[9.5/10] They got me. They really did. I believed that Saul would do it, that he would find a way to lie, cheat, and steal out of suffering any real consequences for all the pain and losses he is responsible for. I believed that he would trade in Kim's freedom and chance to make a clean break after baring her soul in exchange for a damn pint of ice cream. I have long clocked Better Call Saul as a tragedy, about a man who could have been good, and yet, through both circumstance and choice, lists inexorably toward becoming a terrible, arguably evil person. I thought this would be the final thud of his descent, selling out the one person on this Earth who loved him to feather his own nest.
Maybe Walt was right when he said that Jimmy was "always like this." Maybe Chuck was right that there something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy in the heart of his little brother. This post-Breaking Bad epilogue has been an object lesson in the depths to which Gene Takovic will stoop in order to feed his addiction and get what he wants. There would be no greater affirmation of the completeness of his craven selfishness and cruelty than throwing Kim under the bus to save himself.
Only, in the end, that's the feint, that's the trick, that's the con, on the feds and the audience. When Saul hears that Kim took his words to heart and turned herself in, facing the punishments that come with it, he can't sit idly by and profit from his own lies and bullshit. He doesn't want to sell her out; he wants to fall on the sword in front of her, make sure she knows that he knows what he did wrong.Despite his earlier protestations that his only regret was not making more money or avoiding knee damage, he wants to confess in a court of law that he regrets the choices that led him here and the pain he caused, and most of all he regrets that they led to losing her.
In that final act of showmanship and grace, he lives up to the advice Chuck gives him in the flashback scene here, that if he doesn't like the road that his bad choices have led him, there's no shame in taking a different path. Much as Walt did, at the end of the line, Saul admits his genuine motives, he accepts responsibility for his choices after years of blame and evasion. Most of all, he takes his name back, a conscious return to being the person that Kim once knew, in form and substance. It is late, very late, when it happens, but after so much, Jimmy uses his incredible skills to accept his consequences, rather than sidestep them, and he finds the better path that Kim always believed he could walk, one that she motivates him to tread.
It is a wonderful finale to this all-time great show. I had long believed that this series was a tragedy. It had to be, given where Jimmy started and where the audience knew Saul ended. But as it was always so good at doing, Better Call Saul surprised me, with a measured bit of earned redemption for its protagonist, and moving suggestion that with someone we care for and who cares of us, even the worst of us can become someone and something better. In its final episode, the series offered one more transformation -- from a tale of tragedy, to a story of hope.
(On a personal note, I just want to say thank you to everyone who read and commented on my reviews here over the years. There is truly no show that's been as rewarding for me to write about than Better Call Saul, and so much of that owes to the community of people who offered me the time and consideration to share my thoughts, offered their kind words, and helped me look at the series in new ways with their thoughtful comments. I don't know what the future holds, but I am so grateful to have been so fortunate as to share this time and these words with you.)
EDIT: One last time, here is my usual, extended review of the finale in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-series-finale-recap-saul-gone/
[8.4/10] I feel like this episode isn't going to please most people. The critical crowd is going to be annoyed at it for indulging in fan service at times and wrapping a lot of character relationships too quickly. The more casual fan crowd is going to be upset that this episode was full of yakking and sparse on action or narrative momentum. But honestly, I really liked this one. I have to imagine that the next four super-sized episodes are going to be filled to the gils with action and high drama and excitement. In the prelude to that, it's really nice to get a series of quiet moments to reflect on where everyone has been to get to this point, and the uncertainty of the future, amid the other grace notes that "The Rightful Queen" provides.
Those are the two big ideas at the center of the episode. On the one hand, you have this sense of everyone both assuming that they're doomed but worrying about what the future holds. More than one character declares that they're all dead. And yet at the same time, you have Dany and others worrying about who might have a claim to the Iron Throne or some slice of the Seven Kingdoms. You have Tyrion and others worrying about who might become (or remain) Hand to the Queen. And you have everyone from Misandei to Sansa thinking about what the world looks like when this battle is over. There's the sense of an inevitable, mortal threat, but also of concern for where things stand after they've picked up the pieces.
But there's also a sense of marking how long the journey has been to reach this point and how much everyone has changed along it. Arya is grown, with her own skills, directness, and desires that mark a sharp contrast from the aspirational little girl who went with her father to King's Landing. Jaime and Tyrion are both much different men since they were "The Golden Lion" and "The Imp" who previously set foot in Winterfell ("the perils of self-betterment"). Hell, even the likes of Podrick has become a capable warrior (and classy singer to boot.) There's a boatload of taking stock in this episode, of remembering where everyone's been and the distance between here and there.
What's more, there's tons of nice little moments. Lyanna Mormont gets a nice scene with Jorah, Gilly gets a little time to shine, and Edd gets a chance to reunite with his Night's Watch brethren. That's all on top of Tyrion's little gathering by the fire, which makes the most of the hang out vibe this episode summons when the time is right.
All-in-all, this feels like one of those Game of Thrones episodes we'll remember beyond the bigger clashes and contretemps the series usually has in store. It's a slower episode, but one that deepens our understanding of where these characters at psychologically and developmentally after nearly eight seasons, and lets us wonder about what the future holds right alongside them.
[8.4/10] I'd speculated about how Kim would depart Jimmy's world. I feared she might be killed. I thought she'd get fed up with his misdeeds and leave him over that. What I didn't expect was that it would be spurred by a moment of self-recognition born of a terrible tragedy. Kim still loves Jimmy, but she recognizes that they're "poison" together, that they get off on the joint cons, and that when they do, people get hurt. She is one of the vanishingly small number of people in this franchise to recognize that she's on a destructive path and take drastic action to stop it. It's one of the most unexpected, but ultimately satisfying ways to have her exit I can imagine.
And it puts her in good company. Jimmy is as horrified by what happened as Kim is, but he can envision moving on, he can picture maintaining this life despite where it led them, he can see forgetting this some day. Kim can't. It's the same way Gus cannot forget his former partner Max, someone he loves, whose memory lingers with him when he gazes into Don Eladio's pool and holds him back from continuing to flirt with the handsome waiter who chats him up over a glass of a wine. It's the same way Mike cannot forget his son, which leads him to tell Nacho's father the truth about what happened to his child.
Mr. Varga shrugs off Mike's promise that justice will be done, recognizing that what he's talking about is vengeance. He declares that vengeance is a cycle that doesn't stop, and we know from Breaking Bad that he's right. Gus hasn't beaten the Salamancas or Don Eladio. Mike hasn't completed his tour of duty so that he can retire and spend time with his granddaughter. Jimmy can't avoid crossing paths with the cartel again. They're all in this now, and their victories bring them no peace, only pull them deeper into the muck of this, and closer to their ignoble ends.
But Kim breaks away. She cannot forget, but she can act to stop this from happening again. Her final scene with Jimmy (for now at least) is more quietly heartbreaking than explosive and dramatic, but that suits the gravity of this. And in her absence, Jimmy is free to become Saul, as an indeterminate time jump to the man in his huckster faux-finery confirms. The last thing holding Jimmy back is gone. Saul Goodman is here. He can't stop. And despite the woman in his bed, the bedraggled secretary on his phone, and the crowd of people in his waiting room, he is alone.
EDIT: If you'd like to read my usual, longer review, you can find it here -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-9/
[8.4/10] We live in the finite. Everyone reading this has a limited amount of time on this plane of existence. Maybe you believe there’s an eternal paradise waiting on the other end. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you believe that we’re simply waves whose essence is returned to the fabric of the universe. Whatever you believe, almost all of us can agree that whatever we have here, our fragile world and fragile bodies, are not built to last.
That is both terrifying and maddening: terrifying because, like Janet, none of us truly knows what’s on the other side, and maddening because there is so much to do and see and experience even in this finite world, and given how few bearimies we have on this mortal coil, most of us will only have the chance to sample a tiny fraction of it.
So The Good Place gives us a fantasy. It’s not a traditional one, of endless bliss or perpetual pleasure or unbridled success. Instead, it imagines an afterlife where there’s time enough to become unquestionably fulfilled, to accomplish all that we could ever want, to step into the bounds of the next life or the next phase of existence or even oblivion at peace. The finale to Michael Schur’s last show, Parks and Recreation, felt like a dose of wish fulfillment, but with this ending, The Good Place blows it out of the water.
Each of our heroes receives the ultimate send-off. By definition, nearly all of them have found ultimate satisfaction, a sense of peacefulness in their existence that makes them okay to leave it, having connected with their loved ones, improved themselves, and accomplished all that they wanted to. If “One Last Ride” seemed to give the denizens of Pawnee everything they’d ever wanted, “Whenever You’re Ready” makes that approach to a series finale nigh-literal for the residents of The Good Place.
And yet, there’s a sense of melancholy to it all, if only because every person who emerges from paradise at peace and ready to leave, has to say goodbye to people who love them. Most folks take it in stride, with little more than an “oh dip” or an “aw shoot”, but there’s still something sad about people who leave loved ones behind, and whom the audience has come to know and love, bidding what is, for all intents and purposes, a final farewell.
But The Good Place finds ways to make that transcendent joy for each of our heroes feel real. Jason...completes a perfect game of Madden (controlling Blake Bortles, no less). He gets loving send-offs from his father and best friend. He enjoys one last routine with his dance crew. He inadvertently lives the life of a monk while trying to find the necklace he made for Janet. It is the combination of the idiotic, the sweet, and the unexpectedly profound, which has characterized Jason.
Tahani learns every skill she dreamed of mastering (including learning wood-working from Ron Swanson and/or Nick Offerman!). She connects with her sister and develops a loving relationship with her parents. And when it’s time to go, she realizes she has more worlds left to conquer and becomes an architect, a fitting destination for someone who was always so good at designing and creating events for the people she cares about. Hers is one of the few stories that continues, and it fits her.
Chidi doesn't have the same sort of list of boxes checked that leads him to the realization that he has nothing more to do. Sure, he’s read all of the difficult books out there and seemingly refined the new afterlife system (with help from the council) to where it’s running smoothly, almost on automatic. But his realization is more from a state of being happy with where everything is, with what he’s experienced.
He has dinner with his best friend and Eleanor’s best friends and has so many times. He’s spent endless blissful days with the love of his (after)life staring at the sunset. His mom kissed Eleanor and left lipstick on her cheek, which Eleanor’s mom wiped off. I love that. I love that it’s something more ineffable for Chidi, a sense of the world in balance from all the bonds he’s forged rather than a list of things he’s done. And I love that he felt that readiness to move on for a long time, but didn’t for Eleanor’s sake.
Look, we’re at the end of the series, and I’m still not 100% on board with Eleanor/Chidi, which is a flaw. But I want to like it. I like the idea of it. And I especially like the idea of someone being at peace, but sacrificing the need to take the next step for the sake of someone they love. The saddest part of this episode is Eleanor doing everything she can to show Chidi that there’s more to do, only to accept that the moral rule in this situation says that her equal and opposite love means letting him go. Chidi’s departure is hard, but his gifts to Eleanor are warm, and almost justify this half-formed love story that’s driven so much of the show.
Unfortunately, no matter how much peace he finds, Michael cannot walk through the door that leads to whatever comes next. So instead, he gets the thing he always wanted -- to become human, or as Eleanor puts it, a real boy. Ted Danson plays the giddiness of this to the hilt, his excitement at doing simple human things, the symbolism of him learning to play a guitar on earth, on taking pleasure in all the mundane annoyances and simple fun and things we meat-sacks take for granted. Each day of humanity is a new discovery for Michael, and there’s something invigorating about that, something heightened by his own delight at not knowing what happens next in the most human of ways.
The one character who gets the least indication of a next step is Janet. We learn that she is Dr. Manhattan, experiencing all of time at once. We see her accept Jason’s passing, hug our departing protagonists, and take steps to make herself just a touch more human to make her time with Jason a little more right. But hers is a story of persistence, of continued growth, in a way that we don’t really have for anyone else.
Along the way, the show checks in with scads of minor characters to wrap things up. We see the other test subjects having made it into The Good Place (or still being tested). We see Doug Forcett deciding to party hard now that he’s in Heaven. We see Shawn secretly enjoy the new status quo, and Vicky go deep into her new role, and The Judge...get into podcasts! As much as this show tries to get the big things right for all of its major characters, it also takes time to wrap up the little things and try not to leave any loose threads from four seasons of drop-ins across the various planes of existence.
That just leaves Eleanor. She takes the longest of any of the soul squad to be ready. She tries, becoming okay with Chidi’s absence. She overcomes her fear of being alone. But most importantly, she does what she’s come to do best -- help people better herself. There’s self-recognition in the way her final great act, the thing that makes her okay with leaving this plane and entering another, is seeing herself in Mindy St. Clair and trying to save her. The story of The Good Place is one of both self-improvement and the drive to help others do the same. Saving Mindy, caring about her, allows Eleanor to do both in one fell swoop.
So she too walks through the door, beautifully rendered as the bend between two trees in a bucolic setting. Her essence scatters through the universe, with one little brilliant speck of her wave, crashing back into Michael’s hands, reminding him of his dear friend, and inspiring him to pass on that love and sincerity back into the world. It is, as trite as it sounds, both an end and a beginning, something circular that returns the good deeds our protagonists have done, the good people they have become, into some type of cycle that helps make the rest of this place a little better.
Moments end. Lives end. T.V. shows end. The Good Place has its cake and eats it too, returning to and twisting key moments like Michael welcoming Eleanor to the afterlife, while cutting an irrevocable path from here through the crash of the wave. It embraces the way that the finite gives our existence a certain type of meaning, whether we have a million bearimies to experience the joys and wonders of the universe, or less than a hundred years to see and do and feel whatever we can. And it sends Team Cockroach home happy, wherever and whatever their new “home” may be.
