I’ve known the evenings, mornings, and days alone,
I have measured out my life in Mesa Verde awards and burner phones.
With my sincerest apologies to T.S. Eliot, it’s amazing how Better Call Saul can move so slowly and then so quickly in the same season, without missing a beat. It’s hard to know exactly how much time has elapsed in the show so far, but this season picked up right where the last one left off and has, more or less, crept along in the aftermath of Chuck’s death and Hector’s “accident” ever since.
That is, until now. If the last episode stood out for how it seemed to set Jimmy and Kim on diverging trajectories, “Something Stupid” takes that idea up a notch, with a cold open set to the famed Sinatra melody that provides the episode’s title. The series taps into its unrivaled ability to craft montages, depicting the passage of time via unwrapped statuettes, filing cabinet labels, and holiday sale signs. But the show goes a step further with its formal creativity, using a well-placed split screen to show how both Kim and Jimmy are flourishing in their new lives, but also how those lives are slowly but surely pulling them further and further apart.
It makes for a powerful visual, particularly since Better Call Saul’s calling card thus far has been the slow burn. But that montage is part and parcel with one of the show’s most noteworthy and consistent creative decisions — the low key tenor of Jimmy and Kim’s relationship. The pair are depicted more like a real couple than a T.V. couple, with fewer dramatic ups and downs instead of the constant shocks and fireworks of romances and break-ups on a standard network drama.
When this season started, I feared for Kim, because the show seemed poised to concoct some grand accident or big mistake from Jimmy that would either scare her away or worse. Instead, “Something Stupid” gives us the death of a thousand cuts, using small slices of their shared lives and the gradual change of the seasons to make it happen. Better Call Saul may still be building to some momentous incident or gesture, one that will sever the bonds between the only couple the show’s ever truly put together. But Jimmy and Kim didn’t start with fireworks, and rather than ending them with something dramatic, Better Call Saul seems content to show them simply drifting apart, living increasingly separate lives, until the separation just happens without either of them realizing.
"And then I go and spoil it all by...well, you know."
Because “Something Stupid” isn’t just about the passage of time. It’s about the little signs that things are changing, the ones that are almost imperceptible but nevertheless speak volumes.
That comes through in our glimpse of Hector in the episode. Time has been kind to the old man. During rehabilitation exercises with the fancy doctor Gus hired, Hector is able to knock over a cup of water with his finger. The medical staff writes it off as an involuntary reaction from a man still trying to regain control of his motor functions. But the perspective shots and editing let the audience know otherwise — that this was a minor stunt from the not-so-subdued convalescent so that he could leer at his nurse.
Gus, ever the observant man, sees it too. He recognizes not just that his longtime foe is still an awful lech, but that the real Hector, the man from whom Gus wants revenge, is still in there. Vengeance is no good if there’s only the shell of the man you hate there to appreciate it. Gus has his own almost imperceptible moment, a slow malevolent smile, conveying his recognition of the fact that Hector is now awake and aware enough to appreciate his punishment.
So Gus turns the knife. He sends the fancy doctor onto her next assignment. In effect, he halts Hector’s progress, despite the doctor’s protestations that there’s more recovery that can be achieved. Hector has recovered enough to understand what Gus has done, while still being limited enough to hate it. The simple flick of a cup sets in motion a series of events that will change Hector’s life, and lay the groundwork for Gus’s death.
There's that little ray of sunshine we met in Breaking Bad!
That’s the interesting thing about how passage of time is used in “Something Stupid.” It can either elucidate how much progress has been made while suggesting a road to recovery that’s being stymied, or it can show how much things have deteriorated.
When we see Mike and the Germans contractors, it’s very clearly the latter. The crew that Werner, the engineer, hired to build Gus’s underground meth lab, have made great strides, but there’s miles to go before they sleep, and that fact is starting to get to them. When an accident sets the team back months, on a job the group already knows won’t be finished anywhere near on schedule, tempers flare, scuffles break out, and it becomes clear to both Mike and Werner that things can’t continue on as they have.
