I found this episode much more compelling than the last for two reasons. First, the arc of the show was very well put together and very satisfying in the end. I thought the sequence of the guy falling off the billboard was fantastically conceived. There's a nice setup with Jimmy and the cameraman bickering over the shot. Then, when the man falls, there was a span of time where, flashing back to Jimmy bargaining for the lives of his skateboarder accomplices, I was thinking how, whatever his flaws, Jimmy's instincts so often lead him in the right direction. Then, as he's mumbling to himself not to look down as he climbs, it occurred to me that this was likely a scam of some sort, a publicity stunt. I did have some quibbling problems with the scene, however. Jimmy presumably hauls up the man using one arm while dangling sixty-five feet up. I noticed when I was watching, and it's really conspicuous on rewatching, that the safety rope holding the man up is being reeled in during the course of the shot. There is never any slack in the line. Honestly hauling the worker up would require planting both feet and pulling with both hands, which might not give you dramatic, tight camera shots, but has just as much room for tension and danger. Also, early shots of Jimmy extending his hand show a significantly bigger gap between the two men than later shots. All this is obviously done to build doubt, tension, and suspense, but I'm not a big fan.
Better Call Saul is certainly not the only show to engage in these moving-the-goalposts-closer techniques, but I think they're sloppy and insulting to the viewer.
The other reason I found this episode compelling is because of some early head nods to issues I've mentioned in earlier reviews, that is, issues around the narrative Jimmy has built for himself in his head. In back-to-back scenes, Mrs. Ketterman tells Jimmy "You're the kind of lawyer guilty people have." and Jimmy says to Mike "You assume that criminals are gonna be smarter than they are." The first is great because I think it's a pretty spot-on assessment of the way Jimmy comes across, and because of Jimmy's obvious surprise and his unusual difficulty in coming up with a response. It's clear he doesn't see himself that way, and I immediately began to wonder if he was going to have the self-control and the self-awareness to attempt to change. The question is almost immediately answered in this episode. Yes, he is going to
try to change. Trying to copy the HHM brand and the publicity stunt both seem like attempts to appear more upscale lawyer and less ambulance-chaser. But no, he is going to fail, he is who he is, and the character flaws and general approach to doing things that Mrs. Ketterman sees will continue to emerge. This is shown most convincingly in the way he still goes after HHM, the way a kind of cheap, immediate vengeance still dominates his mind when what he really needs is the wisdom to exact his revenge by becoming successful and pursuing a life well lived.
I really appreciated the second line because, though Jimmy wasn't aware of it when he said it, it was obviously also directed at himself. And this feeds back into Jimmy's whole inability to see himself for what he is, an ability necessary for true change and for building the kind of successful, stable life that Jimmy wants for himself but which we know, from where he ends up, that he will fail to achieve. I don't know how much more development we'll get of this idea that Jimmy can't see himself clearly, but I'm personally kind of fascinated by it. If you've read a good bit of my writing, I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I'm super self-aware, self-aware to a fault, to a point of dwelling too much on things I've done wrong and on my shortcomings. So it's always fascinating to me to see someone who is also obviously intelligent like Jimmy, but very much lacking in self-awareness. Also, and I doubt we'll ever get much of this, but it makes me even more interested to learn how Jimmy sees himself, to get a sense of how much he might know or not know that his schemes and his loquaciousness are going to perpetually cause him trouble. To know how well he handles, for instance, uncertainty, how well he anticipates and prepares himself for the range of outcomes his actions might produce.
The other big scene I wanted to devote some time to is the conversation between Kim and Jimmy in the nail salon. I personally found this scene frustrating. I didn't get Jimmy's angle, why he was making things personal. With the money he's come into, he has a chance to kind of start over, to start a new career unharried by an immediate need for money, to build his own distinct brand. It was interesting to me that he told Kim that she could work anywhere, but that he can't see himself clearly enough to know the same is true of him, to see that this is his opportunity. I wasn't happy that he avoids Kim's question about why he's pursuing a path of vengeance and trying to provoke HHM, and that she doesn't press him on it. And this entire conversation was, to me, emblematic of the problems with television. If this was real life, if Kim truly cares about Jimmy, this conversation would have been hours, it could have been a real opportunity for both of them actually to try to persuade the other to pursue a different course, to learn about each other and themselves. But because this is television, you have to distill that whole soul-searching conversation into three minutes, and there's no opportunity for Kim to hold Jimmy to the fire, to pin him down and get him to think about, to tell her why he's pursuing this path.
Now, I'm sufficiently self-aware to know that these are my preferences, that I'm describing the kind of show I want to watch, that I would want to write, the kind of conversation I would try to have if I were either of their friends. I know that the world is wide enough that there are people for whom the conversation I'm suggesting they might have would be totally vain and frustrating, and that Kim might know that and just avoid the difficulty and the pain. I get that, I get that anytime I criticize the show there will be people out there who love the very things I dislike. I hope that anyone who's reading this, even if they disagree with a good portion of the things I say, is getting something out of this, another perspective, a new angle on things they might not have picked up on, a deeper dive into issues they wouldn't think about if they just consumed the show and forget about it.
