‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 2: Do the Hustle

This recap is for Episode 2 of the back-to-back season opener; click here for the recap of Episode 1.

Season 6, Episode 2: ‘Carrot and Stick’

For a guy known for his punctilious approach to both business and personal grooming, Gus Fring sure has made a mess.

Much of this superb and stressful episode, “Carrot and Stick,” is a study in damage control, overseen by a man who seems uncharacteristically ruffled and uncertain about what to do. Gus has always been a study in composure, but in one scene he does something that seems almost unimaginable, at least for him. He accidentally breaks a drinking glass.

It’s an ideal symbol for the mayhem he has loosed with his ill-considered and disastrously executed plan to murder Lalo Salamanca. In hindsight, he must realize the whole idea was a fiasco — and would have been a failure even if Lalo had been killed. Many of the terrible outcomes that have unspooled in the season’s first two episodes are precisely what would have happened if the assassins sent by Gus had succeeded.

Now he has two problems. Lalo is alive, which Gus realizes the moment Don Hector extends a hand in reconciliation during the peace summit organized by Juan Bolsa (Javier Grajeda). Either Hector can’t keep a poker face — if he really wanted Lalo’s continued existence to remain a secret, he would have feigned rage and ignored Gus — or he wants his sworn enemy to know the truth.

The second problem is Nacho. He’s the one guy accessible to the cartel who knows about Gus’s plot, and the race is on to find him in his bleak and desiccated Mexican hide-out, the Motel Ocotillo. (Suggested motto: “But … we do offer room service.) Gus has to grab or kill Nacho before the cartel reaches him. The cartel wants Nacho taken alive — well, the Salamancas certainly do — so that he can be tortured into a confession.

As ever, Fring Inc. has a jump on the competition. In the opening scene, we see Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) show up at Nacho’s home and switch a personal safe for an identical one, minus any evidence that Nacho had ever worked for Gus, presumably. Mike ruefully adds a brown envelope to the switched-in safe, and it’s unclear, at least to Your Faithful Recapper, whether he knows that the documents include a bank statement with the phone number to Motel Ocotillo. When Don Bolsa later opens this envelope, Nacho appears to have only a few minutes left to live.

In fact, he manages to exit the motel premises with a beating heart, following an escape scene that is expertly staged by show co-creator Vince Gilligan, who directed the episode and demonstrates some serious action-movie chops. The sequence begins when Nacho realizes that a man across the courtyard has been hired by Gus’s underlings to keep an eye on him — time to flee. It ends with a shootout between Nacho and the terrifying Leonel and Marco Salamanca (Daniel and Luis Moncada), a.k.a. the Twins, who arrive in a silver SUV ready to kill whomever they have to in order to take Nacho alive.

Now that he is roaming somewhere in Mexico, he might actually have some leverage with Gus, at least. At minimum, he knows that he could wreck Gus’s super lab dreams in under 10 seconds of candid chat with a cartel employee. This doesn’t mean that Gus and his minions will be eager to provide him with safe haven. But he knows that he poses a threat to Gus, and maybe there’s a way to set up a blackmail contraption that would keep a sword over Gus’s head. (For pointers, perhaps Nacho could watch the way Tom Cruise’s character keeps the mafia at bay at the end of 1993 film “The Firm.”)

This complicated dynamic is no doubt why, at the end of this episode, in a scene set in an office at the Los Pollos Hermanos chicken farm, Gus appears ready to talk to Nacho when Mike hands him that mobile phone. For as long as Gus can’t kill Nacho, Nacho poses an all but existential threat to Gus.

Before that call, Gus wants Nacho’s father brought to him, which he must envision as a kind of check mate that will force Nacho’s surrender. Mike, however, will not countenance that idea and says so, bluntly and firmly, in his first act of overt insubordination. This gets a gun pointed at his head by the ever stylish Tyrus Kitt (Ray Campbell), the only henchman in Gus’s crew you could imagine in line at a Manhattan nightclub.

“Whatever happens next, it’s not going to go down the way you think it is,” Mike says.

Precisely what that means is a mystery, at least to Your Faithful Recapper. He might be referring to the sniper set up outside of the office, with whom Mike is in radio contact. But that guy appears to be looking for signs that Lalo or his colleagues are readying an attack. It’s at least possible that the same sniper has been instructed by Mike to kill Gus and Tyrus in the event that Mike is killed. Or that Mike has an entirely different plan. Or that he’s bluffing.

Speaking of bluffing, on to the Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler frame-up show, where “Operation Ruin Howard Hamlin’s Life” is entering Phase 2. This involves revisiting the series’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde, namely Craig and Betsy Kettleman (Jeremy Shamos and Julie Ann Emery), who in the Season 1 timeline were represented by Howard in an unsuccessful attempt to defend Craig against charges that as a county treasurer he embezzled $1.6 million. Having served his sentence, Craig is a free man in highly diminished circumstances, running a bargain basement, and corrupt, tax prep company out of a roadside mobile home.

Jimmy shows up with a proposition: Hire me, and I’ll get you exonerated by arguing that your lawyer was a coke head. This is a bluff. But Jimmy and Kim apparently intuit that the Kettlemans will double cross Jimmy, then head straight to the office of Clifford Main and attempt to enlist him as their attorney. They further know that Main, who saw that planted bag of fake cocaine tumble out of Howard’s locker, will toss the Kettlemans from the office, then wonder whether their story actually has some truth to it.

What’s best about the latest iteration of Jimmy and Kim’s improbable little scheme is the opportunity it provides Kim to demonstrate an almost thuggish toughness. She threatens the Kettlemans with jail time, courtesy of an aborted call to an I.R.S. enforcement office, a power play of pure sang-froid. There’s a Robin Hood quality to her maneuverings — the Kettlemans were scamming their financially struggling clients — but one can envision the day when she flexes even harder against less worthy targets. Or when she’s mixing it up with the show’s true baddies.

Odds and Ends

Well, now we know where Jimmy got that inflatable Lady Liberty that sat atop his office in “Breaking Bad.”

Why would Mike risk his life for Nacho, a man he has kept at a coolly professional distance since they met? One assumes it’s all about Mike’s relationship with his son, a Philadelphia cop who was shot by corrupt colleagues because he wouldn’t accept bribes. It’s a crime Mike feels implicated in because he was on the take when he was on the same force. (See “Five-O” in Season 1.) His defense of Nacho feels, perhaps, like a do over.

Who was tailing Jimmy and Kim as they drove from the Kettlemans’ office? Your Faithful Recapper wanted to run the number on the license plates of the car, then remembered that the show is fictional. And that he doesn’t know how to “run the number” on anything. So, please, speculate in the comments section, along with any other thoughts about this stellar pair of episodes.