Season 5, Episode 3: ‘The Guy for This’
That didn’t take long.
Mere days after Jimmy became Saul Goodman, and started pitching his services to the criminally inclined, he’s been recruited by Lalo Salamanca and is now enmeshed in the imminent war between the Mexican cartel and Gus Fring. Let the record show that the first step to hell was lucrative — $8,000 for a half day’s work. But it’s sure to be terrifying, eventually. Signing up with Lalo means working against the interests of the formidable hometown drug team, whose heavyweights include Mike, a.k.a., the world’s most menacing senior citizen.
“If there’s blowback, I don’t want to be in the middle of it,” Jimmy tells Nacho once his jailhouse consultation and debriefing with Lalo are over.
“It’s not about what you want,” Nacho says. “When you’re in, you’re in.”
This week’s episode, “The Guy for This,” is about the looming, deeply unpleasant sense of “in,” as experienced by both Jimmy and Kim. For Kim, “in” means a tighter tether to her corporate client, Mesa Verde, which entails skimping on pro bono clients, who appear to be her only source of professional satisfaction.
“Mesa Verde keeps the lights on,” says the simmering Richard Schweikart (Dennis Boutsikaris), her corporate law overlord. “We can all agree on that.”
Moments later, Kim is leaving the courthouse and heading to a mostly empty plot of land where Mesa Verde wants to build a call center and where a lone hold out, Everett Acker (the “Northern Exposure” veteran Barry Corbin), is refusing to budge from his home of 30 years. Acker is a cranky ol’ cuss, who gets one of the episode’s best lines (“I’m going to spread my legs out like this and just to finish it off, why don’t you give me a swift kick in the balls”) and makes Kim feel like the worst variety of heartless corporate suit.
She isn’t, as we learn in a revealing soliloquy about her childhood. She was raised, it seems, by a single mother, who was in such arrears with the rent that young Kim would routinely high tail it from landlords before she had a chance to put on shoes.
This might help explain Kim’s fondness for helping the underprivileged, as well her guilt over booting a man from his house. Mr. Acker thinks Kim’s back story is part of a con. He’s one of the few characters in this show who isn’t getting played, all the while certain that he is.
For Jimmy, “in” means a jailhouse charade with his new client, Domingo (Krazy-8) Molina. His acting performance — he feigns an effort to talk Mr. 8 out of snitching — is for the benefit of none other than Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) and Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada), the dauntless duo who provided the face of federal enforcement, and in Hank’s case so much more, in “Breaking Bad.”
It’s great to have these gents back, and they get a suitably insouciant entrance, with Hank pulling an illegal U-turn and then cutting the line for jailhouse visitors.
“Breaking Bad” did a remarkable job of highlighting Hank’s savvy as a D.E.A. agent, while keeping the main suspect, Walter White, right under his nose. And as he negotiates with Saul and Domingo, we see his formidable side, even as he gets snowed. He pegs Saul’s act for as a farce (“I feel like my chain is being pulled, and not in a good way,” he says), but for perfectly understandable reasons, he has no idea that he’s about to do the bidding of a drug kingpin.
That kingpin is Lalo, who is getting played, too. By Nacho, who reports to Gus that his “dead drops” are now under federal surveillance. This makes Gus very unhappy.
Can we pause for a moment to consider Nacho’s plight? First, he appears to be living with a nutter. Specifically, a woman who is, for mysterious reasons, compelled to solve puzzles — the real kind, like a jigsaw, and the self-created kind, like how to clean a remote control.
But an unhinged roommate is the least of Nacho’s worries. He wants nothing more than to run for his life, the end of which he can clearly foresee, and to encourage his father, who is the quintessence of integrity, to run as well. In a poignant scene, Nacho the Elder (Juan Carlos Cantu) says he won’t retire or flee, even if his son secretly tries to buy him out of his upholstery store for an extravagant sum.
Poor Nacho. Who on this show is more miserable?
Maybe Mike, who is underemployed and idling alone in a bar, trying to drink away his anguish. These feelings must now include remorse for the trauma he inflicted on his granddaughter when he yelled at her in the previous episode. He’s in a flinty mood, and for reasons as yet unknown, he’s triggered by a photograph of the Sydney Opera House.
What did Australia do to you, Mike? We’re here to help.
The episode ends with Kim and Jimmy, tossing beer bottles off their balcony, which explode in the parking lot below. I took this as a howl at the sense of “in” that they would dearly like to escape. And yet this is probably as “out” as they’ll be. Certainly, Jimmy is about to get in way over his head.
Odds and Ends:
The opening scene — ants, swarming over ice cream, melting on the sidewalk — is not just an awe-inspiring feat of directing and sound engineering. (The noise of the ants over the chorus of yodelers is a pretty genius combination. Very Coen Brothers-esque.) It’s also a great symbol for the cosmos of “Better Call Saul.” There is the law-abiding citizenry of Albuquerque, which walks the pavement, blithely unaware, as represented by the pedestrians who don’t even notice the ice cream feast. And there is the criminal underworld, which is savage and somehow operating in plain sight while also completely invisible. You watch an opening like that and know you are in the hands of maestros.
Speaking of master strokes: At Nacho’s house, we briefly see a television commercial for Numilifor, a nonexistent medication. The creative minds behind “Better Call Saul” have nailed the look and feel of TV drug ads, in much the way they nailed the look and feel of fast food commercials for Los Pollos Hermanos, in “Breaking Bad.”
Maybe Numilifor cures the urge to clean remote controls. Let’s hope.
Do Hank and Gomez seem especially irritated by each other? I remember their banter as somewhat warmer.
Lalo gets the best line in the episode. Which isn’t a line, actually. It’s more like a noise, which he emits right after telling Jimmy, “You’ll make time,” for future cartel-related legal work.
“Kla!” he says with a smile, before getting into his muscle car.
I wonder if that was in the script.
Anyone else struck by the lack of erotic spark between Kim and Jimmy? Nary a cuddle or a kiss. Even when Kim says she’s celebrating the coming work day, and Jimmy says he’s had his most lucrative 24 hours as Saul Goodman, nada. In another show, we’d at least get a hug. “Good for Saul,” is the most that Kim can muster. Maybe she’s souring on the guy. But the reality is that this pair have never demonstrated much physical interest in each other.
What’s up with that? Please weigh in, and if you ever find an old can of vanilla frosting, don’t eat it. Give it to Gomez.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
