What would you do if you had a time machine?

Mike would go back to the moment he turned down his first bad choice road -- the day he took his first bribe. Walter would have stuck it to Elliott and Gretchen by refusing to allow himself to be pushed out of Gray Matter Technologies. Jimmy, out in the desert lugging around seven million bucks, would put half a mil in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, then fast forwarded to reap the rewards.

But before you answer, question the premise. Not whether time travel is possible, or how it would work. Ask yourself -- do I already have a time machine?

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I missed my chance to use the word “antepenultimate” last week. Luckily Myles used it for me. So I’m not going to miss my chance to call this the penultimate episode. And that adjective seems apt in more than just a chronological sense.

The last we see of Kim, in the timeline established, is an extraordinary sight: Sobbing uncontrollably on a shuttle bus, heading to the Albuquerque airport. It seems quite possible that is her last appearance in this story. She weeps -- she wails -- unable to hold in the emotion. She’s utterly emptied out, hollow, bereft. Her visage, always so composed and forthright, is an uncontrolled wreck. It’s something we’ve never seen. It might be our farewell.

“Waterworks” (in reference both to Palm Coast Sprinklers and to that breakdown) shows us definitively that Saul Goodman buried his humanity under the facade of his cathedral of justice, and that nothing in his Omaha exile has opened a route to restoring it. When Kim serves him with divorce papers, he decide…

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Let’s get the important news out of the way first. Kim is alive and working at Palm Coast Sprinklers in Titusville, Florida. And she does not want to hear from Jimmy.

Now that we’ve digested that piece of news, let’s talk about what happens to Gene. Or is it Saul, or maybe Jimmy? Last week I suggested that the Great Mall Caper was Saul rising from out of the depths to take over from Gene, who’s been keeping his head down and staying out of trouble. Some of you pointed out that this kind of con is more of a Slippin’ Jimmy situation, a resurgence of the scam artist Jimmy used to be before he tried to make a go of it at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. 

But the artful flashbacks (and isn’t it glorious to see that color fade in, taking us back to Albuquerque?) are a reminder that Saul and Slippin’ Jimmy are a close match. We see the parts of Breaking Bad’s “Better Call Saul” (season 2 episode 8) between and around Saul’s kidnapping by Walt and Jesse: bouncing…

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When Saul Goodman threw a shoebox of memories into his suitcase and took the Ed Galbraith Best Quality Vacuum express to Omaha, the price of his safety included leaving his identity behind. In the few black-and-white flash-forwards to the mundane 2010 Omaha life of Gene Takavic, we’ve seen two facets of that decision’s fragility. The first is the constant fear of being exposed, which comes to a head when Gene is recognized as Saul by his taxi driver, Jeff. The second is the stubborn desire to reclaim yourself -- perhaps by scratching “SG WAS HERE” in a hallway, but even more significantly, by doing what you’re best at. Jimmy can’t stop himself from yelling “get a lawyer!” at the poor kid who gets nabbed with a coat full of shoplifted DVDs. 

But what Saul Goodman is really best at is putting one over on people with elaborate schemes and charming patter, the more the better. And after Jeff the taxi driver (now played by Pat Healy) bullies him into …

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"Any way you want it, that's the way you need it, any way you want it." -- Not Kim Wexler.

One of the toughest questions viewers have to ask themselves when watching a show like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul -- shows whose central characters are antiheroes, deeply flawed or outright malevolent people -- is what we want to happen. The audience tends to be divided between those who revel in the antiheroes breaking norms, rejecting conventional morality, seizing power, exploiting the expectations of those around them; and those who want some kind of justice. And when it comes to the supporting characters, whose lives intersect with those antiheroes, we are similarly torn. If the relatively innocent manage to escape the gravitational pull of the central character, that’s satisfying on one level. But it also diminishes the tragedy that surrounds the protagonist. The more people they bring down with them, the more epic the scale of their disaster.

Kim’s fate has been a central focus for all of us during this final season. Week after week we’ve watched anxiously for clues. Some of us thought she must wind up dead, because one way or another (either by diving in deeper or making a break for it) she couldn’t escape. Some hoped that she would live on to perhaps re-emerge in the Omaha timeline. None of us knew what events might precipitate her exit from this timeline, whether permanent or temporary.

