Only Gene in the Building

Wow. What an incredible night of television. Better Call Saul and Only Murders in the Building both had exceptional episodes. Better Call Saul in particular was extraordinarily brilliant.

Directed by Michelle MacLaren and written by Alison Tatlock, "Nippy" was a rare exhibition of relentless tension. From the moment Carol Burnett, playing a woman in a motorised wheelchair, meets Gene (Bob Odenkirk) on a snowy sidewalk, the story constantly keeps the viewer constantly captivated.

What is Gene's scam with the woman? Can he keep it up? It turns out her son is the cab driver who recognised him as Saul. Can Gene maintain this delicate balancing act? Well, not only does he spin those plates, ladies and gentlemen, he takes on two more, concocting a plan to rob a department store and worming his way into the lives of two security guards to do it.

Not only can he do it, he clearly seems alive for the first time in years. This is why retail employers don't like to hire exceptionally smart people. Without a complex problem to work on, they get bored and depressed. It's not just the Saul identity Gene misses. It's not the suits and the glam--it's the challenge and the risk. The same things that drove him as "Slippin' Jimmy" and in his relationship with Kim. And also, sometimes, as in the Sandpiper case, it's what drove him to do a genuinely good deed.

Gene has another problem, too, as we see in the scene where he has to distract the guard unexpectedly. He's profoundly lonely, he has no-one in his life who cares for him really. No-one will miss him if he dies. Now he's starting to think about that wife he has somewhere in the American wilderness . . .

Also to distract the guards, of course, he uses Cinnebons. What great free publicity. Or maybe it wasn't free, maybe Cinnebon provided some budget to the show. In any case, it sure made me hungry for Cinnebon. The department store, meanwhile, is the fictional "Lancaster's". I wondered at first why no real department store would lend their name to the show but then I realised the plan Gene concocts to rob them is a little too credible. Having worked in a department store myself, I'd say, yeah. It'd probably work. If you're willing to spend the money to rent a freight truck and buy a cell phone for a single use and you've worked out a way to reliably distract the security guards from watching the cameras. Gene says Jeff, the cab driver, doesn't have to worry because the security tapes will be wiped by the time the department store does its next inventory. But actually, since Jeff steals a relatively small quantity of merchandise, the missing inventory would likely be put down to "shrinkage" and never seriously investigated. I mean, even if someone suspected it was a robbery, no-one wants to waste time sitting through hours of security footage. There are always little discrepancies. I remember the manager of the JC Penney where I worked would always quote some astonishingly big number at the end of inventory periods--I'm talking thousands of dollars of merchandise unaccounted for. I never heard about any shoplifters being apprehended for it. It was as likely to be due to paperwork discrepancies, damaged merchandise, or some other mix-up. Only the store manager, who had to answer to corporate, truly cared, and even then she was far too busy to spearhead a massive investigation.

This sense of authenticity is partly why this episode works so much better than any of the nonsense with Gus or Lalo. Those Mexican cartel guys are like cartoon characters--they're larger than life figures that could maybe fit into the kind of Spaghetti Western that Breaking Bad eventually tried to be. But the initial concept of Breaking Bad, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug lord, tapped into a very appealing authenticity. And that's what last night's Better Call Saul did.

And what an intelligent way to cast Carol Burnett, who is superb.

Only Murders in the Building was also good. An exceptionally funny episode. I especially liked the scene where the three main characters are too distracted with their personal drama to notice their glitter bomb going off in the background. Guest appearances by Tiny Fey and Jane Lynch also worked very nicely.

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