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Tag Archives: Kim Wexler
Better Call Saul: The Slow Burn Threatens to Bring Down Jimmy and Kim in “Something Stupid”
I’ve known the evenings, mornings, and days alone,
I have measured out my life in Mesa Verde awards and burner phones.
With my sincerest apologies to T.S. Eliot, it’s amazing how Better Call Saul can move so slowly and then so quickly in the same season, without missing a beat. It’s hard to know exactly how much time has elapsed in the show so far, but this season picked up right where the last one left off and has, more or less, crept along in the aftermath of Chuck’s death and Hector’s “accident” ever since.
That is, until now. If the last episode stood out for how it seemed to set Jimmy and Kim on diverging trajectories, “Something Stupid” takes that idea up a notch, with a cold open set to the famed Sinatra melody that provides the episode’s title. The series taps into its unrivaled ability to craft montages, depicting the passage of time via unwrapped statuettes, filing cabinet labels, and holiday sale signs. But the show goes a step further with its formal creativity, using a well-placed split screen to show how both Kim and Jimmy are flourishing in their new lives, but also how those lives are slowly but surely pulling them further and further apart.
Better Call Saul Sets Jimmy and Kim on Different Paths in “Piñata”
Jimmy and Kim are on different paths; that’s been clear for a while now. But the cold open in “Piñata” makes it literal. The episode starts with a flashback to the halls of HHM, at a time when Jimmy is a gregarious mailroom clerk and Kim’s a precocious law student. Even then, the two share a rapport, but also have obvious differences.
Better Call Saul Veers Ever Closer to Breaking Bad in “Quite a Ride”
Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because this episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of our hero during the Walter White era. It’s not just because Gus Fring seems to nail down his plans for the facility that will one day become Heisenberg’s lab. And it’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and seedy hangout where Jesse Pinkman once sold his drug of choice.
It’s because “Quite a Ride” is about people who are almost peerless at what they do, unable to walk away from it, and the different directions those superlative skills take them. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a show devoted to a man who had an undeniable talent, but who could not let it go in the face of the money and long-awaited recognition he thought he was due, even when it came with a side of peril and human misery. Breaking Bad lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone as talented as Walter White operate at the top of his game in a terrible industry, and earned its emotional resonance from the uncertain but foreboding sense of where those talents would lead him.
Better Call Saul Uses its Timeline to Show Us What’s Bothering Mike in “Talk”
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.
Better Call Saul: Nacho and Kim Are in Too Deep in “Something Beautiful”
The end of “Something Beautiful” makes me think of a scene from “Nailed”, the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul’s second season. In that episode, Chuck McGill confronted Kim and Jimmy about the suspected switcheroo with the Mesa Verde files. He impugned his brother’s character and told Kim to open her eyes, saying that Jimmy committed these misdeeds for her as part of a “twisted romantic gesture.”
But Kim defended Jimmy. She admitted that he’s not perfect, but argued that he was still a good person and someone she pitied in light of how much he ached for his brother’s love, a love that he would never get. She chastised Chuck for denying Jimmy that and for judging him, for threatening to inflict such consequences on him, and denied Chuck’s theory as crackpot. But then, when she was alone with Jimmy, she betrayed her true feelings. She punched Jimmy in the arm. She expressed her frustration, because she’s no fool; she knew he did it, and she thought that Chuck was right — that he did it for her.
Better Call Saul and the Choices We Don’t Have to Make in “Breathe”
One of the most interesting questions to ask — for both real people and characters on television — is why someone chooses to do things they don’t have to. The realities of life can push people toward certain choices, and circumstances often dictate actions. But there are situations in which there’s no external force, no rules or sticks or carrots to poke or prod, just a raw choice to be made. It’s these sorts of choices that can reveal who someone really is and what they’re going through, in a way that’s clearer than with choices that are muddied by pressure and inertia and need.
These are the types of questions that “Breathe” is interested in. Why is Gus Fring not only trying to keep Hector Salamanca alive, but also moving against those who tried to kill him? Why is Kim Wexler attending a meeting to determine Jimmy’s share of Chuck’s estate when Jimmy himself is blowing it off? Why is Mike Ehrmantraut determined to perform his “security consultant” routine on all of Madrigal’s outposts despite Lydia’s objections? And why is Jimmy McGill ready to talk himself out of a job, one he’d just hustled like crazy to earn?