And I’ll bet no one thought it would be this week. But friends, we are shedding characters faster than Jimmy sheds his sock garters when he’s headed for that circular bed with the mirrors on the ceiling. And with four episodes to go, the Saul Goodman we knew in BB has appeared for his curtain call even though we thought the final act had just begun. This week we discover Kim’s breaking point, and snap the last tether holding Saul to Jimmy McGill.

It’s about having to hurt people. Not as a means to an end, but permanently. When Kim steps up to the plate and makes up a story about Howard snorting cocaine at his desk one late night at HHM, she crushes Cheryl’s view of Howard forever. Like Howard last week, Cheryl is right! She’s right that there’s something wrong with Jimmy and Kim’s story! She’s right that Howard would never! But between the narrative they’ve spun and the corroboration provided by Mike’s scene-setting and (heartbreakingly) Cliff Main, they’ve provided her no escape, no straw of hope. Kim twists Cheryl’s memories of Howard forever, robs her of the man she once knew, the way they’ve done for all those people in that lobby with their elaborate set-up. And she does it because after all the lies they’ve told, there’s no way out. It has to be done.

Kim can be ruthless as a lawyer, but what has made her successful is that she finds a way to ground that ruthlessness in some positive source of motivation -- out of love, empathy, or at the very least, professionalism. What she has to do to Cheryl can’t be justified that way. Contrast with Gus, whom Don Eladio assesses as driven by hate. A little bit is okay, he advises, but keep it in check and remember who’s boss. By the pool, with Bolsa pouring the drinks and the cry of “blood must be repaid by blood” ringing out, this whole scene points us forward to when we will see Gus take his own revenge in “Salud.”

The question here at this hinge point between the prequel-past, the Saul-present, and the Gene-future, is who gets to have possibilities. Jimmy wants to speak those possibilities into existence. There’s some beautiful writing in this episode that I’d like to highlight, and let’s start with the way Jimmy repeatedly talks about turning the corner and putting this unpleasantness behind them. “One day we’ll wake up, brush our teeth and go to work,” he tells Kim, “and we’ll suddenly realize we haven’t thought about it at all. And that’s when we’ll know.” “I know that was tough, but it’s over,” he frames the situation in the parking garage after Howard’s memorial. “Let the healing begin.” For years now we’ve been watching Jimmy try to speak his own vision of the world into existence. And for years Kim’s been willing to let him. But no more. That world is about what makes them happy, what fulfills them, and in Kim’s damning final assessment, what would be “fun.” She was able to pretend for awhile that it could coexist with helping her clients, and the more she bought into it, the purer her clients’ needs needed to be to offset it. But the rift is so big that it’s swallowed her up. She tunnels out but we aren’t privy to where she emerges -- not yet.

And in the other poignant scene of possibilities, Gus visits a favorite haunt for some fancy wine, and we see a server named David (Reed Diamond) who comes alive at the chance to talk with someone who appreciates and understands. There are aching possibilities in this moment, in that persona that Gus has so carefully cultivated, that does in fact express some deep and true parts of himself. But it hides other parts. And in the end, there is no possibility there, not really. No future even that he can pretend to himself, let alone to us who know how it all will end.

Mike’s visit to Nacho’s father puts a label on that hinge, and confronts us as viewers with the irreparable conflicts among all the things we want. Justice? We don’t want that, lest this whole exercise be exposed as a morality play. Revenge? There’s been way too much of that already. What we really want is for these characters to be confronted with the truth about themselves and others. We want their subjectivity and their objectivity to merge, and for the mirror to reflect true. We want them to know, and then we want to find out whether that knowledge can possibly be redemptive, or whether it must destroy them.

The answer lies in a mall in Omaha. Looks like we’re heading there soon.

Stray observations

• The song playing over Kim and Jimmy’s perfectly normal day of work after the horrors of the last episode is a cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Perfect Day.” And the editing of that montage is a thing of beauty, is it not? Some match-cuts are elegant (Kim’s photos in court and Mike’s photos in the apartment) and some are delightful (mopping up blood to mopping up red sauce).

