Better Call Saul (TV Program)

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    Mark Margolis, Scene-Stealing Actor in ‘Breaking Bad,’ Dies at 83

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    His character, an ex-drug lord in a wheelchair, was unable to speak, but Mr. Margolis, who also appeared in “Better Call Saul,” didn’t need dialogue to wield fearsome power.Mark Margolis, the prolific actor whose simmering air of menace as the fearsome former drug lord Hector Salamanca in “Breaking Bad” transformed the innocent ding of a bellhop bell into a harbinger of doom, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 83.His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital following a brief illness, was confirmed in a statement on Friday by his son, Morgan Margolis. Mr. Margolis lived in Manhattan.Mr. Margolis notched more than 160 credits in movies and on television, gaining particular notice with memorable roles in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” (1983), playing opposite Al Pacino as a cocaine-syndicate henchman, and in the Jim Carrey comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (1994), in which he played Ventura’s aggrieved landlord with delicious malevolence.He also became a go-to actor for the director Darren Aronofsky, appearing in his films “Pi” (1998), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “The Fountain” (2006), “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Noah” (2014).But no role made him as instantly recognizable to millions of viewers as Hector in Vince Gilligan’s critically acclaimed series “Breaking Bad,” which ran for five seasons on AMC, starting in 2008, starring Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn, and in its prequel, “Better Call Saul,” which ran for six seasons starting in 2015, starring Bob Odenkirk and Giancarlo Esposito — two of the many actors who appeared in both shows — as well as Rhea Seehorn.The role, in “Breaking Bad,” brought Mr. Margolis an Emmy nomination in 2012 for outstanding guest actor in a dramatic series.An aging former drug cartel don from Mexico, Hector, also known as Tio, had come to live in a New Mexico nursing home, unable to speak or walk following a stroke but still firmly in control of his power as a rival to Walter White (Mr. Cranston), a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who evolves into a coldhearted kingpin in the crystal methedrine trade.Despite his lack of dialogue in “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis proved a scene stealer from his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his face trembling with rage, despite the nasal cannula pumping oxygen up his nose and his palm furiously banging his bell, taped to an arm of the chair, whenever he needed attention.“Everybody says, ‘My God it must be difficult to work without words,’” he said in a 2012 interview with Fast Company. “My joke is, ‘No. I’m already grounded in the fact that I’ve been acting without hair for years, and that’s not a problem. So, now I’m acting without words.’”As a young actor, he added, he had trained to communicate emotions without dialogue. He also borrowed mannerisms, including a tobacco-chewing motion with the side of his mouth, from his mother-in-law, who had been confined to a Florida nursing home after a stroke.As viewers discovered in “Better Call Saul,” which featured Mr. Margolis as an ambulatory and verbose Hector, the character had wound up in a wheelchair after a defector in his organization switched his medication to incapacitate him, leading to the stroke.Despite the character’s broken moral compass and hair-trigger rage, Mr. Margolis managed to evoke Hector’s complexity — his humanity, even.“You don’t play villains like they are villains,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Forward, the Jewish newspaper. “You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.”Mark Margolis was born on Nov. 26, 1939, in Philadelphia to Isidore and Fanya (Fried) Margolis. He attended Temple University briefly before moving to New York, where at 19 he got a job as a personal assistant to the method acting guru Stella Adler. He also took a class with Lee Strasberg at his famed Actors Studio.After making brief appearances on television shows like “Kojak” and in movies like the Dudley Moore comedy “Arthur” and Mr. De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (both from 1981), Mr. Margolis got his first taste of renown in “Scarface,” playing Alberto the Shadow, a bodyguard and hit man for Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), the Bolivian drug boss who shows Mr. Pacino’s Tony the ropes in the cocaine business.Mr. Margolis, left, played a bodyguard and hit man for a mobster (Paul Shenar, right) in Brian De Palma’s movie “Scarface,” from 1983.Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionIn one slyly comic moment in “Breaking Bad,” Hector is seen watching on television a famous scene from “Scarface” in which Tony spontaneously shoots Alberto in the head when he learns that Alberto’s planned car-bomb murder of a nosy journalist would also kill the journalist’s wife and children.Despite his turns as a Latin heavy, Mr. Margolis, who was Jewish, did not speak Spanish, a point that earned him no shortage of derision from native speakers.“I’ve lived in Mexico,” he said in 2016 interview with Vulture, New York magazine’s culture site. “I know enough of the grammar of it, and I’m pretty good with the accent of it. If I get a good tutor, I can lock into it pretty quickly.”In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 61 years, Jacqueline Margolis; a brother, Jerome; and three grandchildren.In the years between “Scarface” and “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis’s prodigious output made him a known actor, if not a famous one. “People will often come up to me and say, ‘You’re that wonderful character actor,’” he told The Forward, apparently half seriously. “But I’m not a character actor. I’m a weird-looking romantic lead.”Unlike most romantic leads, though, Mr. Margolis struggled at times to make a living. Fans, he told The New York Observer in 2012, “think that I’m some sort of rich guy, that everyone in the movies is making the kind of money Angelina Jolie is making.”He and his wife had lived in the same apartment in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood since 1975.At least his turn as Hector provided him with a dash of supplemental income at the show’s peak, after a messaging app called Dingbel appropriated Hector’s simplest bell command — one ding for yes, two for no. Dingbel hired him as a spokesman.As Mr. Margolis told Vulture: “I tell people I’m the second-most famous bell ringer after Quasimodo.” More

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      Meet the ‘Better Call Saul’ Staffers Who Kept Its Story Straight

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      Ariel Levine and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, members of the show’s “brain trust,” tracked every minor character trait and historical reference.If there’s one takeaway from the moral and ideological universe of “Better Call Saul” — and its similarly meditative parent series “Breaking Bad” — it might be that details matter. Small decisions and non-decisions tend to accumulate until, to paraphrase the character Mike, who appeared in both series, we find ourselves at the end of a road, not necessarily conscious of where it began.The force of accumulated history was baked into the premise of “Better Call Saul,” which ended after six seasons on Monday. But the creators of the show, which began its story — following the exploits of the morally-challenged lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), the taciturn and principled fixer Mike (Jonathan Banks) and his fastidious drug lord boss Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) — six years before the famous events of “Breaking Bad,” went out of their way to reinforce notions of predestination within the narrative. To an unusual degree, it spun a kind of clockwork ecosystem, teeming with portentous allusions, callbacks and foreshadowing that encouraged the most passionate viewers to scrutinize its every frame.Behind the scenes, members of the show’s writing staff were no less obsessive. Ariel Levine, a staff writer on “Saul,” and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, the script coordinator, were part of what was known internally as “the brain trust” — a group of staffers who functioned as the show’s institutional memory. Working closely with a team of writers, assistants and producers — led by the showrunner and co-creator Peter Gould — Levine and Williams-Foshee maintained detailed notes on virtually every person, place, thing or event ever mentioned or implied on either the show or its predecessor.Speaking with The Times on Tuesday, the day after the “Better Call Saul” finale, they discussed solving hard story problems (whatever happened to Saul’s ex-wives?), making the choice to contradict “Breaking Bad” and staying ahead of Reddit sleuths. