makes it so powerful and so devastating. Because the only thing in the world Jimmy wants is his brother's approval. Jimmy never says that he looks up to Chuck, but everything he does to emulate his brother, to try to earn his approbation by imitating him, is to get in his brother's good graces, and he comes to find out that all of it, every bit of it beyond being the reliable mail clerk, not only made his brother scoff, but annoyed him, reinforced the idea that Jimmy wasn't worthy, and that led Chuck to undermine the only person we see in the show who seems to truly love him. It's well constructed as a narrative, it's grounded in what we know about the characters so far, and it's a harrowing, heartwrenching, incredible scene of the two of them putting it all out on the table, with Jimmy walking away more wounded than we've ever seen him.

And I haven't even gotten to the Mike story! In any other episode, that would be the main event. Sure, his scene with the mouthy racist guy and the "man mountain" reeks of fan service and an attempt to make Mike the Batman of Better Call Saul, but it still had me laughing and cheering the whole way through. His was by far the funnier of the two storylines in "Pimento" (though Jimmy's insults for Hamlin were pretty amusing), from his dry sarcastic responses to the other thug, to the bumbling suburban pill-dealer who hired him, to his usual grumpy, withering stare.

But even that story had some heft that came from Mike's speech to the dealer. Mike's philosophy has been clear in his actions, even if he's not the type to vocalize it, and in truth the speech was a little on the nose, but in truth the writing is so good, and more than that, Jonathan Banks is so good, both in his presence and in his delivery, that it works like gangbusters. There are all kinds of people on both sides of the law -- that doesn't make you a good or bad person. That comes from something else--the kind of cop you are, or the kind of criminal you are--and Mike is an honorable, and thoroughly capable criminal.

Maybe that idea works in parallel with the Jimmy and Chuck story here. I don't want to paint Chuck as a bad person just because he's stuck in a bad mode of thinking, one that's understandable from his perspective even as it's patently unfair to his brother. But Chuck is somebody on "the right side", who sees himself as noble and just and good, and yet he has done wrong by the person who loves him and admires him the most in this world. And then there is Jimmy, who is a reformed con artist, who uses billboard stunts and Matlock-inspired clothing to make his way in the world, and he's the one who sacrifices everything not only to help his brother, but to be the kind of man he thinks his brother is.

There are good and bad men on both sides of the line, and sometimes the harshest, and most hurtful thing imaginable, is to realize the difference between where you think you're standing, and where the people closest to you, the ones whose approval and respect you crave, still see you stuck. Poor Jimmy. Poor, poor Jimmy.

8.7/10. Archer is back! You knew it!

And what a return to form. Maybe after a year of doing Archer Vice, and a turn at going official with the CIA, a L.A. detective agency is the right move to refresh the show a bit. This was pretty classic stuff, with Archer, Lana, and Ray having misadventures in the field with their usual witty banter ("why didn't you tell us you were bleeding like a Russian princess?"), Mallory being a big presence with her acerbic wit (including her delightful comment that the ability to buy liquor in grocery store is "the only thing about L.A. that doesn't make [her] want to vomit" and her hilarious take downs when Cyril tries to throw his weight around), Cyril playing up his mostly ceremonial role as head of the agency ("the writing is literally on the wall), Krieger throwing together his usually goodie bags (hush puppies), and Pam and Cheryl enjoying their usual bit of amusing sidekickery.

It's only one episode, but this was a return to form, with enough self-referential humor to make you feel like the show remembers where it came from, but not so much that it feels indulgent. Plus the fact that they'd been duped by a faux-movie star is a classic Archer twist. The story is simple enough, and the animation is better than ever (though I could do without those weird silhouette interstitial cards) but what really sells this show is the crackerjack dialogue that manages to be funny, cutting, and clever, and "The Figgis Agency" had that in spades. Very glad to have the show back.

Swerve swerve swerve. I can't say I'm surprised, it's what Westworld is known for however this felt less organic then before and more like we were intentionally lead down the wrong path just to have the big revelation in the end that we were wrong. Problem is none of it was surprising or inspiring, it didn't make you go "oh what???" like in season 1 when we found out William was the man in black, it just made you go oh whatever...

