I miss the approach — popularized by The Wire and used by series as distinct as BoJack Horseman — of series putting their major fireworks in the penultimate episode of the season rather than the finale. It gives the show and the audience a full episode to recover and process all the major events of the season. And it helps avoid the sense in that second-to-last episode that you’re getting more setup than payoff ahead of the series pulling the trigger on its biggest developments.
That’s the problem with “Wiedersehen”, a perfectly good but not outstanding episode of Better Call Saul. It’s not as though there’s nothing happening in the episode. Lalo Salamanca makes overtures to Gus. Werner makes a daring escape from his gilded cage. And Jimmy not only faces a denial of his application reinstatement, but in his anger and disbelief, manages to sabotage his relationship with Kim, which had finally seemed to be on the mend. But all of this feels more like setting the table for bigger resolutions to come in the finale than anything full or complete in the episode itself.
Now maybe everything falls into place in this season’s last episode, and “Wiedersehen” ends up looking like a brilliant prelude to that climax. And maybe if you load up the second-to-last episode with the major happenings of the season, it would still result in the same snootfuls of setup, just in the third-to-last episode instead. But it’s hard not to feel like “Wiedersehen” amounts to one big question (or, perhaps, three subsidiary questions) that Better Call Saul only intends to answer in the next episode.
That’s the job of television in some ways. For as daring and stylistically audacious as Better Call Saul (and its predecessor series) can be, it’s also a fundamentally sound T.V. show and one attuned to the core rhythms of television. The series still knows how to end on a cliffhanger, or a tease, or something to leave your jaw on the floor and make you desperate to tune in again next week to see how things turn out.
"Plan YOUR next felony at your local IHOP today!"
Rest assured, I’ll be there for the next episode, to find out whether the tension between Gus and the Salamancas reaches the next level, and whether Mike is forced to make a hard choice after his erstwhile buddy flies the coop, and whether Jimmy can rescue his legal career or his relationship or his sense of self. But “Wiedersehen” left me wishing we could immediately get to those parts of the story, not just because this episode’s teases are so tantalizing, but because the proceedings here feel incomplete and even a little insubstantial without the other half of what’s being set up for the finale.
That’s especially true for the Nacho/Lalo/Gus portion of the show. Lalo is still a new character, introduced more than three-quarters of the way into the season. ‘Wiedersehen” makes good on the promising setup we’ve seen since early in season 4 — where Nacho is trapped between the exacting demands of Gus’s clockwork operation and the unpredictable, trigger-happy Salamanca clan. But there’s more promise than proof in this part of “Wiedersehen.”
Sure, the conversation between the poised-but-firm Gus and the loose, freewheeling Lalo is tense and portentous. The prospect of Lalo nosing around Gus’s meth distribution site promises powder keg moments for all involved in the episode(s) to come. For now though, this feels like the beginning of the story, rather than a culmination or even a turning point, of the plot involving Gus and Nacho that Better Call Saul has been spinning this year.
(Don’t get me started on Lalo giving Hector his infamous bell, replete with a tedious backstory. Maybe I’m just smarting from the fan service excesses of Solo: A Star Wars Story, but man, not every iconic detail or feature or accessory from a character needs an origin story. Sometimes, people just get a bell, or a pair of dice, or something practical to help them communicate, and you don’t need some writerly monologue to explain how they came into possession of whatever the object du jour is.)
No, yeah, this is totally necessary and not at all cheesy and indulgent.
The same’s true for Werner’s great escape. There’s meat on the bone of that subplot, both in terms of character development and scene construction. Rainer Bock absolutely sells Werner’s desperation, his simmering distress at having to remain separated from his wife, his crumbling efforts to hold it together and put a good face on matters and just do his job. Bock also sells Werner’s cleverness, the Walter White-esque ingenuity of a nerdy middle-aged nebbish finding ways to be a spanner in the works of an otherwise well-oiled machine. Werner’s ability to find the weak spots in the facility and disguise camera flashes as flight-masking energy surges, shows him as a resourceful and desperate man, and the show manages to communicate that almost solely through images of the aftermath of his escape.
Series co-creator Vince Gilligan is on board to direct “Wiedersehen,” which helps, especially in the Mike/Werner portions of the episode. Having Gilligan gives you more than just the franchise’s cinematographic trademarks (like a shot from inside the dynamite hole). It means including extended, slow burn, tactile sequences where Werner goes all Hurt Locker in trying to check for faulty wiring in the demolition kit. There is, as is often the case on this show, a foreboding atmosphere while this gentle but determined man wills himself through a tight spot. Werner’s hyperventilation, his straining to hold it together, and his careful efforts to fix the problem are all stretched out expertly as Gilligan’s camera skulks through the darkness.
