Better Call Saul: The Good Guys and Bad Guys Fight the Same Fight in “Namaste”

If there’s a persistent thematic undercurrent that touches each part of Better Call Saul (and maybe even Breaking Bad), it’s that people from very different walks of life are not all that different. Respected and superficially decent men like Chuck McGill and Walter White can be cruel and self-serving. Those on the margins of society like Nacho Varga and Jesse Pinkman can be intelligent and empathetic. And crime bosses and young attorneys can be equally determined, equally dogged, and equally committed to doing what they must to win the long game.

At first blush, the challenges facing Kim Wexler and Gus Fring couldn’t be more different. Kim is dealing with an ornery, wannabe adverse-possessor who refuses to vacate his land. Gus is dealing with a rival crime boss attacking him via the DEA. And yet, their responses are remarkably similar. When backed into a corner, the duo’s collective M.O. is to work harder, be smart and disciplined every step of the way, and take the short term loss in exchange for the long term gain.

For Kim, that begins with trying to save Mr. Acker’s house on her own terms. The show makes a point to note the difference between her and Jimmy’s tack after their late night bottle escapades, from the last episode, presaging Kim’s approach to helping out her ornery homesteader. When Kim and Jimmy run across the broken glass from their frustration-venting pitchfest the night before, Jimmy brushes it off, telling his partner that they pay the apartment complex for clean-up. Kim doesn’t push back on him. She knows that’s a dead end. But once he’s gone, she takes the time to sweep it up herself.

That’s Kim Wexler. She acts out sometimes but still cleans up her own messes, and other people’s messes for that matter. That’s what she aims to do with Mr. Acker: put in the extra work, down to the last detail, to make her case and win. Something the stubborn homeowner said struck a chord in Kim, reminding her of where she came from versus where she is now. She wants to reassure herself about who she is and what she stands for, by using her hard-won power and position to help someone closer to her humble origins in the best way she knows how.

"This is the same way I convinced my parents to get me a puppy."

True to form, that means packing a well-constructed PowerPoint presentation and a compelling argument about the financial benefits of redressed drainage (hello There Will Be Blood fans!). When granted entry to the proverbial “room where it happens,” Kim makes the business case for Mesa Verde moving its call center to an alternate location, laying out the financial and practical reasons for Kevin to break ground elsewhere. She plays by the rules and it gets her…nowhere. Kevin bluntly asks if it’s still his land, and when Kim flatly affirms that it is, he politely but firmly says declares that the end of the issue. It’s a loss for Kim, but one that, as always, won’t deter her forever.

Gus also faces a loss here. To keep an increasingly fragile peace with the Salamancas and preserve Nacho’s safety as a mole, Gus must sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DEA and, worse yet, give Lalo the win. Fring is not an overly expressive man, but his demeanor in “Namaste” tells the audience everything it needs to know about how he feels amid this sacrifice play. (The same goes for his polite but curt treatment toward his poor assistant manager.)

And yet, while Gus doesn’t quite play by the rules, he’s like Kim in that he comes impeccably prepared for the task at hand. His attention to detail in everything is perfect, giving the cops three low level guys and enough money for their “leads” to pay off, but not enough to let them anywhere near him, his real lieutenants, or his empire. It’s trading a rook to save a queen, and that doesn’t make Gus happy, but it allows him to live to fight another day.

Mike lives to fight another day too, though his prospects there are far less metaphorical. What brought Mike and Gus together originally was their shared sense of professionalism and attention to detail. But now Mike’s losing it. Werner’s death got to him, making him less stable and steady, something even his daughter-in-law recognizes.

That Yellow Bastard

Her cautions and pleas only make things worse for Mike’s mental state. His muttered curses show how affronted he feels about not being allowed to babysit his granddaughter, and Jonathan Banks nails the scene in his expressions and body language, as usual.

Despite those grumbles, Mike also wants to be punished. So he walks by the same toughs he scrapped with last week, dishing out some punishment, but taking much much more, including a knife to the gut. It’s a form of self-immolation, Mike’s descended into self-loathing over his role in a friend’s death. He can’t move past it, and he doesn’t have the tools or the inclination to heal himself.