Maeve switched sides, saw that coming. Dolores wanted to save humanity now? Please... There's a man in black robot? Already knew that, don't care what comes from it. Don't believe Dolores is really dead, don't care if she isn't, don't believe William is either, don't care if he isn't. William didn't end up saving anything, Hale is a bitch again. The only real emotional part of the episode was seeing Bernard visit Arnold's family and that still wasn't even that spectacular. Bernard has the key... to what exactly? Everyone got their catch phrase in. This episode just showed the show's gone on too long and the story is all over the place. To think it's going to keep going feels more like a chore then something to be excited for. With any mercy they end this thing with a 3 or 4 episode arch in season 4 and be done with it.

Alas Westworld, this pain is all I have left of you.

[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.

I don't think I have ever been in love with a movie, like I'm in love with La La Land. From the first few seconds, till the very end. This movie had me and didn't let go. My english vocabulary is not good enough to express my love, heck, my dutch vocabulary is not good enough to express it. This movie is everything.

It is beautiful, happy, magical, romantic and I could go on for a little while longer but I won't. I wasn't expecting it to be this musical-y, but I mean, I love musicals so I'm not complaining. I think this is a great "musical" because there isn't non stop singing, so people who don't like musicals might like this one because it's more "subtle". I can only imagine how much practice went into all those dance routines and don't get me started on the impressive piano skills Ryan Gosling showed us.

Something that really impressed me as well was the way they filmed everything. It's a very creative and different way, which I really enjoyed and think makes this movie a great inspiration for those who love film and camerawork themselves. The build up and flashbacks and stuff were really cool as well. Yea I really enjoyed that. Also, the storyline, which does so much for a movie, was so great.

This is normally the part were I talk about the actors, but seeing that there were mainly only two actors and they were both amazing (I do think tho, that Ryan Gosling his character wasn't a very challenging one for him because we have seen him in roles like these before. Mixing it up with all the dancing, singing en piano playing though, you got something quite different and I loved it), I'm going to skip this part and say that you should watch this movie, do nothing more, just watch it, enjoyed it and love it.

[9.8/10] One of the ways you can tell that a show is great, not just good, is when it’s engrossing even when there’s not anything particularly exciting or notable happening. It’s easy to be engaged, even giddy, about Better Call Saul in the midst of McGill-on-McGill courtroom combat, in the middle of another of Jimmy’s capers, as Mike Ehrmantraut is springing another one of his traps, or when another little Breaking Bad easter egg pops up. But the mark of a great show is that it can be just as transfixing, just as mesmerizing, to watch Chuck have dinner with his ex-wife, the moment laden with hopes and expectations, with little more happening than a conversation between old friends.

Better yet, that flashback to a time when Jimmy and Chuck were using their scheming in concert and not against one another isn’t simply a flight of fancy to contrast their later antagonism, or a simple pleasing vignette of the early point of Chuck’s condition. It’s a character study, a set of scenes that never comes says anything outright about Chuck McGill, but tells us so much about who he is, how he reacts to obstacles and difficulties, and quietly sets up the bigger fireworks to come.

It shows that Chuck is a prideful man. That’s not much of a revelation, but what’s striking about the flashback are the lengths that he goes to hide his condition from his ex-wife, Rebecca. He concocts a story about a mixup with the electric company (poetically enough, involving transposed letters on an address), and tries to keep it all under wraps.

When Rebecca uses a cell phone that causes his “acute allergy to electromagnetism” to flare up (featuring superb camera work and sound design to convey his perception of it), he throws it out of her hands. But when called to account for his behavior, he doesn’t come clean about why he did it. Tellingly, he not only comes up with an excuse, he not only turns the blame onto Rebecca herself rather than accept it for be honest, but he frames it in terms of propriety, in terms of what’s “right,” in terms of a decorum that he sees himself as adhering to and chastises others for not meeting his standard. It is a defense mechanism, a self-preservation method, one that in that moment and in the future, causes him to mask his frustrations in grandiose notions of propriety and principles rather than face his own failings and prejudices.

