Despite a few similarities (trunk shots for example), Better Call Saul rarely goes for the non-linear storytelling tricks that you might see in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Sure, you may get the periodic flash forward to Cinnabon Gene, or the occasional flashback to some illuminating incident from Jimmy McGill’s old life, but it’s rare that the show depicts the events of the present in something other than chronological order.
It’s noteworthy, then, that in this is episode, we see the end of Mike’s speech in group therapy before we see its beginning. The episode opens with a scene from his past, where Mike is meticulously laying down a slab of concrete and letting his son write his name in the wet cement. It’s a sweet moment, but one tinged with melancholy, and a dissonance when the episode then quickly cuts to Mike in the present, looking out at a stunned room and gruffly remarking that, hey, they wanted him to talk.
That structure is a tease. It implies that Mike bared his soul to this room and stunned them into silence, prompting the audience to wonder what precisely he said to provoke that kind of reaction.
It’s not like Better Call Saul to try to mortgage tension from later in the episode like that. But maybe that type of approach is necessary in an episode like “Talk”, where the show is very gradual in terms of how it parcels out the plot, even by this series’s patiently-paced standards. Despite the excitement of a firefight, “Talk” isn’t an episode where much of anything particularly plot-relevant happens. Instead, it’s more about what’s bothering each of our main characters below the surface, what’s gnawing at their souls while they, and the audience, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
The clearest sense of unease and unrest comes from Kim Wexler, who’s now skulking around the public defender-laden courtrooms than Jimmy himself used to troll. A judge (played by Star Trek: Voyager’s Ethan Phillips) immediately recognizes the look of a lawyer feeling morally bereft and seeking redemption. And in a supercilious but well-meaning sort of way, he tries to talk her out of it. Their exchange (really more of a monologue) makes for a nice scene and gives the underrated Philips a chance to shine as an actor. The judge riffs on The Verdict and softly chastises Kim for barking up the wrong tree with his low-level criminal cases if she wants to buy her soul back.
But Kim is undeterred, because of course she is. Lord knows Kim’s faced greater setbacks and discouragements than one judge telling her that the best way to assuage her conscience is to make lots of money and donate to charity. Kim is feeling the moral stain of her part in the McGill family drama, and these scenes suggest that she’s hoping to wash some of it away by using her prodigious talents to help the downtrodden rather than a scoundrel.
That said, Jimmy is trying to remain on the straight and narrow in his own way. Despite initially turning down a chance for gainful employment (just as he did with the copier company), Kim’s encouragement to see a shrink is enough to convince Jimmy to, at a minimum, put on a show that he’s okay and getting his life back together. So Jimmy ends up taking a job as a shift-manager at a local cell phone store. The foot traffic is practically nonexistent, so Jimmy is left to while away his time with nothing to do (always a dangerous proposition).
It’s an interesting look for our protagonist. We know from his misadventures at Davis & Main, and even his outings picking up trash as part of his community service, that Jimmy has serious trouble sitting still and doing what he’s told. Even when his intentions are good, he can only do things his way. So a flip remark about people listening to phone conversations, made by his Hummel co-conspirator, gives Jimmy the flash of inspiration to kick his small time phone store gig up a notch.
Jimmy's "O-Face"
Jimmy paints the windows of the store to announce himself as selling privacy, protection from an unseen boogeyman, rather than just selling phones. It remains to be seen whether this is the type of (nigh-literal) coloring outside the lines that made him a bad fit for other people’s shops, or if in the brighter world of cell phone sales, his splashy style will be well-received by his customers and superiors alike. Either way, it plants yet another seed for Jimmy’s flashy showmanship and truth-bending spirit that will be harvested, tarted up, and put in the most self-serving light by one Saul Goodman. (Plus hey, maybe it’s the source of all the phones in his desk in Breaking Bad.)
But Jimmy is, at least for the moment, able to fit his more colorful impulses into the confines of the role he’s been given, which is more grace than Nacho’s enjoyed lately. Nacho continues to be a pawn in the cold war between Gus Fring and the Salamancas, having to prove his loyalty to one side and feign it with the other so that his forced flip isn’t discovered.
That continues to be a harrowing effort. When he fingers a rival group as the crew that assaulted him and Arturo, the twins don’t wait for backup. They storm in and take the place, and Nacho’s expected to help out, having to take more lives and tear up his still-wounded body in the process. That exertion is enough to earn Nacho some trust with the Salamancas (via a subtle head nod), and it allows him to figure out Gus’s plans, but it also makes him miserable.
As tense and dangerous as that firefight is, the key scene for Nacho in “Talk” comes when he returns to his father’s house. Mr. Varga banished Nacho from his home for being associated with the criminal element, and at first he seems incensed that his son would have the temerity to return. But as soon as he sees the state Nacho’s in, his demeanor immediately shifts.
"Maybe this wasn't the right week to start trying crossfit."
Whatever you want for your kids, however angry you may be when they don’t live up to your hopes for them, it’s almost impossible to stay mad at them when they’re in trouble, especially when they’re hurting. There’s a supreme pathos to Nacho sitting on his father’s couch, just asking for a moment to recover and be away from the world that’s already taken so much from him, and Mr. Varga is hard pressed to say no. It’s obvious to us that the events of the last few episodes have taken a physical toll on Nacho, but it’s just as clear to Mr. Varga that it’s taken a mental toll on him as well.
That’s what connects Nacho’s dad to Mike in this episode. “Talk” shows Mike returning to group therapy, flirting with Anita, and listening to Stacey for the first time in a long time. But even in those civilian settings, Mike can’t turn off his cop instincts, which lead him to challenge the fabrications of one late-coming, story-changing attendee (who’s on loan from The Good Place), and eventually deride the entire group therapy exercise, alienating his love interest and his daughter-in-law in one fell swoop.
But that’s the beauty of Better Call Saul’s momentary exercise in playing with the timeline — because it comes up with an artistic way to communicate the thoughts that were running through Mike’s head when he gave the spiel that shocked his audience.
Jonathan Banks does a great job showing Mike’s physical discomfort at hearing Stacey talk about maybe forgetting Matty. But that cold open is a creative way to plant the seed of what Mike was thinking in that moment. Those thoughts, those remembrances, and the pain that comes with them, are always going to be dancing around in his head. The image of his son writing his name in wet cement, of an innocence that he let be corrupted, is always going to be there in his mind.
That’s what makes someone lying about that sort of guilt and pain such an insult, one that Mike cannot abide. And that’s what makes the idea of group therapy, of some people’s sense of performative grief, to be such anathema to an old school guy like him. To Mike, the pain is real and inescapable — an image of his little boy that is always going to haunt him — leaving any efforts to prop that pain up, to paint it and make it palatable, seem like nonsense to him.
Mike isn’t exactly the kind of character who’s open with his feelings. That means the show has to find other ways to tell us the important things about what’s going on in his head: how Nacho’s predicament dredges up feelings for Mike about his own son, how he still feels pain and regret over what he lost with Matty, and how he’s willing to tear it all down, to lash out at everyone else, when that pain is too much to bear.
A little formal audaciousness goes a long way toward illuminating what this taciturn and guarded man is thinking and feeling, and it helps spice up an episode of Better Call Saul that is well made as always, but which seems to be marking time until the next big boom.
