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'Better Call Saul' Review: ...Until Someone Gets Hurt

By Ethan Ames

Season Six, Episode Nine: “Fun and Games”

Warning: Contains spoilers for Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad

There's an underlying thread running through Fun and Games" that begs the question of our primary characters' successes: "At cost come ill-gotten gains?"

In “Games,” an episode with a sense of hard-hitting finality, we see all of our main characters succeeding in their machinations. Jimmy and Kim get away with their scheme to take down Howard and cover up his death. Gus gets away with killing Lalo (R.I.P., you charming psychopath) and deceiving the cartel, and he orders Mike to resume construction of the lab. And Mike gets away with "playing the cards he was dealt,” as he told Stacey in season five. But through these ill-gotten gains, all of our main characters sacrifice even more of their fundamental humanity.

Interiority dominates this episode, but not without showcasing the inevitable fallout the series has been building toward. After the high-octane, nail-biter of the previous episode, the pace of “Games" calls to mind the tone of certain episodes of The Sopranos. It’s contemplative without feeling slow, and within its stillness, the fallout from our characters’ choices speaks for itself. A quiet sickness lurks on the margins of the action; karma is coming for them all, sooner or later.

The brief vision of a more human Gus - one who can indulge in almost giddy delight in romantic connection - is almost as fascinating to witness as is the manner in which we see him tamp it down. Giancarlo Esposito plays this perfectly, with his singular physicality, in the transition from a starry-eyed smile to a cold, lizard-like blankness that we've come to know so well.

The show doesn't overly explain what we see here. Instead, we're left to deduce Gus's interiority. Any semblance of authentic human connection - or, God forbid, romance - has no place in his life, other than to endanger the other party and to bring him enormous pain, as we saw with the murder of his partner Max in a Breaking Bad flashback sequence (“Hermanos”). In a sense, Gus's humanity died with Max, or, at least, is doomed to remain forever dormant, up until his own death at the hands of Walter White. The cost of Gus’s life course is his human soul, instead replaced by the beating heart of his quest for vengeance and insured by calculated, dead-eyed artifice.

In an astounding moment, we see Mike's conscience bubbling up once again, spurring him to tell Manuel Varga of his son’s death, and to provide the man with some solace. Manuel tells Mike that revenge is not justice – that retribution against Nacho's killers is a self-serving impulse.

"My boy is gone," he says to Mike. "You gangsters and your ‘justice.’ You’re all the same." It's an illuminating moment: as viewers, we've come to love and admire Mike for both his steely, matter-of-fact competence and the compassion that lies underneath for any person who functions as a reminder or surrogate for his son, Matty. But to zoom out and look at his choices, Mike is now on his own collision course with vengeance, both for his own son’s murderers and, by proxy, Gus’s objects of blood for blood.

Mike’s relatively good nature, whatever that means within this show’s moral framework, doesn't eradicate his wrongdoings. Judging by his actions, he isn’t a good person. Not really. And Mike is doomed to meet his own ignominious end at the hands of Walter, with his nest egg gobbled up by the DEA. A pattern emerges here; there is no longevity for the human soul in this criminal underworld, and even less security.

A primary theme that Saul explores is the notion that doing good and treating even a select few people with kindness does not eradicate one's wrongs. And no other character embodies this theme better than Kim Wexler, whose simultaneous ill deeds and increasingly skewed sense of righteousness finally reach a breaking point.

After the events of "Point and Shoot," Jimmy and Kim have effectively gotten away with literal and figurative murder. Although they didn't pull the trigger, they're indirectly guilty of the conditions that led to Howard’s death. And, not to mention, they’re directly guilty of humiliating, maligning and utterly discrediting him. And, in an unintended consequence of their actions, HHM is as dead and buried as Howard, its namesakes having toppled throughout the series like the row of blood-red dominoes in Nacho's apartment.

Clearly, it was all fun and games, until someone got hurt. Until everything went horribly awry. But Kim still has a shred of actionable conscience (unlike Jimmy; more on him later). Upon successfully implementing one last act of expert gaslighting upon Howard's skeptical wife and Clifford Maine, Kim metes out her own punishment, pulling the ripcord on her life as she knows it and the life she's shared with Jimmy.

It's both a tragic and logical move for Kim. The words of Everett Acker in season five have, at last, come rushing up to meet us: the folly of Kim's attempts to justify and offset her wrongdoings with acts of goodwill. Kim's righteousness doesn't cancel out her misdeeds, especially in light of the outright destruction left in her and Jimmy’s wake. The Kim we’ve come to know and love, her terrible choices aside, is not so far gone that she’d continue to keep digging the hole she’s created (unlike Walter White, or, to an extent, Jimmy).

