Better Call Saul Season 2 Episode 10 Klick Recap
Maybe “Better Call Saul’s” Chuck just forgot that his dying mother had called out for Jimmy with her last breath. Probably slipped his mind in a time of great despair.
Or….Chuck is just as rotten as he appears.
Good grief this man is bitter. The flashback showing Jimmy missing out on seeing his mama awake from her coma as he goes out for a hoagie told the tale of two very different men. Even Jimmy’s mom favored the shady but more lovable younger brother. Chuck, despite following all the rules, just doesn’t touch people in the way Jimmy does.
Admittedly it would be tough hearing your mother call for a sibling even as you sit holding her hand. But Chuck has carried his bitterness over his entire life. You can see it on his haggard face each time we get a closeup of Michael McKean who has done a good job of becoming a cold, calculating villain in the first two seasons of Better Call Saul.
Getting back to the present day, Jimmy is forced to show up to help Chuck after collapsing in the print shop. He’s the only one with the sense to call 911 I guess. Then comes our view from Chuck’s gurney as he’s rolled into the hospital. Quite a bad place to be for a guy allergic to bright lights and the power grid.
Mix in the order for a CAT scan and Chuck screams, “You’re killing me!” The man should be committed. He’s clearly insane .
After Chuck gets settled down in his room, he calls out his brother for being Johnny on the spot. Nevermind Jimmy was trying to help him while the other idiots just watched him bleed on the floor.
Chuck knows he was there already and assumes he bribed the copy shop guy. Right again. But Ernie lies for Jimmy, telling him later that he did so because he is his friend, and that Chuck had been saying how he was going to destroy Jimmy for the Mesa Verde trick.
What’s Mike up to while Chuck is about to get spun through a CAT scan? He’s watching Nacho’s van as they take the driver out to get info about the robbery. Later we see Mike go back to get the sniper rifle he should have bought weeks ago to deal with Tuco.
Chuck is in full freak out mode before entering the CAT scan machine. Unfortunately, his head didn’t pop during the test. I was hoping to see his big brain explode all over the exam room. Jimmy and Kim get to the commercial Jimmy and crew shot at the military base and it’s awesome.
“Gimme Jimmy” is perfect. Easy to remember with rhyme. He’ll have the old folks lined up at his office with Blueblockers and walkers in tow.
He’s feeling guilty though and the “Garden Weasel” commercial following his ad didn’t make him feel any better.
Once Mike closes the deal on his rifle, the gun broker makes sure and wipes his own fingerprints off the weapon since he knows what’s coming. In case you’re wondering, it really is that simple to remove prints from a gun with a cloth. It was scientifically proven in the Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell flick Get Hard.
Once Chuck comes out of his self-induced catatonia (similar to a teen looking up from their iPhone after three hours), Jimmy is able to take him home. Chuck is under the legal care of Jimmy at the moment, which may come into play next season in order to save Jimmy’s neck.
Hector is the only target Mike is interested in as he watches the drug running crew take the poor driver out to his grave. Nacho is in the way of a clean shot as Mike waits patiently with the silence of the desert all around him with only the insects buzzing.
He’s so far away he barely hears the shot that kills the driver.
Good thing too, because his car horn starts blaring. So he aborts the assassination mission, heading back to his station wagon. Mike must have a car dealer specializing in inconspicuous 1980’s models.
Who the hell set the horn off and left the “Don’t” note on his windshield? I have no earthly idea unless it’s one of Gus’ men. That’s very possible. The third season wouldn’t be too early to have the upstart drug kingpin enter the fray. Who else would be slick enough to know what the super careful Mike was up too?
That’s all we got to see of Mike for this season. Damn shame, but a great cliffhanger.
The final act was between the brothers. Chuck is quitting HHM according to Howard so Jimmy abandons his office filled with clients to check on his brother. Jimmy arrives to find Chuck living inside a chewing gum wrapper.
Dude has plastered his entire home’s interior with the solar lining. It appears he finally cracked completely.
