Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because this episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of our hero during the Walter White era. It’s not just because Gus Fring seems to nail down his plans for the facility that will one day become Heisenberg’s lab. And it’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and seedy hangout where Jesse Pinkman once sold his drug of choice.
It’s because “Quite a Ride” is about people who are almost peerless at what they do, unable to walk away from it, and the different directions those superlative skills take them. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a show devoted to a man who had an undeniable talent, but who could not let it go in the face of the money and long-awaited recognition he thought he was due, even when it came with a side of peril and human misery. Breaking Bad lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone as talented as Walter White operate at the top of his game in a terrible industry, and earned its emotional resonance from the uncertain but foreboding sense of where those talents would lead him.
“Quite a Ride” frames Jimmy in the same way. It depicts him as someone with an unrivaled gift for persuasion, the ability to make an anthill sound like Mount Everest, and a dearth of scruples that allows him to skirt the bounds of the law when it suits him. The difference between Walter White and Jimmy McGill is that Walt was running from a life he resented, while Jimmy’s just running from his own grief.
Without that grief, you can envision Jimmy McGill being content, at least temporarily, to work his shifts at the mobile phone store in a semi-normal fashion. Sure, his efforts to convince a passing lookie-loo that he can evade the taxman by buying supposedly popular burner phones isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, but it’s a pretty straight operation by Jimmy’s standards.
"Needs more neon."
It’s not enough to keep Jimmy’s nagging thoughts in check though, especially when he has a quiet moment where his grief can catch up with him. Sitting on the couch at home, watching Dr. Zhivago, Jimmy starts to tear up, as the pain of his brother’s passing and his part in it seems to flood back in a way Jimmy’s otherwise been able to keep at bay. So he turns to his own drug of choice, his favorite distraction, and the thing that makes him feel better than anything in the world — a nice, lucrative scheme.
In another one of the show’s sterling montages, Jimmy buys a heap of burner phones from his own store, and ventures to The Dog House to unload them on whatever criminal element is around to buy. There’s a sense in these scenes that Jimmy is both in his element but also seeking out some punishment. He seems to be torn between the part of himself that wants to see exactly how far his talents can take him, and the part that wants to push him toward a confrontation so harsh that it’ll snap him out of this.
That confrontation comes. Despite a tense moment with a crowd of bikers, Jimmy’s silver tongue buys him an exit yet again. But the three young hoods who’d spurned him earlier in the episode decide to rough him up and take his spoils afterward. Jimmy returns home in rough shape, and after a sweet scene of Kim tending to his wounds, he agrees to go to the shrink she recommended. For a moment, Jimmy seems to realize that this behavior isn’t healthy, and it’s time to cash in his chips. Just the vision of Kim standing across from him, a symbol of his conscience and the better life he could have, seems enough to spur him to improve and not let another night like this happen again.
The catch is that Kim’s running too, except instead of grief, she’s running from her own sense of guilt. And instead of devolving further into a life of questionable morality, Kim rededicates herself doing good in an effort to regain her ethical moorings. That means working as a public defender in her spare time, going toe-to-toe with the same local prosecutor that Jimmy himself used to joust with, and going the extra mile for people in need.
There's an alternate version of this show where Kim becomes a mob doctor. Though hopefully it's better than "The Mob Doctor."
But unlike Jimmy, Kim isn’t just using subterfuge and bombast to get criminals off. She’s using prosecutorial screw-ups to hold opposing counsel accountable. She’s telling the young man for whom she swings a good plea to get his life right, or next time, she won’t be there to bail him out. And she’s going above and beyond by helping a young woman too scared to show up to court face her fear and avoid something worse.
This is all wildly successful, because Kim is damn good at what she does. She knows how to put the prosecutors through their paces; she knows how to read a young screw-up the riot act in the hopes that he won’t end up back where he started, and she knows how to be sympathetic but forceful with clients who need both a helping hand and a little push.
The problem is that Kim is shirking her responsibilities elsewhere, specifically with Mesa Verde. Kim blows off a call from Paige so that she can see things through with her pro bono client. It’s the negative image of Jimmy’s choice in this episode. Kim’s decision is equally misguided and a little self-destructive, but her mistake is a noble rather than huckstering one, and Kim promises never to make it again. Both Kim and Jimmy are trying to regain their souls, but they have different reasons and very different methods, even if both use their God-given skills to great effect in the process.