In “Point and Shoot,” after having erased any evidence of Howard’s murder, Mike instructed Jimmy and Kim to live a lie in perpetuity. But for Kim, it appears that living said lie is both an injustice and a prison sentence. Jimmy is more comfortable in denial, as we see in his parroting of Mike's speech about forgetting the past. But for Kim, the clarity with which she finally sees the writing on the wall (if not blood) isn't conducive to a functioning moral compass.

So, it makes sense that Kim renounces her life as she knows it, effectively ending her career as a lawyer and dissolving their marriage, in favor of an uncertain future. She still has a sense of justice, punishing herself for her misdeeds and the fundamental contradictions she's embodied up to this point. She was a lawyer and a seeker of justice, while also getting away with increasingly risky and hostile schemes. Her motivations for her actions up until this point, however murky and complex, are less relevant than this attempt to right her wrongs. Once again, it's not enough to undo what's been done, but at least she's able to pull herself off of Bad Choice Road before she commits even worse atrocities (which, as we know from Walter, Gus, and even Jimmy, is always possible).

The universe of Saul and Breaking Bad has never shied away from showing consequences in their rawest, ugliest forms. And here, we see the consequences of our characters’ choices unfurling, laying the groundwork for the events of Breaking Bad. Bad Choice Road is a path that begets worse choices. Darkness begets more darkness, and violence begets violence. As Manuel maintains, it’s a never-ending cycle.

One of the greatest ironies of the Saul universe, given its placement in the justice system, is the utter dearth of true justice throughout. Howard’s murder may forever remain obscured, his legacy defamed. The McGill brothers’ dance of mutual resentment and deceit led to the spiritual declines of both parties. And, as it now stands, Kim Wexler, the lawyer, is no more. Consequently, the so-called gains acquired by our principle characters from this episode on come with grave moral and spiritual losses. The series makes clear that vengeance can’t be conflated with justice. So, we’re left to ask ourselves what justice truly means, without much of a clear answer.

And what about Jimmy McGill? Jimmy is buried alive: beneath the chatter of his Bluetooth, an endless stream of clients, Xanax, and a gross combover. The departure of Kim is the apparent catalyst that pushed him fully over the precipice and into perdition. Instead of waking up next to Kim in their apartment, he wakes up in a rotating bed with tiger-patterned sheets, in the gaudy mansion we saw in the season six premiere, next to a sex worker. The transition is complete, and in the words of show-runner Peter Gould, the man has, at long last, become the mask. Enter Saul Goodman, "criminal" lawyer.

Gould and Vince Gilligan have maintained that Saul will change the way we view Breaking Bad. And, after the devastating breakup and disaster that preceded it, the clownish Saul Goodman of the Bad era is now cast under a cloud of smothering, inescapable sadness. The familiar man we see primping and preening before us through his ridiculous mansion is who he is as a reaction to immeasurable, cumulative pain.

While it could be argued that we’ve been watching his slow devolution over the last six seasons, Kim was the last tether to any sense of goodness and decency that Jimmy had. The sudden jump-cut from the breakup in the Saul timeline into the territory of Bad shows that her departure was the catalyst that sent him free-falling into total moral and spiritual bankruptcy.

Jimmy insisted to Kim in season five of his birth name: "That name is burned." It would be more accurate to say that it was a case of self-immolation. Jimmy has burned his own name and the last vestiges of his morality.

Now, after seven years, we’re closing in on “the end of an era,” as Rich Schweikart noted during Howard’s memorial (no doubt a dash of meta commentary).

And what are we to take away from this elegant, heartbreaking entry in the Better Call Saul canon? I believe this episode shines a light on the fallout of staying on Bad Choice Road. For Gus, Mike, and Nacho, their lives end in vain. For Kim, as of yet, she has lost everything she’s held dear to her. And we all know how Saul Goodman’s tenure as a criminal lawyer turns out (not great).

What ultimately becomes of Jimmy/Gene in Omaha still remains to be seen, and it's unlikely that it involves true happiness. But there still remains a shred of possibility that Jimmy will finally get off of Bad Choice Road, in one way or another.

After all of the destruction and pain left in his wake, is it too late for Jimmy’s soul? It’s most certainty too late to undo all that’s been done. But the Jimmy McGill we’ve come to know - the fallible, flawed man with a good heart - is still in there somewhere, underneath yet another disguise. The jury is still out on whether or not he’ll re-emerge once again, as a better man.