A trio of exciting Better Call Sauls meditate on Kim's motivations
Season 6, Episode 4, 5 & 6: "Hit and Run", "Black and Blue", & "Axe and Grind"
The argument that I’ve seen gaining increasing support and popularity in recent times is the idea that Better Call Saul was always about Kim, rather than Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman. Do I agree with this? I don’t know. Maybe. The first four seasons were mainly about how Chuck was ultimately what made Saul, but after Kim and Jimmy got married, I’d say this argument has had more validity. Perhaps we can have it both ways. Better Call Saul is two stories—Jimmy and Kim, not or. Seasons one through four are about a feud between brothers that is so all-consuming that it continues even after one of them is dead, but seasons five and six are about the woman who chose to side with the survivor, and how she became like him because…we don’t know. Maybe we weren’t ever supposed to know. In season two, Chuck states that Jimmy had “ruined” Kim somehow, (even though she had no involvement in his tampering with Chuck’s documents and only suspected him at the time) but Chuck was often wrong, wasn’t he?
But season six is interested in showing us, both through Rhea Seehorn’s performance and its filmmaking, why Kim is the way she is. First those first four seasons where we were left to contemplate Jimmy McGill’s true nature based on his actions and that of his brother’s, Kim always seemed to be his moral center. He often relied on her to give him advice or support, (and, in a very satisfying scene in season four, got told the fuck off after he snapped at her for an unjustified reason) and she always did. But in season five, after Jimmy screws her position at Schweikart & Cokely with his own selfish scheming, something changes. It builds in her, builds as she starts to take public cases like Jimmy was forced to at the beginning of the series, builds as her husband vanishes into the desert for two days. Sure, she helped Jimmy with his scheme involving Chuck, but that was more to save him rather than anything else. She’s the one who suggests their move against Howard at the end of season five. A flashback to Kim’s childhood opens the sixth episodes of both seasons five and six, and they almost feel like bookends—“Wexler v. Goodman” is the episode that starts Kim’s shift in character, and “Axe and Grind” feels like the episode that confirms her origins.
A common criticism I’ve seen levied against this trio of episodes is that they feel like filler, (for some reason…do you not watch this show? Are you unfamiliar with how every season is paced?) but I found “Hit and Run”, “Black and Blue” and “Axe and Grind” to be incredibly substantive and exciting, even if there was a scene or two that felt kind of dragged out. Now that Nacho is dead, the focus is primarily on whatever Jimmy and Kim’s elusive, elaborate final scheme against Howard is, with the storyline of Gus’ preparations against a possible Lalo attack taking place as an aside. And honestly? I like that. The best parts of seasons two and three (my two favorite seasons, although I know the former of those is not a popular opinion to have) were Mike, obviously, but the second best parts were watching Jimmy figure out just how he was going to screw over Chuck. Take the two scenes in the copier store, two of my favorite scenes from the entire show, and look at how meticulously and intricately directed they are. It’s beautiful. Honestly, it is. I stated in my previous article that I felt as though what I loved about Better Call Saul had been lost in season four but expressed that it was coming back, and I really feel like it is. With one of the driving forces of the cartel plotline gone, it feels like Better Call Saul is reintegrating itself into the little things that made it so engrossing.
Take the openings of “Hit and Run” and “Black and Blue”, for instance. Different in presentation and concept, yes, but equally captivating. “Hit and Run” opens with a montage of a middle-aged couple going for a bike ride in suburban Albuquerque. Light-hearted music plays, they comment distastefully on the bright red coat their neighbor has given their house, they use arm signals to turn. (Which I rather appreciated seeing.) And then they go home, and their house is revealed to be occupied by Mike’s guys, there to keep an eye on Gus’ house. In true Better Call Saul fashion, it takes a long time to get there, but it all makes sense in the end. “Black and Blue” is the other kind of Gilliganverse opening—the one that gets explained later, instead of being explained immediately. The editing and choice of music in this scene makes it absolutely hypnotic, hearkening back to the Gene season openers or the ants devouring the ice cream. Both scenes are perfect encapsulations of what makes Better Call Saul so special, and they both embody what the pace and method of storytelling in this show is like in a rather perfect way.
