#especially bc if she did do something than it was retaliatory

[eldritchazuline]

Void scream pay me no mind

I sometimes find myself thinking some real absinthe would totally fix me. It’s the escape artist in me, I know that’s not true it’s addictive tendencies but damn if I don’t want to just check tf out in any way possible right now.

I have never felt this particular sadness before. It’s an accumulation of every shitty cycle I’ve ever seen in my family but this time there’s so much more despair. This is the last straw. The nail in the coffin. I have found and lost hope in my family relationships over and over and how many times can you kick a dog before they bite back? The way everything is happening, I probably can never forgive the people involved. Everything in my body is screaming at me to just roll over and let this blow by like any other horrible fucking thing in my house. But this is it. Maybe this is where I say

‘Enough’

I have hope in the life I can create for myself on the other side of this, but things can never be the same. From one New Year’s Eve I am being forced to reevaluate everything I believed about the people in my life being genuinely good people deep down under all the shit.

And it looks like such an impossible task. I know things can be better but that doesn’t change the now. I will probably spend years trying to dig myself out of this house by my fingernails because it’s necessary.

[enbouton]

Better Call Saul Rewatch, Part 2/30: I’m A Lawyer, Not A Criminal

Mijo (Season 1, Episode 2)

Written by Vince Gilligan & Peter Gould / Directed by Michelle MacLaren

Breaking Bad liked to juxtapose food preparation with menace (particularly where Gus was concerned), but after some extreme close-ups on blood-red peppers and some vivid sound design, we pull out and see that Tuco’s just, well, cooking. In an apron, in his grandma’s kitchen. (Raymond Cruz gives more nuance to Tuco here than he had the chance to in Breaking Bad. He’s not quite as quick to anger, which actually makes him scarier, since you don’t know when he’s going to strike.)

Aside, this is such a Breaking Bad frame:

Mrs. Salamanca arrives with Cal and Lars in tow, fretting about the accident; Tuco reassures her and sends her upstairs, ominously adding “turn up the volume real loud so you can hear it”. I love the twins’ complete obliviousness to the danger they’re in. Even when Tuco pointedly asks them if the cops are coming, they don’t get it; they’re still yammering about “dollar amounts” when he picks up his abuelita’s cane.

The first half of this episode is harrowing. A situation Jimmy thought he could micromanage has spiralled out of control, and he looks sick with fear throughout, face contorting, hands trembling. He does a good job of talking Tuco down at first, only for it all to collapse like a house of cards when Lars yells that the scam was his idea. This brings us to a classic set-piece:

The desert! I missed you.

It’s a good choice not to show Nacho taking in the information about Craig and Betsy and the money they stole; it keeps our attention locked to Jimmy’s perspective. All we need to learn about Nacho at this point is that he’s smarter and more level-headed than his boss.

This scene is where we see that Jimmy really is a good advocate at a fundamental level. He reads Tuco well enough to know how to appeal to him; he deploys truths and untruths selectively for the greatest effect. When Tuco won’t budge on the issue of the twins’ punishment, he starts bargaining: what’s proportionate? What’s fair?

Giving Jimmy credit for arguing on behalf of Cal and Lars after he himself is set free would be setting the bar low, but it does demonstrate qualities that Saul Goodman must have buried pretty deep. He saves the twins’ lives, and he looks utterly disgusted with himself when he and Tuco shake hands on their “sentence”.

The whole leg-breaking/breadsticks sequence is... a lot. You get momentarily distracted by the sight of Jimmy’s maybe-date (it made me wonder about his and Kim’s past relationship; there’s obviously something between them, but he’s flirting with someone else; did they just fool around a few times, or did they actually date and then break up?) and then the snapping starts and ugh it’s just awful. Kudos to the sound design department. Please never repeat this.

It’s poignant that Jimmy, traumatised and blind drunk, ends up seeking shelter at his prickly brother’s house. Chuck seems to experience pain in his right arm just after Jimmy passes out on the couch, right before he thinks to look for Jimmy’s phone. This is an early hint at the true source of his symptoms: if it were really the electromagnetic fields, he’d have reacted as soon as Jimmy crossed the threshold, but he seems fine until he appreciates what a sorry state Jimmy is in.

The next morning, we get to see Chuck’s house in daylight for the first time. In general, the interplay of light and shadow in Chuck’s house is managed beautifully. Draped in a space blanket, Chuck passive-aggressively informs Jimmy that he’s out of milk, and then beautifully pretends not to have read the urgent care bill that fell out of Jimmy’s pocket. The whole “take off the space blanket” back-and-forth that ensues is just so well written and acted, in such an unflashy way. Underneath Jimmy’s hungover frustration is the fear that he is the reason Chuck is under the space blanket:

Jimmy: Hey, Chuck, listen. I— I know how this looks. I’m down to my last dime, and suddenly I’m paying for broken legs. But it’s not that, I swear. This represents a good thing, ultimately.