But most importantly, even when Rebecca is effectively storming out, an act that would thwart the elaborate lengths he went to under the clear purpose of winning her back, he keeps Jimmy from telling her the truth. Even though Chuck seemed on the cusp of making a breakthrough with a woman he clearly still had feelings for, he could not bear to be thought of as sick; he could not bear to be though of a lesser; he could not bear to be thought of as crazy. Jimmy McGill knows that, and though he clearly takes no pleasure in it, it’s how he takes his brother down.

In just five minutes, Better Call Saul gives its audience a snootful of character detail and foreshadowing that establishes and reestablishes every hint and bit of shading to make the series’ peak drama at the end of the episode that much more understandable and meaningful. It’s a sign of this show’s virtuosity, and the way it understands tension, character, and storytelling like no other show on television.

And that’s just the first five minutes! “Chicanery” goes full courtroom drama in a way that BCS, despite being one of the best legal shows to grace our television screens, hasn’t really done before. The show sets it up nigh-perfectly, laying out witness testimony, objections, and grants of “leeway” that make sense in context while also providing enough wiggle room for the major characters to be a little more theatrical that would be typical for a disciplinary proceeding.

That extends to the episode’s supporting characters as well. Kim Wexler, who is Better Call Saul’s secret weapon, is not only sharp and decisive in the courtroom, but amid all the intra-McGill squabbling, gets a big win. Rather than relishing in her success, Kim distinguishes herself from both McGill brothers by coming clean to the representatives from Mesa Verde about all this ugliness, only to have the head of the bank brush it off and call her the best outside counsel he’s ever had. It’s subtle but important way that Kim and Jimmy fully win here, and that the blowback from Chuck’s machinations do not sink the client and the work that Kim has put so much effort into.

It also extends to Howard, who, while frequently a cipher on this show, continues to offer some of the most pragmatic and complex approaches to these situations of anyone. He is clearly on Chuck’s side, and clearly interested in preserving the good name of his firm. But he is also firmly honest on the stand, complimentary about Jimmy when he doesn’t have to be, frank about how his rise and fall within HHM, and cognizant of Chuck’s limitations and liabilities in a way that Chuck himself simply isn’t.

What ensues is an incredible chess match, a battle of wits and wills, between Jimmy and Chuck. Chuck carefully rehearses his testimony, again careful to couch his attack on his brother as not coming from a place of affront or weakness in himself, but to an abstract, platonic ideal -- the law. Chuck is out to show that he does not hate his brother; he cares for him, wants what’s best for him, but also wants what’s best for the legal professional he claims to hold so dear.

“Chicanery” subtly undercuts the sincerity of Chuck’s words not just by their rehearsed nature, but in the selection of detail that precedes them. He professes to love the law because it guarantees equal treatment to everyone under the same rules and regulations, and yet he is driven to these proceedings in a jaguar, pulls up to the courthouse in the presence of reserved parking cones, and saunters in as the concerned god on high, blameless for his own misfortunes and ready to direct judgment at those he sees as at fault.

But Jimmy is ready, as always, with a plan of his own, one that is not completely above board. His official goal is to not to dispute that it’s his voice on the tape or that it was tampered with, but that he said what he said because he was concerned for his brother’s wellbeing and more importantly, his sanity. In that, he hopes to convince the disciplinary committee that he did not undertake the elaborate, “baroque” scheme to disrupt his brother’s dealings with Mesa Verde that Chuck alleges, but that he gave into Chuck’s paranoid fantasy so as to prevent his brother from slipping further.

And like the best of Jimmy’s lies, it works because there is a grain of truth to it. We know that Chuck isn’t wrong that even if there was no hard evidence of it, Jimmy unleashed an elaborate ploy to trip up Chuck. But we also know that Jimmy means it when he says he would say anything to make his brother feel better, to prevent Chuck from slipping back into his aluminum foil-lined nightmare. Jimmy may have been admitting what really happened rather than telling Chuck “whatever he wanted to hear,” but coming from Slippin’ Jimmy, that is the truest sign that he genuinely would have said anything, even the god’s honest, to make his brother feel better.

That’s also what makes it so tragic, so impressive but sad, that Jimmy will now do anything to show that his brother is insane. Better Call Saul is tremendous at muddying the moral waters in complex, unassuming ways, but Jimmy’s plan to provoke Chuck may be the apotheosis of an act that is clever, resourceful, full of Jimmy’s trademark showmanship, understandable, and yet also more than a bit diabolical. It’s easy to root for Jimmy, particularly in the shadow of his brother’s superciliousness, but it’s one more case of Jimmy covering up one dirty trick with yet another.

