Summary: Lalo sets up in the sewer across from Lavanderia Brillante and watches it. He places a call to Hector but realizes that the line was tapped. He tells Hector he will surprise Gus that night and watches as Gus's men leave the laundry Mike meets with Gus and tells him that he's pulling his guys to protect Gus from Lalo. Jimmy gets the crew back together and they do reshoots for D-Day. Jimmy gives the new photos to Howard's PI. Howard sees the photos right before an important meeting with Schweikart. The photos are coated in a substance that causes Howard's pupils to dilate. At the meeting, Howard recognizes Casimiro and accuses him of being compromised, but the photos are swapped for other photos and Howard ends up looking crazy. Cliff meets with Howard and Howard tells him that he was played. Cliff seems to believe him but they are forced to settle anyways. Jimmy and Kim are overjoyed by their success and have sex. Later, Howard visits Jimmy and Kim, confronting them about what they did and bashing their lifestyle. Suddenly, Lalo arrives and shoots Howard in the head before turning to Jimmy and Kim.
The Good: Wow, what an episode. Before I get into the specifics, I have to praise the structure of this episode and how it provides a complete emotional experience from start to finish. The start of this episode is traditional "Better Call Saul" at its methodical and experimental best. We open with an intriguing dialogue-free scene with Lalo, and then transition to a funny and entertaining con as Jimmy and Kim do their reshoots. The episode starts off so delightful and fun by doing several "Better Call Saul" staples, and that gives it a sense of comfort and familiarity. We've supported Jimmy and Kim through many cons, so it's easy to be engrossed in their work yet again. But this episode doesn't allow us to sit in comfort, and it shifts our emotions expertly as we watch the con executed from Howard's point of view. For the first time since "Fall", I found myself totally disgusted by what I was watching. I started the episode enjoying Jimmy and Kim's handiwork, but as the con got going and we saw poor innocent Howard suffer a terrible humiliation, I felt myself gradually shift towards discomfort. I'll get into more specifics later, but this part of the episode was ruled by feelings of disappointment and disgust towards Jimmy and Kim for what they have done to Howard. The sequence is so long and engrossing that I completely forgot that the episode opened with Lalo. After a brief reminder that he exists, we end with a satisfying scene as Howard fully illuminates the selfish, childish, and morally wrong nature of Jimmy and Kim's behaviour. And after what I had just seen, I found myself agreeing with Howard's analysis. This was a step too far for me and it alienated me from Jimmy and Kim in a way that made me want to see them have some sort of comeuppance for what they had done. But be careful what you wish for, because when that comeuppance came at the end of the episode, it was an anxiety-filled horror-show. From feeling so sad and angry for Howard, the episode suddenly turned towards pure terror as Lalo arrives and executes Howard coldly and callously in a scene that left me emotionally devastated and stunned. The emotional journey that this episode took me on from delight to sheer terror was tremendous and is one of the main reasons that this episode was so spectacular. The reshoots at the start of the episode are a blast, and I was grinning throughout pretty much every scene. Thomas Schnauz had a lot of fun with the direction, especially using 1 memorable long take followed by a dynamic spinning camera motion as Lenny was prepared for the reshoot. The comedy is top notch too. Jimmy convincing Lenny to come back is quite funny, and I laughed at Lenny's fascination with his character when he learned that his character's arm is broken ("the plot thickens!"). The film crew got another chance to shine for what might be the final time. I was amused by camera guy's character consistency as he is so condescending about his camera in the lecture hall, and he forces Jimmy to give him a significant pay raise for the shoots. The entire sequence uses many of the signature stylistic elements that "Better Call Saul" has become known for, and it utilizes them with terrific efficiency. The sequence concludes with a big reveal that Howard's PI has been compromised by Jimmy, which is a great twist that raises the stakes for the ensuing scenes with Howard. Watching D-Day go down was deeply uncomfortable. We spend almost all of this time in Howard's point of view and its so sad to see him gradually fall into the trap. "Axe and Grind" laid down so many hints about what's to come so we end up figuring out the scheme shortly before it happens. But I think that this aids the entire sequence, and it becomes all the more painful when we know what's coming because we are rooting on Howard to figure things out and save face, but he falls just short of seeing the bigger picture. Jimmy and Kim are just too good, and it is tragic as Howard uses his head and figures things out; the only issue is that him figuring it out is all part of Kim's plan. There's an air of tragedy here, and I found myself sympathizing more and more with Howard with each passing