Better Call Saul is a show that zigs when you expect it to zag. The series makes its bones as a tragedy, where the events are all the more sad, all the more pitiable, because (most of) the audience knows the unfortunate ends waiting for the show’s main characters. And yet, the series still has an impressive ability to surprise, to delight, to lead you down one path and make you think you know where things are headed, only to take a sudden left turn toward something you might never have expected.
Which is to say that last week’s episode made it seem like Kim and Jimmy were headed for an irreconcilable split. The slow disintegration of their relationship, the frosty air between them, suggested a grinding down of something that had once been a source of solace and strength for both of them. “Coushatta” starts out headed in that direction. Even as Jimmy and Kim are prepping their scheme together, Kim is noticeably unperturbed by Jimmy leaving for the night. She’s unbothered by him staying late at his office. And she barely seems to notice or care that he’s gone.
It’s enough that Jimmy’s landlord even notices his despondency and, in a rare act of kindness, pours him a drink and tells him to make it right. But Jimmy himself admits that it might be too late for that. Maybe his and Kim’s relationship is too damaged. Maybe the people they’ve become, the things they want out of life, are too different for the two of them to work over the long haul. It’s sad, but Jimmy seems to be slowly but surely accepting that harsh truth.
And yet even if the couple aren’t on the same page personally, they’re still a formidable team when it comes to accomplishing whatever they set out to do. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good scheme on Better Call Saul, and the big one in “Coushatta” is a doozy.
Who knew that Neelix got so much fan mail?
It sees Kim and Jimmy mounting a multi-pronged attack to get Huell off the hook. The plan starts with Kim’s idea to send an avalanche of letters casting Huell as a hometown hero for a small hamlet in Louisiana. It goes deeper with her “shock and awe” tactic of bombarding the prosecutor with motions and discovery and potential countersuits to try to make the case too much of a hassle to deal with. And it crests with Jimmy, ever diligent when he needs to be, using his array of drop phones and his old film crew (who pose as the concerned citizens of Huell’s hometown) to convince the prosecutor there’s a groundswell of grassroots support for Huell.
The whole damn thing is just delightful. This has been a pretty heavy season of Better Call Saul, and rightfully so. Chuck’s death hit a number people in a number of different, often difficult ways, and it’s worth exploring that. But it’s also nice to get to see our main characters simply being good at what they do, particularly in a way that makes you laugh. Everything from the joyous pictures of Huell on the “church website,” to the judge complaining that he must be Santa Claus with all the mail he’s getting, to Bob Odenkirk busting out his old Senator Tankerbell accent, drips with the show’s great comic chops.
Better yet, the plan works! After all the meticulous-yet-enjoyable steps “Coushatta” presents our heroes taking, it also gives them a victory. The prosecutor is flummoxed lets Huell off without jail time. The episode toys with the audience a bit, letting us share Jimmy’s anxiety and anticipation as he watches Kim jaw with opposing counsel. But Better Call Saul delivers the news in the best and most unexpected way — a kiss from Kim to Jimmy that packs all the passion and enthusiasm that’s been drained from the frame up to this point. Right at what seems like the brink of a break-up, there is, once again, that spark and joy that brought them together, even as another empty bedside suggests this may be more of a blip than a save.
Nothing sparks romance like defrauding the justice system, apparently.
But the surprises aren’t limited to the con that Jimmy and Kim cook up. Just as their frosty relationship turns suddenly warm, the friendly rapport between Mike and Werner suddenly takes a turn for the curt and business-like.
That shift proves quite the swerve. “Coushatta” sets the audience up to expect that the mutual admiration society of Mike and Werner will keep on humming, while the continued bad behavior of Kai will prove the sticky wicket between the German workers Werner is supervising and the corner of Gus’s empire that Mike is overseeing.
And initially, it seems like that’ll be the case. Mike and Werner both skip out on the strip club-centered “R&R” that Mike’s providing so the boys can blow off steam. The two men bond over beers, with Werner affectionately detailing the achievements of his architect father, Mike lamenting the uselessness of his, and Werner reassuring his new friend that Mike is his father’s legacy and the best thing that Papa Ehrmantraut left behind. Their moment of camaraderie is punctured by Kai’s predictable misbehavior, but Mike is adept, as usual, at quelling these sort of monkeyshines. What could have been the spark that ignites the problem between Mike and the Germans turns out to be an easily snuffed out cinder.
