Hey, everybody. John Teti here.
Um — do you think we should get married?
Or do you think we should just have another
You know what? Let's do the second thing. Right now.
[the lavish and enchanting Basement Breakdown theme song plays]
Okay. Season five, episode six. "Wexler v. Goodman."
I'm going to start with this old TV commercial.
Bob Odenkirk's old
the patriarch of the Mesa Verde empire.
We see Don gazing out to the potential of the frontier.
The Mesa Verde cowboy faces west, as he always does.
So there are traces of Kevin Wachtell’s expansionism here in the commercial,
but I don’t really think that’s the point.
To me, the essential moment of this commercial is that
"Yup!"
It's so profoundly doofy that, for the audience,
it positions Don Wachtell as a man without guile.
He's not the bullshitter that Saul is going to make him out to be, right?
So of course it's poetically perfect that
that "Yup!" is the one detail that Saul turns inside out…
(DON WACHTELL, IN SAUL'S VIDEO) "Yyyyup!"
…and makes it the punctuation mark
with which Don Wachtell seems to confirm his own misdeeds.
His own villainy. Right?
The footage pauses on this logo.
The Mesa Verde cowboy.
The Mesa Verde name is smeared by the VHS interference,
and to me, that's an evocation of Saul's plot
to smear the name of Mesa Verde. In part by way of this cowboy, in fact.
That image is centrally placed throughout this scene,
and I think it's shorthand for this plot thread.
It's another instance of the show finding a way to draw meaning
out of VHS technology.
I was almost disappointed, in this episode, when Saul pulled out a DVD.
But the future comes at some point, even in
Let's talk about color, too. Green is really prominent here.
And of course it is. It's Mesa VERDE, right? But this is just one example.
This episode is really drenched in green.
And green, like so many colors, has a lot of meaning,
a lot of history on
I explored some of that history in my ice cream cone video a little earlier this season.
You can check that out.
I'll give you the abridged version right now, which is,
green tends to pop up in the composition when Saul is in one of his manias.
When he's executing a grand plan.
Green means "go," basically. When Saul's in this go, go, go mode.
Hence the green screen as the ubiquitous backdrop here, with Saul in his ecstasy.
Green is also the color of money. It serves to illustrate Saul's cash flow.
It often portends an ill-gotten windfall for Saul,
as it does here in this episode, as he swindles a big payday out of Kevin Wachtell.
So green is important.
But in this montage, we're bombarded with all sorts of colors. It's more than green.
Saul asks Joey for a blue screen, and Joey snickers at him.
(JOEY) Do you mean a green screen?
Note how the notion of Saul in proximity to blue often makes other characters scoff
as if the color of moral good simply doesn't suit him.
(SAUL) Whatever. Blue, green. Just—can we do that?
And there is some character truth to this green screen, blue screen exchange
because blue screens would have been more common
in the era of classic film that Jimmy loves so much.
Which is the dream Jimmy/Saul is living out here, right?
He's the John Ford of nail salon commercial shoots.
This sequence in the nail salon begins with us going through the orchestra, in my mind.
As the players tune up.
There’s some very sensitive and human sound mixing here.
(SEATED ACTOR) Mom makes meat…
(ACTOR IN YELLOW SWEATER) Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, red—yellow! Yellow leather!
[vocal warmups in background]
Listen, too, to the musicality of the writing.
The vocal warmups, yes, but we even have Joey on the camera saying
(JOEY) Ready, ready.
This guy coming along and saying
(ACTOR WITH HEALTHY PROSTATE) I played Prospero on the plaza, a month after prostate surgery.
It's all this very pizzicato delivery that he brings.
In the mix you also hear this young actor practicing,
(ACTOR IN YELLOW SWEATER) Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, red—yellow! Yellow leather!
So in the space of about 45 seconds, we have “blue screen,” “green screen,”
"red leather," "yellow leather,"
"Red-y, red-y," if you want to go that far.
It's a verbal rainbow to match the visual rainbows that proliferate here.
The rainbow is another rich symbol on the show.
We haven’t talked about it in a while, but, among other things,
it signifies the characters visualizing a dream.
Maybe living it out in some fashion.
But rainbows don't last, right? They're ephemeral.
And the ephemeral nature of the rainbow is part of that symbol, too.
These dreams that they're living out, especially when it comes to Saul,
are often a mirage. And we can feel that in the rainbow symbol. It's going to go away.
There are rainbows all over these first couple scenes.
The makeup artist’s shirt.
The assortment on the craft services table here.
The nail polish on the wall, well-lit to make sure we can see it. It pops in the composition.
Our first glimpse of Saul's office is a rainbow.
Follow the direction of the light. It highlights the blue and gold of Saul’s wardrobe.