• When Mike was burning the stuff from the apartment in the desert, Noel called it “Mike’s classic fire barrel of forgetting,” so that’s what it’s called now, folks, I don’t make the rules.

• I really love the deliberate pace of Mike going into his closet to pull up the floorboards and put away his gun the first time, then the double-time pace of the editing when he goes back in to look at the Manitoba ID a second time.

• Boy, this show knows how to sock you in the gut at the most unexpected moments. How did you feel when Rich told Kim and Jimmy that HHM is downsizing, leaving that building, and taking the McGill name off the firm? End of an era, indeed.

• In that same vein, this seems to be our last visit to the HHM parking garage lowest level, where cigarettes are smoked, truth is spoken, and trash cans have now been replaced.

• Fīat justitia ruat cælum. Let's go.

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Howard Hamlin is right.

He didn’t deserve any of this. Yes, he’s privileged. Yes, he’s ambitious. Yes, he listened to Chuck’s biased portrayal of Jimmy. But Kim using him purely as a means to even the most laudable end of defending the defenseless? That requires freezing your soul, convincing yourself that any pain Howard feels is inconsequential—he’ll land on his feet! It’s a temporary setback for one annoying prick!—and celebrating his humiliation. And then it turns out you’ve gotten him killed.

An essential part of any con is to make the truth seem farfetched. The mark tells the true story of what happened to them, even figures out how the thing was done, and it seems like the ravings of a paranoid. Because who would go to such unbelievable lengths to set up Howard? Believing you’re the target of drugged and switched photos makes you the focus, and nobody is going to listen as you try to point them toward somebody else. What possible st…

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If you thought not much happened last week in “Black and Blue,” you might not be much happier tonight. “Axe and Grind” sets up the midseason finale on every front, from the dawn of Jimmy and Kim’s D-Day to Lalo chopping his way into Gus’s secrets. 

But I see a theme holding this all together -- relationships. Let’s take a look first at the scenes that bookend the episode. After the cold open (more on that relationship later), we get a poignant glimpse into Howard’s home life. He sleeps above the garage, then comes into the main house to make a perfect latte for Cheryl. We heard about their marital problems when Howard went to see his counselor in “Hit and Run.” Howard is making an effort to be extra considerate; he draws a peace sign in the foam, suggests they might go to an event together rather than dividing up the social labor, and promises her he’s taking care of the threat posed by Jimmy McGill. She’s cordial, businesslike, and a little heedless. Instead of enjoying her coffee, sh…

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Isn’t it disconcerting to see Gus so nervous? The Fring signature is cool, calm, collected -- walking into the lion’s den with a smile and an outstretched hand, nothing to fear. But “Black and Blue” finds him with his head on a swivel, with no idea where to look. For all his efforts to lock down any possible vulnerability, an operation as complicated and large-scale as the one he’s running has so many entries and exits to cover. 

With his two houses and bolthole tunnels covered with 24/7 surveillance (even kids on bikes dropping off takeout menus have to be investigated), an incognito drug kingpin’s thoughts lightly turn to their secret lab. Yes! We’re back to the big hole under the laundry that Werner and his men dug in season 4. When Gus and Mike visit in the dark of night, it’s still just a big hole with some scaffolding and an idle excavator. Mike can’t imagine how it’s an entry point. But Gus paces off the distance, and stashes a gun…

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After the shocking character death last week, I had two expectations for this fourth episode. One was that Jimmy and Kim’s plan to humiliate Howard Hamlin would move forward. (Check.) The other was that Lalo might make an appearance, giving us a sense of what proof of Gus’s involvement in the assassination plot he’s trying to unearth. No joy on that one. Instead -- and this is definitely the smarter move for the creative team, albeit heedless of my wishes -- Lalo remains a specter in “Hit and Run,” haunting Kim and Gus in their separate plotlines. 