Another thing that Better Call Saul showed off in these episodes (that it has never lost) is its directing—namely in “Hit and Run” and “Axe and Grind”, directed by Rhea Seehorn and Giancarlo Esposito respectively. There’s one shot in “Hit and Run” that I remember really impressing me: specifically, the one where Jimmy is taking calls for his business in the courthouse yard, the lawyers behind him all engaged in incredibly animated yet realistic conversation. The direction of background characters in the shot is utterly astounding, and it’s a nice way of communicating that at this point, Jimmy just has Kim and his shitty clients. Why is he so isolated? Because he defended Lalo when he was so clearly guilty of murder. “Prove it!” he calls after Bill, the lawyer who always used to knock him for his low-level cases. “There’s proving, and then there’s knowing,” Bill responds. Even with Chuck gone, Jimmy will always be one thing—but, just as when Chuck was alive, the man was right about his brother.
You’d think getting the shit kicked out of him would be a sign to Jimmy that it’s time to cut it out with this Howard business, but if anything, it seems to motivate him. The boxing sequence is a lot of fun, complete with POV shots and a pretty neat overhead of Jimmy getting knocked flat on his back, but it emphasizes how dedicated Jimmy is to the arts of fucking with people and being an asshole. He’s probably taken worse in the name of screwing someone over, so he’s comfortable taking some punches. The world of Better Call Saul seems to be trying to tell Jimmy and Kim to cut their scheme short—take Dr. Caldera, who’s retiring from the game and going legit as a veterinarian—but instead, they’re just happy to get his book of criminal contacts and see it as a sign to do what they love, if nothing else. “He knows what he wants,” Kim observes when Jimmy questions why the doctor would give up his incredibly well-paying job for a significantly more meager one, and the idea seems clear—she’s doing the same thing, because, like Caldera, it makes her happy.
But god, if what makes her happy is tormenting Howard, I don’t know if I’m on their side anymore. I’ve always liked Howard following the reveal that he only “hated” Jimmy because Chuck didn’t want his brother to know that he was holding him back, and these three episodes made me like him more. Sure, on the outside, he seems a bit vain, but he’s proven himself to be a decent guy whose heart is in the right place, judging by his people skills and what we see of him in his therapy sessions. The setup for the rug pull that’s clearly coming is fun as hell to watch, but no amount of (deeply, deeply disturbing) fake Howards or untraceable drugs will put my mind at ease on this one. “It’s like we’re…deadlocked,” Howard notes in regards to his marriage, but he’s unknowingly talking about his two greatest adversaries, stuck in a death struggle with him and refusing to let go until their enemy is obliterated.
But whereas Howard isn’t watching his back nearly enough, vastly underestimating his enemy, Gus is seemingly overestimating a man who is presumed dead. He has the house from the opening connected to his own via underground tunnel, and wears a bulletproof vest on him wherever he goes. He sees signs that aren’t there at work, causing him to slip out of character momentarily while taking an order for large spice curls and check the outside for any signs of danger. When Mike visits the safe house, he finds Gus in the bathroom, dutifully scrubbing dirt from the bathtub with a toothbrush. It could be read as Gus distracting himself from the looming thought of Lalo, watching him from the darkness, but I feel like it could also be read as him trying to purge the very idea of Lalo, dirt on an otherwise clean operation, dirt that could expose him to Eladio and ruin his vengeance decades in the making. We, of course, know that that’s going to work out, but the real pleasure is watching Better Call Saul withhold that information from its own characters. Somehow, Gus is going to get out of this—but in his mind, he could die any day now.
But Lalo isn’t in Albuquerque. Lalo isn’t even in the United States. Lalo is in Germany, still looking for his prueba regarding the superlab, and so he goes to the only connection he can think of—the wife of Werner Ziegler, who he follows to a bar and chats up. There’s a great moment where our perceptions of fictional tropes do the plotting for us, leading us to assume that “Ben” will bed the widow Ziegler and do what he needs to do, but Lalo is too smart for that. It would make his job simpler, yeah, but he could achieve the same effect by breaking into her house when she leaves for work—which is exactly what he does. Lalo is playing with his food, as he so often likes to do, and we see this again when he tracks the sender of the slide rule from the opening. As with the courtyard scene from “Hit and Run”, this is a sequence I find to be insanely well directed, the eerie color grading helping its tone immensely as Lalo hunts the man inside his barn, gets jumped, and then gains the upper hand. The two Germany sequences are careful and quietly put together, and even if the first one goes on a little too long, the parts that matter are fraught with dread and tension.
