Hey everyone—thanks for having such a lively conversation, I remain so thrilled to see this level of engagement proving the worth of what we're trying to build here. I've made this week's review free for all, so if you've been bugging people to start reading Donna's reviews and want to show them what they're missing so they'll join us, you can send them a link!
I think that might have been the line that broke me. It's just such a thing we've become conditioned to believe in stories--love conquers all, love is better than anything, love is worth fighting for, love makes us great. But it's not really true, is it? Love can help you be a better person, but it can also make you selfish, cruel, vindictive; keep thinking about this corny line I saw somewhere about how love makes "a universe of two," like that's automatically a good thing, but what if it isn't, always. What do you do with that? How do you live with it? I'm more of a Jimmy/Saul than a Kim, ultimately (even before you get to the Nutrigrain bars). Even if it would mean the end of the world, I'd want to stay together.
Funny how after all this time speculating, they still managed to catch me off guard, with the most anticlimactic, devastating kind of scene. I love how it underlined what makes Kim such a terrific character--she's always been smarter than everyone else on the show, with this kind of self-awareness that is both endlessly compelling and really, really tricky to pull off in the writer's room. Because once you introduce the idea that she knows what's going on, that she's an actual grown-up, you can't just have her do dumb shit to motivate the plot (which is what I initially thought was going on re: Howard). Somehow, they managed not to compromise her, right up till the end. Of course Kim would leave. What else could she do? (All that talk of "how does Jimmy become Saul," when the answer was always: when he has nothing else left.)
My bet is that Kim's married, with kids now. Gene will meet up with her one last time, kind of a Remains of the Day type of thing.
Anyone else spend the final few minutes wondering if Walt was going to show up? I like how much BCS has turned him into this (completely self-centered and unaware) force of karmic retribution. Gus, Mike, Saul--he brings everything down.
This episode made me think a lot about Jimmy's ability to compartmentalize. Thinking about it, this shows up in the very beginning--as of the pilot, Jimmy is spending so much of his time looking after Chuck. Given what we later learn of how wounded Jimmy was by Chuck's disdain for him, only a person who is deeply, poisonously good at shutting themselves off from their own feelings would be able to continue being Chuck's caretaker like that.
I've always been confused about how the final pivot to Saul would work because Jimmy just doesn't seem like an emotionally reactive enough character to have one defined "snap" and break bad. Some potential progressions like "Kim breaks up with him, so he's so mad at the world that he decides to go all in on being bad" or "Kim dies, so he's so distraught he stops caring about right and wrong" seem like they'd work thematically and narratively but didn't necessarily seem to fit the character to me (I mean, I think this team would've made those stories work too). Chuck's death, the desert, even Howard's death in this very episode--Jimmy's inclination is to put it in a box and move on (present before Mike's speech after the desert but very much strengthened by it), not to have a dramatic emotional reaction that changes him as a person.
So what we're shown instead is that, as others have noted, maybe there's just nothing of Jimmy left. Every part of Jimmy's life--his family, his non-criminal work, his self-image, his past, and finally his marriage--is now too toxic to emotionally touch. It all must be put in the box and moved on from. It almost feels like Jimmy and Saul are full-blown alternate personalities. Saul was created to be an occasional tool, but he's all that's left to retreat into once being Jimmy became too painful.
So it doesn't seem like Kim leaving caused some big emotional blowout that turned him into a different person. He just compartmentalized his entire self away, leaving behind only the thing that he had already separated from that self: the Criminal Lawyer. Saul is amoral because he built a wall around Jimmy's Morals; he's self-centered and self-obsessed because he hid Jimmy's Relationships in the attic; he doesn't care about what kind of lawyer he is because he put Jimmy's Lawyer Brother and Jimmy's Lawyer Wife in the deepest mental hole he could possibly dig.
And that feels -exactly- in line with the character I've been watching.
(Also interesting in that BB is about watching Walt unearth all the darkest parts of himself he had shoved down, where BCS is about watching Jimmy shove away all the best parts of himself. Both becoming the bad guy, but in very different ways.)
