TV Review: Better Call Saul "Nacho"

Trouble calls Saul from all directions.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

One of the neater tricks that Better Call Saul is pulling thus far is tinkering with its chronology. The series opened with a glimpse of Saul’s future before flashing back to explore his past, but “Nacho” sets the Wayback even further, opening with a scene from Saul’s more distant past, when he was in hot water for a laundry list of unspecified crimes serious enough to possibly label young Jimmy McGill a sex offender (!). In this scene, we see Saul as the sort of sketchy lowlife we frequently saw loitering in his waiting room on Breaking Bad, begging his own slick lawyer, a much more cogent version of brother Chuck, to save his bacon. Better Call Saul’s status as a prequel initially seemed limiting (and, in some respects, still does), but the spin-off’s eagerness to not only offer us Saul’s pre-Walt past, but to present a cross-section of the lawyer’s entire life, makes it a more exciting and elastic prospect than it could have been with the more prosaic approach.

Of course, where Better Call Saul does still hit a wall, prequel-wise, is with the lack of any true stakes when placing Saul into danger. “Nacho” thrusts our hapless protagonist into a situation that alternately threatens his life, his freedom and his professional career, yet it’s difficult to worry too much about any of those potentialities because, once again, we know Saul won’t ultimately wind up dead, incarcerated or disbarred. On Breaking Bad, we never knew what was going to happen to Walt and Jesse from week to week, and that tantalizing uncertainty always gave that series a propulsive jolt. Jimmy McGill isn’t afforded that same breadth of possible fates and pitfalls. We know he’s going to be fine, at least until he hooks up with Heisenberg.

Yet that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a great deal of joy to be derived from Saul getting in over his head. In “Nacho,” Saul worries about the plot against the Kettleman family, whose patriarch is suspected of embezzling a large sum of cash through his role as County Treasurer, by the episode’s eponymous character. Wracked with guilt over his role in alerting this craven thug to the possibility of a huge score at the expense of the safety of this photogenically whitebread suburban clan, Saul frantically explores his options toward keeping the Kettlemans safe, first attempting to reach out to his legal colleague, husky-voiced Kim Wexler, without incriminating himself, and then just driving out to a desolate payphone and hilariously attempting to anonymously warn the family directly using a homemade voice modulator crafted from a paper-towel roll. But despite Saul’s bumbling efforts, the Kettlemans vanish and Nacho is picked up, his van being found in front of the family’s home with blood inside. Nacho swears innocence and demands that Saul get him off before the day’s end or else he’ll spill the lawyer’s involvement to the cops, who aren’t buying Saul’s Lebowski-esque insistence that the Kettlemans kidnapped themselves.

One of the key pleasures of “Nacho” is watching Saul get in deep, much as Walt often did, where he is forced to clandestinely further a criminal agenda while also not alerting the authorities to his role in the crime. But unlike Walt, Saul doesn’t have a Saul Goodman to assist him in his exploits, and Saul himself is still a long way from becoming the Saul Goodman who would be better equipped to extricate himself from his predicament. And even less like Walt, Saul is burdened with a nagging conscience and the need to do the right thing. He could simply allow Nacho to do whatever he will to the Kettlemans, as Walt almost certainly would have, yet he runs around like a madman trying to figure out how he can help, and Bob Odenkirk gets a lot of comic mileage out of Saul’s frenzied efforts to save the day without busting himself (the best being a series of desperate payphone attempts to contact Nacho that calls to mind Jon Favreau’s famous answering-machine-overloading scene from Swingers).

Better still is the episode’s efforts to finally include Mike Ehrmantraut in the proceedings beyond merely annoying Saul for improper parking validation. Mike’s role in the series is still unclear, specifically whether he’s an actual parking attendant who hasn’t yet found his calling as a criminal fixer or if he’s occupying this role as some sort of cover, but “Nacho” finally brings him into Saul’s world more significantly after their petty, unstoppable-force/immovable-object parking war leads to a physical altercation. This event, somewhat awkwardly and improbably, leads to Mike being used as a weapon by the cops to try to get Saul out of their hair as they attempt to coerce him into pressing charges to sideline Saul from his independent investigation. Mike, who can always tell which way the wind is blowing, declines to do so, realizing that Saul’s claim that the Kettlemans are behind their own disappearance actually has legs. It’s hard to swallow that Mike would have been granted that level of involvement in the proceedings based upon his largely one-sided skirmish with Saul, and harder still to imagine he would care enough about Saul’s situation to offer help and advice, but anything that puts these two into the same orbit is worth the leap.

Better Call Saul was once speculated to be more of a case-of-the-week lawyer series, sort of a Saul and Order, but thus far seems to be staking out the same serialized format as its parent series, as well that show’s tendency to explore the domino effect of how small moral compromises can reverberate into a rapidly escalating series of crises. Scaling back some of the less involving strands of the first two episodes, such as whatever is going on with Chuck, and throwing Saul right into an onslaught of trouble has really pulled the ripcord on the series, granting it some of the locomotive lifeblood that coursed through Breaking Bad’s veins. May nothing cut off its circulation anytime soon.

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