The rub, however, is that gentle, gregarious Werner turns out to be the problem. Werner, having had a few too many hefeweizen, strikes up a conversation about architecture with a few locals, having scribbled a rudimentary design of Gus’s lab on a coaster and thus potentially let word of this top secret project leak.
Can't you just feel the love radiating from this photo?
Mike whisks Werner away, and confronts him about it the next morning. There’s apologies and efforts to minimize, but the damage is done. A relationship that had grown friendly is now one between an employer and a potential liability (never a good position to be in under Gus Fring). But sadder yet is the sense that Mike had once again grown close to someone, found some sense of equilibrium, only to see it disturbed once more.
The same holds for Nacho, whose quiet command of the Salamanca empire (over what we can surmise has been months in the making) seems poised to be disrupted by the arrival of someone who carries the family name. We don’t get much of Nacho’s story here, even after he’s been missing for a few episodes, but what we do get is potent.
We see a version of Nacho who’s reminiscent of a late-series Jesse Pinkman, another young man finding steady success in an ugly business and realizing that success only hollows him out. The cold way Nacho tears out the earring of a dealer whose tithe was too light, the curt and confident air he assumes when chastising his lieutenant for not doing it fist, the desultory fashion in which he tosses product at his harem in a decked out apartment, all suggest a man who, like Jesse, thought he wanted out, and now finds himself a fixed and more vital part of this machine.
Or maybe not. The arrival of another Salamanca cousin presents a problem, another unpredictable element in an enterprise that needs to work efficiently and according to expectation in order to be successful. There is a spiritual deadening that’s palpable in the version Nacho we see skulking around his home in “Coushatta”, but the appearance of a new cook in the kitchen might give him a way out, one way or another.
Work hard, pay your dues, and one day you too may get to sit at the rear table of a fast food restaurant.
Not everybody wants out, though. The specter hanging over the show over the past few episodes has been the seemingly impending demise of Jimmy and Kim as a couple. That dissolution appeared to be founded on Kim’s growing disdain for Jimmy’s less-than-above-board methods, in view of how they brought down Chuck and tore a sick man to shreds because of a mutually petty (if longstanding) feud.
But what if Jimmy’s powers could be used for good? What if his talent for persuasion and suggestion and theatricality could be put to use without hurting anyone? What if his skills could help decent people have another chance?
Why, then, you could enjoy the con-artistry, the creativity, the performance and presentation guilt free. When Kim sits in an office with the head honcho of Mesa Verde, who wants her to pull another rabbit of her hat to help the company get approval for a new building, she demurs. The old Kim would once have jumped at that chance to put in the legwork and pull off a miracle of filings and applications and zoning exemptions. But in the shadow of a multi-pronged scheme to pressure an opposing lawyer into letting her client off with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, using an aisle’s worth of supplies from M.J. Designs and a boatload of trickeration, the thicket of regulatory complications can’t help but seem dull by comparison.
So when Kim asks to speak to Jimmy, he worries that it’s a death sentence for their relationship, but it’s really an invitation. Kim pauses a moment to consider her options before she answers Kevin’s query. At another point, she caresses the little souvenir from her and Jimmy’s first little scam. Later still, she leans on a wall, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the small vice that once brought her and Jimmy together. And with those symbols and moments on her mind, she tells Jimmy, the man who’s afraid this is a kiss off, that she’s not mad – she wants more.
And why wouldn't she, with this sort of stirring ambiance?
It’s the last thing you’d expect after seven episodes of growing revulsion and concern from Ms. Wexler. But there’s a charge to this line of work, a fulfillment that comes from defending people who need a second chance combined with the excitement of using her boyfriend’s amusing and impressive abilities to grease the wheels of justice, that she can’t find in her otherwise straight life.
Better Call Saul is a show that gives you both the slow grinding pain of inevitability and harsh realizations, but also those jolting, tantalizing, anxiety-boosting shifts that come as a shock, but not quite as a surprise. We know these characters – what Kim, Mike, and Nacho want – and the show never forgets that. When it’s time for a change of direction for each of them, they’re all still recognizable in their renewed concerns, their disappointed resignation, and their dangerous hope to delve deeper into the world of tricks and treats that Jimmy McGill can’t help but conjure up. We understand where most of these characters are headed, what much of their futures look like, but Better Call Saul still manages to find ways to surprise us.
