Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
Written by Alison Tatlok|
Directed by Melissa Bernstein
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
New episodes airing Mondays on AMC

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Tony Dalton's name appears in the opening credits like a threat. It's also a relief - if he had remained AWOL much longer, it may have been unbearable.

Dalton plays Lalo Salamanca, the chief reason the usually unflappable Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is living in a suburban bunker with a pistol strapped to his shin. He's reduced to cleaning his shower with a toothbrush. He's a character who always craves control. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) is wedging chairs under her apartment's door handle in the middle of the night. Everybody is trying to get ready, even if half of them don't know what they need to get ready for. They, like anybody watching Better Call Saul, are trying to predict when Lalo is going to blow through his next ceiling.

Gus is an especially interesting case. Filling in behind the cash register of his chicken restaurant, he has as close to a panic attack as he's capable of when he sees, or thinks he sees, something outside in the parking lot. The camera doesn't show us what he saw, which to my mind implies there's nothing there. Even when Gus got half of his body blown off in Breaking Bad, he was capable of calmly, coolly straightening his tie before collapsing to his death. He is empty but for his desire to punish the people who have tried to fuck him over. And now he's mistaking passing cars, or pedestrians, for his doom.

In lighter scenes of revenge, a seed has been planted in Clifford Main's (Ed Begley, Jr.) head, and every twitch Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) twitches seems to indicate a coke habit. The ruse becomes a little cruel when Cliff reveals his own son had an addiction. But Howard catches on that Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) is playing with him, and he clears his schedule.

Here, Better Call Saul gives us the boxing gym showdown between Jimmy and Howard that we've seen in every preview since the season began. Howard creates false pretenses to lure Jimmy into a private conversation and maybe a fight overseen by a grumpy ref. The previews have made this seem like a dark moment, like something that ends in a character getting seriously hurt. It ends up playing with an upbeat Spanish guitar soundtrack, and two nerds self-consciously touch gloves and crack jokes on the way to what ends up just being a mild beating. Howard wins.

More violently, we learn Howard's got a guy tailing Jimmy. This isn't the culmination of a years-long cold war - it's the first big step toward it becoming hot.

When we meet Gus again, he's smuggled Mike (Jonathan Banks) into the mini-fortress he had started building a few seasons back. It's a hole in the ground that would have been a meth lab by now, if only the project's head engineer, Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock) hadn't come down with cabin fever. The whole project ended with a handful of German scientists flying home, while Mike was forced to kill Werner. It was as heavy as the show's been but it seemed to be resolved. The lab would stay incomplete and Mike would feel significantly worse about himself, but the story would move on without much more resolution.

But everything matters in Better Call Saul. The future-lab is an empty space, which means Gus is frightened of its possibilities. He drops a pistol in a little hiding spot, sure that this is going to be where the shit goes down.

He's right. Lalo re-emerges in Germany, seducing Werner's widow so he can gather whatever information he can find about the lab. This was totally secret. Werner's widow Margarethe (Andrea Sooch) had no idea what her husband was doing in New Mexico. The show took such pains to detail how quiet the project was kept that a major character was murdered for even appearing to compromise its secrecy. We don't know how Lalo found out about it. We don't know how he managed to travel internationally with the DEA on his case. But he's there, and we know he's going to get what he needs.

It reminds me of the Judge in Blood Meridian, who shows up in multiple places at the same time, or the nameless hitman in The Limits of Control, who essentially teleports to his destination. "How did you get in here?" his target asks, to which the hitman replies, "I used my imagination."

Lalo does things because he does them. We don't need to know how. He's supernaturally competent, running around in the margins of every script's pages. But we can't forget that Gus planted a gun in the cave Lalo's investigating. Gus is supernaturally competent, too.

It's a fun dynamic, watching two titans fight while the little people run around boxing in the foreground. Jimmy is competent, but he also recognizes his limits, when his life is really on the line - which puts him several leagues below Gus and Lalo. They're basically gods.

I was talking about the show with Brian at the great Philly comic shop Brave New Worlds, and he pointed out that Vince Gilligan always has men kicking trash cans. Jimmy does it in the first episode of Saul, Walter White does it in Breaking Bad, and Mulder does it in an episode of The X-Files that Gilligan wrote. It's such a perfect expression of impotent rage. When a guy kicks a dent in a garbage can in these shows (at least Saul and Breaking Bad, I haven't seen the X-Files episode), he's taking his anger out on the only thing with less power than he has. Saul kicks an already-beat-up can in Saul because Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill doesn't respect him, and he accomplishes a lot in the next six seasons, but he's put in his place often enough that he's clearly still that guy kicking the trash because he can't do anything else.

That doesn't happen to Lalo. It almost never happens to Gus, whose panic attack in this episode was as close to "losing his shit" as he's come. I don't think the show would work if everybody was at Lalo's level and it wouldn't work if everybody was at Jimmy's, but the way it is now, we're watching superhumans fight superhumans while frail dudes with big mouths stage boxing matches to protect their vanity, and the balance is perfect.