In that, The Good Place is a marvel, not just because it told a story of ever-changing afterlife shenanigans, not just because it tried to tackle the crux of moral philosophy through an off-the-wall network sitcom, but because it ended a successful show, after only four seasons, by sending each of them into another phase of existence and made it meaningful. There’s a million things to do with our limited time on this planet, but watching The Good Place was an uplifting, amusing, challenging, and above all worthwhile use of those dwindling minutes, even if we’ll never have as many as Eleanor or Chidi, Michael or Tahani, Janet or Jason, or any of the other souls lucky enough to be able to choose how much eternity is enough.
[9.8/10] What an episode! It's hard to imagine an hour of television that could draw out the differences between Jimmy and Kim better than this one.
In the wake of Howard's death and all the sins she committed and enabled, Kim numbs herself in a colorless world of banal conversations and empty experiences. Everything about her day-to-date life is colorless and dull, resigning herself to a sort of limbo as both penance and protection from inflicting anymore wrongs on the world. And even there, she won't make any decisions, offer any opinions, as though she's afraid that making any choice will lead her down another bad road.
Until Gene intervenes, balks at her command to turn himself in, and tells her to do that if she's so affronted by what they did. And holy hell, she does! If there was ever an indicator of moral fortitude in the Gilliverse, it's that. The courage of your convictions it takes to have gotten away with it, lived years away from the worst things you've ever done, and still choose to return to the place where it happened and accept your punishment, legal, moral, or otherwise, is absolutely incredible. Rhea Seehorn kills it, especially as Kim comes crumbling apart on an airport shuttle, amid all the hard truths she set aside for so long coming back in one painful rush. It's a tribute to Seehorn, and to Kim, how pained and righteous Kim seems in willfully choosing to confess and suffer whatever fate comes down, unlike anyone else in Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad.
It makes her the polar opposite of Gene, who finds new depths of terribleness as the noose tightens around him. As he continues the robbery of the cancer-stricken man whose house he broke into in the last episode, he finds new lows. Even when this risky excess has worked out for him, he pushes things even further by stealing more luxury goods as time runs out. He nearly smashes in the guy's skull with an urn for his own dead pet. He bails on Jeff. And when Marion finds him out, he advances on her with such a physical threat, a dark echo of the kindness to senior citizens that once defined his legal career.
The contrast is clear. Kim will turn herself in even when she doesn't have to and has excuses and justifications she could offer. Gene resorts to ever more cruelty, fraud, and craven self-interest to save himself from facing any of the consequences he so richly deserves. Kim is right to tell Jesse Pinkman that Saul used to be good, when she knew him. The two of them will understand better than anyone else in this universe what it's like to attach yourself to someone who sheds everything that made them a decent human being. Jimmy lost the part of himself that was good, or kind, or noble, even amid his cons. But Kim held onto her moral convictions, and it's what makes her not just Jimmy's foil, but the honorable counterpoint to the awful person he became.
EDIT: Here's a link to my usual more in-depth review of the episode if anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-season-6-episode-12-recap/
[8.2/10] What a blast this is. I’m impressed both at how well WandaVision is able to replicate the 1950s sitcom vibe, especially for supernatural-themed comedies like Bewitched mixed with The Dick van Dyke show, while also including a subtle but palpable sense of existential terror beneath the three camera confines of the show.
I really enjoy how this first episode plays on the classic sitcom tropes: a couple not remembering an important date on the calendar, a wacky neighbor, a boss coming over for dinner who needs to be impressed. The show does a nice spin on them, while also feeling true to the sitcoms it’s paying homage to. I’m particularly stunned by the cast, who are able to replicate that acting style, and the editors and other behind the scenes craftsmen, who are able to replicate the rhythm, to such perfection.
What’s neat is that the episode works pretty perfectly separate and apart from its larger MCU connections as a solid old school sitcom pastiche. There’s a lot of nice setup and payoffs of gags, like Wanda repurposing a magazine's “Ways to please your man” article to distract her husband’s boss and his wife, or Vision singing “Yakety Yak” after decrying it earlier. Even the lobster door knocker routine was a fun and comical grace note to an earlier bit. As cornball as it is, there’s something charming about this sort of thing, right down to the “What do we actually do here?” gag about the computer company. And despite the light spoofing at play, this works as a solid meat and potatoes sitcom episode.
But the show goes a step further and has real fun with the fact that its leads are a self-described witch and a magical mechanical man respectively. There’s tons of amusing gags, starting with the intro, about the pair using their powers in trifling 1950s household sorts of ways. At the same time, it does well with the jokes about hiding their true identities. Vision writing off Wanda’s behavior as “European”, Wanda reassuring her neighbor that her husband is human, and Vision taking offense when a coworker tells him he’s a “walking computer” are all entertaining bits that make the most of the weird premise.
And yet, what really elevates this episode is the unnerving hints that there’s something terribly wrong going on here. It’s not hard to guess that after the events of Endgame, there’s still concerns about what happened to vision. The show plays with the melodic rhythms of the sitcom form to suggest something off at the edges here, in a really sharp way.
For instance, there’s an interstitial commercial featuring a Stark toaster, and not only does it feature the only bit of color in the black and white presentation with the beeping light, but the toasting takes just a beat too long for comfort. Likewise, the fact that Wanda and Vision can’t remember their story or how they got married is initially played for laughs, but then it becomes creepy when Mrs. Hart demands answers.
The peak of this comes when Mr. Hart chokes on his broccoli and the artifice freezes for a moment, leaving everyone paralyzed by the departure from how things work in this sort of situation. It’s a great piece of work, of a piece with the likes of Twin Peaks and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared in its quiet horror.
I’ll refrain from speculating about who’s watching the broadcast we see or who’s in the monitoring room we seem to have an eye on, but the hints at what's really going on, and how that influences the images the audience witnesses, creates a great organic mystery and another layer to the proceedings.
Overall, this is a boffo debut for the series, and I’m excited to watch more!
[7.5/10] I wondered to myself, what was the point of those Breaking Bad flashbacks. Sure, it's cool to see Walt and Jesse and the RV and even the flat bottom flask again. But I was ready to write off the trip back to Saul's first meeting with the meth-dealers in season 2 of Breaking Bad as simple fan service.
It took the scene with Mike for me to get it. The point, at least on my read, is a theme that Better Call Saul has hit time and again -- Saul can't leave well enough alone. He won't listen to Mike that this chemistry teacher is a rank amateur who's going to end up with a dark result. And Gene won't listen to Jeff or his friend who warn that it's a bad idea to darken the doorstep of another poor man stricken with cancer.
We know how things end for Saul in Breaking Bad. The choice to throw in with Walter White rather than be satisfied with his rewarding, if not exactly classy law practice ultimately ruins him, and takes away everything he'd achieved in the years before and after the events of this series. The choice to cast aside any moral hesitation and callously rob a dying man of his finances, to push the bounds of the pragmatic given how long it takes between when they dosed the guy and when Gene tries to complete the deed, will almost certainly lead to a similarly bad end.
Yes, it's neat to flashback and see some of the old faces from Breaking Bad again. It's cool to learn that Huell made it out and see Francesca get one last payday. But the takeaway is simple. Saul lost everything. He has no more fortune or empire. The cops are still after him. His former allies are either dead or have moved on. And even Kim, who asked about him, seems to want nothing to do with him anymore, via a tantalizingly opaque phone call between her and Gene.
So left with no other options, Gene makes the same choice that Slippin' Jimmy did over and over again. He goes back to running scams. He can't leave well enough alone. He does it without any joy, because he's not doing this out of pleasure. He's doing it out of desperation, addition, sadness, and loneliness. He is scraping the last bit of thrill from the bottom of the jar, and if his star-crossed visit to Walter White is any indication, it's likely to be the last step in his sad, pitiable, but always avoidable fall from grace.
EDIT: Here's my usual, more fulsome review for anyone who's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-11/
[7.7/10] Another really entertaining episode. This is more explicitly doing Bewitched and 1960s sitcoms, and there’s a lot of sheer entertainment to be had from a riff on tropes of odd couples trying to fit into their idyllic neighborhoods.
I also appreciate the recognition of classic sitcom tropes and how they’d evolved in the subsequent decades. That goes beyond just the different decor in Wanda and Vision’s home. We see them walk outside and go seemingly on location, beyond the confines of a single set. We also see many more people of color populating their white picket fence town. It’s small details, but they add up to show change.
The notion of Wanda trying to impress Dottie, the queen bee of the neighborhood (Emma Caufield, aka Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and Vision to get in good with the neighborhood watch, so as to further their joint initiative to fit in works as a great premise for the episode. There’s a lot of humor to be wrung from off-beat Wanda trying to fit in with the Stepford-esque ladies under Dottie’s purview, and awkward square Vision accidentally fitting in with the guys of the watch.
What’s more, the set piece of the two of them trying to pull off a magic act at the local talent show, where Vision is functionally drunk due to some literal gum in the works, and Wanda has to work to make people think it isn’t magic, is fantastic. There’s a great, frantic energy to the whole routine, and both Olsen and Bettany play it to the hilt.
This was also a great episode for stray lines. The running gag of people chanting “For The Children” in unison brought a lot of yuks. The poor mustached man from the prior episode going “That was my grandmother’s piano” when Wanda turns it into a wooden standee was a solid laugh. And one of the housewives in the audience asking “Is that how mirror’s work?” when Wanda uses them to try to explain Vision’s phasing hat trick had me rolling in the aisles.
But it’s not all laughs. There’s more horror at the edge of the frame that’s done quite well. The presence of an airplane that’s visibly Iron Man’s colors seems to shock Wanda as revealing that something’s wrong here. When Wanda assures Dottie that she doesn’t mean any harm, Dottie says “I don’t believe you,” in genuinely frightened tones, while a strange voice cuts through the radio, causing her to break a glass and bleed fluid that likewise breaks through the black and white color scheme. It’s another superbly done unnerving moment.
There’s also some interesting lines that have double meanings that are quickly glossed over, like their new friend saying “I don’t know why I’m here,” seemingly referring to the garden party, but also suggesting she’s been wrapped into this fantasy world somehow and doesn’t know why. There’s a lot of little bits of dialogue that work like that in this one, and it’s fascinating.
We also see and hear some loud thumping, played for laughs in the “move the beds together” scene (another wink toward classic TV changes), but also witness it used for legitimate scares. There’s some frightening imagery when the man emerges from the sewers in a beekeeper outfit and more “Who’s doing this to you, Wanda?” calls are heard, especially when Wanda uses the power to rewind the tape. The advent of a pregnancy is an interesting development, and the arrival of color with their kiss is some great effects worth.
I’m nursing a theory that this is all part of Wanda coping with the loss of Vision, feeling sick or afflicted and unwittingly creating this fantasy world out of some kind of grief, wrapping more and more people into it. Whatever the answer, color me appropriately intrigued by the mystery, charmed by the pastiche, and appropriately disturbed at the hints of something deeply wrong with all of this.
9.5/10. There are times when I feel jaded as a viewer. When it seems like despite the breadth of films out there, that I know most of the tricks, to where while I can appreciate a film's achievements in sort of a detached way, when I can even be engaged and invested in something, it doesn't necessarily reach me in the way that movies did when I first started watching them. The scope of appreciation has widened, but the emotional resonance feels muted, because I can't help but see the strings.
And then a film like Room comes along.
And Jack sees the expanse of sky for the first time. And Joy hugs her parents after not seeing them for seven years. And Robert can't even look at his grandson. And Nancy tells her daughter that she's not the only one whose life was destroyed. And Joy tells her mother that if she hadn't been taught to be nice, she might never have gone with Nick. And there's a supreme, heartbreaking look of guilt on her face when a reporter asks if she should have given her son up while in captivity. And Jack walks in on his mother's suicide attempt. And Nancy hears her grandson say "I love you." And Jack sees a real live dog, and makes a real live friend, and cuts his hair to give his mother his strength.
And I wince and I laugh and I cry and I gasp at this beautiful, devastating, intimate, life-affirming film. This is why we make movies. I love popcorn films, with the fights and flashes and epic feel, and I love the big dramas, with their scope and their sense of grandness and the talent on display, and I love those classic film comedies that mix the absurd and the irreverent and the memorable into a single hilarious package. But the films like Room simultaneously so small and so personal, yet so powerful and affecting, have a special place. These are, as Robert Ebert once put it, the empathy machine that is film working at peak efficiency, taking us into the lives of people who have suffered and been unfathomably wronged, and carries us with them as they carve out a way forward.
I didn't know I wanted a film that feels like a cross between Oldboy, Life Is Beautiful, and Boyhood, and yet the elements Room shares with each--the sense of isolation, the loving way in which a parent tries to distract their child from a continuing tragedy, the slice-of-life, impressionistic depiction of a young boy's innocence--come together to form something absolutely tremendous.
That last facet of the film, the fact that it filters the entire experience through young Jack's eyes, is a stroke of brilliance. There's a matter of factness, a certain directness or even blitheness to the way children experience the world. Using Jack as the lens through which Room tells its story renders those events not only realer, but plainer, imbuing them with the unvarnished perception of childhood. The way the film is able to get into Jack's head, to allow the audience to view these horrors and steps to recovery through his eyes, is its greatest strength and most impressive achievement.
By the same token, Brie Larson as Joy deserves all the accolades she's received for her performance here. While still a prisoner, she carries herself with such an air of both utter resignation and quiet resolve, someone who's been beaten into submission but carries on with whatever she has left. And once she returns home, the guilt that consumes her, the anger that she has for the world that kept turning without her, are palpable in every moment without fading into overwroughtness.
The film can essentially be divided into those two halves. The first is the story of Jack and Joy in Room, of the way that Joy makes unbearable circumstances livable for her son, the way that she copes and shields Jack from the horror around him, and how Jack strains and struggles to understand the idea of the world beyond those four walls, to where he can, eventually, help the two of them escape. The second half is far less intense, but still endlessly intriguing and affecting. It's a quiet domestic story about how people recover from that sort of trauma, both Joy who feels the opposite of survivor's guilt and second guesses herself, and Jack who is exposed to a big scary world, the depth and breadth of which is entirely alien to him.
