Season 5, Episode 4: ‘Namaste’
In the end, Jimmy went with the bowling balls.
They were a fine choice, it turned out. If you’re trying to smash up a guy’s Jaguar by tossing something hard over a high gate, you might need three attempts. Having three objects that are the same weight and size — well, it’s just smart planning.
The act of vandalism itself, on the other hand, seems juvenile. It was triggered by Howard’s lunchtime invitation to Jimmy to join Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, the law firm Howard runs and which was co-founded by Chuck’s (not so) dearly departed brother. The offer is preceded by an apology, wherein Howard confesses that he should have hired Jimmy years ago. This overture won’t surprise longtime viewers. The more we have learned about Howard, the more we’ve realized that the worst thing about him is his shirt collars.
If Jimmy truly thought the bad blood between him and Howard was “ancient history,” a “no thank you” would have sufficed. Apparently, that history isn’t ancient to Jimmy, and the question is, why? Jimmy says he’s happy to have a new name and a new career, and he has a stirring, succinct answer when Howard asks him to explain who Saul Goodman is.
It’s an answer that is filled with nonsense. Saul’s clients aren’t “the little guy” getting “sold down the river.” They’re degenerate criminals, like the bargain-hunting miscreants we meet early in the episode. Jimmy has the soul of a con artist, and it’s already thriving in ways it never would at a corporate firm.
So, what’s with the bowling balls? My sense is that it stems from the lingering rage that Jimmy feels about his brother and the way HH&M mistreated and underestimated him. And a lot of Howard’s humanity — toward Chuck, in particular — is unknown to Jimmy.
We never have seen Gus Fring in recruiting mode, but we know this much: When he’s angry, he’s a highly exacting boss. He drives a Los Pollos Hermanos employee to a fryolator-cleaning frenzy as he awaits word of whether the feds will seize $700,000 of his drug money, as he and his underlings have planned. Poor Lyle. There probably wasn’t a speck of grease on that machine. But Gus was fuming that Lala Salamanco had cunningly forced him to surrender a huge chunk of cash and had put his men at risk. The man was in no mood for compliments.
Let’s compare Gus’s approach to disappointment to Hank’s. Our favorite D.E.A. agent is disappointed that his team netted little more than that $700,000 and three low-level drug runners when it staked out the dead drops mapped by Krazy-8. (“Booby prize,” Hank mutters.) The bust didn’t yield any clues about where that money came from, which is what he really wants. Does Hank stare balefully at the loot and get all passive aggressive with his team? No. He manufactures some bonhomie and announces to the assembled officers and agents that the first round is on him.
Raise your hand if you’d rather work for Hank.
When this episode isn’t comparing management techniques, it is a look at the galvanizing power of guilt. Kim feels guilty about the imminent eviction of crusty ol’ Everett Acker, who owns a home on land that Kim’s biggest client, Mesa Verde, has set aside for a call center. She tries, and fails, to persuade the bank to build that center elsewhere. Then she enlists Jimmy to sign up Mr. Acker as a client, which he does using nothing more than his foot, his silver tongue and a bit of bestiality lifted from the Internet. Once again, cranky Mr. Acker gets one of the episode’s best lines, this time by succinctly, and graphically, describing the image.
So let’s game this out. Jimmy is about to take some kind of legal action against Mesa Verde on Acker’s behalf. Jimmy is well known to Richard Schweikart, a named partner at Kim’s firm, which represents Mesa Verde. So she’ll instantly be in the middle of a brawl, representing a company being sued by her boyfriend.
This stratagem would seem berserk if it weren’t Kim’s idea.
Back to guilt. Mike is feeling overwhelmed by it, having been reminded of his role in the death of his son during a tense, driveway conversation with his daughter-in-law. He later slow walks by the scrum of young thugs who attacked him in last week’s episode, in an apparent attempt at suicide by gang. It nearly works. In fact, it’s hard to fathom how Mike survives the ensuing assault. Or how he wakes up in a bed in an adobe courtyard, in a bucolic convalescent ward of some kind, empty but for grazing goats.
One guess: Fring had Mike surveilled, and his men stepped in to stop his imminent murder, then found him a doctor and an adobe. It makes a certain sense. Fring either keeps an eye on or eliminates people who know his secrets. He would have wanted to know what Mike was up to given that Mike left his post at the nascent Fring Inc. in a snit over having had to kill a lovelorn German engineer — another source of guilt.
Odds and Ends:
The writers of this show have a real challenge before them. They have set up a cat-and-mouse plot between Hank and Gus, but we know from “Breaking Bad” that this mouse is never captured by the D.E.A. Generating narrative suspense in these circumstances will not be easy.
Maybe the erotic heat between Jimmy and Kim is supposed to be conveyed metaphorically, through morning tooth brushing. They do a lot more of that than smooching, though in this episode we do learn they sleep together in the buff.
Three of Gus’s men have been arrested. Any thoughts about what happens to them? It is possible that they are part of the imprisoned group receiving “hazard pay” in “Breaking Bad.” (Those outlays sparked an argument between Walter White and Mike that ended with Mike’s death.) Regardless, Fring is the most careful drug lord in television history. He has a plan. Either those men are going to be cared for, sprung or killed.
As many viewers noted in the comments section last week, the reason Mike was so irate at the sight of the Sydney Opera House, a photo of which was pinned to a wall in a bar where he was drinking, was because of Werner Ziegler, the engineer he had to kill. Ziegler had told Mike that his father had a hand in building it.
Anyone else find that bowling ball prank a tad on the contrived side? And it seems out of character for a guy whose specialty is messing with minds, no?
Lesson: Read the comments. Leave some, too. And remember, escape to where the puck’s going to be.
Namaste.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
