Something Beautiful
On a desert road, Victor lays down a spike strip and drives Arturo's car over it, shredding the tires. Tyrus is following in the Cadillac with Nacho, who is driving. Nacho watches as the two men remove Arturo's dead body from the trunk. As Nacho nervously watches, Victor and Tyrus plant Arturo's body in the driver's seat, and empty their pistols into the car, finishing with a headshot from Victor. Nacho gets into the passenger seat and takes an emptied pistol from Tyrus before bracing himself on the backseat. Victor shoots Nacho in the shoulder, who struggles out of the car into the desert. When Nacho turns to ask if he can "make the call," Victor unexpectedly shoots him in the stomach. "Gotta make it look real," Tyrus smirks before dropping a cell phone in front of a prone Nacho. Victor and Tyrus head out as Nacho forces himself to complete the setup before he passes out.
At Loyola's, Jimmy meets with Mike and details his latest scheme: he wants Mike to break into Neff Copiers, steal Mr. Neff's valuable Hummel figurine, and replace it with a near-identical knockoff, after which Jimmy and Mike will split the illicit proceeds when they sell the original. Mike passes on this opportunity for "easy money," saying that this job isn't for him or for Jimmy. Mike offers his condolences over Chuck's death. Disappointed, Jimmy leaves the diner. Outside, he phones Caldera's Veterinary Office.
The Cousins arrive at the scene of the staged shooting and examine clues. They find Nacho's blood trail and follow it to Nacho himself, who is weak from blood loss and exposure. Inside their own vehicle, the Cousins examine Nacho's wounds and ask about the shooters, who Nacho claims drove a silver Firebird. The Cousins set Arturo's car on fire before they drive away with Nacho.
Kim returns to work at Mesa Verde with a new paralegal, Viola Goto, assisting. During a meeting with Paige discussing Mesa Verde's pending acquisitions, Kevin enters the room. Kevin greets Kim, offers his condolences about Chuck, and asks how Jimmy is handling his death. Kim claims that he's "getting through it." She is then shown a room with architectural models of Mesa Verde's many planned branches and realizes that the bank is expanding much further than she may be able to handle. In the lobby, Kim feels overwhelmed by her task ahead and asks Viola to get started on the new Mesa Verde filings instead of her. She further asks to be driven to the courthouse instead of home.
At Caldera's office, a frustrated Jimmy waits for Caldera to finish a phone call in an adjacent room. Jimmy barges into the room and Caldera tells him that his contact is not interested in the job. Despite Caldera's protests, Jimmy breaks protocol by taking the phone and talking to the contact directly, managing to set up a meeting. He leaves Caldera's office with his goldfish and passes Leonel, who has come to summon Caldera to treat Nacho. Caldera asks the Cousins to drive Nacho to an abandoned car shop, mercifully putting his delirious patient to sleep. Caldera removes the bullet from his sternum and stitches him up with the Cousins' help. Nacho wakes up to see Caldera has set up a blood transfusion between him and Marco. Caldera fills his patient in: he left the bullet in Nacho's shoulder alone, advises him to visit a doctor with imaging equipment and warns him to keep his wounds clean and dry, lest he receive a painful and lethal infection. He whispers in Nacho's ear that he never wants to see him again, as cartel business is "too hot" for him.
That night, Jimmy's contact, Ira, uses a credit card to bridge the door alarm at Neff Copiers and sneak inside Mr. Neff's office. There, he manages to switch the Hummel figurines. He is startled when Mr. Neff flushes the toilet and enters the office. It turns out that Mr. Neff is crashing at the office, having been kicked out of the house by his wife after he got her a vacuum cleaner as a gift. Ira is trapped, hiding underneath Mr. Neff's desk, forced for hours to listen as Mr. Neff drinks scotch, argues with his wife over the phone, and calls to order pizza. Eventually, Ira is able to phone Jimmy to explain the situation, demanding that he come pick him up.
Ira continues hiding under the desk while Mr. Neff eats pizza, plays solitaire, and listens to a self-help CD. Both men hear a car alarm go off outside, which Mr. Neff realizes is coming from his vehicle. He steps outside the store to deactivate the car alarm, but Ira is not able to leave the office. Outside, Jimmy tries to use a clothes hanger to break into Mr. Neff's car, again tripping the car alarm. Mr. Neff, now irritated, leaves his office again and sees his car sliding backwards through the parking garage. As he chases after it, Ira is able to leave the store. In an alley nearby, Ira compliments Jimmy on the trick he pulled with the car.