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How long did you each work on the show and in what roles?KATHLEEN WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve been the script coordinator since Season 3 and also worked briefly as a writer’s assistant in Seasons 5 and 6.The End of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” spinoff has concluded its run after six seasons.Series Finale: If the ending of “Better Call Saul” surprised you, take comfort in this fact: It surprised Saul Goodman, too. Here’s our recap.More Than ‘Breaking Bad 2’: Both prequel and sequel, the show was a time machine that asked how we become who we are, our critic writes.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.ARIEL LEVINE And I started in Season 1 as a postproduction assistant, worked as writer’s production assistant in Season 2, a writer’s assistant in Seasons 3 through 5 and then staff writer for 6.In the writers’ room, how did you keep track of all the history in play as you were trying to generate new stories?LEVINE In the room, figuring out what we could and couldn’t do, or what we should and shouldn’t do, was primarily the writers’ assistants’ job. When I was a writers’ assistant, Kathleen and I would use this living document I made with every established fact or character on both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” So if Saul said in “Breaking Bad,” “I’ve been divorced three times,” that would be in there. Or if Gale [a meth cook in “Breaking Bad” played by David Costabile] had a résumé that appeared in one shot in one episode that said he went to a certain college, that would be in there, as well. Whenever the writers were discussing a particular character or event, we would speak up in the moment and tell everyone what is known about it.How long is this document?LEVINE [Checking her computer.] The final version was 52 pages.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It was beautiful.LEVINE We expanded it into a spreadsheet that we called the Gillaverse Mega Timeline [after Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad” and co-creator of “Better Call Saul”] and then had smaller individual documents for all of the recurring characters.In “Breaking Bad,” Saul was the attorney for that show’s hero/villain, Walter White (Bryan Cranston).Ursula Coyote/AMCHow many times have you both watched “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE All the way through? Seven. But there are individual episodes, like the one that introduces Saul, or the one that gets into the relationship between Gus and the Salamancas [collaborators in a cross-border drug cartel] that I’ve easily seen 20, 25 times or more.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve watched it at least five times, all the way through, but probably more. When [“Saul”] was in production, we were looking at scenes from “Breaking Bad” every day.How did you deal with story decisions that might contradict something that was established on “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE We always wanted to be as consistent as possible, but we reserved the right to decide that something you saw on “Breaking Bad” might have been wrong. Ultimately, we chose to do what we felt would serve this story. Saul’s diploma on “Breaking Bad” said that he graduated from the University of American Samoa in 1986. But that didn’t work for the timeline of our show, so we changed it to 1998. Similarly, on “Breaking Bad,” Saul mentions a second ex-wife, and there’s a deleted scene from the show where he says he has three ex-wives, total. We actually talked about including a flashback scene to one of his previous marriages, but it seemed like too much to introduce an entirely new character. So we just had him present two previous dissolution of marriage certificates in the scene where he and Kim [Saul’s true love, played by Rhea Seehorn] get married at the courthouse.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It helps that Saul talks out of his ass a lot, because in a way it makes sense that not everything is going to add up. He’s just riffing constantly; that’s part of who he is.What was the hardest needle to thread between the two shows?WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I think the thing that took the most time and reasoning was Gus and the super lab [a giant underground meth operation that figured heavily into the plot of “Breaking Bad”]. We wanted to show how Gus and Mike came together to pull that off, but it’s clear that the lab has only recently been completed in the timeline of “Breaking Bad.” We decided that not only did we have to explain just how much time and effort went into building the lab, but that something would have to interrupt them at a certain point and essentially force them to start over.Fans on Reddit never let any detail or perceived misstep go unnoticed. Were there any oversights that came back to haunt you?LEVINE I think the thing that usually haunted us was stuff that was shot that we didn’t know about, or weren’t around for. Dates were a big issue. We were always shouting at production, “Please, don’t show any calendars!” More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’: Jonathan Banks Says Goodbye to Mike

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      Killed off in “Breaking Bad,” Mike Ehrmantraut had a long second act in “Better Call Saul.” Banks said playing Mike made him “a little more silent, a little less rambunctious.”This article contains spoilers for the series finale of “Better Call Saul.”“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,” Shakespeare once wrote. The sentiment has rarely applied to Mike Ehrmantraut, the cantankerous fixer and hit man in the Albuquerque underworld of “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad.”Morally conflicted, with plenty of wrinkles but little mirth, Ehrmantraut was mostly a blunt, coldblooded crank — with a soft spot for his granddaughter — in “Breaking Bad,” arriving in the second season and getting killed off three seasons later. But over the six-season run of “Better Call Saul,” which ended on Monday night, the creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould fleshed out a nuanced back story for the character, expanding him into a figure caught between the weight of his own guilt and the desire to protect what is left of his family.Jonathan Banks, who played Ehrmantraut, is no stranger to the pressure of survival, having grown up in a tough neighborhood just north of Washington, D.C. After refining his theater chops in high school and college, Banks began a long film and television career, with roles in movies like “Airplane!,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and the 2017 Netflix film “Mudbound.” But the role of Ehrmantraut has been a defining feather in his cap after decades of solid journeyman parts, earning him five Emmy nominations to go along with one he got for the CBS drama “Wiseguy” in the late 1980s.Banks can be as blunt and direct as the character, albeit with a bit more mirth. Over the course of two conversations this month, he discussed the changes the role has brought in his own life and whether he really did all those crossword puzzles. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Have you seen the finale?I haven’t seen it. But I know what it is. The last scene that Bob Odenkirk and I had together in the desert, and where I say to him, “You regret nothing?” — Mike was still looking for the humanity in this guy. He had just spent all those days in the desert. He’d also been impressed that this guy had been able to pull it together and survive.So that is a long-winded way of saying that, were Mike living when Jimmy went to jail and fessed up to everything — I wonder, would Mike have been surprised? It might not have taken him by total surprise that the guy finally had a conscience.You started playing Mike in 2009. Is there anything from your own life that informed these different layers we have seen in him over the years?I used, partially, people that I grew up with, people that I feared or respected. You know, it always sounds a little too dramatic to me when somebody says, “My neighborhood, I grew up this way; it was tough.” Suffice to say, I grew up not in the garden district. There was a fair amount of rough life. Certainly nothing in the order of “Breaking Bad” or the cartel life, but it was enough that it got your attention. There were a lot of days you walked around afraid — or at least I did.I got banged around quite a bit, got punched in the mouth a lot. It gives you a certain amount of, I don’t know that it gives you toughness, but it leaves no surprises when all of a sudden you’re in a fight or you get beaten or whatever. As far as Vietnam, the sniper part of Mike’s life: I have several close friends that went. And one of my friends they just put into Arlington Cemetery about a month