3x10 Lantern

[9.1/10] If you graphed Walter White’s transition from mild-mannered science teacher to Heisenberg, there would be a few peaks and valleys, but it would pretty much be a straight, diagonal line. There were always these inciting events, these decision points, that pushed him further and further into becoming the man he eventually became. But the line between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman isn’t that neat. It’s more like a series of deepening parabolic arcs, where time and again, he reaches the brink of giving in, of becoming the shyster running cheesy ads on daytime television and linking up with criminals, and then he pulls back.

Because Jimmy has been fortunate enough to have wake up calls, to have people who pull him toward the light. Whether it’s Marco’s death or Chuck’s episode or Kim’s crash, there are moments that tell Jimmy he’s gone too far, that he needs to feed his better nature rather than settle into his Machiavellian talents. Those have been enough to keep him in the realm of the (at least mildly) righteous. Each time, some setback emerges that prompts him to gradually drift back to his flim-flamming ways, but time and again, he has the presence of mind to recognize that he’s in a bad place and hold back.

That’s one of the nice things about “Lantern,” the finale of Better Call Saul’s third season. It doesn’t overplay its hand on these sorts of moments. Kim doesn’t have some big monologue about how she’s been pushing herself too hard and it’s all Jimmy’s doing. Instead, she responds to Jimmy’s apology by declaring that she’s an adult and chose to get into the car. She comes close to jumping back into the breakneck schedule that brought her to that point and chooses to rent ten movies and actually relax and convalesce instead.

By the same token, Jimmy doesn’t have any long, drawn out confession or apologia. The look on his face, the held hand between him and Kim, the way he dotes on his friend and partner, says it all. “Lantern” plays the remorse, the realization, in Jimmy’s actions, not in the words he uses so often to bend and blister the truth. After fighting so hard to keep the office going, Jimmy immediately has a change of heart and says it doesn’t matter, setting that dream aside after seeing what it did to the woman he loved.

There’s a good deal of repentance to Jimmy here. He tries to make amends with Irene, to set things right with her and her friends, and continually comes up short. Until he reaches a strange epiphany. He admits to Kim that he’s only good at tearing things down, not at building them up, but then realizes that he can fix things by turning that quality against himself. So he uses that Jimmy McGill cleverness, this time setting up a ruse (that takes us back to chair yoga) and hot mic so he can stage a confession with Erin, the young Davis & Main associate we met back in Season 2. Jimmy applies that same manipulative quality to his own detriment, and it proves to be a clever solution to his attempts to correct his mistakes.

It’s not like Jimmy to be self-sacrificing, to make a move that will not only make him look bad, but effectively screw up the elder law niche he’d carved for himself in Albuquerque. That has the benefit of foreshadowing how Jimmy will need to find a new racket whenever his license is reinstated, but more importantly, it shows the lengths Jimmy is willing to go to, the surprisingly selfless moves he’s willing to make, for Kim and for Irene, in an effort to straighten out and fly right.

(Amid all of this fascinating, unexpected, but largely internal drama, it’s notable that Nacho’s portion of the episode is downright straightforward. The episode pays off the dummy pills it set up in “Slip”, and Hector’s debilitating infuriation at having to put his lot in with “The Chicken Man” established in “Fall”. There’s some minor tension in the scene where Nacho’s father seems poised to stand up to Hector but relents (with a great performance from Juan Carlos Cantu), a bit more when Nacho shows himself willing to train a gun on his boss rather than risk Hector hurting his father before his pill plan works, and the knowing look Gus offers after Hector succumbs. But for the most part, this is where the show simply dutifully knocks down what it previously set up.)

It ties into the symbolism that the episode is steeped in. “Lantern” opens on a young Chuck McGill reading to his brother by lantern light. He’s still supercilious (and it’s a great vocal mimic from the young actor), but the whistle of that gas lantern symbolizes the connection between the two siblings, the fact that despite Chuck’s issues, there is a light still burning for him.

That’s the difference between Chuck and Jimmy. Chuck manages to systematically alienate anyone and everyone who cares about him, from pride, from overconfidence, and from self-centeredness. We don’t know exactly what happened with Chuck and Rebecca, but we know that Chuck pissed away a promising chance for reconciliation rather than admit his condition. We see him push away Jimmy, the one person who really loved Chuck, giving him the devastating pronouncement, “you never mattered all that much to me.”

And when he goes to shake Howard’s hand, with the expectation that he will be welcomed back with open arms, Howard not only rebuffs him, not only sends him off from the firm he helped start, but he reaches into his own pocket to do it. He is so ready to be rid of Chuck, so tired of his crap, so devoted to the good of his firm, that he is willing to pay personally to be done with his erstwhile partner.

