Jimmy McGill’s part in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first appearance in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee — the regular, mundane tasks of his new life. And in his last scene, he does the same things: joking about his fish’s appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.
The catch, though, is that between that first feeding and the second, he found out his brother had died.
I don’t know what Jimmy’s feeling between those two oddly similar moments. Better Call Saul writer/showrunner Peter Gould plays it close to the vest in “Smoke”. Jimmy cries no tears. Despite his usual bombast and silver tongue, he is uncharacteristically taciturn and reserved here. And while he sports more of a hangdog expression than usual throughout the episode, Jimmy is largely a blank slate in the wake of such foundation-shaking news.
“Smoke” leaves the viewer to wonder what’s going on between its protagonists’ ears. That is, as I’m fond of saying, a feature not a bug. There’s not a lot of talking in Better Call Saul’s season premiere for its fourth season. Instead, there’s a lot of mulling, a lot of concerned and affected faces, from siblings who look like they’re in shock, culprits swallowing their anxieties, and bald heads bobbing over cubicle walls and sporting the same half frown that speaks both authority and disdain with a single downturned crinkle of the lip.
No matter which one is in focus, Better Call Saul takes the time to show its characters thinking, and to let the audience fill in the gaps, or wonder what exactly is going through their minds, rather than explicating those thoughts in heavy-handed terms.
"If only I hadn't spent so much time spreading mayostard on my sandwiches."
That’s particularly true for Jimmy here. There are signs that Chuck’s death got to him. Jimmy sees the electronics scattered in Chuck’s backyard and knows the events that felled his brother were part of a relapse. He shares in the once celebratory but now palliative shots that he’d previously offered Kim, but he still can’t sleep. Jimmy seems almost catatonic, like he’s still processing the enormous shock of his brother’s grim departure in a state that could indicate numbness or contemplation or being overwhelmed or any number of the complicated emotions that attend grief.
The episode plays similarly coy about what’s motivating Mike Ehrmantraut. Mike quits his job as a parking attendant, seems poised to spend more time with his granddaughter, and can sit at home and watch baseball games in his newfound spare hours. But when he gets that first check from Madrigal in his role as a “security consultant,” something clicks inside of him, and he can’t leave well enough alone.
What follows is another one of Better Call Saul’s superlative sequences, where Mike proves that all you need is a badge, a clipboard, and the air of innate authority to go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything. It’s a visual feast as Mike skulks through a cubicle farm, blazes through a maze of industrial shelves, and observes and corrects a host of Madrigal employees like he owns the place. It’s a sequence where the show’s dry sense of humor comes out, with Mike overhearing a breakroom debate over who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali (before providing an eye roll-fueled but definitive answer). Whoever wins, Mike isn’t content to sit idly by, but instead uses this as an opportunity to advise the nearest Madrigal outpost on what and where it’s going wrong.
“Smoke” leaves it characteristically hazy why Mike is doing all of this. Maybe Mike is, true-to-form, simply scoping out his new arrangement. Despite Lydia’s warning that his “salary” is a rounding error, it’s possible that Mike wants to make sure that he’s seen doing some security consulting in case anyone starts asking questions, and also intends to double check that the people he’s getting into bed with are on the up-and-up. It might also be Mike’s sense of honor, the notion that if he’s receiving a paycheck from these people, he wants to do the job he’s being paid for, and perhaps even show Lydia (and by extension, Gus Fring) exactly what they’re getting with him.
A look of disapproval that could move mountains.
Or it may just be that Mike cannot sit still. We know from Breaking Bad that Mike he active in his line of work, one way or another, for a long time to come. And even if we didn’t, the Mike of Better Call Saul doesn’t seem like the type to be fulfilled by or satisfied with watching baseball and drinking beer all day long. Mike is good at what he does, and when you have talents like his, not to mention someone who seems to appreciate them, it’s hard to let them go to waste.