and a half ago. There are a lot of guys that came back that I know that were hurt badly by their experience in combat. That’s something I never experienced — I borrowed from people that I saw.Banks and Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad.” Mike arrived in Season 2 and was killed three seasons later.Ursula Coyote/AMCI watched the conversations that you and Mark Margolis [who played Hector Salamanca] had as part of a series of actors’ talks for “Better Call Saul”; I got the impression in some of your comments about being a working actor that Mike’s inability to suffer fools is something that you share.I like to be straightforward. I like to be honest. I don’t like pretense. And I try not to be condescending or pretentious. I like just simple honesty. And honesty is not so simple.What about all the crossword puzzles? How good were you at them before you started playing Mike?Terrible, really terrible. In the Sunday comics, there is “find the six differences in between two photos or two drawings.” I have difficulty with that. I’ll tell you who is great at the crossword puzzles, who sits down and just “boom,” is Michael McKean.You had to do a lot of pretty grueling physical work for this role. Was there anything that was just beyond the pale?No. I mean, I’ll never let Vince Gilligan up for air when he puts me in the desert at 110 degrees every day. But I get to break his chops forever! It’s wonderful. [Laughs.] And I’ve got to tell you, that desert — the early morning sunrises or the sunsets, or when the thunderstorms would come across that New Mexico desert, or the wild horses would run by? Oh my god. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.At any point did your relationship with the role turn into a feeling of ownership?Yes. Mike is mine. Mike is mine. I caught myself almost for a moment choking up when you asked that. And I think the honest thing to say is if I really think about it, maybe Mike has changed Johnny, too.I think Jonathan Banks, by playing Mike, became a little more silent, a little less rambunctious. And by silent, I mean, I think I listen a little more than I did 12, 13 years ago. I don’t like to use the word witness, but that’s what’s coming to mind. I think he possibly affected me in that I’m a little more patient. Maybe that comes with age anyway.Was there ever a time where you got a script and thought, “Mike wouldn’t do this”?There have been moments that I went, “Oh, I think Mike wouldn’t do that.” But I found, quite honestly, a lot of the times that what the writers were telling me, if I deferred to them, it made sense.The first thing that comes to my mind is in “Breaking Bad” when Mike left his granddaughter in the park and had to escape. And I was going, “No, Mikey would never leave his granddaughter.” And of course, the reasoning is, the police department — they’re there in the park. They will take care of her, they will return her to her mother. I still have a tough time with Mike leaving his granddaughter in the park.There’s a scene in “Better Call Saul” last season where Mike is reading “The Little Prince” to his granddaughter, Kaylee. It’s a passage where the little prince says, “My flower is ephemeral, and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world.” What do you think this scene means for Mike?I love that scene so much. I love “The Little Prince” so much. It’s a life lesson for that child, obviously, what he’s reading. But as I remember, it touches a lot of chords in Mike as well.Which chords?[Long pause.] Innocence. Innocence protection. And the solace of relaxing, just for a moment. I mean, there’s two things going on — not only the book but her. In spite of all his fears and trepidations, the world is good for a moment with that innocent child and that innocent book.There are two different worlds. And part of his misery is that he can read “The Little Prince” with Kaylee, and then he’s going to go do something that he knows is not good. It’s one of the reasons he despises himself, because he knows better. There are a lot of these characters that don’t know better, or if they do know better they’re not aware of it. Mike is very aware of what he’s doing and knows it is not good.Banks and Juliet Donenfeld in “Better Call Saul.” Mike reserved a soft spot for his granddaughter, Kaylee.Warrick Page/AMCMike is one of the few people in this story who sees himself and others clearly, and that comes through in his relationships with the various other characters, good and bad.He lost his soul when he was responsible for his son’s death. What he tries to get back — and what I’ve also said is his Achilles’ heel — is that he doesn’t want to see people get involved and get hurt. He’ll see the good in somebody, and it usually costs him. Those lines that you well know: “If you’re in the game, you’re in the game.” Mike has no compassion for that once you’re in it.You know, to talk about bad guys, to admire miserable characters — since man could open his mouth and tell a story, it’s gone on. I have a quote in my kitchen — I’m going to take you over here with me so I can read this to you. [Carries laptop across the kitchen] Here we go: It says, “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” Mark Twain. [Laughs.]In the final episode, though, the last scene made me think that the overarching theme within the whole “Breaking Bad” universe — even with Walter White — is that no matter how bad someone goes, love can bring them back to some kind of better place. Do you think that aspect can apply in real life, that somebody can be redeemed by love?Yes, because then they are no longer lying to themselves. They’re trying to turn around, even if it’s only momentarily — even if it’s five seconds before you die. When you’re a little kid, you need a Popsicle, and you’re trying to figure out how to lie, how to get it any way you can. As an adult, hopefully, at some point it hits you that you mustn’t lie. You got to put your head on the pillow at night and go to sleep. Don’t lie to your wife, don’t lie to your friends, don’t lie to yourself. That sounds pretty trite, but I believe it. I truly believe it. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 13 Recap: Life

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      In the series finale, Jimmy and Saul go to war. Kim flies across the country, twice.And so we leave the flawed and conflicted hero of our story, in ADX Montrose, a.k.a. “The Alcatraz of the Rockies,” the maximum security prison where he will serve an 86-year sentence for a wide assortment of felonies. There he will bake bread and, one imagines, dispense endless amounts of free legal advice for the rest of his days.If this ending surprised you, take comfort in this fact: It surprised Saul Goodman, too. Or rather, it was the result of a decision that managed somehow to seem both determined and out of the blue. For a few minutes of this series finale, after negotiations with prosecutors that included a master class in legal posturing, Saul Goodman appeared headed toward a mere seven-and-a-half-year stint at a (relatively) comfortable federal penitentiary with, we are told, a golf program.It was a sweetheart deal based on a version of his working relationship with Walter White that was utterly fanciful, one in which he was a victim of the deceased meth king, not his most important enabler. Though patently far-fetched, Saul needs to sell it to just one juror, as he tells the lead federal prosecutor, George Castellano (Bob Jesser). And after giving government lawyers a look at how effectively he can feign victimhood, the government signs on. It appears as though what we have is the tale of a man who, in the end, is untroubled by his conscience, or at least able to quiet that conscience long enough to wangle the bare minimum of punishment for his many sins.But that is not the end of the story. When Saul hears that his ex-wife, Kim Wexler, has confessed to the authorities about her role in the death of Howard Hamlin and faces a potentially ruinous lawsuit from Howard’s widow, he changes his mind. In the ultimate reverse Perry Mason moment, Saul confesses to everything in open court, defying both an incredulous judge and his stupefied co-counsel, dooming himself to life behind bars.The volte-face leaves our protagonist with a very different legacy. “Better Call Saul” has long been a character study, and the character was forever toggling between shades of good and bad. As Jimmy McGill, he had a peerless gift for con artistry and a conscience. His morals were forever at war with his principal talent — swindling people, for money or fun and sometimes both.Then he became Saul Goodman, and the conscientious side of Jimmy disappeared. He became a very entertaining scoundrel.The finale and the last few episodes were designed to keep viewers wondering which of these two — Jimmy or Saul — would have the upper hand. Saul seemed likely to win, in part because the rapacious side of Jimmy and Saul kept getting highlighted. Especially in this episode.In different scenes, three characters from earlier parts of this show and “Breaking Bad” turn up to take a final bow and to help Jimmy riff on the theme of regret and second chances. To Mike, in dialogue set during their near-death march through the desert in Season 5, Jimmy says that given a time machine, he would teleport back to 1965 so he could invest early in Warren Buffett’s epochal moneymaking run at Berkshire Hathaway.