**Once again, if you haven’t seen all three episodes of Better Call Saul and all of Breaking Bad, take ten minutes to think about what you’ve done. Also don’t read this blog.**

Episodes 1 & 2 Recap

I gotta be honest. Speaking strictly on an entertainment level, I’m 100% more immersed in BCS after its first three episodes than I was my first time through the beginning of Breaking Bad. While that very well could have to do with the fact that BB changed the way I watch and I’m looking for & enjoying things in BCS because of BB, I think (initially at least) Jimmy has been a much more entertaining and dynamic character than Walter or Jesse were. For me, anyway.

Like the first two episodes, Nacho opened up with a flashback before the opening credits. Episode 1 was the infamous Cinnabon scene, episode 2 was a flashback to just before the end of episode 1, and last night’s show began with a younger, incarcerated Jimmy pleading with Chuck to help him get released from an Illinois prison. In keeping with another trend so far in the show (Jimmy quoting movies that have no relevance to the conversation at hand), the younger McGill began and ended this episode with a hearty “Hereeeeeeeeeee’s Johnny!”. After his initial attempt to charm the help out of Chuck, it’s revealed that he doesn’t necessarily have the best relationship with his family back in Albuquerque and he has to resort to more sincere means to gain his brother’s help. “Tell me what to do,” he told Chuck. This could be one of the reasons why Jimmy currently feels so obligated to take care of Chuck now and why he was so apprehensive when Nacho visited his office with his plan to rob the Kettlemans (he insisted to Chuck he wasn’t backsliding to Slippin’ Jimmy in episode 2).

Cut to the present, Jimmy is getting drunk off vodka & cucumber water (for customers only!). He dials up his pal Kim from HH&M, a relationship that was clearly romantic at some point. After letting it slip that the Kettlemans (remember, a client of HH&M) could be in danger, he hangs up and rushes to a pay phone to call and warn them (using his “sexy robot voice” as Kim called it).

After the Kettlemans house is found ransacked and the family missing, Jimmy rushes to a different pay phone to call Nacho and try to help him “de-escalate” his situation. He leaves a multitude of voicemails, which is presumably what led the cops to the phone Jimmy was at and they bring him in. Nacho named Jimmy as his lawyer, believing that he had given the score to another group and set him up. That wasn’t the case. Jimmy thinks that Nacho did do this (his van was seen outside the house by the neighbor and had blood inside it from the skaters), and talks about getting him the lowest possible sentence. This was also not true. Nacho was indeed outside the house two nights in a row, but he was scouting the place and had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

Kim lets Jimmy come to the house and take a look around. In what probably was a “What would I do?” moment, Jimmy notices the daughter’s favorite doll missing and suggests that maybe the Kettlemans kidnapped themselves.

When Jimmy initially tried to leave the courthouse after finding out about the situation, he obviously didn’t have the right amount of stickers to please our boy Mike and had to exit the parking lot by his own means (reaching in to the booth and pressing the button to raise the arm). This displeased Mike. When Jimmy tried to return, an altercation led to a poke from Jimmy with led to Mike putting his face in the pavement.

The cops trying to pin Nacho try to use Mike against Jimmy by convincing the old man to press charges if Jimmy doesn’t get Nacho to come clean. Mike initially agrees, but ends up siding with Jimmy and gives him a nice little speech in the stairwell. He tells Jimmy about a case he had when he was a cop in Philadelphia, that he believes the Kettlemans did kidnap themselves, and that “nobody wants to leave home”. It was exciting to see the two take steps towards being able to work together because that’s what we’re all waiting for if we’re being honest.

Invigorated, Jimmy returns to the Kettlemans house where he notices a camping sticker (sticker….sticker……hmmmmm….) on the back of their car. He walks through to their back yard (which looks an awful lot like the White’s house, with a pool and a seating area to the left of it), into the desert and eventually to a wooded area. The Kettlemans are there, camping in a tent. Jimmy breaks up the party with his second “Hereeeeeee’s Johnny!”, a struggle causes a duffle bag to rip and reveal the $1.5+ million that caused all of this.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

• When the cops take Jimmy down he warns them “I have bad knees!” –> When Walter and Jesse take Saul out to the desert in BB he warns them, “I have bad knees!” (/u/CameronTheCinephile)
• Possibly a Jesse Pinkman graffiti tag on the pay phone Jimmy uses to call Nacho (/u/MouseGuard)

 

• Jimmy gets mad at the other lawyer for mixing up cases in the bathroom –> Saul believes Badger to be the public masturbator when he initially meets him in BB (/u/meganisawesome42)
• May be a stretch, but Mike’s “nobody likes to leave home” quote on a few levels…He eventually had to leave Philadelphia (cop tenure ended “in dramatic fashion” according to Hank in BB), Saul eventually has to leave home at the end of BB, as does Walt, who eventually comes back home and it kills him, while Jesse leaves home and lives.
• A few I missed last week

Let us know over at @Bottlegate or in the comments if there’s anything we missed. Or just to talk. We’re always there for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ331j-sJCU

**If, for some reason, you haven’t seen every episode of Breaking Bad and the first two episodes of Better Call Saul, I’d go ahead and file this blog under “things I shouldn’t read”**

Perfection. No other word to describe it. Biggest cable premier in history. 6.9 million viewers. From that first scene in Omaha on Sunday night, Breaking Bad fans were thrown right back into the cinematic jewel that is Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque, New Mexico without skipping a beat. This was by far my most anticipated TV premier in my 24 years on Earth and boy did it deliver.

I was actually pretty nervous heading into it. Breaking Bad spoiled me. Before Walter White, if you gave me a show with characters I didn’t hate, a decent plot, an unexpected death or two and a cliffhanger at the end, I’d be game. Hell I thought “24” was literally the single greatest thing in the history of entertainment for a solid 6 years of my life (…it 100% was at the time). But never before had I paid attention to what color clothes a character was wearing, or the angle of the camera in a shot, or made mental notes of quotes in case of foreshadowing. Yes obviously the story of Breaking Bad was incredible, but it also changed the way I watch shows. How could Better Call Saul possibly measure up?

Vince Gilligan hit a no-doubt walk-off grand slam to win the World Series with Breaking Bad. Incredible story, yeah. Even more incredible performances from actors and actresses that hadn’t necessarily been there before. But after the success of the first two episodes of BCS, it’s pretty clear that he’s the coal that powers the engine. Yes, it’s going to be interesting to learn more about a character from BB that was universally well-received. Sure, all of the references back to BB were awesome. But take away the links to Breaking Bad, make Jimmy/Saul (FYI I’ll be using whichever name pops in my head first) a brand new character, have it set in Toronto…it’d still be awesome. It’s the way the story is told and the way the show is shot. It’s kind of a similar to an Aaron Sorkin-type situation (if you’re into that kind of thing). The way his shows are shot with walk-and-talks and quick-witted dialogue, that’s what make them awesome. You can apply it to whatever backdrop you want.

Uno

Talk about giving the people what they want. After Saul told Walter that “…in a month from now, best–case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha,” towards the end of Breaking Bad, every idiot in your office was joking about him actually becoming the manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha. So what did BCS kick off the series with? Saul, as “Gene”, managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. Why not. Cool that they wasted no time giving us a BB callback. It also turned sour pretty quickly, with Gene returning home, pouring himself a Rusty Nail and popping in an old tape of Saul Goodman commercials from the good old days.

The first glimpse we have of Jimmy in his native environment is when he is defending a trio of high school students who broke into a bio lab, cut off the head of a cadaver and then banged it. **Tips cap to Gilligan once again** Such a perfect first case to see Saul try and win. He then meets with a state treasurer and his wife about potentially defending him in what we would later learn is a $1.5 million dollar embezzlement case. The treasurer has pen-in-hand before his wife talks him out of it.

On his way back from that meeting it was kind of funny to see Jimmy, not yet the full-blown criminal we’ve come to know and love, almost fall a victim to a scam that he would, later in life, probably view as the smallest potatoes he’s ever seen. A couple skateboard bros with curly hair try to put one over on him by jumping in front of his car and asking him how he’ll “fix it”. He sniffed out the con almost right away, telling us that even though this is a show about how Saul became Saul, there may have been some Saul in Jimmy even before BCS took place.

So Chuck = Saul’s brother. He founded the law firm of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill but hasn’t been working there for some time due to an apparent mental illness (or “extended sabbatical”). Whenever someone comes to his house, they have to “ground” themselves (leave cell phones, keys in the mailbox). Someone on Reddit suggested a condition called “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”, and that’s as a far as I’m going with that. The firm is penning checks to Chuck but delivering them to Jimmy in the meantime, something Jimmy doesn’t particularly appreciate apparently. The entire scene of Jimmy going to the firm to question the checks and suggest they buy Chuck out of his share was one of my favorite scenes of the two episodes. His sleazeball personality was on full display as greeted everyone he saw and nobody gave a shit. This scene and the courtroom montage in Episode 2 put Bob Odenkirk’s talent on full display. Bryan Cranston was obviously genius as Walter in BB, but I’m not entirely sure we won’t see Odenkirk give him a run for his money by series’ end. Jimmy seeing the state treasurer bringing his business to HH&M on his way out was just icing on the cake.

