Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
What They Say:
Better Call Saul is the prequel to the award-winning series Breaking Bad, set six years before Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) became Walter White’s lawyer. When we meet him, the man who will become Saul Goodman is known as Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer searching for his destiny, and, more immediately, hustling to make ends meet. Working alongside, and often against, Jimmy is “fixer” Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a beloved character introduced in Breaking Bad. The series will track Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman, the man who puts “criminal” in “criminal lawyer.”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Well, talk about an episode that just makes you want to throttle the screen or hoist characters up by their lapels and slap them into sense. In regards to the latter especially, most characters suffered “I Know It’s Wrong, and I Have a Plenty of Good Opportunities, But I’m Going to Choose the Wrong Thing to Do” syndrome. Once again, in any other show, this “syndrome” could come across forced or unnatural (a la Tatsee’s dramatic transformation in “Orange is the New Black” season 2), but with Gilligan, the writing helps to bolster the character’s poor decisions. Point to any event in this episode, and I could trace that event back to the character’s past or surroundings shaping their consciousness. Which is why, when Jimmy or Marco or Chuck do choose the wrong option and know it’s the wrong one, it’s extremely compelling to the point that I felt so much tension and frustration and sadness that I wish I could go into the story and change it around. The funny part is, I wish I could do it, and yet even if Gilligan ever did hand his script over to me and say, “Change anything you like,” I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. It’s just that perfect.
On second thought, perhaps it’s not perfect after all. I appreciate that this finale doesn’t ring with bombastic reveals and exaggerated, hype-inducing deaths, but there’s still something unfulfilling and even unsettling about the finale’s execution.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning: Jimmy hands over his retirement home case to H.H.M. based on Kim’s advice and the reveal that Chuck doesn’t consider his younger brother a capable lawyer. Jimmy claims that he’s not emotionally compromised by his severed relationship with Chuck, but in a disorienting time/location skip, Jimmy ends up back in his hometown near Chicago. He reunites with his longtime friend and scam partner, Marco, on a week-long stunt of ripping people off of their money. I should mention the scam “montage” that plays is absolutely brilliant: varying blue-light and red-light portraits of Jimmy and Marco recite their lines, almost addressing the viewer, while street signs drift in and out of the darkness and a fun jazz tune plays in the background. The week-long stunt ends when Jimmy realizes he needs to return to his clients and when Marco unexpectedly has a heart-attack and dies. Marco’s death is so predictable and has such a soundly deus ex machine feel about it that I felt disappointed with the writers on this point. But, continuing on…
Jimmy receives a call from Kim with some very good news. Turns out, the retirement home case is getting so big that H.H.M. is having to partner on it with a different firm. That firm is also interested in hiring Jimmy–based on an interview with him. Jimmy returns to meet this new firm at a court hearing. As he’s walking into the building while reciting his greetings, he stops. In the next shot we see Jimmy in his run-down car leaving the parking garage. He leans out of the car window and asks Mike, who’s working the parking booth, why they didn’t keep the money they stole from the Kettlemans. Mike’s answer is simple: he did a job, and that’s all there was to it. Jimmy, however, is struggling with what stopped him from taking the money. In the last lines of the episode, he says, “I know what stopped me, and you know what? It’s never stopping me again.”
And he leaves. He chooses not to take a dream-come-true option to…pursue what? Ostensibly crime, but we don’t know because the episode–and the season–ends there. This is the point in which I wanted to throttle Jimmy: why didn’t you take the amazing job offer, you stupid fool? Yet we suspected Jimmy would turn away from the “good side” all along. What I didn’t expect was for that about-face to happen with such immediacy and with such a lack of an obvious catalyst. Sure, Jimmy received a taste of being a scam artist once again, and there’s the combined betrayal from Chuck and the ever-looming presence of Nacho that also contributes to his decision, but it’s difficult to understand Jimmy’s exact thought process.
Perhaps that’s how the writers wanted it to seem. Still, the transition from Jimmy as excited interviewee, preparing his lines, to Jimmy as revolutionary turncoat, came across obscure and jarring. Interestingly, Jimmy says that whenever he closes his eyes, he can see those stacks of money again and again, when in fact we never see such a moment in action. It seems like a missed opportunity: the producers could have planted a few very short scenes illustrating this in order to better support Jimmy’s change of mind. In general, Jimmy’s final scene was well-done, and it rests on solid pillars of great writing and character development, but regardless it totters a bit–probably because of the too short amount of space given to it, probably because it moves a mite too fast, and probably because we, as the viewer, don’t want Saul Goodman but rather Jimmy McGill.
In Summary:
The season finale has some amazing moments, but they feel like developments lying in wait for the next season, especially when so much of the episode is devoted to a snail-crawlingly slow scam scene (and to a lesser extent, the earlier Bingo scene). The visual and musical execution is once again absolutely brilliant, and for the most part Gilligan’s writing is compellingly on-point, but the story encounters a few hiccups: Marco’s death, which feels a bit too contrived, and Jimmy’s strangely obscure, too-quick turnaround moment. The final scene, while not a “cliffhanger” like most other shows these days, is still too much of a taste to really understand whether the writers want us to feel doubtful or not.
Grade: B+
