Okay, you've wandered in the desert long enough.
I'm here to quench your thirst for in-depth
That's right, you're in luck.
I'm John Teti, and believe me when I tell you.
I'm about to have another Basement Breakdown.
Drink it in.
[the theme music plays, unassumingly]
All right. Season five, episode eight. "Bagman."
Phenomenal episode. Let's get right into it with a very gold cold open.
First shot of the episode is this Cadillac logo.
It's like the composer is opening a symphony with a chord in the key of Saul.
It carries the import of a transformation
because Cadillac is Saul's vehicle.
It's the car we saw him drive in
It's one of the totems of the Saul Goodman character
that we see in the
In the series premiere of Better Call Saul, very early on,
a character-establishing shot happens with this little fake-out.
We see Jimmy coming out of the courthouse, and it looks like
he's going to the white Cadillac we all know—and expect him to get into.
Instead, both he and the camera move over to the Suzuki Esteem.
This runt of a car that demands respect without earning it.
That shot showed us where Jimmy's going and where he's coming from.
The white Cadillac is Saul.
The Suzuki Esteem is Jimmy McGill.
(JIMMY) It's just little old me, in my little old Suzuki Esteem.
That "little old me" persona seems to be reaching the end of the road
in this shot we see just before the handoff.
The road that's been traveled seems to stretch off onto the horizon and beyond.
We can't tell where it ends. It's infinite.
But the road to be traveled for the Suzuki Esteem, well, it doesn't exist anymore
because of this extreme framing choice. There is no road to be traveled,
and indeed the Suzuki Esteem does reach the end of its road in this episode.
[crash, glass breaking]
In a fictional universe that obsessively uses cars as avatars for the characters,
these images strike me as pretty significant.
They suggest a transformation. A destruction of one identity and the hardening of another.
Speaking of cars as avatars, here's the cousins' car pulling up and centering just so
in a frame defined by symmetry.
And it's appropriate because, to me, the Salamanca cousins embody
a Platonic ideal of the
They're this perfectly symmetrical pair.
So much of the show's human drama is driven by its exploration of pairs.
What makes them tick? What makes two people attract or repel each other?
In
But pairs abound.
And they usually come with the question of,
"Why do these people who seem so right for each other go so wrong?" or vice versa.
Right? That two-sided question is a really basic engine of character development in this universe.
The cousins are an exception. Essentially two of the same thing. The perfect pair.
So it's not even that they "go together" or "go right" or "go wrong." They just go, to me.
Their aesthetic is comically sleek and glossy. They're devoid of personality.
They feel not quite human because we know that human pairs are messy.
These shows have spent a lot of time teaching us that lesson.
The cousins highlight that messiness by providing this extreme contrast.
And in this episode's cold open, we follow the cousins deep into the heart of this gold world.
This gold realm, the unlawful realm in
They are a picture of synchronicity here, unfolding their duffel bags.
Buzby Berkeley would be proud of their formation. But then—
Plop.
Just real quick, a little wad of money drops on the floor.
It's this whimsical way of tipping us off that there's a glitch in this operation.
The cousins are human, and mistakes will be made.
And what's the glitch? Well, I'll put it this way.
Remember that ice cream cone from earlier in the season?
I know you do, because I know you watched my ice cream breakdown.
This is the ice cream cone that flopped to the ground and attracted a swarm of ants.
Well, here's a tasty pile of greenbacks that just dropped on the ground.
And right on cue, if you'll forgive me, here's our first ant.
And later, here's a bunch more.
Saul spends most of the episode trying to outrun these ants.
while lugging two giant ice cream cones across the desert,
if you'll allow me to overextend the metaphor here.
The key message here is, you can be as clever as you can be,
but this much money, this sweet a treat, is going to attract some pests.
Let's move to the Lalo and Saul scene. Lalo says to Saul,
(LALO) Hey, you're the right guy for this.
"You're the right guy for this."
That's been a thematic touchstone of the season. One persistent question has been,
like, okay, Jimmy has created Saul Goodman, but now,
what is Saul the guy for?
What is he good at?
(SAUL) Next!
Saul imagines that he's the streetwise showman lawyer.
The number-one guy to work the levers of the legal system
with his mix of moxie, razzle-dazzle, and corner-cutting.
Then Lalo meets Saul, and Lalo's like, whoa!
Saul Goodman is the perfect guy for drugs and murder.
Thank you so much for coming into my life!
"This dude. Good idea." Right?
He said that to Nacho, but unwittingly, it was also a compliment to Jimmy, like,
"Great job creating this Saul Goodman guy because he and I will make a fantastic pair."
The whole season, we've watched Jimmy/Saul reckon with the reality that
the guy he thought he was creating—
the guy he thought he was becoming—
turns out to be ideal for something else.
