Better Call Saul becomes a horror show as Lalo gets busy
Season 6, Episode 8: "Point and Shoot"
“Why do they bury lawyers under twenty feet of dirt? Because deep down, they’re really good people.”
-Jimmy McGill
I’ve never really known how to feel about Lalo. He enters the series as suddenly as, say, someone crashing through a TravelWire air conditioning system, and he never really leaves. He’s a constant presence that looms over every character he rubs shoulders with either directly or indirectly, the only two characters he’s never really gotten the better of being Gus and Mike, the only characters in the Gilliganverse that are made of even sterner stuff than him. (And maybe the Cousins, but look where being tough got them.) Tony Dalton certainly gives him enough charisma to have a significant screen presence, but…I don’t know. Something has always felt off about him, and not in the way you’d expect him to be off. He feels like something we’ve seen done before, and maybe that’s because he’s always read to me as a cross between Gus and Tuco—characters I both like, of course, but ones I feel have worked once, so why do I need them twice?
That being said, what the fuck? No, seriously, what the actual fuck? Did you just see that? I saw that. Did you? Did you just sit down and watch what happened in that episode? When Kim did the thing and then Mike did the thing and then Lalo did the thing and then Gus did the thing? Everyone did a lot of things in “Point and Shoot”, didn’t they? This is possibly the most linear, focused Better Call Saul episode the series has ever done, even more so than the desert odyssey of “Bagman”—even there, Kim visited Lalo in lockup as she feared for Jimmy’s life. There is one singular story in “Point and Shoot”, and we follow it essentially in real time for its first two thirds, the only cuts being for posterity’s sake. This isn’t a scheme to fuck up Howard’s image anymore—this is Walter White cobbling together a car bomb before time runs out and Gus gets to him first.
What’s so great about “Point and Shoot” is that it makes us, the audience, feel like we’re one of the characters. When Kim is driving to Gus’ house, the camera is in the passenger’s seat. When she walks to his front door, we’re over her shoulder, and when she’s surrounded by Mike and his men, we’re sitting down next to her. We, like Kim, now the only new character still alive, feel at risk of getting put down at any moment for our collective insubordination. We watched Kim march right up to Gus’ door and we didn’t do anything—doesn’t that make us guilty too?
Speaking of guilt, god knows how Kim and Jimmy are going to deal with Howard and his demise—but Lalo doesn’t really give them time for that. He’s drummed up a new, admittedly brilliant plan to get Gus and proof of the superlab, and for once, he actually gets the better of both Gus and Mike without so much as touching them. This is another one of those episodes where words speak louder than actions, because Lalo accomplishes almost everything he gets down with the idea of violence. This is one of those episodes where I truly love Lalo, (fitting, as it’s his last) and it’s because his very presence commands the idea of carnage more than it causes it. The most powerful weapon in the Gilliganverse is the idea of a gun rather than a gun itself, because once you use the gun right, your target can’t be manipulated anymore. If you suggest that there may be a gun if this thing doesn’t happen, you can get anything done—like, for instance, sending a lawyer to kill one of the most dangerous men in the cartel.
But even before that, we have an opening like the one from “Black and Blue”, where we get a question we’re not supposed to know the answer to yet. Howard’s car is parked on a beach as his shoes float in the water, his personal belongings stacked orderly on the dashboard and the engine still running, playing the classical music he loves so much. We know that Howard is dead, and this is clearly a cover-up, but who’s responsible and why? Is this the work of Lalo or Gus? I love all the openings Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have to give us, but I think I prefer the flash-forwards just a touch more for the mysticism it creates, a looming question that hangs over us until we get an answer. It’s almost fitting that this was the last scene filmed for the entire series—the death of Howard Hamlin has clearly affected our two leads very badly, and there’s no way of knowing where it goes from here.
Just as how “Plan and Execution” was so tense and gripping because it was the result of a well-thought out plan going off, “Point and Shoot” is the same for the same reason. While Lalo certainly wasn’t expecting Casa Tranquila’s lines to be tapped, he was expecting that Mike was so on edge that he would immediately send all his men to Gus if Lalo made a direct threat towards him. And then, if he follows up on that threat, Mike will send his guys to where he believes Lalo is, and then Gus will go to the laundromat where he’s hiding his unbuilt meth lab because he knows that Lalo would never agree to the demands of anything someone at his mercy would put forth. See what I mean? Just like in Breaking Bad, we shouldn’t want to see the bad guy win, but we just do, because it’s fun. But it also draws a fascinating parallel to Kim and Jimmy, how their plan was also so much fun because it worked, and we got to watch it work. Lalo’s plan is going to end with someone dead if it works, (and, in more of a perpendicular, so did Kim and Jimmy’s unintentionally) but god, it’s just so cool. Killing ten men in two minutes cool, you know?
