9. Interview With the Vampire

“Home Is Where You’re Happy” by Charles Manson

“Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.” Controversial, Daniel Molloy! The conductor of this vampire drama’s titular interview, played by Eric Bogosian, has very little patience for the bloodsucker in question, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and even less for Louis’s psychotic, pubescent protégé, the teenage vampire Claudia. It’s her Molloy compares to Manson, the cult leader who defined the death of the Age of Aquarius … and much to my everlasting surprise, it’s Manson who soundtracks the end of this episode. Molloy is right: Manson could be a talented songwriter in very limited doses, as his buoyant ode to personal freedom, “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” makes clear. It’s just hard to hear that happiness when you recall the fate of Sharon Tate, which is what makes the song a strong choice for the soundtrack of a show about magnetic mass murderers, even when they’re of the supernatural variety.

I wrote about ten of the best uses of popular music on TV this year for Vulture.

I wrote about the series finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Cheekily titled after the series from which it is a spinoff, Better Call Saul‘s most recent episode deftly if unspectacularly stitches together scenes from the past and present of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman/Gene Takavic’s life. It will thus likely be remembered for the cameos not just of BCS regulars Tina Parker as Jimmy/Saul’s secretary Francesca (with whom it appears he devised a method to keep in touch) and Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut (seen in a flashback reporting on the real identity of Saul’s potential new client “Heisenberg”), but also and especially Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, whom we rejoin during their half-assed kidnapping of Saul the night they first hired him. The present-day material, in which Gene re-recruits the man he ran the department-store scam with for a far more ambitious series of home invasions and identity thefts, adds a certain pathos to all this; at this point, the former Jimmy McGill is just another middle-aged man with a dated mustache, turning to a life of crime more out of boredom than Walt’s desperation.

But none of that is what I’ll really remember from this episode.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I walked around my apartment, holding a beer and singing the opening riff to “Plainsong” by the Cure to myself. I wasn’t sure what else to do. 

In the very first installment of my series of posts entitled My Favorite Music, I wrote about the Cure’s Disintegration, calling it an album about a sadness so huge you could land a spacecraft on it. It’s about outsized emotions, extravagant emotions, emotions in excess, emotions too big to be talked about, to be hashed out, to be discussed in logical terms.

In tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill snaps. Instantly, as far as the magic of TV time is concerned. One moment, he’s being dumped by his wife Kim Wexler, who is so aghast at the horrors their conduct together has wrought that she gives up her life as a lawyer as well as his wife. The next moment, Jimmy awakens to a Journey song, next to a prostitute, in a ghastly and gaudy new apartment. He then makes the transition to his awful strip-mall office, with its inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof and the ridiculous text of the Constitution written on its high-columned walls.

It happens that fast. He’s Jimmy for most of the episode, and then he’s Saul, forever and ever, amen.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

“Cats are a liquid,” the old internet saying goes; Lalo Salamanca is, or was, a liquid too. Unlike so many of his peers on Better Call Saul—Mike Ehrmantraut, shuffling along as if being actively crushed by the weight of his sins; Kim Wexler, whom the filmmakers constantly shoot as framed by cage-like latticeworks of windows and bars to suggest her fenced-in lack of options—Lalo could move. Leaping, jumping, climbing, falling, infiltrating: There was seemingly no structure he couldn’t infiltrate, no person he couldn’t reach. At one point, befitting his fluid nature, he even wound up in a sewer, though it didn’t hold him for long. 

Perhaps it’s fitting that he died in a dirt-floored cave, choking to death on his own vital fluids. At long last, there was nowhere for him to go but down into the earth.

I wrote a little tribute to actor Tony Dalton and our mutual friend Lalo Salamanca for Decider.

I’m reviewing the final episodes of Better Call Saul exclusively on my Patreon, starting with my review of last night’s mid-season premiere.