scene. But while I sympathize with Howard, there's Jimmy and Kim relishing in his humiliation, and that made me gradually feel more and more disgusted by their actions. The big pay-off comes at the end when they have sex while Howard's career goes up in flames, an act so despicable and malicious that it made me completely lose all sympathy for them. I no longer enjoyed seeing their cons at play, and now I feel like I finally see them in the way that Chuck did. Chuck has a lasting role in this episode, and I feel that this is one of those few times where he is vindicated. This is the exact nightmare that Chuck wanted to stop. Jimmy and Kim using their powers to tear down a hard-working lawyer is the "chimp with a machine gun" that Chuck described way back in "Pimento". This episode is careful to parallel Chuck at every turn. Howard starts the episode reminiscing about Chuck while telling a story to the young worker Carey, allowing us to remember Chuck and think about him before the episode starts making its parallels. And the parallels are glorious. So much of the con that happens here resembles what Jimmy did to Chuck back in "Fifi" and "Nailed". In those episodes, Jimmy forced Chuck to make a legal error which cost him Mesa Verde and Chuck knew exactly what had happened, but he sounded so crazy that nobody believed him. This was mirrored in this episode when Howard makes a legal error which costs him the Sandpiper case and he knew exactly what happened but nobody believed him. The key difference between these two separate incidents is how I felt about what was happening. With Chuck, what Jimmy did almost felt justifiable because he was doing it for Kim, and Kim needed Mesa Verde to succeed financially and be willing to branch out with Jimmy. But Jimmy and Kim only did this Howard scheme because they could. There's no reason and no justification for this, and that resulted in me empathizing with Howard and finally seeing what it is that Chuck saw back in "Nailed". Chuck may have gone about it the complete wrong way, but his disgust for these types of schemes was absolutely not misplaced. In the wrong hands, actions like these can end innocent careers, and in the case of this episode, end innocent lives. The parallels with Chuck don't end there. Much like Chuck, Howard is unwilling to back down and let Jimmy win by settling Sandpiper, and you get the sense that he understood the position that Chuck had found himself in back in seasons 2 and 3. In this moment he finally accepted that Chuck was right about Jimmy and that there was no other way to look at it. Poor Howard did nothing wrong to deserve all of this. Patrick Fabian does tremendous work throughout the episode and you can't help but feel for him and what he went through. Howard's craziness is portrayed perfectly because what he's saying and doing is perfectly reasonable, but the situation has been engineered beyond his control to ensure that he looks bad. It's frustrating to watch, and it's frustrating for him to understand and accept that he got played. Howard got absolutely nothing out of everything that happened. At the very least this makes his rant at Jimmy and Kim at the end of the episode thoroughly satisfying. All of his vitriol is right on the money, and there's nothing he says to the two of them that isn't true. They are soulless. Howard did not deserve what they did to him, and he illustrates that perfectly. Sure Howard sided with Chuck, sure he kicked Kim into doc review that one time, but he had reasons for doing so, and there is no world where this can justify them attacking him so personally. Howard is completely accurate with all that he says, and it really hits home when he comes to the conclusion that Jimmy and Kim did this purely for the fun of it. Because they did. They have been justifying their actions throughout the season, but it's crystal clear that they did not need to go through with this scheme. Howard lays this truth bare, and it's a harsh truth for us to accept that the characters we have been rooting for all along have stepped too far and become bad people. The episode handles this idea with care and utilizes it perfectly to impact us while we watch the episode. The final minute of the episode is where it came crashing down. The last minute of the episode felt like an eternity and ramped things up to an unbelievable level of suspense and terror, the likes of which this show has not reached before. When there was a knock at Jimmy and Kim's door, my heart immediately took me back to "Bad Choice Road" and I was scared that it would be Lalo. Thankfully it was just Howard, but I fully think that this brief moment of fear was intentional. We had cut right from a scene with Gus and Mike fretting about Lalo to this moment, which leads me to believe that I was supposed to think it was Lalo. What this accomplished was putting me into a false sense of security which was immediately shattered when Lalo arrived in the final minute of the episode. Signaling his arrival with the flicker of a candle is such an ominous, unsettling image, and I think that it was a superb decision. It didn't take long for me to fear for Howard's life, and seeing Lalo standing right next to him, casually screwing on that silencer was frightening. By this point I knew that Howard would