While Jimmy normally revels in that sort of gamesmanship, in the razzle dazzle that makes him as effective as lawyer as he was a conman, he seems to take no joy in it. He reveals that he had Mike take those photographs of Chuck’s apartment to lure Rebecca back, something that he knew would put his brother off balance. But when he stands by the vending machines (which create a subtle buffer to prevent Chuck from confronting him about it) he does not have a wisp of glee at his plan coming to fruition, just the hurt resignation that it’s come to this.

Jimmy, however, is not done. In his final act meant to prove to the disciplinary board that his brother is unbalanced and thus untrustworthy, he resorts to some of the titular “chicanery.” He employs Huell(!) to slip a cell phone battery in Chuck’s pocket, and what follows is one of the best scenes in the show’s history.

It involves a back and forth between Jimmy and Chuck. Jimmy seems to pulling every rabbit out of his hat that he can come up with to expose his brother as a nut. He shows pictures from inside Chuck’s house. He gestures to Rebecca in the audience and even garnishes an emotional apology from Chuck to her. He plays “commit and contradict” with Chuck about his alleged illness, trying to establish for the disciplinary committee that Chuck’s issues are psychosomatic, and getting his brother to affirm that he is not feeling electromagnetic waves from anywhere in particular in the room.

It’s then that Jimmy takes out his cell phone, presumably expecting a reaction from Chuck to prove that his brother would respond to it on sight. Instead, Chuck, appearing wise to Jimmy’s machinations, determines that the phone is without is battery, and it seems, for a moment, like Jimmy’s stunt has been foiled, more fodder for Chuck to demonstrate that his brother is a two-bit huckster, not a lawyer. Instead, Jimmy plays the magician, revealing the final element of his trick -- the battery that Huell slipped into Chuck’s breast pocket.

That is what sets Chuck off, as he pulls the battery out like it’s radioactive and tosses it on the floor. He goes into a deranged rant that ought to earn Michael McKean an Emmy. He howls about his brother’s irresponsibleness, about how Jimmy’s billboard stunt had to be staged, about how defecating in a sunroof, about slights going back to childhood. The camera zooms in slowly on Chuck as he digs himself deeper and deeper, each word making this crusade seem more like the childish vendetta from a mentally-disturbed man against the imagined slights from his little brother than a high-minded mission to uphold the law. As more and more of his angry, pontificating face fills the frame, he stops, and the ensuing shot of the disciplinary board’s reaction says it all.

Jimmy has done it. In front of the state bar, in front of their partners, in front of the women they love, Jimmy exposes his brother as a mentally ill person ranting and raving, not the dignified legal lion he tried so hard to present himself as, in the courtroom and in that dinner with Rebecca way back when. The episode cuts to a far shot of Chuck, seeming so small, so defeated in the frame, as the buzz of the exit sign looms large next to him. This is his Waterloo, the terrible culmination of two brothers’ issues with one another, laid bare in a court of law for all the world to see.

Chuck, more than Hector or Howard or the cartel, is the villain of Better Call Saul. That makes it easy to hope that Jimmy overcomes him. But in that final moment, Jimmy again mixes fact with fiction. His brother is telling the truth. As paranoid as it sounds, as childish as it is to hold onto certain grudges and resentments, Chuck is correct in all of his assessments. And yet, as the opening scene tells us, he is a prideful individual, unwilling to admit to his illness, to his difficulties, as anything that would make him seem the lesser or not in control. That is his downfall, the fatal flaw that not only keeps him from carrying out his plan, but from what we see in this episode, which costs him the love of both his wife and his brother. That is unspeakably sad -- the story of an individual, even a villain, coming so close, and losing everything worth having in the end, when the worst of him is put on display.

[8.6/10] For a split-second, I believed him. I believed Chuck when he told the Assistant District Attorney handling Jimmy’s case that his brother has a good heart, that he would never actually hurt Chuck, and that maybe there is an easier way to end all of this unpleasantness. Perhaps, I thought, Jimmy’s speech to Chuck, uttered while sitting on the curb waiting for the cops to pick him up, had made an impression. Chuck could be remembering all that his brother’s done for him, believing that Jimmy means well, and wanting to avoid selling him down the river.