Gus takes a phone call from Juan Bolsa about the hit on the Salamancas. Noting its similarities to Mike's previous robbery, Juan suspends transportation of the product and institutes "dummy loads" to weed the attackers out. When Gus notes that their dealers only have a week's supply of drugs left, Juan reluctantly orders him to find a dealer outside of the cartel against Don Eladio's orders. Gus smirks before going to meet his outside dealer in a university chemistry lab - Gale Boetticher. Gale excitedly informs him about his pet project before Gus silently asks him about something relevant to his business: samples of his meth that Gale tested. Gus is happy with the "dreck" being produced, but Gale begs to be allowed to produce higher-quantity meth in the lab. Although he appreciates Gale's enthusiasm, Gus shuts him down: "You were meant for better things."
Kim looks over Viola's work as Jimmy wakes up from sleeping in late. When Viola leaves, Kim pulls out Chuck's bequeathed letter to Jimmy. Jimmy and Kim go over the items from her meeting with Howard; he shocks her by shrugging off his small inheritance. Jimmy opens up Chuck's personal letter - undated, but obviously from when Jimmy was working in HHM's mailroom - and reads it aloud to Kim. Chuck, hoping that the recipient would understand his words "in the spirit in which they were intended," tells Jimmy about how proud he was for turning his life around and how happy he currently is that Jimmy seemed to have found his place in the world. Jimmy blandly speeds through it as Kim gradually loses her composure. When he finishes none the worse for wear, Kim breaks down crying and runs into their bedroom, leaving a puzzled Jimmy behind.
Tropes
- Actually Pretty Funny: Gus drops his usual stony-faced demeanor, and actually allows himself to smile and laugh a little when he observes Gale singing through the periodic table of elements to a tune playing through his headphones.
- Backhanded Apology: When Mr. Neff is Exiled to the Couch (see below), he calls his wife and tries to apologize, and it goes badly. Particularly painful because he seems to sincerely want to reconcile, but is terrible at it."I'm sorry that you got upset. It was never my intention... for you to get upset."
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Peter Gould teased in an interview that an important Breaking Bad cameo would be seen in this episode. Since Gus mentioned the DEA in the season premiere, many fans assumed Hank Schrader and/or Steve Gomez would make an appearance. Instead, Gus pays a visit to Gale Boetticher.
- The previous episode had Kim chewing out Howard over the likely effect the derisory inheritance and letter that Chuck left to Jimmy would have on the latter. Instead, Jimmy just casually comments that the inheritance will still be enough to pay off his credit cards, and shrugs off Chuck's letter. It's Kim who ends up suffering a Heroic BSoD out of seeing Jimmy's callous reaction.
- The Bus Came Back:
- Dr. Caldera returns when Jimmy needs him to get him a thief and to help save Nacho's life.
- Gale Boetticher makes an appearance when Gus visits his college chemistry lab to look at some methamphetamine samples.
- Ira, the owner of Vamonos Pest who moonlights as a "second-story man," returns after we last saw him in the first half of Breaking Bad's fifth season.
- Call-Forward: Mr. Neff orders pizza with dipping sticks while crashing in his office, harkening to a particularly
memetic moment from Breaking Bad. He even specifies that he wants the pizza cut into slices!- See above for Gale and Ira.
- Continuity Nod: When discussing the seeming attack on Nacho and Arturo with Gus, Juan Bolsa notes that it resembles the truck robbery that was committed (unknowingly to him by Mike) on Hector's trucks a couple of months ago.
- Didn't See That Coming: Jimmy sets up a petty larceny job with Ira that they both think will be relatively easy due to the office being vacant. Neither of them were expecting someone to actually be there, much less spending the night because he got kicked out of his own home.
- Digging Yourself Deeper: Mr. Neff's apology to his wife about his thoughtless gift only makes things worse.
- Dramatic Irony: Chuck's letter to Jimmy ends with him saying he hopes when Jimmy reads the letter, he remembers Chuck "not only as your brother, but as a person you knew was always in your corner".
- Even Evil Has Standards: Caldera may be fine with arranging things between small-time criminals, but he balks at getting involved with the Cartel, only making a single exception for Ignacio.
- Mike refuses to help Jimmy steal Neff's hummel figurine at least partly because it'd mean he'd be stealing from a completely innocent man.