But throughout both halves, there is such a pure emotional truth in each moment, from the simple joys that Jack enjoys within the home he doesn't realize is a prison, to his anger and resistance at having that fantasy shattered, to Joy's dispirited but resolute attempts to keep him happy and healthy, to the realistic, painful difficulties parents and children face when rebuilding a family seven years after a tragedy, to the wonder and fear a small boy has for what lies beyond the garden gate, and the unmitigated joy at every step taken toward some cobbled-together normalcy. Room is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, intensely personal film, that takes an unflinching yet uplifting look at how people cope and come back from the worst that our world has to offer.
[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.
Far and away the best episode Agents of Shield has ever produced. The only episode that can give it a run for its money is last season's spotlight episode on how May earned her nickname. There's a lesson there -- centering an episode on an individual story, particularly one that centers around one of the better actors in the cast, gives the show a focus that is often lacking when trying to juggle multiple intersecting plotlines at once.
This was a hell of a showcase for Elizabeth Henstridge. The production design team helped. (Production design as a plus in 'Agents of Shield"? I"m as surprised as you are.) The blue tint was a cheap way to sell the alienness of the world, but it totally worked, and the dessert topography really sold the desolateness of the environment and contributed to the sense of hopelessness in that world.
But Henstridge is what made the episode work. She sold the isolation, the small moments of crestfallen loneliness and discouragement, the little joys of success and friendship, the simple humanity of a survival story. Her burp, her wistfulness when she says "My dad would like you," and her conversations with an imaginary Fitz (a nice nod toward Fitz doing the same routine last season) all made her feel like a three-dimensional person in an extreme situation. There's a sense that this is Marvel's take on 'Castaway' or even 'Last Man on Earth', and doing this kind of laser-focused narrative requires a lot of the actors involved. These types of stories are, by necessity, character pieces; Henstridge was more than up to the challenge, and it deepened my appreciation for Simmons.
The actor who played Will was pretty good as well, and while his story could have felt too cliche, it worked in the context of the episode as a whole. Really, this felt like a well-structured science fiction short story as much as it did an episode of an ongoing series, and that's not a knock. Knowing Fitz and Simmons's relationship helped give certain moments more weight and significance, but it could almost work as a standalone piece. That's how strong and self-contained this was.
There was also a legitimate sense of menace from the planet. The zomibe-like astronaut, the tentacle creature, and the dust storms all suggested something frightening and alien about this world. It prompted so many great emotional moments from the two characters stuck on it. Doing an episode like this, so unlike AoS's usual M.O., was something of a gamble, but it paid off like gangbusters here.
[8.1/10] For the entirety of this season, Kim Wexler, and the audience, have been waiting for Jimmy McGill to genuinely deal with his brother’s death, to confront it in some way, rather than moving on as though nothing happened. From the season premiere, where he brushed off Howard’s tortured confession with a happy air, to last week’s raging out, we’ve seen Jimmy sublimate his feelings about Chuck and his brother’s death. We’ve seen him repress them, run from them, and act out because of them, but never really face them head on.
Those feelings are at the core of “Winner”, the finale of Better Call Saul’s fourth season. The latest scheme from Kim and Jimmy requires Jimmy to cry crocodile tears at Chuck’s grave on the anniversary of his death, to get earnestly involved in the scholarship grants made in Chuck’s name, to loudly but “anonymously” throw a party for the dedication of the Chuck McGill memorial law library and seem too broken up to enjoy it. It’s all a big show, to attract as many members of the local bar as possible, in the hopes that word will get back to the committee judging his appeal for reinstatement as a lawyer.
It is an effort to put on grief, wear it like a mask, for self-serving purposes. The knock on Jimmy, the thing that held him back in his first hearing, was a lack of remorse or concerning or mournfulness about his brother. So he and Kim send every signal imaginable to the legal community, in lugubrious tones, that Jimmy is a broken man still shaken up by his brother’s passing, only withholding mention of Chuck because the memory is too painful to bear.
As usual, it’s a good plan! It’s hard to know for sure whether the signs of Jimmy’s faux grief make it back to the review board, but they at least seem to be effective on his immediate prey. And Kim is there by his side, shooting down his more outlandish ideas, workshopping his speech to the committee, and helping her partner mislead people in the hopes of regaining something that was taken away from him.
But the key to it all working is Jimmy’s speech to the review board. He goes in with a plan to recite Chuck’s letter to him. Jimmy wants to let his brother’s eloquence and feeling carry the day so that he doesn't have to put on that mask of true feeling and seem insincere. But he departs from the script. He improvises. He offers what sounds like an honest assessment of his relationship with his brother, the reasons why he became a lawyer, the difficulty of gaining Chuck’s approval, the truths about Chuck’s demeanor and the hardships their sibling relationship faced at times.
The the impact of those words is heightened by the karaoke cold open that shows Jimmy as needling but caring, Chuck as condescending but proud, and the two of them as loving siblings. It clearly moves the review board. It causes Kim to wipe away a tear. And you’d have to be made of stone to sit in the audience and not feel something as Jimmy offers what sounds like a heartfelt and honest eulogy for his brother and their relationship.
But it’s a canard, a put-on, a lie. It is an echo of similar faux-sentimental assessments from Chuck, and once again, I almost believed it. Jimmy revels in having put one over on the review board. His cravenness about tugging their heartstrings astounds Kim, underlining her worst fears about the man she loves. After tearfully echoing the passage from his brother’s letter, about his pride in sharing the name McGill, Jimmy asks for a “doing business as” form to practice under a pseudonym instead. Saul Goodman, scruple-free lawyer to the seedy underbelly of Albuquerque, is born out of the ashes of his brother’s life and name.
There was no truth in Jimmy’s seemingly sincere pronouncements. There was no outpouring of grief or real feeling in that confessional moment, or if there was, it was anesthetized and calibrated to be used for dishonest purposes. For ten episodes, we’ve been waiting for Jimmy to acknowledge what his brother meant to him in some genuine way, and instead, he gives us, the review board, and most notably Kim, what turns out to be just another performance.
It is, in a strange way, a negative image of how Mike behaves in this episode. When he speaks to Gus about Werner’s disappearance, he seeks mercy on his friend’s behalf, trying to avoid a mortal response from his employer. He pleads caution, forgiveness, the possibility of correction. But when he speaks to Werner himself, he’s colder, angrier, more taciturn and practical in the way we’ve come to expect as the default for Mr. Ehrmantraut. He too has a divide between the face he presents in his profession and the one he presents to his erstwhile friend.
But at least “Winner” gives us some good cat-and-mousing in that effort. For all the heady material in Better Call Saul, it’s hard not to enjoy the petty thrills of detective work and chases gone wrong all the more. Seeing Mike pose as a concerned brother in law, and piece together where Werner’s likely to be is an absolute treat. And the way he manages to loses Lalo Salamanca -- with a gum in the ticket machine ploy -- is a lot of fun.
Lalo himself, though, really drags this portion of the episode down. He’s a little too cartoony of an antagonist on a heightened but still down-to-earth show. The fact that he crawls through the ceiling like he’s freaking Spider-Man was patently ridiculous. And his single-minded pursuit of Mike and ability to ferret details out just as well veered too far into the realm of contrivance. I appreciate the promise of greater friction to come between Gus and Mike’s operation and the Salamancas, but the bulk of Lalo’s business in this one was unnecessary, and kept Nacho, who’s been underserved in general this season, on the sidelines.
Still, it leads to a tragic, moving, heartfelt scene between Mike and Werner where what needs to be done is done. Between Werner’s naive requests to see his wife, Mike’s matter of fact resignation about what needs to happen, and Werner’s slow realization of the position he’s in all unspools slowly and painfully.
The upshot of it is simple though. Mike found a friend, and he has to kill him. There’s sadness in Mike’s eyes, evident beneath the anger that it came to this. There’s pain in Werner’s, and for yours truly, when Werner tells Mike that he thought his little escapade would result only in frustration but ultimately forgiveness and understanding from Mike, because they’re friends.
There’s not room for friends in this line of work, at least not under Gus Fring. Ultimately, it’s not up to Mike, and underneath the stars of New Mexico, at a distance, with a spark and a silhouette, we see him have to end the life of someone he’d rather let go, because it’s his job. Werner is the first man that Mike kills for Gus, but he won’t be the last. And it all starts with a man who made one mistake, that can’t be forgiven, because the powers that be would never allow it.
That’s what ties Mike’s portion of the episode to Jimmy’s. Jimmy delivers what is basically the Saul Goodman Manifesto to a young woman who was denied one of the Chuck McGill scholarships since she was caught shoplifting. He tells her that chances at respectability like that scholarship are false promises, dangled in front of lesser-thans to convince them they have a shot when they were judged harshly before they even stepped in the door. The system is stacked against you. The rules are to their benefit. So don’t abide by them. Make your success without them. Do what you have to do. Rub their nose in your success rather letting yourself be cowed by something unfair and biased against you. The world will try to define you by one mistake, but fight back and don’t let them win.
That’s a comforting worldview, one that lets the viewer off the hook to some degree. We want to like Jimmy. He’s affable. He’s fun. He’s good at what he does. It’s easy to buy in Jimmy’s own sublimated self-assessment -- that the white shoed system is unwilling to overlook less credentialed but hard-working individuals who’ve had missteps but overcome them, so he has to fight dirty. It’s tempting to buy into that narrative -- that the people with the power aren’t playing fair, so why should he? Why shouldn’t scratch, claw, fight, and cut corners along the way to getting what he deserves?
But the truth is that “the system” hasn’t done much to keep Jimmy down. Howard Hamlin wanted to give him a job after he became a lawyer. Davis & Main gave him every opportunity to succeed. Even the disciplinary committee is not unreasonable in questioning Jimmy’s penitence when he offers no remorse for the person he hurt with his scheme. Jimmy’s made plenty of his own mistakes, but it’s not “them” trying to hold Jimmy McGill down; it’s “him.”
That’s the trick of this season finale. Despite all the put-ons and subterfuge, Jimmy does genuinely reckon with the death of his brother, he just does it in the guise of unseen forces set against him rather than a cold body in the cold ground. It’s Chuck who tried to keep Jimmy from being on the same level as him. It’s Chuck who instigated the disciplinary proceedings that continue to be a thorn in Jimmy’s side. It’s Chuck who judged his younger sibling solely on his mistakes, who overlooked his hustle, who saw those missteps as all that Jimmy was or could be. When Jimmy rails against the system that he sees as holding him down, when he uses that as an excuse to color outside the lines, he’s really railing against the brother, and his feelings of anger and pain and grievance, that no longer have a living object of blame to sustain them.
Because Jimmy has to be the winner. If Jimmy is denied his reinstatement, if a young woman with a checkered past but a bright future can’t earn a scholarship in his brother’s name, if it’s ultimately judged that someone like Jimmy isn’t allowed to be in the profession of someone like Chuck, then it means that Chuck won, and Jimmy can’t bear that.
Despite the loss of his sibling, we only see Jimmy truly cry once this season. It’s not in front of the review board. It’s not in a quiet moment with Kim. It’s in his car, by himself, when the engine won’t start, when he feels stymied, when it seems like the forces Chuck set in motion will pull him under for good, cosmically confirming his brother’s harsh assessment of him.
There is grief in Jimmy McGill, pain caused by a severe loss. But that loss didn’t happen when Chuck died. It happened when Chuck broke his heart, turned him away, told him that he didn’t matter. As with others on T.V. this year, death didn’t mean the loss of a confidante for Jimmy; it meant the end of the possibility of approval, of pride, of the sort of family relationship Jimmy had always wanted and thought he might one day gain.
There is truth in those tears behind the wheel of an off-color sedan, a mourning in private to contrast with the show he puts on in public. And Saul Goodman -- the real Saul Goodman -- is born. Because if Jimmy couldn’t earn his brother’s love, then at least he can win, he can try to become what Chuck never thought he would, reach heights his brother never reached, no matter what lies he has to tell, what corners he has to cut, or who he has to hurt or deceive to get there. That’s Jimmy’s truth now; that’s his response to his Chuck’s death, and that’s the force that moves him from the decency and concern of the man we meet at the beginning Better Call Saul to the amoral, win-at-all-costs mentality that comes with the new name that distinguishes him from his brother.
[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
So did Tony die or didn't he? I think he did. I think the suddenness of the cut to black and the previous flashback to his conversation with Bobby that you don't see or hear death nods in that direction. But I also think it doesn't really matter. The point, if I may be so bold, is that the end doesn't necessarily come on schedule. It can come at any time, when you least expect it, when you're not thinking about it, in the heightened moments when you fear for your life at a safe house with an assault rifle draped across your stomach, or when you're feeling safe and enjoying a family meal at a diner.
We try to ignore that fact, to try to live as though it weren't true. You pretty much have to in order to keep living any semblance of a real life. But Tony, more than most people, lives, as Carmella notes, with a sword of damocles hanging over his head at all times. And that means that we should, as Tony once said and as AJ reminds him, remember the good times, to try to enjoy those sweet moments when we have them because we don't know how long they might last or how many opportunities we may have to find them again. It's existentialist, but a surprisingly optimistic take on it for this show.
Drawing back to the title, there's always been something the show posits as quintessentially American about Tony. In the final scene, they surround him with Americana at the diner: the friendly young couple, the cub scout troupe, the sports hero murals on the walls. Even Tony is assembling his nuclear family. He's from an immigrant family, considers himself self-made and both proud of his heritage and a part of the melting pot. Is Tony himself an aging superpower, or am I reading too much into it here?
The finale spends more time with AJ than I might prefer. But it also shows that as much as Tony wanted it, his kids cannot really escape his orbit. AJ is naive and misguided for the most part, and certainly insanely self-pitying, but he also shows a (again naive) sense of understanding about the greater tragedies in the world. His method of trying to help is an interesting one, but also a hard one, which is not typically the Sopranos way. Instead, his parents ply him with a cushy job (as the equivalent of a D-Girl, as Chris might say). And suddenly his concerns about the material world seem to drift away. He may not be a mobster, but he can be corrupted.