That is a wake up call of a different sort of Chuck, one that severs his last connection to the world, that sends him on a downward spiral away from the progress he’d made on coping with his condition. In “Lantern”, Jimmy admits that he’s not good at building things, only tearing things down, a pathology that seems to affect both McGills. For Chuck, that becomes more literal, as he methodically tears his own house apart trying to find the source of the electricity that is driving him deeper and deeper into his insanity.

“Lantern” revels in this, taking the time to show the escalation in Chuck’s madness when he realizes he is truly and utterly alone. It starts with simply shutting off the breakers, then checking the switches, then tearing at the walls, and finally ripping the whole place apart. We’re back to “Fly” from Breaking Bad, an unscratchable itch, an unattainable goal, that stands in for deeper issues the character can’t bear to confront directly. Better Call Saul holds the tension of these moments -- the threat that Chuck will fall off the ladder in his light-bulb snatching ardor, that he’ll electrocute himself grasping at wires buried in drywall, that he’ll cut himself on the shattered glass or sparks of his smashed electricity meter. Instead, it’s Chuck’s own deliberate hand that seemingly does him in.

The last we see of Chuck is him sitting delirious on in his torn apart living room. He is in a stupor. The whistle of the gas lantern returns. And throughout the scene, there is the knock, knock, knock of Chuck kicking at the table where it rests. Chuck’s descent is a straight line, a gradual peeling off of all the people who would give a damn about him. The lantern symbolizes his connections to other people, the quiet hum of the other lights in his life, that he continually had to snuff out to make sure his shined the brightest. That is, in a symbolic and more literal sense, his undoing. The distant crawl of flames that ends the episode sees to that.

And yet, once again, he is right about his brother. That’s the inherent tragedy of Better Call Saul. There’s room for decency in the parts of Saul Goodman’s life we never see in Breaking Bad, but whatever strides he makes here, whatever changes he commits to, we know that eventually, he backslides into becoming the huckster who helps murderers and criminals take care of their problems by any means necessary.

Before he descends into his mania, Chuck offers one last, unwittingly self-effacing assessment of his brother. He asks Jimmy why express the regret, why go through the exercise of pleading remorse and trying to change. Chuck tells his brother that he believes his feelings of regret are genuine, that he feels those feelings, but that it’ll never be enough to make him change, that he will inevitably hurt the people around him. There’s the irony that Chuck himself is scelerotic, that he is just as un-self-aware, incapable of overcoming the lesser parts of himself, but he isn’t wrong. The audience knows that and knows where kind-hearted Jimmy McGill ends up.

That’s the idea this season opened up with, and maybe the theme of the whole show -- you cannot escape your nature. Cinnabon Gene has every reason to keep his mouth shut when a young shoplifter is taken in by local cops, but he cannot help but yell out that he should ask for a lawyer. There are parts of Jimmy that he will never tamp down. Maybe, if his brother had truly loved him, had helped him to channel those parts of himself in a good direction, he could have used his charming, conning ways in service of helping old ladies with wills or other injustices. But there is a part of Jimmy always ready to slip, always ready to go to color outside the lines, to go to extremes, to get his way.

When he does that, people get hurt, people like Chuck. Jimmy is not to blame, at least not solely to blame, for his brother’s (probable) death. Chuck has brought more than enough of that on himself. To paraphrase Kim -- he’s an adult; he made his choices. But Jimmy had a hand in the catalysts for what happened to Chuck, in the things that drove him apart from Howard, that threw a monkey wrench into Chuck’s recovery, that made it impossible for him to return to practice and the life he once knew, the prospect of which seemed to energize and inspire him.

That is going to haunt him. The one thing Jimmy wanted almost as much as his brother’s love was his brother’s respect. Chuck’s likely last words to him will be essentially that he never really loved Jimmy and that he’d only really respect him if he embraced the harmful person he is deep down, and owned it, rather than fighting it. Jimmy won’t learn what happened to his brother and wake up the next morning as a fully-formed Saul Goodman, but that final thought, that warning and proclamation, will linger with him, eat him, even as he makes these grand gestures in the name of being a better man. It’s Chuck’s last awful gift to his little brother.

The changes that happen to people as they grow and evolve are rarely as neat or clean as Walter White’s elegant descent into villainy. They are an accumulation of little moments, stops and starts, peaks and valleys, until another person emerges from the slow tumult. Few people turn into monsters overnight or have one grand moment where they change completely. Instead, for most, it’s just that little by little, moment by moment, person by person, the light goes out.