- Exiled to the Couch: The burglary at Neff Copiers hits a serious snag when it turns out Mr. Neff is spending the night at the office, having been kicked out of his house by his wife after an extremely thoughtless gift. To make matters worse, he calls his wife and tries to justify what he got her."It is a top of the line vacuum cleaner! It never loses suction!
- False Flag Operation: Victor and Tyrus stage an "attack" on Arturo's car in which they wound Nacho and shoot Arturo's dead body, to cover up the true cause of Arturo's death, hide the fact that Nacho is now a double agent conscripted into working for Gus, and make it look like Arturo's death and Mike's truck robbery were the work of a rival gang wanting to take on the Salamancas.
- Fiery Cover-Up: The Cousins burn Arturo's wrecked car to hide any evidence of gang activity in the area. In the process, they ensure that there's no way to determine how Arturo actually died.
- Futureshadowing:
- During Gus's visit, Gale discusses samples of a substance Gus asked him to analyze, and while it isn't mentioned by name, it's clear that Gus is already planning how to move from just selling imported cocaine to creating and selling his own crystal meth.
- Also during said discussion, Gale says that the best sample that Gus gave him was only 67% pure, and that he could do a much better job himself. By the timeframe of Breaking Bad, Gale was able to produce 96% pure crystal meth, 3% short of the 99% purity rate that Walter White's "Blue Sky" meth will have.
- Gift-Giving Gaffe: From what we can tell, Neff apparently thought a vacuum cleaner would be a romantic gift.
- Heroic BSoD: Kim suffers one at the end of the episode, likely due to Chuck's letter bringing home the guilt she feels in ruining his reputation and contributing to his death. The fact that her Mesa Verde workload is implied to be about to massively increase probably didn't help much, either.
- Just a Flesh Wound: Subverted. Nacho is shot in the shoulder by Victor to make it look like he was in the car with Arturo when they were ambushed. The scene is staged so that it looks like Arturo was shot in the head, but Nacho was luckier and managed to get away with just a minor wound. The shoulder wound is painful but it is not life threatening and Nacho is able to walk into the desert on his own. Then Victor shoots him again in the abdomen. Nacho lives, but can only lie in the desert bleeding while he waits for Victor and Tyrus to leave and he can then make the call to the Cousins to get picked up. Caldera is able to fix him up, but it is a very close call as Nacho could still die from an infection. On the other hand, the severity of both wounds is enough to convince the Cousins that Nacho did not betray them.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Inverted; Victor, Nacho, and Tyrus go to great lengths to make sure that the scene of the "car crash" looks as much like an attack as they possibly can. Tyrus even says "Gotta make it look real".
- Meatgrinder Surgery: When Dr. Caldera operates on Nacho. We see the administering of anesthesia, the application of sanitizing to the bullet wounds, and hauling Nacho on a makeshift stretcher. We don't see the rest as a matter of Gory Discretion Shot. It's still extremely unpleasant to behold though.
- One Degree of Separation: Jimmy and one of the Cousins walk past each other while at Dr. Caldera's office.
- Pet the Dog:
- Although he declines Jimmy's offer to steal the figurine from Neff's office, Mike implies to Jimmy that he's better than petty theft. He even offers Jimmy sympathy for Chuck's death, and tells him to "take it easy" as he leaves. Considering the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork nature of their relationship, Mike is unusually kind to Jimmy in this scene.
- Kevin may have openly disliked Chuck when he was alive, but he still offers condolences to Kim regarding his death, noting that nobody should've died the way he did.
- Persona Non Grata: Caldera tells Nacho that he doesn't want to see him anymore; playing the middleman between criminals is one thing, but cartel business is not something he wants any part of.
- Refusing the Call: Jimmy tries to rope Mike into taking part in his plan to steal the figurine from Neff's office, but he turns it down on the implied grounds that petty larceny isn't his thing.
- Shell Game: Jimmy's proposed scheme with Mr. Neff's valuable "Bavarian Boy" Hummel figurine. His plan is to break into Neff Copiers and swap it with a near-identical knockoff called the "Merry Wanderer", then sell it and split the illicit proceeds.
- Title Drop: Jimmy says "something beautiful" when trying to persuade Mike to take the burglary job.
- Tragic Keepsake: Chuck's letter shows that for all his resentment towards Jimmy, there was a part of Chuck that did love him, but by the time Jimmy finds this out, it is far too late, and Jimmy's emotions have become calloused over by the feud and Chuck's death.
- Trunk Shot: When Victor and Tyrus open the trunk revealing Arturo's body.