And Meadow has given up Tony's dream for her - becoming a pediatrician, and helping little babies. (The episode does lean hard into the "sociopaths like babies and pets" idea between this and the cat.). Instead, she's going to become a civil rights lawyers, and Tony can see her representing folks like him, marrying another mobster, and being pulled into a life he did not want for her. If there's a persistent theme to these series, it's not simply about the difficulty of changing on a personal level, it's about it on a generational level, how we carry the baggage of our parents and grandparents and other generations past, that makes it difficult to escape from their orbit. The show is a little blunt about it when Meadow says that if she hadn't seen her father dragged away so many times civil rights wouldn't be such a salient concern for her, but it's an interesting idea.
Indeed, another theme the show has kept close and blossoms in this episode is the idea that Tony taints whatever he touches. AJ is back to being a spoiled brat. Meadow is too much in the world of the mob to truly escape it. Carmela long ago figured out that she was in too deep to pull out of the life she had made with Tony. Agent Harris has gone native, cheering on the NJ crime family when he hears that Phil has been executed. Paulie talks about taking time off, but instead agrees to skipper the construction crew. And as he hits out in front of Satriale's, there are a lot of empty tables there with him.
So when the episode cuts to black, do we see a man about to get his just deserts, a tumor in the lives of friends and family being removed, or have we simply ended our time with a man who will go on to face a weapons charge? I have my thoughts on it, but more importantly than the outcome is the idea behind it. We don't know whether Tony lived or died, just like we don't know when the end is coming. There are perilous forces in the world like Tony Soprano who result in people like the motorcyclist from the last episode dying, or the comare and her father, who have no reason to suspect they'd be impacted by these events in this way. You can live the high-powered life of Junior Soprano and still have who you are taken away by forces beyond your control. Value the good times, David Chase & Co. seem to say, because we live in a state of sudden uncertainty, where the cut to black could come without warning or fanfare, and those moments become all we have, or had.
[9.0/10[ An incredibly tense hour of television. What's so impressive is that Better Call Saul accomplished this despite us knowing that, of course, Jimmy and Gus both survive. It comes down to such fantastic performances from everyone involved. You immediately buy how shaken and terrified Jimmy and Kim are, and how frightened even the normally steady Gus is at the point of Lalo's gun. Vince Gilligan's direction is outstanding, with a Hitchcockian flair for light and shadow that sets the foreboding mood of all these set pieces. And the score does the rest, helping the audience to feel the emotion of these scenes even if we rationally know the fates of several of those at the most risk.
My only mild beef is that Gus' survival feels like a bit of a cheat. It's still not clear to me why he did the gun in the superlab, and the dialogue kind of shrugs at the idea. Even in the dark, it seems like Lalo would have done better against Fring than he did. But details like Fring seeming to make one last desperate ploy to survive, still suffering wounds despite his body armor, and admitting he was over his skiis with this whole thing in the end helps make it passable. On a moment-to-moment basis, the scenes absolutely work, which covers for a lot.
What struck me the most is that closing image -- Howard and Lalo, two very different men, sharing the same fate and the same grave. It's a sign that the barrier between Jimmy's legal life and Saul's criminal life has been firmly shattered. Both lives, both worlds, are bound up in these deaths now, with the psychic weight hanging over Jimmy and Kim for the last five episodes. This never happened, but they, and Mike, will all still have to live with it. I can't wait to see how.
EDIT: If you'd like to read my usual, longer review of the episode, you can find it here -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-8/
[8.0/10] I am amazed that Better Call Saul can still be this tense, and this much fun, when there's nothing that big at stake. Yes, Cinnabon Gene still needs to protect his identity, and things could go terribly wrong if Frank the security guard found out about his involvement in this crime. But by god, at heart, this is just about stealing a minor pile of fancy-ish clothes from a Nebraska department store, and somehow it's still a total thrillride.
I think it speaks to how perfectly the show's creative team knows what they're doing at this late hour. They could make pretty much anything simultaneously exciting and meaningful. There is some inherent juice to the fact that this is the first time we've gotten a full-blown Gene Takovic episode. And it does tie off a few loose ends from the show like the cab driver who identified him as Saul or the security guard whose shoplifting bust he disrupted. But for the most part, this is just a heist for the sake of heist, to show that even so far removed when when we left him in the past and even in Breaking Bad, Jimmy's still got it.
There's a few points of real meaning and resonance though. For one, I believe Jimmy when he talks to Frank (Jerry from Parks and Rec!) about how alone he is. He's using that sad truth to manipulate someone, but I think it's genuinely how he feels, and Jimmy has a history of using real feelings for false purposes. It's underscored by the fact that the title of the episode is just one word, not "____ and ____" like every other title this season. It's a formal way to show that after so long having Kim as a partner, Jimmy is alone.
I'm also struck by the fact that he basically dresses down Jeff and his other accomplice much the same way Mike did to him in "Point and Shoot", right down to him having the other schmucks repeat his line to make sure they understand. Jimmy is still a pro, even if he's been out of the game this long. And despite the fact that he seems to take such joy in the action, he's able to put the loud shirt and louder tie back on the rack at the end of the episode. Jimmy's never been able to stop himself, but after all of this, maybe he's finally got a hold of himself.
There's still three episodes to go, and almost limitless possibilities for where the series could go from here. But it seems like Jimmy has found a tiny bit of peace and security after one last heist, at least for the time being. It's amazing that after all this drama and all this death, something so comparatively low stakes can still be such a thrill.
EDIT: Here's a link to my usual, longer review in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-10/
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.
The Star Wars Prequels had a problem, a problem that would have made George Lucas's job difficult even if he hadn't botched things like character-building and dialogue and overreliance on CGI-spectacle -- we already know how this story ends. The problem with any prequel is that it can be difficult to create stakes because you know certain people have to survive, many characters have to be in position for when you catch up to the familiar narrative, and as a result, any attempts at big twists can either feel like cheap retcons or unsatisfying foregone conclusions.
Staying within the Disney family, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has a problem too, a problem that also makes it difficult for the show to feel real and important within its interconnected universe -- its characters and plot won't, and arguably can't, be acknowledged by the series of films that spawned it. That means AoS always seems like it's sitting at the kids table, where at best, it feels like it's playing in its own disconnected corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and at worst, it feels like nothing on the show really matters.
On paper, Star Wars: The Clone Wars should have these same problems. We know where Anakin and Obi Wan's stories will lead us. We know that however affected and connected the two of them are with Ahsoka, she's not only not around by the time Revenge of the SIth happens, but she isn't even mentioned. In the abstract, it seems like Clone Wars ought to suffer just as much at creating stakes for its characters and making it feels like the events of the show matter within the wider Star Wars Universe.
And yet, in an episode like "The Wrong Jedi," a semi-series finale for the show, the creators of Clone Wars find a way not only create a satisfying and heartbreaking end to Ahsoka's arc over the course of the series, but manage to tie it into the larger conflicts between the Jedi and the Republic, and between Anakin and the Council, which come to a head in Episode III, and throw in some interesting thematic exploration as well. While the Darth Maul arc that finished in Lawless felt like the culmination of the various new characters and settings that Clone Wars has introduced over the prior five seasons, The Wrong Jedi is the culmination of the show's larger project, to create meaningful stories and character journeys that stand on their own but which also feed into and expand the world George Lucas created.
The plot of the episode is fairly straightforward, but effective. With Ahsoka having been captured, the Republic (represented here by Admiral "Don't Call Me a Grand Moff Yet" Tarkin) requests that the Jedi expel Ahsoka from the order and turn her over for a civilian, republic trial for sedition. After deliberation and objection, the Council agrees, and Ahsoka is prosecuted by Tarkin, defended by Padme, in proceedings presided over by Chancellor Palpatine, where she pleads her innocence and tries to explain that she was framed for the bombing of the Jedi Temple. In the mean time, Anakin plays detective, hunting down Ventress and gathering enough clues to figure out that it was another padewan, Barriss who orchestrated the attack on the temple and attempted to frame Ahsoka. After a thrilling ligthsaber battle, Anakin prevails and brings Barriss to the Senate to confess her crimes, and Ahsoka is acquitted.
But despite the well structured and well-executed nature of that story, it's what happens next that really sets this episode apart. The Council summons Ahsoka and apologizes, telling her that they were wrong, and implicitly offering to make her a Jedi Knight by saying that these were her Jedi trials and she has passed them. They want to welcome her back into the fold, and she seems inclined to accept, but instead chooses not to return.
It's a heartbreaking moment, because Ahsoka has been betrayed and we feel her disappointment. She has given her whole life to the order, been a good soldier and as the show has depicted for five years, followed orders, grown and matured, and become an incredibly faithful, talented, and devoted Jedi who represents the best that this collective has to offer to the world. And yet in her hour of need, the Council turned its back on her and turned her over to a tribunal where she faced death for a crime she didn't commit. Granted, the show does a good job of depicting the Council as conflicted in how they feel about Ahsoka but pulled by the admittedly convincing evidence against her and the larger political forces at play. But still, Ahsoka believed in this institution with her heart and soul, and it didn't believe in her. That fundamentally changes how she sees the Jedi Order, and however much she's become a better person because of it, changes whether she wants to be a part of an organization that would do such a thing to one of its own.
It solves an important problem for the show. For every Jedi we see short of Anakin, Obi Wan, and Yoda, there's the terrible knowledge that by Episode III, they all end up dead. So the seemingly implicit limitation of a character like Ahsoka is that either she dies off screen in ignominious fashion, or she miraculously survives Order 66 in a way that feels like a cheat. "The Wrong Jedi" manages to sidestep this problem in a way that is not only narratively satisfying, but which grounds the event in pathos and character. Ahsoka may avoid Order 66 because she's no longer a Jedi, and yet this isn't some plot convenience or quickly slapped-together escape hatch; it's a meaningful event in her life, that fits with the difficulties she's faced over the course of the show and makes this something painful and real, that would matter to her journey regardless of how it fits into the larger world of the franchise.
At the same time, the episode makes this a meaningful event for Anakin too. The Anakin Skywalker we meet in Revenge of the Sith is more capable, self-assured, and accomplished than the one we meet in Attack of the Clones, something bolstered by his trials and tribulations we've witnessed between Episodes II and III. But he is also increasingly mistrustful of the Council. The events here, though never spoken of, create a subtext to that mistrust. Anakin has a fraternal, maybe even parental love for Ahsoka. He has, in many ways, raised her over the course of the show. He stood by her and believed her and worked to prove her innocence even when all the world thought she was guilty. And yet because of the Council's decision, one that clearly frustrated Anakin even before its damage could not be undone, someone he loves feels rightfully betrayed, and is leaving. How could he not begin to doubt the Council's wisdom when they effectively turn away one of the few people in the galaxy Anakin truly cares for?
That subtext extends to the episode's villain as well. Too often in Star Wars, in both its cinematic and T.V.-centered outings, the bad guys align with the Dark Side due to a simple, frequently boring lust for power. (General Krell is the perfect example, a Jedi who basically became evil for evil's sake.) But Barriss is not simply a power hungry force-wielder, she is both an extremist and an idealist. She stands on the Senate floor and rails against the Jedi Order, not because they're weak when the Sith are strong, but because she feels that the Order has abandoned its principles, that they have become instruments of violence and war, that this once great calling has been corrupted by violence and darkness. It's a shocking rebuke, and one that offers a surprising deconstruction of the military adventures of these so-called peacekeepers that we've witnessed in Clone Wars up to this point. Barriss raises the idea that the Jedi have strayed from their guiding ideals, and that her bombing was not an attack on the Jedi, but an attack on what the Jedi have come.
Anakin is standing there when Barriss explains herself in these terms. Though he has been shown, in conversations with Tarkin no less, to understand that war may require more and different things from the Jedi than is typical, it's another seed that's planted, another event that shapes his view of the Council and the Jedi, as maybe not so monolithicly good. He too, has another reason to doubt.
Those recriminations by Barriss feed into another of the themes flitting around in the background of "The Wrong Jedi" -- a growing schism between the Jedi and the Republic government. We see people protesting in the streets. We see Tarkin putting forward the idea that the Jedi have become too insular. We see Palpatine floating the notion that the Separtists have infiltrated and betrayed the Jedi before. The story arc, and this episode in particular, helps lay the groundwork for why the government as a whole, not to mention the people, might begin to look suspiciously as these galactic guardians. Beyond Palpatine's machination, there's reason for Senators and commoners alike to doubt the Jedi. The Council, in turn, has reason to be suspicious of a government body that persuaded it to turn over, and very nearly railroaded, an innocent padewan. This too, helps to set the stage for the division and mutual mistrust on display in Revenge of the Sith.
It's an amazing feat, and it all helps to elevate Clone Wars into being more than a series of amusing series of side-adventures between the major fireworks of the films. "The Wrong Jedi" doesn't just tell a neat little standalone story. It rounds off Ahsoka's arc over the course of the series in devastating fashion. It gives a plausible, satisfying rationale for her absence from Episode III. It gives us deeper insight into Anakin and helps motivate his turn to the dark side. Unable to change the text of Revenge of the Sith, it adds meaningful, maybe even vital subtext to Anakin's mistrust of the Council, the divide between the Republic Government and the Jedi. It helps explain why the Senate writ large and the people would accept Palpatine's assertion that the Jedi had turned on him and were no longer trustworthy. It helps expand and deepen the world that so many people found so inviting and immersive when A New Hope burst onto the seen.
In short, Clone Wars in general, and "The Wrong Jedi* in particular, does the impossible. It finds a way to make the stories told meaningful within the limits of how the audience knows they have to end. It cannot affect the plot of the Star Wars films as constituted, so it adds illuminating subtext to the choices the characters make in those films and deepens our understanding of them. It centers its narrative on a new character who is close enough to the events of the films that her absence is conspicuous, but makes her journey worthwhile and her distance understandable. And, god help me, it even makes the Prequels, Revenge of the Sith especially, a little more comprehensible, a little more logically consistent, and a little more worthwhile. That alone is a miracle, and a testament to the greatness that Star Wars: Clone Wars managed to achieve by filling in the gaps of the Star Wars Universe, and creating its own, indelible characters and stories in the process.
