Now that the show is back, though? Make mine Mike. By season’s end my concerns that Mike’s half would overwhelm Jimmy’s were largely alleviated, even though their paths never wound up converging Jimmy’s accidental destruction of his brother, his shamefaced attempts to put the pieces back together, his confession of wrongdoing, and Chuck’s secret plan to use that confession against him was all dynamite stuff that more than held its own. During Season Two the series more or less split itself in two, with the Jimmy and Chuck stuff chugging along as a quirky and compelling workplace drama and the Mike material nosediving its way toward meth and murder with slow-burn suspense so strong it was almost nauseating to watch. Much as I enjoy the misadventures of the Brothers McGill, however, Better Call Saul is still in many ways The Mike Ehrmantraut Show. Marvelous moments abound here: Jimmy’s desperately jovial attempts to re-ingratiate himself with Chuck through shared, half-remembered nostalgia about their childhood his later lashing out against an Air Force captain he’d bamboozled last season, now standing in as a surrogate older brother figure Chuck’s cryptic comment to his partner Howard Hamlin that while Jimmy’s surreptitiously taped confession may be useless in court, it has a hidden purpose of its own his smirk of triumph when he gets his assistant Ernesto to “accidentally” play Jimmy’s confession, beginning the spread of this reputation-destroying information the collateral damage done to Kim, whose guilt over what she knows about how Jimmy got her client back from Chuck is manifesting itself in debilitatingly obsessive attention to detail, as if the crime might recur with her as its victim. Or so it seemed: Chuck’s departure from the high-powered law firm he cofounded and his subsequent cocooning of his entire house in insulation was just a ruse to coax out his kid brother’s confession. When we last saw them, Jimmy had confessed to tampering with Chuck’s files in order to make him look incompetent in front of a client he’d wrinkled from Jimmy’s girlfriend and business partner Kim Wexler the sabotage had caused Chuck’s psychosomatic allergy to electromagnetic fields to spiral him into the hospital and out of a job. The attorneys in question are Jimmy and Chuck McGill, who as far as Jimmy knows are enjoying a momentary truce in their long battle against one another’s mental and moral shortcomings. But his words serve as an instruction manual for us as well: “Mabel,” Better Call Saul’s Season Three premiere, is after all the story of two lawyers and a man who says nothing. That’s an experience with which Gene, aka Saul Goodman, aka Jimmy McGill, is quite familiar. His instructions, at first shouted impulsively and then mumbled sheepishly, turn him from face to heel in the eyes of his ersatz law-enforcement buddies. It comes courtesy of “Gene,” the sad-sack manager of a shopping mall Cinnabon who witnesses a shoplifter get pinched by security after he reflexively points out the kid’s location to the cops. “Say nothing! You understand? Get a lawyer! Get a lawyer.” You want a Better Call Saul mission statement? You got one.
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