Chuck: Okay.

Jimmy: I’m not backsliding. This isn’t Slippin’ Jimmy.

Chuck: Fine.

Jimmy: Take off the space blanket, will you, please, Chuck?

Chuck: It helps.

Jimmy: Take off the space blanket. I didn’t do anything wrong.

Chuck: It has nothing to do with that. It was your phone.

Jimmy: Take off the space blanket.

Chuck: Why?

Jimmy: Take off the space blanket, Chuck. Come on. Take off the blanket.

Begrudgingly, Chuck takes it off. Jimmy goes out to find his phone, and Chuck wraps himself back up again.

Another montage! I love this one, it’s so snappy. The Baroque music is something we wouldn’t have heard on Breaking Bad. We get to see Jimmy wheeling and dealing with DDA Bill “Petty With A Prior” Oakley, subsisting on vending-machine coffee, and exchanging glances with Kim. The shot where Jimmy meets a client, walks into one courtroom, and emerges from another door with a different client is almost balletic, and the sequence of cuts between arguments in different cases (improvised by Bob Odenkirk) is especially good. Just as he did at HHM and the nail salon, he engages with the people around him, giving coffee to a deputy outside the courtroom. His suits, shirts and ties are notably subdued; James M. McGill isn’t flashy, after all.

The show takes its time integrating Mike within the plot, which is good. They could have gone full fanservice from the start, but they don’t. (The audio description track on Netflix just calls him “the parking attendant” for the first few episodes until someone finally uses his name.) You do wonder why, after the third or fourth time Mike makes Jimmy go back for more stickers, he doesn’t start double-checking his validation with the clerk. Maybe he did offscreen and she wouldn’t budge.

The sequence where Jimmy gets into his office, checks for messages, unfolds his bed, pours himself a drink and settles back before being disturbed is one of the quiet, carefully observed scenes that BCS does so well. Nothing dramatic is happening, it’s just a guy coming home from work and making himself comfortable.

The exchange in which Nacho asks Jimmy to help him rip off the Kettlemans would do little but move the plot forward were it not for Nacho’s uncomfortably accurate reading of Jimmy. Much as he protests, much as he insists that he’s sticking to the straight and narrow, much as he pretends to be only temporarily based in Mrs. Nguyen’s back room, he is seen through.

One of the tragedies of Jimmy McGill’s life is that no matter what he does, people keep telling him who and what he is and always will be: Slippin’ Jimmy, a conman, a criminal. Another one is that he keeps on proving them right.

Misc.

“Judge’s gotta see your mother. … Well, do you know anybody who looks like her? … No, an uncle won’t do it.”

Hello and goodbye to Jimmy’s shortest-lived alter ego, Special Agent Jeffrey A. Steele, FBI. I wonder if we’ll ever see him again?

This is so far the only episode of BCS directed by Michelle MacLaren, who directed some of my favourite Breaking Bad eps (Salud, Madrigal, Buried) including such #iconic scenes as the poolside cartel massacre. 

Timeframe: May 25 to maybe June 5, 2002; the urgent care receipt is dated May 25th, and Jimmy wears at least nine different ties in the courthouse montage, suggesting at least two weeks of work.

The parking lot is the one at the end of 1st Street, behind the Albuquerque Convention Center; it’s not actually attached to any of the courthouses, but it is very close to them. (NB: whenever I cite a location, credit should go to Marc Valdez, who has catalogued pretty much every site used in filming BrBa and BCS on his blog.)

Music

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Juan García Esquivel (1958), during the bar scene

Vivaldi’s Concerto for Strings in G Major, RV 151 (Concerto alla rustica), first movement, during the court montage

References

The Code of Hammurabi: a Babylonian legal code dating back to 1754 BCE that codified the principle of retaliatory justice. Law #196 states “if a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out” (source).

“Title 21, Schedule II through V, including Part B” refers to the United States Code Controlled Substances Act.

“It’s showtime, folks” is from All That Jazz (1979). Context, from Shmoop:

Joe Gideon is a chain-smoking, pill-popping workaholic by day and playboy by night. As a famous choreographer-director, he is physically burning out. Every morning he greets his hungover, bloodshot image in the bathroom mirror with, "It's showtime, folks!"

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