I'll end with a couple miscellaneous comments. I found it both shocking and refreshing that the Kettlemens are so unapologetic about the money they've stolen. I think as far as a show like
Better Call Saul has a message, it's this, that people are selfish jerks who will do anything to gratify their most pressing impulses and have little compunction at having done so. I think there's a certain truth to that, that a large part of society operates that way, but I've rarely experienced it. My work atmospheres have generally been populated by competent, mostly self-controlled people who are able to work as a team towards some large goal. Well, at least until upper management pops their heads in. I didn't have a problem with Jimmy accepting their bribe, but I'm also aware, as I write this, that the show once again used this trick of setting up a character (here Jimmy) as sympathetic by contrasting them with someone less sympathetic. Finally, I don't get Jimmy's relationship with Chuck. Based on what we've seen, if someone treated me as Chuck treats Jimmy, given what Jimmy is doing for him, I would not want to subject myself to the hassle. I imagine at some point we'll get some insight into Jimmy's inner view of the relationship, I gather he's looking for approval, trying to get respect and an I-told-you-so by showing he can be the responsible one.
I have to say, this episode didn't work for me, and I have to wonder if I would have reacted the same way to it were I not committing myself to watching it closely, with a fresh mind and a notepad, ready to write up my thoughts afterward.
I'd describe the show's arc as Jimmy does some questionable things, ends up in trouble, through a combination of coincidence, wits, desperation, and determination, solves a mystery, proves the cops wrong, potentially saves his own skin, and blows open the case against the Kettlemans. And I think that arc, especially with the nice tidy ending, could be really satisfying to a casual viewer. But as someone watching the show critically, it fell flat for me. My wife and I, having watched all the original and Next Generation
Strek Trek episodes together, are now watching
Star Trek: Enterprise. The writing's always been a little uneven, but we're now in the third season, and the writing is noticeably worse. By about five minutes into literally every episode in the third season, we've rolled our eyes at each other multiple times while questioning aloud why the characters are doing particular things that don't make sense and obviously are going to cause them problems. A show requires a sort of benefit of the doubt, a suspension of disbelief, in order to work, and this episode lost mine.
Now, don't get me wrong,
Better Call Saul is absolutely much better written than "Enterprise". I do like the complexity and the kind of real-world grit of characters like Jimmy and Mike. I like how the show prods you to think along with the characters, trying to answer questions like what is Jimmy doing, how is he going to get out of this, should he tell Kim everything he knows about Nacho, where did the Kettlemans really go? But there are too many odd decisions or coincidences in this show, and by the end I was no longer willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
To start, I didn't understand what Jimmy was doing in calling Kim and the Kettlemans, whether he was trying to warn them or play them and why he thought, if he was trying to warn them, things would not backfire. Then there were the multiple phone messages he left for Nacho which, while I understand he was nervous and hunting for a way out, just seemed to me over-the-top asking for trouble. There's the whole interaction with Mike, which has never made any sense to me. Why is he always short on stickers, hasn't he learned yet, why not just pay the extra money, why make a big fuss that will obviously make things worse, why, in this episode, does he have pocket change to make who-knows-how-many pay phone calls, but doesn't have enough cash to pay nine dollars in parking fees? I understand Jimmy's impulsiveness, his impatience, his desperation in this particular episode, I understand there's a certain humor at work here, but it's always struck me as a bit contrived. Still, I consider all this relatively minor. When Jimmy makes the desperate and/or foolish decision to look for the Kettlemans himself by walking randomly, with no tracking skills, for what, given the progression of lighting from later afternoon to evening, must be hours, and manages to find them, that's when the show really lost me. Things didn't get any better when the Kettlemans just happen to leave the backpack with all the cash near the door to their tent, and it's the bag Jimmy just happens to grab and start pulling on.
Another reason I found this episode frustrating is that I want access to at least some of Jimmy's internal monologue, the narrative he's building for himself. The show goes to great lengths, especially when he's calling to warn the Kettlemans, to show his indecision, to show how hard he's wrestling with himself over the course of action he's taking. But we have no idea why he's wrestling with himself, what his concerns are we don't even, even during the calls to Kim and to the Kettlemans, we don't even really know what he's trying to accomplish. I personally thought he was still trying to play them somehow. I understand the show is trying to build suspense, to arouse in the viewer a desire to see how things turn out and what's really going on, and I'm sure that works for a lot of people. But when a show withholds important information that a character obviously has access to, I recognize that as an artifice employed by the writers, and it frustrates me, it shows the seems in the presentation. I personally would find the show more meaningful, more engaging, more revelatory of Jimmy's character, if we found out what he was thinking, which demons he was wrestling with, how much doubt he harbored over the wisdom of his path, what he thought his chances of success were, what his ultimate plan is, or if he even has one.
I think the show itself senses this deficiency. When he hangs up from talking to Kim, he mumbles "I'm no hero." At the time, I took it as additional evidence that he was trying to play them somehow, but in hindsight I think it's intended to show his regret from trying to scam Mrs. Kettleman/Tucos' grandmother. Either way, that utterance indicates to me that the writers realized that Jimmy had to make some kind of comment on his internal mental state, that they couldn't just leave everything to showing us his actions. His regret needed to be vocalized. I just don't think they went far enough. There's so much meat in this part of the story that's left on the bone, so much opportunity to complicate Jimmy's narrative and his character that's wasted.
The last thing I want to comment on is the opening scene between younger Chuck and younger Jimmy. I certainly thought it was cool to see the younger Jimmy, but again, that scene didn't work well for me because so little information was conveyed. We already knew Jimmy had a troubled past, and that's all we really learn. I also found it really confusing when Jimmy appeared sincerely (to my eyes) to want to turn over a new leaf, and it just made Chuck mad at him. This was another case where if we had more markers of internal mental state, both from Jimmy and from Chuck, it would give us a lot more insight into their characters, make the scene easier to understand, enrich some of the later interactions, and help us understand why Jimmy in the present seems in such danger of falling off the narrow path, especially with his family offering so little support.