'Better Call Saul' Recap: 'I Just Finally Decided to Be Me'
WARNING: This recap of “Switch,“ the Season 2 premiere of Better Call Saul, contains spoilers.
In which Jimmy McGill decides to live life on his own terms… until he gets a chance at the romance of his life.
In Omaha
Season 1 began with a present day check-in on Jimmy/Saul/Gene, who’s now the manager of a Cinnabon store in Omaha. Season 2 begins back in the mall shop, too, where Gene and his employees are closing up for the day. He nods to the maintenance man, who’s wearing headphones, and carries his store’s refuse to the mall garbage room, but forgets to prop the door open. Before he can get to it, it closes, trapping him in the room. The maintenance guy can’t hear him banging on the door… headphones. He can’t open the emergency exit, because a sign warns police will be notified if the door’s alarm is activated; Gene doesn’t want to draw the police, because… Saul. So Gene, wearing the supremely un-Saul-like outfit of drab-colored Dockers and a polo shirt, cops a squat on a milk crate to wait for someone to find him.
Two hours later, the maintenance man opens the door, and Gene bolts, as the camera pans in on something he carved into the wall with a screw he found on the floor: “SG WAS HERE.” Not JM, not Gene, but “SG,” suggesting that’s the life he misses while slinging warm, frosted buns in Nebraska.
The Courthouse Meeting
When we left Jimmy at the end of Season 1, he’d arrived at the courthouse for a meeting about a potential partner-track job with Davis & Mane, the law firm partnering with HHM on the Sandpiper case. We saw him arrive, stop, and then take off out of the parking lot after a brief conversation with Mike. So… did Jimmy go inside for the meeting before fleeing?
He did, and meets up with Howard, Kim, and Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.), who tells Jimmy he knows all about his efforts on Sandpiper. Jimmy tells him it was a group effort, then asks to talk to Kim privately.
“If I take this job, does it mean the two of us… if I take this job, today, with Davis & Main, does that mean that you, me… is this gonna happen?” he asks Kim.
Flustered, she tells him one thing has nothing to do with the other. “Nothing at all?” he asks.
“No!” she says. “Of course not. Why would it?”
Which sends Jimmy happily back to Clifford Main, whom he thanks before turning down the job, leaving the building, driving to the toll booth to have his Season 1 finale conversation with Mike, and tooling down the road, humming “Smoke on the Water,” the favorite song of his Cicero BFF Marco.
Related: ‘Better Call Saul’ Postmortem: Star Rhea Seehorn Talks Jimmy’s New Romance
Jimmy & Kim
Jimmy then drives to his nail salon office, defiantly drinks the salon’s cucumber water — right from the spout — and tears down the computer-printed James McGill law office sign from the door. The next time we see him — in shorts and a casual button-down, contently floating in a hotel pool with cocktail, crab dip, and his cell phone beside him — we learn via a phone call that he has quit the law game.
“So, is this what a mid-life crisis looks like?” asks Kim, who arrives at the pool.
“Clarity. Mid-life clarity,” Jimmy corrects. But Kim wants to know why he passed up the best career opportunity of his life.
“I just finally decided to be me,” he answers, and then joins her at a table in the hotel bar, where he tries to order a $50 shot of tequila. Kim says she’s paying, and orders more modestly priced drinks. And then she asks him if something happened when he was in Cicero, because when she talked to him while he was there, he seemed excited about Davis & Main.
He doesn’t tell her about Marco’s death. Instead, he talks about Chuck. “All I’ve done is try to make Chuck happy,” he says. “Bend over backwards to please Chuck. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck… well, no more. I got into law for all the wrong reasons. I think that my talents are better spent elsewhere. People tell me how they see me, and it’s not as a lawyer.”
Jimmy tells Kim his plan is “to be open to the universe.”
“OK, so no plan? Just walk the earth, like Jules at the end of Pulp Fiction?” she responds.
Related: 'Better Call Saul’ Showrunner Peter Gould Shares the Key to the Show’s Season 1 Success
Since he can’t explain himself effectively with words — a rarity for Jimmy — he decides to show Kim how he plans to utilize his many skills. Nearby at the bar, an obnoxiously loud guy is talking about the stock market on his cell phone. Jimmy convinces Kim to approach the man with him. After a few purposefully naïve questions, Jimmy tells the man — who we’ll soon learn is named Ken — that he and his sister have inherited $1.4 million from their “Uncle Humphrey.” Ken, a wealth manager, sees a glittering opportunity, so he convinces “Viktor” and “Giselle” — the aliases Jimmy and Kim have chosen — to sign over their money to him to invest for them.