Then, Jimmy sees the deal the A.D.A. offers him. It is surprisingly light, one that would allow him to avoid jail time and, assuming he can maintain some good behavior, even keep it off his record. The catch, undoubtedly concocted by Chuck in the meeting with Ms. Hay, is that the deal is conditioned on Jimmy writing a letter of confession to the felony charge, that would lead to him losing his law license.

The truth becomes clear. Chuck does not care for Jimmy’s well-being. He is not flush with the memories of the times his brother has been there for him. He just wants Jimmy out of the legal profession. Chuck still sees it as an insult, a joke, that his screw-up brother can, let alone would, be able to call himself the same thing as Chuck. That has always been the grandest affront to the elder McGill brother -- that Slippin’ Jimmy is allowed to be an officer of the court, and he aims to put a stop to it. He does not care about anything else in this, let alone his brother.

But Kim Wexler does. There is an inherent tragedy to even the kindest, sweetest scenes between her and Jimmy. We know that she is not around, or at least unseen, by the time Saul Goodman pops up on Breaking Bad, which makes every time Jimmy tries her patience or brushes her aside come off like a stepping stone to the seemingly inevitable dissolution of their partnership, personally and professionally. For the time being though, Kim is Jimmy’s best ally, the one who, unlike Chuck, truly believes that he can be good.

The episode shows that off in its name, “Sunk Costs,” a reference to Kim’s notion that she has invested too much time in Jimmy to give up on him now, but it also shows it off in its visuals. While the acting and writing are top notch every week on Better Call Saul, what sets the series apart from its peers is how much it uses its cinematography and other visual tools to tells it story on top of that. Even if it were not clear from the superb performances of Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in their characters’ responses to this news, Jimmy and Kim, framed by the glass-decked front of their office, turned to silhouettes bathed in light, holding hands, tells the audience everything its needs to know about how it’s the two of them against the world.

The same aesthetic acuity is on display in Mike’s half of the episode. Prior to any of the fireworks of “Sunk Costs” -- either the aftermath of the phonecall that teased us in the prior episode or the incident between Chuck and Jimmy -- we see a perfectly-orchestrated little scene of a Los Pollos Hermanos truck rambling through the New Mexico desert. Flanked by sharp yellow and saturated blues of the arid landscape, the shots of an old pair of sneakers, hanging on a wire, falling to the earth below, set the stage, both for the episode’s visuals, and for the trap set at end.
That trap is the natural outgrowth of what is, as far as we know, the first ever meeting of Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring. This is a momentous occasion, one that lacks any particularly grand declarations or big arguments, but shows the pair of reserved but perceptive men sizing one another up and finding each other worthy, or at least potentially useful to one another.

That’s communicated in how well each is able to perceive what the other is after. Gus has the advantage of his goons, but he’s done his homework. He knows Mike’s name. He knows what Mike’s done. And most importantly, he’s able to figure out why Mike is still at it, even after taking Hector Salamanca’s money, even after knocking over one of his trucks, even after it would seem the threat against his family has been settled.

Mike, for his part, shows that his intelligence does not just extend to piecing together how he’s being tracked, but to his ability to quickly understand the lay of the land. Fring, he reasons, is fine with Mike messing up Hector’s trucks because he’s the competition, and like that, he’s managed to peel back one of Gus’s protective layers and the veneer of respectability and mystery he keeps up to preserve himself in this business. The two men stand face to face in that desert, realizing that while they stand in different positions, their minds work in similar ways. That generates a quick mutual respect that lays the groundwork both for the working relationship we see in Breaking Bad and for the escapade that immediately ensues.

After the meeting, Mike shows off his wit and creativity once again, using the stretch of highway the viewers witnessed in the cold open to thwart Hector once again. “Sunk Costs” takes the time to show Mike being careful and deliberate -- whiffing on his first few throws of the new sneakers (a sharp contrast to Walt’s pizza-throwing adventure), and shooting his gun in the air to assure Hector’s goons that there’s just a hunter out there. When all is settled, he aims true, and dusts the same ice cream truck we saw back in [[Episode]] with enough suspicious white powder to tip off the Border Patrol's guard dogs and strike another blow against Hector. It’s an instance of two individuals’ aligned interests, and shared philosophies, coming together nigh-perfectly.