Wrapping up the premier, Jimmy reconnects with the skater bros from earlier and tells them a story about “Slippin’ Jimmy” (lol), who used to pull off similar scams as they were attempting to do. He eventually joins forces with them and creates a plan to win the business of the treasurer by having his wife hit the brother with her car. Unfortunately they’re real fucking dumb and jump in front of the wrong car, which turned out to be none other than Tuco Salamanca’s grandmother.

Mijo

Morale of this episode? Don’t call the grandma of a psychotic methamphetamine pusher who beats people’s asses for fun a “biznatch”. That’s what the skater bros from episode 1 did, so Tuco promptly sent his sweet old grandma upstairs before breaking their noses with her cane.

Odenkirk earned his paycheck in this one, explaining himself out of a death sentence multiple times. Initially, when Tuco first brings him in the house, he convinces him he was just a lawyer who got a call from clients. Then when Tuco is ready to release the brothers, one of them spits out that Jimmy put them up to it, immediately turning the focus right back to Jimmy. Then once again in the first scene in our beloved New Mexico desert since BB, Jimmy convinces Tuco not only that this was a big misunderstanding, but to spare the lives of the brothers. Instead they just get a couple broken legs.

Jimmy has sort of a PTSD situation later on when he goes on a date with what was certainly a lady of the night. A fellow patron keeps breaking breadsticks in half, reminding him of tweedle dee and tweedle dumb’s respective femurs, and leads to Jimmy calling dinosaurs in the bar’s toilet.

Fast forward to the morning. Jimmy stumbled home to Chuck’s last night without grounding himself. Chuck tossed Jimmy’s cellphone into the front yard. Jimmy wakes up to Chuck wearing a space blanket. F***ing weird. But despite Jimmy’s clear disdain for his brother’s “condition” (“Take off the blanket. I didn’t do anything wrong.”), you could tell their love for one another was greater than that sickness or Jimmy’s pride. Jimmy was concerned about the checks earlier in the first episode, Chuck was concerned with the hospital bill he found in Jimmy’s pant pocket the night before.

Determined to make ends meet, the next scene was a montage straight out of Walt and Jesse’s lab in BB. Beautifully shot, it shows Jimmy working his tail off to defend the scum of the earth and rub his sleaze all over anyone who comes near him. “It’s show time!” was his go-to line during his pre-trial bathroom pep talks. I’d also be remiss to not mention the hilarious back-and-forth between Jimmy and your favorite senile old man from BB Mike Ehrmantraut, now working as a laid-back (and almost seemingly medicated) toll booth operator at the court house. It was honestly just a perfect couple minute summary of Saul’s beginnings as a criminal lawyer.

Even more fitting though, that scene ended with him in his closet-of-an-office, using the pull-out couch as a bed and drinking a short glass of cheap vodka out of a cup that wasn’t his. That’s when the first “client” we see comes to visit him — Tuco’s henchman Nacho. Armed with a plan to “win the business” of the treasurer on his own terms, Jimmy initially declines, but Nacho leaves his number on a matchbook with Jimmy’s name on it, for “when you figure out you’re in the game.” I’m guessing the coach is going to be calling Jimmy’s number pretty damn soon.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

• Saul Goodman
• The Cinnabon in Omaha
• The Cadillac Saul would eventually drive in BB parked next to his POS mustardmobile

 

• The garbage can he dented after the meeting at the lawfirm — the hand-towel dispenser Walt punched after his chemo treatment in BB
• Nacho and that other thug that tries to get Tuco to spare the brothers are both in BB (Tuco literally beats the thug to death in BB, and Saul is deathly afraid of Nacho in S2)
• Pretty sure Jimmy’s keys use the same red keyless entry keychain that Walt used to arm his turret in Felina
• The nail salon that Jimmy’s office is located in the back of –> the nail salon Saul suggests Jesse embezzle his money through in BB
• 
• Mike, obviously
• Saul lives on the same street as Gale Boetticher from BB (Juan Pablo)
• The courtroom montage –> Walt & Jesse cooking montage

• The confrontation in the desert –> like 15 thousand desert confrontations from BB

 

Let us know in the comments or @Bottlegate if we missed any BB references, or even if you just think this review was garbage. This will (hopefully) be a weekly thing where you can get your BCS recap for every episode.