Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 10 Review: Nippy
We’ve all been wondering when we’d see Gene again, and on Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 10, “Nippy,” we finally see how he plans to deal with the fact that he’s been recognized in Omaha as Saul Goodman.
Because this is set in the future with Gene working at the Cinnabon, the entire episode is done in black-and-white to match the flashforwards we’ve seen of him in that world so far.
Everything we’ve seen of Gene until this point has been pretty melancholy and mundane, all except for the cab driver Jeff who confronts him at the beginning of Better Call Saul Season 5. But Gene doesn’t want to change his identity again — he almost does, then changes his mind and decides to stay and fix the problem instead.
And so he does, in yet another elaborate scheme. Something we get the sense he hasn’t done as this new persona.
The scheme has Gene putting himself in the path of Jeff’s mother, Marion, played by none other than Carol Burnett. Once he befriends her, he’s able to get to Jeff and propose a way to put this all behind them.
By now, he says, if Jeff was going to rat him out as Saul Goodman, he’d have done it. And if he wanted money, he’d have already tried to get it. Instead, he understands, Jeff wants to be in the game. And Gene is the person who can make that happen.
This setup is only thrown off a little by the fact that the character of Jeff has been recast. Originally, Jeff was played by Don Harvey, but here, he’s played by Pat Healy. Details like the cab itself and the sweater Jeff is wearing help matters.
So, Gene works to help Jeff work a major scheme by getting back into the game himself. He’s every bit as meticulous and clever as he used to be, though there isn’t the sort of joy in it that he used to have.
It’s a markedly different tone as he goes through the motions of his grand plan, which includes befriending a security guard and timing how long it takes him to eat a Cinnabon.
Even though the tone is more somber, it’s still great fun to watch Gene work this scheme. From counting steps in the department store and learning more about sports in order to have better conversations with the security guard, then mapping everything out in a field.
We also get a nod to Breaking Bad. When Jeff says this whole plan seems crazy, Gene offers a short anecdote that convinces him to keep going:
Gene: I’ll tell you what’s crazy: A fifty-year-old chemistry teacher comes into my office. The guy is so broke, he can’t pay his own mortgage. One year later, he’s got a pile of cash as big as a Volkswagen. That’s crazy.
When the day finally comes to put their plan into action, with a little help from Jeff’s friend as well (we saw this guy before too) everything goes exactly as it should… that is until Jeff slips on the department store floor.
It’s the kind of suspense that makes you a little sick to your stomach as you watch — and I mean that in a good way. It’s all done so well with just a little bit of humor, right before the sadness of Gene having what we know to be a very honest moment with the security guard.
He opens up to this guy in a desperate attempt to buy Jeff some time — hoping he’ll be able to get himself up off that floor before he’s spotted — but it’s a real moment.
He says he’s lonely. He says his parents are dead. He says his brother is dead, and we see him choke up on that a bit as he thinks of Chuck. Then he says he has no wife or kids, which brings up feelings about Kim.
It’s a powerful, emotional scene, though it’s veiled in some humor as he also watches those security screens and finally sees Jeff get up and scamper off in the kind of slapstick humor that reminds me a bit of a Charlie Chaplin film.
I mean, so much of this is truly funny. That’s not even to mention the humor of the whole Cinnabon thing to begin with, and the way this man cuts his pastry so methodically as he eats it.
Later, Jeff and his friend are excited over everything they’ve stolen, but Gene makes a point to let them know he’s done. He tells him all the ways they’d go down if they ever ratted him out — mutually assured destruction.
Channeling a bit of Mike Erhmantraut, he then turns the tables on Jeff, now demanding that he be the one to “Say it.” Jeff had bullied Gene, in Season 5, into saying the phrase “Better Call Saul” with those same words. Now Gene says “Say it” insisting he say, “We’re done.”
Problem solved, or so it seems. But now Gene has gotten a taste of his former days as Saul Goodman, and when he finds a shirt and tie at the department store that looks like the sort of thing he’d have worn back then, it clearly makes him feel a bit nostalgic.
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Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 9/8c on AMC.
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Ashley Bissette Sumerel
Ashley Bissette Sumerel is a television and film critic living in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is editor-in-chief of Tell-Tale TV as well as Eulalie Magazine. Ashley has also written for outlets such as Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine, and Insider. Ashley has been a member of the Critics Choice Association since 2017 and is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic. In addition to her work as an editor and critic, Ashley teaches Entertainment Journalism, Composition, and Literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.