In present day, "Gene" is extremely unnerved from the experience with the cab driver from Albuquerque. Fearing that he has been recognized, he returns to his apartment to remove a secret stash of diamonds. He then takes a couple of days off work to lay low and stake out his apartment to determine whether anyone is surveilling him. But as nothing suspicious happens, he decides to return to work. However, as he is on break, the cab driver, Jeff, along with a friend, approaches him, revealing that he did indeed recognize him as Saul Goodman from his old commercials back from late night TV in Albuquerque. Presenting himself as a bit of a fan of Saul, Jeff asks him to say his catchphrase for old times' sake, which Gene reluctantly does. Starstruck and excited by this, Jeff tells Saul to just call his cab firm and ask for him if he ever needs help with anything, before bidding him goodbye.
Gene, however, is more scared than ever by this encounter and quickly seeks out the nearest payphone. He calls up Ed Galbraith and asks for his services again. Ed, recognizing Gene's voice, tells him that he is willing to help him, but warns him that is it going to be more expensive than the last time; in fact, he wants double payment, which Gene agrees to. Ed then asks how bad it is, and Gene explains that someone recognized him, but not anyone from the authorities. Ed continues to give him instructions for how to proceed, but Gene falls silent, as he mulls over a heavy decision. Coming to a conclusion, Gene tells Ed that he is going to fix his problems himself and won't be needing his services, before hanging up.
Having gotten his law license back, Jimmy signs the DBA allowing him to practice under his new name, Saul Goodman. Outside the licensing room, Jimmy explains to an anxious Kim that, rather than practice law nobly as he misled the bar committee into believing, he plans to take the criminals who know him from his illicit drop phone business and use them as his new client base. Kim, upset by this turn of events, reluctantly agrees to accept Jimmy's new plan. Jimmy returns to the licensing office to sign the final piece of paperwork.
At El Michoacáno, Lalo struggles to figure out who Werner Ziegler and "Michael" are and what they have to do with Gus' mysterious construction project. He learns from Nacho and Domingo that the skells are complaining that their stuff is "stepped on" or at least different. Lalo decides to investigate with Nacho in tow, driving to a Salamanca hideout where packets of the cocaine from Gus' chicken farm are being kept for distribution. Lalo inspects each packet and determines that some of them are not cartel product.
In celebration of his reinstatement, Kim gives Jimmy a new briefcase — erroneously inscribed with his real initials — and a thermos reading "World's 2nd Best Lawyer." Jimmy contemplates throwing a promotional event selling his remaining drop phones and considers offering a 50% discount for non-violent offenders. Kim is concerned that what Jimmy is planning will encourage his clients to continue their criminal behavior and will reflect badly on Jimmy himself. He tells her that he can't go back to being regarded as "Chuck McGill's loser brother" and insists that his new identity will give him a fresh start.
Lalo drives to the chicken farm to have a sit-down with Gustavo Fring and Juan Bolsa over the altered cocaine. Gustavo falsely admits that he secretly replaced some of the cartel's cocaine with methamphetamine after Werner stumbled upon Gustavo's drug business and stole the product. When Lalo demands to know what "construction project" Werner was working on, Gustavo shows him and Bolsa a massive structure being built by Werner's men for an industrial chiller. Lalo is introduced to Mike, who is supervising the crew. With Lalo seemingly mollified, Bolsa tells Gus that Eladio is not pleased with the breach and warns him not to keep secrets from the cartel again.
Outside the chicken farm, Bolsa confronts Lalo for spying on Gustavo's operation and murdering the TravelWire employee. Lalo replies that he is simply looking after the interests of his uncle Hector, who believes that Gus is holding a grudge against the cartel after Hector executed his "boyfriend." Bolsa insists that Gustavo is solely concerned with business, to which Lalo expresses skepticism due to an unspecified past incident in Santiago. Bolsa says that Gustavo will never be "one of us" but that he's a good earner who keeps Eladio happy, which is all that matters. Lalo tells Bolsa that he has no further issues with Gustavo.
After nightfall, Jimmy sells off his remaining drop phones from inside a circus tent, with Huell acting as his bouncer. The city's criminals, misfits, and disreputable characters come out in droves to purchase the phones, creating a carnival-like atmosphere. Jimmy, donning a brightly-colored suit, takes the opportunity to offer his reinstated legal services to these customers, and eventually sells out his drop phone supply. When the crowd begins to leave, Jimmy regains their attention by offering his 50% discount. Huell congratulates Jimmy on a job well done, but Jimmy tells him they're just getting started.
Werner's terrified men are transported by truck to the middle of the desert, where they are to take several vehicles to various distant airports and take flights home. Before he hands out the plane tickets, Mike warns the men that there will be consequences if any of them divulges the details of their work for Gustavo. Kai tells Mike that Werner was "soft" and that his killing had to be done, which prompts Mike to punch him in the face and knock him to the ground. Casper tells Mike that Werner was "worth fifty of you", which emotionally impacts Mike.