And then the directionality of the actors brings your eye across.
Across a whole rainbow. Blue, gold, more gold, green—
and ends up on the reds and purples of Saul's tie.
With Saul himself in shadow, by the way.
Here’s a stairway to heaven with a Saul clothing rainbow hanging over the scene.
The color mix of the shirts, to me, looks a lot like
Kim's blurry vision of Saul that began her storyline this season.
All of this is to say, this is a very playful opening, sonically and visually.
And it’s effective whether or not you care to think about the deeper symbology of
as most viewers probably won’t, right? Which is fine.
You only need to be an attentive viewer to be infused with a hint of the effervescence these colors bring about.
The effervescence that Saul is feeling as the cameras roll, right?
As for Saul’s directorial style, um—
I think we can classify it as "incoherent."
Saul's directions make no sense.
(SAUL) But don't hit it too hard. Just throw it away.
But—with feeling.
He contradicts himself again and again. The dialogue kind of zigzags along like this.
But Bob Odenkirk's performance as Saul is smooth, confident, strong.
Here's really present here. Engaged.
(SAUL) Smile?
And now look sad. Glum.
This layering of contrasts in the writing and performance—A, it’s really funny,
but B, it gets at Jimmy's internal contradictions
and show us how the Saul persona smooths all those over.
It doesn't matter if there's turmoil and nonsense under here
because the polish of Saul Goodman—that Saul Goodman smile—smooths it all over.
Let's talk about the cinematography here.
There's two basic shots in this montage. One is from the camera’s point of view.
And the other is the reverse of that.
We also get some close-ups of Saul for emphasis, of course,
but these are the two basic shots, right? Shot, reverse shot.
Over and over again, we see it. With some close-ups in there.
This is not like those more sweeping, lush
where every shot is something different—a new visual poem.
The visual language of this montage is really restricted.
Because the lush approach wouldn't make sense in this confined space.
The montage is built simply to mirror the low-frills approach of Saul's own production.
(SAUL) Boom.
Note how the editing always follows Saul.
We don't get to see any of the actors actually perform.
Instead, we see Saul’s performance of them.
Because that's the dream he's living.
He’s creating all these identities on the spot.
It reminds me of the cell phone scam with Huell in season 4…
(SAUL)
…except instead of voices on a phone, now Saul is manipulating actual human beings.
Like action figures, the way he handles them.
You can tell it’s an exquisite thrill for Saul. He’s enjoying himself.
The identities that he invents don’t make much sense, right?
Like, how is this supposed to be “cool”?
It's so funny, and it doesn't matter to him that they don't make sense.
It's all about this sense of command.
Telling people who they’re going to be, and watching them become that, at his command.
That's what is so invigorating for him here.
Then Kim shows up. And the high seemingly has to end—Saul's high.
In this shot of Kim looking through the window of the nail salon—
What a beautiful shot this is, because we see in the same shot, thanks to the reflection,
her vision of what's going on here.
These “gold” fish, a frequent symbol on
looking especially red here.
They’re contained, though, aren’t they? In that tank?
The silent motion of the fish echoes the wide shot that we saw just before this one
in which we see the plucky film crew swimming about their set.
The fish are contained in their tank.
Fittingly, because Kim is here to contain this mess. She’s eager to do so, in fact.
Note how the conversation between Saul and Kim begins and ends.
(SAUL) You comin' in? 'Cause—hey—we've still got a slice or two of pizza left.
At the beginning, Saul asks Kim to come in, repeatedly.
And she refuses, right? She doesn't want to wallow down in the sleaze with him.
But then, at the end of the exchange…
(SAUL) There’s a lot to clean up before Mrs. Nguyen can open in the morning, so—
(KIM) I’ll help.
(SAUL) No—
When Kim thinks she's put an end to Saul's latest chicanery,
Kim is eager to clean up, and Saul's kind of the one putting her off.
She'll always help Jimmy clean up.
Right? She loves to do that—she loves to clean up. But that's not the fun part.
Saul wants Kim there for the fun stuff. The dirty business, right?
In this one conversation we see their different motivations. Almost like ships passing in the night.
They are not really talking to each other even though they may think that they are.
The long and short of it is that Kim underestimates the extent of Saul's mania,
as she is wont to do, right?
He can't just go back to regular life now.
Because we see what an emotional minefield the life of Saul is.
At the courthouse, he sort of meekly suggests that his two clients clean up their act.
(SAUL) Hey, do you two think that maybe, maybe you should take a break?
And as they walk away, he feels the emptiness of the Saul routine.
He feels that all he's done is enable more sleaze.
He's wallowing in it and, really, changing nothing about the world.
Doing nothing to make the world a better place.
It’s a powerless feeling, and Jimmy can’t tolerate it. Both in this moment at the courthouse
and when we see him later. I think in both of these moments,
we're seeing Jimmy McGill bubble to the surface.
As the prostitutes walk away in the courthouse
and again after the prank on Howard proves so unsatisfying.
We see Jimmy. Bob Odenkirk allows Jimmy to flash across his face just for a moment,
so that we can see he's there.
But Saul exists to protect Jimmy from this very feeling.
That despair and empty disappointment that results when Jimmy reflects on himself.
So Saul reasserts control almost immediately.
He gets on the phone. We're back in the mania.
He's going to raise the stakes on the Kevin Wachtell play.
Green means go, baby!
And Saul bathes the Schweikart & Cokely boardroom in his particular shade of green.
So, we see in the cold open that Kim's instrument is the cello,
and Kim's paralegal, Viola, is here.
(SAUL) Hey, Viola, how's it hangin'?
We're already halfway to a string quartet.
Let's say that Rich and Kevin are the violins.
And here's Saul playing every instrument.
The maestro. And his command is unshakable.
Note how the protests from the Kevin Wachtell camp, and all his lawyers,
They all revolve around how none of this is true.
(KEVIN) Are you kidding me?
(PAIGE) None of that is true. It's defamation!
(RICH) It's libel. It's libel!
(KEVIN) That's my father you're making a fool of!
That's not who Don Wachtell was! My father never did anything like that.
But Saul just argues that the truth doesn't matter.
He's going to tell this story. He's basically saying,
"I have the awesome power to craft whatever story I want about you people,
and there's nothing you can do about it."
On that point, though, why does he involve the father?
This is an old Mesa Verde commercial. Surely they've made more since then.
Probably featuring Kevin Wachtell.
Why does he dig back so far and involve Don Wachtell?
Well, it made me think about how Jimmy views his own father.
Remember, Jimmy grew up watching his dad get swindled by every grifter in town
because his dad was, as Chuck once put it, "the personification of good."
Con artists knew that Jimmy's dad was an easy mark.
And it made Jimmy feel so weak and ashamed to watch it happen.
Now Saul is the con artist who goes after Kevin Wachtell's dad.
(DON WACHTELL) Yyyup!
(KEVIN) My dad never, ever did anything like that!
And Saul gets to sit there while Kevin feels weak, impotent, like less of a man.
That's key, isn't it?
At the beginning of this scene, Saul makes this thinly veiled dig at Kevin's manhood
by making a remark about his belt buckle.
(KIM) Kevin Wachtell, CEO of Mesa Verde.
(SAUL) Oh, you know what? I could tell from the impressive belt buckle.
And he asks Kevin to shake hands "man to man"
after thoroughly emasculating the guy in the parking garage.
Let's go down to that parking garage, by the way.
Saul really needs to bring Kevin down to his level of sleaze
and down to Jimmy's level of emotional pain, I feel.
And Saul succeeds in bringing Kevin down, all right.
Look how far down we are: Level Eight!
And in that basement, what does he do?
He directs Kevin.
(SAUL) Would you, would you close your eyes and imagine a world with me?
(JOHN) (V.O.) "Here's the story. Here's the role you're going to play."
It's the nail salon shoot all over again, but now
with these intoxicating boosters of money, of power
of deep-seated emotional grievance.
This is an intense triumph for Saul.
So no wonder that, back at the apartment, he's playing the chords for "Smoke on the Water."
This is his old buddy Marco's favorite song,
and it's the song that comes in at the very end of season one
after Jimmy tells Mike, basically, that
he's not going to let moral considerations hold him back anymore.
When we hear this song, it's a signal to us that Saul is living an amoral existence.
And, look, "Smoke on the Water" is a song about a casino burning to the ground.
so it's fair to say that it speaks to Saul's destructive tendencies, too.
Although that's not how Saul sees it.
This
I think pretty well captures Jimmy/Saul's self-image in this moment
Jack Moxie with his white horse, and Jimmy with his white guitar.
This argument is a tremendous performance by both the actors.
Rhea Seehorn really feels Kim's truth as she lets it all out.
And she really lays it all out, doesn't she?
This is a full accounting of their relationship.
And it's made to feel like an ending.
(KIM) Fuck you, Jimmy!
Look at the way Kim's framed here. This is an extreme framing choice
because she's facing out to the boundary.
She has no room to go.
If she were facing this way, this would be perfectly normal, right?
But she's facing to the edge. You rarely see this
because it makes it feel like the character is almost gone.
Like you almost want to hold on to them and pull them back, right?
Hmm. I wonder why they positioned her that way for this scene.
They're making us feel like this is the moment when she's finally going to say goodbye to Jimmy.
She just has to take one step to be gone.
