Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
6.08 “Point and Shoot”
Written by Gordon Smith
Directed by Vince Gilligan
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
New episodes airing Mondays on AMC

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Hello, hope you're well! I last filed a Better Call Saul review in late May, before the mid-season finale that saw one main character snuffed out in an instant, and two more looking down the barrel of a gun. I was surprised the series’s writers would end an episode like that, especially one followed by a month-plus of silence. That's what they do, though, these wacky creative types!

In that time, my wife had a baby three weeks before her projected due date, which will shake your brains up like nothing else. Taking care of an infant is a ridiculous, schedule-shredding thing to do, but I'm looking forward to taking an hour every week to watch the best show on TV, and then whatever time I can piece together in the subsequent days to write these reviews. Thank you, as always, for reading. Better Call Saul is the only show I actively talk about with other people, and I hope we can spend these next six weeks engaging with this monumental piece of art together.

So what did we get in the first of our last Saul episodes? Kim died.

That isn't true, obviously. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), fresh off killing Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), stands in Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim Wexler's (Rhea Seehorn) apartment, insisting Jimmy drive to Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito)'s house, shoot him dead and return with photographic evidence of the deed. Jimmy convinces Lalo to let Kim leave to deal with Gus, hoping she'll look out for herself and drive to safety. The second Kim sets out for Gus's makeshift compound, it seems like she's done for. Either she arrives at Gus's home and is killed by his security army, or she fails to kill Gus, makes it back to the apartment, and is killed by Lalo.

Either way, Gus has to stay alive. The character is in Breaking Bad, more powerful than ever, with a completed meth mega-lab. That tension has always existed in Better Call Saul, but time is really starting to run out and I spent the first half of "Point and Shoot" the way I imagine I'll spend the next five episodes of this series-- convinced Kim is finally on the chopping block. Her fate is unwritten, which means the writers can play with our worries about her survival, which means the writers are going to do exactly that. She's arguably the most sympathetic character left on the show, and every episode she gets through alive feels like a minor miracle. Does she get killed, does she get relocated by the world's best connected vacuum salespeople, does she separate from Jimmy and stay right where she is? The questions are all I'll be thinking about.

In my fear from Kim's life, I put a big fact on the backburner—Lalo's fate is also a mystery. As his plan reveals surprise levels of misdirection, Lalo tears across town, separating Gus from his protectors. Lalo never cared either way about Jimmy and Kim—he just wanted bait, and they were touchable.

In a true testament to how well this show is made, I remained on edge as Lalo killed Gus's personal security, revealed himself, and backed his rival down into the nascent meth lab at gunpoint. Because, again, Gus makes it out of this series stronger than ever. Lalo has vanished by the time Breaking Bad's story starts. It should be clear that no matter how disadvantaged he looks, Gus is going to turn the tables on Lalo. And it is clear, but we're trapped in that lab with these two psychos. Whether Gus lives is almost beside the point if we know that, no matter what transpires, we're going to watch some fucked up shit. Death is whatever. Better Call Saul has done worse to its cast.

Lalo films Gus on the trip to the lab. He's going to kill the chicken man, but not before proving that he's been a rat and that the Salamanca family was right to question his loyalties. Gus will die, and Lalo will trigger a reckoning that takes out all of Gus's remaining allies and his reputation. The inevitable happens and Gus kills Lalo, but you can't watch Lalo attempt to humiliate Gus and still feel like you're watching popcorn entertainment. The high stakes got higher right before Lalo was removed from the picture entirely and this uncharacteristically narrow-focused episode did the unthinkable by deriving tension from a story whose ending we've already known for a decade.