So let’s talk about that haunting. The way it keeps those two looking over their shoulders. The way they hesitate a few more beats before moving forward, because the past won’t stay buried. The way it brings in Mike as the bridge between them, covering the waterfront, watching every shadowy corner where Lalo might reappear. The way Jimmy is too jazzed about his success to notice the creaks an…

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For some reason I’m reminded of a toy floating in a swimming pool. Something seen in a cold open that portends terrible death. Not sure why that popped into my head. Probably nothing!

Just like the first two episodes, we are flying through the fallout of the botched operation at Lalo’s compound. And while the plot is a lot clearer and easier to follow in “Rock and Hard Place,” the implications of what is happening take a while to sink in. Nacho figured it out a lot quicker than I did. 

And I should have known! Here’s a peek inside the world of a TV critic: If we’re lucky and the production company or network is kind, we get screeners to watch the episodes ahead of time. Along with those come restrictions on what details we can’t mention in any pre-air reviews. For this episode, that restriction was two words: “Character death.” As we settled in for the first viewing, I turned to Noel and said, “Here we go! Character death!”

But the best ins…

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[Welcome to the first of Episodic Criticism’s reviews of the final season of Better Call Saul from former A.V. Club contributor Donna Bowman. This week’s review is free for all, but starting next week reviews will only be available to paid subscribers, who can access reviews and join in the comment section. For more information, see here.]

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We start slow. Monochrome. Almost abstract. Color fills in pixel by pixel, and the abstract falling curves resolve into neckties. By the time the garish riot of hues fully arrives, we have been ushered once again into the Better Call Saul aesthetic. We’re back.

But slow doesn’t describe anything else about these two premiere episodes. Nearly nine years ago (my God), I wrote about Breaking Bad’s last episode: “Breaking Bad isn’t afraid to move at light speed from action to consequence, thrilling us with its boldness, trusting us to keep up, and most importantly, leaving the characters as whiplashed by the pace as the viewers.” Nothing’s changed, folks. I’m still here, you’re still here, and it’s still true that if you are hoping for a little time to get up to highway velocity, you’re out of luck.

After that cold open (with its Sunset Boulevard homage of cardboard-standee Saul getting fished out of a pool), we’re thrust back into the two plots of the season 5 finale “Something Unforgivable,” mere moments or hours after that episode’s action. Kim and Jimmy are sleeping off the ice cream sundae bar at the hotel where they fled following the confrontation with Lalo. Nacho is running from Lalo’s compound, hiding from every farmer, looking for a bolt hole. Both storylines fire off the blocks at a full sprint. If you didn’t review your notes from 2020 (or even if you did), you’ll be hard pressed to keep up.

Let’s start with Nacho, because frankly this was confusing. Here are the facts: Tyrus (Gus’s lieutenant) directs him to a motel, where a room, clothes, and a gun are waiting for him. He’s supposed to stay there for a few days, having his meals delivered, until he can hop a farm truck to be smuggled back across the border. But Bolsa vows an all-out effort to capture Nacho. Mike wants to try retrieving him, but Gus needs to tie up loose ends. So Mike and Tyrus plant a clue in Nacho’s apartment for Bolsa to find: an envelope showing a funds transfer from Peru (directing attention to some rival gang as the engineers of the Lalo plot) and the phone number of the motel.

Now here’s where I found it hard to follow. The idea seems to be to set up a situation where the Salamancas will kill Nacho. To that end, Tyrus tells Nacho not to leave the room and shoot anyone who comes to the door; in the ensuing gunfight, if Nacho is desperate enough to fight to the death rather than submit to capture and torture, he’s sure to be killed. (Seems like a less-than-foolproof plan, especially since the Lalo adventure just went south.) But Nacho notices a man strolling around a boarded-up building with water dripping from the A/C unit -- somebody’s in there watching him. He kicks out his own A/C to escape, confronts the watcher, and confirms -- by calling Tyrus to say he was leaving the motel, at which point the watcher’s phone buzzes -- that it’s Gus that is trying to make sure he stays put. Believing he’s been betrayed, Nacho makes a break for it in a hotwired truck just as the Cousins and their forces swoop down on the motel. And they’re so determined to take him alive that they shoot one of their own men.

