TV Review: Better Call Saul "Marco"

Jimmy breaks bad.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

It’s been easy to forget that Jimmy McGill, the put-upon protagonist of Better Call Saul, is the same man as Saul Goodman, the oily sleazebucket from Breaking Bad. It’s not just that Jimmy goes by a different name and largely interacts with people unfamiliar to us, but more that he simply hasn’t felt like the same individual. Jimmy is a good-hearted man who can’t catch a break, where Saul was as crooked as a barrel of snakes and almost always in control. Over and over, throughout the first nine episodes of the spin-off, we’ve seen Jimmy struggle to do what’s right, to not slip back into the “Slippin’ Jimmy” con-artist ways of his youth, only to watch him eat the pavement with each attempt. The lesson that Jimmy takes from his trials over the course of the season is that crime does pay and being a straight-arrow is for suckers, and given what he’s been through, it’s difficult to argue to the contrary.

“Marco” opens with a flashback to Jimmy’s younger days (or, more accurately, to Bob Odenkirk wearing a “young” wig) in Chicago, where he says goodbye who his partner in (literal) crime, Marco (Mel Rodriguez, currently playing the nicest man on Earth on The Last Man on Earth), as he heads off to join Chuck in Albuquerque, leaving his life of petty larceny behind for the greener pastures of the HHM mailroom. Then we cut ahead ten years to Jimmy’s return to Chicago, to Marco and to his old criminal tricks, retreating to something familiar after Chuck crushed his litigious spirit. Jimmy and Marco immediately fall back into their elaborate con games, fleecing schmucks at the local dive bar for modest scores. In these scenes, we see Jimmy reborn. He may be a skilled lawyer, but he’s a world-class flim-flam man, and embracing something he’s undeniably gifted at fills him with the purpose that he’s been lacking for far too long. Jimmy ends up returning to New Mexico, after the sudden death of Marco and the promise of a job at a Santa Fe-based law firm, thanks to some strings pulled by Kim Wexler, but relieving schnooks of their cash, that was where Jimmy excelled in a way that he has yet to achieve with his law degree.

It says a great deal about how strong the character work has been on this show in such a brief amount of time that Jimmy shirking his primo job interview and confessing to Mike that being honest and forthright is for the birds feels like a kick in the gut. We’ve seen Jimmy fight continuously to do the right thing, only to be rewarded with a mouthful of dirt each time. Had he pocketed the Kettlemans’ stolen cash or kept the Sandpiper case under his hat, he’d have had it made, but the impulse to be a good guy constantly bit him in the ass. We went into Better Call Saul expecting more face-time with the weasel who took Walt and Jesse under his wing, but were instead presented with the fairly tragic tale of a well-meaning soul being told emphatically by the universe that being a good man is a fool’s errand. It’s hard to fault Jimmy for the conclusion he comes to, yet it’s impossible not to feel a twinge of sadness at watching him succumb to his shady destiny.

Intriguingly, Better Call Saul has emerged as a companion series to Breaking Bad thematically as well as narratively. Both shows chronicle the trials and tribulations of a modern-day Job, worn down to a nub by the oppressive unfairness of the universe, who then willfully trades in his soul when he learns that he possesses a lucrative aptitude for crime that has the added benefit of imbuing his mediocre life with glorious purpose. Jimmy, obviously, doesn’t break bad as hard as Walt did – he hasn’t killed anyone nor does he manufacture addictive poison – but his downfall somehow feels more tragic simply because Walt was never nearly as sympathetic a character. There were moments early on when we did feel bad for Walt, but there was never a concerted effort to portray him as someone who truly cared about trying to do some good in the world. We never looked at Walter White and saw a man doing his damnedest to be on the side of the angels and being thwarted at every turn. We only saw a weak man stoking his ego by lustily absorbing power. There is far greater pathos inherent in Jimmy’s fall.

“Marco” is not the strongest episode of Better Call Saul. It continues the series’ trend of allowing scenes to drag on beyond their natural lifespan (witness Jimmy’s lengthy existential crisis while reading bingo numbers at the nursing home). More than that, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the series could have offered us a bit more oomph as it eased us into its long hiatus. Or at least a little more Mike, as the show’s de facto co-lead is basically reduced to the same sort of brief attendant-booth cameo we thought we had left behind in the first batch of episodes. Jimmy embracing his reptilian nature is huge, but the episode in which it occurs feels a bit lightweight.

As Better Call Saul moves forward, it’s clear that we’re going to see the path Jimmy walks toward officially becoming Saul Goodman, to caring less about impressing Chuck than making a buck, as well as how he and Mike sew up an uneasy partnership. However, I would like to see the series play fast and loose with its chronology. The producers have discussed portions of the series taking place during the timeframe of Breaking Bad - and we got a few callbacks, or call-forwards, to that show this week, as we learned that Belize has been a go-to reference for Jimmy for some time and saw a depiction of that once-referenced time he convinced a woman he was Kevin Costner – but I would also love it if the show returned to the hinterlands of Jimmy’s Cinnabon future that was briefly glimpsed in the series’ opening scene. I wouldn’t even mind another look back at Slippin’ Jimmy, even if it necessitates depicting Jimmy as the oldest-looking twentysomething in all of history. Better Call Saul had a terrific first season, but all the possibilities of where, and when, it can go from here are as tantalizing as the prospect of ambulance-chasing is about to become to James McGill.

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