Gene Doesn’t Exactly Get Clean
Better Call Saul Final Episode Reviews — ‘Nippy’
In my review of last week’s episode, I posed the question what would happen in the black and white flashforwards that had opened every season of Better Call Saul until the last one. I also asked how ‘Gene’ would handle the situation now that his identity was known. I wondered if that meant he would finally ‘break bad’
In ‘Nippy’, we got an answer to some of those questions, and the writers did so in a way that we had never seen in the Breaking Bad verse before — an episode entire set in one of those same flashforwards. (For those who have been paying close attention to some of the dates and times in these flashforwards — I confess I haven’t been — we actually got an exact estimate as to when these flashforwards have been taking place relative to the Breaking Bad calendar. I’ll deal with that a little later on.)
In one of those perfect moments of casting you never thought even Vince Gilligan could get away with, one of the central characters to ‘Nippy’ was played by Carol Burnett, who I can only assume appeared in this episode to cross it off her bucket list. She played Miriam, a perfectly average senior citizen (the kind that Jimmy had a lot of success charming in the series) who Gene just ‘happened to ‘run into’ when he was posted signs for his lost dog ‘Nippy’. Naturally, being an upstanding citizen Gene helped her push her wheelchair out of the snow, they had a nice conversation and Miriam invited Gene home for dinner. Of course, Miriam happens to be the mother of Eddie, the cab driver who recognized ‘Gene’ two flashforwards ago.
Understandably Eddie was stunned to see Gene in his house. And I was similarly shocked to see how Gene intending to solve the problem — he was going to teach Eddie how to run a con. “One time and then we’re done.” Eddie bought into it.
The next fifteen minutes were unlike anything we’d ever seen in the history of the series. Gene took some of his Cinnabon back to the security guards to thank Steve, the guard who’d rescued him from being locked up back in Season 2. (Steve was not happy considering Gene had warned a shoplifter to ‘get a lawyer’.) Gene then met with the other security guard. In another piece of perfect casting, this guard was played by Parks and Recreation’s most memorable idiot Jim O’Heir, once again cast as the sucker. We also got a reference to another flashforward from one of the promotional ads for the final episodes: this guard is the man we’ve seen eating his cinnamon bun with a fork and knife. Gene engages in discussion about University of Nebraska football as a partially distraction, while he sets the timer on his watch to see how long it takes before the guard finishes he sweep and they check the camera.
In a montage straight out of Hollywood, we see variations of these scenes play out over what seems to be a period of weeks. Gene follows the routine every day, the guards become increasingly friendly too him, and Gene continues to brush up on Cornhusker football so he can engage fully in conversation with the man. We know there’s a con in play, but we don’t know the details until the sequence is over.
Then we see Gene walking through the mall that he has spent the department stores in the mall he has spent several months working it, quietly counting his footsteps. He declines help, and is taking notes on a pad. Cut to the driven snow in Omaha where he, Ed and one of his friends are mapping out what seems to be the blueprint of the layout of the store.
The con is now clear: in the three minutes that it will take the security guard to show up on the camera and for Gene’s mark to turn around and check the camera, Ed will run the length of the mall, grab three each of the most expensive properties at certain locations, and then return to the exit. They will then sell the goods on the black market.
At this point, now seeing the ‘work’ he’s going to have to do, Ed starts to balk at it. Gene than rebukes him for not having faith. Then he promotes his skills like so:
“A middle-aged chemistry teacher showed up in my office; couldn’t pay his medical bills. Less than a year later, he had a pile of cash the size of Volkswagen.”
Marvel at everything that the writers in those two sentences. First, revel in the fact that we’re nearly at the end of the prequel, and this is the first direct mention of Walter White and everything that happened in the first five and a half seasons of Breaking Bad. And I thought the writers of Angel could be succinct in summing up some of the more complicated plots of Buffy.
Second, look how Saul has crafted things. Not only has he taken full credit for everything Walter White managed to accomplish in his rise to power (credit by the way, that Walter never deemed to show anyone, certainly not Saul) he has meted out a certain measure of revenge in basically dismissing everything Walter ‘achieved’ in less than two sentences as something he would have been hopeless at doing without his help. Does ‘Gene’ know what has happened to Walter yet? (The timetable suggests it, and we know Gene reads the paper, but how much coverage would have gotten in Omaha?) I don’t think it’s relevant. Saul understandably blames Walter for destroying everything he managed to build in Albuquerque (and given what we’ve seen to this point, you can’t blame him) and always had a better sense of reality than Walter ever did. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul may appear in the last few episodes, but that’s almost unnecessary at this point; it’s hard to imagine either being used as perfectly as the writers do in this scene.
And all of this, by the way, is a way of one more con: convincing Ed to go through with the scam, and it works. Gene tries to call it off, and Ed naturally starts running the track again.
