Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
6.10 “Nippy”
Written by Alison Tatlock
Directed by Michelle MacLaren
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
New episodes airing Mondays on AMC

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Last week, I speculated Better Call Saul would be returning to Omaha because this week's episode is titled "Nippy." You know, like cold! Omaha is cold in the winter!

We do get to see Jimmy as Gene Takavic, working at a Cinnabon in Omaha, but "Nippy" is the name of his (fake) dog. Jimmy's made up a story and printed some fliers and he's using Nippy's (fake) disappearance to start a conversation with and gain sympathy from Marion (Carol Burnett), the mother of the cab driver who recognized him last season.

There is no way you could have predicted that. We hadn't met Marion, and Jimmy hadn't used the Nippy trick before. In some ways, it was foolish of me to try to predict anything on Better Call Saul. This isn't a puzzle. This isn't a J.J. Abrams show, where you're encouraged to gather background details and character names to predict the solution, because there is no solution, because this is a cohesive narrative and it isn't trying insecurely to prove how smart it is or score meta points. Peter Gould is never going to have to pull a Damon Lindelof and lie to the audience about a major character reveal that everybody immediately clocked because the pleasure of the show isn't about trying to math everything out and scramble letters in character names on IMDb pages or whatever. I firmly believe that art can involve the audience but also that it slips and becomes something emptier when it taunts that audience. The line between "art" and "alternate reality game (ARG)" is ten miles thick. The moat is surrounded by barbed wire and it gets deeper every day. It's fun as hell to speculate about what's going to happen in a story like Better Call Saul's, but I've never once thought "this show would be better if all the fan theories had turned out to be true!"

That doesn't mean there aren't little things I need outside sources to clue me into. I didn't realize until a friend showed me this tweet that the video quality of the opening credits sequence has been deteriorating a little more every season. In this episode, for the first time, the tape ends and we're abruptly left looking at a blue screen. It'll be interesting to see if the VCR starts playing again next time and, if it does, what tape it's running through now that the Saul commercials are finished. It's like we're watching the video tape fall apart as Jimmy sits in Omaha, rewinding and playing back his old TV spots over and over, remembering the glory days.

Anyway. Nippy is lost. Marion, an ornery older person using an electric scooter to get home from the grocery store, is concerned after hearing Jimmy's story about lil' Nippy (you can call the number on the Lost Dog poster, 402-342-9288, and maybe get through if you're lucky). Jimmy repays her concern by clipping a powerline on her scooter so that he can take her home, where she lives with her son, Jeff (Pat Healy).

It took me a moment to realize Pat Healy was playing the same character Don Harvey played over the past two seasons. Harvey's off filming We Own This City, and I get why you'd sign on for a main cast role in a David Simon HBO show instead of acting in two minutes of Better Call Saul every two years. He probably didn't know when or if he'd be asked to return. I love Healy, though. He's had a million fun character actor roles but I'll always think of him as the prickish pharmacist in Magnolia, and the prickish zine store clerk in Ghost World. He looks so weary here, like Jimmy's sucking his life away just by sitting in his house.

Going back to the folly of expecting anything—I had assumed Jimmy was going to give up his Gene persona after Jeff made him. Last season, it seemed like Jeff and his friend were going to try to blackmail Jimmy and Jimmy was going to flee. Instead, Jimmy takes control of the situation. Going through a shoebox of keepsakes from his two past lives, he holds his wedding ring, puts it down and replaces it with Marco's (Mel Rodriguez) pinky ring. He's Slippin' Jimmy, maybe even Saul Goodman.

When Jimmy shows up at Jeff's house, he knows he can control him because Jeff was desperate enough to obliquely threaten Jimmy. Jeff isn't happy with his station in life and that means the show can underline its central obsession once again: capitalism. The three characters Odenkirk has played on this show—Jimmy McGill, Saul Goodman and Gene Takovic—are all parts of the same guy working his ass off to transcend the little places he came from. People will do almost anything to get a little further up the ladder. But this is almost always a show about how the have-nots can never become the haves. You can fall from grace-- you can be the Kettlemans and go from upper-middle-class to barely hanging on, or you can be Howard Hamlin and squander every head start you were given until you wind up dead in your former mail clerk's living room, but Kim is probably the only character to start small and get to a place commensurate to the work she put in. Most characters are Jimmys—they work hard but the people with a little more clout and a little more in the bank can shut them down with minimal effort.

Not this time, at this small scale. Jimmy plans a heist and it works. I appreciate that the pacing of Better Call Saul remains consistent when we're this close to the end. There are four episodes left and the show's crew are still making the call to spend 20 minutes on a montage of Jimmy meticulously learning a mall's security schedule and camera placements, counting steps between Armani racks at a department store. It means they aren't rushed, they aren't forcing answers into a conclusion they hadn't properly allocated space for. On some level, I was a little disappointed, but that's only because I want more now. I would watch four-hour-long episodes every night if I could.

After years of suppressing Saul, and putting on his Gene face, Jimmy orchestrates a perfect little crime. He'll learn everything he can about security and buddy up with the guards, Jeff's friend will drive a pallet up to a Nordstrom or Macy's-type clothing store and, after the mall's closed and mostly empty for the night, Jeff will burst out of the pallet, swipe as many expensive suits, lingerie sets, and Air Jordans as he safely can and stuff them back into the pallet. Everything is tightly planned and the show, a large ensemble for the past six seasons, narrows down to a single plotline for one episode so that the plan is the only thing we care about.

There's one hitch, a recently-buffed floor that sends Jeff falling backward onto his head and passing out for a minute or two. I audibly yelled "ooooohhhh" when he tumbled and the cyclical pain of one fall at the end of Jimmy's criminal career ate the tail of the falls Jimmy used to take as Slippin' Jimmy at the beginning of that criminal career. But everything works out and Jimmy gets a little of his swagger back. We'll see where he takes it-- the next episode is titled "Breaking Bad," so we could hit another flashback to Albuquerque. Whenever we do pick up in Omaha, we'll be watching a reenergized protagonist, and that could be good or terrible.