The dramatic transition to the Saul Goodman era was great and all, and I think it pointedly answers the question of how and when Jimmy finally becomes Saul Goodman, but what I really loved about this episode was that it also showed how Mike became the Mike we know from Breaking Bad.
Mike has been pretending all this time that what he really wants is justice, for his son, and later on for the people victimized by the Salamancas, but what he really wants is revenge, which Papa Varga unwittingly clarifies for him.
The most striking moment of the episode for me was Papa Varga walking away as Mike stood quietly, sadly behind the lattice of the chain link fence, looking more like a prisoner than a free man.
For all his righteous talk about justice and the difference between good and bad, Mike really is, deep down, a corrupt and evil person.
And I think that moment at the fence was when he realized it.
It struck me that Vince Gilligan has one clear obsession here, as both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are essentially about the same thing: how we deal with our inner darkness. Walter embraces it and he's pretty much okay with it. Kim is fucking terrified of it.
Breaking Bad is ostensibly about a good man who "breaks bad," but the show does a very good job convincing us he was never really a "good man" to begin with and the villain inside him was waiting to get out. And so when Better Call Saul started, it was ostensibly about a good man who "breaks bad," but I think the show has done a very good job convincing us that Jimmy McGill is, at his core, a decent person, and it was never him who was the Walter of the show. It was Kim.
This episode was brutal in its quietness. The pivotal scenes were all achingly muted, to me. Gustavo at the bar was like a ghost; Kim in the parking deck kissing Jimmy to both stop his manic rationalizations and to serve as a stop gap for all age couldn’t say; Mike with Nacho’s father fumbling to say Justice in Spanish. And of course, the final conversation between Jimmy and Kim which ends with just the sound of tape stripping from the roll, affixing another box.
Jul 19, 2022·edited Jul 19, 2022Liked by Donna Bowman
First of all, THANK YOU Myles for starting this site! This is the first episode of BB/BCS I’ve caught in real time (late to the game on BB and then waiting for Netflix to air BCS, finally finished Season 5 a couple weeks ago, had no idea what I was going to do without Donna’s coverage of Season 6 :)).
What I found particular poignant about Jimmy’s soliloquy? about turning the corner was that it was the same thing that Mike told Jimmy following their time in the desert. Neither Jimmy nor Kim could wait that long though..
During this episode, I kept thinking about the last two episodes of season 3, particularly Kim’s storyline in those episodes and her car crash. I remember at the time being really stuck and amazed by Kim’s decision to take a step back and lighten her work load. It was such a self aware and emotionally intelligent decision for a universe where characters are always digging themself deeper (which Kim had done plenty of in the series). Kim’s car crash made her realize that she could have seriously hurt herself and others, so she course corrected before it become too late, before she could do serious damage.
But this time, in season 6, that decision did come when it was too late. She had already done serious damage. Her realization and decision this time only after she has destroyed herself and others. And that is one of the things that make Kim and this episode so tragic to me. She has always had the ability and insight , more than any of the characters in the breaking bad, to make smart, self-aware decisions; but as the series went on, that ability increasingly become clouded and overcome by other things, other desires. And in this episode, she finally finally gets that back and for her to see things clearly but in took utter devastation for that to happen. But unlike with the car crash, it’s too late. The damage is done.
Also, is Kim the only character in the breaking bad universe to successfully walk away of her own volition? Other characters have had many chances to walk away, other characters have walked a way for a brief time and then sucked themselves back in, other characters have wanted to walk away but external forces prevented them from doing so...but I can’t think of anyone else but Kim who has actually successfully walked away. They’ve either been killed (mike, nacho, hank, etc) or forced to walk away as fugitives (Jimmy/Saul, Jesse).
- Kim's comment a while ago to Rich that she would have ended up as a cashier if she hadn't moved to ABQ and gone to law school is haunting me. What is she doing now?
