Welcome back to our weekly breakdown of the minutia of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul. While Brian Grubb provides his always excellent coverage of the series (here’s his write up of the latest episode), here we will look at some of the details viewers may have missed, callbacks to Breaking Bad, references to other shows or movies, and theories on the direction the series is heading. We scour Reddit threads, Twitter, listen each week to the phenomenal Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, and attempt to curate the best intel about each episode..
1. Obviously, the big Easter Egg this week is the return of Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez, who are put in charge of interrogating Domingo/Krazy 8. The real Easter Egg here, however, is that back in Breaking Bad, Hank and Gomie actually briefly mentioned Krazy 8. “You know what I’m thinking, Gomie?” Hank said to him back in the opening season. “Yep,” Gomez said. “Someone croaked our snitch.” That snitch was Domingo. In fact, this entire storyline between Saul, Domingo, Hank, Gomez, Lalo, and Fring was all built around a single line from Breaking Bad.
That said, don’t expect Hank and Gomez — whose names were hilariously “Duke” and “Yancy” in the script — to become series regulars. On the Insider podcast, Peter Gould says that Hank and Gomez will only be on two episodes this season.
2. This is absolutely insane to me, but in that cold open, those are real ants. Director Michael Morris brought in an “ant guy” from Los Angeles, who brought his own ants and then took those ants back to Los Angeles when he was done.
3. I am intensely curious about where Kim’s storyline is headed. It’s clear that she prefers to work pro bono cases, and that she’s burned out on Mesa Verde, which pays the bills. If Saul starts making really good money, will Kim use that opportunity to offset Saul’s sleazy work with good work underwritten by Jimmy’s work with the cartel? Either way, the “Do you think your special? You do not get to make up your own rules” speech Kim delivers to Mr. Acker is 100 percent meant for Saul.
4. A few notes on Saul’s initial conversation with Lalo. The $7,925 figure that Saul pitched to Lalo was obviously specifically calculated to scare Lalo away. Saul thought he was giving Lalo a number that was more than Lalo could afford but not a figure so high that it sounded like Saul was intentionally trying to scare Lalo away. That $7,925 figure, however, is peanuts to the $80,000 Saul will charge a few years later to get someone to go to prison as Heisenberg — $50,000 as a finder’s fee for Saul, and $30,000 (and a pound of meth) for the guy who goes to prison. “Conscience gets expensive, doesn’t it?” Saul says in a few years time. In other words, he may be “Saul Goodman” now, but he’s still not Saul Goodman.
5. I love how the episode is bookended by those scenes on the balcony. It’s a little thing, but it imputes so much meaning in the episode. In the first balcony scene, Kim is anxious because Jimmy leaves a bottle of beer on the railing.
In the second, Kim starts chucking those beer bottles.
Kim needs Jimmy to keep her from being the person always worried about the bottle on the railing. But she also needs to find a middle-ground between that and throwing beer bottles into a parking lot.
6. This relationship between Lalo, Nacho, and Saul, as well as the the double-cross with Krazy-8 and Gus all seems to hint at why Saul said what he did to Walt and Jesse in Breaking Bad when they kidnapped Saul and took him out into the desert. “Did Lalo send you all?” … “It wasn’t me. It was Ignacio. He’s the one!” It suggests that Jimmy knows in Breaking Bad that Nacho screws over Lalo by playing both sides.
7. Finally, the speech that Kim gave to Mr. Acker about her background, growing up without a home and moving around? It was a really nice speech, and I think the reason why it drove Kim to drink (and throw drinks off the balcony) is because she was genuinely pouring her heart out to Mr. Acker, and he thought she was pulling a Slippin’ Jimmy. In Kim’s mind she has to be thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do. They’ll always think of me the same way they think of Slippin’ Jimmy.” I genuinely don’t know if that brings her closer to Jimmy, or if it pushes her further away.
