Better Call Saul comes to a close five episodes before its finale
Season 6, Episode 9: "Fun and Games"
What people often forget (because we only get reminded once a season, and in this season’s case, not at all) is that Better Call Saul is essentially one (very) long flashback. If you’ve seen Breaking Bad, you know what happens to every character—Gus and Mike die, Jimmy vanishes into Gene Takavic, all of the new characters do not appear because almost all of them are dead. On one hand, this removes some tension from episodes like “Bagman”, because “do you think Mike and Jimmy will die?” is a question we all know the answer to, but on the other, it holds the new characters hostage, forcing us to agonize over why we don’t see Nacho working for Gus or the Salamancas when Walter White is dealing with them, or why Saul is never shown with a ring on or mentioning a wife. Openers like “Point and Shoot” trap us in short-term questions that are answered by the episode’s end, and Breaking Bad season premieres like “Seven Thirty-Seven” and “Live Free or Die” force entire seasons of speculation and waiting with their cold opens, but the long con of Better Call Saul—a con that not even Slippin’ Jimmy could pull off—is that the entire series is one long question of “who leaves when, how, and why?”
With “Point and Shoot” over, there was really only one question that was yet to be answered—what happens to Kim Wexler? There has been plenty of speculation, of course: Kim dies, Kim calls the vacuum repair man, Kim becomes a cartel lawyer, Kim gets eaten by Huell, (yes, that’s real) and my personal favorite, Kim dies in the Wayfarer 515 crash, a scenario fans have been using to predict any number of characters’ fates on this show for years, which I will never not find funny. With the other four dead, Kim is the last character standing, and there’s only five episodes left in the entire series. So what’s going to happen to her? What will the climactic finale of a show that has been building for eight long years be for one of its most important characters?
But there is no climax. Kim leaves—she doesn’t get a new identity, she doesn’t flee because someone is threatening her life, Huell doesn’t go anywhere near her. Kim leaves because she realizes that her relationship with Jimmy is bad for both them and other people, so she scrapes the morality she once displayed so prominently off the bottom and uses it to come to this conclusion. And she’s right. She’s the intellectual with the ability to be ruthless enough to strong-arm them through their cons—think of how she intimidated the Kettlemans and stood up to Howard when Jimmy could only play it semi-cool before him—while Jimmy is the charming front man, the figurehead of their little partnership. “I have had the time of my life with you,” she promises Jimmy, and she’s not being untruthful—but not all good things last forever, and sooner or later, we all manage our own Cinnabons. “I love you too. But so what?”
“Fun and Games” is about wrapping up the story of Better Call Saul and moving on to…something. We don’t know yet. Likely a series of scenes taking place throughout Breaking Bad that we never got to see and then leading in to the Gene timeline, but again, we don’t know. The four characters left—Gus, Mike, Jimmy, Kim—all are given a definitive (and thematically fitting!) end to their stories, and in my mind, it’s doubtful we’ll see three of them again after this. Howard and Lalo are dead, so problem solved. What else would we have to see with this timeline? Better to push forward and see whatever the future has in store for us over this next month of final episodes.
But for Gus, there is no future. He goes to meet with Eladio following Lalo’s disappearance, Hector having accused him of foul play. He arrives under cover of darkness and sits by the pool where his (very platonic) friend was killed all those years ago, a symbol across both shows of what drives Gus in his frigid war against the cartel. Lit by a roaring fire, Gus sits between Eladio and Hector, and when he turns towards the latter, the flames blaze in the reflection of his glasses, the hatred he is forced to keep pushed down in front of his superiors—the hatred that drives and defines his very being. But he gets away with it. Hector is dismissed (and privately mocked) by Eladio, and Gus is allowed to go home—his home, not his decoy home he was using while hiding from the possibility of Lalo.
So Gus decides to celebrate. For the first time ever, we get to see Gus actually chill the hell out and go to a nice little wine bar that he’s familiar with. When we see Gus relaxing at his home with Walter in season three of Breaking Bad and Jesse in season four, they’re both ploys. Here, Gus is just happy to be alive. He makes conversation with David, the bar’s sommelier that he seems to know. Now, there’s been a lot of debate (as with Gus’ relationship with Max) over the true nature of this conversation—whether it’s old friends, or something more—and while I think it’s the latter, that doesn’t change the point of the scene. David pours Gus a glass, and he downs it when David leaves momentarily—and when he drinks it, he suddenly shifts back into the Gus we know and fear, leaves money on the bar, and exits promptly. Gus realizes that when it comes to his business, his work is never done—Hector will undoubtedly want revenge, and now he has to actually set up his superlab with Lalo out of the way. There’s so much more to do, and all of it is dangerous. The wine represents Gus’ fantasy of just being a normal dude again, but the instant he dealt that meth on Eladio’s territory, there was no going back. He consumes his fantasy, and with it all gone, he gets back to work, because what else is he going to do?
