Review: Better Call Saul, "Fun and Games" | Season 6, Episode 9

Possibilities and breaking points meet at the Saul Goodman crossroads

Photo: Greg Lewis (AMC/Sony Pictures TV)

"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.