Better Call Saul can be a very difficult show to grade on a numerical scale. Sometimes things happen, and that’s good. Sometimes things don’t happen, and that’s, somehow, also good. It’s a bit of a conundrum, but the show has successfully been able to have it both ways since it premiered. “Bali Ha’i” was kind of an in-between episode. There were long stretches – such as the opening montage – where nothing happened; those were balanced out by several significant plot developments.
One thing the show has been doing much better in its second season than in its first is putting the spotlight on Kim Wexler. Put simply, Rhea Seehorn plays the hell out of Kim, and even in scenes where she has no one to play off of she inhabits the role nicely. She never flounders. Look at her in court (another smart move on the show’s part, showing Kim outside the HHM offices): tough, sharp, and absolutely intolerant of bullshit. She’s so good defending a losing position that she even gets a job offer from the opposing counsel, Rich Schweigert of Schweigert & Coakley.
There are a couple ways this could go. It would be great to see Kim leave HHM in dramatic fashion (“Please let me be there when you tell Howard,” Jimmy implores), but realistically Better Call Saul is unlikely to move forward without Howard Hamlin, who has been firmly reestablished as the villain he was in season one. Take note of the long tracking shot of he and Kim going to meet with the people from Mesa Verde. He says nothing, never breaking stride, angry that Chuck broke ranks and stood up for Kim. Right before entering the conference room, though, his facade cracks and a smile breaks out. It’s a show. Someone that good at controlling their emotions usually doesn’t have any.
The B-plot had Mike dealing with Tio Salamanca’s offer/command/no-seriously-this-is-a-command. (One thing Better Call Saul does very well is shift focus away from its main character; technically, according to the title, we haven’t even met the main character yet.) As opposed to Chuck or Kim, who are destined for tragic ends, I don’t know what to expect from Mike’s storyline here, and defying expectations is one of the hardest tricks for any prequel to pull off.
And kudos to BCS for imbuing these developments with a sense of actual danger. We know how Mike dies, and it doesn’t happen for a while (uh, years-old spoiler alert), so we shouldn’t worry for him. Yet we do, especially when we see the Salamanca twins watching him and Kaylee from a rooftop, staring at him like one of the apparitions from It Follows. The twins never worked for me – the strong silent type more often comes across as dumb – but it’s more connective tissue to Breaking Bad, so I’ll give it a pass. And it’s another way for the show to illustrate Tio’s stranglehold on the New Mexico drug trade. So Mike agrees to go to jail – is this the last we see of Mike until Breaking Bad? The timeline more or less lines up, but then that would all but cancel the possibility of a Gus Fring appearance on BCS.
Mike’s incarceration would be the most interesting development from “Bali Ha’i,” a solid episode that moved as its own pace. It’s the classic case of bang vs. whimper, and it would take serious balls for the show to go the second route.
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