Better Call Saul producer breaks down Gene's 'dangerous' move in 'Nippy'
Warning: This story contains plot details from Monday's episode of Better Call Saul, titled "Nippy."
Last week's installment of Better Call Saul saw Kim (Rhea Seehorn) tear it all down and leave herself (as well as Jimmy) devastated. The final minutes skipped ahead to Saul (Bob Odenkirk) in full, bleak, amoral glory. So naturally, this week's episode of AMC's magnificently mercurial Breaking Bad prequel picked up with… neither of them, instead flashing forward to Gene, Saul's sad-sack-Cinnabon-manager alias who had been made by an unsettling cab driver named Jeff. When Gene canceled his second extraction with the Disappearer and told him that he would fix it himself, he wasn't kidding. And he was also suddenly feeling like his old self.
Presented entirely in black and white, and directed by Michelle MacLaren, "Nippy" unspooled Gene's quirky, intricate plan of damage control. He began by underhandedly befriending Jeff's mother, Marion (hello, Carol Burnett!), with a lost-dog gambit. When Jeff (Pat Healy) came home to find Gene sitting in the kitchen with Marion, he was... flustered, to say the least. Away from Marion, Gene offered to show Jeff and his buddy "the game" to buy his silence, and this game involved a meticulously plotted out department store heist. After the store closed, Jimmy would distract the friendly mall security guard (oh, hi, Jim O'Heir!) with a certain sugary treat while Jeff ran through the store after hours and strategically grabbed merchandise.
The plan went off with a hitch — that hitch being Jeff knocking himself out for a minute after slipping on the freshly shined floor — but illicit victory was ultimately achieved. The celebratory vibes quickly vanished, though, as Gene forcefully explained that this was a one-and-done operation, or he would take these two down with him. Later, Gene dropped by the department store, where he checked out a Goodman-approved splashy shirt-and-tie combo, only to reluctantly return it to the rack. Game over. Or just temporarily suspended....
Let's take a load off, grab a cup of coffee, tell Wisconsin to keep it, wish Lizzie good luck in the spelling bee, and fall in with someone in the bad crowd in Albuquerque — namely executive producer Alison Tatlock, who wrote the expectation-upending "Nippy."
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Last week, the show took viewers right from a devastated Jimmy to a godless Saul. This week, it surprised by delving solely into Gene, where there's a lot of unfinished business. Will this largely be the homebase timeline for the final three episodes, or will the story jump all around in time?
ALISON TATLOCK: Well, [laughs] that is a tough question to answer right now. So I am going to plead the fifth and say we will have to wait and see what happens moving forward.
[Writer-producer] Gordon Smith hinted that these final episodes will throw some curveballs, take some big, weird swings, and take fans down some roads they don't see coming. So just when fans think they have their footing, should they stay on guard?
Well, that is certainly true of this episode. We did consciously defy expectations and we would never do that if it felt inorganic or forced; we really try to honor where the story wants to go and where the characters are moving. And it felt right to us to, finally, in this season — much later in the game than we're used to — go into Omaha world. Even though some could argue it was the wrong time. To us, it felt like it was the right time. [Laughs] We did acknowledge that people might be yelling at us either internally or out loud, but it seemed like it would be worth it in the end. I hope it was.
This is a different Gene than shown before; he's been so meek and shut down. We've seen Gene write "SG was here," and yell, "Get a lawyer," but he truly comes to life and awakens a part of himself here that he's had to keep locked up. While he's doing it to neutralize a threat here, how dangerous is this game for him?
I think it is dangerous for him. He's taking a huge risk by channeling the energy of Saul Goodman while he's still undercover as Gene at the Cinnabon. It's dangerous, and perhaps also a little bit thrilling. And with that thrill comes a kind of invigoration and enlivening, as you say — a bounce in his step, both literal and metaphorical. We see the bounce start to come when he's walking down the hall in the mall and gaining confidence. And the more threatening tough side of Saul comes back as well.
There's a lot of scheming going on. What was the biggest challenge facing you and Michelle in bringing this episode to life?