The same cannot be said for Jimmy and Chuck McGill. As Jimmy sits on the sidewalk in front of Chuck’s house, smoking a cigarette from when his car’s doors were all the same color, the depth of his hurt, of his anger, of his sense of betrayal is palpable. In a curt but devastating monologue he tells his brother one of the harshest things one family member can tell another -- that when you’re hurt, when you need help, when you’re dying -- I won’t be there.

And yet, Chuck declares that he is trying to help his brother, and as much as I look askance on his methods and his intentions and his perspective, in a way, I believe he really means it. I believe Chuck’s reasons are selfish and self-aggrandizing, that keeping Jimmy out of his domain is his main objective, whether he realizes it or not. But I also believe that Chuck really thinks it will be better for Jimmy if he’s not a lawyer, that it will help keep him out of trouble, that he’ll be happier and maybe even better.

That catch is that it’s a view that comes from a place of condescension, from a notion that everyone has a place in this world, and that Jimmy’s is under the bootheel of smarter, better folks like Chuck. To that end, Chuck can justify his actions because he’s simply putting everything back in the proper order -- him the successful lawyer, his brother the decent enough guy who does well enough to get by -- without allowing Jimmy to supersede him based on the charm and craftiness that’s sustained him thus far.

Despite a certain duplicitousness from Chuck, he genuinely believes, in his own way, that he’s doing what’s best for his brother, that is actions are a sign of caring. The problem is that they’re also reflective of a worldview, one that says he is meant to be on top and Jimmy is meant to be on bottom. Chuck may never admit that to himself, he may also cloak his prejudices in the guise of justness and righteousness, but his form of caring, his “tough love,” is the harsh, patronizing act of a man who thinks himself superior, ready to snuff out anything that would challenge that, by any means necessary.

[9.5/10] Despite the initial greatness of the dog revolution episode, only the second episode of the series, I might argue that this is where Rick and Morty became Rick and Morty. It’s all here – an escalating yet insane science fiction problem, Rick being self-centered and holding himself blameless, a great deal of weird but hilarious comedy, a dimension-hopping-related solution, a fun Jerry-focused subplot, and a gut punch, mind-wrinkling ending.

Two things stand out in particular rewatching this episode. First, the way in which Rick is constantly screwing things up and yet accepts none of the blame for it. He places this all on Morty, and pins every bad development on him, despite his grandson’s protestations. He is endlessly confident, even braggadocios, about how he’s brilliant and can fix it and brushes off any concern or censure for when his attempts go awry. And when things get really bad, his solution is to just ditch the universe and find another one.

It’s not a coincidence that this all takes place in an episode where Beth disregards her dad because “he left [her] mother.” Having seen two full episodes of Rick’s antics, I’m not sure there’s a better encapsulation of who he is than this episode, or at least the problems and self-enabling that can make him a pretty miserable person to have to deal with. When things start to get bad, he puts that on anyone but him, and even gets mean about it (calling Morty a creep, which, isn’t entirely unfair), and when things get really bad, he just finds an escape hatch and tries to wipe it all away. Everything is weightless to Rick, everything is just an inconvenience that he need not worry about, and if you make him worry long enough, he’ll just bail.

The second is Morty. Obviously the ending landed pretty hard the first time, but it’s even more impactful knowing what happens next, about Morty’s troubles coping with what he’s seen, of coming to terms with the wealth of alternate universes and other versions of himself out there, of his growing resentments for his grandfather and the way Rick treats him. Morty isn’t always great, but you feel for him trying to get through to Rick and make him accept some blame for how poorly things are going, only to be rebuffed and told that his grandfather is perfect and any bump in the road is Morty’s falt.

