‘Waterworks’ Has One Huge Twist I Didn’t See Coming

I’m nervous and a little bit sad. After six extraordinary seasons, Better Call Saul is finally coming to an end. We have just one more episode remaining after last night’s, and things are not looking good for our heroes—especially Saul Goodman.

This was a surprising episode in some ways. In others, the fallout was setup so perfectly and clearly last week that we could practically trace exactly what was going to happen. Or, well, we could guess the general shape it would take.

There were two main storylines in ‘Waterworks’—an episode I would have titled ‘Sweet Cheeks’ if I had been in charge. We’ll get to that in a minute. In any case, two main storylines and then one brief moment when Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) 2.0 come face-to-face for the first time.

Let’s start with Kim.

Kim Wexler In Black & White

As we learned last week, Kim has been living in Florida. Gene called her last week from Nebraska, though we only heard their muffled conversation before he smashed the payphone booth windows in a fit of pique. This was the straw that broke Gene’s back, leading him down his final, dangerous path.

In Episode 12 we finally hear that conversation. We’ll get to it in a moment. First, we need to set the stage.

Kim has lived in Florida for six years, give or take. She’s died her hair brown (or stopped dying it blond?) and dresses almost as bad as her co-workers. (On a side-note, I’m glad to see the show continue Breaking Bad’s tradition of absolutely god-awful fashion).

She lives what appears to be a quiet, boring life. Naturally, she’s thrown herself into work, where she has to pretend to enjoy her insipid office-mates, sing along at the office birthday party, pretend to be someone she isn’t. In a lot of ways, even though she’s not on the run from the law, she’s living the same kind of fake life that Saul is leading. She works at a sprinkler system company. He works at Cinnabon. Both have changed their appearance and, to some degree, their demeanor. Both are in hiding.

Kim has a boyfriend named Glenn who says “Yep, yep, yep, yep,” during sex, with the “yeps” growing in intensity as he nears climax. His idea of a hot date is Outback Steakhouse.

This is no way to live. Good grief.

So then one day, out of the blue, Saul calls her while she’s at work. She closes the blinds, stares at the phone for a minute, and then picks it up and they talk for the first time in six years. It doesn’t go well.

Saul is clearly not doing so great. He’s just gotten off the phone with Francesca where he learned that most of his assets, even the well-hidden ones, have been gobbled up by the Feds. He’s in a bad mood. It’s a bad time to call his ex-wife. But he misses her and he wants to hear her voice. He just doesn’t want to hear what she has to say.

“I think you should turn yourself in,” she tells him, after he brags about how he’s still free and the incompetence of everyone looking for him. He’s flabbergasted. He can barely speak. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!” he finally says indignantly (I’m paraphrasing). He goes on an angry rant before collecting himself. “Why are we even talking about this?” he asks, pleading in his voice. He just wanted to talk, to catch up, to let her know he’s still alive.

For her part, Kim can barely speak. This call is out of left field. She wasn’t emotionally prepared for it and finally she blurts out, “I’m glad you’re alive,” and hangs up the phone. We can picture Gene on the other end, mistaking his heartache for rage.

But what he said actually matters to Kim. “Why don’t you turn yourself in!” he says petulantly. And so she does.

As Jimmy continues to spiral down his dark path, remorseless and increasingly unhinged, Kim heads back to Albuquerque. She’s written an affidavit/confession laying out her and Jimmy’s harassment of Howard and describing how he was killed. She confesses to making up his cocaine use and essentially destroying his reputation. She admits to covering up his murder and lying about everything. She drops one copy off with the District Attorney and she takes another to Howard’s widow, Cheryl.

Cheryl doesn’t take the news well. It’s one of the more gut-wrenching, uncomfortable scenes this show has given us in a long time.

Then Kim leaves and heads to the bus station. She gets on a bus. As it drives off into the night, surrounded by strangers, Kim Wexler breaks down into tears, weeping as the years of guilt and shame wash over her. It’s the first time we’ve seen this side of Kim, or this much emotion from the usually stone-faced attorney. It’s heartbreaking and powerful and unexpected. Rhea Seehorn knocks it right out of the park.