This was a complicated episode. There were so many different elements. It was a crazy puzzle. It was a puzzle within a puzzle. It had not only the big montage sequence, which was a huge puzzle in itself, but the sequence on the monitors was almost like another movie within the movie. Planning out, plotting out, figuring out that sequence — filming all of those pieces — that would then be on the monitor behind Frank's head while Gene was sitting there talking to him and choking on his coffee was probably the biggest challenge among several others….
There's one other thing worth mentioning, which is that we did not have a department store. That department store was just an empty space in the mall, and our incredible team of designers — our production designer and our art department — built that thing from scratch. Every single item was created or purchased and brought in. So it was quite a feat. And as far as I can tell, you would never know. It looks absolutely like a real living, breathing department store when you see it on the screen.
More about Jeff is revealed in this episode, though the character is no longer played by Don Harvey; now he's played by Pat Healy. Was Don unavailable because of his commitment to We Own This City? And how painful was that to have to recast that role, given that you had used him in two earlier seasons, first with his eyes in the cab's rearview mirror and then his conversation with Gene at the mall?
Don did have a work conflict. I'm not at liberty to confirm the job that you mentioned. And, yes, there was quite a bit of discussion about how to handle this and how to move forward. I think it was tough on him, a hard decision, which we understood, and we were very sorry to lose him. We were very grateful to have such an amazing actor, Pat Healy, step in and bring his own interpretation of Jeffy into the world.
Don is more imposing and creepy in the role when he's confronting Gene at the mall. Pat's Jeff is a little quieter. Obviously, he's really thrown off guard by Gene befriending his mother and infiltrating his home, but did that casting switch at all tweak your approach to the character?
Every actor brings his or her or their own energy and own take. And to me, the whole thing felt right. I was on set watching Pat embody Jeff for the first time. And I will say I was initially relieved, because first you just want everything to be okay, right? [Laughs] So I was like, "Okay, we're in good hands. This is a very, very skilled actor. Phew!"
Then I became enthralled because his interpretation was so, I thought, compelling. You're right, there's a kind of a vulnerability and a tentativeness that he brought. And I buy that had he, Pat, been playing the scenes in the mall, he would've channeled a tougher and more threatening version of himself in those moments because he had the upper hand. Or so he thought. But we meet Pat Healy's version of Jeff when the tables have already turned. He walks into the kitchen and here's this creep, who he thought he had power over, sitting there with his mother, which I think one could argue would be anybody's worst nightmare. [Laughs] You don't want that guy sitting at the table with your mother; that can only be bad news. So immediately he has reason to be unsettled and to be shaken.
His mother is played by... Carol Burnett, which is fun. Carol is a huge Saul fan. Why was she ideal for this role?
We conceived of the role first in the room. We felt that in order for Gene to get the upper hand on Jeff, he would need to know Jeff's vulnerability. And often, one's vulnerability is one's loved ones. We thought that Jeff was kind of a loner-ish guy, not somebody surrounded by a lot of friends and family. It felt right to us that he was very much an adult man who would be, for a combination of reasons, living with his mom. And if he was living with his mom, then that character could be a mark for Gene. Once we had that conversation, the lightbulb went off, because not only is Carol Burnett a big fan of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, but we, of course, are huge fans of hers. She's not only a legend and a trailblazer in her own right, but also just an incredibly skilled and delightful actor. And we were very lucky to get her.
Marion is introduced as a sharp and strong woman; she points out to the deli employee that he gave her a quarter-pound too much pastrami. Is there any chance that she's onto Gene a little bit at the end or is there more to her story? Will we see her and/or Jeff again?
I guess we'll just have to wait and see…. We wanted Marion to be smart, and we wanted her to have a little bit of grit. The word that we used a lot in the room to describe Marion was "independent." We didn't want a shrinking violet. This was even before we knew that we would for sure have Carol Burnett. But whether we did or not, we did not want to create a character who immediately read as a victim. Or as somebody who was easy for Gene. We always want him and all of the characters to have to work. If it was too easy, it wouldn't satisfy us as storytellers or satisfy the audience.
