It’s been two years since anyone watched a new episode of “Better Call Saul,” but the characters presumably haven’t aged a minute.
So before the Season 6 opener, which debuts on Monday, let’s take a moment to remember exactly what was happening to this menagerie of sociopathic drug kingpins and morally compromised lawyers as the closing credits rolled on Season 5. And let’s take it one burning question at a time.
Where was Lalo Salamanca headed in that last scene of the finale?
Toward revenge. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) just survived the world’s most incompetent home invasion-cum-assassination attempt, having outmaneuvered a handful of heavily armed men using little more than a frying pan of boiling oil, borrowed weapons and the artful use of his own underground escape tunnel. He knows who sent these guys — the rival meth wholesaler and fried chicken entrepreneur Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).
Gus has been a few steps ahead of Lalo ever since this newest Salamanca showed up in Season 4. It was Gus who engineered Lalo’s arrest and imprisonment for murder — a crime Lalo did, in fact, commit — then promptly got him sprung when the mustachioed villano proved he could wreak plenty of havoc from behind bars.
Having lost his beloved cook, and apparently everyone else on his staff, Lalo will now be looking for maximum retribution. We know this will not involve killing Fring — he is alive and well in “Breaking Bad,” this show’s sequel — but he can presumably cause chaos and damage. At minimum, he can forestall the opening of the meth super lab, which is arguably the cause dearest to Gus’s heart and most important to his bottom line.
Is Nacho Varga doomed?
Seems like it! Nacho (Michael Mando) let those Mexican assassins into Lalo’s fortress, then split as the mayhem began. Now that Lalo has survived the carnage, it will be pretty obvious to him that Nacho played a role in it.
But consider this. In the last episode, Nacho had a lengthy discussion with the cartel leader Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) about how he would manage the business in New Mexico now that there isn’t a Salamanca around to replace Lalo. Was that a waste of viewers’ time? It is if Nacho never runs operations in Albuquerque.
However this pans out, it’s safe to assume that Nacho will retain his title as the Most Tormented Character in this series. Pound for pound, no one has endured more physical and psychological abuse.
How bad is Kim Wexler breaking?
Very bad. At the end of the last season, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) was persuading Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) to help frame her former mentor and boss, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), in some kind of career-ending act of fraud or malfeasance. The contours of this plot are unclear, but Kim is adamant that Howard deserves the worst that she and Jimmy can conjure.
One obvious motive here is money. With Howard sidelined in a scandal, she and Jimmy will collect about $2 million from a long-percolating class action lawsuit against a retirement home. It’s more than that, though. Kim loathes the guy in a way that even Jimmy — no fan either — finds excessive.
The hatred is complicated and worth an essay of its own. Suffice to say, Howard has a history of patronizing and demeaning Kim — he once made her toil in a poorly lit room with first-year associates back when she was an up-and-comer at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, essentially punishing her for Jimmy’s sins. But Kim and Howard had good years, too, and he forgave her student loan debt when she quit the firm.
Not to mention the other side of their ledger. Kim gut-punched Howard, figuratively speaking, when she and Jimmy found a very underhanded way to steal a blue-chip client from H.H.M. So they have issues, and it brings to mind the truism that you can deeply hate only the people you once liked.
Kim is shaping up as one of the most intellectually rich characters on this show. (Gus is her only rival.) In her exit scene from Season 5, she was dreaming of opening a law firm to help the poor, which is about as altruistic a career move as an attorney can imagine. She was also conniving to destroy a man because, as she put it, he needed to be taken a peg.
Watch your back, Howard. Watch your front, too.
What’s next for Jimmy?
Therapy, one hopes. When last seen, Jimmy had endured the roughest 48 hours of his life, starting with a horrifically botched effort to transport $7 million in cartel money from Mexico to Albuquerque — bail for his client, Lalo. Instead of a simple handoff, Jimmy came within a millisecond of an execution-style death, then watched his would-be killer get shot, the start of a deadly spree orchestrated by Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), who turned in his finest sniper performance to date.
That was the easy part. Jimmy and Mike then hoofed it through the desert overnight, dragging heavy sacks of $100 bills and barely escaping death by dehydration. Then Lalo decided that Jimmy’s version of his bagman travails — that he simply had car trouble and then walked all night — had holes in it. Specifically, bullet holes, which he discovered on Jimmy’s car when he examined it during his bail-skipping drive to the Mexican border. Lalo visited Jimmy and Kim at their apartment to confront Jimmy and was saved only by Kim’s gift for improvised lying.
Whither Gus and Mike?
Expect some rage from the usually even-tempered Mr. Fring over the Lalo fiasco. Expect also some countermeasures to thwart whatever vengeance Lalo has in mind, especially if it means delaying the already delayed super lab.
Mike, his favorite in-house heavy, will surely provide the muscle and close combat skills needed in the coming battle. Mike and Gus have been through a rough patch. Mike took a few orders he despised, most notably shooting the heartsick super-lab engineer, Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock), for the German’s verboten efforts to briefly reunite with his wife.
Maybe this is why Mike came close to an act of disobedience that verged on career suicide. He had a rifle scope trained through a window on Lalo during that confrontation in Jimmy and Kim’s apartment. If he had actually shot the guy, he would have wrecked Gus’s plans and been forced to run for his life.
Better call Gene?
Let’s talk about the story set after “Breaking Bad,” in which Jimmy lives in Nebraska under the assumed name Gene Takavic.
The previous five seasons of “Better Call Saul” have started with a brief visit to Omaha, where a post-Saul Jimmy lives and works at a Cinnabon in a mall, having fled Albuquerque as a fugitive. (In a clever inversion of the norm, scenes set in the show’s future are shot in black and white.) In the Season 5 opener, Jimmy is confronted by a guy who seems to recognize him, suggesting that his cover has been blown.
It’s worth noting that the promotional poster for this new season shows Jimmy as the milquetoast Takavic — mustache, close-cropped hair, glasses. It’s possible that far more than a few minutes of the coming season will happen in Nebraska. There could be whole episodes. We may see him blackmailed. Or pursued by the feds. Or running, again.
And, given that nobody knows Kim’s future, it’s at least possible that the two will meet in this time period, assuming she survives the machinations of the show’s present tense. Which is not a safe assumption.
Which actor’s name should viewers be most stoked to see in the opening credits?
Norbert Weisser. He plays Peter Schuler, the hyper-anxious executive — who in the future commits suicide — running a division of Madrigal Electromotive, a German conglomerate, and helping Gus build the meth super lab. He has been in exactly one episode of “Breaking Bad” and one of “Better Call Saul,” and both were exceptional.
Anything else?
The show is gradually docking with the starting moments of “Breaking Bad.” So Jimmy will soon fully embrace his alter ego, Saul Goodman, who has made only fleeting cameos thus far. We might get reacquainted with some old friends, too. Like the libertarian and obscure music aficionado Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), who helps set up the super lab. And producers have hinted that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul) could turn up.
If we meet Mr. White in his pre-“Breaking Bad” incarnation, he’ll be a nebbishy chemistry teacher with plenty of unrealized ambition — and the world’s most famous pair of Wallabees.
