5x07 JMM

[9.0/10] It’s just supposed to be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. You don’t get sentimental. There are practical reasons to do this thing, reasons that, coincidentally, involve your continued safety and freedom.

But then you look at the person standing across from you, a person whose joy or pain matters to you, and suddenly you can’t pretend that this is all just a ministerial act, just a necessary concession to the gods of bureaucracy or the legal system. Instead, it becomes something meaningful, something personal, that has an emotional import and connection that makes it more than just business as usual.

So yeah, Kim and Jimmy are married now. After fans reeled from last week’s cliffhanger, it turns out their union isn’t a last desperate act of mutual self-immolation or an impulse borne of bad family lessons. It’s a means of protection, so that if Kim is implicated in Jimmy’s lies once again, she can never be compelled to testify against him as her husband.

And yet, my favorite moment in an episode not short on great moments comes when the two of them face one another in some dingy courtroom, enduring the world’s least romantic wedding ceremony and, against all odds, they’re both moved by it. It’s an outstanding piece of acting from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who hardly say a word in the scene, but whose faces and subtle changes in expression let slip that however much these two people themselves this wedding is a practicality, it is actually a fleeting moment of romantic transcendence for two people who, whatever their problems, do genuinely love one another.

It sets the tone for “JMM”, an episode where people try to keep things professional, detached, and calm, until it’s contrasted with something much more personal, much more piercing, that wins out.

That’s certainly true for Kim. The episode doesn't spare us the aftermath at Mesa Verde in the wreckage of Saul’s stunt last week. “JMM” involves Kim and Rich low-key groveling before a miffed Kevin Wachtell, all but ready to fire their firm. The partners do the respectful, deferential thing, evincing the sort of demeanor that’s expected between lawyers and their clients, and take responsibility for the failures that led to Wachtell and his company getting fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars by Saul. And all it gets them is a dismissive, perturbed kiss off from Kevin, along with the admonition that Kim can do better than her shady beau.

But after walking out the door, Kim decides that she won’t take that lying down. She barges her way back in and is frank with Kevin, about how she really feels, in a way her deferential act wasn’t. She tells him that time and again they advised him against every step that led down this path, and he rejected their advice and barged ahead. It’s not entirely true (or at least omits how much fuel Kim threw on the fire), but she challenges Kevin, approaches him candidly and directly and, most important of all, personally. He respects that and, with a terse but telling response that he’ll see her on Thursday, lets her know that she’s keeping the business.

That directness matters. It builds on a frankness, a realness, that Kevin respects in Kim far more than all the fancy degrees and smarty pants advisors he low-key loathes given his faux-blue collar roots. Truth and honesty gets to him in a way that the usual routine in this situation doesn't and wouldn’t.

There’s a similar contrast between the professional and the personal in Gus’s part of the episode. His first appearance in “JMM” is in a bland boardroom meeting, where fast food CEOs are golf clapping over quarterly percentage increases and plastically delighting over the unprecedented advent of spicy curly fries (which, in fairness, do look pretty tasty).

But the tenor of the conversation changes when we see Gus, Lydia (!), and Peter Schuler behind closed doors. Breaking Bad fans will remember Herr Schuler as the Madrigal exec who had an...unfortunate reaction to the DEA’s investigation. “JMM” plants the seeds for that fatalistic response to external pressure. Schuler is deep in the muck on this, helping to fund Gus’s operation and far enough into it to know and worry about the threat posed by Lalo and the cartel. He’s panicked over auditors, desperate not to get caught, and ready to throw in the towel.

That is, until Gus makes it personal. I don’t want to speculate too deeply about the friendship that Gus and Schuler share, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy to their interactions back at the hotel. Gus persuades his benefactor to stay in the fight by holding him by the arm, looking him (and by extension, the audience) in the eye, and calling back to a shared history together. It’s that gesture, that remembrance, that keeps Schuler mollified enough to give Gus a little more rope, a little more time, far removed from the practiced smiles of the boardroom.

It’s personal for his mole too. Nacho ends up helping Gus burn down one of his own restaurants, under orders from an imprisoned Lalo, to keep the pressure on for the Salamancas and to keep up appearances for Fring. It is, as always, a cool and cathartic sequence on this show, and Gus’s chicken slide grease explosion (which he cooly walks away from, naturally), is a visual highlight.

But for Nacho, however cool this may be, it is something he does not out of loyalty or anger or a sense of rivalry, but because it’s just his job. It’s the necessary evil to protect the thing he actually cares about -- his father. In his meeting with Mike, he tells his new handler that he wants out, that he wants to whisk his dad away somewhere that the cartel can’t get him, because the separation from his “career” and his family is getting thinner by the second.

