'Better Call Saul' Writer Talks Jimmy's Legal Skills, That Dumpster Scene, and What Caused Chuck's Illness
Spoiler alert: This interview contains storyline and character spoilers for the “RICO” episode of Better Call Saul.
Better Call Saul is batting a thousand eight episodes into its debut season, and the writer behind two of those gems is Gordon Smith, former assistant to Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan. Even more impressive: The two episodes Smith has written, the instant classic “Five-O” (aka the one with Mike’s backstory) and Monday’s “RICO,” are the first two TV scripts Smith wrote, ever. So, batting a thousand, as a rookie.
Related: ‘Better Call Saul’ Recap: It’s All Very Aboveboard
The newbie writer, who deserves an Emmy nod for “Five-O,” talks to Yahoo TV about “RICO,” an episode that reveals as much about what makes Jimmy tick as “Five-O” did about what makes Mr. Ehrmantraut tick, namely Jimmy’s serious skills as an attorney, his complicated relationship with big brother Chuck, and his willingness to boldly go where others, like Chuck, would never dream of, like a nasty dumpster and an assisted living center bathroom.
This episode feels like another huge piece of the Jimmy-to-Saul puzzle. In this episode, it’s really highlighted that he has skills others, even super-talented attorney Chuck, don’t have: He has a knack for recognizing when people are taking advantage of others, when they’re scamming people. It sets him up to be this this potential champion of the underdog, yet we know, again, who his clientele ends up being, and that’s a little heartbreaking. Is that what you meant for this episode to do for us, really spotlight what Jimmy’s potential is?
Sometimes, I think, people think of the slick part of Jimmy and Saul, and not the fact that he’s actually a really good lawyer. We’ve seen him in Breaking Bad and, hopefully, here, as you say, picking up on things that are sometimes subtle. Chuck is a brilliant legal mind, but he might be too mired in the details and miss the bigger picture; that’s something Jimmy picks up on. Chuck is able to process the proper forms and the proper structure of the wills that Jimmy puts in front of him, but he doesn’t see the bigger picture, which is “Hey, these numbers don’t add up. Something doesn’t smell right here.” That’s the horse sense that Jimmy has, that Chuck is missing.
When we talked to Bob Odenkirk earlier this season, he was very insistent that those of us who think Jimmy/Saul is a good attorney, that we think that partly to justify him, because we like the character so much. But this episode gives evidence that he is talented, that, specifically, he has a grasp of the law and how to apply it.
He does, he does, and he has a grasp of looking around… he works people better than necessarily the intricacies of the law, but that’s not to say that he’s not able to do more, not able to understand the intricacies of the law. One of my favorite scenes from Breaking Bad is the scene where he meets with Jesse’s parents to try and get them to sell the house, and he uses the law, but it’s the way he uses it. He knows the law, and it’s how he uses it that makes him particularly interesting and particularly dangerous.
Like locking himself in the bathroom to write that spoliation letter at Sandpiper.
Exactly. I had to get an awful lot of help on this one. My sister is an attorney, so I asked her a lot of questions on this. Basically, as the opposing attorney says, you can shred documents all day long. There’s nothing illegal about that, but if you’ve been served with the demand letter, someone tells you that litigation is coming, then you’re supposed to stop, because then you’re destroying evidence. He knows that he has to get that letter to them as soon as possible so that they will stop shredding, because any evidence that’s lost, he may not be able to recover.
Jimmy never gives up, which is one of his most endearing qualities, even when he’s faced with regular indignities. The dumpster is, I think, a new level of Jimmy indignity. You can’t allow yourself to even think about all the things that would be in a dumpster at an assisted-living facility.
He knows that he’s going to take it as far as he can. On a side note, when we were working on that scene, it’s not just Jimmy. I think one of the things that really comes through to me in that scene is how far Bob Odenkirk is willing to go. We were staging it, and he wanted to make sure that it didn’t look like he was holding back. He was very concerned. He’s like, “Look, I don’t want to be the kind of guy who doesn’t give it their all.” Every time he jumped in there and got that stuff all over him, we had a big reset to clean him up, we had to get him into a new suit. That takes time, and it takes effort, and it’s hard on the actors, but he’s like, “I don’t want to be the guy that doesn’t give it their all just to avoid having to do that kind of extra labor. I don’t want to clock out early just so that I don’t have to do that.” He was just as committed as the character, which I think comes through.
How many Matlock suits did you go through, then, for that scene?
Oh, gosh. Unfortunately, he had to do it both on location, and when we shot the close-up stuff inside the dumpster on set, so he had to do it twice. Two or three of the suits got pretty messed up, especially when he was doing the close-up work. And I think it had rained that night, so it was all a mess.
Related: 'Better Call Saul’ Star Bob Odenkirk on Jimmy McGill’s Chutzpah, Cinnabon, and What’s Ahead
We saw lettuce, but what else was being dumped on him?
