[rating=6.00]
I’ll just say it: This week’s episode was mostly a dud. It’s not entirely surprising — I expected it to happen, even after last week’s promising start, just not so soon. Saul was familiar and loveable this week, but the world around him and the way it moved to guide him to where he needed to be felt cheap and forced — like James McGill subbed for Ice-T on a bad episode of Law and Order: SVU, where suspension of disbelief is at its peak and things are allowed to not make sense. Set your standards higher, Jimmy!
Thankfully, it’s not all that bad. This week, we’re given a little more insight into Jimmy’s past (as in, a time before the time before he became Saul Goodman. Make sense?) and his complicated relationship with his brother, Chuck. Elsewhere, Mike finally steps outside of his toll booth to do something other than take tickets and complain about missing stickers, and it’s clear that he’s the same as we remember him. That’s great. As a whole, though, these few highlights aren’t enough to forgive some major missteps that, fortunately, feel like outliers coming from the guy responsible for Breaking Bad, one of the best shows to grace television in the last 10 years. He’s earned the trust of the network and his viewers. For now, let’s wait and see.
Here are my takeaways from Better Call Saul’s third episode:
Jimmy’s Past
This week’s cold open gave us a glimpse into pre-Saul (as in the show, not the moniker) Jimmy. It’s a different look than we’ve ever seen before — he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. In a visitation room, Jimmy meets with his brother Chuck, an esteemed lawyer at the time, about how to get out of whatever he’s gotten himself into. Chuck is reluctant to help. Whatever Jimmy’s done isn’t made clear, but the sentiment is obvious: He’s in a bad spot, and his relationship with his family is pretty broken. It doesn’t look good for him.
Now viewers are left trying to connect the dots and complete the timeline from this moment to the beginning of Better Call Saul, just as we are with the first few episodes of the series until the time we meet Saul in Breaking Bad. It’s a side of Jimmy we haven’t seen before (we’re used to him as the defender, not the defended), and the prospect of seeing how he transitioned from facing serious jail time to passing the Bar is probably the best part of this episode moving forward. Unfortunately, it’s mostly downhill from here.
A Headline About Lazy Writing
Here’s a list of things that happened during this week’s episode of Better Call Saul that would never happen in real life:
The police, after combing through the evidence of a supposed-kidnapping and coming up with nothing, invite Jimmy, the only suspect’s lawyer, over to the crime scene to rummage around and give them a second opinion.
Jimmy suggests that, perhaps, the family that is assumed to be kidnapped has actually kidnapped themselves. Given the growing mountain of evidence against said family in a pending embezzlement case, this theory makes sense. Not only have the police not really thought of that possibility, but they pretty much immediately dismiss the suggestion outright. Only the misunderstood lawyer and a parking lot attendant know the truth.
After a sudden epiphany, Jimmy discovers the missing family hidden inside a tent in the forest, right within walking distance from their own home. The FBI, who have already been assigned to the case less than 24 hours after the family has gone missing, neglected to check there. Conveniently, they’re carrying a duffle bag of embezzled cash with them. Imagine that.
The result of all this is that, now, Nacho is out of jail, thanks almost entirely to the efforts of Jimmy. James McGill has now not only solved two open investigations — both the kidnapping and embezzlement cases — but he has also, at least in part, earned the favor of a well-established gang member. This sets us up, I’m sure, for whatever business is about to happen in the coming episodes. But how we got here, in a lot of ways, just feels lazy. Hopefully, in the case of this episode, the destination means more than the journey.
Nacho Episode
Whether or not you find a man named after a kind of Lunchable particularly intimidating, you’ve got to admit that his character certainly has appeal. He’s a special kind of scary. Last week, when stood next to Tuco, Nacho’s calm and calculated demeanor was as comforting as it was frightening. Composed villains are often more dangerous than crazy ones.
Coming into this week, I expected his role in the show to grow. The episode is named after the character, and I got excited at the prospect of seeing Nacho’s uneasy relationship with Jimmy lurch forward into dangerous territory in a big way. It’s pretty clear at this point that this will be the guy who drags James McGill (perhaps kicking and screaming) back into a life of crime. This week, I wanted to see that concept start to take flight.
Instead, what viewers got was this: One unnecessarily long scene where Jimmy grovels into Nacho’s voice mailbox from a payphone, and then a pretty brief visit with Nacho in person, where he does some pretty typical villainy, intimidation-type stuff that motivates James and moves the plot forward a little quicker. I can’t help but feel that that’s selling him way short. In an episode named “Nacho,” we spent more time meandering through the wooded areas of Albuquerque looking for a lost family than we did learning more about Nacho himself. Something is wrong about that.
Breaking Off
Eventually, I do hope to write a review of Better Call Saul without mentioning Breaking Bad. The two are only tangentially related, and comparing a television show in its first three episodes to one that is an established Emmy-winning powerhouse, even if they’re from the same Executive Producer, isn’t really fair. I get it. I really do.
That being said, so far, this show is practically begging for the comparisons. Don’t agree? Let’s consider the title — Better Call Saul. Which character in the first three episodes of the series is named Saul? Oh yeah. None of them. Breaking Bad fans know the story: James McGill, the struggling lawyer we meet in episode one of Saul, through whatever mishaps we’ll inevitably see in the near future, later becomes Saul Goodman, the criminal lawyer that emerges as a staple character through five seasons of Breaking Bad. In this regard, the show’s title is fine. It makes sense. But to new viewers, people who have never seen Bad (surely they’re out there), there has to be some kind of disconnect. As unfair as the comparisons may be, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the show can’t sustain itself entirely on the overflow of diehard Breaking Bad fans who just want to see more content from the same universe. There’s got to be appeal beyond the callbacks, sight gags and character cameos. In episodes one and two, there was. In this one, there wasn’t. That will have to change if Saul hopes to step out of its predecessor’s shadow.