Outstanding episode that shows how Michael, deep down, believes in what he does and the people he supervises, no matter how inept he may be at his job. There's lots of laughs in his embarrassing speech to Ryan's class, and lots of great human moments, like when he gives Pam the acceptance she needs when her art show's going poorly. Really great work on both the comedy and emotion front.
It's easy to call Oldboy a movie about a revenge. It is, after all. Lee Woo-Jin wants revenge on Oh Dae-Su, Oh Dae-Su doesn't realize it for much of the film, but he wants revenge on Lee Woo-Jin. And each man is changed tremendously in the process. Lee Woo-Jin is not the nerdy photographer we see in flashbacks, but a suave millionaire who exacts his plan in style. Oh Dae-Su is not the pudgy lech we see causing trouble at the police station in the film's beginning, but a fearless fighter and nigh-detective with real purpose in his life. And yet, neither of them is better for it.
What's striking is that the spark that begins this conflagration is so tiny. Works like Match Point and Breaking Bad have toyed with themes about tiny events and small coincidences having outsized effects on people's lives. But Oldboy outpaces them on this front. Oh Dae-Su is almost done with his school, moving on. When he sees two people fooling around by chance, he absent-mindedly repeats the gossip to his friend, barely even aware of who they were or what he was seeing. And this small action led to innumerable deaths, torture of the living both psychological and physical, and irrevocable changes for Oh Dae-Su and the lives of the people he's touched.
The hollow consumption of revenge has been examined by more than a few works, stretching back at least as far as The Scarlet Letter and the name-checked Count of Monte Cristo. But there's something bitterly ironic about all this fuss, the entire impetus from the film, beginning with some punk kid thoughtlessly relaying some vague information about something he saw but didn't really process, appreciate, or care about. The film drives the irony home by having Oh Dae-Su scribble a list of his possible enemies in his journals, and have his best friend mention the hundreds of people's lives he's ruined, and instead of the revenge stemming from his many misdeeds, it's from an offhand comment that, unbeknownst to him, had a butterfly effect.
I think that's why this film stays with me a bit. I think it's why, beyond the twists that give it a memorable "holy crap" moment, the bloody end stands out so much. Because the entire enterprise is framed as so empty, so fruitless, so damaging to all involved. Lee Woo-Jin is desperately trying to rectify the grief he feels for the loss of his sister and lover. And yet once he has, once his plan reaches fruition, he asks what he has to live for, imagines her death once more, and kills himself, laden with the realization that all his grand plans cannot heal those wounds.
And he puts Oh Dae-Su in the same position, realizing that his quest for revenge was just as much a sham, that he's done more damage by becoming this monster than if he'd simply died, or gone to live his life, or never bothered to go on this Herculean (or Batman-esque) attempt to get to the bottom of what happened. That's why at the end of the film, he asks to forget, he asks to wipe away the revenge, wipe away that past rather than let it linger with him, to clear his heart of the anger and scars inflicted upon him over the past fifteen years. And all of this, every last bit of it, begins with a brief word to a gossip that the original informant didn't even remember. The absurdity of it, the senselessness of it, lingers far beyond the shock of the film's reveals.
Despite that, it's a film that could run on plot alone. The story of a man trapped without knowledge of why or by whom, who is freed and sets out to find his captor, works at an elemental level to rope in the viewer. The opening segment depicting Oh Dae-Su's is enthralling as a psychological experiment, making us wonder what it would be like to go through something so isolating and dehumanizing. It puts us on Oh Dae-Su's side as we too wonder who would do this to him, why they did it, and hope that he gets his revenge. There's a relentless momentum to the film, that parcels out these discoveries well along the way, while guiding us through Oh Dae-Su's maladjusted reentry into the world.
Park Chan-Wook's direction adds to the atmosphere of the film with his deft camera work and creative choices in presentation. The film is bathed in dingy, Fincher-esque greens and blues that convey the grittiness of the proceedings. While the long-take fight scene is the most notable visual flourish in the film, Chan-Wook uses a great deal of creative framing to convey the emotions of his scenes, from layering Dae-Su, Woo-Jin, and the picture of Woo-Jin's sister in the same scene, to the transitions that blend one scene into another.
There are, of course, those shocking reveals. Watching the film for the second time takes away the jaw-dropping reaction at the true identity of Mi-do. (Who, on second watch, feels less developed than I remembered). But to the film's credit, the twist still works on rewatch because of the effect it has on Oh Dae-Su. His aghast response, his near insanity that once again throws him into vacillations between seeking pity and mercy and making threats and vows of retribution, while over the top, still has power even if the twist itself is muted.
There's a degree of magical realism to Oldboy. The idea that Lee Woo-Jin could pull off his convoluted scheme even with the seemingly unlimited resources at his disposal, that hypnosis could work as well and as clearly as depicted in the film, that all the players would play their roles as necessary for everything the fall the way they did is more than a little unrealistic. And yet it works because more than anything, Oldboy feels like a parable, a fable, rather than a story that aims towards realism.
It is a fable about revenge, taking whatever liberties with plausibility it needs to in order to thread the needle of its message, of the hollowed out emptiness of anger and revenge and its inability to make up for loss. The tragedy is amplified by the nigh-random incident that sets it all into motion. But Oldboy is about more than revenge. It's about the compromises we make, about the lies we tell ourselves, about the way small events can shift the tides of lives, and about the people we can become when the baser elements within us--The Monster and the Calculating Avengers--consume us.
[8.4/10] What a masterclass in tension that final scene is. Lalo ready to kill. Jimmy having lied to someone who's already proven he'll kill a civilian. Kim seeming in continuous mortal peril. And Mike with a sniper rifle ready to end things in different terms at any moment. The scene is a brilliant one, deliberately paced with the right conclusion -- Kim saving the day by making a bold move, a move with the conviction, like she always does.
It's a great episode because it's one that centers on choices. The key comes from Mike's speech to Jimmy about the decisions that we make, and the way they set us on a certain road. Jimmy is overcoming his PTSD from last week's episode and with it comes an epihpany that maybe he's gone too far, that maybe he's in too deep and should pull back. But Mike basically tells him that it's too late. It's too late for Mike, who's made peace with his role as Gus Fring's lieutenant as the place where his choices have led him. It may be too late for Nacho, who Gus seems to suggest will either continue to serve Fring's empire or be "put down." And it's too late for Jimmy, who made so many choices before he ever officially became Saul Goodman that led him here, and which he can't suddenly turn away from.
But it's not too late for Kim. She quits her job, breaks things off with Mesa Verde, and decides to pursue a life of helping the people who really need her talents. She has the vision to see where this road is heading and the courage of her conviction to go another way. She has the temerity and the fortitude and the boldness to go toe-to-toe with a crime lord and talk him down.
In short, she is the one person in this show, and maybe in all of the Breaking Bad universe, with the willingness to see herself frankly, the self-awareness to recognize what path she's on, and the strength to decide it isn't what she wants. That is, however, a hell of a way to find that out, and one hell of an episode.
EDIT: For anyone who enjoys my longer reviews for this show, you can find mine for this episode here: https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/04/better-call-saul-kim-wexler-his-girl-friday/
I have no idea how to rate this episode. It is a technical masterpiece. The imagery of Dany wreaking her terrible vengeance on King's Landing left me awe-struck. "The Bells" doesn't just give us all the amazing CGI wizardry of flaming death reigning from above and masses of bodies hacking one another to bits. It firmly and fully conveys the abject terror that being in that situation would create, anchoring the Saving Private Ryan-esque horror in the reaction of Jon, the efforts to escape by Arya, the mother and child who are the audience inserts and vehicles our sympathies as innocents caught in this maelstrom. There is such an atmosphere, such arresting visuals, and such a sad, frightening mood that Game of Thrones evokes here. You could show this episode to someone who'd never seen the show before and, while it would spoil a hell of a lot, I still think they would get and appreciate the gruesome peak of the show's "war is hell" mentality in a potent and visceral way.
But god help me, the show writes so many characters so poorly, and rushes others, that when you step away from the sheer spectacle and emotion of what you've just seen, it's hard not to just be frustrated. Jaime's eight-season path of growth and development basically goes to pot in twenty minutes of "I just love Cersei", without enough time to grapple with all he'd done and how he'd changed. Cersei crumples in the face of loss and death, in a way that doesn't track with her actions in the Battle of Blackwater. And Tyrion has gone from being smart if a little unduly optimistic to being downright naive about his sister and his queen and pretty much everyone these days. Other characters get a bit of the short shrift in terms of their journeys too, but the Lannisters in particular, who the show spent so much of its narrative juice on over the course of the series, just get butchered in terms of their character arcs here.
I am still awed by the visceral brutality of the Cleganebowl, touched by Tyrion's farewell to his brother and The Hound's last lesson to his accidental student, and I even buy Dany's descent into madness 100%. The final turn happens quickly, but the show has been hinting at Dany's dark side for a long time, and I definitely can accept losing pretty much all the people she loves or cares about it in the span of a week as spurring her to unleash that. Again, the direction, editing, and aesthetics of the Battle of King's Landing is truly masterful, letting you feel the force and fury of Dany's quest for vengeance while rooting it in the lives of the innocent people she's wasting.
But I still just can't get past the sorry destinations "The Bells" had for a number of characters I really cared about on the show. As spectacle, as emotion, and the bloody ascendance of The Mad Queen, the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones wows and more than does its job. But as a vindication and culmination of character arcs the show has been seeding and growing for eight years now, there is so much to be disappointed with her, that it tarnishes the episode's otherwise stunning technical and emotional achievements.
[9.5/10] Such a classic. An absolute masterpiece of cringe comedy that not only plays out the barely-restrained resentments between Michael and Jan, but adds so much weird detail to their lives together, until you get the most awkward party of all time. Everyone in the cast is on fire here, and it's reassuring that after the writer's strike, everyone put their heads together and came up with this bit of brilliance.
[9.8/10] One of the kindest things you can say about Better Call Saul is that it rarely feels like Breaking Bad anymore. Sure, there’s still stories that intersect with the cartel, and a prequel to the war between Gus and the Salamancas, and the time-honored practice of writing your characters into a corner and forcing themselves to figure a way out of it. But despite its roots, Better Call Saul has become its own thing, with its own voice, own world, and own style that’s connected to the story of Walter White, but distinct from it.
And yet, something about “Bagman” feels distinctively Breaking Bad-esque. Maybe it’s that Vince Gilligan is in the director’s chair. Maybe it’s so much time spent beneath the New Mexico sun. Maybe it’s the tale of an uncommonly common schmuck crossing paths with drug-runners and getting more than he bargained for. Whatever it is, stranding Saul and Mike in the desert wouldn’t feel out of place on Better Call Saul’s predecessor.
The sand-swept isolation calls to mind Walt and Jesse’s similar struggles in “4 Days Out.” The small scale personal story told within a larger moment makes “Bagman” feel strikingly like “Fly.” Hell, for folks whose prestige television memories run back twenty years ago, the episode has a whiff of Christopher and Paulie stuck in the Pine Barrens.
There’s a reason television shows, not just Breaking Bad, return to these sorts of stories of struggle and isolation and mutual survival. They give creators the chance to put characters through hell, challenges that they may or may not be prepared to face, and in those challenges, reveal them.
Because the episode reveals Saul Goodman. It humbles him. It both brings him down to one of his lowest points, his willingness to die and give up and fail in a way the crafty huckster never has before, only to build him back up when he’s reminded what’s at stake. This episode isn’t Jimmy McGill’s finest hour, but it may be Better Call Saul’s.
The setup for the episode comes from an off-hand comment in last week’s outing. Lalo needs seven million dollars to make bond and taps Saul to pick it up for him. There’s a logic there. The Cousins are too hot to avoid suspicion from the Salamancas’ competitors. Nacho is reliable, but Lalo correctly intuits that this kind of money would be enough to send him packing. Jimmy is too plain, too apart from these internecine squabbles, to arouse that kind of suspicion, so he’s nominated for the job.
He doesn't want it though. He knows it’s dangerous. He told Kim he wouldn’t do it. But he bargains his way to a hundred thousand dollar commission and can’t bear to turn that kind of money. Jimmy tries to break it to his wife gently, plying her with fajitas and old el paso (exotic!), except that Kim knows better. She is aghast. She practically demands that he back out. She all but pleads with him, please that Jimmy, naturally, ignores.
And why wouldn’t he? Saul Goodman is invinceable. He has never found a scrape or a tight spot that he couldn’t wriggle his way out of. He is, as he told Howard last week, a god. So why not ramble into the desert, take a pick-up from murderous crime bosses, and drive away crooning a bastardized version of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? No fuss, no muss.
Until, of course, everything goes pear shaped.
The striking thing about “Bagman” is not just that this plan goes horribly wrong. It was practically destined to. Rivals, or simple opportunists, tipped off by a mole in a Salamanca safehouse, ambush Saul, there’s a firefight that leaves him cowering and in shock, until Mike saves the day. This isn’t the first exchange of gunfire on Better Call Saul or the first scheme that hit a major bump for Jimmy.
What stands out, though, is how ill-equipped he is to handle this. Normally Jimmy is the expert, the resourceful planner, who uses his silver tongue and conman instincts to work something out. Here, though, he has nothing to fall back on, nothing to do, but contemplate his own hubris. Bullet barrages are not his game. Survivalist treks through the desert are not his specialty. Saul is, in short, completely out of his depth, in a way we’ve never really seen before.
But Mike isn’t. Mike is very much in his element. One of the great features of episodes like this one is that forcing two people to work together like highlights the differences between them. Mike is, in his own way, just as talented and resourceful as Jimmy is. As his Private Investigator routine showed, he can even pull a con just like Saul can.