So we knew from the beginning, she should be somebody who he thinks he can make it work, but she is smart, she is perceptive, and she's quite independent given her circumstances. However, she has a soft spot for the idea of this missing dog, and we imagine that off screen, Gene did a little bit of recon. And even though Marion, as far as we know, doesn't have a dog of her own that he was able to perceive, this would be an effective ploy. And it softens her to him. And to me, it reads as very genuine at the end.
Speaking of casting, Jim O'Heir plays Frank, the mall security guard. Are there a lot of Parks and Recreation fans at Saul? How did he enter your orbit?
He was the man for the job. We didn't know ahead of time that it would be him, but we knew what we envisioned for Frank. And we were just incredibly fortunate to get him because he was incredible. And not only was he great on the page, but he and Bob did a little bit of improvisation as part of the montage. And they had crossed paths in Chicago as improvisers and just had such a great time together. And we're so lucky to have gotten him. He's amazing.
To distract Frank while Jeff wakes up, Gene bursts into a crying speech and says, "My brother's dead. I got no wife, no kids, no friends, if I die tonight, no one would care…. I'd be a ghost. Less than a ghost, I'd be a shadow. I'd just be nothing. I mean, what's the point?" How quickly does that speech turn a little too real for Gene — and is he starting to realize, 'What is the point of this life I have in hiding?"
Yes. Gene starts to reveal his true feelings about his life, even as he is using them to manipulate Frank. So it is truly both at the same time.
Two things can be true.
Yes! It's an interesting psychological phenomenon that Jimmy and now Gene has access to, which is not only to use emotion to get what he wants, which you could argue almost any child knows how to do, but in his case, to reveal deep, buried, heavy, hidden truths that he's never said out loud before, to use those to get what he wants and what he needs — talk about a Hail Mary. It's not like he does this every day. He does it under great duress in case of emergency. It's like his emergency ammunition.
Another potent scene is when Gene emphatically lays out to Jeff that they are done. Of course, it's critical for Gene to guard his security, but are Walter White's words of "We're done when I say we're done" after Saul said, "You and I are done" still echoing in his head, given his mention of Walt?
I think you're right. Gene invokes Walter White quite specifically at one point in this episode, and we know from the end of [last week's episode] that we're treading in that story line — our Jimmy/Saul story line — into the true Saul Goodman era. We learn in this episode in a couple different ways that that experience is still looming large for him, even though he's never voiced it before as Gene.
At the end of the episode in the department store, Gene holds up a Saul-esque shirt and tie, and then seems to have that pained realization of a forbidden life and puts it back. But he puts it on the end of the rack. Is it meaningful that he didn't put it all the way back or just a cool shot?
I think it's both. Of course, a detail like that is a group discussion and comes often, not always, out of the writers' room. In this case, it was in the script. And then Michelle realized it so beautifully because she very much understood that it was both, that it was going to be a striking shot, ending the episode on the costume of Saul Goodman without the man himself ready to fully step into it.
But also just the look on Bob as Gene's face at the very end when he has to part with that beloved shirt and tie reminded me of a strange adult Omaha version of Romeo and Juliet. [Laughs] He does not want to have to part with his beloved, but he knows that he has to. And so with longing in his eyes, he turns and walks away, but leaves the skin behind.
It's bold that the whole episode is in black and white. Will the Gene-era story remain in black and white? And was there discussion about switching to color once you settled in this time period?
I love that the episode was all in black and white. We were excited and had talked about that it would be interesting to us both in the story way and cinematically to do an entire black-and-white episode, and this is where it landed. And that was just cool artistically. We had a very enlightening Zoom session with [co-creator] Peter [Gould] and our DP and Michelle, where Peter shared images with us from black-and-white movies that he loves. So there was a real honoring of some film history as we delved into this one.
We talked extensively in the room, just in terms of the trajectory of the season, about what would be color, what would be black and white when, when Gene might appear, the fact that he doesn't appear in [the season 6 premiere] and that we hold that off, and now here he is. But in terms of moving forward, I can neither confirm nor deny.
What is your cryptic tease for next week's episode?
We're going to keep you on your toes.
And what adjective would describe that episode?
Hmmm… Harrowing.
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