The number of branching “what-if”s are too many to count at this point, but full credit to Seehorn for another nonverbal Kim moment that speaks volumes beyond the moment itself. “Better Call Saul” - Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Televisionįor as much as the rest of this season will be dissected for hidden self-referential details, it’s moments like Kim hesitating at the stop light next to the police car that speak to the full Albuquerque tapestry better than anything else. On the other hand, Gus adjusting his shirt and jacket, so as to face his own potential execution with dignity, may have been what helped buy himself enough time to distract Lalo and his camcorder. Just as he shows he doesn’t know the whole nature of Jimmy’s identity, his assumption that he knows the entire specifications of the underground lab lead him to overlook the one key detail that might have saved him. Goodman” and laying out the specifics of the German engineering crew, Lalo’s attempts at disarming his opponents with superior knowledge backfire. It all comes down to where each man draws his pride. In turn, thinking he’d finally hooked his big fish, Lalo provides just enough an opening for Gus to lunge for the secret pistol nestled inside the earth-mover tread. In trying to intercept Lalo at Lavandería Brillante, Gus makes the fundamental mistake of not watching his back.
Yet, in a battle of reasonable equals, they each swap mistakes. Lalo’s not the only one with the superpower here.
Without knowing what Kim is capable of in other circumstances, Gus recognizes that it would have taken a leverage-less Jimmy a lot more than a simple argument to convince someone that strong-willed to change his plan. Smith respects both Gus’ intelligence and the audience’s by giving him the minimal amount of detail to realize that sending Kim to his place was a Lalo fakeout. Of course, Kim’s assignment to hunt down Gus (or whoever else opens the door to the Fortress of Fringitude) is a textbook Lalo (and by extension “Better Call Saul”) misdirect, designed to draw The Chicken Man out of hiding.įrom there, it’s a showdown of two professionals, each who’ve made a living and stayed alive in their own corner of the cartel chess match. There’s the terror of watching a man being assassinated in a living room but another kind entirely to have that same man explain the simplicity of killing another person, delivered with the relative ease of a calculus teacher saying that differential equations aren’t really all that hard if you just follow the steps. If “Better Call Saul” gave Lalo his own warped superpower - one magnified exponentially by a seemingly unflappable Dalton - it’s competence.
SOUGHT SAY. REVENGE AGAINST TORMENTOR. THEY PRO
Lalo offers them an out in the form of a quid pro quo, a life for a life. Picking right back up after his murder of Howard, “Point and Shoot” begins with a clear contrast: Jimmy and Kim’s abject horror vs. In Lalo’s case, though, he’s the one holding all the cards at the beginning of his end. And both are obviously swan songs for a pair whose ends were surprising but inescapable in their own way. They look at marked men going rogue from a strictly outlined plan in order to have the freedom to go out on their own terms. They both feature men bent on revenge whose hubris makes them ignorant of their own vulnerabilities. It’s fitting that Gordon Smith is the writer on “Point and Shoot,” given that it’s a mirror in many ways of the Nacho farewell he wrote and directed. Lalo (Tony Dalton) won’t be one of those somebodies. If somebody is going to survive this season, they’ll have to tiptoe around their share of corpses to do so. By the time the attention turns back to the Wexler-McGill apartment, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) are the only two who seem to acknowledge that his body is still lying there on the floor, no matter how many people come through that door over the course of the episode. Take the late Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), who’s only represented by a few of his personal items in the (unsurprisingly poetic) cold open.
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