We’re used to Jimmy McGill pushing limits and crossing lines. Time after time, Better Call Saul serves up scenarios where its title character faces two options: do things the safe and expected way, or do them the Saul Goodman way. The latter might gain Jimmy a little more, but it’s also riskier and sometimes even dangerous.
For once, though, it’s Kim taking that type of risk. She’s obviously no stranger to participating in Jimmy’s schemes and even concocting some of her own. But she’s also always had a limit, a certain line she refused to cross, even if doing so would get her what she wanted. It’s in Jimmy’s nature to cheat and finagle and squeeze the last bit of juice out of everything. It’s in Kim’s to dabble in those conman ways, even excel at them, but to ultimately come back to the light.
And yet, now, she’s fighting for something that pushes her past those limitations. It’s not just some “squatter” she wants to save; it’s herself. Time and again, people in “Dedicado a Max” question whether her continued efforts to move Mesa Verde’s call center is worth it and present her with off-ramps and opportunities where she should, by all accounts, give up and step back. Instead, she turns each of them down and risks the career built on the back of so much labor and hustle and hard-fought accomplishment, because of what this fight means to her.
It is, as in last week’s episode, something that connects her and Gus. “Dedicado a Max” continues the thematic throughline from that installment, suggesting that Ms. Wexler and Mr. Fring both enlist their heavy hitters here because they know a war is coming and want the soldiers in place who can help them win it.
Not the kind you'd thank for their service.
Kim is a lawyer enmeshed in a business dispute. Gus is, as Mike puts it, a drug dealer in scrapping with other drug dealers. But they are both motivated by something that elevates their struggles beyond just business, beyond their paychecks, to the point where each is essentially willing to put their livelihoods on the line in the name of something even greater than what they’ve worked their whole lives to achieve.
For Kim, it’s a means to prove she’s a good person. Kim is clearly still stinging from Mr. Acker’s dressing-down in “Namaste.” So while New Mexico’s favorite homesteader may never know of her good(?) deeds, she deploys Jimmy’s chicanery on his behalf, brings in her partner and boss to grease the wheels at Mesa Verde, and even taps into Jimmy’s underworld connections to dig up dirt on Kevin Wachtell. But rather than fighting for Mr. Acker, she’s fighting to save her own soul, to affirm the kind of person she sees herself as, and is willing to risk everything to do it.
Gus has no such illusions about the kind of person he is. As he tells Mike in the fateful closing scene of the episode, he is what he is and makes no bones about his acts of charity as somehow absolving him of his sins. And yet, Gus acts with a greater purpose as well. He is not paying to fix Mike up, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and playing a dangerous game with Nacho just to succeed in his chosen line of work. He’s doing it all to avenge Max, the man he loved, and to bring the people who killed him to justice.
That love is evident in the small town where Mike convalesces. The episode never comes out and confirms it, but it’s fair to infer that this is one of the “slums” where Gus’s former partner grew up. Gus helped build up the town, provided funding for the local doctor and, as is evident in any one of the episode’s impeccably framed shots, donated a fountain dedicated to Fring’s poor deceased friend. So much of this half of “Dedicado” centers on Mike wondering why he’s here, what exactly Gus wants from him, when the answer’s all around him.
"Look, I liked A Goofy Movie too, but this seems excessive."
Gus wants vengeance on the bad actors who took away someone he cared about, something that, given what we (and apparently Gus) know of Mike from season 1, Mr. Ehrmantraut can understand. Better Call Saul made a deliberate choice to break up Mike and Gus’s professional relationship in the early part of this season. Putting them back together can’t be too easy or too convenient, or else it would feel cheap. Instead, Gus starts to convince Mike that he isn’t interested in hiring a henchman in a drug war; he wants Mike as his ally in a noble, if bloody, cause, one that transcends his business interests, and verges into the deeply personal.
