[rating=10.00] “Bad Choice Road”
Season five of Better Call Saul has turned into the most intense, taut, and best season of the Breaking Bad spinoff yet. That’s saying a lot, considering how astounding the previous four seasons have been, but Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have crafted something truly remarkable this year which, somehow, pushes their already high bar even higher.
As the second to last episode this season, “Bad Choice Road” had two jobs, both of which it accomplished phenomenally. The first was to begin to tie together the disparate narrative threads that have run throughout this season—no small feat, considering just how much happened over the previous eight episodes. The second was to set up the end game for the season—a feat further complicated by the fact that the sixth season of Better Call Saul will be its last.
Gilligan and Gould more than rose to these challenges and, once again, made the case for why this series is even better than the one from which it spawned.
“Bad Choice Road” picked up almost exactly where we left off last week with “Bagman.” Jimmy and Mike are making their way out of the desert and Kim trying her best not to lose her mind over her husband’s absence. The opening split screen, brilliantly calling back to season four’s “Something Stupid,” bringing us up to speed on the conclusion of the desert narrative with both emotion and economy.
What’s interesting is the idea that it implies with the callback, however. The split screen in “Something Stupid” was used to introduce the mundane routine Jimmy and Kim were falling into as they moved in together, detailing for us the minutiae of their existence. Here, however, the stakes are considerably higher. And yet we’re forced to consider that this is their new normal, that this is their new mundane. If Jimmy succeeds at becoming a friend of the cartel, then Kim worrying about his safety will be as boring and normal as brushing teeth.
The implications here are fascinating. Despite his best intentions, Jimmy continues pulling Kim to somewhere she doesn’t want to be—or, at least, somewhere she never thought she would be. It’s certainly a place she doesn’t deserve to be. As the heart of this series, Rhea Seehorn carries the emotional weight of Better Call Saul on her shoulders. Time and time again, Kim Wexler has found herself in an undue situation simply because she did something stupid like love Jimmy McGill.
Which is good for him, at least. This whole situation has fortified Kim in ways she hasn’t been previously. She knows now who she is and who she wants to be better than she ever has before. Hence why she quit her cushy job. The morals vs. ethics question that has plagued Kim all season pushed her to where she wants to be, at least professionally. No longer satisfied by playing lackey for a giant firm and a bank, she’s reconnected with her desire to help people in bad situations.
And, to be clear, Jimmy is in a bad situation. Not only is he in deeper than he wants to be with the cartel, he’s also, for the first time, been forced to endure the repercussions of his actions. The desert situation has left Jimmy suffering from post-traumatic stress, not just because he almost died but because he watched—and even caused—so much death unfold in front of him. And so while Lalo is happy (at first, at least) and Jimmy is $100,000 richer, he is not the same.
This tells us a little more about how he became who he was when we met him in Breaking Bad. The Saul Goodman we know from that series is the Saul Goodman who had to process intense traumas and find a way to move on. We saw that process begin with his conversation with Mike after botching a simple motion in court. Jimmy still doesn’t know how to begin to process what he went through in the desert but Mike assures him that one day he will. It’s that “one day” where Saul as we knew him dwells.
In the meantime, however, Jimmy is not okay. He’s been shot at, almost killed, walked miles through the desert sun, drank his own piss, and seen multiple people die more or less because of him. He is utterly unprepared for Lalo when Lalo starts to question his story, which begins to tie the narrative threads of this season together into yet another brilliant woven Gilligan and Gould tapestry.
Lalo’s alignment with Saul puts Jimmy and Kim into the line of sight of Gus, who is currently invested in the most dangerous long con of all time. That puts Mike in the middle of Saul and Gus, forcing Mike into a position of protecting Jimmy from Lalo in order to protect Gus while simultaneously trying to protect Nacho who is also caught between Lalo and Gus. Gus clearly doesn’t care about either Jimmy or Nacho, both of whom, for one reason or another, have won Mike’s respect, putting Mike in the position of protecting his friends (well, “friends”) as much as he can while protecting his boss.
It’s all very complicated and bound to become more complicated as the season comes to a close in the next episode. And most at danger, at this point, we find Kim. Kim’s telling off of Lalo, whose suspicions of Jimmy caused him to come to his and Kim’s apartment unannounced, would have been the most incredible Kim Wexler moment of the entire series if it wasn’t also the scariest moment in either Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad.
For now at least, it seems as though Lalo is willing to buy Kim’s explanation—an explanation Kim knows to be false—and is headed back to Mexico with Nacho. But something terrifying is certainly looming, something that makes future Saul frightened out of his wits at the prospect of Lalo, and somehow involves Nacho potentially betraying his cartel boss. Does all this happen in episode 10? We’ll have to see. Either way, things are going to be different heading into the sixth and final season of Better Call Saul.
Better Call Saul airs Monday nights at 9/8c on AMC.
