Better Call Saul 5.06.

[selenak]

I think the biggest mystery of the episode is a minor one: why does Jimmy play all these petty pranks on Howard now? In s1, that would have been understandable. But now, years after figuring out it was Chuck who didn't want him to work at HHM, now, when Howard had offered that job to him? Is this belated revenge for Howard trying to share the Chuck guilt last season? Burning bridges so he won't ever be tempted to accept hat offer? Beats me, right now.

The Howard related scenes are the comic relief in an episode which is big on the drama in both storylines. Mike through the episode frames (well, "Frames", since Lalo is actually guilty) Lalo Salamanca methodically and expertly, but the key scene is the one with Nacho where Nacho, who has no illusions about Gus being a better type of person than the Salamancas, mentions that he himself got blackmailed with his father's life into working for Gus. Mike's "first Lalo, then we'll see" sounds as if he's offering Nacho to get out of that blackmail situation, but given that by Breaking Bad times, Mike has become Gus' loyal enforcer, I very much doubt it, or rather: Mike's more likely to help Nacho (or Nacho's father) out of his life. By returning with Gus, he's made his choice.

The majority of the episode, though, belongs to Kim (and Jimmy), and I couldn't be happier. (In a nail biting fretting kind of way.) The episode opens with the first flashback to Kim's pre BCS life, and she's an intense teenager refusing to get in the car with her drunken mother (at least I think it's her mother?), having no time for the prettifying excuses. In the present, the magnitude of what she did last episode has sunk into Kim, and she's trying to abort the scheme she and Jimmy agreed on, instead intending to settle all legally, even if she has to pay about to dis-housed Mr. Acker's additional settlement money out of her own pocket. But the plan they've come up with is just too beautiful for now in fulls wing Saul Goodman to resist, and so he pulls it off, not seeing that he's just made Kim a mark, too. And that goes right back to the realisation she's had in the last season finale - that she can no longer tell when he's lying and when he's not, and if she can't, how can she trust him? So Kim saying this to Jimmy and saying they had to end their relationship now was what I expected. what I didn't expect, though, was the alternative she offered in the very last line. Which was one of the show's best cliffhangers without any violence involved at all. "Or we should get married." Wow.

Two immediate, not mutually exclusive reasons: a) husband and wife can't be forced to testify against each ohter, and b) if she marries him now, she's abandoning her old self - the self that would rather walk for three miles carrying a cello than get into a car with a drunk driver lying to her - for good. Because she would marry Saul Goodman. Without the relationships being similar at all, I'm reminded of Skyler deciding not to get divorced from Walt after he's finally signed the papers in s3, thereby taking that step to becoming a co-criminal.

In unrelated rl news, Uderzo, co-parent to Asterix, has died. He was in his 90s, so he's had a good life, but still, yet another person who's made a mark with their creativity has left us. Due to the occasion, the London Review of Books has put up an old essay of Mary Beard's about the Asterix comics up, here.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Thanks for the Mary Beard link! I stopped reading Asterix when Uderzo started doing it all himself because it turned very "grumpy old man yells at cloud" but he was still a massive influence!

[makamu]

And another thank you for the Mary Beard link! My grandpa has the deluxe editions of the first twenty Asterix volumes, and I loved reading them as a kid. As a matter of fact, I think I could do with a re-read as an adult (I am sure some of the references went right over my head even as a somewhat precoscious eight-year-old).