Better Call Saul: The Reason to Keep Walking Through Hell in “Bagman”

One of the kindest things you can say about Better Call Saul is that it rarely feels like Breaking Bad anymore. Sure, there’s still bits of cartel intrigue, and preludes to the war between Gus and the Salamancas, and a shared propensity to write characters into corners and force them to think their way out. But despite its roots, Better Call Saul has become its own show, with its own world and voice and style that are distinct from the story of Walter White.

And yet, something about “Bagman” feels distinctively Breaking Bad-esque. Maybe it’s just that Vince Gilligan is in the director’s chair. Maybe it’s all the time spent beneath the New Mexico sun. Maybe it’s the tale of an uncommon domestic schmuck crossing paths with killers and drug-runners and quickly finding himself in over his head. Whatever the reason, an hour of Saul and Mike stranded in the desert feels in harmony with this show’s predecessor.

The sand-swept isolation calls to mind Walt and Jesse’s similar struggles in “4 Days Out.” The intimate tale of two men and their moments of introspection amid a crisis raises memories of “Fly.” Hell, for folks whose prestige television memories run all the way back to the ancient days of The Sopranos, the episode carries a whiff of Christopher and Paulie lost in the Pine Barrens.

Those parallels are not a coincidence. There’s a reason lots of television shows, not just Breaking Bad, return to these sorts of stories of remote struggle and mutual survival. They give writers the chance to put characters through hell, let them face challenges that they may or may not be prepared for, and through those hardships, reveal them.

It also lets you bring in a couple of twin silent badass types for the crime lord equivalent of synchronized swimming.

Because “Bagman” reveals Saul Goodman to his core. It humbles him. The story lets him sink down to his lowest point, to where he’s willing to give up and die and fail in a way the crafty con man never has before, only to build him back up when he remembers what’s at stake. This episode isn’t Jimmy McGill’s finest hour, but it may be Better Call Saul’s.

Those hardships come when Lalo taps Saul to pick up the seven million dollars needed to pay his bond. There’s a logic to that decision. The Cousins(!) are too hot to avoid notice from the Salamancas’ rivals. Nacho is reliable, but Lalo correctly intuits that such a large bankroll might be enough to send him running off. Jimmy, on the other hand, is a civilian, too far removed from these internecine squabbles to arouse that kind of suspicion, so Lalo offers him the job.

The catch is that Jimmy doesn’t want to take it. He knows it’s dangerous to become a friend of the cartel and all but promised Kim he wouldn’t. But Jimmy bargains his way to a hundred thousand dollar commission and can’t bear to turn that kind of money down. So he tries to break it to his wife gently, plying her with skirt steak and Old El Paso (exotic!), only for Kim to sniff out the ploy immediately. She is understandably aghast, practically demanding that he back out. Despite Jimmy’s reassurances, she essentially pleads with him not to go — pleas that Jimmy, naturally, ignores.

And why wouldn’t he? Saul Goodman is invincible. He’s never run into a scrape or a tight spot that he couldn’t wriggle his way out of. He is, as he shouted at Howard last week, a god. So why not rumble into the desert, make a pick-up from murderous crime bosses, and drive away while crooning a bastardized version of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? No fuss, no muss. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Nine hundred and ninety-nine bottles of something...

The striking thing about “Bagman” is not just that this plan goes horribly wrong. It was practically destined to turn pear-shaped. Pistol-packing opportunists tipped off by a mole in a Salamanca safehouse, ambush Saul. A firefight ensues that leaves him cowering and in shock, until Mike saves the day. That’s a major development, but far from the first bit of gunfire on the show or the first of Jimmy’s schemes to hit a major bump in the road.

What stands out, though, is how ill-equipped Saul is to handle this one. Normally he’s the problem-solving magician, the slippery Mr. Fixit, who uses his silver tongue and con man instincts to work something out whatever the situation. Here, on the other hand, he has nothing to fall back on, nothing to do but weep and reflect on his potentially lethal hubris. Bullet barrages are not his game. Survivalist treks through the desert are not in his wheelhouse. Saul is, in short, completely out of his depth here, in a way we’ve never really seen before.

But Mike isn’t. Mr. Ehrmantraut is very much in his element. One of the great features of episodes like “Bagman” is that forcing two people together like this not only helps add intrigue to the story but also highlights the differences between them. Mike is, in his own way, just as talented and resourceful as Jimmy. His “private investigator” routine proved that he can even pull off a person-to-person con just like Saul can. But they are not the same.

The difference is that Mike’s tough and carries his own sort of nobility that Jimmy could hardly fathom. Mike is determined, with a background in special forces that makes him resilient and ready for these rough circumstances. Mike came prepared for this in a way that Jimmy didn’t. He thought through contingencies and failsafes that Jimmy didn’t. And despite that, even battle-hardened Mike is pushed to his limits by this trek. What does that leave for a softie like Jimmy McGill?

"Ooh look, a red-crested wren! Another check mark for me!"

It results in a man brought lower and lower by his failure to recognize the all-encompassing quicksand he stepped into the moment he threw in with Lalo. Gilligan uses all his favorite camera tricks to not only show off the scenic beauty of the New Mexico landscape once more, but to contrast the series’s colorful huckster, usually so at home in whatever space he enters, with the harsh environs he now finds himself wholly unprepared to deal with.

Gilligan frames The Cousins looming on either side of Jimmy’s head, cutting the image of intimidation. He shows Mike and Saul wandering through a valley as the clouds sweep overhead, communicating how small they are amid the grand reach of this place. He allows a cactus or a shoe or even a hole in the ground to dominate the field of vision, forcing us to look upon our heroes from unnatural angles, dwarfed by what’s around them. His visual approach highlights the unforgiving, if gorgeous, features of this arid deathtrap that threatens to tear down the seasoned vet and hapless greenhorn alike.