- There's some symmetry this season with Kim and Nacho in contrast to Mike. Mike is choosing to stay in the game, but Kim and Nacho prove that you're not stuck; you CAN choose another path for yourself once you're on a bad choice road, but you have to accept the consequences, the heavens may fall. Nacho paid with his life, and Kim is no longer the world's best lawyer and hardly has a fantastic safety net to fall back on. Mike doesn't want to accept not having a ton of money for Stacy and Kaylee, fine. But that doesn't mean his only choice is to glare at Gus and then go do whatever he says, and just thinking you're different from the other cartel people is not the same as actually being different, as Mr. Varga points out. You actually have to do something different, otherwise the result of your actions is the same.
- And Jimmy/Saul can decide to opt out too, no matter what Chuck and Howard and so many others said about him being unable to change. Walter White was a struggling teacher when he decided he could be something different and someone bad. I wonder if this show will end with Saul deciding to be good.
Thanks as always, Donna. I wonder (and I haven’t read all 112 comments) if anyone shares my take on Gus’s interaction with the sommelier. Absolutely, Gus is charmed by the guy, and may regret what his life choices don’t allow him to have. I also heard something else as Reed Diamond’s character was speaking, and I sensed Gus’s wheels turning (because — Esposito’s face and eyes!). In Côte-Rôtie they make wine. They’ve been doing it for millenia and they’re very good at it, making something that is unique, and specific — entirely their local product while also being one of the world’s best. Yes, it’s an intoxicant, potentially danerous and addictive, causing social and physical harm. But it’s also a work of art, and a point of pride. It makes people like the sommelier enthusiastically tell great stories about it. At this point Gus is thinking of his unfinished superlab, and what he wants to make there. Gus is proud, and vain, and we’ve just been reminded he’s full of hate. He manifests his hate by being better than everyone else — even taking pride in his chicken business that’s just a front and a laundry for his drug operation. This story by the charming, smiley sommelier is what Gus is thinking about a few years later when he learns about the high-yield blue meth and meets Walt, and why a guy as careful and methodical as Gus takes Walt on as chief of the superlab despite all of Walt’s evident red flags. Making and selling the Côte-Rôtie of crystal meth appealed to Gus’s pride and vanity and hate, and it eventually got him killed.
It really helped at the final moment of this episode to know I'd be able to come and read your review, Donna. Thank you for that. I did find it fairly overwhelmingly sad, but that's because I care so much. At least, for the time being, it eases the tension of fearing Kim will be killed.
Leave it up to Vince & Co. to barrel towards the finish line like this. While some have complained about the pacing, I find it thrilling that they've set up so many things that they can essentially just start tearing out the Jenga pieces like this in the back half of the season, our feelings and emotions be damned. If Rhea doesn't finally win an Emmy after this episode I will go 100% Lalo on the voters, watching from the gutters, and charming your widows.
Prediction: They tie up the loose end that Kim went back to Nebraska after leaving Jimmy, somehow they cross paths and (this is too much to hope for from V & Co so I'm already setting myself up for being crushed) maybe these two kids get some sort of happy ending from the mayhem that has been the Meth Wars of ABQ.
I had started to believe that Jimmy and Kim were going to be put in an impossible situation and be forced to be these caricatures of themselves forever -- it is somehow much less obvious and much more painful that their end comes not because they deny who they are, but accept it fully, instead.
As Emily VDW is to Deadwood, Alan Sepinwall is to Sopranos, and MZS is to Mad Men, Donna is to the ABQ-verse. I look forward to these reviews almost as much as the episode itself. They add clarity and reinforcement to art that I think is great but can’t quite find the words to articulate HOW it is so.
Long-winded way of saying, thank you, Donna. I can’t wait for the final four episodes and recaps.
Hey everyone—thanks for having such a lively conversation, I remain so thrilled to see this level of engagement proving the worth of what we're trying to build here. I've made this week's review free for all, so if you've been bugging people to start reading Donna's reviews and want to show them what they're missing so they'll join us, you can send them a link!
