The character progressions onBetter Call Saulare as intricate yet logical as legalese.
“Rebecca” usurps that notion.
Chuck is changing a lightbulb, sometime before his electrical affliction.
Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC
He puts a record on jazz, of course, ‘cause he’s classy.
In the kitchen, a woman sweats onions.
Chuck’s sheet music sits undisturbed in the foreground, in the dark.
Of their soon-to-arrive dinner guest, Chuck says, “He’s…an acquired taste.”
“How bad can he be?”
Jimmy sits down for dinner, the best meal he’s had in a decade.
He apologizes for missing the wedding.
“Yo-Yo Ma was there,” Chuck says; “Ah, right on,” Jimmy responds.
He tells Rebecca about his new job in the Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill mail room.
The vacuum cleaner has the dirt bag on the inside!"
Chuck doesn’t laugh.
Jimmy spits out a stream of lawyer jokes to Chuck’s chagrin.
“More,” Rebecca says.
“Go on.”
The lighting is cold, a kind of chrome-blue veil over the room.
Chuck tries to tell a lawyer joke; Rebecca says, “What?
She doesn’t laugh.
Chuck stares off into the cold void.
The question that will probably plague you after this scene is what happened to Rebecca?
Jimmy and Kim are both working late.
A young lady appears at Jimmy’s door.
She’s a second-year attorney and easily the most annoying character on the show so far.
“Ah, sorry.
Go green,” Jimmy says.
Kim tries desperately to bring in new business.
“Hey, how’s it going?
emphatically, shown from a wide flat shot, what David Bordwell calls “planimetric.”
NEXT: No one cried harder than Jimmy
Kim brings in a $250,000 client.
But Kim is still in the office, still in the doghouse.
Then he tells her, “Make two cups.”
She conjures up courage and says, “Do I have a future here?”
Chuck answers her question with a gut-punch of a story.
A story about his father, about Jimmy.
Their father, a hard-working, honest man, ran his own corner store.
Wasn’t much, but it put food on the table, as they say.
When Chuck went off to college, Jimmy started working in the store, helping out his old man.
Their dad was as good as guy as you’ll ever meet but a lousy businessman.
When Chuck came home, he saw a $14,000 discrepancy in the books.
Slippin’ Jimmy had been pilfering from the store to fuel his noxious vices.
When Chuck told their father, he wouldn’t hear it, no way, not his Jimmy.
He had to sell the store.
Six months later he died.
“At the funeral, nobody cried harder than Jimmy.”
Kim, like Chuck’s dad, trusted Jimmy; Jimmy lied to her, let her down.
Like he did with his dad.
“I’ll talk to Howard,” Chuck says.
Before departing, he tells her good job bringing in that account.
The consequences of trusting Jimmy McGill course “Rebecca” like tainted blood.
(Jonathan Banks remains a master of emulating through stoicism; he’s a one-man Kuleshov Effect.)
In walks Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), uncle of Tuco, not yet a bell-ringing invalid.
He takes a seat across from Mike.
He apologizes for his nephew, saying some time spent in jail will teach him to respect his elders.
But a decade in prison?
For a gun charge?
That’s a bit much.
Hector wants Mike to tell the police it washisgun so Tuco only takes a battery charge.
Hector will make the gun charge worth Mike’s time ($$$).
Mike doesn’t want to be a bad man, so he didn’t kill Tuco.