And in fact, when she does take that step, albeit in a different shot,
she crosses Jimmy and says
(KIM) Uhh, you know what? I can't do this anymore.
The direction in this scene, the writing, the staging—all of it
is designed to make us feel like this is the moment that Kim's finally going to call it quits.
But we, too, are being played.
Because the misdirection here is just to heighten the shock of Kim's stunning pivot to this
sad impromptu proposal that ends the episode.
(KIM) Maybe we get married?
(JOHN) (V.O.) Why?
Well, to start making sense of this moment, let's go all the way back to the beginning.
Sometimes, if you don't understand anything at the end,
look for clues at the beginning of the episode
because both
across the entirety of the episode.
Almost like they're building a loom, and then the story of the episode gets woven on it, right?
So from the end, let's go back to the beginning here.
Turn our attention to that cold open where we see young Kim standing outside.
Hey, if you're a regular viewer of the breakdowns, I know you caught this.
The "red cloud"—they literally spelled it out—hanging over Kim's head.
It immediately places Kim's young life in the context of a criminal element.
Did you also notice, by the way, the yellow line—they emphasize it in a couple shots—
that Kim doesn't cross. She literally toes the line. Because of course.
Kim always wants to stay on the right side of that gold dividing line
between the good and bad of society.
Then her mom comes in.
Now, I want to back up even further in the series.
And further in the breakdowns, in fact, because in my breakdown for "The Guy For This,"
specifically, Kim's evening showdown with Mr. Acker,
I hedged my language a little bit because I wasn't sure,
but I made it clear that I really didn't buy the sad childhood story
that Kim told Mr. Acker here.
(KIM) I'd throw my things in a cardboard box and run outside in my pajamas and bare feet
Then some commenters piped up and said that they did believe her.
And they made a good case.
And it really got me thinking. I thought about it a lot because
I started to appreciate the scene even more by the fact that I could see it both ways.
Lying and telling the truth.
And I realized that that ambiguity was part of the show's design.
Better Call Saul
They're really good at holding key character info in suspense
with an eye toward the larger rhythm of the story. Right?
The show has suspended this question of Kim's childhood—of the truth of this story,
waiting to provide answers when they know it will serve the story best.
Okay, so now that suspense drops. In this exchange between Kim and her mom,
we see that the substance of Kim's story, her impoverished childhood,
must indeed be true.
(YOUNG KIM) You were drinking?
(KIM'S MOM) Kimmy. It was one beer.
Good call, commenters, by the way. I've got some smart commenters on this channel.
So the question becomes, why does this answer come now?
Why this cold open with this episode?
Here's my take. Maybe Kim's mom ran with people like Jimmy.
Unreliable con artists who left Kim and her mom to fend for themselves.
Maybe Jimmy is something like Kim's father, and we're seeing a generational echo play out
in the partner that Kim chooses for herself.
There are certainly hints of that. You can make that case. I think it's valid.
Let me frame this scene for you a little bit differently. Here's how it hit me.
There are parallels between Kim's conversation at the beginning of the episode
and her conversation with Jimmy at the end.
In both scenes, Kim is refusing to be played,
and she's refusing to accept the old lies she's heard a hundred times before from these people.
(KIM'S MOM) It was one beer.
(YOUNG KIM) Doesn't smell like one beer.
(SAUL) It will never happen again.
(KIM) That's a lie.
(JOHN) (V.O.) So Kim doesn't get in the car, but as we leave her,
where is she going?
She's going home.
She's going home to the person who tried to play her,
with this outsized burden on her back.
Now, you can say, well, Kim's just a kid, where else is she going to go?
She doesn't have any choice but to go home.
Sure. But the patterns we establish when we're young
and have limited choices
often persist when we're adults and supposedly have more freedom.
"Freedom," the key word of the Mesa Verde ad that follows this scene. Right?
And provides another lens for the episode.
(DON WACHTELL) Freedom. Freedom to ride. Freedom to explore.
To our eyes, Kim has the freedom to leave Jimmy. And she has every reason to do so—
reasons that she herself spells out. Right?
But there's something that we can't see as readily, that holds her back.
Maybe it feels strangely natural, in a way that Kim can't even express to herself,
that she would keep coming home to Jimmy.
Even though he does lie to her. Even though he does play her.
Maybe the wounded girl who still lives inside grown-up Kim Wexler
simply doesn't know where else to go.
That does it for this Basement Breakdown. Thank you for watching.
Be sure to comment, subscribe, and all that.
I really want to thank you for your words of support lately.
Look, it's a tough time. It's a tough time for all of us, but—
frankly, the feedback I've gotten from you has helped me get back on my feet
and get back to the breakdowns. I'm really grateful for it.
Always grateful for intrepid editor Brendan
Be safe, be well. I love you. See you soon. Bye.