And because Lalo’s plan works, Gus ends up at his mercy as he uses a point and shoot camera to film Gus opening the superlab up (he shoots him in his vest because fuck him, I suppose) and descending into it (he kicks him down the stairs because again, fuck him) as Lalo gloats about how all of Fring’s work will be for nothing. He gives Gus the chance to say his last words, and perhaps taking a leaf out of Nacho’s book, he spits poison at the men he has had to kiss the asses of for so long. (I love how Lalo is grinning until Gus starts dissing the Salamancas.) He lays out his plan to topple them all with the air of someone who fully intends to get out of the lab and continue his quest for vengeance, and knowing that it actually works makes the scene less tense, but subsequently more badass, a trade I’m reasonably comfortable with.
But then Gus’ paranoia finally pays off, the gun he hid in “Black and Blue” finally coming into play when he kills the lights and fires with reckless abandon as Lalo shoots sporadically in the dark. Gus pulls the trigger long after it’s empty with a desperation and panic that is incredibly unlike him. It’s both fitting and fascinating that the only time we see him express emotion beyond the murder of Max is in total darkness, showing us a man who conceals everything but his outer shell of the polite and well-ordered owner of a fried chicken chain. Lalo laughs weakly as he dies, having been shot in the throat, perhaps to signify how his greatest weapon failed him in the end. He can form no coherent words—all he can do is wheeze as Gus lays down in the light, the victor of their duel, but only just.
What ultimately makes this resolution so satisfying is how the greatest flaws of these two men undo them both, one almost permanently. Lalo is prideful, too prideful to report his plan to Eladio before he goes ahead with it, and that is what ensures that Gus will continue to operate underneath him without any issues. The only people Lalo put above himself were his family, and now they, like Howard’s associates, will never truly know what happened to him, even if they have their suspicions. Meanwhile, Gus’ paranoia seemed to be his undoing—he goes to the laundry because he knows something is off about Kim’s story, and Lalo kills his guards just as Gus realizes his adversary is inside—but in the end, it saves him, because his plan with the stashed gun goes beyond Lalo’s improvised plot. And so Lalo gets buried in the foundation of the lab he was so obsessed with alongside Howard, his final resting place. Just as Gus was almost consumed by his obsession with the idea of Lalo, Lalo was swallowed up by an idea of a meth lab—not one that had actually been built.
“You keep telling the lie that you’ve been telling,” Mike advises Kim and Jimmy as his guys load Howard’s body into their old fridge. It almost recalls the ending of Breaking Bad’s season four opener “Box Cutter”, where henchman Victor is killed by Gus as collateral for Walter and Jesse’s actions—Jimmy is Walter, deeply unsettled by the brutality of what he has witnessed, but Kim is Jesse, numb to the world after her first exposure to a death she feels responsible for. (Jesse actually was responsible for a death shortly before Victor’s, but it’s apples to apples at this point.) The event that triggered it—Gale’s murder—is what, in my mind, led to the destruction of Walt and Jesse’s father-son bond, (because Jesse assumed Jane died without any possibility of being saved) so what implications will it have for Kim and Jimmy?
All that aside, “Point and Shoot” may be my favorite episode of the season so far. It’s not as tightly wound as “Plan and Execution” or as emotionally brutal as “Rock and Hard Place”, but it’s straight-shot action that refuses to slow down—something I never thought I would see Better Call Saul do, but I’m glad I did. Kim and Jimmy finally got the rush they wanted from their plan’s success, but perhaps it wasn’t what they expected. What’re they going to do with it now that it’s all over?
Rating: 10/10 (A)
If I have one nitpick with this episode, it’s that nobody would believe that a man so high on cocaine that he died would take off his wedding ring and place it neatly on the dashboard of his car. But, like, I don’t give a shit.
Kim is probably too smart to believe this, but there’s a small part of me that wonders if the Wexler-McGill split will occur because a small part of her believes Jimmy was sending her to die as opposed to get help. Or, at least, that could be what justification she uses, either with him or herself.
This is the episode where Bob Odenkirk had his heart attack, reportedly while Lalo was tying him up, which sounds…terrifying. Imagine you’re filming a shot where you’re tying a guy up and he just goes limp.
Mike warns his guy to go “easy” with Howard’s body, but doesn’t care about Lalo’s being thrown into the pit, a nice way to illustrate his sympathetic view of people not in “the game” and his distaste for Lalo.
Considering the history of Salamancas and this phrase, I knew Lalo was going to die the instant he told Gus that he had “one minute” to say his piece.
Why does Lyle need to come to work at, like, midnight?
The fake Gus was probably the only funny thing in this episode, but god damn, was it funny.