The second episode of Better Call Saul again starts with a callback to Breaking Bad. This time, we pick up right where we left off on Sunday night in a situation not unlike one of the first real debacles Walter White and Jesse Pinkman face.
He’s back (Or, more like, we’re meeting him in his first chronological appearance in the Gilligan-verse.) And we got here as a result of a scam gone wrong. Jimmy and a couple of kids were trying to stage an accident with one of McGill’s prospective clients in an effort to sway her to employ his services.
But instead of a well-to-do white woman in her 30s, Jimmy’s compatriots have a run-in with an elderly Mexican woman. When James and the gang track her down, they get a little more than they bargained for.
Which brings us to the present. “Mijo,” the second episode of the series, opens with Tuco frying up a bit of grub, a great callback to one of the last things we saw him do in Breaking Bad.
Tuco confronts Jimmy’s accomplices as they try to shake down his abuelita and knocks them out cold. And when Jimmy shows up, well, you know what happens.
And herein lies one of the purposes “Mijo” serves for Better Call Saul. The parallels between James McGill’s and Walter White’s run-ins with Tuco thematically pull the shows together. But the way Jimmy handles the drug runner shows us just how close, how capable he is of being the shifty lawyer we know and love.
Tuco says it best: “Wow, you’ve got a mouth on you.”
The first episode of the series established Jimmy McGill as an incapable, down-on-his luck guy who’s just trying to get his practice off the ground. Saul Goodman is in there somewhere, but McGill hasn’t quite found him yet.
We see James get a little closer. We also see more of Breaking Bad’s DNA showing up. Saul and his accomplices are bound in the basement. He gets dragged to the desert where he’s threatened by Tuco and his associates (at one point, with a box cutter, no less). There’s even a moment when one of Tuco’s cronies pipes in with suggestions on how to dismember his victims and the crazed drug dealer threatens him. And we all remember the way that ends up.
But it’s the way that James handles it all, the way he talks his way out of certain death and gets Tuco to spare the lives of his accomplices that sheds light on the kind of guy he is.
If Breaking Bad is Mr. Chips turning into Scarface, then Better Call Saul is the story of a man coming to accept with his shortcomings and embracing his place as a world-class talker.
The major difference between Walt and Jimmy is that the latter shows us some semblance of remorse, of a conscience.
After Tuco breaks the skateboarders’ legs, Jimmy pays for the trip to Urgent Care. Sure, Walter White paid his share of bills, but the difference here is that Jimmy has little, if anything, left to give. It’s not like he’s giving up hundreds of thousands out of the millions of dollars that Walter made during the second through fifth seasons of Breaking Bad.
That’s also what gets Jimmy running back to the courthouse to take cases as a public defender, a job he swore off at the beginning of the series premiere. We then segue into a montage where Jimmy takes on court case after court case, battling fellow attorneys and Mike Ermantraut the parking attendant along the way. That’s more of the signature Breaking Bad DNA seeping through, albeit in a lighter tone than we’re used to.
Stray observations:
• Say what you will about the Salamancas, but they take care of their own.
• “Turns out your darling abuelita drives a car that looks an awful lot like the Kettlemobile.”
• “An eye for an eye … you want me to blind them …”
• Saul is a damn good lawyer. You’d have to be if you’re dealing with a lunatic like Tuco.
• Those traffic stickers are a metaphor for every time you got to your car just in time to see the University of Oregon parking attendant leave a yellow envelope on your windshield.
Follow Eder Campuzano on Twitter: @edercampuzano
‘Better Call Saul’ recap: ‘Mijo’ brings back an old face
Daily Emerald
February 8, 2015
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