The following are two descriptions of the final scene of the Better Call Saul episode “Rebecca,” the fifth episode of the second season. The point of this exercise is the effect of context on the experience of watching a given sequence of film. Version A is told from the perspective of someone starting Better Call Saul without having watched Breaking Bad, whereas Version B is how it looks when one starts the other way around. When both series exist in their entirety, the choice to watch one or the other first will inevitably affect the way certain scenes land emotionally, although all the tangible, permanent details are identical.
Version A
Mike Ehrmantraut, a retired Philadelphia cop now working as a parking lot attendant at a municipal building in Albuquerque, has been finding himself inching by spiritual inertia toward his new city’s criminal element. Recently, he did a favor for an ambitious drug lieutenant named Nacho, whose taste for lieutenancy was minimal, which led to Mike taking a beating from Nacho’s boss Tuco. This led Tuco to be arrested and sent to prison for a very long stretch for carrying a gun he wasn’t supposed to be carrying (in the eyes of the law), thus sparing Nacho the inconvenience of being murdered, presumably elevating Nacho to top dog status, and leaving Mike with a set of contusions that serve only to enhance his generally battered, stubbornly alive affect.
As the scene begins in earnest, Mike is sitting in his favorite coffee shop, in a booth at the window. He is right-center in the frame, the depth of focus shallow, ending just over Mike’s shoulder. A man enters the coffee shop in that part of the frame. He is blurry, but his posture looks familiar. He saunters over to Mike’s table and asks “Mind if I join you?” in a thick Mexican accent. Mike does not recognize the man, but he recognizes that it is not really a request. He introduces himself as Tuco’s uncle. He affects an apologetic, respectful tone, but it slowly becomes apparent that this is a means to convince Mike to go along with a scheme to reduce Tuco’s prison time, which involves Mike telling the cops Tuco’s gun was really his. He assures Mike that his ex-cop status—a subtle revelation that he knows exactly who Mike is, absent of any overt threat—will ensure lenient treatment, and offers Mike $5000 to play along, although it’s not really an offer. He asks Mike to “think about it,” although Mike is not really being asked, but told. The scene ends with a cut to silent credits, and the certainty that Mike’s life has just gotten extremely complicated.
Version B
Mike, being Mike, is looking a little worse for wear, as Saul/Jimmy noted earlier in the episode. He isn’t so much breaking bad as he is bending perceptibly. He heaves a big, weary Mike sigh. Someone, out of focus, walks into the coffee shop. He moves like Tuco . . . but it can’t be Tuco, Tuco’s inside. Nacho’s plan worked perfectly. But that guy sure does move like Tuco.
The guy comes over and sits down at Mike’s table. We see his face for the first time . . . it’s Hector Salamanca. Holy shit. He hasn’t had his stroke yet but he still has that patented Hector Salamanca lip twitch, fuel of a thousand nightmares. Even scarier, Hector is unfailingly, elegantly polite to Mike. Mike being Mike, he may not know that this is Hector Salamanca but he knows in a broader, poetic sense that this is Hector Salamanca. Mike has not made it this far without learning how to read a chess board.
And with just as little fanfare as he arrived, Hector leaves, and the silent credits drive home the inevitability of Mike’s inexorable glide toward the Salamanca organization, and the not-yet-glimpsed-in-the-prequel Gus Fring.
Not to beat the point into the ground, this radical difference between experiences of a given piece is true, to varying extents, of all cinema and indeed all art. Whether you see a film for the first time on a big screen on 35mm, or on your laptop. Whether you see a highly referential film before or after you see all the films it references. And so on. This isn’t the most profound point in the history of points, but it’s something to always keep in mind.
Anyway, the more important thing is that Better Call Saul is delightful.
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