‘Better Call Saul’ season 2 premiere review: Gene, Jimmy, and Daniel show their cards
One of the joys of “Better Call Saul” is that these are not characters who see things as black-and-white, or feel the need to constantly check whether or not these people are doing the right thing. They’re imperfect. They don’t often know when to stop a good thin. They get greedy.
We began this season 2 premiere with our second flash-forward into the life of Gene, the future version of Saul Goodman working as a Cinnabon manager in Omaha. What do we make of him inscribing his initials on the wall after being trapped in the garbage room? To us, it represented his unwillingness to fully let go of that life, terrible and dangerous as it was sometimes. Jimmy likes to live on the knife’s edge, provided that he is not close to being sliced.
This is why in the present, Jimmy fantasized about getting to be a grifter-of-sorts with Kim at his side, forming a sort of Bonnie & Clyde operation for tricking people to get what they wanted. It was a fun night! Unfortunately for him, that’s all it was: A night. There was no way for him to move past that other than realize that he couldn’t spend all of his time lounging around the pool. Instead, he eventually took Kim’s suggestion and went with a job over at Davis & Main, a firm that was giving him a chance still. It’s really the job that almost any upstart New Mexico attorney would want, but you know he won’t be happy with it for long. That’s why he tried to flip that light switch!
Now, we turn to Daniel, a man who almost literally saw his house of cards come toppling down when his baseball cards were stolen … which was mostly just the end result of his own ignorance, and thinking that he could go around in his fancy Hummer without anyone noticing or thinking that this would be a problem. Suffice it to say, it was, and he should’ve taken Mike’s advice that he was living enough on the edge without putting flames on his car.
Did this episode perhaps need a bigger “moment”? Sure, but it was far and away better than the season 1 finale, and it reminded us precisely of the writing Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould do so well. Grade: B+.
(Photo: AMC.)