I guess this is the real reason the episode is called “Waterworks.” I also admit, I never saw this twist coming. I thought we might see Kim and Jimmy reunite. I still believe Saul will face justice. But I didn’t expect Kim to turn herself in. Knowing her as well as we do now, I should have.

Saul Goodman In Black & White

After Gene’s call, he loses his cool and starts a new scam with Jeff and Buddy, this time ripping off rich, single middle-aged men. It’s a lucrative scam, but Gene has ‘broken bad’ at this point, and when Buddy won’t help rip off a man dying from cancer, Gene fires him and has Jeff take him to the mark’s house to do the job himself.

This turns out to be a mistake for a number of reasons. First off, he bungles the job. But even worse than that, he shows his true colors to Marion (Carol Burnett), Jeff’s mom. Marion viewed Gene as a new friend, someone to laugh with over a few afternoon drinks. But in last week’s episode, Gene not only dropped her like a hot rock, she saw him yelling at Buddy about his barking dog. Her suspicions were already heightened by the time everything went wrong with the burglary.

Jeff (Pat Healy) can hardly be blamed for the job going south, even though he definitely messed up. He had both bad luck and Gene’s arrogance working against him.

When Gene gets to the house, he finds the mark asleep and snoring on the floor. He seems to be out cold. Even a loud note from the piano doesn’t stir him. So Gene takes his time, taking pictures of account information, searching for passwords—doing everything Buddy did before he was fired.

Only, unlike Buddy, Gene is an arrogant prick. Gene—now even more of a cocky crook than Saul 2.0—doesn’t just take his time. When he’s all finished up, instead of going out to get in the cab where Jeff is waiting outside, decides to explore the upstairs. Not to find any more personal information to rip this guy off, but just for fun. He even pours himself a drink. It’s audacious, and as a viewer it’s stressful to watch.

He doesn’t notice when the cop car pulls up behind Jeff, but Jeff sure does.

This is the bad luck. The cops aren’t here to scope out Jeff’s taxi. They’re not on the scene because Gene is inside the house. They’re just pulling over to enjoy some (terrible) fish tacos and talk. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, much like Howard Hamlin was when Lalo put a bullet in him. Maybe this is karma. Saul Goodman certainly has plenty of bad karma to go around.

The other problem? The mark wakes up, goes to the bathroom, sits on the steps below Gene and gets on his phone. Fortunately he starts snoring again pretty quickly, so Gene doesn’t have to crack him over the skull with an urn filled with dog ashes. He’s about to head out to the cab when he notices the cop car.

Ironically, if he’d just walked calmly out to the cab they could have driven off unmolested. There’s nothing strange or suspicious or illegal about a taxi picking someone up from their house in the early AM.

But Gene goes back inside, and presumably slips out the back, making his way home by other means. Jeff, clearly assuming the worst, makes the worst possible decision: Instead of just driving off slowly, stopping at the stop-sign, using his blinker to turn, he peels out, runs the stop sign and crashes into a parked car. The cops look dumbfounded.

Naturally, Jeff is arrested. He calls Saul (who else?) the next morning and Saul is waiting for the call with another drink in hand. He must have watched the crash go down before he left, or just assumed the worst. In any case, he tells Jeff not to worry. The cops think he’s responsible for breaking into the house, but there’s no evidence that he took anything. (I’m curious why Saul took anything—Buddy never did. The entire point of this scam was to leave no trace. A broken window and stolen goods is not the MO).

Saul tells Jeff he’ll send Marion to get him and find him “the best legal defense money can buy” and then he calls Marion.

Marion In Black & White

Saul has underestimated elderly women before, but he’s never really used and abused anyone so badly as he has Marion. Even the Sandpiper women who he deceived were going to benefit from that deception. Poor Marion is just a puppet in Saul’s scheming, which he’s doing solely to make himself feel better. Not for the money, not for the thrill even. He’s simply using people to stroke his own ego and prove to himself that he’s “still got a pulse” (words he flung at Kim).

