So, where were we in Albuquerque? The first half of the final season of Better Call Saul ended with Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and wife Kim (Rhea Seehorn) confronted in their apartment by Howard Hamlin, the law firm boss they’d successfully conspired to discredit. As bad timing would have it, vengeful drug cartel boss Lalo Salamanca (Timothy Dalton) also chose that moment to appear on their doorstep, greeting Howard with a bullet to the head.
Up till now, Better Call Saul has run on two separate, occasionally intersecting tramlines – Saul’s Albuquerque lawyer business and the Mexican drugs cartel action. With the first of the final six episodes, Point and Shoot, both plot strands finally coalesce. We’re now firmly on the runway that will lead to Walter White and the Breaking Bad universe.
Point and Shoot doesn’t, however, take us straight back to Howard bleeding out on Saul and Kim’s carpet. Instead, the pre-credits sequence features one of the show’s teasingly elliptical openings – a shoe being washed up on the surf, the camera pulling back to reveal a car parked on the beach with the driver’s door open, a wallet and wedding ring on the dashboard. A clear case of suicide, it would seem. But whose suicide?
The accessories suggest a man, so it presumably isn’t Kim – who doesn’t exist in the Breaking Bad universe and whose fate is therefore precarious. And obviously it isn’t Saul, unless Odenkirk’s slippery lawyer has faked his own death. But before too many questions crowd in, the opening credits finally lead us back to Howard’s corpse, and Lalo confronting a horrified Saul and Kim.
He has a job for them both (one of those offers you can’t refuse), and it wouldn’t be too spoiler-ish to say that the task involves Gus Fring, the drugs kingpin played with stony malice by Giancarlo Esposito. After all, Lalo spent the previous half-season uncovering Fring’s involvement in the massacre at his ranch in Mexico and reconnoitering his “mother of all meths labs” for a revenge attack. Lalo is being somewhat disingenuous, however, when he tells the couple that Fring “looks like a librarian”. Looks here couldn’t be more deceptive.
Co-creator Vince Gilligan is on directing duty – and channelling Hitchcock in a sequence involving Kim that is reminiscent of Janet Leigh’s guilt-ridden car journey near the start of Psycho. Gilligan also gives us some of the show’s trademark screwball camera angles, including Saul’s floor-level point of view after he’s been tied to a chair that then tips over.
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A strength of Better Call Saul has been the way it is able to draw on viewers’ knowledge of future events to make a dramatic use of fate. Occasionally this foreknowledge can be a weakness and (without being too specific) a climactic showdown here loses some suspense because we know which character must survive to feature in Breaking Bad.
No sign yet of that show’s Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, although Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are both slated to appear during these final episodes. For most fans of the prequel, however, it’s going to be the fate of Rhea Seehorn’s Kim – the breakout character of the series – that is going to be the most intriguing aspect of the next five weeks.
Killing Kim would be tragic but predictable – and that’s not a word usually associated with either Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Surviving somehow for her own spinoff show would be a more alluring outcome.
New episodes of ‘Better Call Saul’ will stream on Netflix every Tuesday