The difference is that Mike is tough. He is determined, with a background in special forces that makes him resilient in these circumstances. He came prepared for this in a way that Jimmy didn’t. He was ready for contingencies and failsafes that Jimmy wasn’t. And even he is tested and pushed to his limits. What does that leave for a softie like Jimmy McGill?
It leaves a man to be brought low by his failure to realize what he’s getting into. Gilligan uses the tricks of the camera not only to once again show us the scenic beauty of the New Mexico landscape, but to contrast this colorful shnook, at home in the circles where he operates, from the harsh environs he now finds himself wholly unprepared to deal with.
Gilligan shows The Cousins looming on either side of a close up of the back of Jimmy’s head, creating the image of intimidation. He gives us Mike and Saul wandering through a valley as the clouds sweep overhead, communicating how small they are in the far stretches of this place. He uses glow sticks to light their faces in different colors, providing high contrast so we see every weathered line. He puts the camera in the field of vision of a cactus, a shoe, or a hole in the ground, forcing us to look upon our heroes from unnatural angles, dwarfed by what’s around them. He highlights the unforgiving, if gorgeous, features of this arid deathtrap that threatens to tear down the seasoned vet and the hapless civilian in turn.
In the midst of that struggle, the show stealthily nods to little symbols, little pieces of who Jimmy and Mike have been and what led them to this moment, as so many of them end up either lost or just what the pair need in a given moment.
Mike saves Jimmy’s life with a sniper’s rifle, presumably the same one he bought to kill Hector in “Klick.” When he packs up what’s worth scavenging from Jimmy’s car, he takes the gas cap, likely having used it to track Jimmy just as Gus tracked him in “Mabel.” The Mike we see resolutely trudging his way through the desert is the product of so much, some things we’ve seen, and a great deal we haven’t, but those things have made him better able to face this moment.
Instead, Jimmy sees the things that have defined him slowly stripped away. His mismatched colored Suzuki Esteem ends up flipped into a ditch. The “Second Best Lawyer” mug Kim gifted him, one he’s desperate to hang onto, ends up with a bullet through it. He sweats through one of his colorful suits and strips it for protection against the penetrating rays of the sun. His perfectly manicured image and visage of self-assured confidence gives way to a blistered, sunburnt wretch, laid low and shown what he cannot simply bluff his way through.
But the ties to events past go beyond the tools that Mike and Saul lose or use in the process. There’s a brotherly vibe about the two of them together, Mike grumpily herding Jimmy along like a pestersome younger sibling he’s reluctantly responsible for. The glowsticks the two share while “camping” help set a mood, letting Gilligan up the contrast and show the weathered lines of each of these men’s faces. But it also conjures the image of Jimmy and Chuck as young boys, lit by a similar light in “Lantern”, and comparison that becomes all the more salient when Mike wraps himself up in a “space blanket” to save off the cold, something that Jimmy can’t bring himself to partake in for obvious reasons.
There’s a deeper connection there too, though neither of them fully knows it. Saul tells Mike that Kim will be worrying about him, and Mike is aghast that Saul let his wife in on what he’s up to here. Jimmy protests that Kim’s smart enough not to do anything rash (a faith Kim echoes to Lalo), but Mike just gives him an incredulous look. Mike tells Jimmy that he’s made Kim a part of the game now, something that Kim identifying herself to Lalo reinforces.
That’s scary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, for seasons now, Better Call Saul fans have been on pins and needles hoping that Kim survives. The fact that she’s implicated, even tangentially, that Lalo knows her by sight, makes her survival of the series that much more perilous. It’s scarier, though, because Mike knows full well that you can’t just be lightly involved and float above this kind of muck. He watched his son try to be in it without being a part of it, and saw where that leaves you and them. His skepticism is an admonition and a cosmic warning for Kim.
But when Jimmy’s latest shortcut has failed, when his effort to work smarter not harder has left him losing packs of hundred dollar bills, pulling spines out of his foot, and melting in the sun, it’s the thought of Kim’s well-being that keeps him going.
Mike gives him what can only become his signature speech of the series, about not caring whether he lives or dies, but choosing to go on because there’s people whose lives he wants to make better. Mike has been through some shit, crawled his way out of it, and had every reason to tap out on the other end. But he has Stacey and Kaylee, and he has been willing to dirty himself and fight through the muck, to keep them safe and supported. It is as clear a statement of purpose as we’re likely to get from the famously taciturn survivor.
Jimmy takes the critique to heart. Rather than hide or give up, he swallows his pride and wraps himself in the space blanket, gaining the attention of the criminals trying to hunt them down. This is not a slick con or a clever ruse. It’s a desperate ploy, one where Jimmy is willing to make himself bait, to put his life on the line, in the hopes that it will see him through this and get him back to Kim, hopefully with the money and wherewithal to make her life better too.
The sequence that follows is incredible. Despite knowing that both characters survive, Gilligan draws out the tension and terror as a car bears down on Jimmy and Mike lies in wait with his rifle. A missed shot, a swerving car, an upturned chassis, and a newly-determined foil-wrapped man who can’t even look at any of it, leads to the heart-pumping catharsis of an episode’s worth of character choices bound up in a rollicking climax.
In the end, Jimmy is willing to face his lowest moments, debase himself to make it through this, because Mike reminds him of whom he’s doing this for. He’ll swaddle himself in the shining memories of his dead brother to catch the gangsters’ eye. He’ll drink his own urine out of a water bottle branded with the law firm he swindled. He will make himself bait, the last resort of a man with nothing left to offer. And when it works, he will trudge on, having shed the niceties and pretensions and pride that made him think he was better than this, or capable of this.
The stock and trade of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad is change and self-realization. More than the arid trappings, more than the isolated chance for two characters to measure themselves against one another, that is what makes “Bagman” of a piece with our first televised journey to Albuquerque. Amid sand and blood and piss, Jimmy receives one last wake up call, one last chance to change his path, one last chance to remember who it’s worth making that choice for.
[7.8/10] “Previously On” is the sort of episode that answers the questions fans have been asking from the beginning. Who caused the hex? (Wanda) What made her do it? (Cumulative trauma) Who’s controlling it? (Sort of Wanda, sort of not.) What’s the deal with Pietro? (Total fake). What about Vision? (Wanda recreated him.) What’s Agnes’s angle here? (A witch trying to attain more power a probably drain Wanda the same way she drained the rest of her coven.)
For a lesser show, these could be mechanical answers to mechanical questions. Instead, this episode answers those technical points while also getting at the why of all this. It confirms, once and for all, that WandaVision is a story about the slow accumulation of trauma, and the ways the shiny sitcom worlds on the television screens are an escape from it.
Agnes (or Agatha, depending on your preference), plays Ghost of Xmas Past with Wanda, forcing Wanda to guide her through major events of her history in an effort to uncover how she became this powerful. Rather than centering on incantations or magical artifacts (give or take an Infinity Stone), it hinges on the moments of both comfort and loss in Wanda’s life.
It’s a strong conceit, giving Elizabeth Olsen plenty of notes to play across the years and showing how Wanda has lost so much of the year. We start with a scene of serene domestic bliss, or what passes for it in a war-torn Eastern Bloc country, with Wanda and Pietro as children with their parents. Suddenly a bomb disrupts the peace of “TV night”, destroying the young kids’ lives amid a moment of happiness and depicting events described in Age of Ultron. \
That sets a pattern for these things, where each moment involves how Wanda copes with such losses. We see her becoming a freedom fighter (or terrorist, depending on your vantage point), out of an attempt to avenge her parents in a way. It leads her to connect with the mind stone (something that, alongside a shadowy figure, will no doubt be explored in more depth later). The experience heightened her powers, but was also a source of further trauma, of being experimented on and treated as disposable.
(Just my crazy theory: [spoiler]I predict that the shadowy figure Wanda saw in the Mind Stone will be Wanda herself, from the future, creating a stable time loop and deciding to set these events into motion, even knowing the hardships of where they lead, because it’s a way to let love persevere.[/spoilers].)
But then we get the best scene in the whole episode, where we jump to Wanda still grieving her brother’s loss, another unfathomable trauma, only to get some unexpected comfort from Vision. The writing and acting here is magnificent. The imagery of Wanda talking about grief as a series of waves, continually hitting her every time she tries to stand, is haunting and effective. But Vision’s retort, of not knowing what loss is given his origins, but appreciating the notion that it is love persevering, is just as beautiful a counterpoint. You can see the way the two of them are connected not just through the mind stone, but through their unique experiences of grappling with the human condition from opposite sides, of learning how to move forward together. The chemistry, easy rapport, and connection between them in those moments is off the charts.
It’s a minor miracle. Having lost everyone close to her, Wanda forges a connection with someone else, someone who helps fill that space. Only then, he’s taken from her too. The final flashback we see is Wanda barging into Sword and seeing Vision being torn apart. We see the man she expected to be waiting for her when she was un-blipped lying in pieces before her. She reaches down and can no longer feel her, the last thread of that connection severed.
It’s enough to send anyone sprialing. We witness the mechanics of what happens next -- a grief-stricken Wanda coming to Westview, uncovering what was meant to be the place where the rest of their lives together began, the ghost of a new chapter of domestic bliss that she was once again robbed of by chaotic forces.
So she snaps. She explodes in her grief, for her parents, for her brother, and for her love, each ripped away from her in the times she most needed comfort, most thought she could be safe and happy like those people on the television screens.
That’s the most piercing thread of “Previously On.” At each stage, Wanda watches these sitcoms as a form of relief, of escape, to have a glimpse of the life denied her by circumstance and tragedy. She’s watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and seeing a happy couple when her parents are killed. She’s watching The Brady Bunch and a couple of friendly but needling siblings when she and her brother are treated like lab rats. She sees the comical violence of Malcolm in the Middle where the father figure can endure large scale mishaps but come out unscathed because “it’s not that kind of show.”
The import is clear. The allure of these stories, this pristine or even hardscrabble sitcom worlds, is that even when the edges are rougher, tragedies rarely happen. Happy families get to persist, to flourish. They get to happen at all. It’s a world where the worst losses of the world are kept outside of the frame, made digestible and easily resolved, one half hour at a time. It is, a world where she can have the life that she dreamed of as a little girl, the life she and Vision imagined for themselves, back.
Who wouldn’t want to bury themselves in that world at a time when the universe has taken pound of flesh after pound of flesh from your body? Look, we’re talking about a famed Scarlet Witch using her “chaos magic” to rewrite reality for a small town in New Jersey. None of this is down-to-earth exactly. And yet there’s something that feels so relatable, even natural, to Wanda choosing (or instinctively reacting) to conjure the sort of place that’s bereft of the traumas she’s suffered again and again and again.
We know the ruddy details now: that Agnes wants power, that Hayward wants a Vision of his own, that Wanda is firmly the source of the Hex. But more importantly, we understand why it came to this. “Previously On” gives us all those stark moments of love and joy and happiness that Wanda was robbed of, and the comforting glow of a place where no such heart-wrenching thefts can occur. Whatever season-ending fireworks happen next week, no one can blame poor Wanda for retreating into her static-filled dream world, when so much of her life has been this crystal clear nightmare.
6.6/10. You’ve seen Hidden Figures before. Maybe you haven’t seen this exact movie -- about how three unduly unheralded African American women helped NASA in the early 1960s -- but if, like me, you dutifully watch many, if not most, of the Oscar-nominated films each year, then within ten minutes, you’ll already know this movie by heart.
It features a gutsy but unorthodox protagonist trying to make a dent in a system that marginalizes and ignores her. It’s a period piece, with enough obvious dialogue, signs, and cameos from well-known historical figures to let you know exactly when the story is taking place with plenty of opportunity for the viewer to say, “My, how far we’ve come.” It has supporting characters facing challenges that mirror the protagonist’s, shining more light on the ways in which the order of the day affected those who were quietly fighting to maintain their place in it, and maybe even change it. And it has the untold story/historical injustice angle that’s supposed to imbue it with an extra bit of triumph and tragedy, all unleashed with a heavy dose of Hollywood mythmaking.
The difference, and the thing that distinguishes Hidden Figures from the likes of The Imitation Game, Dallas Buyers Club, and other recent Oscar nominees that play in the same space is that it uses the power of that formula in support of a woman of color. At a time when the world of film is still lingering in the shadow of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, it’s encouraging that Taraji P. Henson can be cast as the star of a movie that follows the Academy Award film blueprint and succeed at the box office in the process. It’s just a shame that the film’s artistic merit doesn’t match its social merit.
Don’t get me wrong; Hidden Figures is a well-made film. It chugs along at a good clip -- telling the story of one brilliant mathematician’s contributions to NASA at a time when someone of her race and gender had to work twice as hard to make it half as far -- in a tight, if predictable manner. It sprinkles in the subplots about her compatriots nicely, allowing them to work well as breaks from the main narrative that still feed into it. The acting on display is solid-to-good all around. It’s impeccably shot, framed, and edited, with colors that leap off the screen and composition that emphasizes the loneliness, bustle, or intimacy of a given setting. And it can boast a jam-worthy soundtrack that fits the movie’s big moments, but which would be worth listening to apart even outside the theater.
But good lord is it full of every hoary trope from every awards season film you’ve ever seen. The film runs through a litany of standard, predictable beats, telegraphing each one along the way. The good guys overcome the heavily-underlined obstacles in their way. They stand up to thinly-drawn, ineffectual antagonists. They offering cutting, cheesy one-liners after finding their footing.
The film provides an opportunity for Henson to give a Big Damn Speech, and for Kevin Costner to give a Big Damn Speech, and for Janelle Monáe to give a Big Damn Speech (which is, surprisingly, the best written and performed of the three). There is a one-dimensional love interest (Mahershala Ali, whose talents are squandered here) whose only true defining characteristic is that he likes the protagonist. And in the end, there are the expected measured but clear victories, culminating in a big historical event and a “where are they now” text-on-screen closing.
