(WARNING: This post has major spoilers from tonight’s Season 5 finale of “Better Call Saul”)
“Better Call Saul” wrapped up its fifth season on Monday with Kim (Rhea Seehorn) seemingly going off the deep end and Nacho (Michael Mando) potentially enraging a murderous cartel member. It shouldn’t take showrunner Peter Gould explaining why that puts those two in a precarious state as the show heads into its final season, but we’ll let him anyway:
“The title of the penultimate episode this season was ‘Bad Choice Road.’ And, certainly, Kim Wexler seems to be on a bad choice road, and I don’t know how we’re looking at Nacho. He’s in deep, deep trouble,” Gould told TheWrap.
Making matters even more worrisome for Kim and Nacho fans: They’re the only two main protagonists of the “Breaking Bad” prequel that don’t appear once Walter White (Bryan Cranston) comes strolling into Saul Goodman’s office. “I’m worried, myself,” Gould said.
Monday’s finale, aptly titled “Something Unforgivable,” saw Kim propose something that would be straight out of the “Breaking Bad”-era Saul Goodman’s playbook: Frame Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) for something illegal that would likely end his career (or worse) and end the years-long Class Action Lawsuit against Sandpiper Crossing, and give both Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim millions from the settlement.
Seehorn tells TheWrap that it’s not exactly clear if Kim was seriously suggesting it or if it was her way of conning Jimmy, after being on the other end of a particularly brutal con earlier in the season. But more importantly, it shows that something is “eroding” in her.
“Kim hates being told how to feel or what to do, or who she is. She really loathes it,” Seehorn said. “Would she really do these things? And even if she wouldn’t, she’s saying them as though they’re a game, in a way that she really detests in a lot of other people at this point — playing games with the law and playing with people’s lives.”
Seehorn points out that Kim is gone from being very calculated in her decision-making to making very impulsive and rash choices. “Is any of this a person she’s been backed against a wall into becoming? Or are these parts of her she has always suppressed, and you haven’t seen before?” she asked. “It’s such an interesting question to me of who, who would she be if she never met Jimmy. I think people thought in the beginning, they knew the answer to that, like, Oh, he’s just bad for her and she’s a saint, and it’s clearly not that simple.”
The other big part of the episode, the failed assassination attempt on Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), left Nacho in the crosshairs, even if he was able to get out of Lalo’s compound well-before Gus Fring’s (Giancarlo Esposito) hired hit-men failed to accomplish their goal. The cut to black scene of Lalo angrily limping away certainly doesn’t sound like he’s going to check to see if Nacho is OK.
“He looks over very deliberately at the glasses and the liquor that he was drinking with Nacho and, of course, Nacho disappeared,” Gould explained. “I think he’s put together an awful lot. I think the pieces and scales are falling from Lalo Salomonca’s eyes. And I think the question is, what’s he going to do about it?”
This season began to pay off what was Saul Goodman’s first few lines in “Breaking Bad” when he asked Walter and Jesse (Aaron Paul) after they capture him, “Did Lalo send you?” Gould says that, although when they wrote that line he had “no idea that we’d be paying if off years and years later,” he’s glad they were finally able to give a brief glimpse into why Saul may have been so terrified of him.
“I will say, Lalo has a lot of scores to settle. One of them might be with Jimmy and Kim,” he teased. “The person who probably pushed for introducing Lalo more than anybody was Bob. For the first few seasons Bob kept saying ‘We’re going to meet Lalo right? I’m going to find out who Lalo is?’”
We finally found out. And now we’re just as afraid as Saul.