Noiseless Chatter Archive

Making money legitimately is dull. It’s boring. It saps your soul. You know it. I know it. It sucks. We don’t want jobs. We don’t want to wake up and go to work. We don’t want to spend 40-50 hours a week wishing it were the weekend so that we could rest up for the next 40-50 hour week. Better Call Saul might cheat a little when “Talk” sticks Jimmy in a cellphone store that’s completely devoid of customers, but it makes its point. Or rather Jimmy, classic film aficionado, makes it when he spends his first day on the job bouncing a ball onto the floor, then the wall, then catching it, over and over again. He’s imitating Steve McQueen when he gets sent to the cooler in The Great Escape . Jimmy sees legitimate employment as imprisonment. That’s why, in the past two episodes, we saw him decline a job offer but then set into motion a plan to break into that workplace and steal a Hummel figurine. Sure, the figurine earned him more than he would have possibly made for...

As much as I come down on Better Call Saul for so frequently echoing Breaking Bad , I do have to confess that I’m part of the problem. I am indeed one of those people in the audience who gets a giddy little thrill out of seeing a familiar face. I smile. My ears perk up. I really hate to admit this, but I pay more attention. And so “Something Beautiful” reunited us with Gayle, one of my absolute favorite characters from Breaking Bad . Why I didn’t immediately think of him when Gus learned he’d have to find someone to cook product locally, I have no idea. Maybe the mention of the DEA in the season premiere had me primed for Hank, Gomez, and possibly Marie to be the next ambassadors from that show. Instead it was the perfectly natural — and just about obligatory — appearance of Gayle. I laughed as soon as I recognized him. I was excited. I was happy to see him. Breaking Bad didn’t keep him around for long. He was the one for whom Gus invested in the superlab, and...

In last week’s review, I focused on one story rather than all three that were in the episode, expecting the other two would pick up in “Breathe” and I could talk about them more completely then. I made the right judgement. As much as I could have said after “Smoke,” it felt a bit end a discussion of Jimmy’s ever-loosening morals to say, “Also Mike did a comedy routine with some idiots we’ll never see again.” Both things happened in the same episode, but it didn’t feel as though they belonged in the same review. And, sure enough, “Breathe” picks up both of those threads I neglected, but only one of them reaches any kind of real milestone. Season four began with three major plots unfolding concurrently. The first, and certainly the most important to this show rather than as setup for Breaking Bad , was the aftermath of Chuck’s death. This plot involves Jimmy, Kim, and Howard, and was the focus of “Smoke.” But we also had the impending fallout from Hector’s heart attack, ...

I skimmed an interview with Peter Gould before the premiere of Better Call Saul (I was trying to avoid direct spoilers) and he mentioned that he toyed with the idea of jumping ahead in time after the end of season three. In fact, they toyed with that idea a few times already on Better Call Saul , and did the same when writing Breaking Bad . But each time, they realized there were still stories to tell right where they were. I’ve said before that my main issue with the final stretch of Breaking Bad was its willingness to jump ahead in time. In any other show, that would neither have mattered nor registered. Breaking Bad , though, spent the vast majority of its run moving deliberately from point to point. We followed every step from A to B to C, so that we could trace not so much the workings of the plot, but the evolutions of the characters. We didn’t jump from A to C; we watched every painful moment of the characters changing along the way. Loosening their personal mo...