‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 11 Recap: Back to the Beginning

Season 6, Episode 11: ‘Breaking Bad’

Well, look who’s back.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) make their much heralded return in this episode, which is named for the show they immortalized. We re-meet them in the immediate aftermath of a scene that took place in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” in an episode titled, with fitting symmetry, “Better Call Saul.”

It’s the moment when Saul completes his pivot from sheer terror at his imminent death — he initially thought that cartel mercenaries were about to kill him in the desert — to a kind of swaggering delight as he looks around the RV that is the duo’s rolling meth lab. He handles some equipment and quickly figures out that Walt is Heisenberg, maker of the famed “blue stuff” that is the most celebrated illicit drug in Albuquerque.

Your Faithful Recapper was stunned at how easily and convincingly these two actors resuscitated their roles. Then he wondered at the point of inserting these guys at this particular moment in the tale. A theory: What’s being explored is an origin story, the birth of a trio that earns hundreds of millions in the meth business and leaves in its wake more than a dozen corpses, including those of a drug kingpin (Gus Fring) and an innocent boy on a dirt bike. We see the spark that ends in a bonfire.

When Mike shows up later at Saul’s office to report that Walt is a high school chemistry teacher with cancer, he also delivers a prescient warning.

“I wouldn’t go near him,” he says. “He’s a complete amateur.”

If only Saul had listened. If he had taken Mike’s advice, he would still have his practice in Albuquerque, that spectacularly garish house and a prominent place in the legal firmament of the city.

He misses all of it. In the Omaha timeline of the show, he reconnects with Francesca, his benighted assistant, whose life in the aftermath of “Breaking Bad” turns out to be dreary and haunted by law enforcement. She is tailed, her phone is tapped, and her tenants are stoners who expect her to clear their stem-clogged sink. One can only imagine the incredulity of the D.E.A. when she claimed that she had no idea she was an officer of an offshore shell company, owned by Mr. Goodman, called Tigerfish. Small wonder she oozes bitterness during her conversation with Saul-Gene, who calls a pay phone from Omaha — exactly at 3 pm, on Nov. 12, as planned during a flash forward in Episode 5 of Season 4 — to get an update about his carefully hidden fortune.

All gone, she reports.

The only good news comes at the end of the call when Francesca says that Kim was in touch and asked about Jimmy. Specifically, she wanted to know if Jimmy was alive. This heartens Jimmy so much that he calls Kim at Palm Coast Sprinklers in Titusville, Fla., which is where she seems to work. (The transition from corporate lawyer to public defender to sprinkler sales somehow seems about right.) We don’t know anything about the conversation other than that Jimmy’s side of it is filled with the body language of an infuriated man and ends with him doing his best to destroy the phone and phone booth.

The scene strongly suggests that the show is going to revisit the relationship between the two. Now that there are no impediments to construction of the superlab being built by Gus and the Salamancas have decided not to kill “the Chicken Man” over the disappearance of Lalo, the future of Jimmy and Kim looks like the main element of suspense in the remaining two episodes of the show.

So here’s a question: Are we rooting for a reunion? If you’re Kim, the answer is clouded by the reality that Saul Goodman became not merely a new work name but also a new persona. Jimmy began to consort with prostitutes and lived in an preposterously decorated mansion, clearly obsessed with earning as many dollars possible. He became a guy that Kim would find repulsive. If Kim followed the news, or did an internet search, she would have seen what became of her husband. She might know that the man she married no longer exists.

Whatever she said during that call, it inspires Jimmy to start earning money, pronto. He makes amends, in his own blunt way, with Jeff and his buddy Buddy (Max Bickelhaup) and the three begin a new scam. Jimmy approaches men at bars and gets them soused; Jeff drives them home in a cab, offering a bottle of water spiked with barbiturates; then Buddy enters the home and photographs IDs, tax records and credit card bills, information which is sold to some kind of broker. It’s a three-man identity theft crime spree, and it yields stacks of $20s. That is far better than the Cinnabon money Gene earns but a fraction of the plaintiff’s attorney bucks he pocketed and off-shored as Saul.

Exactly why Jimmy-Gene feels so compelled to raise money quickly isn’t clear. He doesn’t seem to need the services of Ed Galbraith, a.k.a. the Disappearer, whom Gene called last season when he was first approached by Jeff. (At least he doesn’t need those services now. Firing Buddy over the morality of robbing a guy with cancer could prove his undoing if Buddy starts talking to the cops, or anyone else, for that matter.)

The episode ends with Saul walking in one door and Gene walking in another, events separated by years. Saul is paying a visit to Walt, a meeting we have already seen in “Breaking Bad.” Jimmy is entering the home of the mark with cancer. The confab with Walt, we know, eventually ends in calamity. We’ll see what happens to Gene in Omaha, but it’s a safe bet that Jeff is right when he says that the barbiturates have surely worn off.

Odds and Ends

• From that conversation with Francesca, we learn the fate of some key characters from “Breaking Bad.” Skyler White cut a deal with the feds. Huell Babineaux lives in New Orleans, free largely because he was unlawfully detained by none other than Hank Schrader, fans will recall.

• Saul is apparently a fan of “Frankenstein,” the 1931 movie by James Whale. He calls the R.V. “James Whale’s traveling road show,” a reference to the lab in the film. He calls Jesse “Igor,” who was Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. And when he recommends the Swing Master to Mike — has there ever been a more useless looking device? — he says it will help him to stop walking “like Frankenstein after he was probed by aliens.”

• We have to assume that Saul buried the money that he uses to pay Francesca for the reconnaissance phone call. He sounds relieved that it hasn’t been eaten by rats, suggesting it has been in situ for a while. And who else could have put it there?

“Better Call Saul” has always had something of a split personality. It has had the drugs-and-crime plot bequeathed to it, in reverse, by “Breaking Bad,” and it has told the story of Jimmy and his relationships with his brother and with Kim. The drug plot is largely physical, the relationships plot mostly interior. The previous two episodes have all but abandoned the cartel element of the story, perhaps because it was buried along with Lalo.

Where “Breaking Bad” kept getting bigger as the show progressed — it eventually included Mexican mobsters, neo-Nazis, a German conglomerate, federal agents, prosecutors and a story that purported to make national news — “Better Call Saul” is getting smaller. It has shed old story lines to create new ones that are modest in scale. Our main character is back in bars, where he started.

One way to look at this: The show is emphasizing its own identity rather than ending with the sort of crescendo we watched in “Breaking Bad.” Another way: It’s disappointing that viewers are not currently in a frenzy of anticipation over the life and death of any number of people. Instead, we’re waiting to find out if Gene’s secret identity will remain intact, and whether he’ll win back Kim.

Two more to go. In the comments, please offer some theories about what is happening to the intro reel of the show. It’s been deteriorating over the seasons, as though it were a VHS tape that’s been viewed too many times. Why? A mirror of Jimmy’s moral degradation? A tribute to Mike’s Betamax machine?

Or ponder something simpler: Is that a soggy Funyun in the sink of Francesca’s tenants?

If yes, ick.