A traditional bottle episode limits the action to one location, usually closed, and a small number of actors, in order to both create a sense of intimacy/isolation/claustrophobia and save money. “Bagman” manages to be an episode that’s mostly about two guys doing things mostly by themselves, but upends the rest of the logic of a bottle episode, smearing blood and piss across the desert landscape. It has a lot in common with its bottle-episode antecedents in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, like the (overly?) acclaimed Rian Johnson–directed “Bug,” but it does what it’s doing by turning the bottle episode inside-out. That shredded jug of water Mike finds in the car of the final sicario he kills makes for a decent stand-in. You might call this an open-bottle episode.
I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.
Tags: better call saul, breaking bad, reviews, TV, TV reviews