It’s actually garbage, it’s just not actually garbage that’s been sitting around. Basically, our prop department took a lot of moist coffee grounds and food things. They were fresh, they were sanitary at the time, but the only thing that separates garbage from food is how old it is. This was all fresh garbage, as it were.
Is this the grossest scene we will see the rest of the season, I hope, for Bob’s sake?
I think Bob hopes that. I can’t say for sure, but it’s certainly, if not the grossest scene, it’s close.
At the end of the mailroom scene, when Howard tells Jimmy HHM isn’t going to hire him as an attorney, we don’t hear the conversation, but what was he saying to him? Was there any indication that maybe Chuck didn’t want Jimmy to be there as an attorney, or did Howard take the fall for rejecting him?
Poor Patrick [Fabian, Howard’s portrayer] had to memorize this whole long speech that we wrote for him, but we always knew we weren’t going to hear it, or that was always our hope, that we would be able to do it without the dialogue. He’s basically just giving Jimmy the pure boilerplate, “We don’t have any associate positions open right now, and my hands are tied. I wish we could help you. It’s really great that you’ve done this, but it’s not going to happen right now” Then he ends with, “Well, we’ll think about it again in six months.” Beyond that, it’s very formal. I think it’s left open to interpretation, or it should be an open question at this point, why exactly Hamlin wouldn’t go to bat for him, and whether or not Chuck went to bat for him as he said he would.
Why didn’t Chuck deliver the news to Jimmy himself? He just couldn’t take disappointing him?
I think there’s some of that, but we’re also not exactly certain, at this point, what relationship Chuck and Hamlin have to each other. We sort of play them as equals, but obviously, there’s two Hamlins and one McGill in the title of the law firm, so Chuck may be a name partner, but he’s not the most senior of the name partners. It remains to be seen exactly what his rank is, relative to Howard.
When Chuck and Jimmy are talking about the Sandpiper case, Chuck is surprised he missed the fraud evidence, and Jimmy downplays it right away. Why did he do that? Was it more about soothing Chuck’s ego, or was it more for himself, because he idolizes Chuck so much and doesn’t want to think of his brother making a misstep?
Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and I think it’s both of those things. Jimmy is not cocky about that at all. He’s really very sweet and like, “No, no, don’t beat yourself up over it.” I think he does idolize his brother, and he thinks of his brother in a lot of the ways that his brother thinks of his brother, which is as the greatest attorney around. I think it would be hard for Jimmy to think of Chuck as having missed something because there was something wrong with him. Other people seem to treat Chuck like he’s just crazy, he’s just broken… Jimmy doesn’t really care whether Chuck’s ailment is purely psychological or psychosomatic, or a physical ailment that hasn’t been diagnosed. He just knows his brother is suffering, and he believes him. I think in the same way, he believes that his brother is a great attorney, and if somebody else had told him, “Ah, your brother missed this,” I think he would correct them and be like, “It’s a small thing.”
Chuck’s reaction, or lack thereof, at the end of the episode, when he goes outside… he walks outside without thinking while engrossed in working on the case, and seems to have forgotten about the electromagnetic hypersensitivity. With his confidence back with this big case, does that suggest there was something specific that happened that caused him to lose confidence and sparked the illness?
I think that’s certainly a way to interpret it. We’d like to leave it open to interpretation a little bit at this point, but I think that for sure, Chuck seems like the kind of person who gets strength from working. This is all he’s done. It’s his life’s work to be a hotshot lawyer and the smartest guy in the room sort of person. I think he struggled with that in relationship to his ailment, so I think there is definitely some sense that whatever went wrong may have something to do with either a confidence crisis or something that has thrown him off his game. Getting back on his game definitely gives him some confidence and some strength.
Touching on Mike’s situation a bit, Stacy asks him if she can spend Matt’s money, and he encourages it. Then she says, “Of course, it’s just a drop in the bucket.” Is she working Mike, and Mike’s guilt?
Yes. I don’t think it’s an unjustified manipulation. She’s let him back into her life, cautiously, but between them… there’s just such an emptiness, that it’s going to be almost impossible for Mike to quench his own sense of guilt over what happened. Honestly, she feels the same way about it, that Mike is so incredibly good at what he does, that when he fails in such dramatic fashion, in this case, it’s hard not to think, “Yeah, he’s a little bit responsible, and there’s no way to pay that back, but maybe he owes me a little.” I’m not saying that this is a conscious choice on her part, to work him, but I do think there’s an element [of it], maybe in ways that she doesn’t even realize, based on her own grief and her own feelings toward Mike.
Mike suddenly has a dog when he visits the vet. Will Mike keep the dog? If there’s anybody who could use a pet, I think it’s Mike.
[Laughs.] I do love the idea that Mike would have a dog. All I can say for sure is that, that’s not the last we will have seen of the dog.
Better Call Saul airs Monday at 10 p.m. on AMC.