Better Call Saul and the Last Line of Defense Between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman
Breaking Bad posited that who a person is, what kind of choices they make, is situational. Walter White always had Heisenberg within him: the arrogance, anger, and self-satisfaction. But that side of him, and the evil he would inflict, couldn’t emerge until his circumstances changed. When fenced in by a middle-class life with domestic responsibilities, Walt was a meek science teacher who wouldn’t, and maybe couldn’t, hurt a fly. It took a cancer diagnosis and a series of increasingly wild events to turn him into the vicious kingpin he eventually became and yet somehow always was. Breaking Bad suggested that this type of change in circumstances could reveal the real you and that your true nature is just one big bang away.
And yet Better Call Saul, through its own protagonist, presents a very different idea of who a person is and who they might become and what can restrain or expose that. There is a sense that Jimmy McGill’s true nature is irrepressible no matter his circumstances. Jimmy was born to con and manipulate and use his silver tongue to open doors, regardless of whether he’s a humble (if colorful) elder law attorney or the local TV huckster who becomes Walt’s conscience-free fixer in Breaking Bad. That part of him was always going to be there, rich or poor, success or failure, good or bad.
Posted in Better Call Saul, Television
Tagged Better Call Saul Season 3, Breaking Bad, Chuck McGill, Kim Wexler, Op-eds, Saul Goodman
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Better Call Saul: The Winding Road between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman in “Lantern”
If you graphed Walter White’s transition from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to meth-dealing kingpin, there would be a few bumps here and there, but the line would mostly run straight. Breaking Bad always gave him these inciting events, these decision points, that would push him further and further toward becoming Heisenberg.
But the line that runs between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman isn’t that neat or that clear. It’s more of a series of deepening, parabolic arcs. Time and again, Jimmy stumbles close to the brink of giving in, of becoming the shyster who runs cheesy ads on daytime television and joins up with criminals. But time and again, he pulls back.
Better Call Saul: the Inevitable Hard Landings in “Fall”
There is no show on television that threads the needle between symbolism and literalism better than Better Call Saul. A major part of the show’s success (and that of its predecessor) comes from the fact that the series works equally well as a well-told story as it does a commentary on human nature and what relationships with rough-edged individuals do to us. No character represents that balance better than Kim Wexler.
The scene with her close scrape near the Texas-New Mexico border works well as plot-focused foreshadowing. When her car gets stuck in the dirt, there is so much happening in Kim’s life — yet another tight deadline taken on to make up for Jimmy’s probable financial shortfall — that she tries to take care of the immediate problem all by herself. She find a nearby board, heaves and pushes on the car until it budges, and panics when it starts heading toward a nearby oil derrick.
Only racing into the driver’s seat and slamming on the brakes allows her to avoid a grisly wreck at the last second. The scene functions as a sign that Kim is juggling too many balls, that she’s letting small but important details slip or threaten to overwhelm her (with her car as a particular conduit for this idea) in a way that comes back to bite her later. It’s an indication Kim is trying to take on too much by herself and coming all too close to paying the price for it.
Better Call Saul: Everyone Takes an Extra Step in “Slip”
The opening of “Slip” is a little more direct than episodes of Better Call Saul usually are when filling in some gaps Jimmy’s backstory and philosophy. When Marco presses Jimmy about his parents’ shop, about how they worked hard and everyone liked them, Jimmy admits that’s true, but questions the value of it. He protests that it got them nowhere; he characterizes his own dad as a sucker, and he takes the coin his father once planned to put in the poor box for use in yet another scam.
With that, Jimmy’s perspective on life becomes a little clearer, aligning with the prior flashback to his parents’ store. Papa McGill was someone who refused to bend the rules even a little, who wouldn’t take so much as a moderately-valuable coin for himself, let alone sell cigarettes to the kids from the local religious school to make ends meet. In Jimmy’s eyes, that approach got him nowhere. It’s a little too tidy and pat to account for Jimmy’s actions in the present day, but the man himself sums it up nicely — Papa McGill wasn’t willing to “do what he had to do,” and Jimmy assuredly is.
That’s the thrust of “Slip,” which is as much of an ensemble piece as any episode of Better Call Saul so far. Not only Jimmy, but also Mike, Chuck, Kim, and Nacho, are each willing to go the extra mile, to do the difficult or painful thing, not because they wish to or because it’s easy, but because each believe it’s what they simply need to do to go on. It’s what unites these disparate individuals and their very different challenges here — each of them strains a bit more, goes a little farther, in the name of biting the bullet and doing what needs doing.