It's a trajectory, by the way, that parallels Kim.
She thinks that she's created, in herself, the ultimate pro bono do-gooder.
But then it's always, ring ring, "Hello, Ms. Wexler, it's money on the line."
Kim's just too good at being Ms. Fix-it for corporate empire builders.
Her inner angels really struggle to carry her out of that orbit.
Tough to segue from "inner angels" back to Lalo, so let's just go to another quote from Lalo in this scene.
(LALO) You're nobody. Hey, no offense, but nobody's going to look twice at you.
A line that Jimmy then echoes later when he's trying to reassure Kim:
(JIMMY) No one's going to look at me twice.
This repeated "twice" I think is a reference to the Jimmy/Saul duality, but
the key, to me, here is this idea that Saul somehow has this power of invisibility.
His operative quality is that nobody will see him, according to Lalo and later according to himself.
(KIM) You sound like you are talking yourself into this.
(JIMMY) I will be okay.
Did it feel a little "off" to you, to hear Saul Goodman, this guy, described as
the person nobody would see—nobody's going to look at?
Saul Goodman, of all people, is going to escape everyone's notice?
It doesn't sound right. It sounds kind of dissonant.
And of course it's not supposed to sound right.
"No one will look at you" functions as this sort of suspended harmony
that is resolved over the course of the episode.
Touching on Kim and Jimmy real quick—this invisibility thread
shows up in this scene, contained in this idea expressed by Kim when she tells Jimmy,
(KIM) Jimmy, you are an attorney, not a bagman.
It resonates with Saul's repeated declarations of, "Yo soy abogado."
(SAUL) Yo soy abogado. Yo soy abogado. Yo soy abogado.
"I'm a lawyer." Obviously, this is his way of identifying himself to the cousins.
"I'm
But it's also this shield that he hides behind.
(SAUL) Abogado.
"I'm not one of you. I'm a protected class. Act like I'm not here."
Right? That's what "I'm a lawyer"—"Yo soy abogado"—means in this context.
"Yo soy abogado" is also the story that Saul's telling himself.
It's an attempt to make sense of this situation. Because, look.
If he has become a cartel bagman, then his life has really gone sideways.
But if he's a lawyer, well, there's order. There's rules.
The only way he can calm his deepening doubts and fear is by saying,
"I'm simply a lawyer working on behalf of my client."
The ultimate rationalization for shady behavior.
(JIMMY) Some evidence fell into my lap. I was kind of obligated to use it.
You know, for my client.
So "abogado" is this identity that Saul clings to like a blanket until what he thinks is his final moment,
when he discards that in an instant and declares himself…
(SAUL) Abogado! Abogado! El amigo del cartel! El amigo del cartel!
Before now, it's been, I "could be" a friend of the cartel. Maybe. "Kind of."
This is the first time we hear Saul actually say, in so many words, "I am a criminal."
What happens next? What do we see and hear next?
Saul screams. The slice of a speeding bullet. Blood splattering on Saul's shirt.
And then the report of Mike's rifle arrives, and Saul begins to realize, as we do,
that he wasn't actually hit.
But for a moment, we do perceive this character dying by way of a golden gun.
And the suggestion is that someone did die right here.
Someone did die right after Saul declared himself a criminal,
and I would suggest, of course, that Jimmy died.
I'm not saying, "This is the moment Jimmy McGill dies and Saul Goodman is born."
That's not how the show works. It's not flipping a switch like that.
This is more nuanced story of continuous transformation.
But of course there are still turning points.
Moments when the music comes to a crescendo.
And this episode is made to feel like one of those turning points.
The blood splattering where Jimmy's heart would be is of a piece
with other images that suggest Jimmy's death.
The Esteem doing the Wile E. Coyote routine, I already mentioned.
The bullet going through the "2nd Best Lawyer" mug.
These are images designed to make us grieve Jimmy McGill.
The essence of this episode's turning point—to me, the reason for all this grief—
is summed up by Mike's diagnosis of the broken Esteem. He says:
(MIKE) The alternator's shot.
"The alternator." The guy who alternates between the right and wrong side of the law.
Between blue and gold. Between Saul and Jimmy.
The balance has been tipped. No more alternating.
Saul Goodman plays for the gold team.
We can't deny it anymore. He can't deny it anymore, might be the more apt thing to say.
I want to talk now about hiding.
Mike and Saul, on this journey, their main imperative is to remain hidden.
Lalo's prophecy was that no one would look twice at Saul,
and the irony became that, of course, a lot of people had eyes on him.
The bandits were on him, for one.
And Mike had a bead on him all along, as we see when he takes the gas cap out of the Esteem.
