By JASON MARTIN (@JMartZone – September 25, 2018)

Tempter – Stereolab (1995)

Midway between happiness and sadness, boiling but not overflowing,

fails to only make a better come back, more powerful and poignant and falls again.

 

Destructive lust for life erected, on the verge pricked up like a picket

fearing to respond to the tempting but malevolent call of the other side.

If you remember back a few seasons to when we first discovered Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler had been friends and certainly cared about one another, it wasn’t as much that fact’s existence but the way we learned it that should be meaningful to us now. We found out as Jimmy convinced Kim to engage in a con with him inside a hotel restaurant. It was more prankster, but it was also to separate a few relatively naive folks from their money.

The reason this matters today is because “Coushatta,” which spent much of its time displaying the fraud job the two of them perpetrated to help Huell Babineaux escape jail time for what he did last week to a plain clothes police officer, also showed us Kim’s propensity to be tempted into going just a little too far, because it makes her feel alive. Thus, it’s a temptation, and as she works from home and has the earphones in, it’s the Stereolab tune, “Tempter,” that plays.

The exhilaration she shows when she pushes Jimmy up against that stairwell wall and passionately kisses him is a sign of how Mesa Verde and cases such as that have completely sucked the marrow out of her life. As she sits like a zombie talking with Paige and Kevin in the meeting, agreeing with the former in order to just get it out of the way more than anything else, you observe the opposite. That’s what death looks like. She’s not happy with it, and it’s not the life she likes.

She feels the breath of life, she feels a tingle when she’s doing pro bono because she’s helping people and there’s emotion involved. Jimmy shirking rules and taking low roads is a temptation to her as well, because she’s bored to tears and she likes playing Bonnie to his Clyde on occasion. I predicted last week that we were seeing Kim’s fall right before our very eyes. A few of you reached out and said you hoped I was wrong, but also that you tended to agree with my assessment.

In one sentence at the end of last night’s episode, Kim verified my fears, at least in the short term. “Let’s do it again.” Jimmy was in the process of following Ms. Nguyen’s advice, apologizing and taking ownership for putting his girlfriend in a position of risk. “We are totally done with all of that. Over and out. No more.” That’s not what Kim Wexler wanted to hear. She wants another ride. She wants a second bite from the apple that fell from the forbidden tree.

And it’s going to either end her…or kill her.

“Coushatta” was about three people forced at least in part to be people they’re not. Kim Wexler isn’t a criminal, but she likes to play one from time to time. It challenges her intellect and feels almost like solving a puzzle. When they outsmarted Suzanne, she was breathlessly happy about it. That’s the adverb to use here because a few minutes before the plot worked, she brought the three highly paid associates into the prosecutor’s office, tried to bury her in paperwork, and it didn’t get the job done. As she exited the office, you could hear an audible exhale from a mildly stressed Kim.

Werner, a German national, tasked to build a meth superlab for Gus Fring, has been away from his family for an extended length of time. He’s never been gone this long, not in 26 years, he tells Mike. He is in the strip club with the rest of his team, but it’s not his scene. He goes and drinks and then we find out what makes him feel alive, and we find out, as we did with Kim, due to a mistake or at least a questionable piece of judgment. After buying a German beer for a local, he sits with the man and one of the man’s friends and discusses engineering. He draws a schematic on the back of a coaster and you can see the smile as he quizzes the two about the process, which includes much of what he’s doing for Gus.

It’s dangerous, Mike knows it, and basically has to tell Werner this can’t happen again, because Gus is serious and the secrecy with which the work is being done should be enough of a threat to know he has to be quiet. He says he will, he just had a little too much to drink, and Mike smoothes it over with Gus, just as he did when Kai got rowdy in the club and Ehrmantraut bought off the security personnel. But, Werner was so happy in the moments where he had enthusiastic young lads hinging on his every word about his job. That’s his passion. It cost his dad ten years of life to help design the arches of the famed Sydney Opera House.

And it’s going to cost Werner and his crew their lives. I hadn’t thought about it until I started writing this, but Gus Fring is going to execute every single one of these men when they’re finished. It’s not about the money. It’s about the knowledge. Werner’s drunken Alex Trebek engineering edition act should be the clue. No loose ends. They’re all dead.

Finally, there’s Nacho Varga, who is now trapped and owned by Gus Fring, after a failed attempt to get out of the business and do as his father prayed he would. We see the earring move at the beginning, which isn’t Nacho, and we see him blindly toss meth to two girls at his house, where he’s the equivalent of Kim Wexler in the Mesa Verde meeting. He’s just trying to get through the day. Finally, we see Eduardo arrive at the restaurant, and Nacho knows he has to be careful. He wanted out. He couldn’t get out. Unlike Werner and definitely unlike Kim, his fate may be sealed.

Or are ALL their fates sealed? That’s what we’ll find out before all is said and done.

I love Jimmy’s schemes, especially when Kim is involved, and even though we don’t want to see her wreck her life, that’s what this show is from top to bottom. Jimmy’s life in the future is destroyed, Huell has to run, we don’t even see Kim, Gus ends up with half his face blown off, Mike ends up shot dead, Hector…well, and it just kind of goes from there. Hopefully that’s not a spoiler for some of you, but Saul is the origin story of a tragedy. It’s the very definition of, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

It’s not going to end well. But it’s fun to watch the flames begin to come into focus. The Coushatta plan was genius, the cold open was so entertaining with the bus trip to Louisiana, and brilliantly, the writers used the burner phones as a key addition to the plan. The idea of strategically placing phone numbers in some of the letters, so Suzanne Ericsen would call, only to find out they were “legit” and people loved Huell for saving church parishioners from, of all things, a fire (see the above analogy), was incredible. Also of note was Julie Pearl’s work in the Suzanne role. She was really good at playing the person we wanted to see fail miserably. She was just stubborn enough in her expressions as to make it easy to pull against her at every turn.

“He really does sound like Santa Claus.” It was terrific, and I’m glad the show recognized the scheme as such and focused so much attention on it, rather than rushing through. Of course, considering this could have cost (or will cost) Kim her career and who knows what else, it needed to be pushed as important.

Better Call Saul‘s schemes, which are how we get to know the mind of Jimmy McGill (and Kim Wexler) are windows into how he and others finish up where they do. The storytelling, despite knowing much of the conclusion before it started, is the point. It’s not about the scoreboard at the end. This series is all about the battle in the middle innings, and thus far, it’s the second and third quarter (changing sports) that have been more than worth the price of that ducat.

We are midway between happiness and sadness for so many of Saul’s characters. They are boiling but not overflowing, but they’re fearing the malevolent call of the other side. A few didn’t want to answer, but have been forced into it through past decisions. Unfortunately, a few are willingly seeking out the tempter, rather than staying above the fray.

“What you owe, you owe with interest.”

That’s going to be one egregious, dare I say it…downright criminal APR isn’t it?

I’m @JMartZone. I’ve got crawdads in my pants.