Chuck McGill once described his brother with a law degree as like “a chimp with a machine gun.” That conjures a particular image, one of extreme recklessness and likely harm from a device far beyond the comprehension or abilities of its user. As Lalo showed us here, you don’t need to have perfect aim or a good line of sight to do some serious damage with one of those at your disposal. That’s why Chuck, in his own mind at least, worried so much about his brother entering his hallowed profession.
But I never bought that line of thinking. Jimmy was undoubtedly born to color outside the lines. Despite that, the early seasons of Better Call Saul suggested that — with the right guidance, the right supervision, the right cricket on his shoulder — he could have used those powers for good. The early stages of the Sandpiper case seemed to show that Jimmy’s con artist ways could be used to help people in need (while admittedly feathering his own nest in the process) and do the right thing, even if it involved questionable means. Given the bad blood between the McGill brothers, that never came to fruition. Instead, we’ve seen Jimmy’s soul gradually darken over the course of five seasons.
Maybe, though, the prospect of that rule-bending crusader for the less fortunate is still in the cards, except in the guise of a professional pantsuit and neatly-curled ponytail in place of the loud blazer and billboard-ready wink. Those same early seasons slowly revealed that Kim was just as formidable a con artist as her partner in crime, only one whose conscience held her back from the worst of Saul’s indulgences and excesses.
What if, however, she found the right deserving target — a self-involved, well-coiffed, thoroughly-tanned representative of the bourgeois world she disdains, who treated her poorly on multiple occasions? What if she had a just cause — enough money to fund a pro bono practice that could give the indigent the type of representation that only the wealthy can afford? And what if there would be no harm in forcing the desired result — a Sandpiper settlement that may reduce the overall take but still offer its octogenarian beneficiaries their money now, when they can still use it.
So I start a revolution from my bed.
For years, fans and critics like me have posited Kim as the final thing keeping Jimmy McGill from fully becoming Saul Goodman. What if we were wrong? What if the ties of mutual trust and care that seemed to be the last thing holding Jimmy back from his wicked ways were, in fact, the ties Saul inadvertently used to drag Kim down into the muck with him?
Jimmy himself certainly seems to think so. Maybe it’s the lingering PTSD or Mike’s warning in “Bagman” that Saul had put Kim in the line of fire. Whatever the cause, Jimmy seems ready to extricate himself from their relationship, not because he loves Kim any less, but because he realizes what a life spent with him could mean for the person he cares about most. The catch is that, until the end of the episode, Jimmy believes the threat is an external one, coming either from the cartel or his other likely crossed lines in the future, which might put this poor woman, whose only sin is her loyalty to him, in more danger.
And why wouldn’t he? The cartel half of “Something Unforgivable” posits the web of personal grievances and conflicting business interests among Lalo, Gus, Juan Bolsa, and Don Eladio as something volatile and quick to turn deadly. The confrontation between Lalo and his assassins results in the deaths of old men, innocent women, and foot soldiers so young they’re practically kids. It’s reasonable to fear what, and more importantly who, could become collateral damage next.
Granted, it seems like nothing in this world can stop Lalo Salamanca. The character has been a more than welcome presence in season 5, and Tony Dalton has brought a type of combined mirth and menace to the role unseen since Mark Hamill voiced the Joker. Despite that, his escape from a host of cut-throats who are, by Fring’s description, the best at what they do, starts to make him feel superhuman in the same way his ceiling-leap did last season.
Spider-Man / Spider-Man / Criminal Drug Lord Spider-Man!
Lalo has, nevertheless, proven himself to be exceedingly smart, prepared, and aware of what type of business he’s in. It’s not crazy, then, to think he might be ready for this type of assault. Regardless, Lalo single-handedly taking out a squad of trained killers carrying automatic weapons, despite starting the fight with little more than a frying pan full of hot oil, starts to strain credulity and hamper the only real fireworks the episode has to offer.
That said, the skirmish puts a target on Nacho’s back. He, more than anyone, has been caught in the cartel’s tug of war for a long time. Mike once again wants to give him a reprieve before something bad happens. But as Gus surveys the burned wreckage of his restaurant, his tone and tenor cast him as a man who’s invested too much in Nacho Varga to spare him, especially when he may be rising up the ranks of both Don Eladio’s empire and the Salamanca pecking order.