"I love you, too... but so what?"
I think that might have been the line that broke me. It's just such a thing we've become conditioned to believe in stories--love conquers all, love is better than anything, love is worth fighting for, love makes us great. But it's not really true, is it? Love can help you be a better person, but it can also make you selfish, cruel, vindictive; keep thinking about this corny line I saw somewhere about how love makes "a universe of two," like that's automatically a good thing, but what if it isn't, always. What do you do with that? How do you live with it? I'm more of a Jimmy/Saul than a Kim, ultimately (even before you get to the Nutrigrain bars). Even if it would mean the end of the world, I'd want to stay together.
Funny how after all this time speculating, they still managed to catch me off guard, with the most anticlimactic, devastating kind of scene. I love how it underlined what makes Kim such a terrific character--she's always been smarter than everyone else on the show, with this kind of self-awareness that is both endlessly compelling and really, really tricky to pull off in the writer's room. Because once you introduce the idea that she knows what's going on, that she's an actual grown-up, you can't just have her do dumb shit to motivate the plot (which is what I initially thought was going on re: Howard). Somehow, they managed not to compromise her, right up till the end. Of course Kim would leave. What else could she do? (All that talk of "how does Jimmy become Saul," when the answer was always: when he has nothing else left.)
My bet is that Kim's married, with kids now. Gene will meet up with her one last time, kind of a Remains of the Day type of thing.
Anyone else spend the final few minutes wondering if Walt was going to show up? I like how much BCS has turned him into this (completely self-centered and unaware) force of karmic retribution. Gus, Mike, Saul--he brings everything down.
This episode made me think a lot about Jimmy's ability to compartmentalize. Thinking about it, this shows up in the very beginning--as of the pilot, Jimmy is spending so much of his time looking after Chuck. Given what we later learn of how wounded Jimmy was by Chuck's disdain for him, only a person who is deeply, poisonously good at shutting themselves off from their own feelings would be able to continue being Chuck's caretaker like that.
I've always been confused about how the final pivot to Saul would work because Jimmy just doesn't seem like an emotionally reactive enough character to have one defined "snap" and break bad. Some potential progressions like "Kim breaks up with him, so he's so mad at the world that he decides to go all in on being bad" or "Kim dies, so he's so distraught he stops caring about right and wrong" seem like they'd work thematically and narratively but didn't necessarily seem to fit the character to me (I mean, I think this team would've made those stories work too). Chuck's death, the desert, even Howard's death in this very episode--Jimmy's inclination is to put it in a box and move on (present before Mike's speech after the desert but very much strengthened by it), not to have a dramatic emotional reaction that changes him as a person.
So what we're shown instead is that, as others have noted, maybe there's just nothing of Jimmy left. Every part of Jimmy's life--his family, his non-criminal work, his self-image, his past, and finally his marriage--is now too toxic to emotionally touch. It all must be put in the box and moved on from. It almost feels like Jimmy and Saul are full-blown alternate personalities. Saul was created to be an occasional tool, but he's all that's left to retreat into once being Jimmy became too painful.
So it doesn't seem like Kim leaving caused some big emotional blowout that turned him into a different person. He just compartmentalized his entire self away, leaving behind only the thing that he had already separated from that self: the Criminal Lawyer. Saul is amoral because he built a wall around Jimmy's Morals; he's self-centered and self-obsessed because he hid Jimmy's Relationships in the attic; he doesn't care about what kind of lawyer he is because he put Jimmy's Lawyer Brother and Jimmy's Lawyer Wife in the deepest mental hole he could possibly dig.
And that feels -exactly- in line with the character I've been watching.
(Also interesting in that BB is about watching Walt unearth all the darkest parts of himself he had shoved down, where BCS is about watching Jimmy shove away all the best parts of himself. Both becoming the bad guy, but in very different ways.)
