I don’t think Kingdom Hearts was made for folks like me, who’ve watched a lifetime of Disney films but barely played any of the Final Fantasy games. It feels much more like a Final Fantasy game dressed up in Disney drag than like an interactive Disney tale built around the Final Fantasy structure.
Five years after it left the airwaves, Parks and Recreation is back for a scripted reunion special that brings together all your favorite employees of the Pawnee Parks Department during their self-quarantine. Leslie Knope has organized a phone tree with her husband, Ben Wyatt, and all her old friends to make sure everyone’s okay and maintain her connection to her loved ones while they all have to stay socially distant.
Chuck McGill once described his brother with a law degree as like “a chimp with a machine gun.” That conjures a particular image, one of extreme recklessness and likely harm from a device far beyond the comprehension or abilities of its user. As Lalo showed us here, you don’t need to have perfect aim or a good line of sight to do some serious damage with one of those at your disposal. That’s why Chuck, in his own mind at least, worried so much about his brother entering his hallowed profession.
Note: This review pertains to the director’s cut of Dark City and contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the film.
What is it about the 1990s that gave us so many films like this one? Whether it’s Dark City, or City of Lost Children, or even The Matrix (which I bet had the word “city” in the title at first), the decade was awash in reality-questioning, green-tinted stories about chosen one saviors breaking through confusing and oppressive systems. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, each of these movies offers the same sense of grime-ridden trippiness, the same sort of heady themes wrapped in a quasi-blockbuster package, and the same type of dreamlike, steampunk-meets-futurism aesthetic.
I’ve always thought of His Girl Friday as a tragedy. When Kim and Jimmy sit down to watch the film in “Bad Choice Road”, they’re watching the story of someone who nearly breaks free of a life and a job she excels at, but which doesn’t make her happy. But then she’s lured back into it through the dirty tricks of her conniving former paramour and the inexorable pull it has over her. (The movie is also, not coincidentally, the story of a talented and dogged female professional who ends up hitched to a manipulative, morally-dubious huckster.) That subtle call out to the 1940 classic carries meaning for both Jimmy and Kim.
One of the kindest things you can say about Better Call Saul is that it rarely feels like Breaking Bad anymore. Sure, there’s still bits of cartel intrigue, and preludes to the war between Gus and the Salamancas, and a shared propensity to write characters into corners and force them to think their way out. But despite its roots, Better Call Saul has become its own show, with its own world and voice and style that are distinct from the story of Walter White.
It’s supposed to just be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. What you don’t do is get sentimental. There are practical reasons to take this step — reasons that, not coincidentally, help preserve your ongoing safety and non-incarceration.
But then you look at the person standing across from you, someone whose joy and pain matters to you, and all of a sudden, it’s impossible to pretend that this is just a ministerial act or some necessary concession to the gods of legal privilege and bureaucracy. Instead, it becomes something more, something meaningful, something personal, with an emotional charge and an attendant importance that elevates it above business as usual.
Better Call Saul’s major players are always making plans. It’s one of the features that makes this show (and its predecessor) so engrossing. In between the committed character work and gorgeous desert styling, there’s intersecting schemes that either merge together or crash into one another, until our champions and villains are left to pick up the pieces.
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.
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.