“That’s it? Money?” Mike says incredulously.Jimmy looks ready to admit to something more meaningful but lets the moment pass.When he has a time-machine talk with Walter White, as the two share an underground apartment and await new identities, he says he would like the chance to avoid a knee injury he sustained during a “slip-n-fall” scam when he was young.“So you were always like this,” Walter says with disgust.And when Chuck, his older brother, says, “If you don’t like where you’re headed, there’s no shame in going back and changing your path,” Jimmy seems unmoved.“When have you ever changed your path?” he retorts.None of this makes him sound like a guy ready for a moral reckoning. And, of course, the dark version of Jimmy-Saul seemed ascendant in recent episodes. In Omaha, we watched his on-the-lam persona, Gene Takavic, devolve into what might have been the most contemptible version of his character we have ever seen. In the penultimate episode Gene/Saul seemed ready to strangle Carol Burnett (OK, she’s Marion in the show, but she’s still Carol Burnett) with a phone cord.So why does Jimmy trump Saul in the end? Why does he opt for a lifetime of punishment? Part of the answer is love. Love for Kim, specifically. His fake offer to the feds to provide dirt on his ex is, we learn, a ruse to make sure she is in the courtroom to watch him redeem himself.There’s some symmetry here. He becomes the toxic version of Saul because of Kim. He returns to the morally fastidious version of Jimmy for the same reason. In the next to last scene, the two are sharing a cigarette, just as they did at the beginning of their legal careers.Of course, love can’t fully explain the decision to choose 86 years of prison. Jimmy has opted for light over darkness, and that means giving himself the sentence he thinks he deserves. Sound improbable? Keep in mind that Jimmy/Gene has often lurched between good and bad, at moments and in ways that feel unpredictable. Which might be his defining quality and the only reason that the writers could pull the final switcheroo in this episode. It’s a narrative cliché that character is destiny, and Jimmy/Saul’s true character was a coin toss until the end. And thus, so too was his destiny.As for Kim, she is going to manage. She seems ready to leave her sprinkler company job to work again as a public defender. True love, however, might not be in the cards. She was never more amorous than when she and Jimmy were fleecing a mark. But if she finds another con man, she might avoid him the way alcoholics avoid booze.There is much to hash over in this episode but space for only one last question: What is the final verdict on “Better Call Saul”?Here’s Your Faithful Recapper’s take: it was occasionally a great show that was more often a pretty good show and too often a dull show. It got bogged down in story lines — everything involving Chuck, most notably — that were happily forgotten. It had trouble modulating its tone. There were goofy elements to the scheme to frame Howard, for instance, which felt out of place even before the guy was murdered. There were a few too many elaborate cons. And the writers seemed to relish their willingness to let Jimmy McGill’s biography unfold at its own sometimes glacial pace, ignoring the pace viewers might have preferred.The show was always an odd contraption. It had spare parts bolted on from “Breaking Bad,” and it told the story of cartel life before Walter White in segments that were often the most gripping in an episode. (Big round of applause for Hector, Gus, Nacho and Lalo.) It created two completely different planets and allowed them to cross orbits very rarely, albeit to thrilling effect. (Consider the restaurant meeting between Mike and Kim.) The writers gave themselves a nearly impossible task: to tell a story about love and ethics that kept being interrupted by a bunch of cunning and heavily armed sociopaths.In the end, what shines brightest to Your Faithful Recapper is the psychological richness of the show’s characters. One could argue over their motivations as if they were real people; their actions were often ambiguous enough for viewers to debate. Also, the show was always beautifully directed and shot. (Remember those ants swarming over sidewalk ice cream in Episode 3 of Season 5?) Attention to detail yielded all manner of Easter egg for vigilant viewers. (The same banal, hotel room painting appears in both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” In this episode, Jimmy/Saul flies on Wayfarer, the same airline that suffers a mid-air collision in “Breaking Bad.”) And there was a lot of exceptional dialogue, ranging from poignant to hilarious. You often watched and thought, “Nobody on television writes this well.”Or showcases such superb acting. Jonathan Banks’s performance in Episode 6 of Season 1, which tells the back story of Mike Ehrmantraut, is just one of many standout performances. Then there’s Rhea Seehorn’s Sphinx-like style since she first appeared, which provided a wallop to her tearful catharsis in last week’s episode. Oh, and a hat tip to Betsy Brandt, who turns up in the finale and gives what is arguably Marie Schrader’s finest soliloquy.That’s all from Your Faithful Recapper, who will sign off with that pretend-gun double draw farewell and take a shot of tequila, the show’s tipple of choice, in tribute. Now it’s your turn. In the comments section, opine on this episode and the entire series. Also, nominate a character, or set of characters, who should get the next spin off so we can do this all over again. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 12 Recap: Hit the Road

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      Kim would like to make a confession, Gene has a new problem, and Jeff has car trouble.Season 6, Episode 12: ‘Waterworks’After years of blending in and keeping low in Omaha, Gene Takavic, a.k.a. Saul Goodman, is about to lam it. In the closing moments of this episode, he is outed for good by a terrified but determined Marion, who has discovered the truth about her overly helpful pal. All it took was a computer, Ask Jeeves and a few key words: “Con man” and “Albuquerque.”We still don’t know why Gene changed from a skittish, no-profile schmo into a risk-addled home invader. One assumed that there were clues to be gleaned from the conversation he had with Kim in the previous episode, but in this one, we hear that conversation and nothing about it says, “This guy needs a lot of cash, stat.” It might be that swindlers need to swindle, that Jimmy/Saul isn’t alive unless he is ripping someone off and skirting the law. Perhaps this isn’t a story about a man who needs money. It’s a story about a man who can’t change.If so, it sets up a stark distinction between Jimmy/Saul and Kim. We find her in Titusville, Fla., living an utterly pedestrian life designing brochures for a sprinkler wholesaler. She seems reasonably happy with her hunky boyfriend and their suburban, backyard-barbeque life. The justice-seeking lawyer in her has been quashed, and we get only the briefest peek at her former self when Kim flies to Albuquerque and visits the courthouse, where she looks enviously at a public defender. In a glance, she sees the life she has abandoned, the calling that drew her with such force that she hatched a very nasty scheme — to frame Howard Hamlin as a drug addict — in order to fund it.Kim has returned to New Mexico to right a wrong. She confesses everything in an affidavit, which she presents both to prosecutors and to Cheryl, Howard’s widow. It’s all there. Every petty twist in the plot that buried Howard, including his murder at hands of Lalo Salamanca. This drastic act happens right after that call from Jimmy/Saul in the previous episode.“I’m still getting away with it,” Jimmy/Saul says.“You should turn yourself in,” Kim replies, after a painful silence.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.