Last week’s episode was, quite simply, an astounding hour of television, in the patient yet precise way it began to connect the dots that must, in time, lead from the optimism of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill in this series to the cynicism of his eventual adopted alter ego of Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad. For Jimmy to become the Saul we know in Breaking Bad, he has to lose his optimism. This season, he’s already lost his older brother (the relationship was complicated, but still central to Jimmy) – and in revealing his determination to regain his law license in nine months and restart a new, lucrative and impressive law firm with his girlfriend, Rhea Seehorn’s Kim, he’s basically started the clock on a sad but unavoidable new set of chapters in this show’s narrative. (They even added a flash-forward to this flashback series, starting with a scene of Jimmy as Saul, which would have fallen near the end of Breaking Bad, of him pulling out his hidden loot from behind his office walls.) Last week, Jimmy used his verbal and salesmanship skills to sell a bunch of untraceable cell phones at a big profit, with the loot earmarked as seed money to relaunch his law firm with Kim – then was robbed and beaten by some teenagers, who stole all the cash. Even after that, Jimmy was talking of pushing forward to the straight and narrow path, so sometime soon, something has to happen to remove Kim from Jimmy’s life entirely. Meanwhile, in another story line building to a Breaking Bad intersection point, Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmentraut used his amazingly precise skills at attacking tasks and assessing people to hire the right person to realize Gus Fring’s audacious scheme of hiding a giant meth lab beneath one of his existing industrial laundry sites. These paths lead to known points, but with the way Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and the other collaborators on Saul are getting there, the journey is the destination. And tonight’s episode, “Pinata,” may or may not refer to Jimmy himself, but I’m guessing, at least in part, it does.