In the midst of that struggle, the show stealthily nods toward various symbols, little pieces of who Jimmy and Mike that led them to this moment, even as so many of these trinkets end up either lost or surprisingly useful in the effort.

Mike saves Jimmy’s life with a sniper rifle, presumably the same one he bought to kill Hector in “Klick”. When he scavenges for useful supplies from Saul’s car, he grabs the gas cap, likely having used it to track Saul just as Gus tracked him in “Mabel”. The grizzled survivor we see resolutely marching his way through the desert is the product of so many experiences, some good and some bad, that have nevertheless made him able to face this moment.

"I mean, our cars aren't THAT different, right?"

Jimmy, by contrast, can only watch as the things that have defined him are slowly stripped away. He and Mike flip his mismatched Suzuki Esteem into a ditch. He finds the “Second Best Lawyer” mug Kim gave him, after a desperate search, ruined by a bullet hole. He sweats through one of his colorful suits and ruins it to protect him against the sun’s beating rays. His perfectly manicured image of assured self-confidence gives way to a blistered, sunburnt wretch, laid low and made to face hardships even he cannot simply bluff his way through.

But the ties to events past go beyond the tools that Mike and Saul use or lose during this trial. There’s a brotherly vibe about the two of them, Mike grumpily herding Jimmy along like a pestersome younger sibling he’s reluctantly responsible for. The glowsticks the two share while “camping” help set a mood, as Gilligan ups the contrast and shows each weathered lines on these men’s faces. But it also conjures the image of Jimmy and Chuck as young boys, lit by a similar light in “Lantern”. The parallel becomes all the more salient when Mike wraps himself up in a “space blanket” to stave off the cold, something that Jimmy can’t bring himself to indulge in for obvious reasons.

There’s a deeper connection there too, albeit one neither of them fully understands. Saul fears that Kim will be up worried about him, and Mike is aghast that Saul would clue his wife into this deadly, dirty business. Jimmy reasonably protests that he shared those details with her out of a well-intentioned sense of honesty and candor, not his usual look. He reassures Mike that Kim’s smart enough not to do anything rash (a brand of faith that Kim echoes to Lalo). But Mike just gives him an incredulous look and tells Jimmy that his big mouth just made Kim a part of the game, something her impromptu meeting with Lalo reinforces.

That’s scary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, for seasons now, Better Call Saul fans have been on pins and needles hoping that Kim Wexler survives despite her absence in Breaking Bad. The fact that she’s implicated, even tangentially, in cartel business, and that Lalo knows her by sight, makes her chances of living through the Walter White era that much more tenuous.

Oh yeah, that shot's not ominous at all.

It’s scarier now, though, because Mike knows full well that you can’t just be lightly involved in this sort of muck and come out unscathed. He watched his son try to operate within something dirty without becoming a part of it. He witnessed where that noble but doomed effort leaves you and the people you care about. His words give Jimmy a proper scolding, and represent a cosmic warning for Kim.

But when Jimmy’s latest attempt at a shortcut fails, when his efforts to work smarter not harder only amount to him losing flutter-fulls of hundred dollar bills, pulling spines out of his foot, and melting in the sun, it’s the thought of Kim and her well-being that keeps him going.

His renewed vigor arrives after Mike offers what can only be his signature speech of Better Call Saul. Mike tells Jimmy that he doesn’t care about whether he lives or dies himself, but chooses to go on because there’s people who need him, people whose lives he wants to make better. Mike has seen some real shit, crawled his way out of it, and had every reason to tap out on the other end. But he has Stacey and Kaylee to think about, and that makes him willing to stain and debase himself to keep them clean, to suffer and scrap so they can be safe and supported. It is as clear a statement of purpose as we’ll ever get from the famously taciturn grump.

Jimmy takes it to heart. Rather than giving up or hiding, he swallows his pride and wraps himself in the space blanket, gaining the attention of the criminals trying to hunt him down. This is not a slick con or a clever ruse. It’s a desperate ploy, one where Jimmy is willing to turn himself into bait, to put his life on the line, in the hopes that it will see him through, get him back to Kim, and maybe even hold onto enough to make her life better too.

Not the photo Jimmy's going to use for the next billboard.

The sequence that follows is incredible. Despite knowing that both characters survive, Gilligan draws out the tension and terror as an attacker’s car bears down on Jimmy, and Mike lies in wait behind a scope. A missed shot, a swerving car, an upturned chassis, and a newly-determined, foil-wrapped madman who can’t even bear to look, leads to the heart-pumping catharsis of an episode’s worth of character choices, all bound up in one rollicking climax.

In the end, Jimmy is willing to confront his lowest moments and debase himself to make it through this, because Mike reminded him who he’s doing all of this for. He’ll swaddle himself in the shining memories of a dead brother to catch his pursuers’ eye. He’ll drink his own urine to slake his thirst and survive this, using a water bottle branded by the law firm he swindled. He will make himself bait, the last resort of a man with nothing left to offer. And when it works, he will trudge on, having shed the niceties and pretensions and pride that made him think he was anywhere close to ready for this.

The stock and trade of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad is change and self-realization. More than the desert trappings, more than the chance for two characters to measure themselves against one another in hard isolation, that is what renders “Bagman” cut from the same cloth as our first televised journey to Albuquerque. Amid an ocean of dirt and blood and piss, Jimmy accepts one last wake up call, one last opportunity to change his path, one last chance to remember who all those tricks and triumphs and dwindling chances to be a better man are for.