“Why don’t you turn yourself in, seeing as you’re the one with the guilty conscience,” Jimmy/Saul says. “What is stopping you?”He then lists the people, all dead, who could possibly help implicate Kim. It’s a reminder that she could tell the authorities the whole truth, and without any bodies and any witnesses, it might not matter.It’s a point that Kim herself makes when Cheryl asks whether this conscience-cleansing affidavit comes with any authentic legal peril. The truth is that Kim can keep getting away with it, too, even if she wants to be punished. Maybe that’s why she cries during the ride on the rental car bus. The unburdened life is unavailable to her. It’s a predicament worthy of Dostoyevsky, and it’s an especially gruesome fate given that she was the one who conceived and pushed for the scheme against Howard. There was a time — it started at the end of Season 5, to be precise — when Kim was the more wicked of this duo.Not that Kim has become a saint. Note that she tells Cheryl one whopper — that Jimmy might be dead. (To be lawyerly and specific about it, Kim says that there are no living witnesses to events described in the affidavit, other than her ex-husband, “assuming he’s still alive.”) She knows he’s alive. She just spoke to him. Kim was always the better liar in this couple, and that is still true.But with her job and boyfriend in Florida, Kim was taking a stab at a dull and law-abiding life. At first, it seemed hard to fathom that she had managed to become an office worker whose life revolved around writing vivid descriptions of plastic tubing. It seems a long way from the valiant efforts she made on behalf of indigent clients. Remember though, that the crusading incarnation of Kim was relatively new. She worked for years as an associate at a law firm, and then she burrowed deep into the intricacies of banking regulations as counsel to Mesa Verde, a local bank with regional dreams. She’s done the office drudgery thing before.Whether she can keep her quotidian existence is a question that is no longer hers alone to answer. Her affidavit incriminates Jimmy, too, and at minimum, he is going to need to run from the law. If he is caught, the show could end with an episode that pits Kim against Jimmy, back in Albuquerque, perhaps in a trial that garners national attention. (“Consigliere of Dead Meth Baron Implicated by Ex-Wife!”)Kim would be the only witness who could send Jimmy away. And it’s getting easier to root for some jail time for this guy, is it not? In the last few episodes the writers have put their collective and heavy thumbs on the scale by turning Saul/Gene into a monster. In this week’ episode, he appeared to be on the verge of strangling Marion with a cord, and earlier he seemed every bit as ready to cold-cock a man with the urn containing the ashes of his dog.This is a nervy turn of events. The show has ditched the idea that this is a narrative about love. The show will culminate, it seems, by posing questions about fairness and justice and maybe mercy. Will Cheryl forgive Kim or sue her? Will Kim testify against Jimmy or spare him?What ending does Saul Goodman deserve?Odds and EndsIt’s great to see Jesse Pinkman return for yet another scene, one that occurs before he goes to speak to Saul about springing his friend Badger out of jail, an event from the “Breaking Bad” timeline. His dialogue sounds utterly organic. (“It’s crazy, like bananas, all this rain. I thought we were, like, in a desert, you know?”)But this feels a bit like stunt casting because it’s hard to see how his presence moves the story forward. The scene ends with Kim saying that Saul was a good lawyer back when she knew him, underscoring the notion that the man she married no longer exists. That’s a point that could have been made without Jesse, and one that is pretty obvious during the signing of the divorce papers, moments earlier, when Saul feigns indifference as they muddle through the paperwork. It would have been great to learn something about Saul we could not have known unless Jesse showed up. Or even something new about Jesse.Fun fact: Kim represented Combo after he stole a creche.Wait, another scene of Kim brushing her teeth?Jeff’s freak out and car wreck seem implausible, even for Jeff.Saul/Gene uses the name Viktor St. Clair as a pseudonym when he calls Kim, which she appears to recognize immediately. Sound familiar? It’s the name he used (“Viktor, with a K”) when he and Kim ran their first con together, on the foul-mouthed stockbroker Ken, back in the Season 2 premiere (with help from a spiky-topped bottle of Zafiro Añejo).We learn during that phone conversation that Kim did not take the Sandpiper Crossing settlement money. Her conscience has been plaguing her for a while.Perhaps the best part of this episode is the way that its writer and director, Vince Gilligan, captured office life with such uncanny verisimilitude. The birthday cakes, the Miracle Whip lunch talk, the ritualized passing of hole punchers from one employee to another — it’s all so dead on. Offices like that of Palm Coast Sprinklers have been a part of television for a long time, but this might be the most accurate depiction of it Your Faithful Recapper has ever seen.The next episode is the last. The end of an era! Feel free to make predictions in the comments section. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 11 Recap: Back to the Beginning

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      Gene works a new scam, Francesca takes a phone call, and three guys get to know each other in an RV.Season 6, Episode 11: ‘Breaking Bad’Well, look who’s back.Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) make their much heralded return in this episode, which is named for the show they immortalized. We re-meet them in the immediate aftermath of a scene that took place in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” in an episode titled, with fitting symmetry, “Better Call Saul.”It’s the moment when Saul completes his pivot from sheer terror at his imminent death — he initially thought that cartel mercenaries were about to kill him in the desert — to a kind of swaggering delight as he looks around the RV that is the duo’s rolling meth lab. He handles some equipment and quickly figures out that Walt is Heisenberg, maker of the famed “blue stuff” that is the most celebrated illicit drug in Albuquerque.Your Faithful Recapper was stunned at how easily and convincingly these two actors resuscitated their roles. Then he wondered at the point of inserting these guys at this particular moment in the tale. A theory: What’s being explored is an origin story, the birth of a trio that earns hundreds of millions in the meth business and leaves in its wake more than a dozen corpses, including those of a drug kingpin (Gus Fring) and an innocent boy on a dirt bike. We see the spark that ends in a bonfire.When Mike shows up later at Saul’s office to report that Walt is a high school chemistry teacher with cancer, he also delivers a prescient warning.“I wouldn’t go near him,” he says. “He’s a complete amateur.”If only Saul had listened. If he had taken Mike’s advice, he would still have his practice in Albuquerque, that spectacularly garish house and a prominent place in the legal firmament of the city.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.He misses all of it. In the Omaha timeline of the show, he reconnects with Francesca, his benighted assistant, whose life in the aftermath of “Breaking Bad” turns out to be dreary and haunted by law enforcement. She is tailed, her phone is tapped, and her tenants are stoners who expect her to clear their stem-clogged sink. One can only imagine the incredulity of the D.E.A. when she claimed that she had no idea she was an officer of an offshore shell company, owned by Mr. Goodman, called Tigerfish. Small wonder she oozes bitterness during her conversation with Saul-Gene, who calls a pay phone from Omaha — exactly at 3 pm, on Nov. 12, as planned during a flash forward in Episode 5 of Season 4 — to get an update about his carefully hidden fortune.All gone, she reports.The only good news comes at the end of the call when Francesca says that Kim was in touch and asked about Jimmy. Specifically, she wanted to know if Jimmy was alive. This heartens Jimmy so much that he calls Kim at Palm Coast Sprinklers in Titusville, Fla., which is where she seems to work. (The transition from corporate lawyer to public defender to sprinkler sales somehow seems about right.) We don’t know anything about the conversation other than that Jimmy’s side of it is filled with the body language of an infuriated man and ends with him doing his best to destroy the phone and phone booth.The scene strongly suggests that the show is going to revisit the relationship between the two. Now that there are no impediments to construction of the superlab being built by Gus and the Salamancas have decided not to kill “the Chicken Man” over the disappearance of Lalo, the future of Jimmy and Kim looks like the main element of suspense in the remaining two episodes of the show.So here’s a question: Are we rooting for a reunion? If you’re Kim, the answer is clouded by the reality that Saul Goodman became not merely a new work name but also a new persona. Jimmy began to consort with prostitutes and lived in an preposterously decorated mansion, clearly obsessed with earning as many dollars possible. He became a guy that Kim would find repulsive. If Kim followed the news, or did an internet search, she would have seen what became of her husband. She might know that the man she married no longer exists.Whatever she said during that call, it inspires Jimmy to