Better Call Saul: The Clash of the Personal and the Professional in “JMM”

It’s supposed to just be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. What you don’t do is get sentimental. There are practical reasons to take this step — reasons that, not coincidentally, help preserve your ongoing safety and non-incarceration.

But then you look at the person standing across from you, someone whose joy and pain matters to you, and all of a sudden, it’s impossible to pretend that this is just a ministerial act or some necessary concession to the gods of legal privilege and bureaucracy. Instead, it becomes something more, something meaningful, something personal, with an emotional charge and an attendant importance that elevates it above business as usual.

So yeah, Kim and Jimmy are now bound in holy matrimony. After fans reeled from last week’s cliffhanger, it turns out their union isn’t some final desperate act of mutual self-immolation or an impulse borne of poor childhood examples. Instead, it’s a means of protection, so that if Kim’s implicated in Jimmy’s lies again, she can’t be compelled to testify against him.

And yet, my favorite moment (in an episode not short on great ones) comes when Jimmy Morgan McGill and Kim Wexler stand face to face in a dingy courtroom. They endure what may be the world’s least romantic wedding ceremony and yet, against all odds, when they look into one another’s eyes, that cannot help but be moved by the experience.

It's not a mid-2000s wedding without somebody using a disposable camera.

It’s an outstanding piece of acting from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who hardly say a word in the scene, but whose faces and subtle changes in expression let slip that, however much these two people tell themselves this wedding is nothing more than a practicality, it is, in fact, a fleeting moment of romantic transcendence for two people who, whatever their recurring problems, still genuinely love one another.

That sequence sets the tone for “JMM”, an episode where players from across the show try to keep things calm, detached, and professional, until Better Call Saul contrasts that with scenes where the more personal and piercing wins out.

That’s certainly true for Kim. “JMM” doesn’t spare us the Mesa Verde aftermath in the wreckage of Saul’s stunt. The episode presents Kim and Rich politely groveling before a miffed Kevin Wachtell, who’s all but ready to fire them. The lawyers offer the mandatory contrition and deference, radiating the sort of conciliatory demeanor that’s expected between attorneys and their clients. They take responsibility for the failures that led to Saul fleecing Wachtell and his company for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, in the end, all it earns them is a curt dismissal from a perturbed Kevin, along with an admonition that Kim can do much better than her slimy beau.

But after walking away, Kim decides that she won’t take it lying down. She barges back into the room and speaks frankly to Kevin about how she really feels, in direct contrast to her deferential demeanor moments before. She tells Kevin that, time and again, they advised him against every step along the path that led here and that he rejected their advice and charged ahead anyway, out of stubbornness and pride.

At times like these, all you can do is sit back and smell your own hand.

That story isn’t entirely true (or at least omits how much fuel Kim threw on the fire), but she challenges Kevin rather than acceding to him. She approaches him candidly and directly and, most importantly, personally. Kevin respects that and, with a terse but telling RSVP for their usual Thursday meeting, lets her know that she’ll hold onto his business.

That directness from Kim matters. It builds on her straight-shooting nature and her realness, which Kevin respects far more than all the fancy degrees and smarty pants advisors he low-key hates given his faux-blue collar roots. Frankness and honesty get to him in a way that the standard stuffed shirt routine wouldn’t and doesn’t.

There’s a similar contrast between staid professionalism and a piercing honesty in Gus’s part of the episode. His first appearance in “JMM” comes in a bland boardroom meeting, where fast food CEOs golf clap over quarterly percentage increases and vacuously delight in the stirring advent of spicy curly fries (which, in fairness, do look pretty tasty).

But the tenor of the conversation changes when we see Gus, Lydia(!), and their boss, Peter Schuler, behind closed doors. Breaking Bad fans will remember Herr Schuler as the Madrigal executive who had an…unfortunate reaction to the DEA’s investigation. “JMM” plants the seeds for that fatalistic response to external pressure. Schuler’s deep in the muck here, funding Gus’s operation and sinking far enough into it to worry about the threat posed by Lalo and the cartel. He’s panicked over auditors, desperate not to get caught, and ready to throw in the towel.

Schuler felt he deserved a $15 thing of candy beans.

He seems implacable until Gus makes it personal. I don’t want to speculate too deeply about the friendship that Fring and Schuler share, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy to their interactions back at the hotel. Gus persuades his benefactor to stay in the fight by holding him by the arm, looking him (and by extension, the audience) in the eye, and calling back to a shared history together. It’s not quite the same thing shared by Jimmy and Kim, but that gesture, that remembrance, keeps Schuler reassured enough to give Gus a little more rope, a little more time, using an approach far removed from the practiced smiles of the boardroom.

It’s personal for his mole too. Nacho eventually helps Gus burn down one of his own restaurants. Lalo issued the order to his lieutenant from prison, hoping to keep the pressure on Gus, while the chicken man tries to keep up appearances. It is, as always, a cool and cathartic sequence on the show. Gus’s sliding chicken grease explosion (which he coolly walks away from, naturally) is a particular visual highlight.

But for Nacho, however cool this may look, it’s something he does not out of loyalty or anger or because he has a real stake in this rivalry, but rather because it’s his job. This act is a necessary evil to protect the thing he actually cares about — his father. When meeting with Mike, Nacho tells his new handler that he wants out. He wants to whisk his dad somewhere so far away that the cartel can’t get him, because the separation between his “career” and his family is getting perilously thinner all the time.