Even the canny little moments of repetition and subversion -- the protagonist being handed a piece of chalk, symbolizing opportunity, by her supervisor the same way she as a child in the classroom; or one of her white colleagues having to hustle across the NASA campus to find her rather than the other way around -- feel like a page torn out of the usual awards-bait playbook. The only times when the film transcends this are when it puts its three leads -- Henson, Monáe, and Octavia Spencer (who manages to make a lot out of a little here) -- together. It’s in these moments that they seem like real human beings finding solace in one another and navigating an environment where the deck is stacked against them, rather than mascots for another rote bout of silver screen “triumph over adversity” heartstring-pulling.
Hidden Figures does the good work of telling the world about the trailblazing achievements of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, but it does a disservice to these women’s stories to reduce them to the usual prestige pablum, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
It’s laudable that Hollywood is using its hagiographic abilities on women of color who deserve to be widely known, but even the Awards season fare of the recent past shows that it can do better. The superlative Selma looked like a bog-standard Great Man biopic, and instead treated its historical giant of a central figure with a humanizing gaze that made Martin Luther King Jr., his movement, and his struggle feel more real than all the usual tinseltown gloss and lionizing tone could. The Best Picture-winning Twelve Years a Slave suffers from a small bit of the same white savior syndrome that afflicted the execrable The Help, but it was raw and uncompromising, putting the ugliness of the prejudices faced by its protagonist on display in a way that didn’t reduce them to petty hurdles our heroes would inevitably hop over. These vital stories can be told without sacrificing artistry or giving into the cliches of typical Oscar fare.
But maybe that’s the best thing to say about Hidden Figures. Every awards season is going to feature a certain quotient of this type of film. Every year sees a new crop of competently-made, not particularly inspired movies that deal with Important Things, typically from The Long Long Ago. If this is inevitable, if the awards circuit is continually going to honor films that hit these same notes over and over again, then the least we can do is use this generic form in service of people whose stories deserve to be told, and who are all too often, as the movie’s title portends, left on the cutting room floor.
9.5/10. If you'd said to me, "Hey watch this short film that's a cross between Lost in Translation and the opening act of Wall-E," I'm pretty sure I would just look at you funny. And yet that's pretty much what this was, and it worked beautifully. The undersea world BoJack found himself in, where he couldn't eat the food, couldn't engage in his usual vices, and most of all couldn't speak or understand the local dialect, captured the experience of isolation and confusion that can come from visiting a foreign country through a distinctively BoJack lens.
But it also created a great atmosphere for a format-bending episode. Offering a nigh-wordless half hour of comedy in a show that makes its hay from its dialogue could either be gimmicky or bold, and thankfully this episode tended toward the former. It helped to put the viewer in BoJack's shoes -- only able to communicate and express mood through non-verbal cues like gestures, body language, and the score.
And in the absence of dialogue, Bojack Horseman reverts to a certain Looney Tunes-esque vibe where BoJack finds himself inadvertently responsible for an adorable little seahorse moppet. (I had flashbacks to the "Buttons and MIndy"segments of Animaniacs and a dozen other classic cartoons.) The design and personality of the seahorse baby struck the right balance of adorable and mischievous, and it created a nice opportunity for BoJack to be caring, brave, and as always, eternally frustated.
But this being Bojack, of course there's a quiet strain of melancholy through the whole thing. When Bojack returns to the seahorse babe to its father, the dad is mildly grateful, but mostly blase, and the baby doesn't even wave to him when it's time for BoJack to say goodbye. They went through this experience together, through shark attacks and taffy explosions and being stranded, and the moppet is too little to even look up for his soup or appreciate what his equine friend did for him. There's an emptiness there, a sort of existential realization that all that effort, which was quite noble in and of itself, feels a little hollow without someone to share it with or to appreciate it.
So through this experience, BoJack finally finds the words to apologize to Kelsey Jannings, noting that grand acts are nice, but that accomplishments, even ones far more important than winning and Oscar like returning a child to their parent, can seem like building a sandcastle, inevitably fleeting and meant to be washed away with the coming tide. But that those connections between individuals are what sustain us and give us life and reason to go on in a world of sandcastles.
Again, this being BoJack Horseman, those words too are washed away before he can get them to Kelsey in any sort of readable fashion. To add insult to injury, he realizes in the end that he could have talked this whole time, which is the right combination of sad and funny. But overall, this is a wonderful episode that uses some great Warner Bros. silent capering to further the show's project of examining its lead's attempts to find meaning in his life, and finds an inventive way to convey that experience.
Sometimes you have to cross a line. Sometimes, you do everything right; you do everything the way you believe that it should be done, and you still lose. Your forbearance, your good deeds, your extra effort to do the right thing, only enabled the bad guys, only let them profit from their misbehavior. So you have to make compromises. You have break some of the rules yourself; you have to sully yourself by playing their game; you have to be like the bad guys to beat the bad guys, for the greater good.
These are the thoughts motivating Mike Ehrmantraut as he wraps his hands around the rifle he'd previously shied away from. But they're the same ones going through Chuck's head as he tricks his brother into incriminating himself on tape.
Mike has a code. He doesn't want to kill people. His shaky hand after his run-in with Hector's henchmen shows he doesn't even want to hurt people. And he certainly doesn't want an innocent person to come to harm because of a choice he makes. But as Asimov explored in the short stories involving his Three Laws of Robotics, sometimes these principles conflict; sometimes they pull a person in different directions and force them to make some hard choices.
The eminently capable Mr. Ehrmantraut tried to abide by his no-kill policy, and still deliver a blow to his erstwhile rival. He tried to exact his vengeance on Hector in a way that would take the crime boss out of the picture, but also keep the innocents out of harm's way, and insulate himself and his family from the Salamancas' reach. Instead, it all goes sideways. Bad luck keeps the cops off of Hector's trail. A Good Samaritan loses their life in the exchange. And the man Mike went to great lengths to leave still kicking is summarily executed in the desert.
Mike tried. He tried very, very hard to have his cake and eat it too, to earn the money that he thinks will help him buy his soul back after the death of his son, to dip his toe in the mud without getting too dirty. He tried, and he lost anyway.
So it's come to this -- a sniper's nest overlooking a Salamanca hideout in the harshness of the New Mexico desert. His silent vow not to take a life, his distaste for snuffing out another man's existence, have to be put aside. More harm will be done--at least in the final tally--if he doesn't violate that code. He buys the sort of weapon he turned down the last time he considered killing a Salamanca. He sets up from his far away vantage point, to where his enemies seem to be in miniature -- tiny lives off in the distance. He lines up his shot. And he waits.
Then, that pesky moral code comes back again. At the moment of truth, Nacho stands between him and Hector. The greater good says do it. The pure utilitarian says that Hector will continue to inflict misery and pain, that Nacho isn't exactly an angel himself, and that a semi-innocent man will be killed regardless of whether Mike shoots or doesn't, so he may as well take out the real bad guy in the process. The retributivist says that Hector deserves it, for threatening a little girl, for ordering the death of an innocent person, for having a man killed who may not be nearly as innocent, but whose only crime in Hector's eyes was succumbing to Mike's scheme.
But Mike can't. He just can't. It's the reason he caught a beating instead of taking a life in the first place. It's the reason he gave Nacho half of his money for taking the rap for Tuco. It's the reason he's spurred on to right this wrong in the first place. Only the people who kill the innocent--Hector Salamanca, Matty's murderers--deserve to die, and Mike just doesn't have it in him to stomach the collateral damage that would come along with preventing Hector from hurting anyone else. The moment passes; another undeserved death takes place, and Mike waits once more.
Until the sound of his car horn calls him away. He finds a branch lodged between the seat and the steering wheel, calling his attention to a note with a simple message -- "don't." Someone is smart enough to know what Mike is up to, and has a different plan. Who is that someone? [Speculative Spoilers here -- an enterprising redditor found that if you take the first letters of all the episode titles in Season 2, they make an anagram for the phrase "Fring's Back."] We don't know for sure yet. But it's someone who wants to stop Mike from going through with it. Mike is ready; he's been pushed past his limit and he's ready to do what needs to be done, but his conscience and outside forces keep him from crossing that line.
Chuck has no such limitations, either from within or without. But the episode's cold open gives us a window into what drives him, what's shaped the way he looks at his brother. Chuck has tried to be an upstanding man, at least from his own perspective. While Jimmy is reminiscing about a crazy time at their mother's birthday party, Chuck only remembers everyone else having to clean up Jimmy's mess, literally and figuratively. While Jimmy strolls off to grab a sandwich, Chuck waits dutifully with his comatose mom. And when he's alone, he breaks down. Chuck may seem heartless at times, but he is still a man of feeling, and his quickly recovered demeanor when the nurse comes in suggests that, like Hamlin, he may put on a mask to project the image he thinks he needs to uphold, regardless of how he really feels.
Then his mother lurches back to life for just a moment, and Chuck is captivated once more. But with her final breath, does she call for the son who stayed by her side? The one Who made something of himself? The one who was there to help his parents rather than exploit them? No, she calls for Jimmy. The hurt, the jealousy in Chuck's eyes looms large. This is the final insult, the last thumb in his eyes that for all Chuck's good deeds, for all his effort to do right, to be right, everyone, even his own Mother, loves the personable Jimmy McGill just a little bit more. Chuck keeps their mother's final words from his brother--better to keep him from enjoying the fruits of his misbegotten labors--but their sting lingers.
(Incidentally, it's a great little swerve to show Jimmy waiting beside at the hospital, only to then reveal his brother sitting next to him, letting the audience know that this is a flashback and not the aftermath of Chuck's incident at the copy shop.)
That's how Chuck processes these events, and that's what's lurking in the back of his mind when he realizes that Jimmy has sabotaged him. Jimmy can't be allowed to him win. He can't continue to prosper and benefit from stepping outside the lines just because he knows how to work a crowd. He can't be a bad actor and still be rewarding by living so large and so well on the back of so many lies and cheats and shortcuts. As Jesse Pinkman so memorably put it, he can't keep getting away with it.
To prevent that, to expose Jimmy for what Chuck thinks he really is, he has to take a page out of his brother's playbook. Chuck's plan to entrap his brother into confessing his misdeeds on tape is nigh-Machiavellian, but also feels like the sort of scheme that Jimmy himself would cook up.
One of the interesting things about Better Call Saul as its developed over the course of two seasons is the way it's explored the idea that as different as Chuck and Jimmy seem on the surface, there's a great deal of common ground between them. Chuck's shown a certain duplicitousness before -- in how he's used Howard as his hatchet man or pushed his partner to punish Kim as a way of getting to Jimmy. But this is something different, something more elaborate and even sinister. The layers to to Chuck's ruse, the misdirection, the orchestration, the cleverness in how he pulls it off all reek of Slippin' Jimmy. The younger McGill brother may be more personable, but there's a craftiness that he and Chuck share. Chuck may not have his brother's golden tongue, but he still knows what buttons to push when it comes to the CEO of Mesa Verde, and he knows how to pull off a plan as meticulous, manipulative, and perfectly-calculated as any of Jimmy's.
What's ironic about is that at the same time Chuck is becoming more like the man he misguidedly believes his brother to be, Jimmy is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. "Klick" may be the most overtly moral and upstanding we've ever seen Jimmy be. He rushes into the copy shop and starts directing traffic to get his brother some help, even though it will expose his attempt to cover his tracks. (And kudos to Michael McKean, who was amazing throughout the episode, but was especially good in his wordless but meaningful reaction when he sees Jimmy as he regains consciousness.) He stays by his brother's side throughout Chuck's recovery. He draws a line in the sand that despite everything that's happened, he won't commit Chuck, because it's not what he brother would want. He agonizes over subjecting Chuck to those tests even if he believes it's in Chuck's own best interests. He gives up his temporary guardianship even if it would leave Chuck, as he puts it, right where Jimmy wants him. He has a look of guilt when he watches the commercial he worked so hard to make and realizes he hasn't quite lived up to being the paragon of honesty and virtue he presents himself as.
And in the end, he confesses to his brother. Jimmy comes clean when he believes that the chain of events he set in motion caused Chuck to retire and dive even deeper into his psychosis. Jimmy may not believe he's really risking his career or his livelihood by doing so, but he is exposing himself, making a sacrifice by playing into Chuck's image of him. Jimmy absolutely loves his brother, and after all the effort he put into covering up his misdeeds, the lengths he went to in order to prevent Chuck from confirming his suspicions, the thought of his actions wounding his brother deeply motivates Jimmy to lay it all out there for him.
What's so tragic and deplorable is that Chuck is taking advantage of that. He's using his brother's love to hurt him. In a way, he's making the same choice Jimmy did when he obtained temporary guardianship over Chuck and forced him to take those tests at the hospital. He's taking the choice out of his brother's hands, because he doesn't trust him to make the right one. But it's also cravenly manipulative. Chuck is playing on Jimmy's own deep-seated concerns for him in order to undermine him. There's something especially cruel in the poetry of that, something that feels particularly wrong about turning someone's care for you against them in such a cold and calculated fashion.
It can be hard to explain what makes Better Call Saul great because so often it comes out in the little things. It may be the direction and editing, which convey Chuck's disorientation by flipping his perspective upside down beneath the hospital lights, or communicating Kim's pride in Jimmy by putting her beaming smile in the frame as his commercial plays. It may be the small but significant performance of the doctor who looks after Chuck, who manages to be a steady and caring voice of reason between each of the mercurial McGill brothers. It may be the little bits of dry comedy in an episode as significant as "Klick," from the "no offense," "none taken," exchange between Mike and the arms who wipes his prints off the rifle, to Ernesto's beleaguered wish that he was back in the mail room. Or it may be something like the quiet moment where Ernesto explains to Jimmy why he lied on his behalf -- for the simple reason that Chuck seemed out to get him, and Jimmy's his friend.
