Shouldn't Better Call Saul's Jimmy Be Thinking Up A Way To Slip Out Of His Community Service?

Suspended attorney James M. McGill is handed a waiver before his community service shift and he just signs it?

Did this seem out of character to anyone else? The supervisor (hey, Kimmy's dad from The Americans!) clearly has no time for Jimmy's bullshit, as we see at the end of the shift when he only credits Jimmy for thirty minutes' work, after four hours of cleaning up filthy underwear and piss bottles, because Jimmy spent so much time on his phone. So maybe Jimmy's just picking his spot to get himself out of this assignment in a manner that doesn't draw too much attention. It just seems like the fact that we took a moment of Jimmy regarding the liability waiver and pondering whether he should sign it without reading it is going to come up later -- perhaps after Jimmy has a very bad slip, and has to make the case that he was pressured into agreeing to something he just didn't fully understand!

Aren't we past due, at this point, for Stacey to get some kind of comeuppance?

My understanding with regard to how much time we spent on her storyline in Season 2 was that her talk of gunshots and her unsafe neighbourhood was that she was full of shit and shaking down Mike, either as a standard opportunist, or in belated revenge for the circumstances of her husband's death. Atoning for his sins by helping out with a community construction project should be Mike's choice; as a viewer who still considers Stacey to be very shady, I don't like seeing her volunteer him for shit when she seems to have taken advantage of him so much already. That said....

Was Stacey trying to use her shadiness for good on Anita's behalf?

After meeting Anita on the work crew, Mike ends up, with Stacey, at a support group, where Anita is telling the story of getting closure with regard to her husband by giving away all his things, except his uniform. Mike assumes he was "on the job," but she says he wasn't a police officer, but that he was in the Navy; she left out that detail because, she says, everyone in the group has heard her tell the story so many times. In fact, her husband, with whom she used to run a camping business, went hiking in Gila National Forest and never came back. Later, when he meets up with Nacho again (of which more shortly), Mike seems like he's about to get him to look into what may have happened with Mr. Anita -- maybe someone was trying to bust out the business and he took an ill-advised stand -- which makes me wonder whether the volunteering was just a pretext for putting Anita in Mike's path so that he would be moved to try to reach out to his network of sketchy characters and get her an answer as to what actually happened to him?

Were we witness to a Chekhov's gun setup with Mike's floorboard cash stash?

Before Mike gets to the construction site, we see him retrieve a $5000 bundle from under the floorboards in a closet at his house.

Is this to establish where he's squirreled it away so that we'll know what's happened later in the season when someone steals it from him and he's forced to start working for Gus in order to be able to keep Stacey and Kaylee in the style to which they've become accustomed?

Is Kim starting to slip on her Mesa Verde paperwork?

Kim's meeting with Paige at Mesa Verde begins with Paige gloating extensively about Kim's victory over Chuck at the bar association hearing. ("'I'm not crazy, it's 1216, one after Magna Carta' -- the Magna Carta?!") Moments later, as they're going over Kim's latest work, Paige questions a percentage and Kim bites her head off, showily dropping a fat book of banking regulations on the table and inviting Paige to verify it for herself. Paige backs down, and Kim apologizes for her lack of professionalism...but adds, "As far as I'm concerned, all we did-- All we did was tear down a sick man." Between the remorse that's apparently still devouring her, and the fact that she's so sleep-deprived she not only sets a timer to grab a five-minute nap in her car but falls fully asleep before it goes off, is Kim making mistakes? Is she subconsciously sabotaging herself out of guilt over Chuck, or is the amount of work Mesa Verde requires of her actually more than one person reasonably can do? And is this going to get Jimmy to start helping her out despite his official suspension, somehow getting her in trouble too, or will she disgrace herself enough to require herself to leave town?

How thirsty are the Sklars?

I have to say, I thought their comedy career might be on the rocks when they showed up in that Burger King commercial, and my view of their career didn't improve when, last week, they also showed up in that Catfish "special."

Admittedly, this is a step up from Catfish, but still, it feels like a lot of them in a short amount of time. Even Frank Deal took a couple of weeks off between the last time he played Isaac Breland on The Americans and his turn as the mean community service supervisor here.

How does AMC decide which is going to be the episode's "Talked About Scene"?

Because I get that Daniel "Squat Cobbler" Wormald -- whom Nacho hires to get empties of Hector's heart medication, for deadly sabotage purposes -- is a fan favourite, but this was not what I would have put online.

The scene I would most want to talk about from this episode -- which, I have to say, was once again kind of a snooze -- was the last one in the episode, in which Jimmy makes an in-person appeal for a refund on his malpractice insurance. Jimmy's been trying to work this out since his very first community service shift: his argument is that if he's not going to be practicing law for the next twelve months, he won't need the insurance. At the same time, he's spent the episode getting ground down by the realities of his extremely grim financial situation: he's only able to sell one cut-rate TV ad to a furniture store owner, and desperately tells the Sklars, when they're about to renege, that he'll shoot theirs for free on the theory that they'll come back to him for more when they see the results in their foot traffic. He also brings a morose Kim out for drinks at their favourite griftin' bar (on him -- or, rather on his new credit card, with what I assume is a usurious interest rate) trolling for marks; she tries to get him to join her in discussing her regret about what happened with Chuck at the hearing, but a very bitter Jimmy blames Chuck -- rightly...ish -- for his current troubles, and disagrees with her that they could have gone about things "another way": "He had us in a corner, okay? We did what we had to do....Everything that happened was his own fault. Everything. Put him in the rearview mirror, he is not worth thinking about. Done."

When Jimmy ends up in the office at his malpractice insurance agency to be told there's nothing that can be done about his policy -- after all, one of his clients could still sue him regardless of whether he's currently under suspension -- and also that, because of the suspension, when he's reinstated his premiums are going to go up 150%, he doesn't take the news well, finally breaking down in tears as he tells the agent what he's been dealing with. His brother! Yes, that very same one whose name came up when she searched Jimmy's because Jimmy couldn't remember his policy number! His brother, who's mentally ill, and whom Jimmy's been taking care of, and who just had a breakdown at a Bar Association hearing!!!

"Don't write! What are you writing? Don't write, I didn't mean to say that! I don't want him to get in trouble with you guys because of me....You're not gonna do anything, are you?"

Heeeeeeeey! Jimmy wasn't overcome with emotion at all! He's just still thinking of ways to fuck over Chuck! This scene was, to me, the only reason this episode had to exist, and yet it's not the most "Talked About"? AMC, please.