That was a long seven weeks, wasn’t it? It’s been a little under two months since Better Call Saul embarked on its mid-season break – leaving fans on one hell of a cliffhanger. While the show’s creators may insist that the break hadn’t been factored into the final season’s pacing, there could hardly have been a more compelling time to hit pause: the last time we saw Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn), they were staring down the leonine eyes of Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), moments after he had strolled through their door and shot Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) through the head.
The entirety of this episode (entitled “Point and Shoot”) takes place in the immediate claustrophobic aftermath of this moment. It quickly transpires that Lalo is there to coerce his onetime attorney into carrying out a surprise hit: he is instructed to walk up to the door of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), wait until it opens, and then keep shooting. (The proposed assassination has more than a few echoes of the Jesse-Gale killing at the end of Breaking Bad’s third season). Naturally – as any Breaking Bad viewer knows, of course – things don’t end with Gus’s brains splattered across his foyer. But we’ve seen enough of Lalo to know that there’s always another angle at play.