Contrasted with Lalo’s uncanny fluidity is the masterful performance by Patrick Fabian as Howard Hamlin in full flop-sweat mode. In this episode, thanks to Jimmy and Kim’s machinations, he’s not at home or at ease anywhere. He gets dosed with drugs and starts sweating and itching, eyes dilated, in front of his colleagues and client. His clipped cadence becomes more so when he barks for an assistant to bring him the photographs he believes implicate a mediator in a conspiracy with Jimmy, then gets even angrier when the photos he receives aren’t what he believed them to be. The case collapses, his colleagues turn on him. He has no refuge at home, either; as he tells Kim and Jimmy when he shows up at their apartment to confront him, his marriage has fallen apart, and he sleeps in the guest house. He’s at home nowhere, and he has nowhere to go.

I reviewed last night’s mid-season finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

“The reflex is a lonely child, who’s waiting by the park / The reflex is in charge of finding treasure in the dark”

As Sam Richardson from I Think You Should Leave might put it, Better Call Saul cuts the music hard at the conclusion of the flashback that opens this week’s episode, involving Kim Wexler first being reprimanded and then rewarded for shoplifting by her mother. The casting and acting here is frankly incredible—Beth Hoyt nails Rhea Seehorn’s eventual mannerisms as if they were twins—but I adored that hard cut away from Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” more than anything else in the segment. There’s something truly disconcerting about cutting off a familiar pop hit like that, a sense that something has gone unfinished, that something is missing, that something is wrong.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

But there are times when appearances tell us more than what’s going on beneath the surface does. At nearly every step of this story, Rhea Seehorn, directing herself, places her character Kim in front of bar-like vertical blinds, walls of glass bricks, a window grid. Slowly but surely, as she’s been doing since the series started, she’s sealing herself into a Saul Goodman–shaped trap, like a vacant office in a strip mall furnished solely with a toilet.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Better Call Saul is like Breaking Bad equipped with a silencer. It’s one of the quietest shows to emerge over the past decade of television, despite being nominally about the most loudmouthed character in creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s universe. If you track main character Ignacio “Nacho” Varga through the two-episode season premiere, in fact, I think he utters under a dozen words total. I’ve sung the praises of actor Michael Mando in this respect many times before, but I don’t care—the way he commands the screen with nothing but his big brown eyes demands it.

I’ll be covering the final season of Better Call Saul for my Patreon, starting with my review of the two-part season premiere.

The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

Weirdness is where art lives.

I wrote about the season finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

This episode of Better Call Saul focuses on Jimmy’s trauma after witnessing his first murder, an important and necessary thing for the show to do. But because of the skill of actor Rhea Seehorn, the story of the episode can be told almost entirely by a series of looks on her face.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Five for my Patreon.

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.

“I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of! I’m so far beyond you! I’m like a god in human clothing! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!”

Jimmy McGill is right about all of this in at least two respects I can think of. For one thing, he’s probably right: Howard Hamlin would not believe what Jimmy McGill is capable of—helping a murdering cartel boss walk free, for example. To borrow a phrase from Lloyd Henreid in The Stand, “small-time shit” is the extent of the trouble Howard can likely imagine Jimmy getting into. Little does he know.

I wrote about last week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Somewhere along the line, the Kimmy Wexler who refused to get in that car became the Kim Wexler who, despite being kept in the dark (literally, thanks to director Michael Morris and cinematographer Marshall Adams’s obscurely low lighting) by Jimmy McGill, decides to get in his car anyway. And we know where Jimmy’s headed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Caul Saul for my Patreon.

Once again there’s a cycle of shittiness; once again there’s a person who thinks they have both the right and the power to decide exactly where the wheel stops.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

On Better Call Saul, the devil is in the details. This has been true if not from the start then at least from the early going, when it became clear that co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan were out to depict the show’s thriller sequences, whether of the legal or action variety, as matters of tradecraft. It has this in common with The Americans, which though it faltered slightly with its too-generous ending always rooted the espionage antics of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in utter tedium. If Mike Ehrmantraut took a brake from painstakingly studding a garden hose with nails long enough to watch the Jennings dig a hole to exhume a dead colleague practically in real time, he’d certainly relate.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.