start earning money, pronto. He makes amends, in his own blunt way, with Jeff and his buddy Buddy (Max Bickelhaup) and the three begin a new scam. Jimmy approaches men at bars and gets them soused; Jeff drives them home in a cab, offering a bottle of water spiked with barbiturates; then Buddy enters the home and photographs IDs, tax records and credit card bills, information which is sold to some kind of broker. It’s a three-man identity theft crime spree, and it yields stacks of $20s. That is far better than the Cinnabon money Gene earns but a fraction of the plaintiff’s attorney bucks he pocketed and off-shored as Saul.Exactly why Jimmy-Gene feels so compelled to raise money quickly isn’t clear. He doesn’t seem to need the services of Ed Galbraith, a.k.a. the Disappearer, whom Gene called last season when he was first approached by Jeff. (At least he doesn’t need those services now. Firing Buddy over the morality of robbing a guy with cancer could prove his undoing if Buddy starts talking to the cops, or anyone else, for that matter.)The episode ends with Saul walking in one door and Gene walking in another, events separated by years. Saul is paying a visit to Walt, a meeting we have already seen in “Breaking Bad.” Jimmy is entering the home of the mark with cancer. The confab with Walt, we know, eventually ends in calamity. We’ll see what happens to Gene in Omaha, but it’s a safe bet that Jeff is right when he says that the barbiturates have surely worn off.Odds and EndsFrom that conversation with Francesca, we learn the fate of some key characters from “Breaking Bad.” Skyler White cut a deal with the feds. Huell Babineaux lives in New Orleans, free largely because he was unlawfully detained by none other than Hank Schrader, fans will recall.Saul is apparently a fan of “Frankenstein,” the 1931 movie by James Whale. He calls the R.V. “James Whale’s traveling road show,” a reference to the lab in the film. He calls Jesse “Igor,” who was Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. And when he recommends the Swing Master to Mike — has there ever been a more useless looking device? — he says it will help him to stop walking “like Frankenstein after he was probed by aliens.”We have to assume that Saul buried the money that he uses to pay Francesca for the reconnaissance phone call. He sounds relieved that it hasn’t been eaten by rats, suggesting it has been in situ for a while. And who else could have put it there?“Better Call Saul” has always had something of a split personality. It has had the drugs-and-crime plot bequeathed to it, in reverse, by “Breaking Bad,” and it has told the story of Jimmy and his relationships with his brother and with Kim. The drug plot is largely physical, the relationships plot mostly interior. The previous two episodes have all but abandoned the cartel element of the story, perhaps because it was buried along with Lalo.Where “Breaking Bad” kept getting bigger as the show progressed — it eventually included Mexican mobsters, neo-Nazis, a German conglomerate, federal agents, prosecutors and a story that purported to make national news — “Better Call Saul” is getting smaller. It has shed old story lines to create new ones that are modest in scale. Our main character is back in bars, where he started.One way to look at this: The show is emphasizing its own identity rather than ending with the sort of crescendo we watched in “Breaking Bad.” Another way: It’s disappointing that viewers are not currently in a frenzy of anticipation over the life and death of any number of people. Instead, we’re waiting to find out if Gene’s secret identity will remain intact, and whether he’ll win back Kim.Two more to go. In the comments, please offer some theories about what is happening to the intro reel of the show. It’s been deteriorating over the seasons, as though it were a VHS tape that’s been viewed too many times. Why? A mirror of Jimmy’s moral degradation? A tribute to Mike’s Betamax machine?Or ponder something simpler: Is that a soggy Funyun in the sink of Francesca’s tenants?If yes, ick. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 10 Recap: Sweet Revenge

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      Gene Takavic, a.k.a, Saul Goodman, thwarts an enemy using little more than his wits and a lot of sugar.Season 6, Episode 10: ‘Nippy’A mystery has lurked in the post-“Breaking Bad” timeline of “Better Call Saul,” when our favorite plaintiff’s attorney has become Gene Takavic, manager of a Cinnabon at an Omaha mall. Each season of “Better Call Saul” has opened with a few minutes of Gene’s life, shot in black and white, a glimpse at a life filled with frosting, tedium and dread. Saul is an hourly wage drudge who lives alone and constantly scans for anyone who might recognize him from his days as a wanted man in the aftermath of “Breaking Bad” infamy.Last season, his worst nightmare was realized. A guy named Jeff — a slightly menacing cabbie who had spent time in Albuquerque and had seen Saul on TV and billboard ads — confronted Saul during a lunch break at the mall and elicited a confession.“I know who you are, you know who you are,” Jeff said, creepily. “Let’s just get past that.”How Saul would handle this potential catastrophe was one of the questions looming in the final season, and in this week’s episode, we get the answer. Saul falls back on his gift for elaborate cons. He persuades Jeff and a co-conspirator to shoplift thousands of dollars worth clothing from a store at the mall where Saul works, a heist that succeeds only because Saul distracts the mall’s security officer from a bank of surveillance video screens with — what else? — a nightly Cinnabon.Once the crime has been committed, Saul explains to Jeff and his confederate that they both could be prosecuted for federal crimes. So never speak to Gene/Saul again. Or visit the mall.The blackmailer, in other words, is blackmailed. Or checkmated, if you prefer. So much for Jeff.Your Faithful Recapper found much of this unsatisfying, although before he could get to that feeling, he had to work through some confusion. The Jeff in this episode isn’t the same as the original Jeff. (Don Harvey was reportedly unable to reprise the role because of a contractual commitment with another show.) The issue with the change goes beyond continuity in the most cosmetic sense. The new Jeff, as embodied by Pat Healy, seems like a different character — more malleable and less intimidating.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.And that, it turns out, is the right way to play Jeff. The Don Harvey version of the guy seemed like a serious criminal, perhaps a hit man, or security for a cartel heavy. We first laid eyes on Jeff at the start of Season 4, a pair of very ominous eyes staring at Saul through a rear view mirror. He seemed like a looming fiasco.So early in “Nippy,” when Saul says, “I know what you really want; you want in the game,” you think he’s about to discuss major felonies, perhaps a drug deal. After all, Jeff would have known Saul as a figure in a spectacular meth bust.When Saul offers help engineering a scam to steal Air Jordans and Armani suits, it jars. The crime seems too small-bore. In actuality, it’s a perfect fit for the character on the page and the version of Jeff in this episode. He’s a divorced man who has money troubles and lives with his mom (played straight and beautifully by Carol Burnett). Earning a few thousand dollars with stolen clothing is just his speed.By the end of this episode, it’s clear that the Jeff problem is not that big a deal — more an unpleasant inconvenience than mortal threat. That’s a letdown because viewers could be forgiven for thinking that Jeff was a genuine impediment, not a goofball who nearly bungles a (relatively) modest robbery.Now let’s discuss context and timing. Giving over an entire episode to one caper puts a lot of pressure on that caper, and this one had the same flaw as parts of the Get Howard Scheme. It felt low-stakes and a bit broad, a tone that felt out of place after the departure of Kim and the murder of Howard. With three episodes left, it seems odd that the writers devised a tale in which Saul snookers a mall cop with an oversized pastry. The show should be steamrolling toward the resolution of tantalizing conflicts, threads that we viewers can’t wait to see tied together. At the moment, with Lalo dead and with Jeff neutralized, we don’t know what those conflicts will be.That said, Your Faithful Recapper would bet that the best episodes of this show are ahead of it. This one ends with Saul visiting the slightly depleted department store and draping a very garish tie over a busily patterned shirt. It’s a moment of nostalgia, a chance to look briefly at his old costume. He nearly revs up a fake smile, the one he always used when greeting a new client. But before he truly grins, he returns to his senses and puts the clothing back on the rack.Cinnabon, Up CloseThis week, we break from the usual closing format of “Odds and Ends” to