Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 8 has just released
on Netflix and AMC, and we get an incredibly tense and fatal episode to start the second
half of this final season.
From Lalo talking to Jimmy and Kim, to Gus's final confrontation,
It was a big episode to kickstart the world of Breaking Bad, yet one that sets up the
aftermath surrounding the death of Howard.
In this spoiler review, I'm going to be giving you my recap of Better Call Season 6 episode
8, entitled Point And Shoot, alongside discussing my general thoughts on it.
But before I get into it, if you want to see more videos on
the final episodes of Better Call Saul, then don't forget to support this video by giving
it a like rating, subscribing to the channel and
turning on your notifications.
Also, feel free to check me out on twitter, facebook, reddit and instagram at cortex videos,
which is all linked in the description below.
But without further a do, lets dive into my recap and
review for Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 8.
So the tension isn’t going away anytime soon, as after a long break, Better Call Saul
has returned for it's final six episodes and the deaaths keep climbing.
But we know that this show is more focussed on making us feel each impactful
moment, whether it be death or dark comedy, to really echo the world that Jimmy and Kim
have become alligned with.
We've always wondered why Kim Wexler was never in Breaking
Bad and we suspected that death was a likely option.
But after episode 8, I think we get a better idea of where this could actually be
going, thanks to the heartbreaking storytelling, writing and directing of Vince Gilligan and
Gordon Smith.
Before we get to that though, we have to breakdown exactly what happened
following the shocking events at the end of episode 7, and where this new episode ends
up.
So let's get straight into it.
We get a cold open that shows us a shoe washing up on a beach with footprints leading along
the sand to Howard’s car.
So right from the get go his death is being staged as a suicide,
but the question is how do we get here.
Well after the intro we pick up right where episode 7 ended, with Jimmy and Kim stood
over Howard’s body, terrified, as an armed Lalo stands
before them.
Jimmy says that he had no part in Lalo being targetted, but it's quite clear that Lalo
doesn't care and has bigger plans for how he will seek retribution.
He asks Jimmy to take his car which has a gun inside, drive
to an address, and walk up to the door and shoot the man who opens it.
He says there's a camera inside and he wants photo proof of him killing
Gus.
Of course, Lalo doesn't really think that will happen, but what he does want is someone
to go there and in return, Gus's men would come to Jimmy's apartment, while Lalo has
the time to infiltrate the Superlab.
But Jimmy quickly tries to start negotiating and tells Lalo that he should send Kim instead,
because they'd be more likely to open the door for her.
Lalo initially believes that she's too smart but with Jimmy and Kim fighting about it,
Lalo eventually agrees just to calm them down.
The reality is that Jimmy is begging her to go
because he wants Kim to leave their home and get away from the danger that Lalo has brought
there.
This isn't Jimmy slithering out of him having to do this, it's all about getting Kim
away from their apartment.
And maybe Jimmy thinks that she might come up with a different plan while she's away.
But once agreed, Lalo gives Kim an hour to do what he asked and come
back, and once she leaves, Jimmy is tied to up to a chair, and they have a brief conversation
about the attempt on Lalo's life via Nacho and Gus.
Lalo wants to know what Jimmy knows about this because he did know Nacho and Gus's
men killed people that Lalo cared about.
Jimmy says the famous line from Breaking Bad while he's being gagged, saying "It wasn't
me, it was Ignacio", and even makes a reference to
the moment where Jesse points a gun at him in his office, and says "listen, you gotta
believe me".
That's not the only parralels that this episode brought, but it's really cool to see
that they are tying stuff together in a neat bow, following all the questions we had about
scenes from the previous show.
But Jimmy keeps claiming his innoncence in the situation,
and with Lalo about to be on the way out to carry out the next stage of his plan, he turns
the TV up loud to cover up Jimmy's crying, and we
are left to watch him struggling on the floor while tied up, facing a dead Howard.
Returning to Kim, we watch as she worryingly drives Lalo's car to Gus's house, trying to
remain calm at a red light as a police pull up alongside and then when she makes it to
his door, before she can shoot, Mike pulls her inside
and sits her down, wanting to know her side of the story as to why Lalo sent her there
to kill Gus.
They actually have a Gus lookalike inside and Gus himself is watching the monitors
from the other room, working out what he should do next.
Kim is extremely angry with Mike because he said that they we would be watching
if it did come to this, and while Mike sends 2 men to protact Gus, he takes to others to
go round to Jimmy's apartment.
