Better Call Saul and the Choices We Don’t Have to Make in “Breathe”

One of the most interesting questions to ask — for both real people and characters on television — is why someone chooses to do things they don’t have to. The realities of life can push people toward certain choices, and circumstances often dictate actions. But there are situations in which there’s no external force, no rules or sticks or carrots to poke or prod, just a raw choice to be made. It’s these sorts of choices that can reveal who someone really is and what they’re going through, in a way that’s clearer than with choices that are muddied by pressure and inertia and need.

These are the types of questions that “Breathe” is interested in. Why is Gus Fring not only trying to keep Hector Salamanca alive, but also moving against those who tried to kill him? Why is Kim Wexler attending a meeting to determine Jimmy’s share of Chuck’s estate when Jimmy himself is blowing it off? Why is Mike Ehrmantraut determined to perform his “security consultant” routine on all of Madrigal’s outposts despite Lydia’s objections? And why is Jimmy McGill ready to talk himself out of a job, one he’d just hustled like crazy to earn?

It’s that first question, about Gus’s motivations, that interests me most. Why would Gus go to the effort and expense of trying to make sure Hector survives when, as his lieutenant notes, it would be far easier, and perhaps even more just, for Gus to simply let him die.

I write most of these reviews assuming that the average Better Call Saul viewer is at least roughly familiar with Breaking Bad, and I suspect Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and the rest of Better Call Saul’s creative team work in the same way. There’s too many hints and callbacks and Easter eggs (see also: the Salamanca twins in this episode) for that not to be the case. But oddly enough, Gus’s actions here might make more sense if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to find suits that compliment one another but aren't 'matching'"?

Without the prior series’s flashback to Gus’s first encounter with Hector, you might assume that Gus and Hector are just standard-issue rivals in a typically dangerous business. You could read Gus’s efforts to save Hector’s life (both here and in last season’s finale) as him trying to protect the cartel from what he suspects is an outside attack. You can read the palpable dislike between him and Hector as stemming from a perceived (or actual) lack of respect, while still not being enough for Gus to want his counterpart to die for it. And you can read Gus as a man of principle, who believes that the captain of an organization should be protected, even if Gus isn’t especially fond of this particular peer.

But if you have seen Breaking Bad, Gus’s behavior is all the more puzzling, precisely because you know exactly what Hector has done to Gus, and how easy (both emotionally and practically) it would be for him to let the old man die. Keeping Hector alive — let alone paying to bring in someone from a renowned medical facility — is something that Gus absolutely does not have to do, especially when mere inaction would allow this villain to meet his maker without Gus having to take the risk of enacting revenge himself. And it’s confusing, albeit strikingly so, why he decides to do all of this.

But maybe the other characters’ choices can help explicate his motivations. Lydia has a similar, if not exactly the same, type of confusion about what’s motivating Mike to inspect the Madrigal facilities in the guise of his made up job title, and it helps put Gus’s perspective into relief. Despite my similar puzzlement over Mike’s behavior in the last episode, Mike explains himself here – telling Lydia that this is a way of covering his tracks, of making sure that if anyone asks about this “rounding error,” people can say that they’ve seen him doing his job. Lydia (gently but firmly) encourages Mike to reconsider, but he won’t be deterred.

When Lydia raises the issue with their mutual friend, Gus isn’t exactly sympathetic to her concerns. Instead, he inquires whether Mike’s causing any real problems, and when Lydia admits that he isn’t, Gus leaves it at that. Gus and Mike are birds of a feather, who recognize something in one another – a combination of a particular sort of honor, meticulousness, and a sense of pride in their work. Gus’s thoughts on the matter seem to be, “The man has his reasons,” and if he deems that good enough for Mike, he may deem it good enough for himself as well.

"Today I'm securely consulting the playground."

Or maybe Gus’s decision has to do with wanting the chance to do right by someone. That seems to be Kim’s motivation to stand in for Jimmy when Howard is administering Chuck’s last will and testament, something Jimmy himself seems to have no interest in. As a final insult to his little brother, Chuck leaves Jimmy a mere $5,000 dollars, just enough to let any reviewing probate court know that Jimmy wasn’t overlooked and that he wasn’t disinherited in a way that would leave the will open to being contested. It’s another calculated move from Chuck, a way to make sure that his good-for-nothing little brother doesn’t get anything but the most meager slice his estate, despite how much time and effort and love Jimmy put into looking after his brother, because he thinks Jimmy’s already gotten more than he deserves out of this world.

But that’s not the insult Kim is worried about. In a powerhouse performance (and if there’s any justice in Tinseltown, one that will help Rhea Seehorn get the Emmy recognition she’s deserved for some time now) Kim turns her anger on Howard, letting him have it for what he said to Jimmy at the end of “Smoke”.