There’s a motif I noticed throughout these three episodes—mainly “Hit and Run”—that I felt were worth touching on, and that is the idea of facades. Gus uses a fake house, Jimmy becomes a fake Howard, Howard uses a fake name to lure Jimmy to the boxing ring, Lalo travels under an alias. This theme of facades feels as though it’s playing into a greater idea that encompasses not just Better Call Saul, but Breaking Bad as well. Throughout both of them, the characters disguise their true intentions through their actions, the most obvious example of this being Walter White. But Jimmy, a con man, needs to hide his true actions. So does Gus, in hopes of staying alive, and so does Lalo, in hopes of getting closer to his target. The facades present throughout these three episodes are not there by coincidence—they’re there to highlight a specific character, and make a specific point about them.
And that character is Kim. The opening of “Axe and Grind” is, as I mentioned, a flashback to Kim’s childhood. She gets caught stealing some jewelry and her irresponsible mother fakes shock and horror at the idea that her daughter could ever do such a thing, only to laugh it off as soon as they duck out of sight, telling Kim to “relax, you got away with it.” This is not the only time we see Kim and this jewelry together—in fact, we can see her wearing it throughout the entirety of the series. It’s as though she wears them as a reminder of what instilled this attraction to lawlessness in her, to keep her centered on what she turns out to be incredibly good at. The shot of her watching Jimmy recount the events of their fake Howard scheme communicates what she really likes perfectly—Jimmy’s face is shrouded in shadow. She’s attracted to the moral darkness she sees in him, and the idea that she could be a part of it too. “God, it was...beautiful,” she notes when reminiscing about their scheme, a line that says all it needs to say.
There’s a detail that I feel has gone underlooked that, if I’m right, could be the key to Kim’s motivations as a whole. When we first see her in “Axe and Grind”, she’s waiting in the back room of the store for her impending punishment, tapping her right foot on the ground in a staccato rhythm. We see it again when she goes to meet with Cliff Main, her right foot tapping under the table, both instances where she’s doing something wrong. I initially thought this was a sign of guilt, but then I looked at the ending of “Axe and Grind” after my second watch, and I thought about something. Kim is on her way to a career-boosting lunch when she gets a call from Jimmy—the man they had impersonated for staged photos as part of their scheme has broken his arm, making said photos unusable—she hesitates for a moment. But then, what does she do? She presses her right foot to the gas pedal, and she goes. She presses down on the pedal, and she goes. The foot tapping wasn’t her way of dealing with the consequences of her actions—it’s the subconscious desire to press onward, go farther than she thought she could. This has always been in her. She just needed the outlet for it.
When Kim points out that Mike (who she meets in “Hit and Run” for the first time) is the parking lot attendant at the courthouse, he corrects her that “I was.” We know where Mike will end up—as the “grunting, dead-eyed cretin” that will clean up the bodies of vulnerable young women and ruthless criminals indiscriminately—but it’s strange to consider that we now have (almost) the full picture of the man. But at the same time, it’s strange to consider that we’ve been given the same thing with Kim now, having almost everything in place on the timeline. We’ve always gotten to see who Kim was—when she helped Jimmy tear down Chuck, we got to see her. It’s not that people change. “People don’t change.” It’s that they get to choose when to reveal who they really are.
Ratings: 8/10 (“Hit and Run”: B / “Black and Blue”: B+ / “Axe and Grind”: B+)
Scene I was not a fan of: Mike spending time with his granddaughter over the phone. This new Kaylee feels less like a kid and more like an actor reading lines, right? It’s not just me?
Cool detail: from Kim’s POV in the scene where she doesn’t tell Jimmy that Lalo may be alive, her clock reads “LI:E”.
The singers of the song from the opening of “Black and Blue” (linked here if you wanted to relisten to it like I did many times) are part of the famous Trapp family, grandchildern of a one Werner von Trapp. Nice touch.
The couple from the opening of “Hit and Run” are married in real life, which is sweet.
The German inscribed in the lucite translates to “With Love… Your Boys”.
Luis Moncada, aka Marco Salamanca, coordinated the boxing match.
I would’ve just killed the strange man clearly not from my country who tried to kill me if I had the chance. I don’t know about that German guy, but that feels like the smart move to me.
The sign falling over to cap off the “fake Howard” sequence was absolutely spectacular.
I appreciate that they kept the actor who plays Spooge’s hairline from Breaking Bad.
I like that Howard’s plan to lure Jimmy to the boxing ring was using an alias that was essentially “H.O. Ward.”
Man, Erin can’t catch a break this season.
“What kind of asshole moves a cone?!”
“Hey, I’m playing a man of substance, right?”
“I can’t use a pen. I have no opposable thumbs.”
“That’s very street of you.”
“You’re the guy, right?” “And what guy is that?” “Salamanca’s guy.”
“I want to live in a world where people can trust each other. And I bet you do, too.”