Better Call Saul: Nacho and Kim Are in Too Deep in “Something Beautiful”

The end of “Something Beautiful” makes me think of a scene from “Nailed”, the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul’s second season. In that episode, Chuck McGill confronted Kim and Jimmy about the suspected switcheroo with the Mesa Verde files. He impugned his brother’s character and told Kim to open her eyes, saying that Jimmy committed these misdeeds for her as part of a “twisted romantic gesture.”

But Kim defended Jimmy. She admitted that he’s not perfect, but argued that he was still a good person and someone she pitied in light of how much he ached for his brother’s love, a love that he would never get. She chastised Chuck for denying Jimmy that and for judging him, for threatening to inflict such consequences on him, and denied Chuck’s theory as crackpot. But then, when she was alone with Jimmy, she betrayed her true feelings. She punched Jimmy in the arm. She expressed her frustration, because she’s no fool; she knew he did it, and she thought that Chuck was right — that he did it for her.

So when Kim returns to the offices of Mesa Verde in “Something Beautiful”, the towering reminder of her ill-gotten gains, and sees the vaunted “models” that represent the company’s expansion plans, it’s overwhelming for her. The camerawork and editing is tremendous in the ensuing sequence, zooming in on this miniature world and making it larger than life from Kim’s emotional perspective. She sees a tiny man and woman in front of a building; the sounds and the feelings rush back, and she can’t help but remember how this all started. It began with a man she loved taking revenge against his own brother for her benefit. That’s not something Kim Wexler can shake as easily as Jimmy McGill (seemingly) can.

Sometimes you start something, and you don’t know how big it’s going to get, or the difficult places it’s going to take you. That seems to be the theme of “Something Beautiful”, one that provides an unexpected connection between Kim and Nacho within the episode.

"Would you mind if Hep Alien played the next Mesa Verde opening?"

“Nailed” was also the episode where Mike knocked over one of Hector’s trucks and beat up his goons. In a bitter echo of that scene, “Something Beautiful” opens with Gus’s henchmen recreating that tableau with Nacho and (an already deceased) Arturo, in order to make it look like the same brute who attacked Hector’s soldiers before have now struck again. It is, in keeping with Gus’s M.O., a meticulous job. No detail is left unattended, and to complete the careful cover-up, Gus’s men callously shoot Nacho in the shoulder and in the abdomen, leaving him to bleed in the desert with nothing but a phone call to the twins to save his life.

There too, the scenes are beautiful, but harsh, as director Daniel Sackheim uses Nacho’s injury and rescue to show both the efficient brutality of Gus’s crew while Nacho is left to bake and bleed in the desert sun, and the impressionistic resplendence and flashes of night-lit faces Nacho sees as he lies on the operating table of the same veterinarian who works with Mike and Jimmy. After the vet delivers his diagnosis and medical advice, he leaves Nacho with one last instruction — “leave me out of this.” The vet says that the work with the cartel is too hot for him, and he wants out of this crap for good.

It’s another bitter irony, because Nacho wants out too. He told his father he was trying to break free of all this. That desire, and the sequence was events that led him to this moment, were borne of his efforts to keep his family from getting involved deeper with the Salamancas, deeper into this morass. But like Kim, he’s too far into it now, and he’s suffering the physical and mental consequence of something he can’t escape from and something that happened because of him.

And yet, as much as Nacho desperately want out, there are those who desperately want in. Gus, ever the mastermind, has made it so that the Salamancas are without leadership and that the supply on the streets is running thin. He gets to play the reluctant subordinate to Don Bolsa, agreeing over feigned protest that, if he must, he’ll find an alternative supply of meth while the Salamanca’s pipelines are temporarily shut off. This is a contingency he’s clearly been preparing for for some time. His almost undetectable smile whilst on the phone with Don Bolsa betrays that. While everyone else is scrambling, in too deep, Gus knows how to play the hand he’s dealt, in part because he’s been counting cards.

Or, to be more precise, counting local science teachers with limited scruples.

But this new situation requires him to go Gale, the latest Breaking Bad alum to appear on Better Call Saul. Gale is as delightfully geeky and puppy dog-like as always, singing along to a chemical-based roundelay set to “Modern Major General”, reporting his results from the tests that Gus hired him to run, and practically begging Gus to let him be the official Pollos Hermanos meth cook.