So if I’m reading this correctly … it was not a very good plan. Perhaps it hinges on Gus misunderstanding Nacho’s initiative and instincts. Whatever the disconnect, it sure does rely on a pretty long chain of inferences about who will do what in the situation Gus and Tyrus engineered, and whaddya know, that chain breaks down. At least the collapse is slam-bang, with Nacho blazing two pistols through his own windshield and the Cousins stepping aside calmly, like bullfighters, as the truck barrels past with inches to spare. The truck crashes, and that’s where we leave that scene. But later Nacho calls Mike, who is in a standoff with Tyrus in Gus’s office, and upon hearing Mike say that something is “not my call,” he demands to speak to Gus directly. Will we see him wriggle away from the Cousins one more time, or is he in their power?

On to the other plot, and plot is the appropriate word here. Jimmy thinks Kim might have gotten it out of her system with a day in the public defender trenches, but over sopapillas she’s right back into it, suggesting they use Clifford Main to further the downfall of Howard Hamlin. “So we’re doing that?” he asks timidly. “I thought we were! Are we?” she shoots back. After the trauma of Lalo’s threats, he’s too spooked to challenge her, and she’s perfectly willing to manipulate that hesitation. They scheme to get Jimmy inside the country club while Cliff and Howard are on the links, ostensibly to take a tour Saul Goodman has arranged with the manager (the always welcome James Urbaniak). Kevin from Mesa Verde almost scotches the deal when he demands that Jimmy be thrown out, but Jimmy improvs a very loud accusation of antisemitism (“5000 years and it never ends!”) and gets directions to the men’s locker room. Cliff sees the little white baggie fall out of Howard’s locker, and the seed is planted. 

Next step is to recruit a client who can tell Cliff a tale of how Howard let them down. Maybe mesothelioma class action? “When I took the job at the shoe factory, I had no idea I was risking my life,” Jimmy spitballs. But Kim wants something even better. And when inspiration strikes, she warms Jimmy: “You are going to hate this.”

Because it’s the Kettlemans! Betsy and Craig! From season one! What a delight to have them reappear, in greatly reduced circumstances (running a tax service out of a mobile home painted like an American flag inside and out) but otherwise just as we remember them (Betsy confident she can run the show, Craig credulous and henpecked). Jimmy tells them he’s got grounds for a civil suit for ineffective assistance of counsel. The lawyer who was supposed to be on their side turned out to be, he hints broadly, “a person of substance.” Sharp-tack Betsy: “That girl with the ponytail was a cocaine addict?” Once he’s got their stories straight, and had them sign letters of intent preventing them from running off to, I dunno, Cliff Main or somebody, Betsy triumphantly tears up the agreement and does just that. They lay out their case for Howard’s cocaine abuse (Craig: “It was pretty much common knowledge out in the yard”) but Cliff disabuses them of the notion that exoneration is in the cards. Seed now watered.

The real action in Kim and Jimmy’s storyline, though, is the end of the second episode, when Jimmy is summoned back to Sweet Liberty Tax Service by an angry Betsy. “You’re going to use the stick, right?” Kim prompts as Jimmy picks out the perfect shyster lawyer outfit. “They’re more carrot types,” Jimmy says, as he cracks open the bag he toted out of the desert and sticks a roll of bills in his pocket. And with studied casualness, Kim decides to tag along. When Betsy lays into Jimmy for using them and their “good name” (right) to perform character assassination on Howard Hamlin, Jimmy fishes out that carrot -- a nice payout, and they go their separate ways. “Money fixes everything, isn’t that the motto stitched into the Kettleman family crest?” he needles. We’ve seen Jimmy do this dance so many times. He’s in no hurry. Schemes are multi-act affairs, and he learned back in Chicago to let them play all the way out.

Here’s where we get our first sense of what broke-bad Kim is going to be like. She’s -- well, let’s call it “outcome-driven.” After listening to the back and forth for a bit, tapping her foot and clenching her jaw, she picks up her stick and takes an big swing: calling a friend in the IRS investigations division (on the Kettleman’s own office phone! “Dial 9 to get out,” Craig helpfully instructs) with a lead on massive ongoing tax preparer fraud. She doesn’t need any evidence to know that an outfit like this, run by people like the Kettlemans, is giving clients a lowball refund number and pocketing the difference. When Betsy caves, Kim hangs that stick over them like the sword of Damocles. Make their clients whole, then forget they ever heard of Howard Hamlin. “You think you’ve lost everything?” she hisses at Betsy. “You have no idea.”

