Plenty to unpack in sad-sack stand-alone Saul story

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This article was published 30/07/2022 (1523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It says something about the unconventional brilliance of Better Call Saul that just as the front end of this incredible prequel is about to crash into the back end of Breaking Bad, just as the tight-wound saga of Saul (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and the duelling drug cartels seems set for a violent reckoning, BCS jams the brakes on that nerve-wracking narrative and goes for a stand-alone episode.

And Nippy, which aired last week on AMC, is not just any stand-alone episode. It’s a black-and-white, bleakly comic look at the life of sad Gene Takovic, whose story, until now, has been carefully doled out in the cold openings of BCS’s first five seasons.

Those flash-forwards jumped right over Breaking Bad to take us into the lead character’s post-Saul Goodman existence as Gene, the moustachioed manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha, Neb.

The complex Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad timeline follows Jimmy McGill, a small-time grifter who tries to go straight with a legal career but then incrementally evolves into Saul Goodman, who’s not so much a criminal lawyer as a “criminal” lawyer. In the wake of Breaking Bad’s wreckage, Saul changes again. The splashy suits, gaudy mansion and big-talking ways are all gone after he’s “disappeared” by vacuum salesman Ed Galbraith (the late, great Robert Forster) and given a new identity.

Gene Takovic now lies low in the Midwest, where he works his Cinnabon shifts and returns to a dark, empty apartment to watch his old TV commercials on VHS tape. His life is dull but safe, at least until he’s rumbled by a taxi driver called Jeff. Fearful that Jeff is going to blackmail him over his criminal past, Gene calls Ed in the Season 5 opener to arrange another extraction, only to cancel at the last minute. “I’ve changed my mind,” Gene tells Ed. “I’m going to fix it myself.”

And that’s what this self-contained episode is about. (Minor spoilers to come.) Gene is in full fix-it mode, but what at first might seem like a maddening pause in the show’s larger narrative is in fact a precisely constructed crystallization of what has made this series so terrific.

First off, there’s that trademark visual style. There’s the bland ’80s-era mall incongruously captured in film-noir black and white. There are those trademark process sequences, in which trivial acts like making cinnamon buns and taking garbage bags to the trash get transformed with jazzy split-screen montages.

There’s the patient, repetitive setup, as Gene constructs a criminal plan with a meticulousness that would impress even Mike Ehrmantraut. And there’s the dialogue that seems aimless but turns out to be significant, as when Gene starts taking notes on college ball so he can chat with a mall security guard about how the Cornhuskers are doing this season.

There are the clever callbacks to the past, as when the one-time “Slippin’ Jimmy,” who used to stage fake falls for money, is almost brought down by the real thing. And we see once again Jimmy’s winning way with the elderly — which has always been motivated both by lawsuit loot and genuine compassion — when he uses a lost-dog poster to finagle a “chance” meeting with Marion, an octogenarian played by comedy legend Carol Burnett.

Marion, ferociously independent and frank-talking, turns out to be the mother of Jeff (originally played by Don Harvey but recast with Pat Healy, though Jeff’s hideous sweater remains the same to ease the transition). To protect his cover, Gene offers to bring Jeff in on the criminal scheme he’s arranging.

Compared with the massive potential payoffs and possible murderous threats that Saul has been facing in the larger arc of Season 6, Nippy is a low-rent, low-stakes scenario. But this con within a con still manages to set out the complex moral and emotional stakes that are at the heart of the show.

Here Gene appeals to other people’s vices, to their greed and envy. He takes advantage of harmless human weakness, like one character’s love of cream cheese icing. Worst of all, he actually plays on people’s goodness, using their Midwestern friendliness and openness against them.

In this minor Season 6 detour, we get a major glimpse into the darkness of Jimmy/Saul/Gene, who has always vacillated between good and bad, between lies and truth.

We also sense his sadness. There’s a key scene in which Gene feigns sudden emotional distress to distract his mark from something else that’s going on. He talks about his utter aloneness: He has no brother, no wife, no friend, he tells the man. If he died that night, his landlord would pack up his life in three hours. It’s a ploy, but it’s also painfully real.

That’s something to keep in mind if you’re finding this weird little episode frustrating, as many fans have: It’s not so much a distraction from the main story as a distillation.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca