Better Call Saul Season 4 Ep. 4 Recap: 'Quite A Ride'

Photo: Nicole Wilder/AMC

Now at the midway point of what has so far been a more slowly paced fourth season, Better Call Saul begins to show more of its hand, revealing how characters like Jimmy, Gus and Mike became interconnected in the underbelly of Albuquerque before Walter White came knocking.

"Quite A Ride," begins with another flash forward, where the one-time Jimmy McGill, now Saul Goodman, is tearing up his office and having Francesca shred incriminating documents after what is the inevitable fallout of Walter White's meth empire being exposed. He hastily makes arrangements with her about an important phone call and bribes her will some ill-gotten banks rolls. "Quite a ride huh?" he pants, flashing a desperate smile before attempting a hug, to which she scoffs. Alone, Saul makes the call to the "cleaners," who will scrub away every trace of his old life so he can begin his dismal existence as Gene.

Tragically, Jimmy is not so far off from that sad fate, as his worst instincts are getting both harder to control and conceal from those closest to him. He's still at his crushingly dull day job at CC Mobile, trying to will a customer to come into the store. A man does enter, curious what exactly the phrase "privacy sold here" actually means. Jimmy spins a good conspiracy tale about the IRS, extols the virtues of "information hygiene" and boom, before you know it the guy's walking out with a stack of burners. Another scam well done.

Bolstered by his success, Jimmy can hardly sit still at home. He tries to watch a film while Kim works, but then practically bolts out the door, lying that he has work to do at CC Mobile. Once there he launches his next scheme, printing up a stack of phony receipts, putting some cash in the register then walking out the door with a box full of cell phones. Setting up at The Dog House, he hawks more burners to the strains of Randy Crawford's "Street Life." It's a tracksuited, slick-talking good time until some fearsome looking bikers show up, scaring off the rest of the crowd. Undeterred, Jimmy walks right over, and after some talk of serving time and whatnot, sells out the rest of his stash. Unfortunately the night takes a turn for the worse when a trio of teens, who earlier dismissed him as a narc (this was pre-tracksuit mind you), rob him and beat him up.

The whole scene is notable for a few reasons, not least of which of how it ends. While Jimmy's faced greater danger before--being taken out to the desert by an enraged Tuco in season one comes to mind--it was suburban mom Mrs. Kettleman, not Tuco, who was his original target for that scam. Until now, his marks have been solidly middle to upper-middle class folks who are either clueless, law abiding citizens (Mr. Neff) or white collar criminals (the Kettlemans). But with this latest stunt, he's stepped into the undeniably seedier side of the hustle, a side populated by people with little to lose and no qualms about inflicting violence. While the beating he took from what he calls "low rent little skeeves" is enough to momentarily put Jimmy back on the straight and narrow, Saul Goodman will be more than eager to sharpen the skill set of street smarts, chicanery and ruthlessness needed to survive and thrive and in the murkier depths of the criminal underworld.

That eagerness will eventually lead Jimmy to enlist the services of Mike, who is also becoming further ensared to the criminal underworld.  He spends the episode doing the job he gruffly asked Gus about at the end of "Talk." At first, we don't even see Mike. Instead his voice guides what we soon learn are contractors on a delightfully elaborate, disorienting journey that includes placing a hood over their heads and taking a long ride in the back of a van. The stop ends up being a warehouse, one which, judging from the looks of it, will be the super lab where Walt and Jesse cook up the primo blue meth. While the first candidate doesn't pass muster due what a skeptical Mike and Gus might deem overconfidence, the second one seems both knowledgeable yet pragmatic about the difficulties involved in building an underground lab.  Gus then emerges from the shadows--because of course he would--and introduces himself, shaking the guy's hand and speaking in his native German. Blue Sky here we come.

Kim has decided to call Judge Munsinger's bluff, diving into public defender work at the courthouse. There she is the same hallway Jimmy once trudged through, wheeling and dealing with his former prosecutorial nemesis Bill. In case we needed a reminder, Kim is good at this lawyer thing; watching her pressure Bill to drop her client's sentence down to four month's probation with the threat to out him to the judge about some shifty collusion between he and the police was like watching a child pluck a fly's wings off.

"I only have one other client, and it's a bank," she says to an incredulous Bill when he asks if she has more important things to do. "I have all the time in the world."  Except she actually doesn't, and is reminded of that fact when she blows off an urgent call from Paige to take another client, Denise, to face the music for a drug possession charge. "When we say we need you, we need you," Paige lectures her when she shows up the office to apologize. "We're not a client you hang up on."

Of course, Kim could quit on the spot. Mesa Verde is her client. But just as Roger Sterling once donned a Santa suit to make Lee Garner Jr.'s Christmas wish come true,  Kim must nod and genuflect. Mesa Verde is her most important and only client. They are paying the bills, so until she can get a roster of similar high profile clientele, they call the shots. This lopsided dynamic is what likely makes public defender work so appealing. There at least, she's on a more level playing field with her clients, and the results--keeping a kid out of "grown-up jail," dispensing empathy and tough love to a young woman so she'll go to court and avoid making a bad situation worse--are more tangible, more satisfying than make a rich company even richer.

It's probably also a good way to quiet the gnawing doubts she may be having about Jimmy. On some level she knows she's been lied to, if not straight to her face, then at least by omission. She takes care of him after his scuffle at The Dog House, questioning just what he was doing out there at 1:30 in the morning, but not pressing him further. She reminds him his days as Slippin' Jimmy are over when he berates himself for not recognizing the teens for what they were, but you can also feel her fight the urge not to add a "right?" to her sentence. And she doesn't push him when it seems he's on the verge of copping to what could be any number of misdeeds, before he pivots yet again with talk of seeing a shrink.

To his credit, Jimmy does appear intent on following through and sitting down with a therapist. However, a run-in with Howard at the courthouse men's room changes his mind. Howard, who looks and complete and utter hot mess, explains he's suffering from insomnia, and replies he's already seeing a psychiatrist twice a week when Jimmy recommends therapy. Once he leaves, Jimmy tears up the shrink's number and flushes it down the toilet. Damn.

During his PPD appointment, he reels off his ambitions to his officer, explaining once the remaining nine months and however many days are up, he's going back to law, bigger and better than ever. "I'm gonna be a damn good lawyer. And people are gonna know about it," he says.

The latter's a certainty. The former? Well, it's gonna be quite a ride.