That, more than Chuck's fierce intelligence, more than Jimmy's golden tongue, more than one brother's pride and the other's lack of shame, is what truly distinguishes the McGill brothers from one another. When Jimmy plies his trade these days, when he employs a little subterfuge, he's usually trying to help people -- sometimes himself, but also the woman he loves and people like the seniors at Sandpiper. When things go awry, when it looks like people will really be hurt, he doesn't sit on the sidelines; he acts to rectify his mistakes, whether it's by talking Tuco into commuting the death sentences of his twin collaborators in the desert, or by admitting his actions to his brother to prevent Chuck from giving up his life and his sanity. Jimmy is far from pure, but he cares and he tries, and people like Ernesto see that.
But Chuck only uses those same skills to hurt people. Sure, he justifies it by seeing himself as an agent of morality, as it being part and parcel with his self-given duty to uphold what's right and just in this world. And yet even if he thinks what he does is for the greater good, when push comes to shove, Chuck uses that craftiness to deny his brother the seat at the table that he'd earned, to punish Kim for Jimmy's transgressions since she was the only one within reach, to wrest away a client when someone more deserving had done the legwork, and to incriminate a brother whose confession he was only able to wring out because of Jimmy's love and concern for him. Jimmy serves individuals; Chuck serves some greater sense of righteousness, and unlike Mike, he cares little for who's caught in the crossfire.
Chuck has a very personal, very exacting moral code, and it leads him to hurt the people who care about him the most. Jimmy's ethical mores are much more fluid, much more apt to let the ends justify the means, but he means to do good, more or less, and to help people, especially those close to him. And Mike is somewhere in the middle, intent on protecting the most important people in his life, trying to live up to the high moral standards he sets for himself even as he gets his hands dirty, and most of all trying not to hurt anyone in the process. "Klick" wraps its characters in these little moral conundrums, and teases out the connections and distinctions between its heroes and its villains as each tries to find their way out of them, and the lines they are and are not willing to cross to do it.
When I wrote my thoughts on Spotlight, I speculated about how knowing the end of the story going in, knowing the extent of the scandal the team in Spotlight was uncovering, may have robbed the plot of some of its punch. And yet, The Big Short is, in many ways, the perfect counter to that.
Almost everyone old enough to watch this film lived through The Great Recession. They know that the disaster all the main characters in the film are predicting comes true, in all its horrible, self-destructive glory. But rather than taking away from the film, it adds to it. There's this sense of foreboding, of doom that hangs over everything.
A film about the financial crisis, especially involving traders and analysts and people crunching numbers in a fund, could easily be too dry. And yet, the fact that the individuals the film focuses on are slowly but surely investigating an economic massacre waiting to happen, and how each step they take reveals another way that disaster might have been diverted, or people who are supposedly in the know digging the whole deeper, means that the entire film is just an exercise in creating that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's not a prestige picture; it's a horror film.
It's also a very weird film. It's not so bold in its presentation that it feels unprecedented, but it feels stitched together, disjointed, and unusual, but in a good way. Adam McKay, of Anchorman fame, is the right man for the job. There is a darkly funny absurdity to the topic The Big Short covers, and with his fourth-wall breaking asides, his cuts to celebrity explanations of complex financial consequences in ridiculous situations, and his jumping between various characters acting wild or nutty lends the perfect tone to the movie, one of simultaneous horror at what hell hath been wrought and unavoidable bemusement at the clowns who steered us all into this ditch.
The direction and rhythm of the film is frenetic. It's closest comparison point is Requiem For a Dream with the same frenetic hodgepodge of images and sounds, bleeding and blending into one another, disorienting the viewer and conveying the sense in which the financial world the film depicts is intoxicating, dizzying, and unsettled all at the same time.
Another aspect of the film that makes it hard to compare to other works in this space is the fact that it doesn't really have a protagonist or a plot. Sure, it has a story, and it has characters who take up the most oxygen over the course of the movie, but more than anything it feels like a documentary. It's far too stylized and irreverent to really deserve that label, but it's far more interested in trying to describe what happened, to explain just what mistakes and lies and blindspots led to the global economic crisis, than it is in rising action and resolution, or showing people growing or changing.
That's not to say there isn't an emotional element to the film. Steve Carell stands out by playing essentially a smarter, angrier Michael Scott who grabs your attention every time he's on screen. The parallels between his character's sense that a catastrophe is looming in economic terms that he could do something to prevent, and his guilt over not doing more to prevent his brother's suicide was--while perhaps a little easy--also affecting.
The rest of the cast do their jobs well, but blend together a bit because again, while they're a vital part of the film, the film isn't really about them. The characters in The Big Short are conduits to detail, in amusing and human terms, just what the hell went wrong. Christian Bale is a collection of actorly tics, but he acquits himself well enough. Ryan Gosling does his best dudebro douchebag type, and is sufficiently entertaining in that guise. And Brad Pitt seems pretty reserved, short of his moment where he chastises his young wards for being too happy about what they're making their money from.
But again, the fact that there's not really a narrative means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The film is not really a story; it's an autopsy, cutting up the corpse of our financial system and exposing the bloody innards, the rotten organs at the core that led the USA, and the world, to the dire economic state it was in by late 2008. In that sense, the film succeeds wildly, and McKay manages to tackle something of real significance without losing the absurd madcap attitude he brings to his comedic works, and somehow, doing justice to the insanity of the lead up to The Great Recession in the process. It's a hell of an achievement to make a film this funny, this disturbing, and this great.
[8.6/10] It’s a fool’s errand to wish for happy endings in the world of Better Call Saul. But I had a faint hope for Nacho. I pictured him getting out somehow. I envisioned him finally escaping from the life that he fell too deeply into and starting again. I imagined Jesse Pinkman arriving in Alaska and making a connection with Ignacio Varga under an assumed name, Mike’s two surrogate sons coming together and looking after one another the way he might have done himself. It’s a nice thought, one too nice for the consequences this universe tends to have in store for its major players.
Instead, Nacho is dead. And we are left to take comfort in the few saving graces of his unfortunate demise. He went out his way, choosing his own “good death” rather than being the plaything of other people’s wills like he’s been for so much of the series. He did so to guarantee the safety of his father, with whom he shared a pained final phone call, freighted with meaning. He claimed one final measure of control, of destiny, to make his death worth something, to him and the people he cared about.
These are small blessings and small comforts. I teared up at the fateful moment when Nacho takes his own life rather than subject himself to the plans of the drug lords around him. Because this is a tragedy. Because this went south just as Nacho’s father said it would. Because Nacho thought he could beat it, avoid the pitfalls, and instead was sucked down by the inevitable gravity of this life. Because despite his best efforts, Mike Ehrmantraut lost another son.
These are not showy, emotional men. So their tiniest expressions speak volumes. The scrunch of Mike’s mouth when he knows Nacho’s gone that reveals his pain and disgust with this whole thing. The slightly raised eyebrows of Gus Fring that show his quiet terror that, with one word, Nacho could blow this whole thing up. And the almost imperceptible nod shared by Nacho and Mike, an acknowledgment of deeds that say more than any words either man has. This is a grim, even sentimental experience for all, made that much more forceful by how Better Call Saul underplays it.
God help me, Michael Mando deserves an Emmy for this episode alone. He, like so much of this incredibly talented cast, has deserved recognition for a long time now. But this is a masterclass. The sheer physicality he puts on display when Nacho buries himself in the sludge of an old tanker truck, the unspoken well of pain and regret pouring out of him when he hears his father’s voice one last time, the sheer vitriol on display when he curses the Salamancas and declares himself the author of all their pain. The shades of desperation, resignation, and self-immolation Mando communicates are virtuosic to the last. If this is truly his final performance on the show, he goes out with his masterpiece.
But it’s not all Nacho in this episode. We get more advancement in Kim and Jimmy’s plan to undermine Howard. This is one of their smaller efforts, but there’s a sufficient amount of tension in Huell(!) and a keymaker using their combined skills to duplicate Howard’s car keys before his valet can catch wise. One of this show’s great skills is taking fairly mundane parts of these scams and ratcheting up the tension. The interplay between a teenage valet rushing back to a parking garage, cut with the grooves of the key and the stairwells of the building, set to a classical soundtrack, makes a comparatively straightforward part of this plan seem like a big deal.
But after such chicanery, Huell asks Saul a simple but telling question -- why do you do this? The dialogue implies that Huell needs the funds, that this is one of few options for him. Jimmy, on the other hand, is a lawyer. His wife is a lawyer. They could get by without this. Jimmy claims that Huell doesn’t understand, that this is for the greater good, that even if the tactics are underhanded, the desired result is good, which makes taking these risks worthwhile.
And yet, Kim and Jimmy seem to revel in the chase. There’s something personal in this for both of them. The thrill of it seems to light both of their fires. All of it suggests their motives for continuing with something that, to Huell’s implicit point, they don’t have to pursue, may not be as altruistic as Saul pretends. More to the point, they have more to lose in all this than either one of them seems ready to acknowledge.
There’s a lifeline though. One of the prosecutors, Suzanne Ericsen, who once called Jimmy a scumbag, offers to let him turn state’s evidence. She pieces together not only the real deal with Lalo, but how Jimmy didn’t want to be the cartel’s lawyer. After Kim turns over some incriminating evidence she’d be better off suppressing in the name of fairness, Suzanne shares this offer with her, with the idea that he might listen to her in a way he wouldn’t listen to Suzanne.
Suzanne frames it as an opportunity to do what’s right after being steeped in something dirty. Kim frames it as a choice between being a “friend of the cartel” or a rat. But neither of them seems to fully countenance it in the way the viewers, who can process it in the context of the show as a whole, can. It’s a chance for Jimmy to do what Nacho didn’t -- to get out of this, to step away before it’s too late.
It’s too late for Nacho. He tries valiantly to avoid the worst of the blowback. His descent into the muck to avoid his killers is as symbolic as it is terrifying. His kindness (and cash) for a friendly mechanic who offers him help when he needs it and asks for nothing in return shows the decency within a troubled and ultimately doomed young man. His grief, not just at never being able to see his father again, but at confirming Manuel Varga’s worst fears and predictions about his son, is palpable.
There is something admirable in Nacho in his final days, when he accepts the inevitability of his end. He cannot change that. He’s made too many bad choices to reach this point. But he can use his life, the value it still has, to protect the person he cares about most.
The sharpest thing Nacho does is leverage the value of whether he’ll tell the Salamancas the truth, or whether he’ll play along. He realizes the rare power he holds over Gus, rather than the other way around. He doesn’t use it for comfort or to try to buy his own way out. He just wants to protect his dad and uses the last thing he has of value to do it.
It wouldn’t work, though, without his similarly paternal bond with Mike. For all his “Not my call” talk with Nacho, Mike is a man of honor. The only way a promise from a snake like Gus means anything to Ignacio is that it comes backed by Mike.
There’s a rapport between the two of them, an understanding, a familial intimacy that adds the wholesomeness and tragedy of it all. Mike insists on being the one to rough Nacho up to look the part of someone working against Gus’ operation rather than for it. Beforehand, they share that drink together, an acknowledgment or respect and care. And Mike puts himself out there to be an “insurance policy” for the plan, there to ensure, in his heart of hearts, that it goes down the way they planned it, that Nacho doesn’t have to suffer. He looks through the scope in the way he did back in season 2’s “Klick”, and sees someone who understands the lengths a father and son will go to in order to protect one another as well as he does.
Except, when the time comes, Nacho goes off script. He palmed a piece of glass, presumably from the cup Gus broke an episode ago, and uses it when the time’s right. Rather than simply announcing, as Fring insisted, that he was in league with Alvarez and paid off by rivals in Peru to sabotage the Salamancas, he goes a step further.
He laughs at the prospect of “the chicken man” being involved as a joke. He swears his hatred of the whole Salamanca family, offering up the motive for him to do this without any need for being aligned with Gus. He takes credit for Hector’s sugar pills, pointing to Gus’ intervention as the only reason Hector is still alive. In brief, he makes the story better and more plausible than even Gus had in mind. It’s clever, proving his worth even in his final moments, giving Fring everything he could possibly want to throw the heat off of him, in the hopes that it will convince the crime lord to keep his word and spare his father. After so long, so many missteps, Nacho seized control and went out on his own terms, if only a little.
The palmed glass becomes vital to slipping through the zip ties that bind him. He seizes Don Bolsa’s gun and holds it to the man’s head, so everyone can point their guns at him. And then, with the weapon in hand, he can kill himself, rather than subject him to the Salamancas’ torture or other humiliating or excrutiating ways to leave his world. His death is still a sad, terrible, regrettable thing, but it comes with a moment of self-actualization, where for a moment at least, Nacho is not the pawn of these men. He is their equal. And then he is gone.
Another life wasted. Another existence snuffed out in the middle of the desert. Another son lost amid the plata y plomo. In a beautiful opening sequence, we see the flora growing over the spot where Nacho died, growth perhaps fueled by his remains. Amid such desolation grows a beautiful azure flower, the rain come to wash it all away. There, catching its droplets, is that same shard of glass, the one that gave Nacho his last bit of freedom, before the collective weight of these larger forces could firmly and finally take it away.
It would be too much to call Nacho a good person. At his best, he was still a drug dealer thriving on others’ addiction and misery. He may have been a touch nobler, a touch younger and thus more excusable, than the psychos he worked for. But he was still a bad guy doing bad things.
And yet, there was something recognizable in his fall and folly. Too many of us see shorter, yet more dangerous paths to the things we want, and believe we can avoid their greatest perils along the way to our hope for spoils. We see Nacho’s regret, his emptiness, his sense of being trapped in this before he realized how deeply he had fallen. We see how his desire to protect his dad -- from Hector, from Gus, from his own mistakes -- led him to this point, where he was in too deep with no good options.
Nacho may not have been perfect, but he was pitiable; he was recognizable; he was loved. There is always tragedy in the death of someone loved. Jimmy is also loved. He has his chance to get out, to turn to the police like Nacho’s father instructed his son.
But Ignacio didn’t listen. He’ll never have a chance to escape. He won’t ever meet Jesse in Alaska. Exit ramps are rare. Happy endings are in short supply in this world. And in the end, there weren’t enough of either left for Manuel Varga’s little boy.