Better Call Saul Teaches A Tough Lesson About Being Clear-Headed In Business

When you enter into a business partnership, it's inevitable that you will run into problems. Someone forgets to pay the quarterly income tax installment. Someone else leaves the keys in the door overnight. Someone starts using his own meth supply and becomes so erratic that someone else has to hire a money-hungry sexagenarian to kill him. Nacho, as a fellow small business owner, I empathize with the bind you've found yourself in, and admire your outside-the-box problem-solving strategies!

I kid. Hiring an assassin is very much in the box for a purveyor of illegal narcotics. And when Nacho explains to Mike, the hit man he wants to work with, how he's arrived at the decision to have Tuco killed by an unrelated third party, it's hard to dispute. Nacho has already had the experience, years ago, of working with a Tuco who's using crank: he's paranoid, violent (which is to say, more so than usual), and incapable of listening to reason. Business partners can and should disagree -- better practices are certainly developed through conflict and compromise! -- but such disagreements should, ideally, resolve themselves before one of you ends up with pieces of a biker's skull embedded in his shoulder because the other shot him when you were real nearby. That's just not the energy you want to bring to a client meeting or an appointment with a bank manager to discuss a line of equity!

Because Mike needs the promised $50,000 fee -- his surveillance, last week, of his daughter-in-law Stacey's house and failure to corroborate her story hasn't cured him of the desire to protect and provide for his granddaughter Kaylee -- he considers the job very seriously. He develops an alternate plan from the one Nacho's suggested that allows him a safer escape route -- not a close-range shot after parking next to Tuco, but a long-range sniper shot from a lot across the street. He meets with Lawson, a fellow pragmatist of an illegal gun dealer so gentlemanly that, when Mike considers the wares on display and decides against buying any of them, he refuses Mike's offer of a cash payment for his time for the sake of business they might do together in the future. (Can Mike and Lawson maybe start having coffee hangs and movie dates? MIKE COULD USE A FRIEND.)

Despite the appeal of the money he'd earn, the risks of Nacho's desired assassination plan are greater than Mike wants to take on, and Mike arranges another meeting with Nacho to tell him so -- because, as Mike explains, Nacho's putting himself at unnecessary risk too. If Nacho just wants Tuco gone, there are other ways to go about it than killing him, which "draws Salamancas like flies." Nacho wouldn't have to snitch on him to the cops, either, since that would draw them to Nacho as a known associate if the cartel doesn't kill him first. Nacho can't guess what Mike could possibly have in mind. Nacho's pretty smart and pretty sneaky, but Mike's smarter and sneakier by far.

Here's what happens: Mike stakes out the taco place Nacho had directed him to, where Tuco takes his cut from all his dealers. At a pay phone across the street, Mike puts on his most rube-y voice to call 911 on an altercation at the restaurant in which a fight has broken out and one fellow is threatening another with a gun. He then gets in his car, strategically grazes Tuco's fender, plays dumb by trying to deal with it through their insurance companies, acts like he doesn't have in his wallet the several $100 bills he'd made sure Tuco'd seen inside, and lures him out to the street...for this.

Afterward, when they meet so that Mike can get paid, Nacho tries to hide how much seeing Mike is upsetting him, though his voice is rough and his eyes moist...

...but even a criminal like Nacho would have to be a real psycho not to be upset by the look of Mike in this moment.

I'm honestly not sure how Mike was even able to drive with his eyes that swollen. Mike won't have to testify, since the cops witnessed the altercation, and found both Mike's wallet and Tuco's gun on Tuco's person when they apprehended him, so: no, they're all set, and Tuco will be in prison for 5-10 years. Mike's fee is only $25,000, and Nacho can't comprehend why Mike would go this far -- mess up his face, risk Tuco's vengeance whenever he gets out, fail to rid the world of a total bastard -- just to avoid shooting a guy. Nacho wants to know why, and Mike doesn't tell him. Is it because the ends (getting Tuco out of the way for Nacho, potentially keeping Nacho as a future client with his superlative service just like Lawson did Mike; sidestepping the danger of Mike getting traced to an illegal sniper rifle with the serial number filed off; making money to support Kaylee and keep her safe) justify the means (walking around for a while looking like he got hit by a truck)? Because in our other storyline this week, that's been Jimmy's defense for having gone rogue with the Davis & Main TV ad: that it shouldn't matter if he didn't get anyone to sign off on it or if Davis & Main's more discreet clients are nervous about working with a firm that would solicit seniors on television because the gambit actually worked; he even tries to back Chuck into committing a felony -- getting Jimmy to give up his law career, permanently, if Chuck will just roll back Hamlin's punishment of Kim for her guilt by association with Jimmy's ad, which would technically be extortion -- because that end would, Jimmy thinks, justify the means for Chuck. Mike has solved Nacho's problem -- or, as Jimmy would put it: "It worked." Mike also, in the process, got $25,000 that might move Kaylee to a better part of town. But now he definitely can't see her for a while. So did it work?

Mike probably doesn't want to think about that one too hard just now. Tonight, he needs to get back home, put some frozen carrots on his head...

...and cradle the trophy he took off Tuco's neck. Meanwhile, offscreen, Tuco is undoubtedly pondering the tough lesson he learned at Mike's knee -- or, rather, at Mike's cheekbone, when he smashed it to pieces, seconds before getting swarmed by cops.