be dying, and that slow build-up to an eventual inevitability is a hallmark of great tragedy. Howard's death is filmed in such a way that it still manages to be a sudden, anxiety-inducing surprise that made me flinch and gasp in shock. It's such a devastating moment especially because of how little Howard deserved his fate. He was simply in the wrong place at the worst possible time and he paid for it with his life. Even more devastating is Jimmy and Kim's shocked reactions as they are unable to articulate and immediately begin to panic, having witnessed Howard's murder right in front of them out of nowhere. Lalo's arrival came right out of left field, and it's a terrifying moment that puts a damp and depressing end to an episode that took me on an unbelievable emotional ride. Lalo had other scenes in this episode, and all of them were great. The opening scene is a marvelous piece of wordless filmmaking. It's a gradual revealing of information that sets the scene for the episode. We start wondering who we are looking at, and after a slow zoom-in we quickly realize it is Lalo. The next question is where he is, which we are told subtly through the use of a New Mexico license plate, which is a clever bit of scene-setting. Then finally our last question is what is he doing. Through this sequence we get to see Lalo's daily routine as he showers up, catches an hour of sleep (consistent with what he told Nacho back in "Something Unforgivable"), grabs some food, and returns to his spot. It's not until the final reveal, done with a lovely dynamic bit of filmmaking, that we realize what exactly Lalo is up to. This type of slow-paced mystery-solving is typical of "Better Call Saul" and it's a joy to watch. Lalo is really fun here as he records a video for Eladio and sums up for us how much he has learned about Gus's operation from Casper and what his current plan is. It's surprising that Lalo left Germany so quickly, but I do like this decision since it's much less exciting to watch Lalo when he's so far away geographically from the main plot. But Lalo gets found out while placing a call to Hector, which is a detail that I loved. Lalo does not know that Gus is onto him, and so he falls right into this trap. Gus has been so paranoid, so it's no wonder that he bugged Casa Tranquila. But unfortunately Lalo's smart enough to notice that the phone line has been bugged, and he is resourceful on his feet to lie and set up a distraction to create himself an opening. Lots of wonderful little details in this episode. I'll give bonus points for Lalo noticing the cockroach and thinking of Jimmy, who he described as "la cucaracha" last season. There is a distinct theme of rotation throughout this episode, which adds to the anxiety. The sweeping shot revealing Lalo to be watching the laundry, the rapidly rotating camera while Lenny is being prepared for the shoots, Howard turning the soda can to dispel the pressure build-up, the shot of Howard running up the spiral staircase, and Lalo putting on the silencer all added to this feeling. I smiled at Lalo's delight when recognizing Mike, almost like he had stumbled upon an old friend. Lenny practicing some lines while pushing shopping carts is one of those little things that make this show richer than most others. Showing us a quick second of Lenny's life makes the character feel so much more real. The camera guy telling Jimmy and Kim "you can't rush the process" surely has to be a meta joke about the slow pacing of this series. I chuckled at that. The double meaning of "Plan and Execution" has to be one of my favourite uses of an episode title. Of course the title means that execution of Jimmy and Kim's plan for Howard, but the "execution" aspect can also refer to Howard's death at the end of an episode that was filled with characters making plans. The Bad: Nothing. The Unknown: What does Lalo want from Jimmy and Kim? How will they help him move against Gus? How will Jimmy and Kim react in the wake of Howard's death? How will this tragedy change them and their beliefs? How will Jimmy and Kim cover up Howard's death? Will they stage it as suicide or a spat with his drug dealer? Will Lalo take care of Howard's body for them? Will they have to call Mike for help? Will Jimmy learn that Kim knew Lalo was still alive? How will this affect their relationship? Best Moment: It has to be that shocking ending. Everything after the candle flickered had my heart pounding with tension and fear, and I will not soon be able to shake the image of Howard being murdered from my head. Character of the Episode: Howard. He didn't deserve what happened to him, and I will greatly miss Patrick Fabian in this show. Conclusion: What a masterful episode. This was everything that I love about "Better Call Saul" packed into a single episode, and it resulted in an emotional, exhilarating, and shocking experience. I know this wasn't intended to be a midseason finale, but it functions perfectly as one. An all-around terrific episode. Score: 87
1 Comment
Joe Y
5/29/2022 10:47:07 am
This show. Better Call Saul is by far the best show on tv at the moment, and it's not particularly close. Though I also really enjoyed Undone Season 2.
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
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