Summary: Kim and Jimmy go spend the night at a hotel to be safe from Lalo and they contemplate their next moves. Kim goes to work the next day and gets 20 new PD cases. She meets with Howard who warns her about Jimmy but she laughs in his face. Jimmy visits Mike who tells him that it has been arranged for Lalo to die at night. Jimmy tells Kim it's safe and they spend one final night at the hotel, though Jimmy is visibly shaken and wants to go home. However, Kim convinces him to stay and pushes him towards coming up with a massive con on Howard so that they can collect the $2 million of Sandpiper money. Jimmy is surprised by Kim's sudden shift in character. Lalo takes Nacho to his home in Mexico and has him meet Don Eladio for a promotion. Nacho gets a call saying that he has to open a gate at 3AM. Nacho desperately manages to escape Lalo and his guards and opens the gate, letting a hit squad into Lalo's home. The squad kills everyone in Lalo's household, but Lalo manages to escape and kills them all, however he gets one of the squad to send a message that they managed to kill him. He sees that Nacho's body isn't there and angrily storms off.
The Good: Jimmy's dilemma throughout this episode is easy to understand. He screwed up massively by getting involved with Lalo, he feels immensely guilty for putting Kim's life in danger and he so desperately just wants to be safe again. So the Jimmy we see in this episode is a far cry from the bold and confident man that lashed out at Howard in "JMM". His recent experiences have changed him, and they've made him consider the possibility that he actually is bad for Kim. He tries talking about it, and he is clearly considering doing something drastic to correct this. Having Lalo come to Kim's house with a gun was the final straw for Jimmy. But what's most surprising about all this is how Kim reacts to what just happened. She seems so normal. She takes the news of Jimmy's shooting surprisingly well, she seems quite nonchalant about getting back to work, and when Jimmy tries to discuss serious matters, she tempts him away by daydreaming about conning Howard. It's alarming and quite shocking to see this change in character for Kim. I think just about everyone was expecting that Kim would have been on the verge of leaving Jimmy, if not already gone, but this season pulled quite a twist by having Kim stay. The show has transformed Kim's arc into a tragic story of a character who isn't able to control her impulses and continues to fall further and further into the morally questionable world. This is perfectly clear when we see her seriously suggest ruining Howard's career for her own personal gain, a remarkably unethical move that the old Kim would never have even considered. Just look at how she fell apart when she and Jimmy tore Chuck down in "Chicanery". This is so far removed from the Kim we knew and it completely took me off guard. What this episode succeeds most with is making us look back at Kim's character arc throughout the series and question what the purpose of everything was. Just looking back on season 5 makes it evident that this season was as much about transforming Kim as season 4 was about transforming Jimmy. The toughest part about this episode is that it had to make Kim's transformation feel organic. It had to make sense, and that's where Kim's horrific experiences in "Bagman" and "Bad Choice Road" come into play. She has committed her life exclusively to the things she loves most: PD work and conning people. We can see that Kim's mindset has been taken over by spending too much time flirting with the idea of conning with Jimmy. But the more she was exposed to it, the more she wanted to stay in that world. And now she has given into the temptation. And Jimmy is stunned by this. The final Jimmy/Kim scene was a masterful piece of work that directly paralleled Jimmy's "s'all good man" moment at the end of season 4. Only this time it's Kim who changed and Jimmy who's left feeling small and confused. Of course the horrible irony is that had Kim changed like this back in seasons 2 or 3, Jimmy may have been happy about it. But after all that just happened? Jimmy and Kim are on very different pages right now and it should be interesting to see how this new version of Kim will affect their relationship going forwards. Then we get to the excellent Nacho/Lalo story which provided most of the episode's suspense and action. Clearly Kim's words have gotten to Lalo and so his first move is to ensure that Nacho is trustworthy by giving him a much more solid position amongst the cartel. But this puts Nacho in a deeply uncomfortable position. He's entered the hornet's nest and is surrounded by enemies everywhere, and yet he is being told to act like a double agent to set up Lalo's death. It's all very tense stuff for Nacho. One of the standout scenes for me was his improvisation to Eladio. He forces himself to pretend to care about joining up with the cartel, but he injects a little bit of truth when talking about what he really wants. It's a lovely little scene for Nacho who doesn't typically get many opportunities to express himself. Then towards the end of the episode, there's a lovely sequence that's filled with tension as Nacho tries to escape Lalo's house only to run into him outside in the middle of the night. The acting here is outstanding, and the suspense really builds up as we start to wonder if Nacho can actually make it out and if Lalo is actually going to die by the end of the episode. Thankfully for Nacho This episode was a very big one for Lalo who we get to learn a lot about. He's such a charismatic guy and we see that on display while he chats with his housekeepers and when he sweet-talks Eladio. Tony Dalton portrays Lalo's cheeriness wonderfully well and makes him so much fun to watch. But that makes him all the more terrifying by the end of the episode when the laughs are all gone. After a fantastic action sequence where Lalo takes out the hit squad, we get the wonderfully foreboding moment where he realizes that Nacho has betrayed him. The final shot of the episode with a vengeful and angry Lalo storming off to make things right is stellar stuff, and I can't wait to see how he will try to exact revenge on Gus and what he may have planned for Nacho. There was one specific detail that I really loved. Jimmy doesn't want to have mint chocolate anymore. It's fair for him to reject it considering the last time he had it was right before he was introduced to Lalo. The Bad: The only complaint I have about this is that it doesn't really feel like a season finale. Sure, it's hard to follow up the sheer action of the last two episodes, but this one felt a bit too heavy on the set-up for my liking. I would have liked to see more resolution in this episode so that season 5 could feel a little more complete. The Unknown: How is Nacho going to get out of Mexico? Will Lalo catch him? What would Lalo do with him? What's Lalo's new plan? Will he continue to pretend that he's dead? Will Gus believe this? What does Kim's change in character mean for her future? What happens to her before the events of "Breaking Bad"? So much is up in the air after this episode. Best Moment: There's plenty of choices to pick from. I'll go with Nacho's escape and conversation with Lalo which was wonderfully tense television. Character of the Episode: It's a very tough choice since just about everyone is brilliant here. I think Lalo deserves it the most. Conclusion: This was a great finale with several welcome surprises. This season has been all about subverting what we thought we knew about the show, and this finale fits that trend perfectly. The season as a whole has been tremendous. I think this is easily the best season of the show yet. The combining of the show's two worlds made this feel like the most important season so far, and it gave the story such focus and suspense that the show hasn't really accomplished in previous seasons. The character growth was as spectacular as ever and every character's journey was engaging to watch. Jimmy's descent into Saul Goodman was tremendous fun in the first half of the season, and there were some genuine twists in the second half to keep us on our feet. Kim's journey also took a lot of surprising turns and I think this was the highlight of the season as Kim has consistently been one of the best parts of the show. And the Nacho/Lalo/Mike/Gus story was also much improved. I felt that the balance between these stories was much better than in previous seasons, and all 4 characters were given plenty to do and were very enjoyable whenever they were on screen. As a whole, this season worked tremendously well, with the final 5 episodes being absolutely excellent. I'm very excited for season 6 and I'm curious to see how else the writers can explore these characters. Score: 75
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
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