Saul Goodman is back in business as Better Call Saul returns for its final season – and he’s also reuniting with some old friends.
Monday’s two-part premiere begins with the usual flash-forward… except this one isn’t in black and white and is set in Omaha. Instead, we see a lavish mansion being evicted by repo men, and seeing the cardboard cutout and tequila bottle cap, we can guess this is Saul’s apartment, following his “disappearance” from Breaking Bad. Back in the current timeline, Nacho goes into hiding after Lalo’s assassination (he doesn’t know it was botched), a seething Lalo hides in the Mexican countryside, and the cousins make an inventory of all the bodies on Lalo’s compound. Gus plays it cool when he hears from Juan Bolsa that Lalo is dead, but he’s a little concerned that all the mercenaries they sent to do the job are now dead. He also doesn’t seem too keen on helping Nacho rescue him, despite Mike’s protestations.
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Jimmy and Kim, meanwhile, are a dynamic legal duo where she enjoys taking on pro bono cases and he reassures prosecutors that Lalo didn’t skip bail. (He slips a bit, though, calling him “Lalo” instead of his false name, “Jorge De Guzman.”) The two still hatch a plan to take Howard down and also settle the Sandpiper case. Kim thinks there’s a way to pull it off without ruining Howard’s reputation, but “it has to be at the right pace and it has to make sense.” Her first trick: sneaking into Howard’s country club – Jimmy distracts her, by causing a huge stink about the club’s lack of diversity: “There’s mayonnaise wall to wall in here!” – and sticking a tiny sachet of white powder in Howard’s locker, right where Clifford Main can see it.
Lalo arranges a trip across the border with smugglers, but first he calls his uncle Hector and tells him “it was the chicken man” who tried to kill him and vows to come north to “hurt him.” like you taught me”. Hector rings his bell to spell the word “prueba,” or “proof,” and Lalo realizes where to get some. He tells the smugglers he’s changed his mind and wants his money back – and when they say no, he shoots them in cold blood. Yes, we’re learning that saying no to Lalo Salamanca isn’t a good idea.
The second half of the premiere begins with Mike chasing the drug girls out of Nacho’s apartment and giving them cash so they can get out of town and stay somewhere “far from here.” He then gets a safecracker to open Nacho’s safe, taking out the fake Canadian IDs Nacho had for him and his father and replacing it with a new safe in which he plants an envelope. (Gus is still not sure if Lalo is dead, but he tells Juan Bolsa he has an idea to keep the peace.) Also, Jimmy and Kim eye the next step in their plan: Clifford Main on it to bring to hold a meeting because of a tempting course – action suit. However, they will need help from an unlikely ally. “You’re going to hate this,” Kim warns Jimmy.
The plan results in Jimmy reconnecting with the Kettlemans, the couple who represented Jimmy in Season 1! He finds her providing tax services from a trailer home deep in the desert, and Betsy is furious when she sees him, blaming him for losing everything. (“Our kids go to public school!”) Craig, however, is happy to see him, and their ears perk up when he tells them that their attorney, Howard Hamlin, has been “impaired” by a cocaine problem, allowing them to pursue Craig’s conviction overturned. They don’t hire Jimmy as their attorney, but they run to Clifford Main with their case, and although Cliff doesn’t take it, we can see his wheels turning when it comes to Howard and his off-office activities.
Nacho is stuck in a Mexican motel while Bolsa’s men search his apartment and open the safe and find the envelope Mike put inside. It has a phone number… for the motel where Nacho is staying. Gus meets up with Hector Salamanca and offers his condolences to Lalo, but when he catches a faint smile on Hector’s face, he realizes the truth: “Lalo Salamanca is alive.” Nacho spies on a man watching him from a nearby shed , and confronts the guy, who admits he’s being paid to watch him. The cousins come on screaming and a gunfight ensues, during which the cousins shoot dead one of their own who dared shoot Nacho before reminding their men, “Alive.” Nacho takes over takes the wheel of an old truck and drives it straight at the cousins, who shoot out his tires and force him into an accident on the way out. He somehow gets a phone and calls Mike, who is busy vehemently refusing Gus’ request to bring Nacho’s father to him. Mike hands Gus the phone: “He wants to talk to you.”
Jimmy and Kim go back to the Kettlemans, who accuse them of using them to slander Howard’s reputation. Jimmy offers them cash, but Betsy just wants Craig’s reputation restored. Kim interrupts, “Enough carrot.” She calls the IRS and speaks to a fellow detective to give him a lead on a couple who are cheating on their tax clients. Betsy stops her and offers her to do anything and Kim orders her to refund her clients and forget about Howard. “Do you think you’ve lost everything?” she warns. “You have no idea.” Jimmy looks positively shocked as they leave. Maybe he created a monster. (And did we spot a car following them as they left?)
Now that we’ve reconnected with the Kettlemans — and we know Walt and Jesse are showing up — when can we expect to reconnect with other familiar faces from Jimmy’s past (and future)? “We’re blessed with this wonderful catalog of characters,” executive producer and showrunner Peter Gould tells TVLine, noting that there’s a corkboard in the writers’ room with the names of all the characters they’d like to see again. “I can tell you I’m very happy and satisfied with how it all came together,” he reveals. “We will see some familiar faces. Probably not all that people hope or dream about. But there are a lot of surprises in who shows up and when.”
And about the season opener flash-forward, Gould notes that it opens up a whole new way for writers to tell stories. “We have these different timelines to play with. We’ve seen the world of Jimmy McGill. We got a glimpse of what life is like when he becomes Omaha Cinnabon manager Gene Takovic, and now we may see a different timeline that happened right after Saul Goodman was busted from the stable.” But we’ll be checking back in with Gene in Omaha before the series ends, right? Gould laughs, “Well, we’d be pretty crazy to put him on the keyframe and never see him.”
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