Eric Bay-Andersen reviews the fifth episode of Better Call Saul season 2…
Episode five opens with a flashback to Jimmy’s first week at HHM, when he’s invited over to Chuck’s house one evening for dinner. In this scene we discover that in his pre-electrophobe days, Chuck had a wife, the titular Rebecca (some viewers might also remember this was the name on the sheet music Chuck was playing at the beginning of episode 2). Before the dinner, Chuck warns Rebecca (Ann Cusack) that Jimmy can be a bit off-putting, but she ends up liking him and being very amused by his newly-acquired arsenal of lawyer jokes. Just before the credits begin, there’s a wonderfully tragi-comic moment where Chuck tries to make his wife laugh with a lawyer joke of his own, but it doesn’t have the same effect. Obviously Jimmy and Chuck’s animosity (and the breakdown of Chuck’s marriage) is based on more than the events of a single evening, but the whole pre-credits sequence does a great job of highlighting a couple of the contributing sources to their friction – Jimmy’s superior charm, and his disrespect (as Chuck perceives it) towards the law profession.
As the episode begins proper, it becomes clear that this view is shared by Jimmy’s current employers Davis & Main – they’ve assigned an annoyingly chipper young associate called Erin (Jessie Ennis) to act as his watchdog after the advert incident. Between her curbing his usual practices (she prevents him from trying to get preferential treatment by bribing a courthouse clerk) and Kim shooting down his latest attempt to get her out of the doghouse (suing HHM, which would be career suicide for her), Jimmy is feeling increasingly trapped.
Kim (Rhea Seehorn) gets a real chance to shine in this episode – there’s a brilliant montage, ingeniously set to a Spanish version of ‘My Way’, where she attempts to drum up business for HHM to redeem herself. At the end of it there’s a great moment where she thinks she’s succeeded (a wide shot in the parking lot where she literally jumps for joy), but when Howard refuses to reward her hard work there’s an equally heartbreaking moment where she’s left standing alone outside the HHM building.
Later that night she bumps into Chuck, who’s doing an early morning at the office, and he tells her a story about how Jimmy embezzled money from their father’s store when he was a teenager, which ultimately cost their father his business. It’s a testament to the richness of the characters and the quality of the writing that your opinion about a character can constantly change as you learn more about them – it’s easy to view Chuck as an antagonist, but he has plenty of reasons for viewing and treating Jimmy the way he does. Likewise, we’ve seen Jimmy do bad things for good reasons and vice versa, so it’s easy to root for him yet it’s also hard to disagree when people like Kim or Howard want to disassociate themselves from him.
The episode ends with the return of a familiar face (and an unfamiliar voice) from Breaking Bad – Tuco’s uncle, Hector (Mark Margolis). With the exception of a couple of flashbacks to his early days in the drug cartels, up until now Hector has mostly been shown as a mute invalid, whose only means of communication was a bell and a twisted expression, but when he approaches Mike in a diner at the end of the episode to ask if he’d consider dropping some the charges against Tuco, he appears to be a kindly old man who’s just concerned for his nephew. However, those of us who’ve seen Breaking Bad know just how vengeful and violent his man can be, and it seems likely that before long Mike will come to regret choosing not to just kill Tuco. Or will Hector regret crossing Mike? After all, we never did find out how he ended up paralysed in that wheelchair…
Eric Bay-Andersen
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Originally published March 18, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