For the last couple of seasons, as Kim has gotten closer and closer to Jimmy, participating in his scams and defending his methods, I and many others have been dreading the moment where Jimmy drags Kim underwater for good. But as this last season begins, it’s the other way around. Kim has gone all in, because of course she has -- that’s our Kim Wexler, always has been. If the only way to do good for the clients who need her, the pro bono clients, is to get that Sandpiper payday banked, then scruples about doing things the right way are worse than useless -- they’re active impediments to justice. 

Kim’s tried all the combinations of working within the system. She’s been a good soldier at a firm, she’s taken care of the corporate clients, she’s dedicated herself to public service. They all require doing the worst kind of evil, the kind that does the bidding of the powerful and adopts their view of the powerless as suckers. She’s done with it. Her place is outside the system, where she’s beholden to nothing except results for the people who need an advocate. But that also means that her version of justice is not beholden anymore to process -- just to outcomes. Jimmy still believes in a process: the one Marco taught him, the way you get things done and get what you want. That process is parasitic on people’s predictability within those systems. Jimmy can only watch in helpless dismay as Kim blows it all up with barely a backward glance. Hey, we all enjoy making the privileged blowhards of the world squirm, but there’s a protocol to these things!

“Wolves and sheep,” Jimmy mutters as they get back in the car. Saul Goodman is a disguise he puts on to make the sheep think they’ve got his number. But Kim walks in with no mask and no patter, just a white-hot hatred of the system that puts poor people in boxes upon boxes upon boxes, stacked to the rafters, and pats itself on the back for doing its best. She’s going to burn it all to the ground.

Stray observations

• Many thanks to Myles for making a space in Episodic Medium for these final season recaps. As he pointed out last week, I started episodic reviews of Breaking Bad with the series premiere on January 22, 2008. And for more than 14 years, I’ve stayed on the beat of Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque shows. It’s a privilege -- and a bit of a relief; quitting so close to the finish line seemed like a crying shame -- to finish out the string here.

• Give it up for Jeremy Shamos as Craig Kettleman. I’ve missed that little weasel. 

• Lots of fun details in that first episode cold open: the pink thong hanging on the bathtub, the Trumpian golden toilet, the rare Beanie Babies, the copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine on the counter, and the secret panic room with the bulletproof vest behind the mirror in the walk-in closet. (That same copy of The Time Machine is on Jimmy’s bedside table in the next episode.)

• RIP Jimmy’s 1998 Suzuki Esteem, abandoned in the desert in season 5’s “Bagman.” Saul’s new ride is a boring brown Ford Taurus (“Detroit calls it taupe,” Jimmy claims). Kim thinks Saul should drive something flashy but still American, and have an office -- nay, a “cathedral of justice” -- convenient to the courthouse.

• We haven’t even touched on Lalo, who was going to get ferried across the border in a hollowed out stack of hay bales by a couple of gringo coyotes, but then heads back south after Hector asks for proof that the hit was arranged by “the chicken man.” Is the proof in the hands of Jimmy and Kim? That car following them out of the Sweet Liberty dirt lot is pretty ominous. I could do without another scene of Lalo -- or anyone in the Salamanca organization -- in the same room with either of them.

• Mike finds a Manitoba drivers license for Nacho’s dad in the safe, but doesn’t put it back for Bolsa to find. And he rebels when Gus calls for Nacho’s father to be targeted as leverage over Nacho: “Not happening.” I’ve given up on Kim making it out okay, but I still hope Manuel Varga does.

• That inflatable Statue of Liberty outside the Kettlemans’ tax service is pretty sweet. But Betsy doesn’t appreciate their ex-con life: “We lost everything! Our kids are in public school!”

• “I have an angle, Craig -- it’s an angle called justice.”