He calls Marion and tells her what happened with Jeff and at first she’s just worried. “He’s done this before,” she says. “He’ll be the death of me!” She tells Saul about his troubles in Albuquerque and the bail bondsman she had to work with to get him out, and how she maxed out her credit card. He assures her that here in Omaha, that won’t be an issue. Unlike Albuquerque, he says, Omaha doesn’t use bonds. You just pay a fee at the jail.

Once again, Marion’s suspicion flares up. How does he know all of this? How does he know these very specific details? “Why did Jeff call you instead of me?” she asks, and he tells her that Jeff was probably just worried about her reaction.

She doesn’t buy it. When Gene tells her to get ready and he’ll pick her up in an hour, she grabs her laptop, unplugs the phone cable and plugs it into the modem (now that’s retro) and starts searching.

Gene shows up an hour later and knocks but she doesn’t hear him with her headphones on. He comes through the back door and she shuts the laptop quickly, but it doesn’t shut all the way and Gene hears something playing—something familiar. A “Better Call Saul” ad.

He opens the laptop and watches in dismay. The image from the screen is reflected—in color—in his glasses. “You think that’s me?” Gene asks her. “What has Jeff been telling you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” she replies. “AskJeeves did. I looked up Albuquerque con-man and you popped right up.” (Again, paraphrasing). “What did you get my Jeff into?” she asks.

“Nothing he didn’t want to be a part of,” Gene shoots back.

He tries to assure her that he’s still her and Jeff’s friend, that he’s only trying to help, but she threatens to call the police. He rips the phone cable out of the wall and she backs up, suddenly afraid. He wraps the cable around both hands threateningly, the way you might if you were going to strangle someone to death.

It may be the very lowest Jimmy McGill has ever stooped, and he’s stooped very, very low many times before. There’s a moment when I thought that maybe, just maybe, Gene Takovic would kill Marion to save his own hide.

She pulls out her emergency button—the type elderly people use if they’ve fallen or have an emergency of some kind—and he tells her “Don’t.” She doesn’t let go and he says “Last warning,” ominously. For a moment she relents. They stare at one another. He’s debating whether to take the button from her and what to do next, and we see his resolve falter. He hesitates, some part of him, perhaps, realizing just how low he’s fallen in this moment.

Marion grips the button and presses it. A woman’s voice pops up on the other end asking if she’s having an emergency. “Yes!” Marion cries. “There’s a criminal standing in front of me in my kitchen threatening me! His name is Saul Goodman!”

The dispatcher says she’s calling the police and Jimmy—Saul—Gene runs from the kitchen, once again a man on the run.

And so we come to the end, or very nearly the end. Gene has broken bad and is paying for his actions and his arrogance. Pride cometh before the fall and all that jazz. Whether he’ll escape or finally face justice remains to be seen.

The interesting thing about Better Call Saul is that up to this point, pretty much nobody has gone to jail for anything. Walter White got away and when he came back to rescue Jesse, he died. We know that Skylar got a deal. Francesca cooperated with the authorities. Walter kills Mike. Salamanca and Walter kill Gustavo. In El Camino we learn that Jesse gets away and last week we learned that the police think he’s in Mexico, where he most certainly isn’t.

This makes me think that, far from a happy ending for Saul Goodman—let alone a reunion between him and Kim—Saul will be the first and only bad guy to go to prison for his crimes. He won’t get away. He won’t die. He’ll have his day in court, fittingly enough, and he’ll go to prison for a very, very long time—as he should. Which brings us to . . .

Saul & Kim In Living Color (With A Special Guest)

A while back I wrote a piece arguing that this show had a lot of legwork to get Saul Goodman of Better Call Saul to the person he is in Breaking Bad. Specifically, I brought up the scene where Saul calls Francesca “sweet cheeks” which is totally 100% out of character for Saul/Jimmy in 99% of this prequel show.