And Gus Fring might be in need of Mike’s services very soon. The part of the episode involving Gus and Nacho is the most “Breaking Bad prequel” portion of “Smoke.” It’s the straightforward conclusion to Nacho’s ploy with Hector. It gives Gus the chance to artfully attempt to fill in the power vacuum that Hector’s incapacitation creates, lest war follow. And it shows the audience how one of Gus’s henchman has scoped out Nacho ditching the evidence, suggesting that Gus will have an angle to play here.
These scenes are fairly slight, doing more to clean up after Hector’s reaction in the previous episode and hint at what might be the offing than moving things along in the here and now. They’re about teasing a war in the New Mexico drug scene, but just as much about Nacho’s state of mind. You feel his jangled nerves, his concerns about the storm that might be ahead, and his worries that Gus or Juan Bolsa know about his actions. “Smoke” spends a great deal of time letting the viewer simply observe as Nacho grows ever more anxious and worries about what might come next.
The truth is that not much happens in “Smoke.” A hell of a lot happened in last season’s finale, without much (or in some cases any) time for denouement or for the show to catch its breath. So a good chunk of this premiere is purposefully light on incident, more about the fallout of those series-shifting events and the effect they’ve had on Nacho, Mike, and Jimmy, than about the next big bang in the Better Call Saul timeline.
Better Call Saul is also a stealth prequel to Finding Nemo.
The timeline seems to be speeding up though. The Jimmy McGill we see at the end of “Smoke” seems closer to the man we meet in Breaking Bad.
For most of the episode, Jimmy remains nearly inscrutable, with it unclear whether he’s stunned or unaffected or somewhere in between in his flat affect throughout the proceedings. But the episode contrasts him with Howard, who is clearly broken up about Chuck’s passing, and with that, presents a strange role reversal.
Howard seems like the family member, while Jimmy seems like the staid business partner. Howard reads back an admiring obituary, and Jimmy doesn’t even want to listen to it. At the funeral, Jimmy is shaking hands with all of Chuck’s business colleagues and contemporaries, while Howard is comforting Chuck’s near-widow. And the clincher of all of this is how Howard waits for Jimmy after the funeral, so he can offer a confession.
Howard blames himself for Chuck’s death, knowing that someone as deliberate as his former partner wouldn’t let the fire erupt by accident. Howard is broken up over his belief that forcing Chuck out of HHM set him down this path, and he is trying to bare his soul and clear his conscience by confiding this guilt in the man whom he imagines would be most hurt the revelation.
But unbeknownst to Howard, that confession only confirms to Jimmy that he was the superseding cause of his brother’s demise, not Howard. Jimmy’s own tip off to the insurance company is what set this whole thing in motion. And yet, Jimmy doesn’t care, or at least doesn’t want to be seen to do so outwardly. In a move that prompts a brief but palpable moment of disbelief from Kim, Jimmy just starts whistling and going through this day, the day his brother was laid to rest, like it’s any other day. He feeds fish. He makes coffee. He goes about his normal routine.
Not the look of a happy partner.
Who knows if this is Jimmy slipping into the man he’ll eventually become, the one who won’t accept blame for anything and has a casual obliviousness to those who stand in his way. Who knows if this is the sort of thing that slowly but surely pushes Kim out of his life. Who knows if Chuck’s last words to him truly obliterated whatever sort of affection Jimmy might have had for his brother, or even convinced him to be the amoral slimeball that Chuck said was his true, unavoidable nature, one he should embrace.
We don’t know what’s going on in Jimmy’s head during “Smoke.” All we know is that it ends with a version of Jimmy McGill who seems closer to Saul Goodman than ever, who seems ready to brush off his own brother’s death because “that’s just the way things are,” who is calm and cool and unbothered by any of it. And we know that the episode begins with a version of Cinnabon Gene who is anything but, who is unnerved and frightened by something as simple as a mistyped social security number or an Albuquerque air freshener.
We still know the beginning and what seems to be the end game for Jimmy McGill’s adult life, and we know the beginning and what seems to be the end of his mourning for his brother. But Better Call Saul honors the complexity of, and trusts its audience to wait for and to figure out, what happens in between.
