Within Better Call Saul’s “Bagman” episode, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) gets caught in the middle of a shootout between Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and the cartel members trying to steal Lalo Salamanca’s (Tony Dalton) $7 million bail. Stranded in the desert overnight after their transportation was destroyed, the colors of the individual glow sticks that Jimmy and Mike use to make camp at night say something about Jimmy and Mike as people.
In the eighth episode of Better Call Saul season 5, Jimmy goes out to a remote location in the desert to pick up Lalo's bail money from The Cousins (Daniel Moncada and Luis Moncada). Ambushed on the return journey home by cartel members, Mike saves Jimmy from being killed by shooting all of the cartel members except for one. Damaging their vehicles during the shootout, both Jimmy and Mike are forced to travel through the desert, avoiding the roads so as not to be found by the cartel member who escaped. As Mike and Jimmy set up camp for the night, Mike hands Jimmy a yellow glow stick and breaks a green one for himself. Since Better Call Saul is a series that is known for its meticulous attention to detail, the colors of Jimmy and Mike’s glow sticks appear to be designed to correspond to the way each of them handles the crisis of being stranded in the desert.
Within the episode “Bagman,” Mike’s green glow stick represents his calm and collected demeanor. From Jimmy’s dehydration to fixing the hole at the bottom of the bag of money, Mike is a character who is consistently resourceful and composed, always finding an intelligent solution to each new problem. The color green also represents the harmony and balance within Mike’s life. Unlike Jimmy, who told Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) about his dealings with the cartel, Mike has managed to keep his home life and criminal career separate. In harmony with who he is and what he does for a living, Mike also has a clear understanding of his purpose, which is to provide for his daughter-in-law Stacey (Kerry Condon) and his granddaughter Kaylee. Beaten down by the desert conditions, Jimmy asks Mike how he’s able to keep going, to which Mike states, “Because I know why I’m out here. I know what it’s for.”
Jimmy, on the other hand, who doesn’t have the same harmony within his life, is given a yellow glow stick, a color which has conflicting associations, from cowardice and deceit to honor and loyalty. “Bagman” most clearly depicts Jimmy’s divided priorities in his interaction with Kim, who Jimmy worries will be concerned about him not coming home, but he instantly forgets about her when he’s at his lowest point and wants to give up. Since the color yellow has a contrary meaning, yellow is the color that best depicts Jimmy’s own internal conflict between being the honorable lawyer his brother Chuck (Michael McKean) wanted him to be and retreating to his old deceitful tricks, which began with his “Slippin’ Jimmy” con. That struggle has been most prevalent throughout Better Call Saul season 5, especially since Jimmy has been transitioning more and more into the criminal lawyer Saul Goodman.
While the color yellow is more closely related to the persona of Jimmy McGill, Saul Goodman would be more accurately associated with the color green. Ironically, Jimmy is more Saul Goodman now than he ever has been, having befriended the cartel, but Jimmy still needs one important quality in order to fully become Saul Goodman: acceptance. While Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul fought the idea that schemes were instinctually ingrained into his personality, Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad accepts his deceit as a valuable part of himself. Similar to Mike, Goodman also has a clear cut purpose: to make money, which oddly enough is also associated with the color green.
While the colors of Jimmy and Mike’s glow sticks in the Better Call Saul episode “Bagman” may seem like an inconsequential detail, the meaning behind the colors further emphasizes the difference between the two characters, as well as the distance Jimmy still needs to travel to completely transform into the persona of Saul Goodman featured within Breaking Bad.