MORE FROM FORBES‘Better Call Saul’ Needs To Fix One Huge ‘Breaking Bad’ ProblemBy Erik Kain

It turns out, sometimes all it takes is a broken heart—and a divorce—to make some men lose all sense of themselves. Kim leaving Saul changed him, and not for the better. Perhaps “change” isn’t the right word. Kim leaving Saul woke up a dark side of him that he had kept buried, or at least had kept on a leash, up to this point.

There was always a darkness in Jimmy McGill. His brother Chuck was one of the few people who saw it clearly and who mistrusted him despite all of Jimmy’s affection and help. Back then, we saw Chuck as something of a monster, an obstacle in Jimmy’s path to becoming a better man. But Chuck was no monster. He saw the darkness and he felt obligated, as a man of the law, to stop Jimmy from doing real damage.

Chuck failed. And when he failed, Saul was born. And when Kim left Saul, Saul Goodman embraced that darkness entirely (maybe not quite entirely, as we see an even darker version awaken in Gene).

When Kim visits Saul in his office—gaudier and more resplendent now with its foam pillars and constitutional wallpaper—he’s flippant and rude with her. He asks her “Why Florida?” but when she starts to speak he cuts her off. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, dismissively, as though he could care less about her reasons. It’s all a façade, of course. Every awful way he behaves toward her just screams heartbreak. Just like Gene’s phone call with Kim in Florida, Saul masks his grief with resentment.

“Have a nice life, Kim,” he says bitterly as she leaves. And then, as she and Francesca walk out the office door into the crowded waiting room: “Hey sweet cheeks, who do we got next? Let’s make some money!”

The next client is an old familiar hoodlum: Emilio—Jesse’s original partner, busted back when they were still putting chili powder in their meth, before Walter White ever showed up on the scene and ruined so many lives. This gives us a sense of timing. Kim and Jimmy’s split occurs just months before Saul and Walter and Jesse are introduced (which we saw a bit more of in last week’s episode).

And sure enough, when Kim walks out of the law offices of Saul Goodman and lights up a cigarette, there’s Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). He bums a smoke and marvels at the rain. “I thought this was supposed to be a desert, yo,” he says, though I’m not sure anyone who grew up in a desert would say something so inane. It rains hard in the desert. The water just doesn’t stick around.

This is the one moment where Kim has any contact with either of the lead characters in Breaking Bad. She’ll never come across Walt. She’s off to Florida before the blue meth rises. Jesse asks her if “this guy is any good” because his buddy is in some big trouble. He recognizes Kim as a lawyer who once got one of his friends off—a feat he seems quite impressed by.

“So is he any good?” he asks again.

Kim doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “When I knew him he was.”

She’s not talking about his prowess as an attorney in this moment, but Jesse doesn’t know that. Kim Wexler pulls her coat around her and runs into the rain.

I was going to say: “Kim Wexler pulls her coat around her and runs into the rain, never to see any of them again” but I’m not sure. I don’t think she will. I don’t think her and Saul’s paths will cross. This felt like a finale for Kim. She’s confessed to her crimes, unloaded her grief, finally made some kind of peace with what she’s done. She’s held herself accountable and damn the consequences.

Saul, on the other hand, lives in a place of constant rationalizations. There is no crime too heinous, no event too tragic, that he can’t wipe it all away. It’s been six years, but the man who told Kim, after Howard’s death, that they’d soon forget the whole thing, is still justifying his actions today. But clearly Kim could not forget. Because despite her bad choices, she’s still a good person at heart, a person with conscience.

Next week we’ll find out if Saul is brought to justice. My guess is that he is, but that to the bitter end he maintains his innocence, makes excuses for his crimes, and ultimately pays for them. We won’t see him dead or free. Maybe they won’t even tell us what happens to him, but there is no happy ending for Saul Goodman, and the only justice that makes sense is for this man—sworn to uphold the law, who broke all his promises—is to go to prison.

Perhaps a more important question is this: Will he be captured or will he turn himself in? I doubt very much that he will succeed in fleeing under a new identity all over again. What do you think?

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