At the same time, Mike is finding peace on that front. If it weren’t for Kim and Jimmy’s strange but endearing wedding, Mike’s interludes with his granddaughter and daughter-in-law would be the sweetest thing in the episode. He reads to his son’s little girl. He reminisces with Stacey about his boy’s elementary school age antics. And he tells her that he’s better, that he’s accepted what his professional situation is and doesn't want to fight it anymore. More than anyone in the show, Mike is able to find equilibrium by accepting the “hand he’s dealt” in his job, and enjoying the private, personal things that job (hopefully) exists far away and apart from.
He does, however, still have a job to do, and right now that means getting Lalo out of prison so that Gus can force him south of the border where it’s harder for Lalo to call the shots. (And hey, if it gives Gus a chance to take the guy out, all the better). That leads to Mike crossing paths with Saul for the first time in a long time, feeding Saul the dirt (which Mike himself created), to get Lalo out on bail and back to Mexico.

Jimmy is genuinely conflicted about it. As ready, willing, and able as he’s been to represent the, shall we say, less than reputable members of the community, becoming a “friend of the cartel” is a horse of a different color. He says as much to Kim in a heartening moment of honesty and candor between them. He thinks about the money, “ranch in Montana” money, but when she asks him if it’s what he wants, he says no. It’s about the thrill of the chase, and about making a life for and with the people he cares about with Jimmy, not necessarily the size of the bankroll. Money’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself for him.

Still, Mike shows up on his doorstep, notes a mysterious benefactor, and between that and the intimidation of a scary crime lord telling him it’s better to be in front of the judge than the cartel, he does what’s expected of him as a zealous advocate and professional. He uses the info that the prosecution’s star witness was coached by “some P.I.” to cast the judge’s ire on the state, and deploys a phony wife and family to show ties to the community. It works! Despite facing a murder charge, Lalo receives a bond and can afford it despite a hefty price tag.

But something’s eating at Jimmy through all of this. In contrast to the fake fiance and moppets he scares up to sway the judge, Jimmy looks across the aisle at the real family of the victim. He sees a poor kid’s mother crying in the courtroom, where he’s helping a cold blooded killer evade justice. Even when it’s done, he peaks at them from around a corner, with his reflection on the marble helping to represent the duality of him in this moment.

It’s too neat and clean to divide this man into Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. There’s elements of each in the other. But there’s always been a side of the man whose born initials are “JMM” that wants to win at any cost, and a side of him that genuinely cares for people and can feel their pain. There are so many exit ramps in Jimmy’s life, so many places where he could have changed directions and not become the shyster we met in Breaking Bad, and this moment, where the palpable, deeply personal pain felt by this poor family cuts through his typical mercenary craftiness is one of them.

But it’s not to be. Howard Hamlin intervenes, revokes his job offer, and calls Jimmy out for his recent antics with bowling balls and prostitutes and other schemes to mess with Howard’s life. To say that Saul reacts poorly is an understatement. He lashes out at Howard, accusing him of killing Chuck, declaring that a job at HHM is beneath him, loudly and publicly promoting himself as a god, whose stature and grandiosity are so great as to make Howard’s piddling little offer to him infinitesimal.

That’s the thing about Jimmy. He didn’t become a lawyer because of a supposed deep respect and admiration for the law like Chuck. He didn’t do it as a way out and a way forward like Kim. His reasons were always personal. He wanted to impress his brother. He wanted to make Chuck proud. His business life and his private wants were always mixed and matched.

Only here, that motivation has changed. There’s still good in Jimmy, the impulse to gaze at the mournful expressions of a victim’s loved ones and have it give him pause over whether he’s doing the right thing. But the polarity of the personal has changed for him. He’s no longer just in the legal business to earn Chuck’s respect or make a living or fund his dreams with Kim. Now he wants revenge, to show Chuck’s ghost, and every living manifestation of the people and institutions and norms that have made him feel “less than” and looked down upon his whole life that he’s better, and more important, bigger than everyone who once thought less of him.

For Jimmy it always starts out as business, as a transactional thing he does without real consideration. Then, time and again, he has that moment of pause, that moment of restraint, when he thinks about the emotional impact of his choices. But then, inevitably, his personal grievances, his perceived slights, the personal baggage he’s carried for so long, shoves him back toward being Saul Goodman. No deep look into someone’s eyes can change that, however much we might want it to.