That leaves Nacho having to play both sides from higher on the food chain. When Lalo coaches him up to win the top spot in the Salamanca crew you can see Nacho mulling what it would mean. Nacho’s smart enough to know he’s damned no matter the outcome. Failing to earn that benediction may leave him much more expendable to both the Salamancas and Gus Fring. But winning it just raises the stakes within his double-agent predicament, making his tenuous position between two murderous crime bosses that much more precarious.
His conspicuous escape from the Chihuahua compound puts him squarely in Lalo’s crosshairs. With all the dramatics of the last two episodes, “Something Unforgivable” is more of a wind-down for this season and a setup for the next than a heart-pumping hour of television in and of itself. But as setup goes, Lalo’s back-from-the-presumed-dead revenge quest is an exciting tease, that puts literally every other major character on the show in peril.
Kitchen grease fires do make for some pretty nice lighting.
Lalo’s sharp enough to suspect that Nacho was involved in the attempt on his life. His disdain for Gus is well-documented. He has unfinished business with Mike after their near-misses in last season’s finale. He already thinks Saul might have sold him out given last week’s thrilling standoff. And Kim is officially on the cartel’s radar, having not only identified herself to Lalo during Jimmy’s disappearance, but told him off to his face. As Better Call Saul puts its pieces in place for the show’s final season, it leaves each of its major players from across the series’s landscape in potentially mortal danger.
The only character of significance who manages to avoid that Sword of Damocles is Howard Hamlin. But he may be staring down the barrel of the only thing scarier than an enraged, hell-bent Lalo — Kim Wexler with a righteous cause and a willingness to do whatever it takes to see it succeed.
All this time, we thought we were watching the slow descent of Jimmy McGill into his Saul Goodman persona, worried that he would drag Kim down into the wreckage of his former life. Maybe he has, just not in the way any of us were expecting. Just as the firefight on the Salamanca compound seems to presage a series of confrontations for season 6 more than it closes the book on the cartel story of season 5, Kim’s choices here appear to be setting up the last big job that she and Jimmy will try to pull off in the show’s final batch of episodes.
Her plan to trick, coax, or outright fabricate some unforgivable crime by Howard would bring the series full circle. It would set Jimmy and Kim in opposition to the show’s fake-out villain from season 1. It would offer Kim revenge on the man who took his beefs with Jimmy, and overall frustrations, out on her despite all of her good, hard work. And it would wrap up the Sandpiper case that drove so many of Jimmy’s choices in the series’s early going. Better Call Saul is rarely so neat or so tidy, but the climax of these plots that the couple adorably toss around under the covers would make for satisfying bookends as the show takes its final lap.
"Wait, how come Chewey never told Han that he'd seen Jedi using the Force himself?"
But it would also darken Kim’s soul to an extent few expected, let alone wished for. That includes Jimmy, who seems aghast that his partner is serious about this plan. We’ve seen Kim cross lines before, from pulling simple cons for fun, to testing out more complex schemes to help her practice, to her complicity in Jimmy’s moves against Chuck, to her transgressions on behalf of Mr. Acker in the shadow of Mesa Verde’s call center. We’ve also seen her idolize Atticus Finch and, in that last ploy in particular, struggle mightily with her moral nausea over being part of the elite world from which Jimmy still resents his rejection.
It’s easy to see those steps as the road to hell paved with good intentions, a slip greased, however intentional or accidental, by Saul’s bad influence. An authority no less than Kim herself rejects this hypothesis when it’s offered by Howard. Kim insists, as she should, that she’s someone who makes her own choices.
We’re all a product of the friends and loved ones we spend our lives with. But Kim has experienced the same thrill from her chances to color outside the lines that Jimmy has. She’s felt the same righteous anger at the white shoe gatekeepers who hold down the little guy whom Saul’s railed against. Maybe our only mistake was thinking that Kim would hold onto her conscience in the shadow of Jimmy’s worst transgressions, rather than find her own path toward the darkness.
Perhaps, instead, she will become what Jimmy once seemed poised to, only to fall short given familial grievances and perceived slights — an underhanded champion of the downtrodden, who does bad things for good ends. Season 5 of Better Call Saul is where Saul Goodman, the amoral advocate we would come to know on Breaking Bad, truly emerged and flourished. But it may also feature the birth of a new Kim Wexler, a fallen angel ready to slay the wicked in the name of the good, as the devil on her shoulder starts to wonder what he’s done, and maybe even regret it.
