"Based on the salsa stain there, this… could have gone a couple of ways." James's kind of determinedly calm, repressed fear here really reminded me of how he responded to Mike and Walt threatening him years down the line in Breaking Bad. Helping." Poor No-Doze, still getting no love six years back. I wonder if the treasurer and his wife are going to become the season-long antagonists here, or if screwing them over is just the gateway drug for James becoming Saul. It's impressive how layered this relationship already feels after only two scenes. This isn't Slippin' Jimmy." I'm not totally clear on what we're meant to take from this line, but I assume Slippin' Jimmy was into the same kind of extortion deal as the twins are, and Chuck the legendary lawyer wasn't having any of that.
I'm not sorry it did, because I wouldn't change a thing about 'Grilled', but I'm glad we're getting to see some of what Vince Gilligan originally had in mind for him. It's great to have Raymond Cruz back as Tuco, since the character was originally planned for a much longer arc on Breaking Bad before scheduling intervened.
"You're like a troll under a bridge! You must have enough stickers or you won't pass!" I'm glad that they're keeping Saul and Mike's partnership as a slow burn, because my God this is fun. I think the Breaking Bad montage it recalled most for me is Wendy the hooker, so take from that what you will about Saul and his hustling. It goes without saying that this creative team know their way around a montage, but it was still just so thrilling to feel the energy and wit of that courtroom sequence. So, I'm trying to keep track of the Salamanca family tree here.
He's not in the game yet, but he will be. When you have to put your chair on your desk just to get to your fold-out bed, you know your accommodation situation isn't ideal. James's financial situation might not provide quite the same high-pressure stakes as Walt's cancer, but it's still impossible not to root for him to get ahead - by whatever means necessary - when you realise he actually lives in that terrible prison cell of an office. He's still insisting he's not a criminal for now, but despite the momentum of that courtroom montage, he's at a standstill career-wise, barely making ends meet even when he's not paying his clients' hospital bills. There's a kind of mini ticking clock on the season now, because we know as well as Nacho does that James is going to call that number, maybe right around the same time he decides to start calling himself Saul Goodman. The brothers' dynamic is working very well for me so far. James seems to deal pretty well with the electricity delusions (insofar as he mostly ignores them), but when he's mentally off-balance himself, he can't do it, and just insists repeatedly that Chuck "take off the space blanket". And it was interesting to see him interacting in that vulnerable state with Chuck, who I'm now fairly sure is schizophrenic. The post-traumatic aftermath of that desert showdown kicks in immediately in the form of a full-blown, mid-date panic attack (goddamn breadsticks), demonstrating how much more affected James is by all this than Walt was even in the very early days. So once he tells Tuco "Let's talk proportionality", we know he's in control. He's got an answer for everything and he's already anticipating his opponent's response, because that's what the courtroom demands. What Saul is good at, doubtful though this seems at times, is argument. It's only thanks to Nacho, Tuco's more level-headed accomplice (who's played by Orphan Black's very compelling Michael Mando) that things don't end more messily. He's not a coward, he's not a fool, and he's really fascinating to watch under pressure, even as he tries a whole lot of avenues of escape for himself that ultimately go nowhere. I loved how level-headed he stayed throughout this whole thing, first suggesting ankle sprains before settling on one broken leg apiece ("Arms? When did we get onto arms?" "We could go that way, but we were talking about breaking, I think we're heading in the wrong direction…").Īnd it's in this moment, to me, that James McGill becomes a really plausible leading man. The splashy black comedy of Breaking Bad's early episodes is replicated here too, with Tuco trying to pass off bloodstains as salsa to his grandma - promising her he'll use club soda to really get that carpet clean - and James brilliantly negotiating with an enraged Tuco to get his clients' punishment down from death to GBH.