4x04 Talk

[7.3/10] Despite a few similarities (trunk shots for one), Better Call Saul rarely goes for the non-linear storytelling tricks that you might see in a Quentin Tarantino film. Sure, we may get the occasional flash forward to Cinnabon Gene, or the occasional flashback to some animating events in Jimmy McGill’s life, but it’s rare that we get the proceedings in the present in something other than chronological order.

It’s noteworthy, then, that we see the end of Mike’s little speech in group therapy before we see the beginning of it. The episode opens with a scene from Mike’s past, of him meticulously laying down a slab of concrete, and letting his son write his name in it. It’s a sweet moment, but one tinged with melancholy. And then the episode cuts to Mike in the present, looking out at a stunned room, gruffly remarking that they wanted him to talk. There’s a tease in that -- the suggestion that Mike bared his soul to this room and stunned them into silence -- leading the audience to wonder and want to know what was said to prompt such a reaction.

It’s not like Better Call Saul to try to mortgage tension from later in the episode like that. But maybe that sort of tack is necessary in an episode like “Talk”, one that is very gradual in terms of plot pacing, even by this series’s patient standards. Despite the excitement of a firefight, this isn’t an episode where much of plot-significance happens. It’s more about what’s eating all of our main characters’ up inside, what’s gnawing at their souls while they, and the audience, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The most obvious of those is Kim Wexler, who’s skulking around the public defender-trod hallways and courtrooms than Jimmy used to inhabit. A judge (played by Star Trek Voyager’s Ethan Phillips) immediately recognizes the look of a lawyer feeling morally bereft and seeking redemption, and in a bit of a supercilious way, tries to talk her out of it. It’s a nice scene, that gives the underrated Philips a chance to shine, riff on The Verdict, and softly chastise Kim for barking up the wrong tree with his low-level criminal cases if she wants to buy back her soul.

But Kim is undeterred, because of course she is. Lord knows Kim’s faced greater setbacks and discouragement than one judge telling her to make lots of money for Mesa Verde and donate some of it to charity instead. Kim is feeling the moral stain of her part in the McGill drama, and hopes that she can wash some of it away by using her legal skills to help the downtrodden.

Jimmy’s trying to remain on the straight and narrow as well. Despite initially turning down gainful employment the same way he did with the copier company, Kim’s encouragement to see a shrink is enough to convince him to, at a minimum, put on a show that he’s okay and is getting his life together. He takes a job at a shift-manager at a slow local cell phone store, and whiles away his time with nothing to do.

It’s an interesting look for Jimmy. We know from his misadventures at Davis & Main, and even his interludes picking up trash as part of his community service, that Jimmy has real trouble sitting still and doing things the normal way. He can only do things his way, even when his intentions are good. So a flip remark about people listening to phone conversations from his Hummel co-conspirator causes him to paint the windows of the store he’s managing to frame himself as selling privacy. It remains to be seen whether this is the type of (nigh-literal) coloring outside the lines that made him a bad fit for other people’s shops, or if in the brighter world of cell phone sales, his splashy style will be a well-received hit. Either way, it plants yet another seed for the flashy showmanship, that truth-bending salesmanship, that will be harvest, tarted up, and put in the most self-serving light by one Saul Goodman.

But Jimmy is at least, for the moment, able to fit his more colorful impulses into the role he’s been given, which is more grace than Nacho’s received at the moment. He continues to be a pawn between Gus and the Salamancas, having to prove loyalty to one side and feign it to the other so his forced flip isn’t found out. That continues to be a harrowing effort for Nacho. When he fingers a rival group as the ones who knocked him and Arturo over, the twins don’t wait for backup. They storm in and take the place, and Nacho’s expected to help out, having to take more lives and tear up his still wounded body in the process.

That’s enough to earn him some trust with the Salamancas (via a subtle head nod), and allows him to figure out Gus’s plans, but it also makes him miserable. As tense and dangerous as that firefight is, the key scene for Nacho here is when he returns to his father’s house. Nacho’s dad banished him for being associated with the criminal element, and seems incensed that his son would have the temerity to return, but as soon as he sees the state Nacho is in, his demeanor immediately shifts.

Whatever you want for your kids, however angry you may be when they don’t do what you believe they should, it’s almost impossible to stay mad at them when they’re in trouble, especially when they’re hurting. It’s obvious to us that the events of the last few episodes have taken a physical toll on Nacho, but it’s just as clear to Mr. Varga that it’s taken a mental toll on his son as well.

That’s what connects him to Mike in this episode. We see Mike returning to group therapy, flirting with Anita, and listening to Stacey for the first time in a long time on Better Call Saul. But even in that setting, he can’t turn off his cop instincts, which lead him to challenge the B.S. of one late-coming, story-changing attendee (who’s on loan from The Good Place), and eventually deride the entire group therapy exercise, alienating his love interest and his daughter-in-law in the process.

But that’s the beauty of Better Call Saul’s momentary exercise in playing with the timeline. Jonathan Banks does a great job showing his physical discomfort with hearing Stacey talk about potentially forgetting Matty, but that cold open is a creative way to plant the seed of what Mike was thinking in that moment. Those thoughts, those remembrances, and the pain that comes with them are always going to be dancing in his head. The scene of his little boy writing his name in wet cement is always going to be there in his mind.

That’s what makes someone lying about that sort of thing such an insult, one that Mike can’t abide. That’s what makes the idea of group therapy, of some people’s sense of performative grief, to be such anathema to an old school guy like Mike. To him, the pain is real and inescapable, leaving any efforts to prop it up, to paint it and make it palatable, seem like nonsense.

Mike isn’t exactly the kind of character who’s open with his feelings. That means the show has to find other ways to tell us the important things about what’s going on in his head: how Nacho’s predicament dredges up feelings in Mike about his own son, how he still feels pain and regret over what he lost with Matty, and how he’s willing to tear it all down, to lash out at everyone else, when that pain is too much to bear.

A little formal audaciousness goes a long way toward illuminating what this taciturn and guarded man is thinking and feeling, and it helps spice up an episode of Better Call Saul that seems to be marking time until the next big boom.