That's a sly callback to the gas cap beacon that Mike discovered and then hijacked in season three.
But after the gunfight, Saul still has the bags of money
and he's still trying to fulfill Lalo's original prophecy
that nobody will see him.
And to me, all of this hiding is reflective of a longer arc for Jimmy.
After Chuck's death, Jimmy, rather than face his pain,
essentially went into hiding from everybody else and from himself.
We rarely glimpse the person we know as Jimmy anymore, right?
Haven't you felt it this season? It rarely feels like Jimmy on the screen. It's usually Saul.
And when Jimmy feels like he's being truly seen by Howard
at the end of "JMM," the previous episode—that Howard can see his pain—
Saul Goodman launches into this fireworks display to provide a distraction.
That has been the pattern. Jimmy withdraws and Saul comes to the fore.
"Bagman" now plays off that long-developing pattern with a space blanket.
Mike and Saul can't light a fire at night. They're still hiding, after all.
So Mike offers Saul a space blanket.
(MIKE) I got two of these. You want one?
(JIMMY) No, thanks.
And he refuses. But that guy saying no—that's Jimmy.
Mike might not know it. But we know it. Because Jimmy's the only person who would care.
The space blanket was Chuck's anti-electricity cloak of choice.
Does Jimmy want to wrap himself in the memory of his brotherly nemesis? I don't think so.
But the next day, Saul straps it on his back and goes bandit fishing with himself as bait.
What prompts this dramatic gambit?
Well, the immediate cause seems to be Mike's speech, when he talks about
how he's out there, and he keeps going, because he's taking care of his people.
(MIKE) I have people waiting for me.
And absolutely that has an effect.
Saul's connection for Kim, his concern for Kim, provides some fuel for him here.
Throughout the episode, he's clearly concerned about Kim's welfare. It comes up more than once.
At the same time, though,
Mike's speech is a version of this story that
we have heard the men of the
"I do bad things to protect the ones I love."
Maybe that's the ultimate rationalization, now that I think of it.
And Jimmy has used this line of thought before.
(KIM) Jesus, Jimmy!
You can excuse stabbing me in the back by making it about protecting me?
But it's a little difference with this instance of the speech because
because Mike frames it in terms of a drive to survive. Not in terms of doing bad things.
So I think Mike's speech is part of what makes Saul get up.
And I think the space blanket tactic is also inspired by this realization that
hiding is no longer sustainable.
Again, an idea that has import for Jimmy's life overall.
They can't hide anymore. They're not going to survive if they keep hiding.
And so Saul has this epiphany, or maybe he just remembers that
Saul Goodman is not the guy for hiding anyway.
He's the guy for drawing attention to himself.
And so the suspended harmony is resolved.
This is Saul's power. Not invisibility.
This flash. This literal dazzlement. This shock and awe.
Lalo was ultimately wrong in this respect:
He said that Saul was the right guy for this because "nobody's going to look twice" at him.
It turns out that Saul was the right guy for this because he can draw attention to himself so well.
He knows how to grab people's attention.
In this moment, the space blanket really has nothing to do with Chuck.
It's an inspired recasting of this blanket.
It goes from being a symbol of Chuck's psychological troubles
to becoming a symbol of Saul Goodman's power
to command attention, maybe even to blind those around him.
So in this last shot of the episode, with the space blanket drifting away,
it feels like the ghost of Chuck McGill leaving the screen to me.
But just before that last shot—don't think I'd forget—
Saul drinks pee.
Yum.
The water bottle that Saul carries over the course of this episode has the logo of Davis & Main on it.
His brief tenure at Davis & Main is the closest that Jimmy ever came
to leading the legit, "blue" life.
And that bottle is filled with the color gold,
which, as we know, embodies the lawless path he's taken.
It's like we're seeing this huge fork in the life of Jimmy McGill
in one bottle filled with pee.
They can get a lot of mileage out of strange symbols on this show.
In an episode suffused with gold, this one—this instance of gold stands out.
Because at last we see Saul drinking the gold. Ingesting it.
This is not a gold shirt. It's not a gold jacket. It's not a piece of jewelry he can put on or take off.
Right? All those external things.
With this act, the gold is inside him now. It is part of him now.
Because he's reached a point in the desert, as in life,
where he has no other option to survive.
Saul is not the guy he liked to think he was going to be.
The gold world is not the paradise he thought it was going to be.
And that is a bitter reality to swallow.
That's it! I'm done. Or should I say…
(LALO) Done!
Wow, what a phenomenal episode of television.
It's such a privilege to talk about it with you.
As always, this is my read of the episode. I really look forward to hearing your insights in the comments.
Here's a shout-out to intrepid editor Brendan Leonard.
Thanks for watching. I gotta go work on the next one. See you soon!