And still, that ending. “The Bridge” is a great choice for a melancholy, existence-questioning bit of wordless reflection. What I love about this episode is that it doesn’t really resolve anything. Normally, that’d be a drawback, but here it feels real. Rick doesn’t change or learn a lesson, he just offers a reset and doesn’t think twice about it. Morty doesn’t take it in stride, but walks around in shock that the people he knew and loved are gone in some other slice of reality and he is back living among their identical, indistinguishable doubles. Rick and Morty is often better with design than animation or character expression, but the wide-eyed look on Morty’s face so perfectly conveys the shock and discomfort of what just happened to him. It’s one of the show’s all time best sequence and a sign that this was going to be something deeper than just a series of funny, madcap, sci-fi adventures.

Those adventures are still great, and the escalating cronenberg problems were fun. (Jerry turning into a Mad Max style badass led to some great stuff as well). But this is the episode that revealed how philosophical, moral, and twisted the show was willing to get.

This isn't an origin story exactly. We already know who Jimmy McGill is by the time he shows up on our screens. But at the same time, "Mijo" is an important building block in how Jimmy becomes Saul Goodman. It's darkly funny, but there's something very compelling about Saul more or less realizing his potential and gaining his confidence based on being able to negotiate a drug dealer seeking retribution down to a leg-breaking from murder. The ensuing montage, showing McGill employing that newfound confidence to hack it as P.D. and get honest pay for semi-honest work is a neat little tale that feels very much of a piece with the rest of Vince Gilligan's ouvre.

It also shows a certain conscience within Jimmy McGill. Sure, he's bending the truth and using his big mouth (which he thanks Tuco for pointing out) to help out criminals, but he also could have walked away from the whole Tuco mess scot free, and instead chose to put himself at risk again to save the lives of the twins that he'd put in harm's way. And his discomfort at the breaking of breadsticks (in a scene that was tremendously shot by ace director Michelle MacLaren) reveals that he can't quite just walk away from what happened, even if it's given him a new lease on life to some degree or another.

That scene out in the desert features the trademark Gilligan combination of terror and comedy, with a moral choice looming over the whole affair. The entire Tuco chain of events, from the tightly-wound boss's quiet reassurances to his grandmother, to his exuberant response to hearing he's "the king" in an FBI sting, was cracker-jack storytelling that paid off in the rest of the episode.

I also appreciated the slow development of the relationship between Jimmy/Saul and his brother. The show is sticking with a slow burn as to the real nature of Chuck's predicament, but his disapprobation and implied concern that Saul is back to his "Slippin' Jimmy" days after reading the hospital bill is good character work that helps motivate the "back to work" montage that follows. By the same token, Saul encouraging his brother not to use the "space blanket", and the meaningful looks exchanged nods toward the bigger issues of Chuck's situation without being too blunt about it.

And it all leads to a promising jumping off point for the story, with Tuco's henchman (Nacho?) hearing Saul's story and wanting to use the (apparently) scam-minded attorney to help him rip off the Kettlemans. The last scene does have a certain "something tells me we'll meet again, each and every week" vibe, but it works as a natural followup to the events of the episode. Engaging from the start, this was a great episode.

[8.3/10] Very nice episode. Anytime you can fit Patton Oswalt onto your show, you're doing something right. I like the theme of the episode -- that Leslie is inclined to uphold the historical traditions of the town, but sees that anachronisms can be harmful too and works to repeal the town's old, out of date laws (like the "Ted" dumping). Oswalt's character makes a great foil, playing up the actor's nerdy persona in an old timey standoff. Anytime two characters on a sitcom get into a big wager, it's a recipe for a certain amount of cheese, but the reveal that Oswalt's character has no friends, and Leslie's ensuing push to get him on the Historical Society Board is a nice way to resolve it. Lots of funny stuff from both comic pros playing off one another.

The B-story, with Chris and Ron having a similarly cheesy wager about whose managerial style works better was good for some laughs. Again, Ron and Chris and their conflicting personalities usually generates some comedic sparks, and this was no exception. Their attempts to motivate Jerry had some good humor to it, and the reveal that April played them against one another to avoid having to do a leadership seminar was the perfect button.

The C-story was serviceable, with Ann and Ben fighting over an old waffle-maker from JJ's diner to give to Leslie for each of their hyper-specific Leslie-invented holidays. It's the kind of thing that makes Leslie seem a little too cartoony in her friendliness and preparedness for my tastes, but there's some good humor in the pair's competition and attempt to cut this off at the pass together.

Overall, a very funny episode with solid stories in each part.