Another car of Mike's men leave the Superlab Laundry facility,
and of course, Lalo is there watching, having the previous knowledge of how their operation
works back in Episode 7, when he was in the sewer.
He sneaks in after they leave, meaning that as we predicted, this was all going to
end at the superlab.
But before we get to that, Gus wants to talk to Kim before he makes any move and to understand
exactly how we got here.
He rings Kim from the room of monitors and she tells him that Lalo tried to send Jimmy,
but that he talked him out of it.
So Gus now knows that it was a plan to get his men out of the
Lab, so that Lalo could gain entry.
And this all but confirms his suspictions of it ending there too, after he previously
placed that gun behind the tractor and placed a light switch
in the middle of the empty lab.
So Gus leaves, now on a mission of his own with the 2 men that Mike left to protect him.
In the meantime, Mike and his other men arrive at Jimmy’s
apartment, and he tells them that Lalo left straight after Kim did, so Mike is now placed
in a frantic situation to race back to the lab and save his boss.
But there's not enough time for that to happen and as suspected this is
all coming down to a face off between Gus and Lalo at the lab, and boy, do we see the
face off we've wanted to see.
Gus arrives at the laundry facility and once he's inside, his
men are shot dead by Lalo, and it's just the two of them left.
He holds Gus at gunpoint, recording a video for Don Eladio while he does so,
showing him the proof he needs that Gus has been building a super meth lab without him
knowing.
He forces Gus to show him around, even shooting him in his bullet proof vest when he
denies doing so, which takes his breath away.
Gus eventually opens the secret door to the lab and they both go down while Lalo continues
filming.
Once down there, Lalo is astonished at how much meth they could cook in a place like
that, even telling Gus that he's knows the story of how this place came to be and that
Don Eladio could use it himself once he's done with the
chicken man.
So Lalo is ready to shoot him, but after asking for a final word by Gus that he would record,
he get's a powerful return speech.
Gus paces around, almost warming up for what he's about to do and tells Don Eladio while
speaking to the camera what he really thinks of him.
Something that made me think back to Nacho's speech in episode 3, but this time
in a more twisted way, that you know is being done to delay time before Gus does something.
He calls Eladio a fat pig, rants about killing all the Salamancas and then the camera moves
down to that hidden gun that Gus put there earlier in the season, leading to this point
and shoot moment.
We look down at the light switch that Gus also conveniently placed, and in
a quick flash, he triggers a blackout, grabs the gun from behind the vehicle, shooting
Lalo in complete darkness as he also does in return.
And when Gus turns on the light, Lalo is on the ground with blood pouring out of his mouth.
He briefly laughs before dying and even Gus notices that he is bleeding under his vest,
but as we suspect, it wasn't a fatal wound.
That's because when we come to the next scene, Gus calls his his Los Pollos Hermanos employee
Lyle and explains to him that he won't be around
for a week and that there's a family emergency which he needs to deal with.
One of Mike's men is patching Gus up on the sofa and Mike makes it clear to him that he
doesn’t want him going alone anymore.
He says, “this could’ve ended a whole lot different”, and Gus replies “It could
have".
So Gus has shown the badass that he can be and to kill Lalo, he didn't need
the help of Mike.
He played Lalo's game and beat him at it with a planned attack.
And this is where we come to the final scenes of this episode, which tell us that Jimmy
and Kim's lives have changed forever.
Back at their apartment, they hug it out as Mike and his
henchmen perform another one of their classic clean up jobs, and it involves Jimmy and Kim
having a brand new refigerator, with poor Howard being snuck out in the old one.
Like the cold open was pointing too, they’ll take
Howard and his car to the beach, load the vehicle with cocaine and make it look like
it was all a suicide.
In a parralel to Mike's first scene in Breaking Bad, where he tells Jesse what
to say to the police following Jane's death, Mike tells Jimmy and Kim to tell the cops
that Howard came by, seemed high on Cocaine and left.
He tells them to keep telling the lie that they essentially used as part of their plan
to destroy his career.
They have to go about their normal lives as if none of this ever happened.
They both agree looking shocked at what they just witnessed, and Mike heads back to the
superlab to help bury Lalo and Howard’s bodies in there.
They are buried next to each other, and it appears as quite a disturbing piece of
imagery in that we have a known killer in Lalo placed right next to an innocent Lawyer,
showcasing both sides of the Breaking Bad Universe.