She’s a little inscrutable in her motivations there too. There’s the sense that Kim means what she says when she chastises Howard for telling Jimmy about his theory that Chuck’s death was a suicide, for “putting that on” Jimmy. She’s seen the effect that his brother’s passing had on Jimmy, the sort of hardship that he’s dealing with under his surface-level calm, and it’s possible she genuinely blames Howard, at least in part, for complicating Jimmy’s grief.

Still, while Kim isn’t necessarily mercenary enough to try to strong-arm Howard into doing something more financially for Jimmy than Chuck did, there is the sense that there’s more to Kim’s blistering rebuke than just what’s on the surface. There’s the hint that Kim is also frustrated with Chuck, frustrated with this situation, and maybe even a little frustrated with Jimmy. But you can’t yell at a dead man; you can’t yell at a situation; and if you have a shred of decency, you can’t yell at someone who’s grieving.

"Those lamps alone are an affront to Chuck's memory!"

You can, however, yell at Howard Hamlin, who is, at best, an accessory to the ills Chuck suffered and caused, but who’s there and willing to take it. It feels like there’s more in store for Kim and Howard than this just verbal missive. But for now, Better Call Saul leaves us to wonder why Kim chose to stand in for Jimmy in a meeting that he himself blew off – whether it’s to stand-up for someone who’s been disrespected and wounded, or to let something out with no other place for it.

Jimmy’s similarly brief but potent sequence in the episode sees him looking for an outlet as well, but in a very different way. With his suspension still in effect, Jimmy is job-hunting, and his first stop of the day is an interview for a position as a copier salesman. As usual, Jimmy gives the sort of brilliant pitch you’d expect from him, where he shows that he knows the product inside and out, ingratiates himself with the folks making the hiring decision using his affable charm, and wins them over with his powers of persuasion. And when all that is still only enough to net him a very positive “we’ll be in touch” from his interviewers, he doubles down, makes the hard sell, and gets the job offer right then and there.

Then he rejects it outright and chews out his erstwhile employers for being so reckless as to offer it to him.

Jimmy doesn’t have to do that. He doesn’t have to throw away an opportunity that he worked like hell to get. He doesn’t have to build up his prowess as a salesman and a potentially valuable member of this company just to instantly self-sabotage and go so far as to shame his would-be employers for having the poor judgment to fall for his schtick. But Jimmy wants to punish himself, and he wants to test himself.

No matter what face he tries to put on, Chuck’s death, and his hand in it, has clearly gotten to Jimmy (something Kim perceives in the quick but meaningful look she shares with him on the couch after this is all over). So when Jimmy walks into a place like that office, one that might remind him of the copy shop he used to mess with his brother, he tries to be the silver tongued devil who could talk his way into anything. But he hears his brother’s voice in his head, the one that tells Jimmy that everything he’s ever done is built on a lie, that he doesn’t deserve to have any sort of success, and that what he does is dangerous and dishonest. This is Jimmy’s form of self-flagellation, of self-sabotage, and it’s a tribute to Bob Odenkirk and the show’s writers how well-constructed, well-acted, and well-suited the scene is to tell that story.

This screenshot is actually from a deleted scene where Jimmy closed with a yo momma joke.

And maybe that’s the lesson and the connection between Jimmy’s story and Gus’s puzzling choices in this episode. Maybe it’s all a question of punishment and control.

The final scene of “Breathe” is the most frightening Gus Fring has seemed since he threatened to kill Walt’s little girl. There’s a gentility to Fring (and in Giancarlo Esposito in his performance) that makes Gus plausible as someone who could pass without notice in the respectable world, but which makes him ten times as scary when he ever so slightly lets loose and speaks in clear but unnerving threats and demands. His threats are implicit in the death he orders and in his statement to Nacho that he knows what was done to Hector and by whom, and his demand comes earlier in the episode.

Gus tells his lieutenant that he decides when Hector dies — not a stroke, not some low level soldier — just Gustavo Fring and Gustavo Fring alone. Maybe Gus still believes that Hector is deserving of punishment and that he deserves to suffer, but Gus wants to be the one to dole it out, to decide when Hector’s had enough, which might not come until he’s been forced to watch Gus single-handedly conquer the empire that Hector and his family worked so hard to build. Gus doesn’t want Hector to die, but perhaps it’s not because of any sort of mercy or professional courtesy. Perhaps it’s because he has a plan for Hector; he’s playing the long game, and death’s too good for his enemy, at least right now.

So Gus Fring does something that neither circumstance nor pressure forces him to do — he spends his money to keep a rival from perishing, just as Jimmy undercuts himself, and Mike takes on duties no one asked him to, and Kim stands up for someone she cares about. In a show centered on a man who moves the world with his equivocations and manipulations, there’s a purity to these sorts of actions, the ones that aren’t forced or required. Instead, they emerge from what these individuals really want. They show what’s important to them, what’s bothering them, and what might be worth more to them in the fullness of time than what’s in front of them in the here and now.