That’s all pretty heavy material, which belies how unbelievably funny and entertaining “Dedicado a Max” is for most of its runtime. We get Saul at his most mischievous and creative. We get Jimmy and Kim making fun of Kevin (and a little bit of each other). And we get Mike grumping it up with a patient but no-B.S. caretaker. Each of these bits is great in its own way.
Jimmy’s schemes to prevent the local construction crew (headed by John “Bender the robot” DiMaggio!) are a dose of pure, classic Saul Goodman hijinks. Everything from an address switcheroo (shades of his scheme to foil Chuck!), to planted archaeological pottery, to smoke detector-based radioactivity, to a faux-miracle attracting religious tourists, helps buy Kim the time and the headaches to try to convince Kevin to move the call center.
Beyond the cleverness of these ploys, it’s just fun to see Saul in his element once more, interacting with local deputies and contractors, cool as a cucumber and playing coy every step of the way. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — as sad as it is to see Jimmy turn into Saul, it’s also entertaining as hell.
"Sir, when you told us this was a habitat for endangered cranes, you had to know the terminology was misleading."
Still, there’s something more subtly amusing about Mike’s misadventures here. You can feel Mike’s (frankly kind of adorable) frustration at being trapped so far from home. He’s in moral, if not literal, debt to someone else, something he clearly hates, and stuck in a place where, despite all his skills, he’s almost entirely unable to help himself.
The funniest moment of his quasi-imprisonment is the sequence where he tries to recharge a cellphone so that he can dial his way out of there. It starts out like a classic bit of Breaking Bad-style tactile problem-solving. Mike picks and pries at various bits of detritus in a nearby storeroom, plays around with wires, and starts fusing, cracking, and connecting the mechanical parts he needs to complete his plan. Then, suddenly, his caretaker short-circuits the whole thing when she sees his tinkering mess and just hands him a charger.
There’s a wry, understated brand of humor at play there, and it adds to the low-key sweet relationship between Mike and the woman looking after him. There’s a similar “not countenancing your crap” vibe to them both, but also a willingness to help where it’s needed. For the caretaker, that means looking after this wounded old man. For Mr. Ehrmantraut, it means helping sop up rain amid a downpour and fixing a waterlogged windowsill in the aftermath. However hard and gruff Mike might be, there’s a softer side to him, a side that sees the humanity in others and wants to vindicate it in his own, grumbly way.
That’s the side that Gus means to appeal to. It’s the side that he hopes will persuade Mike to firmly step out of civilian life, to join in a war, and help him extract his vengeance. Gus’s mission is premised on love and loss, the sort of loss that motivates him to do extraordinary things in the hopes of making it all right, or at least equally wrong.
"Maybe I could use this stuff to build some sort of remote control gun..."
Kim’s willing to do the same on her own behalf. She’s smart and prepared as always, so she knows to try to recuse herself from the dispute once Jimmy’s on the other side of it, to have Rich Schweikart be the bearer of the advice to Kevin, and to refute Rich’s implied accusations as publicly as possible to bolster the strength and conviction of her moral alibi.
But all the while, she’s veering closer and closer to being exposed. When Kevin says he “smells a rat” she almost imperceptibly flinches, until Kevin blames Mr. Acker instead of the true author of this skullduggery. When Jimmy tells her that she fought the good fight and lost and anything beyond this would be risky and dirty, she still doesn’t back down. And when her boss tells her, gently at first and then explicitly, that he thinks she’s compromised, she effectively stakes her career and reputation on a lie and a plan.
That’s Slippin’ Jimmy-like behavior, the sort of choices that leave you doubling down on your past deceptions and overcommitting to them, in the hopes that you can stay one step ahead of your foes and even your friends. For Jimmy, he did that to save or spite Chuck, and to help or hold onto Kim. For Gus, it’s to honor and avenge the man he loved. For Kim, it’s to convince herself of who she really is, to fight for a cause greater than money or titles or professional success.
When it comes to Jimmy and Gus, we know where that path, and pushing those limits, leads — to measured success mixed with a great cost and greater loss. We can only hope it ends somewhere sunnier for Ms. Wexler.
