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Spoiler alert: This interview contains storyline and character spoilers for the “RICO” episode of Better Call Saul.

Better Call Saul is batting a thousand eight episodes into its debut season, and the writer behind two of those gems is Gordon Smith, former assistant to Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan. Even more impressive: The two episodes Smith has written, the instant classic “Five-O” (aka the one with Mike’s backstory) and Monday’s “RICO,” are the first two TV scripts Smith wrote, ever. So, batting a thousand, as a rookie.

Related: ‘Better Call Saul’ Recap: It’s All Very Aboveboard

The newbie writer, who deserves an Emmy nod for “Five-O,” talks to Yahoo TV about “RICO,” an episode that reveals as much about what makes Jimmy tick as “Five-O” did about what makes Mr. Ehrmantraut tick, namely Jimmy’s serious skills as an attorney, his complicated relationship with big brother Chuck, and his willingness to boldly go where others, like Chuck, would never dream of, like a nasty dumpster and an assisted living center bathroom.

This episode feels like another huge piece of the Jimmy-to-Saul puzzle. In this episode, it’s really highlighted that he has skills others, even super-talented attorney Chuck, don’t have: He has a knack for recognizing when people are taking advantage of others, when they’re scamming people. It sets him up to be this this potential champion of the underdog, yet we know, again, who his clientele ends up being, and that’s a little heartbreaking. Is that what you meant for this episode to do for us, really spotlight what Jimmy’s potential is?

Sometimes, I think, people think of the slick part of Jimmy and Saul, and not the fact that he’s actually a really good lawyer. We’ve seen him in Breaking Bad and, hopefully, here, as you say, picking up on things that are sometimes subtle. Chuck is a brilliant legal mind, but he might be too mired in the details and miss the bigger picture; that’s something Jimmy picks up on. Chuck is able to process the proper forms and the proper structure of the wills that Jimmy puts in front of him, but he doesn’t see the bigger picture, which is “Hey, these numbers don’t add up. Something doesn’t smell right here.” That’s the horse sense that Jimmy has, that Chuck is missing.

When we talked to Bob Odenkirk earlier this season, he was very insistent that those of us who think Jimmy/Saul is a good attorney, that we think that partly to justify him, because we like the character so much. But this episode gives evidence that he is talented, that, specifically, he has a grasp of the law and how to apply it.

He does, he does, and he has a grasp of looking around… he works people better than necessarily the intricacies of the law, but that’s not to say that he’s not able to do more, not able to understand the intricacies of the law. One of my favorite scenes from Breaking Bad is the scene where he meets with Jesse’s parents to try and get them to sell the house, and he uses the law, but it’s the way he uses it. He knows the law, and it’s how he uses it that makes him particularly interesting and particularly dangerous.

Like locking himself in the bathroom to write that spoliation letter at Sandpiper.

Exactly. I had to get an awful lot of help on this one. My sister is an attorney, so I asked her a lot of questions on this. Basically, as the opposing attorney says, you can shred documents all day long. There’s nothing illegal about that, but if you’ve been served with the demand letter, someone tells you that litigation is coming, then you’re supposed to stop, because then you’re destroying evidence. He knows that he has to get that letter to them as soon as possible so that they will stop shredding, because any evidence that’s lost, he may not be able to recover.