But somebody does. It’s uncertain where exactly Mike is when he wakes up from his beating, but a safe bet is that Gus is involved. Fring sees the war with the Salamancas escalating, and knows the benefits of having someone with Mike’s talents and level of preparation on his side in such fraught moments. If anyone has the incentive and the means to help Mike get better, it’s Gus. Chances are Mike awoke in Gus’s childhood home, soon to receive a speech and a demonstration of why Gus needs him for this war — one more contingency accounted for in all of Fring’s exacting calculations.

When your back’s against the wall, it helps to have an ace in the hole like that. It’s the same thing Kim (reluctantly) has with Jimmy. The title character in Better Call Saul takes on more of a minor role in “Namaste”. We mostly see him working his outside-the-box magic in select scenes. His moral degradation continues when he’s not only willing to connect the unrepentant “Fifty Percent Off!” numbskulls with a phony rehab center, but also more than happy to let some poor grandmother wire him the funds necessary to defend them.

"Let's celebrate our new arrangement with a spirited sing-a-long to the YMCA song!"

And yet, the show wrings the laughs from watching him deal with these knuckleheads. It’s just as fun to watch him pull the ol’ switcheroo to challenge a witness’s recollection on the stand. Slippin’ Jimmy is up to his old tricks, and as sad as that is in some ways, it’s also roundly entertaining.

But what’s more interesting from a character standpoint is that fate presents Saul with another off-ramp to once again become Jimmy McGill, or at least avoid becoming the new version of Slippin’ Jimmy, and he rejects it. Howard Hamlin not only takes Jimmy out to lunch but offers him a job. He apologizes for not giving Jimmy a shot before, shows him respect for standing up for the young woman at the scholarship committee meeting, and seemingly offers Jimmy the respectability he’s craved for so long.

Jimmy just doesn’t want it anymore. He’s done trying to play the game of men like Howard and Chuck and is resolved, even dare I say happy, to play his own mercenary version of it, replete with a little revenge. An opening weight-check through a thrift store pays off in the closing moments of the episode, where Saul heaves his bowling balls over Howard’s gate and wrecks up his car in the process. That’s not the first bit of vehicular vengeance Jimmy’s inflicted, and it cements the way that Saul is here to stay, whether you like it or not.

Kim doesn’t like it, but she still needs it. When the right way fails, Kim resorts to the wrong way (also known as the Saul Goodman way). In the end, she wants justice for Mr. Acker, and more importantly, absolution for herself. So she connects Mr. Acker with her partner-in-crime with an eye toward his “by any means necessary” methods.

"Buddy, I don't know what you're selling exactly, but I know I don't want any."

That choice is already less-than-scrupulous to begin with, given Kim’s connection to the other side of the dispute. But it’s made all the more ethically dubious given that she’s expressly enlisting Jimmy for his propensity to lie, steal, and cheat his way to victory no matter what. That’s made plain with his bizarre but hilarious equine visual aid, and by the end of a fraught confrontation, Saul Goodman wins himself another client.

It’s not the ideal solution for Kim Wexler, but she knows how to take a loss in one space so that she can get a win in another, one that’s more important to her. It’s the same type of judgment call that Gus Fring makes with the police. The intersection between his operation and Hank & Gomey’s has a real Breaking Bad energy to it, with the police sniffing in the right places, but finding themselves a step slow relative to the bad guys.

The show wrings tension from an all-but choreographed routine to give the DEA what it wants while Gus quietly seethes during a misdirected fryer-scrub. It’s a nice way to convey Gus’s frustrations, unable to be taken out where he wants them, to where Gus projects them onto his other precision operation. In the end, he gives up a good chunk of change and small parts of his drug business to keep his edge on Lalo, while Hank, despite his smiling, chipper, culvert-contemplating demeanor, knows it’s a hollow victory.

That sort of choice binds all these wayward souls together. Nacho and Mike are both hurting from the messes they’re stuck in. Jimmy and Mike are both secret weapons for their partners, ones whose abilities are called for in particularly tight spots. And Kim and Gus operate on very different sides of the law, but still recognize the value in enduring a hit now – to the wallet, to the plan, to your pride – in order to win over the long haul. As this franchise continues, it has telescoped to include broader cross-sections of its world and society writ large, and finds that while the challenges are different, the responses, and the people, stay much the same.