bring you an interview. In May, Your Faithful Recapper called the Cinnabon headquarters in Atlanta and talked with Michael Alberici, the company’s head of marketing, to learn more about its relationship with “Better Call Saul.” Now that the show has aired an episode that all but co-stars one Cinnabon after another, it’s time to excerpt that discussion.Toward the end of “Breaking Bad,” Saul says that his best case scenario is winding up as a manager as a Cinnabon in Omaha. What did you guys think when you heard that line?Our phones blew up. People were calling to say, “Did you see that?” And our social media team swung into action and they sent a tweet to Bob Odenkirk with a cheeky message, something like: “We hear you’re looking for a job. Here’s how to apply,” with a link to our careers page.How much do you participate in the show?The show is very secretive about the scripts, which is fine, of course. They just call us and ask us to set up the store, which is actually in a mall in Albuquerque, a former Cinnabon that’s now closed. So each time, we recreate the bakery — the ovens, the mixers, the hot plates and everything else are in a storage facility — and we send thousands of fresh rolls. We train the actors as if they’re real team members, so they know how to interact with extras. The actors at the cash register know all the mannerisms, they know what to do.Do you have any agreement with the producers, any guardrails about the way the company is represented?We just have to trust that they have the brand’s best interests in mind. And if there were to be some crazy story line in which the store blows up, we’ll handle it. We monitor social media and the press daily, and right now there’s a lot of talk about whether Cinnabon will show up again in “Better Call Saul.” It keeps our brand top of mind for consumers around the world. We’d be crazy to put stipulations around this opportunity.Saul Goodman looks like he would rather be doing anything other than working at a Cinnabon. What does the company make of the way it’s portrayed on the show?We definitely don’t take it as a ding on the brand. I mean, he might not like his job, but that has no impact on the company. They always make that store look like a well-oiled machine. The bakery looks great. He’s miserable, but hey, the rolls are hot. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 9 Recap: Bye Bye Love

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      Kim and Gus make some difficult decisions of the heart. Mike goes on a mission of mercy.Season 6, Episode 9: ‘Fun and Games’Let’s break with tradition and start at the end of this whipsawing episode, which delivers two quick jolts in its closing minutes.The first is Kim’s decision to quit both the law and her marriage. Her rationale? That together she and Jimmy are a hazard, both to themselves and to others. A newlywed who is not as rash might have considered less drastic solutions — maybe a week in Bali, a bit of therapy. But Kim is nothing if not unpredictable, and there have been many moments in this show when you are certain she’s going to break up with Jimmy only to then see her give him a smooch. What we saw here was the same thing in reverse.If Kim were presenting a legal argument, we would say it started logically enough — hey, these two do produce some toxic chemistry — but got wacky by the end. She says that she withheld the news from Jimmy that Lalo was alive because she knew what would happen — that Jimmy would protect her, hide with her and end the plot against Howard. And were that to happen, “We’d break up,” as she puts it.Why? “Because I was having too much fun!” she shouts.Whoa. The implication here is that the scam was so unnervingly delightful, and harmful to others, that she must quit her co-conspirator, like an alcoholic who keeps crashing the car and swears off booze. That’s a guess. It’s difficult to fathom the inner life of someone who says, “I love you, too, but so what?”Let’s leave aside, for a moment, Jimmy’s reaction and focus on a connected question: What will Mike think? Kim has been given instructions to deliver an Academy Award-worthy performance in a real-life documentary called “Nothing to See Here” in the aftermath of Howard’s murder. And now she has left her job and Jimmy. That will raise exactly the sort of questions Mike didn’t want. This is a problem.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.On to the second jolt. Right after the breakup argument, the episode jumps forward in time to Saul Goodman’s louche and extravagant life, which is filled with Xanax, prostitutes and Roman-influenced, self-mythologizing décor and art, all of it in the comically opulent house that we saw in the opening episode of this season.Is the sudden end of this relationship with Kim supposed to explain this transformation? Lots of people have their hearts broken. Some evolve. Very few emerge with entirely different personalities. Perhaps we’re to believe that Saul was hiding inside Jimmy and emerged courtesy of the trauma of Kim’s departure. Granted, Kim’s farewell is quite a trauma. It’s just hard to believe that it steered a slightly crooked, often endearing and largehearted man into total depravity.That said, we know that in the future, Saul will hastily exit Albuquerque when he gains infamy in “Breaking Bad” and emerge with as a nebbish named Gene Takavic, managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. The writers have already signaled that this character can shift in shape.The less confounding part of this episode comes near the beginning. Gus has been summoned to the south-of-the-border home of Don Eladio, where Don Hector accuses him of killing Lalo and plotting to usurp the cartel. Unruffled, Gus answers this potentially fatal allegation by declaring it too preposterous to dignify with words. Then Eladio and his underling Bolsa make Gus’s case on his behalf, and in doing so demonstrate how well Fring has covered his tracks, with an assist from Lalo, who left behind a burned corpse with matching teeth.Hector is left to ring his bell in frantic, fruitless protest. Point to Gus, who seems to derive much of the meaning in his life by tormenting his foe. The scene ends with a moment that explains why. Fring stares at the pool, the same place where years ago, Hector shot and killed Max Arciniega, the love of Gus’s life. At that moment, Gus was lying next to Max, close enough to watch blood gush into the pool.Gus is haunted by that memory, and when he returns to his home in Albuquerque, we watch him regain his life, his happiness and his routine. But there are limits. When he visits what appears to be his favorite restaurant, he has a long conversation with a waiter and oenophile named David (Reed Diamond), who dazzles Gus with his good looks and tales of vineyard hopping through Europe as a young man. Nobody has ever spoken to Gus for so long, and through David’s entire monologue, Gus seems pleasantly rapt. This is smitten Gus, a side of the man we’ve never seen.Instead of asking for a date, which is what happens in the rom-com version of this interlude, Gus quickly leaves while the waiter is retrieving an even rarer bottle of wine. Fring has either decided he can’t get hurt again or concluded that love isn’t for a man in his position. It’s a weakness he can’t afford because to enemies, loved ones are easy targets. They end up dead, or sent on suicide missions to kill other people, like Kim in the previous episode.The finest part of this strangely long scene — six minutes! — comes at the end, when there’s a lingering tight shot of Gus’s face and we see him segue from relaxed and joyful to tense and withdrawn. Without a word of dialogue, you can see him come to a firm decision. He must keep his monastic, loveless life.Mike uses some of his post-clean-up downtime to visit Manuel Varga (Juan Carlos Cantu) and explain that his son, Nacho, is dead. (He does this because he has been taught about the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one by Anita, his grief counseling buddy from Season 3, whose husband vanished in the New Mexico wilderness years earlier, a source of wrenching sorrow for her.) On the plus side, he says, Nacho’s killers will soon come to justice. Mr. Varga corrects Mike. It won’t be justice. It will be revenge, he says.In a cast of characters who are corrupt and wicked in various shades of gray, this humble upholsterer is here to remind viewers what uncompromising goodness actually looks like. To him, even a guy like Mike, who has an acute sense of fairness, is just another hoodlum.Odds and EndsSaul Goodman has finally turned up in the flesh, albeit for just a few minutes. Kind of nervy — naming a show for character who debuts in the ninth episode of the sixth season.What’s with the tip that Gus left at that restaurant? Obviously, $201 is generous for a glass of wine. But why the added $1? Did he think $200 just isn’t quite enough?Jimmy’s line, “What’s done can be undone,” is a nod to Macbeth, and a famous utterance by a Lady Macbeth — the original female gangster — who rues her role in murdering King Duncan of Scotland. “What’s done,” she says, “cannot be undone.”Lady Macbeth is an apt and interesting model for Kim. She sort of pushes her husband into the plot against the king, much as Kim pushes Jimmy to trap Howard. And Lady Macbeth has seriously strong scheming chops, just like Kim. Consider her psychological assault on Howard’s widow, Cheryl (Sandrine Holt) at Howard’s wake. First, she conjures a memory of seeing Howard “snorting something” off his desk at the office. When Cheryl begins to believe that her husband just might have had a drug problem, Kim comforts Cheryl and implies that everyone else might be wrong.