At the same time, Mike is finding peace in the separation between the two. If it weren’t for Kim and Jimmy’s strange but heartstring-tugging wedding, Mike’s interludes with his granddaughter and daughter-in-law would be the sweetest thing here.

"The apartment complex sent me because your neighbors are complaining about broken beer bottles in the parking lot."

Mike reads The Little Prince to a sleepy, cuddly Kaylee. He reminisces about Matty’s elementary school-age antics with Stacey. And he tells her that he’s better now, having accepted his professional situation with no more desire to fight against it. More than anyone on Better Call Saul, Mike has been able to find equilibrium by accepting the “hand he’s dealt” with his role in Gus’s operation, while still enjoying the private, personal things that part of his life (hopefully) exists separate and apart from.

He does, however, still have a job to do. Right now that means getting Lalo out of prison so that Gus can force him south of the border and make it harder for him to call the shots for the Salamancas. (And hey, if it gives Gus a chance to eliminate him there, all the better). That leads to Mike crossing paths with Better Call Saul’s title character for the first time in a long time, feeding Jimmy the dirt (which Mike himself created), to get Lalo out on bail and back to Mexico.

Jimmy’s genuinely conflicted about it though. As ready, willing, and able as he’s been to represent less-than-reputable members of the community, becoming a “friend of the cartel” is a horse of a different color. He says as much to Kim in an endearing moment of honesty between the two of them. He thinks about the “ranch in Montana” money this job might provide, but when she asks him if it’s what he wants, he says no and says it convincingly.

It’s usually about the thrill of the chase for Jimmy, about making a life with the people he cares about, not necessarily the size of his bankroll. Money is, more often than not, a means to an end for him, not an end unto itself.

"You know, that orange looks great on you."

Still, when Mike shows up on his doorstep invoking a mysterious benefactor, and a scary crime lord tells him it’s better to be in front of the judge than the cartel, Jimmy does what’s expected of him as a professional. In the courtroom, Saul Goodman uses the fact that the prosecution’s star witness was coached by “some P.I.” to cast the judge’s ire in the other direction. He even hires a phony wife and kids to show Lalo’s “ties to the community.” And it works! Despite facing a murder charge, the judge sets a bond for Lalo, who can afford it despite a hefty price tag.

But something’s eating at Jimmy through all of this. Opposite the fake fiancé and pair of moppets Jimmy scared up to sway the judge, sits the real family of the victim and Jimmy can hardly bear to look away from them. When he can’t resist the urge, he sees a young man’s poor mother crying in the galley, as he helps a cold blooded killer evade justice. Even when it’s over and done with, he peeks at them from around a corner, with his reflection on the polished marble wall representing the duality of his psyche in this moment.

It would be too neat and clean to divide this man into “Jimmy McGill” on one side and “Saul Goodman” on the other. Each persona contains elements of the other. But there’s always been a part of the man carrying those “JMM” initials that wants to win at any cost, and another side of him that genuinely cares for people, especially those who suffer unjustly.

There have been so many exit ramps in Jimmy’s life, so many places where he could have changed directions, embraced his better self, and not become the shyster we met in Breaking Bad. And this moment — where the palpable, deeply personal pain felt by one devastated family cuts through his typical mercenary craftiness — is one of them.

Everyone thought this was a prelude to Breaking Bad, but it's really a Two-Face prequel.

But it’s not to be. Howard Hamlin intervenes, revokes his job offer, and calls Jimmy out for his recent antics and schemes. To say that Saul reacts poorly is an understatement. He lashes out at Howard, accusing him of killing Chuck, declaring that a job at HHM is beneath him, and loudly and publicly promotes himself as a god whose stature and grandiosity are so great as to make Howard’s piddling little offer infinitesimal.

That’s the thing about Jimmy. He didn’t become a lawyer because of a deep respect for the law like Chuck. He didn’t do it as a way out and a way forward like Kim. His reasons were always personal. He wanted to impress his big brother. He wanted Kim to respect him. He wanted to make the people in his life proud. His career goals and his personal goals were always mixed together.

Only here, that rationale behind his profession of choice has curdled and hardened him. There’s still good in Jimmy. He’s still compelled to look upon the mournful expressions of a victim’s loved ones and wonder whether he’s doing the right thing. But the polarity of the personal has shifted for him.

He’s no longer in the legal business to earn Chuck’s admiration or to pay his rent or even to fund his dream life with Kim. Now he wants revenge. He wants to prove the ghost of his brother wrong. He wants to show every living manifestation of the esteemed figures and institutions and norms that have made him feel “less than” his whole life that he’s better, and more importantly, bigger, than everyone who once looked down on him.

For Jimmy it always starts out as just business. Every ploy is merely some transactional trick he does without real consideration or concern. Then, time and again, he has those moments of pause, that brief bit of restraint, when he thinks about the consequences of his choices, particularly when they inflict hardship on those who don’t deserve it.

But inevitably, his deeply-held grievances, his perceived slights, the personal baggage he’s carried for so long, nudges him back to being Saul Goodman. No deep look into someone’s eyes can change that, however much we might want it to.