BETTER CALL SAUL, 6.5 – ‘Black and Blue’

I love Better Call Saul’s cryptic cold opens (like rain hitting a shard of glass in a parched desert in “Rock and Hard Place”), which foreshadow something the story circles back to when you’ve forgotten it. In “Black and Blue”, that was an unseen man creating a Lucite block containing a wooden slide rule, engraved with ‘In Liebe… Deine Jungs’ (‘With Love… Your Boys’) and the manufacturer’s name Voelker. Your guess was as good as mine at that point, but we’ll get back to that…

This episode was primarily about people on edge and feeling distracted. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) can’t sleep after hearing Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is perhaps still alive, so Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) catches her working early in the morning after being unable to get some sleep. He confesses he also doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in their home now, as Lalo knows where they live and already paid them a nerve-shredding visit recently.

Elsewhere, even the seemingly unflappable Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is having difficulty getting back into his routine at Los Pollos Hermanos, adopting his worktime persona for customers that can’t help cracking as he clearly has other things on his mind and fears Lalo’s reprisal attack. Later, when visiting the construction site of his famous ‘Superlab’ from Breaking Bad—which has come on a lot since we last saw it, but is still essentially an empty cave—Gus hides a handgun in the track of an excavator. A literal Chekov’s Gun moment, so it’ll be interesting to see why and when that weapon goes off.

One of the episode’s best developments was with Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), who rescues a tricky situation with Erin Brill (Jessie Ennis) trying to persuade the elderly Sandpiper clients to be patient because they’re after an extra 30% compensation with the class action. It was great to see Howard so on the ball professionally, but Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) nevertheless took the opportunity to later confront him about his suspect drugs and sex addiction. And despite the season doing a careful job with Jimmy and Kim going about their business, trying to frame Howard to ruin his life, it was rather amusing that Howard instantly knew he was being set up by Jimmy.

In some ways, it was frustrating because a lot of screen time’s been spent on stuff with Jimmy and Kim that’s ultimately been pointless (although it was entertaining to watch)… but on the other hand, it makes sense Howard isn’t going to fall victim to such a simple con. But there seems to be more to Jimmy and Kim’s master plan, as they expected him to catch them this early, and later we see Kim manage to get the name of the retired judge who will mediate on the Sandpiper case from her old Schweikart & Cokely paralegal Viola Goto (Keiko Agena). The plot only thickens…

The reason this episode’s entitled “Black and Blue” soon became apparent once Howard tricked Jimmy into coming to a boxing gym he’s rented for the evening, offering him the chance to settle his score physically, once and for all. This sequence was both embarrassing and amusing in equal measure (and the actors did it all themselves), but interesting to see that Jimmy couldn’t resist the chance to go a few rounds with Howard and punch him in the ribs a few times. Howard was victorious but also wise enough to know this vendetta likely isn’t over…

The more initially perplexing part of the episode, for me anyway, was the return of Lalo Salamanca. We see him at a bar in Germany using his charm to woo Margarethe (Andrea Sooch), the widow of Werner Ziegler, the engineer who masterminded the construction of Gus’s Superlab and was later murdered (so it was made to look like an accident during which he saved his crew, or ‘boys’). Lalo doesn’t sleep with Margarethe after escorting her home, but creeps back to her place the next day, breaks inside, finds the Lucite block from the cold open in her office, and steals it. This sequence was wonderfully tense because you felt like Lalo was going to kill Margarethe after she unexpectedly returned home, and her dog tried to alert her to the fact a Mexican with a pistol is creeping around upstairs, but she ultimately survived and is none the wiser…

I’d totally forgotten Lalo knows Gus is building something under the laundromat in Albuquerque, and I’m still not sure how he knows of Margarethe and where she lives. Better Call Saul may work better for future audiences bingeing all six seasons, as the 18-24 month gaps between the later years don’t help it in that respect. I’m not one of those fans who re-watches things, so it was certainly a headscratcher trying to recall how Lalo knew to go to Germany. And why? The only reason I can think of is that he’s going to try and scupper Gus’s plans legitimately and needs evidence of what’s going on?

Overall, “Black and Blue” was another solid instalment of the show, albeit more of a building block episode. Better Call Saul tends to have ‘movements’, where things calm down after a recent high and the story regroups to build up to the next thing. I suspect Lalo’s inevitable return to New Mexico is going to simmer away for a few more episodes, as we perhaps focus more on Jimmy and Kim’s real plans for Howard and the Sandpiper case. I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes Jimmy a rich man on the level of Howard Hamlin—which we perhaps didn’t quite appreciate was the case in Breaking Bad?—which would explain the garish but expensive decor of his house we saw being stripped apart in the premiere. It was also fun to see Jimmy rehire Francesca Liddy (Tina Paker) as his assistant, too, now he needs her to deal with his clientele queuing up outside his empty new office. Looking forward to the scene where he forces the choice of wallpaper on her…