Review: Better Call Saul, "Wine and Roses"/"Carrot and Stick" | Season 6, Episodes 1 and 2

As the Salamanca noose tightens around them, Nacho fights to get back home—but Kim heads for the wilderness.

Photo: Greg Lewis / AMC / Sony Pictures Television

[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.]

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.”