Gale is one of this universe’s more endearing inventions, to the point that his presence is a welcome little joy in an otherwise fairly heavy episode. That even makes me forgive the show’s increasing, and frankly kind of cheesy, willingness to dip back into the Breaking Bad pool. But here that crossover quality works, because we know Gale’s fate, and what lies in wait for him on the other side of that desperation to join up, and with that, the harsh realities that are visited upon Nacho as he wants out of what Gale wants into.

Sometimes, though, that life on the other side of the glass is just too appealing. That seems to be the case for Jimmy, who returns to the sort of small time hustles we saw him running with Marco back in the day. This time, his scheme is to secretly replace a valuable Hummel figurine (owned by the copier salesmen he rejected in the last episode) with a common, otherwise undetectable replacement and then pocket the profits.

The ensuing sequence — where Jimmy’s hired goon tries to make the swap, and inadvertently gets trapped while hiding from the company’s doghouse-banished owner — is one of the funniest in the show so far. (It had “squat cobbler” levels of absurdity.) The humdrum, almost cliché problems of the owner arguing with his wife over a vacuum cleaner birthday present, listening to self-motivational tapes, and ordering pizza in the middle of the night while the would-be thief hides under a desk is a brilliant and hilarious setup, made funnier by how much patience Better Call Saul displays with it. And the coda, with Jimmy misdirecting the owner and rescuing his accomplice with little more than a coat hanger and a car alarm, is the icing on the cake.

Jimmy should have thought twice before getting mixed up in the cutthroat world of Hummels.

But there’s more going on than just comedy here. Mike recognizes that when he turns down Jimmy’s offer to do the job. He realizes that Jimmy’s after something else, something beyond just an easy score, and that’s a complication Mike is smart enough not to want to get involved in. Unlike Nacho, and unlike Kim, Mike knows when he’s walking into a briar patch he might never walk out of. He was reminded recently enough that few things in the circles he runs in are as clean or “in and out” as one might hope. There’s warning bells going off about Jimmy, and though we know they won’t keep Mike away from the once-and-future Saul Goodman forever, they’re enough to keep him away for now.

And maybe that’s the same sort of realization that Kim is starting to have. At the end of the episode, Jimmy sees the piddling distribution Chuck left for him, reads a mildly condescending but still genuine and heartfelt letter from his brother, but remains nonplussed. Yet again, something that would seem to provoke an outpouring of emotion from Jimmy results in nothing, while it’s Kim who breaks down and tears up and needs a minute. Chuck’s letter talks about his and Jimmy’s brotherly bond, about the connection they shared despite their differences, about the resilience and hustle Chuck always admired in his younger sibling. And there’s two ways to take Kim’s wounded reaction to that.

The first is as a reflection of the guilt she feels for having been the thing that motivated the rift between the McGills. Chuck told her that schism wasn’t her fault back in “Nailed”, but he also told her that Jimmy performed these awful acts on her behalf. As I’ve mentioned before, part of the larger story Better Call Saul has been telling is of Kim slowly but surely replacing Chuck as the major figure in Jimmy’s life. Maybe being reminded of what led to her winning Mesa Verde as a client, of the bond between brothers that was severed on her account, is too much to bear.

"It's actually a letter from Publishers Clearing House. It says I may already have won."

But the other possibility is that Kim’s realizing she picked the wrong side in this war, or that she regrets having any part in it whatsoever. The last time Kim was in Mesa Verde’s offices, she told her counterpart that all that had happened at Jimmy’s disciplinary hearing was the tearing down of a sick man. And yet just a little bit before, in that scene in “Nailed”, Kim took Jimmy’s side over Chuck’s. Whatever the truth was, she believed that Jimmy’s heart was in the right place, that he was the victim, and that he was a good man.

Now, in the wake of Chuck’s suicide, maybe she’s starting to see Chuck’s decency, maybe she’s starting to reevaluate the set of events that led her to this place, and her choice to be with a person who seems fine with them all. In “Something Beautiful”’s final image, we see only half of Jimmy’s face, the other half obscured by Kim’s closed door, and there’s symbolism in that. As perceptive as Kim is, she didn’t see the whole picture with Jimmy; she didn’t see the whole picture with Chuck. Now that it’s coming into focus, she finds herself so immersed in something awful, so bound up in it, and all she can do is buckle and try to bear it.

Breaking Bad has already shown us the fates of so many of these characters, how Jimmy, Gus, Gale, Mike, and others are all sucked in and battered by this world. But Better Call Saul gives us people like Kim and Nacho, whose futures are unknown, and who we can only hope escape this terrible orbit in better shape than Chuck did.