Pretend you’re an ant. You’re a scout, minding your own business, skittering through the craggy macroscape of your daily existence. You can carry 5,000 times your own body weight, but most days the struggle is still real. You never know the shape your day’s going to take. But you’re scrappy. You’re a survivor. Instinct says you’ll find something good if you just keep searching.
Then BAM. One day you stumble upon a sugary mountain of earthly delights. But you’re still an ant, and all you can think about is how much of this mana you can cram into your face before you pop. Then everyone else finds it, too. Suddenly, you’re in a green-tinged free-for-all with your red siblings and everything becomes a scrambling fight for a limited resource.
Season 5, episode 3 of Better Call Saul opens on an ant’s-eye-view of a sudden windfall as a pretty straight metaphor for Jimmy’s idea of his new persona, and how the criminal underworld of Albuquerque (that red I mentioned before? Very Breaking Bad) will exploit his services both in this episode and in times to come.
Jimmy initially imagines Saul Goodman as a criminal honey pot. He’s stopped believing in peoples’ ability to change, if he ever did in the first place, and figures he can cash in on that with repeat offenders–your run-of-the-mill scumbags; your burnouts; your similarly desperate people trying to get by in the most dangerous ways possible. Unfortunately, a honey pot doesn’t just attract one kind of ant. The Salamancas enter Jimmy’s life once again, and this time, both Lalo and Nacho tells him in their own ways that he’s in.
Nothing stays sweet for anyone in this week’s cast. Kim thought she could have her cake and eat it too by walking the line between a well-paying morally gray job and the work she believes in, but as we see in several different emotionally charged ways this episode, the pressure of being on that edge is dragging her down.
Nacho is walking his own line, trying to keep both his family and all of the powerful people in his life happy, and getting by on pure desperation. Things went sour for him a while ago and he’s just waiting for everyone else to catch up. At this point he’s a man in the middle of several schemes, and arguably in the most danger of anyone this episode, including the drunk and staggering Ehrmantraut.
Mike is a fixer, but a fixer with his own moral code that he was forced to break out of fear. Right now he’s disgusted and fed up with himself and everyone around him. Will he be able to pull himself out of this pattern of self destruction before it spirals out of control? Is he going to put himself in jail before the guy who was caught with a “dealer’s weight” amount of meth?
The scent of conspiracy is just too sweet for Hank to ignore. Share on XHank and Gomez make their official appearances this time around, and even though they’re not quite buying what Saul and Domingo are selling, the scent of conspiracy is just too sweet for Hank to ignore. Thanks to the power of prequel, we already know how that story ultimately ends–but we’re all waiting to see how Saul and the Salamancas will make our tiny eyes grow wide with delight.