Mike uses his own unparalleled talents in the episode as well. The top-of-the-line, undetectable meth lab that Gus wants to build is part of his grand plan, and so Gus needs people he can rely on to see it through. That’s why he brings in Mike to scout the builders he’s assessing. Mike has shown, through his escapades at Madrigal, that he knows how to cover every detail and ensure sure that these illicit dealings are neither found out nor shut down. The show conveys that with another superb visual sequence, one that communicates the candidates’ disorientation using point-of-view shots from under a hood and depicts the passage of time with quick-cut changes in sound and lighting in the back of a rocky van. These are the sort of minor details Mike can handle better than anyone else.
But Mike also knows people (something we saw last week). He can tell when someone is blowing smoke and when they’re being honest. That’s why Gus trusts him, and why Mike sends the boastful, overpromising builder packing with little more than a plane ticket home and a “thanks for your time.”
"Damn hipsters. They're always trying to do business in weird industrial warehouses."
And it’s why when Werner Ziegler, the nauseous but thorough German architect who tells his would-be employers that the job will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, he earns their approval. There is a frankness and a dedication there that appeals to men like Mike and Gus. They’re birds of a feather — frank, meticulous, and cautious, and it means that when taking on a project of this size, they want people who’ll approach it the same way.
We know, though, that no matter how careful Mike and Gus are, no matter how close they come to bringing this long-brewing plan to fruition, it all ends in ruin. No matter how well you plot, how good you are at what you do, there are unpredictable elements that can still disrupt everything you’ve built. For Gus Fring, that unpredictable element will be Walter White, but for Jimmy McGill, it’s Howard Hamlin.
After his incident with the muggers, Jimmy seems on the straight and narrow path once more, until he runs into Howard in the courthouse bathroom. Howard is normally composed to a fault, but here he looks worse for wear, complains about insomnia, and stresses over a case that he admits isn’t particularly significant. It’s clear — to both Jimmy and the audience — that Chuck’s death has gotten to the last living person in the HHM name. It’s enough for Jimmy to offer a small measure of kindness to Howard, recommending that he see the same shrink Kim urged Jimmy to see.
It’s then that the worm turns. Howard tells Jimmy that he’s already seeing a therapist, twice a week in fact. The admission startles Jimmy and creates yet another shift in his trajectory. Howard has all the advantages Jimmy didn’t — his wealth, his position, and his father’s name. He has lived as traditionally successful a life as someone like Jimmy could imagine, the kind of life Jimmy was once trying to wrangle for himself.
"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
But Howard is haunted by the same grief Jimmy is, and he’s no better for it despite how much more that he has than Jimmy does. Howard’s visibly unmoored in the wake of that shared loss, Jimmy gleans a lesson from that. “Following the right path, doing what’s expected of you, doing things the normal way, won’t get you where you want to go, and don’t seem to make you feel better either.”
So when Jimmy talks with the D.A. about his plans for after his reinstatement, Jimmy says he wants to go bigger and better. His refuge from grief is not treatment and reckoning with his misdeeds. It’s his same refuge from everything else — an aim to pursue his talents to their highest peak until it either makes his dreams come true or forces him to go down in flames.
“Quite a Ride” suggests a little of both. We know the heights that Jimmy will hit: the Saul Goodman commercials running 24/7, the suitcase full of money, the cheesy but lucrative law office he destroys in the cold open. But we also know about his fall, his paranoid, button-down life as Cinnabon Gene — a life that requires him to be demure and inconspicuous, the greatest punishment there could be for someone like Jimmy.
And it’s possible that “Quite a Ride” suggests a fall beyond even that. After Jimmy is jumped by the hoodlums who rob him at The Dog House, he lays on the ground in pain as the camera pulls skyward. It’s the same shot Breaking Bad used in Walt’s final moments — a visual echo and a portent that seems to preview what a myopic quest to make use of your own best talents, with no regard for the consequences, gets you. We know where that sort of quest ended for Walt, and as he veers ever nearer to going full Saul Goodman, Jimmy seems closer to that same grisly endpoint than he’s ever been.