The dramatic transition to the Saul Goodman era was great and all, and I think it pointedly answers the question of how and when Jimmy finally becomes Saul Goodman, but what I really loved about this episode was that it also showed how Mike became the Mike we know from Breaking Bad.
Mike has been pretending all this time that what he really wants is justice, for his son, and later on for the people victimized by the Salamancas, but what he really wants is revenge, which Papa Varga unwittingly clarifies for him.
The most striking moment of the episode for me was Papa Varga walking away as Mike stood quietly, sadly behind the lattice of the chain link fence, looking more like a prisoner than a free man.
For all his righteous talk about justice and the difference between good and bad, Mike really is, deep down, a corrupt and evil person.
And I think that moment at the fence was when he realized it.
A couple of incredible shots that stayed with me:
the view of Mike from beneath the fire in the barrel--very much a frame of Mike in a hell of his own making
The shot of Saul’s “best lawyer in the world” mug, another replacement, edited, less colorful.
I was prepared for the possibility that Kim could die.
I was prepared for the possibility that Kim and Jimmy could break up.
I was never prepared for the possibility that Kim WOULD GIVE UP LAW, that unexpectedly broke me.
It struck me that Vince Gilligan has one clear obsession here, as both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are essentially about the same thing: how we deal with our inner darkness. Walter embraces it and he's pretty much okay with it. Kim is fucking terrified of it.
Breaking Bad is ostensibly about a good man who "breaks bad," but the show does a very good job convincing us he was never really a "good man" to begin with and the villain inside him was waiting to get out. And so when Better Call Saul started, it was ostensibly about a good man who "breaks bad," but I think the show has done a very good job convincing us that Jimmy McGill is, at his core, a decent person, and it was never him who was the Walter of the show. It was Kim.
This episode was brutal in its quietness. The pivotal scenes were all achingly muted, to me. Gustavo at the bar was like a ghost; Kim in the parking deck kissing Jimmy to both stop his manic rationalizations and to serve as a stop gap for all age couldn’t say; Mike with Nacho’s father fumbling to say Justice in Spanish. And of course, the final conversation between Jimmy and Kim which ends with just the sound of tape stripping from the roll, affixing another box.
Goddamn.
First of all, THANK YOU Myles for starting this site! This is the first episode of BB/BCS I’ve caught in real time (late to the game on BB and then waiting for Netflix to air BCS, finally finished Season 5 a couple weeks ago, had no idea what I was going to do without Donna’s coverage of Season 6 :)).
What I found particular poignant about Jimmy’s soliloquy? about turning the corner was that it was the same thing that Mike told Jimmy following their time in the desert. Neither Jimmy nor Kim could wait that long though..
During this episode, I kept thinking about the last two episodes of season 3, particularly Kim’s storyline in those episodes and her car crash. I remember at the time being really stuck and amazed by Kim’s decision to take a step back and lighten her work load. It was such a self aware and emotionally intelligent decision for a universe where characters are always digging themself deeper (which Kim had done plenty of in the series). Kim’s car crash made her realize that she could have seriously hurt herself and others, so she course corrected before it become too late, before she could do serious damage.
But this time, in season 6, that decision did come when it was too late. She had already done serious damage. Her realization and decision this time only after she has destroyed herself and others. And that is one of the things that make Kim and this episode so tragic to me. She has always had the ability and insight , more than any of the characters in the breaking bad, to make smart, self-aware decisions; but as the series went on, that ability increasingly become clouded and overcome by other things, other desires. And in this episode, she finally finally gets that back and for her to see things clearly but in took utter devastation for that to happen. But unlike with the car crash, it’s too late. The damage is done.
Also, is Kim the only character in the breaking bad universe to successfully walk away of her own volition? Other characters have had many chances to walk away, other characters have walked a way for a brief time and then sucked themselves back in, other characters have wanted to walk away but external forces prevented them from doing so...but I can’t think of anyone else but Kim who has actually successfully walked away. They’ve either been killed (mike, nacho, hank, etc) or forced to walk away as fugitives (Jimmy/Saul, Jesse).