In the next scene, we get the buildup Ed’s friend, pretending to be a delivery man, leaves a crate at the back of the department store. The head of the clothing store is angry; she demands he take it back. She calls his boss — which is Gene. Using a model that Slipping Jimmy must have used endless variations on, he pretends to be a kindly supervisor, making up a story about rotten mackerel that needs to be picked up, then offering to drive four hours from Detroit to pick it up that night. As David Mamet said in House of Games, he gives this woman his confidence. And it works perfectly. She suggests that they leave the crate outside overnight as long as someone comes to pick it up the next morning.
That night, we see Gene do everything he’s done a couple of dozen times before: he closes up shop, he throws out his garbage, he takes his cinnamon buns to the guards (who by now buzz him in without thinking twice); he gets coffee, he hands them their baked goods, he starts talking about the most recent game (for those playing along at home; the flashforwards are apparently taking place in October of 2010), and he sits down to enjoy conversation. The moment he sits down, he types GO into his pager.
Ed breaks out of the box and starts running, counting off every time he makes his grab: “Two! Air Jordan Shoes for You!” Gene and the guard talk about that week’s game, the upcoming star, while Gene in perfect position watches as Ed makes his grab.
Then, of course, something goes wrong. Ed has been moving too fast and carrying too much. He collapses. Gene starts doing his best Saul and BS-ing about football doing everything he can not to make the guard turn around, praying for Ed to get up.
And then it happens. Gene starts getting maudlin to keep his eyes on him. Only to do so, he lays his soul bare. “My parents are dead. So is my brother. My wife is gone, no kids. If I died tonight, it would take three hours to pack up my stuff at home. They’d assign someone to manage the Cinnabon. I’m a ghost.”
Now this is a callback to Walt’s breakdown in Hank’s office in ‘Dead Freight’ where he despaired about the state of his marriage to place a bug in the DEA head’s phone. But Walt was completely faking his emotions. There’s a note of brutal honesty in Gene’s tone that we haven’t seen before in any of his incarnations. It’s as close to him baring his soul as we’ve ever seen. He manages to back off it, when Ed manages to get to his feet and run off, and gets a promise to the guard not to say anything about it. If there’s any justice in this world, this will be the scene that finally gets Bob Odenkirk the Emmy he’s been owed at least since Better Call Saul premiered (if not before).
In the aftermath, back at Ed’s place while they’re all looking at the stolen goods, Gene brings a harsh dose of reality as he calmly and clearly lays out the crimes they’ve committed and the prison time they’ll be facing even they decide to turn him in: “It’s called Mutually Assured Destruction’,” he tells them in as cold a voice as we’ve ever heard him use in nearly a decade. He finally gets the promise he’s been looking for since he started this: “We’re done.”
But of course, Miriam is still around. There’s a horrible moment when we think she’s going to power over and see all this, and who knows what would happen. But by the time the garage door goes up, all three men are standing around the hood of the car and she takes it for granted. Of course, Gene has to stay for dinner, and they have one last conversation (though Miriam doesn’t know, going on about what a ‘good influence Gene has been’) Then she asks him about Nippy, who Gene has almost forgotten. But he remembers that the dog had been with a family this whole time and got him back. “After all this, a happy ending,” he says.
But that’s not the last scene of the show. We see Gene walking through the department store again. He looks at a Kansas City Royals bag (Kim’s old team) and then he looks at a tie that must be particularly garish and put it next to what must be a flashy jacket. A look of nostalgia comes into his eyes. Then one of the women asks him if he needs anything, and he returns to the reality just as dark as the tones of the flashforward he’s been in. He says: “No thank you,” looks at the suit another moment, and then walks away, leaving it behind.
There are many critics who thought it would have been perfect if Breaking Bad had ended its run with ‘Ozymandias’, or indeed any of the last four episodes. There will no doubt be arguments just as valid in the weeks to come that Better Call Saul could just as easily have ended with ‘Nippy’, a story that has connected the threads of all of the flashforwards that have opened every season of the series and brought them to a very satisfying conclusion. And maybe it is, at least as far as the story of Gene Tarkovic is, and to an extent Saul Goodman’s.
But even though ‘Nippy’ is a masterpiece, I still believe there’s an even better ending out there. ‘Ozymandias’ may be one of the greatest episodes in TV history, but ‘Felina’ was the perfect finale for Breaking Bad. And given Gilligan and his crew’s history and the amount of time they’ve had to do this, I think it’s very likely that the final episode of Better Call Saul could be still better and finally bring closure to the life of Jimmy McGill. We know that according to the calendar, Walter White has died several months prior to the first flashforward of the series. So the question is what does Jimmy/Saul/Gene do now that the immediate threat has passed? One reviewer of this episode asks: “What does (Gene) have to live for any more?” We got a hint of it in this episode. I’m not saying that this could be a back door pilot for yet another spinoff (“Gene the Machine?).
What I’m saying is that while this episode answered many question, it still hasn’t answered the one that’s been ‘gliding over all’ since the series began. Why did Saul Goodman insist on going to Omaha?