“Something Stupid” tends toward suggestion over progression here, as we see more of the restlessness bubbling under the surface of the workers’ demeanor than anything actually coming to a head. But we do see a growing camaraderie between Mike and Werner, a shot down suggestion that things might flow easier without Kai that feels portentous, and the slightest change in expression from Mike to show him accepting the idea that the workers need some R&R or else things will spin out of control.
But bad feelings are bubbling under the surface for Jimmy and Kim as well. The two of them have some growing resentments but are either too ensconced in the status quo to rock the boat or, more charitably, care about each other too much to make an issue out of them, so they come out in other places and other ways.
"But enough about the humongous fish I caught!"
Ways like Jimmy tagging along with Kim to a Schweikart office party and deciding to make trouble. During the party, Jimmy can’t help but take a powder in Kim’s office. And while there, he starts to feel a little jealous. He walks the floor and discovers that her office is almost twice as big as his. He looks at a framed note from a pro bono client and sees that Kim has already had more success and garnered more appreciation in her spare time as a substitute public defender than he was able to earn when it was his regular gig. Jimmy’s just scraping by while having to watch his partner soar. It bothers him, but he loves Kim, so he lashes out elsewhere.
That means using his small talk expertise to spitball a fantastical company trip to Mr. Schweikart himself, with all the firm’s employees within earshot. Jimmy lays out his idea for an extravagant ski trip, creating expectations that Schweikart will either have to break the bank to fulfill or disappoint his employees when the real trip fails to live up to the image of a winter wonderland that Jimmy conjured.
It’s Jimmy’s little way of stomping on the Schweikart sandcastle that Kim helped build. It’s a “you’re not so big, huh?” moment. His move has plenty of plausible deniability despite the trouble it’ll cause, but Kim knows better, even if she’s unable or unwilling to call him on it. The icy trip home says as much.
But they’re still a team. So when a misunderstanding with a bag of sandwiches, a pair of headphones, and a plainclothes cop leads to Huell facing jail time, Jimmy goes to Kim for help. The ethics of the problem are complicated, which makes it perfect to expose the fault lines the episode is exploring here. There’s some real injustice in Huell facing prison time because of a legitimate misunderstanding, even related to a less-than-legitimate business. But there’s something questionable at best about Jimmy’s willful blindness and obstinance with the cop about his burner phones, and something mixed about Jimmy’s motives, even if it seems unfair for Huell to have to take the fall.
"This looks like a fully licensed and reputable small business if I've ever seen one."
Then there’s Kim’s role in all of this. The most striking momentary response, in an episode full of them, is Kim practically suppressing a gag reflex when Jimmy tells her his plan. He suggests solving this problem by making the policeman crack on the stand. It’s too close to the ploy she helped Jimmy inflict on Chuck, too much like the sort of life-destroying scheme to save one’s own bacon that she’s been trying to make amends for ever since. So Kim takes the case but rebuffs Jimmy, resolving to do it her way — with facts and precedent rather than hustles and manipulation.
And yet she still fails. The prosecutor not only rejects Kim’s tactics, but questions why Kim’s even involved in the case, unwittingly slagging her romantic partner in the process. It’s a tense scene, where Kim tries to do everything in her power to make this work, the right way, and to help Jimmy, even as she’s increasingly seeing the ways he is not, as she once thought, just a kind-hearted soul with a few rough edges. The edges are starting crowd out the parts of Jimmy she once appreciated. In true Breaking Bad fashion, the show puts her in a tight spot and dares the audience to stick around and see how she’ll respond, and what it will cost her and Jimmy, to escape it.
The close of the episode seems to be setting up the sort of dramatic, high stakes moments that drove Breaking Bad. But Better Call Saul has been a show about long simmers and more gradual, softer transformations than the collection of inflection points that pushed Walter White from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” It’s taking the same tack with Jimmy and Kim. Even as the seasons shift, there’s not some big moment that changes everything. There’s just a gradual winnowing of the trust and admiration they once shared, until the image each had of the other is too tarnished to go on.