- Kim's comment a while ago to Rich that she would have ended up as a cashier if she hadn't moved to ABQ and gone to law school is haunting me. What is she doing now?
- There's some symmetry this season with Kim and Nacho in contrast to Mike. Mike is choosing to stay in the game, but Kim and Nacho prove that you're not stuck; you CAN choose another path for yourself once you're on a bad choice road, but you have to accept the consequences, the heavens may fall. Nacho paid with his life, and Kim is no longer the world's best lawyer and hardly has a fantastic safety net to fall back on. Mike doesn't want to accept not having a ton of money for Stacy and Kaylee, fine. But that doesn't mean his only choice is to glare at Gus and then go do whatever he says, and just thinking you're different from the other cartel people is not the same as actually being different, as Mr. Varga points out. You actually have to do something different, otherwise the result of your actions is the same.
- And Jimmy/Saul can decide to opt out too, no matter what Chuck and Howard and so many others said about him being unable to change. Walter White was a struggling teacher when he decided he could be something different and someone bad. I wonder if this show will end with Saul deciding to be good.
Thanks as always, Donna. I wonder (and I haven’t read all 112 comments) if anyone shares my take on Gus’s interaction with the sommelier. Absolutely, Gus is charmed by the guy, and may regret what his life choices don’t allow him to have. I also heard something else as Reed Diamond’s character was speaking, and I sensed Gus’s wheels turning (because — Esposito’s face and eyes!). In Côte-Rôtie they make wine. They’ve been doing it for millenia and they’re very good at it, making something that is unique, and specific — entirely their local product while also being one of the world’s best. Yes, it’s an intoxicant, potentially danerous and addictive, causing social and physical harm. But it’s also a work of art, and a point of pride. It makes people like the sommelier enthusiastically tell great stories about it. At this point Gus is thinking of his unfinished superlab, and what he wants to make there. Gus is proud, and vain, and we’ve just been reminded he’s full of hate. He manifests his hate by being better than everyone else — even taking pride in his chicken business that’s just a front and a laundry for his drug operation. This story by the charming, smiley sommelier is what Gus is thinking about a few years later when he learns about the high-yield blue meth and meets Walt, and why a guy as careful and methodical as Gus takes Walt on as chief of the superlab despite all of Walt’s evident red flags. Making and selling the Côte-Rôtie of crystal meth appealed to Gus’s pride and vanity and hate, and it eventually got him killed.
Any thoughts?
It really helped at the final moment of this episode to know I'd be able to come and read your review, Donna. Thank you for that. I did find it fairly overwhelmingly sad, but that's because I care so much. At least, for the time being, it eases the tension of fearing Kim will be killed.
Leave it up to Vince & Co. to barrel towards the finish line like this. While some have complained about the pacing, I find it thrilling that they've set up so many things that they can essentially just start tearing out the Jenga pieces like this in the back half of the season, our feelings and emotions be damned. If Rhea doesn't finally win an Emmy after this episode I will go 100% Lalo on the voters, watching from the gutters, and charming your widows.
Prediction: They tie up the loose end that Kim went back to Nebraska after leaving Jimmy, somehow they cross paths and (this is too much to hope for from V & Co so I'm already setting myself up for being crushed) maybe these two kids get some sort of happy ending from the mayhem that has been the Meth Wars of ABQ.
I had started to believe that Jimmy and Kim were going to be put in an impossible situation and be forced to be these caricatures of themselves forever -- it is somehow much less obvious and much more painful that their end comes not because they deny who they are, but accept it fully, instead.
As Emily VDW is to Deadwood, Alan Sepinwall is to Sopranos, and MZS is to Mad Men, Donna is to the ABQ-verse. I look forward to these reviews almost as much as the episode itself. They add clarity and reinforcement to art that I think is great but can’t quite find the words to articulate HOW it is so.
Long-winded way of saying, thank you, Donna. I can’t wait for the final four episodes and recaps.