Back at the chicken farm, Gustavo explains to Mike that construction of the excavation will not continue as long as Lalo is north of the border. Furthermore, Werner's wife has been told that he has been killed in a construction accident and has been compensated, and Mike will continue to be paid as a "retainer". Mike, disgusted at the whole situation, tells Gus to keep his retainer and leaves.
ADA Oakley is walking through the courthouse when he is ambushed by Jimmy's film crew, who are posing as TV reporters who are confronting him over a case he has heard nothing about. Jimmy enters the scene as the fictitious defendant's attorney, confronting a confused Oakley and making a speech before the camera. The stunt attracts more potential business from people at the courthouse.
Meanwhile, Kim, working in her public defender capacity, tries to convince a stubborn client named Bobby to take a five-month plea deal and avoid trial for fencing stolen mini-fridges. Jimmy appears and, upon hearing about the situation, proposes a scheme to make Bobby take the deal by posing as an antagonistic prosecutor. Kim is unnerved at the idea of scamming her client and orders Jimmy to leave. However, when Bobby and his pregnant wife ask what the argument was about, Kim finds herself going along with the ruse, telling them that Jimmy was a prosecutor who took the plea deal off the table. Bobby suddenly becomes desperate to take the deal, prompting Kim to flee to a stairwell to compose herself over what she has done.
Tropes
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg:
- Downplayed: after announcing he's out of cell phones, Jimmy tries to give out business cards for his legal consultation. Upon realizing he isn't getting any takers, he presents the following offer: for the next two weeks, any consultation for non-violent felonies is 50% off.
- When Kim (reluctantly) decides to go along with Jimmy's suggested bit of acting like the DA is removing the 5 month plea deal, Bobby begins to panic over the prospect of going to trial (since it's "implied" they got more evidence on him), to the point where he practically begs Kim to try and reacquire the previous deal.
- Ambiguous Situation: The Cold Open with "Gene" is extremely open to interpretation. It's unclear whether Jeff is a Loony Fan just starstruck to have met Saul, or if he has some other intention such as Blackmail.
- Amoral Attorney:
- Jimmy stages an advertisement based on the film crew ambushing ADA Oakley over a fictitious client.
- Jimmy proposes bluffing Bobby with the prosecution having new evidence and wanting to throw the book at him. Kim initially rejects the proposal, but then pulls off the bluff herself after Jimmy departs.
- Artistic Licence – Law: If the bar association found out about Jimmy's staged advertisement based on a fictitious client, and chances are they would if it aired on the news, Jimmy would find himself right back in the association's crosshairs and looking at disbarment again.
- Batman Gambit: Gustavo Fring pulls this on Lalo by replacing some of the cocaine shipped to one of their hideouts with low-quality meth. Knowing that the skells will complain about the quality to the cartel, it gets relayed to Lalo, causing him to check out the load that they're carrying and discover that some of the product isn't normal, later informing Juan Bolsa. This forces a sit-down between Gus, Lalo and Bolsa, allowing Gustavo to apply a cover story to recover from Lalo's investigation from the last season.
- Berserk Button:
- Kai unintentionally pushes Mike's by assuring him that Werner was "soft" and needed to be taken care of. Mike responds with a hard punch knocking him to the ground.
- Jimmy inadvertently presses Kim's when he mentions how he scammed Mesa Verde into taking her services again.
- Break the Haughty: In Season 4, Kai was characterized as the bad apple in Werner's construction crew who almost never missed an opportunity to antagonize Mike. Now he's so terrified of sharing Werner's fate that he attempts to brown-nose Mike, which only gets him a fist to the face. He quickly gets up and obeys his orders without a word.
- Cassandra Truth:
- Lalo, and by extension Hector as well, try to warn Bolsa that Gus Fring is playing a Long Game to avenge his "dead boyfriend." Bolsa proves to be a Horrible Judge of Character when he blows off Lalo, who is proven right years later during the events in Breaking Bad, and emphasizes that Gus Fring is only about making money.
- Kim warns Jimmy that prospective clients might end up committing more crimes if they learn about his proposed discount. He denies it, but she turns out to be right in the next episode.
- Call-Back: Huell calls Saul the "magic man", which Jimmy used to refer to himself when he promised Huell that he'd get off the assault charge.
- Confess to a Lesser Crime: Put under pressure by both Juan Bolsa and the investigative Lalo, Gustavo comes clean about his secret construction operation... but fudges the truth by showing them a new chicken chiller being built in one of his warehouses, using Ziegler's workers to make it appear legitimate. He also admits to one of his engineers going rogue, but claims that Werner Ziegler stole cocaine from the factories and ran away with it, requiring him to use local sourced meth to replace it.
- Continuity Nod:
- Ed Galbraith warns Gene during the episode's Cold Open that the cost for using his services a second time is double what Saul previously paid in Breaking Bad, much like he told Jesse Pinkman back in El Camino.