Jimmy is super concerned and can’t understand why he’s retiring from the law. Chuck puts on a great show, saying his illness is the reason for his mistake on the Mesa Verde papers.
The con man falls for the con, hook, line, and sinker. Hell, he jumped in the damn boat without Chuck having to even reel him in!
Jimmy admits he doctored the papers in order to help Kim, not to humiliate Chuck. Full admission son. In another epic performance by Bob Odenkirk, we can feel just how much his character cares about his older bro. He wants Chuck to get better and throws self preservation aside.
When he’s told he just admitted to a felony, Jimmy says, “It would be your word against mine.”
Wrong.
Chuck had been digging through his storage shed for an old tape recorder. I mean old. But it worked well enough to record Jimmy throwing himself under the bus.
That scene ended season two, with Jimmy unaware of the recording.
What I look for in season three is Jimmy finally realizing how awful Chuck is. And he’ll finally start fighting as dirty as need be. If that means having Chuck committed to a loony bin, then great. Can’t wait to see the guy in a straight jacket drooling on himself.
For me, Mike’s story is still above the brothers’ conflict even though I love Jimmy’s character. I’m not an action junkie either. I guess I just see a closer connection to Breaking Bad with Mike at this point in the show.
That shouldn’t make me partial to one storyline or another though since I’ve said for a while that BCS can stand on its own two feet without having to lean on the success of BB.
So, did season two fly by for you all?
Who do you think left the note warning Mike to abort his plan for killing Hector? Has Gus Fring made his crossover debut from “Breaking Bad?”
“Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul’s” Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould has this to say about Gus Fring coming to Season 3:
Does this mean that Gus Fring is back? The return of Hector Salamanca and the Cousins came as surprises during season two. Was the heightened anticipation of Gus’ return something you wanted fans to marinate in between seasons two and three of “Better Call Saul”?
Peter Gould: If we knew for sure one way or the other I’d be more comfortable saying that we want them to marinate in that. I have to say, we did not think the clues in the titles would be decoded as quickly as they were. We’re still mulling over season three. Now that the cat is out of the bag, we’re certainly thinking Gus Fring had a hand in what happened with Mike at the end of season two. Having said that, Gus Fring works in mysterious ways, he casts a long shadow, he works indirectly.
Personally I think we’d feel a little worried about disappointing the fans if their hopes were raised they would see wall-to-wall Gus Fring next season. Whether he appears in episode one, two, three, four, five, or any of them, is still up in the air. He’s certainly, it’s safe to say, already a presence on the show. The one concern we have about the fact that people decoded this so quickly is we don’t want to do a bait and switch. We try very hard not to play head games with the audience. Not the wrong kind of head games …
Vince Gilligan: We love the fun kind.
PG: We love suspense, we love surprise. But the one thing we don’t want to do is raise folks’ expectations that they’re going to see something and then not ever deliver it. That certainly is something we’re thinking about here.
VG: It really is on us that we didn’t realize how smart the audience was. We thought that little clue — “FRING’S BACK” in the titles — would be something Peter could tweet about today, or sometime this week…
PG: Or over the summer!
VG: Exactly, it could’ve been any time. It could have been months from now. We thought Peter could throw it out there in the universe for people to discover, “Oh my God, that’s a clue about what happened in the last episode.” But because it came so early, we’ve been biting our nails all week thinking, “Oh man, people are going to absolutely assume they’re going to see Giancarlo Esposito in that final episode that aired last night and they’re gonna think we baited and switched them.” That’s a funny — I don’t know if funny is the right word — that’s an interesting example of the message getting out there before it should. But that’s on us.
PG: I think there’s a good reason George Lucas didn’t create a title for the second “Star Wars” movie that spelled out “Darth Vader is Luke’s father.”
You mentioned Giancarlo Esposito, he does have some kind of commitment to Baz Luhrmann’s series “The Get Down” for Netflix. Have you had any discussions with him at this point about how committed he could be to “Better Call Saul” versus other projects he might be doing?