“You were his wife,” she says. “You knew him better than anyone.”Well played, madam. Keep in mind that there’s often a price for such wicked manipulations. Lady Macbeth goes insane and then commits suicide. Kim has an easier time of it, at least so far. She leaves the work and the man she loves.Four episodes left, and a lot of story to tell. The future of Gene Takavic. The fate of Kim. There are engineers and a crew to hire, a super lab to build. Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are due any minute.Please leave thoughts — and any theories about Gus’s tipping habits — in the comments section. More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 7 Recap: Plan A

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      Lalo goes underground, Gus gets gloomy, and Howard presents his closing argument.As the producers of “Better Call Saul” have wondered publicly about how to end the show, they have been guided, they say, by one question: What does Saul Goodman deserve?“Plan and Execution,” as this episode is called, complicates the answer. Through the first six episodes of this season, and throughout “Breaking Bad,” Saul — and his progenitor, Jimmy McGill — seemed like a relatively benign weasel, a colorful grifter who often put his talent for chicanery to constructive use. None of his professional life was purely altruistic, but when he behaved like a crook it was often in the name of fairness.Now though, the scheming of Jimmy and his wife and accomplice, Kim Wexler, have ended in the murder of a civilian, as noncombatants are called in mob movies. Howard did not “land on his feet,” as both he and Jimmy predicted during Howard’s final minutes of life. He landed on his head, with a bullet lodged in it from Lalo’s gun.If one were defending Jimmy/Saul in court over the question of his culpability in Howard’s death, there are arguments to marshal. Lalo pulled the trigger. Kim pushed the plan. The former deserves life in prison. The latter needs therapy. But given the way that this show’s sequel hems in so much of the plot, the chief matter of suspense is what becomes of Gene Takavic, the third identity of Jimmy McGill, who runs a Cinnabon in an Omaha mall in the post-“Breaking Bad” timeline.And what happens to Kim? If she survives, does she wind up with Jimmy?It was easier to root for an Omaha reunion before Operation Frame Howard ended with the words “There’s really no need to … ” and a corpse on the floor. But that might be the ultimate point of this suddenly grim chapter of “Better Call Saul.” It gave Kim a chance to demonstrate moral complexity. She’s come a long way from the strait-laced attorney we met early in this show. Nor is she any match for the guy who’s about to interrogate her and Jimmy in their home. Like many of the best characters to emerge from the mind of the creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, she’s a mix of compassion and malignancy, sympathy and cunning.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.If her destiny is tied to Jimmy’s, it’s safe to assume that it will be determined by how the couple handle the realization that their larky stratagems have ended in blood. Which doesn’t mean that Jimmy and Kim will cope with whatever comes next the same way. The first episode of this season is called “Wine and Roses,” a reference to the 1962 film, “Days of Wine and Roses,” about a couple, played by Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, who are alcoholics. Lemmon’s character gets sober. Remick’s character remains in love with Lemmon’s but refuses to stop drinking, and they part. This is either foreshadowing or a fake out, but it raises the possibility that Kim will continue trending toward the wicked and Jimmy will not.Although, who knows? The reverse could be true.Regardless, R.I.P. Howard. You were much derided, mostly because of your smooth manners, good looks and old-timey shirt collars. They made you seem haughty and foppish. You were far more thoughtful than your enemies realized. If it’s any comfort, Patrick Fabian played you with an impeccable mix of confidence and vulnerability.The plot against you will not be missed. It was a ridiculous endeavor and never more so than in the middle of this episode, when Jimmy and Lenny, the aspiring actor/shopping cart wrangler, played by John Ennis, are photographed in a park, pantomiming a bribe. The point is that Lenny looks a lot like the Sandpiper mediator, Rand Casimiro (John Posey).The effort to settle the Sandpiper case and humiliate Howard had a few twists for viewers, like the realization that Howard’s private detective was a mole. But it was ultimately a Rube Goldberg contraption, fanciful to the point of absurdity and somehow effective nonetheless. About the best that can be said for this scheme is that it’s over. Plus, it seemed to have a profoundly aphrodisiacal effect on its perpetrators.By the time Lalo has secured the silencer on his gun, the amorous celebration has given way to terror. The question of what to do with Howard’s body is now Kim and Jimmy’s problem, but the more immediate issue is that Lalo wants some information. He will want to know the truth about Jimmy’s benighted $7 million trek through the desert, made possible by Mike’s sniper work and survival techniques last season. He will likely learn that it was Mike who engineered Lalo’s bail jump.What Jimmy can’t offer is details about Gus Fring, whom he presumably knows nothing about. (In “Breaking Bad,” he connects Walter White to Gus without knowing the man’s identity.) He can’t illuminate much about the superlab.And superlab is Lalo’s focus. He has returned from Germany with information tortured from Casper, who, to Your Faithful Recapper’s surprise, apparently knew the location and purpose of the excavation site where he worked. Lalo is surveilling the laundry above it from an underground lair in the city’s sewer system. Realizing that his phone call to Hector is bugged, he suggests, for the ears of Fring’s underlings, that his next move is an assault on Fring’s home. In fact, he plans to infiltrate the superlab and send images of it to Don Eladio, the head of the Mexican cartel.“Tonight, I go in, I kill all the guards and show you proof,” he says in a video message to Eladio. “Then you decide.”The possibility raised here is that the proof eventually offered will not be compelling enough to persuade Eladio to against Fring. As Lalo puts it, Fring will have his own story and defenders because he’s an “earner.” In fact, we know from “Breaking Bad” that Fring will finish his “mother of all meth labs,” as Lalo calls it. The question is whether Lalo can delay the inevitable without getting killed.Odds and EndsNothing in “Better Call Saul” is haphazard, so let’s note that the movie Jimmy and Kim are watching before Howard shows up is “Born Yesterday,” a 1950 film directed by George Cukor, about a woman, played by Judy Holliday, who falls in love with a journalist, played by William Holden, who’s been hired by her millionaire husband to educate her. We overhear a snippet of dialogue in which Holliday’s character is discussing Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” a poem published early in the 18th century. One of Pope’s themes is the limits of science to grasp the true nature of humanity.Howard’s exit monologue is remarkably insightful. His guesses about what motivated the plot against him are as good as any out there, and unlike viewers, he wasn’t privy to the hotel room conversation last season when the idea was giddily conceived. “You did it for fun.” True. “You’re perfect for each other.” Yup. And so on.Fun fact: The guy playing the shopping cart wrangler and mediator look-alike is the father of Jessie Ennis, who plays Erin Brill, the law firm associate at Davis & Main. In this episode, she’s in charge of the group phone call during the mediation.The show now goes on hiatus until July 11, when the final six episodes will air. Your Faithful Recapper expects that a good portion of the remaining action will occur in the post-“Breaking Bad” era. But your recapper is faithful, which is very different from clairvoyant. So feel free to speculate about what comes next in the comments section, or about anything else you would like to share with the group.Until then, namaste. More