Better Call Saul season 5, episode 3 makes use of ants and a dropped ice-cream cone to symbolize Jimmy McGill’s character arc and transformation into Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman. The fifth season of Better Call Saul is closer to Breaking Bad than ever before, especially when it comes to Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk). He’s now fully into the swing of practicing law under the name of Saul, and is increasingly getting mixed in with the wrong crowd, portending him becoming the sleaze-bag lawyer fans know and love.
In Better Call Saul season 5, episode 2, Jimmy is picked up off the street by Nacho (Michael Mando), who clearly has some business for him. At that moment in time, Jimmy is walking along eating an ice cream cone, which he drops on the street when he has to get into the car. That ice cream cone makes a return in episode 3, “The Guy For This”, where it’s set upon by an army of ants. The sequence is filmed almost like a nature documentary, presenting close-up action of the ants on the ice cream, but as ever with Better Call Saul there’s a reason behind it, in a similar (if smaller) fashion to Breaking Bad’s divisive “Fly” episode.
The ants and the ice cream have a couple of different meanings for Jimmy in Better Call Saul. On one level, they represent the duality of his life as Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. The ice cream is Jimmy: happy and pleasant. The ants, on the other hand, could be seen as being either a representation of Saul himself, or at least the people he is aligned with. That the ants are swarming all over and eating the ice cream works as a means of showing that the old Jimmy is slipping farther and farther away, as Saul Goodman and the people he works with/for take over. By the end of the episode, when Saul is dropped off at the same spot, the ice cream is almost all gone. Sooner rather than later, any traces of Jimmy will have vanished too.
The ants and ice cream could also be seen as Jimmy’s approach to business, especially after his 50% offer. That’s the ice cream, a deal to get people in, but rather than good clients all he ends up with are ants stripping away anything that’s left of him. Given the shots of the ice cream and ants bookmark Jimmy being coerced into working for Lalo Salamanca, then it isn’t difficult to see how this lines up with this fate. Jimmy can’t just put his life on hold, work for drug cartels and crime bosses, and then pick things up as normal, no more than he can return and find his ice cream still intact.
This suggests that things are only going to get worse for Jimmy now that he’s working for Lalo in Better Call Saul. Unbeknownst to Jimmy, Lalo’s motivated by his desire to take down Gus Fring, which means Jimmy is being roped into that mess, albeit at a distance for now. But now that’s he’s started down the path, there’s no turning back for him. He’s going to be consumed by the ants, or he’ll have to adapt and join them.
Next: Better Call Saul May Have Tied Into El Camino (& Revealed Gene’s Ending)