VG: We love Giancarlo, he’s family, he’s part of “Breaking Bad” and therefore part of the “Better Call Saul” family as well even if we never see him on the show. He’s a wonderful human being and a great actor. He’s a very much in demand actor and it stands to reason he’s much sought after because he’s so wonderful. I just saw his name, he’s in the giant hit movie “The Jungle Book.” He’s busy and always planning to be busier, so that was maybe one of the dumbest things we ever did. [laughs]
PG: We’re both wearing dunce caps right now.
Have you already settled on other “Breaking Bad” characters we might see in season 3 of “Saul”?
PG: We’ve talked about a couple. We have a board up in the writers office with the names of characters we’d like to bring back. At this point there are almost as many “Better Call Saul” characters, or almost, as there are “Breaking Bad” characters. There are a lot of folks we saw in season one of “Better Call Saul,” like the Kettlemans for instance, who we’d love to see again. Weirdly enough we have this embarrassment of riches, because we have all these wonderful characters played by brilliant fun actors to choose from to bring back.
There’s always a temptation to do an episode which is a just a giant class reunion — which we’d love to shoot and it would be so much fun in Albuquerque to have everybody there — but we’re really slaves to the story that we’re telling. We have to make sure that anything we do is justified by the story of Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut.
You leave Chuck and Jimmy’s relationship at a very precarious point. What should we make of Chuck’s single-minded obsession with getting the world to see Jimmy as a fraud?
VG: The best answer I can give you is we talk a lot about the novel “Moby Dick” in the writers room and Captain Ahab in reference to Charles McGill. He does seem to have this Ahab-esque quality. It’s funny that so many viewers just hate his guts, that he’s such a villain and such a bad guy. I wouldn’t argue that, but I feel sorry for the guy. He’s so damaged on some fundamental level. He’s so jealous of his brother. His mother’s dying words were “Jimmy.” He did a hateful thing in not telling his brother that with her last words she was thinking of him, that’s a sin of omission that speaks to a paucity of spirit that’s hateful on one hand but makes me feel sorry for the guy on the other. I’m not saying I’d want him as my brother. I’m not saying I’d want to hang around him. He’s holier than thou and kinda smug and all these unlikeable things. On some level I feel more sorry for him than anything.
PG: I think it’s fascinating that people hate Chuck so much and we don’t hear about that for Hector Salamanca. Hector will threaten a man’s family. Watch while a man is shot in the head just because he didn’t tell Hector what he wanted to hear. We’re not hearing how much people hate Hector Salamanca, we’re hearing about Chuck. It’s an interesting thing to think about, because people will talk about what the stakes are in this story, but there’s something about the relationship between these two brothers that really gets you in the gut. It’s a really different kind of story. I’m fascinated by it, but I’m fascinated by all these characters.
VG: It’s interesting to contemplate. The way I see it is Hector is expected to be the villain. Chuck, as the brother, is expected to give love and support and respect and leadership even to his big brother. He’s expected to be good to him and in a weird way that makes him more villainous than Hector Salamanca. Even though in real life I’d cross the street to avoid Hector Salamanca, Chuck I could stand to be trapped in an elevator with I think.
PG: I’d definitely rather have Chuck for a neighbor.
Kim Wexler really came into her own this season but we didn’t see much of her in the finale. What can we expect from her next season?
VG: Rhea Seehorn is a star, that’s the easiest way to put it, even more than we expected. We knew we were hiring a wonderful actress two years ago, nonetheless she continues to surprise us. She has enough charisma to light up Burbank. She’s one of the best actors we’ve ever worked with.
PG: Her character has so much to lose. One of the great unresolved questions of the show is what — we certainly know that Kim is absolutely central to Jimmy and Jimmy’s life, he loves her — so what happened to her? Why is there no sign of her on “Breaking Bad,” or is there? Maybe there is some sign of her on “Breaking Bad” and we just haven’t figured it out yet.