‘Better Call Saul’ breeds its own brand of high-stakes slapstick
If you missed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul, well, you missed one of the century’s great hours of scripted television. Vince Gilligan, Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks delivered pure, unfiltered dramatic excellence in the fifth season’s eighth episode; the strongest of this show’s run and likely to leave a legacy greater even than Breaking Bad’s seminal “Ozymandias” episode — to date my favourite of Gilligan’s achievements.
After last week’s unconventionally touching Saul/Kim wedding (the least romantic marriage I’ve maybe ever seen on TV) and Odenkirk’s pantheon “Lightning shoots from my fingertips” rant, Saul finds himself sent on a seemingly harmless mission to collect $8m in the middle of the desert from two familiar twin brothers. It goes, one might say, catastrophically, and Saul finds himself amidst a cartel shootout, sobbing as he hides from a hail of bullets behind his Suzuki Esteem. It’s terrifying; gruesome; extremely fatal. It’s also a scene without genuine dramatic concern.
Saul can’t die. He can’t die during the arc of this entire show, because he has to survive into the Breaking Bad era.
Gilligan has set himself a very narrow, very difficult window of threat: his main character can never be in true danger. Better Call Saul gives him a pre-arc, but this is only 60% of his story. A scene like this, where multiple nameless goons get shot dead horrifically, has about as much at stake as Batman The Movie’s iconic bomb disposal gag, or a Three Stooges skit involving a capsized boat. It’s cartoon horror. We wince at the death we’re witnessing, but we keep looking, because we know Saul gets out alive.
How does he do it? That’s where the show finds the real tension, the real thrill.
In this case, it’s because of Mike. Jonathan Banks’ reliable old grump is another holdover from the Breaking years; he too is safe from reckless screenwriting. Without any means of transport, the men embark on a dehydrated trek across the sand with their $8m in two duffel bags.
It’s our first opportunity in years to see Odenkirk and Banks in the same scene, nevermind with such an intensity to the proximity, and they are — as expected — dynamite. This is truly an ingenious pairing on the level of Cranston and Paul, there’s no doubt about it. While they bicker and cry and consider whether to drink their own…. y’know, Rhea Seehorn’s Kim is back in Albuquerque sorting shit out with the man who sent Saul on the mission to begin with.
Seehorn isn’t given as much to do as in the previous three or four episodes, in which she has excelled, but she inserts herself into one of Saul’s plotlines without causing a blink. She’s a natural (arguably more electric) counterpart to Odenkirk, and it’s worth stating that this fifth season has been as much Better Call Kim as it has been the story of our male hero. I’m crushed with panic every time I consider that Kim doesn’t have that Breaking Bad guarantee on her side. Highly concerning.