Mike, who criticized Gus’ obsessiveness, is struck with a bout of his own as he sits at home. He pulls Manuel Varga’s fake ID out of the floorboards, looks at it, puts it down. After dealing with another body of a character so important to this show recently, he’s got Nacho on his mind, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He tries to ignore it, but one look at Kaylee’s erector set in the corner of the room and the weight of losing a son presses in on him, and so he goes to Manuel. “He was never like them. Not really. He had a good heart,” Mike insists to Manuel about his son. He promises that he was different, and maybe Manuel agrees, but he certainly doesn’t feel the same way about Mike. “You’re all the same,” he murmurs sorrowfully, knowing that he lost his son to the machine of organized crime—after all, no one killed him, he shot himself—and that there’s no getting him back. He ignores Mike’s promises of justice, knowing that what he really means is vengeance. Despite how much we like him, Mike is, at his core, the same as those he works with—he may be significantly more professional and competent, but at the end of the day, he’s still a criminal.
Meanwhile, Kim and Jimmy go to Howard’s wake, and it goes about how you’d expect. They wear all black—who wouldn’t wear all black to a wake—but, if you recall, their dark color palette played into this idea of Kim’s backsliding moral values throughout this season. Here, it’s more so that they’re trying to blend in with everyone else, both literally and figuratively to avoid any suspicion. They pass by the trashcan that Jimmy kicked the hell out of in the pilot, an outlet for him to take his Howard-related frustrations out on, but now Howard is gone, HHM is being gutted, and as such, the can is being replaced. The wake goes well at first, but then they come face-to-face with Cliff Main and Howard’s widow, the latter of whom is firm that he never had a drug problem. But without even thinking about it, Kim jumps in as Jimmy struggles to think of a response, spinning a yarn about catching Howard with his head down in a pile of something after hours, and that’s all it takes. Jimmy’s eyes flicker from the increasingly distressed ex-Hamlin to Kim in a brilliant little moment. The emotion being displayed isn’t clear, and that is in no way unintentional.
And then it’s over. Jimmy listens as Kim packs in the other room, only to wake up with a prostitute on his arm in the extravagant mansion we saw in the season premiere. Was he dreaming of Kim? Maybe.
There’s a motif in this episode that I think is the key to unlocking it. Stay with me. First, we have Gus, imprisoned by his own work, and despite being the boss, he will one day die for it. He’s trapped both by his profession and his desire for revenge. Then we have Mike, always stuck under the authority of someone—first Gus, which, granted, is a very beneficial relationship, then Walter, which would ultimately get him killed. In this episode, this idea is visually represented in the shot above. Manuel’s half of the frame is empty, but Mike’s half is blocked off by the fence, one man in the game and one out. And Jimmy is trapped in the confines of Saul Goodman, framed by the pillars in his office as stuck between them. Only Kim, who left and I sincerely hope never returns, (because I’m currently unsure how I would feel about a reunion) is free to do what she wants, even if she feels trapped by the choices she and Jimmy made.
So Saul drives to work, and his waiting room is filled with his usual clientele—crying babies, neck-braced individuals, and so on. He sits down behind his desk. He no longer has the “WORLD’S (2nd) BEST LAWYER” cup, because the best lawyer is gone—now it’s just him, all alone. He utters the words a brother he no longer has once spoke, “let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” It’s just another day for Saul Goodman, and it leaves us with even more questions, most of all “what happens next?” But like our three Breaking Bad characters, we don’t know. We’re stuck in here with them, and we’re here to stay, unfortunately. You want answers? Go find Kim. Maybe she’ll tell you.
Rating: 9/10 (A-)
Sorry about the rating, but two-fifths of this episode really didn’t need to be Gus.
Don’t make me wait for that cover of “Perfect Day”, Spotify. I’m warning you. (A “two weeks late” edit: they added it!)
Worth noting that Jimmy’s advice to Kim at the end of the cold open are the same that Mike used on Jimmy in season five’s ninth episode.
The pictures of Howard at his wake are lifted from Patrick Fabian’s Instagram, the funny part being that Tony Dalton had to be digitally edited out of some of them.
If you recognized David, he plays Terry Crowley on The Shield, a name that should be incredibly important to you if you’re familiar with that show.
According to the wiki’s timeline, the Wexler-McGill marriage lasted only a month.
I feel like Saul referencing the public masturbation case was more Breaking Bad bait than an easter egg to get people debating about the timeline. I believe the current consensus is that it takes place several months after Kim leaves, so clearly their scheme to get the Sandpiper payout really worked judging by the mansion.
“Because I was having too much fun.”