Mike takes Howard’s wallet, rings and shoes as seen in the opening, and we're left with
him emotionally starring down at the bodies with a sense of sadness that reminds us of
that look he also had when he watched Nacho shoot himself
in the head.
The crane covers their bodies up with durt and forever will it be known, that Walt and
Jesse worked in the superlab where both Lalo and Howard were buried.
And that's just one thing that changes the way the end of this show affects how we will
view Breaking Bad in the future.
The other thing we have to keep in mind is where Jimmy and Kim will go
from here, and I'm guessing that the final 5 episodes are going to very much focus on
that.
How do Kim and Jimmy go back to their usual lives, when they have to live with the truth
that Howard wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn't have destroyed his career.
They now have to live with what they've done and try to live
with eachother, and based on their faces and reactions to what goes down, I don't think
that will be possible.
We still have 5 episodes to go, but episode 8 may have given us the
beginning of the end when it comes to them being together.
And not to forget that Kim didn't tell Jimmy about Lalo still being alive, and when he
finds that out, they'll be an even bigger void between them.
The confrontation between them is going to be crucial for where this show takes us and
I think it may even lead to the person Jimmy becomes at the start of
Breaking Bad.
Like I said in my predictions video last week, when it comes to Episode 9's title, Fun And
Games, is that referring to Jimmy being mentally different throughout the time
we see him as Saul in the future.
Has that affected him to a point where the persona he gives off is the quite upbeat one
we eventually see, to distract himself from the brutal nature
of something he's been involved with.
I think it's possible and with Rhea Seehorn mentioning that the end of this show is physchologically
disturbing and devastating, that would be one
of my current guesses.
I think anything's possible, but I trust that they will make this satisfing, because so
far in Season 6, the showrunners and writters have nailed all of the
decisions they've made.
So what are my overall thoughts of this latest episode.
Well, in 'Point and Shoot', Better Call Saul has maintained it's methodical pacing, even
in the face of a tense life and death situation.
In many intense scenes without the use of dialogue, this show is the master at being
able to keep us glued to the screen awaiting that powerful moment or decision.
Even with it's use of Breaking Bad-like music, it still
keeps it's identity when transitioning very quickly into that world.
I think that was a difficult thing to pull off in an episode like
this, and especially when you've got events happening that some fans predicted.
That's the difference between good writing and inconsistent examples.
They keep you compelled by the state at which these scenes flow together
and it never loses sight of its characters.
The performances once again stood out, with Rhea Seehorn showing a very different Kim
Wexler here with one that's panicking throughout, and
then of course, Giancarlo Esposito delivers some of the greatest work he's done as Gus.
I have to say, I personally found the performances of Mike and Lalo to be the strongest though,
because using their characters they really highlighted the different sides to this world
in the most poetic way possible.
It will be a shame to not see anymore of Tony Dalton, but
his run on this show has been excellent and I think he's cemented himself as one of TV's
best villians from the last few years.
Overall, while this episode may have been close to
the expectations of the fans, I think what makes it so good, is that the superb writing,
directing and acting, gives it a compelling edge that
many shows would fail to accomplish this late in the game.
They continuously raise the bar in different ways and through through differing tones,
yet once again, they keep the identity and focus of what makes this show so interesting.
And that comes by seeing the reactions of characters in complex ways that define who
they are.
And we very well may get a big reaction from our main characters in the coming episodes,
likely showing the innevitable downfall.
And that reaction is a question.
How can Jimmy and Kim move on from this brutal night?
But that was my spoiler review and recap for Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 8.
Point and Shoot is again another fantastic entry in this show, and while the meat of
this season is still left to come, I think it's an important
episode that sets up how Jimmy and Kim will go on after what we just saw unfold.
We've still got the time to fill in leading up to Breaking
Bad, the return of characters from that show and the very important Gene timeline that
many of us are looking forward too.
I can't wait to see what happens and it really is sad that
we've only got 5 episodes left.
Still, if the remainder of this show is as good as it has been, then I think we're in
for an extremely satisfying conclusion.
I'm giving Season 6 Episode 8 of Better Call Saul a rating of 9.5 out
of 10.
But to those who have already seen this episode, what are your thoughts on all the events that
went down and what do you think will happen in Episode 9?
Let me know down below in the comments section.
For more videos on the final episodes of Better Call Saul Season 6, then subscribe to the
channel and turn on your notifications.
Also if you enjoyed this video remember to leave a
like rating and follow me on social media via the links in the description.
But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.