Ken can’t believe his luck in having these rubes and their cash fall right into his lap, and when “Viktor” suggests they order shots of a pricey tequila to celebrate, Ken agrees. Many shots later, papers are signed, and the waiter brings the beautifully designed top of the tequila bottle to the table as a souvenir. Jimmy/Viktor pretends he wants to pay, but Ken says he’s got it. “Viktor” and “Giselle” take their receipt and leave, as Ken cackles to himself about his new clients. Then he takes a look at the check, for the whole bottle of tequila that cost $50 a shot. Jimmy and Kim are already outside, giggling about their grift, which excites Kim so much that she kisses Jimmy.
The next morning: Jimmy gets out of Kim’s bed and joins her in the bathroom, where he asks to share her toothbrush. She refuses, so he puts some toothpaste on her finger and uses that to clean his mouth. She laughs when he tells her, “Wait ‘til you see what I floss with.”
As she hurries to get ready for work, he picks up the tequila bottle top from the night before, and says it would be great if they could have adventures like that every night. Kim laughs, and doesn’t seem to have regrets about anything that happened the previous evening, but she’s already focused on getting to the office. She asks Jimmy if he has somewhere to go, and he says yes.
Mike & Pryce
Mike is waiting at a parking garage, with pimento sandwich in a brown bag, for Pryce, his client who’s selling prescription drugs he steals from the pharmaceutical company where he works in IT. But when Pryce pulls up in a tricked out yellow and red Humvee (complete with spinning rims), Mike tells him he needs to practice some restraint for the drug business, and refuses to go anywhere in that auto.
Pryce is stubborn, saying he’s proud of the car, and questions what Mike is really providing him with when he goes along to Pryce’s drug-selling meet-ups with Nacho. Mike tells him to do what he thinks is best, but urges him not to go to the meeting without someone along to watch his back. Foolish Pryce doesn’t heed the warning and goes off to meet Nacho, with his “PLAYUH” license plate making his ridiculous vehicle even more conspicuous.
And when Pryce gets out of his car at the meeting, it gets better, which means worse: he has also matched his sneakers (yellow, with red laces) and watch (yellow and red band) to the car. When Nacho arrives (in his appropriately low-key junker van), he and Pryce swap drugs for cash, and Pryce invites Nacho to sit inside his cool SUV. As Mike had warned, someone should have been watching his back; while Pryce is in back of the car counting the cash, Nacho looks through his glove compartment and finds his registration, i.e. his address.
Days later, a pair of cops pull up in front of Pryce’s house. He went home on lunch break to find his house had been broken into, and his valuable baseball card collection (including a Mickey Mantle rookie card) had been stolen. Cash was taken, too, but Pryce only cares about the cards. And he doesn’t seem to have a clue that Nacho might be involved. The cops, though, see his flashy car, modest home, access to pharmaceuticals, and a hollowed out baseboard behind his sofa and suspect there are other things at play.
The Law Offices of Davis & Main (& McGill)
Jimmy’s back in the hotel pool, with drink, snack, and his ziplocked cell phone floating in the pool. He sees another con mark sitting poolside, and calls Kim to ask her to join him. Then he thinks for a moment, and dials operator assistance to get another number: Davis & Main. Cut to Jimmy, clearly having considered that while Kim had fun, she’s not ready to join him for nightly scams in pursuit of free drinks, arriving at the Davis & Main offices, where Clifford is introducing him to his friendly new co-workers.
Jimmy’s ushered into his own beautiful office, which includes a fireplace and giant desk. He’s told he has his choice of company cars, and selections from a private art collection to decorate his walls, and an assistant asks what he’d like stocked in his refrigerator.
Jimmy’s impressed, briefly, but then spots a light switch by the window. It’s covered with a label that says it must be left on, never turned off. It is, of course, what he gravitates toward, peeling back the label to turn the switch off. Nothing happens. He turns it back on and puts the label back in place.
Legal Briefs:
— It’s the best Breaking Bad Easter egg yet: the very expensive bottle of tequila Jimmy and Kim con Ken into buying was Zafiro Anejo, which BB fans will remember from Season 4’s “Salud.” Gus Fring presented a bottle of the premium liquor to his enemy Don Eladio. Don Eladio didn’t know Gus had poisoned the drink, allowing him to get revenge for Don Eladio’s murder of Gus’s friend 20 years earlier. Zafiro Anejo isn’t available in stores, sadly; BB producers had to concoct a faux brand of tequila in Season 4, because no real company would agree to have their product featured as the libation people drank, then died from a few minutes later.
— The visit to Gene in Omaha plays out to the perfectly chosen strains of Billy Walker’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” a tune written by Willie Nelson.
— Pryce’s Humvee registration reveals his real name: Daniel Wormald.
Let’s hear your feedback, Saul fans: Do you love that Jimmy and Kim have become a couple? How long do you think the relationship can last, with Jimmy seemingly ever more determined to take any chance to go his own way? What do you think Chuck will say and do when he learns “Slippin’ Jimmy” earned himself a partner-track gig at D&M? And, as ridiculous as Pryce’s ride is, did Mike make a mistake letting him go off on his own, especially now that his robbery put him, and Mike by extension, on the cops’ radars?
Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
