TV Review: Better Call Saul "Alpine Shepherd Boy"

Better call Chuck a mental health professional.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

Another lesson Jimmy McGill learns on his path to becoming Saul Goodman is that lowbrow stunts, like his big show of “rescuing” the worker from the billboard last week, don’t net you the highest caliber of clients. We know in the future that garishly chintzy advertising techniques are Saul’s bread and butter, and that he’s perfectly fine with the riff-raff that this brand of promotion brings in. But here in his nascent Jimmy McGill days, he finds himself crestfallen when his reward for his calibrated public relations bid is a kook who wants to secede from the country and pay Jimmy in homemade currency, the inventor of an inadvertently suggestive talking toilet and a bunch of nice grandmas hammering out their wills for pocket change. Jimmy still aspires to greatness. He hasn’t yet accepted that a thriving practice can be built on a foundation of crumb-bums and schmoes.

“Alpine Shepherd Boy” could have gotten along just fine as an hour-long examination of Jimmy taking meetings with weirdoes. The early scenes of him meeting with clients are funny, if a bit cartoonish. But the focus quickly shifts to Chuck, Jimmy’s troubled brother, and the episode suffers for it. Chuck has been a problematic character in the early goings of Better Call Saul, through no fault of Michael McKean’s. Here, after his desperate bid to snag his neighbor’s paper last week, Chuck finds the cops banging on his door (that neighbor clearly really wanted that paper) and entirely unsympathetic to his claims of electromagnetic sensitivity, since the bizarre condition of Chuck’s home is suspicious enough to allow for probable cause. This lands him restrained in a hospital bed, where a doctor recommends that Jimmy have his brother committed after proving to him that Chuck’s “allergy” to electricity is purely psychological. Jimmy balks at the notion of sending his brother to an institution in spite of all the evidence that suggests this would be the best thing for him. Even in Chuck’s lamentable current state, Jimmy looks up to him, still desperate for his approval.

Chuck is the least successful major element of the series thus far. His condition was so clearly psychological from the start that receiving the confirmation in this episode lands with a thud. Frankly, it would have been a lot more interesting if Chuck actually had some weird malady that made exposure to electricity debilitating. Perhaps it’s because we only know Chuck as a character within the context of his ailment that it’s difficult to become invested in him. Thus far, we’ve only garnered that Jimmy is very eager to make Chuck proud of him, even when the man whose approval he so badly craves is cowering under a space blanket. Perhaps future flashbacks (coupled with the expectation that an old pro like McKean will eventually make this work) will help fill in Chuck as a character, but right now it’s hard not to want Jimmy to just commit the guy to get him out of the picture.

Another character that could use a bit more clarity is Kim Wexler, Jimmy’s lawyer friend. The nature of their relationship remains very murky. She doesn’t appear to be Jimmy’s girlfriend, exactly, yet the scene in Jimmy’s nail-salon home base where he’s painting her toes suggests there’s something going on under the surface here. What Kim sees in Jimmy and what he feels for her in return is not readily apparent yet, and it still feels like Kim is here because it was decided that the show needed “The Girl” rather than because someone had a solid idea for a character. Hopefully the show will crack her character in the coming weeks.

One character who doesn’t need to be cracked is good ol’ Mike, who finally does emerge from his ticket booth this week, offering a glimpse into his personal life. It’s about what we might expect it to be from Breaking Bad. He has breakfast alone in a diner, spies on a young woman that seems likely to be his estranged daughter (although since he has visitation rights to his granddaughter on Breaking Bad, I guess they’ll make amends at some point on this show) and then has cops from Philly knock on his door. We were told on Breaking Bad that something bad went down when Mike was still a Philadelphia cop. It seems that we’ll finally get an idea of what that event might have been. The focal hand-off from Jimmy to Mike (reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Slacker) is a bit jarring at first (especially since the episode ends on Mike when he hadn’t been a factor in it for the first 55 minutes), but anything that puts this great character further into play can only be worthwhile.

“Alpine Shepherd Boy” is the shakiest episode of Better Call Saul aired thus far. It lacks a clear focus and too much of it fails to hold audience interest the way previous episodes had. This is still very much a show trying to figure itself out, but it had been doing a much better job up to this point in maintaining a good flow while still sorting things out beneath the surface. This outing, on the other hand, makes too transparent how much of a work-in-progress the show remains at this point in time. It’s not enough to sound any alarms, given how enjoyable the series has been thus far, but it’s enough to hope that the remainder of this first season has a clearer sense of overall purpose.

Discuss this review with fellow SJF fans on Facebook. On Twitter, follow us at @SandwichJohnFilms, and follow author Brandon Wolfe at @BrandonTheWolfe.