Maybe that’s enough action for one episode, especially one that’s leading to a (presumably) eventful finale. But it also can’t help but seem like the show is saving the real excitement — the inevitable dilemma between Mike’s understanding of and affection for Werner and the potentially lethal duties of his job — until next week.
But you can make the argument that we get the majorest of major happenings in the Jimmy/Kim portion of this week’s episode. “Wiedersehen” opens up with the two of them pulling off another brilliant scheme. It turns out that Kim turning down Kevin’s request to change the Mesa Verde designs in Lubbock wasn’t a sign of losing interest in her regular work in comparison to her con artist thrills, but rather a prelude to her combining the two to pull off a miracle for her client using less-than-savory tactics.
"These large print books are getting a little out of control."
The entire sequence of her and Jimmy — posing as a crutch-hopping single mom and a deadbeat brother respectively, earning the trust and sympathy of the town clerk, and pulling the ol’ switcheroo with the plans — is another enjoyable flim-flamming outing. It plays in the space this show has long lived in, between wanting to pass judgment on these people for fraud and manipulation and having so much fun watching them work. But a good con doesn’t fix what’s eating Jimmy, with his renewed (and once-again rejected) efforts to have Kim as his partner in law, not just his partner in crime.
That comes to a head when, after a trademark Jimmy McGill performance in front of the attorney review board, his request for reinstatement is rejected. He gives all the right answers to the committee’s questions, quotes Supreme Court decisions, and talks about what the law means to him. By his own assessment, he does everything right. But he never mentions Chuck, the ghost who’s been haunting this season of Better Call Saul, who still manages to prove a hindrance to Jimmy’s life even from beyond the grave.
Despite some complicated things going on under the surface, Jimmy has tried to distance himself emotionally from Chuck, to move past his brother’s death. So at the hearing, he expresses no remorse for what happened to Chuck, what effect it had on his family, or anything specific to the man who used to be the most significant presence in Jimmy’s life. And it’s what eventually dooms him.
The rejection becomes too much for Jimmy to bear. He acts out in a way we’ve rarely seen before. He feels the frustration of a year’s worth of (comparatively) good behavior down the drain, with another year of it required to even get back to square one. He experiences the anger of his grand expectations being punctured in a single second. And worst of all, he takes it out on Kim.
There's no therapy like parking garage therapy.
It’s a point I’ve probably beaten into the ground by now, but Kim has stepped into the role that Chuck used to play for Jimmy. There’s loads of complicated consequences of that, but one of the biggest is that Jimmy projects his insecurities and his anger toward his brother onto her. He lashes out at her for seeing him as insincere, for viewing him as a “low life”, for thinking he’s not good enough to share a practice with, charges he might as well be leveling at his dead brother rather than his girlfriend.
Kim, to her credit, pushes back, pointing out how many times she’s been there for Jimmy, how often she looks out for him, takes care of him, drops everything to clean up his messes. There is this one pinnacle-level dream that Jimmy uses as the yardstick to measure whether or not he’s loved, overlooking all the other ways in which he has an incredibly good thing going, one he sure as hell shouldn’t mess up in fit of pique after getting a bad hand in his professional life.
But that’s exactly what he does. I’m done trying to predict whether or not the Kim/Jimmy relationship will end, and if so, how soon. But after a brief dead cat bounce, there’s enough acrimony between the two of them that Jimmy starts packing up his stuff. Issues that have been bubbling under the surface on both sides of the relationship bubble up, and it’s hard to know whether they can ever be quelled or rectified.
“Wiedersehen”, the episode’s title, is a German word that means both “goodbye” and “reunion.” It suggests there’s endings in the offing, but also more to come. That could mean another chance for Kim to help Jimmy, to aid him in his quest to become a lawyer again through an appeal or a hail mary or whatever new scheme the duo can come up with. But real damage has been done. That much is undeniable.
"The artist's rendering of your remorse symbolized as a mournful kitten is a nice touch."
Even then, it feels like there’s more to the story. Season 4 of Better Call Saul has been as superb as ever, but also a bit interstitial. After the incredible build that gave us the McGill vs. McGill showdown and Chuck’s death in season 3, the series has largely been in a reactive mode in season 4.
It’s given us the rocky road of Jimmy’s recovery, Kim reckoning with the trespasses she’s been a party to, Nacho falling into a tug of war between Fring’s Empire and the Salamancas, and Mike starting his work with Gus in earnest. The former two plots are post scripts to previous stories, and the latter two seem like the beginnings of new ones. It remains to be seen whether Better Call Saul will give us any resolution at all in its season finale or if, like “Wiedersehen”, it will be paving the way for something (hopefully) greater to come.