- When Bolsa asks Lalo why he's spying on Gustavo's operation, he explains that he's doing it on behalf of his uncle Hector, who believes Gus still harbors a grudge on the family for murdering his "boyfriend".
- The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Werner's death has been passed off as a construction accident.
- Disapproving Look: Kim stares at Jimmy while he's filling out his DBA forms. She's wondering how much even she doesn't know about him.
- Double Speak: Ed frames his offer of a second extraction as a vacuum purchase sale, even containing references to a model previously bought to set up the insistence on double the fee.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Jimmy notices Kim's uneasiness at his new business plan, but assumes that she's worried he's going about it too fast. Then later, when he explains the discount plan he intends to offer for repeated felonies, Kim asks if all of this is really him. Jimmy agrees with her... that he shouldn't be giving out discounts.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Jimmy tries to ring up Ed on a payphone, only for the payphone to insist on another 50 cents before completing the connection. Ed, during the conversation itself, insists on double the fee Jimmy paid for the first extraction out of Albuquerque.
- Glad I Thought of It: Two:
- Jimmy initially rejects the idea of giving discounts (on non-violent felonies) as part of a promotional deal for his newly resurrected legal career. However once he runs out of burner cellphones to give out and people obviously start losing interest, he goes with it anyway.
- Kim in turn rejects Jimmy's idea of pretending a plea bargain is being withdrawn for one of her clients, so as to coax said client into taking it - and angrily so once Jimmy mentions how it worked for Mesa Verde. And immediately after, on sitting down with that client again, goes with the idea anyway.
- He Knows Too Much: Downplayed; Gustavo allows Werner's construction crew to return to Germany with their full salaries, but Mike makes it clear that there'll be dire consequences should any of them mention what they were doing in America. All of the engineers are more than aware of their situation, though some harbor stronger grudges against Werner's death than others.
- If I Wanted You Dead...: Said by Mike to the remaining German construction crew, once they see that they're in the middle of a desert and are obviously starting to think that dead men tell no tales.
- Insistent Terminology: Gustavo's cover story for the construction crew is that he's building a new refrigeration unit for his restaurants. Even though that whole business is a front (and even though the unit is fictitious anyway), he chafes when Bolsa calls it a freezer. It's a chiller, his chicken is never frozen.
- Just Plane Wrong: Werner's crew are sent on 4 different flights back to Europe. While two of the flights (Denver to Zurich, El Paso to Chicago to Vienna) are plausible due to the airlines that work at those airports, two others are not.
- Kai's direct flight from Dallas to Berlin does not work considering back in 2004, Berlin's Tegel airport was in operation. This airport was small, and had only one flight to the eastern United States, that is Newark to Berlin. It is likely that Kai would have either had to fly to Newark, London, or Frankfurt, with either one of these cities providing a connection to Berlin.
- Similarly, Casper's flight from Phoenix to Vancouver, and then to Budapest also does not work considering that Budapest's airport is even smaller than Berlin's Tegel, and the airport never had any North American connections prior to 2015. A far likelier routing would have had Casper taking a British Airways flight from Phoenix to London, with a connecting flight to Budapest.
- The Last Dance: Implied. Right as he's about to arrange for another relocation through Ed, thanks to the taxi driver recognizing who he is and forcing him to confirm it, Gene decides at the last minute to cancel it and stay.Gene: I'm gonna fix it myself.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Neither Lalo nor the rest of the crews have told the street-level dealers and accomplices who he is, complicating things when he rushes over to the crackhouse to check on the product. Thankfully Nacho is there to clarify that he's one of them.
- Media Scrum: Spoofed. Jimmy has his camera crew ambush DDA Oakley and hound him about a fictitious criminal who Jimmy is ostensibly representing.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Kim struggles to compose herself after bluffing Bobby into taking the deal.
- Noodle Incident: Bolsa insists to Lalo that Gustavo Fring is all business, to which Lalo asks, "What about what happened in Santiago?". Bearing in mind that Gustavo Fring is Chilean and Santiago is the Chilean capital...
- Not So Above It All: Jimmy proposes the prosecutor bluff to Kim, only for Kim to shoot it down and state emphatically that she's not going to do it. Moments later she pulls the bluff on Bobby, and without Jimmy's help.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Bolsa chastises Lalo for murdering Fred the TravelWire clerk, explaining that wanton violence against civilians is just not acceptable north of the border.
- Properly Paranoid: In the previous season's Flash Forward, Gene fled from his taxi after noticing the driver staring intently at him with an Albuquerue Isotopes air freshener dangling from his mirror, and worrying that the driver recognized him. That man eventually comes up to him at the mall and reveals that he indeed recognized him from his billboards, but seems to just be an enthusiastic fan of his.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: ADA Oakley promptly leaves once he realizes Jimmy is pulling a staged advertisement at his expense.
- Self-Serving Memory: Invoked: in the montage of Jimmy selling his last batch of cell phones to potential clients, he brings up how he managed to do business for Huell, but as we are shown, he keeps inflating how long of a sentence Huell was looking at, starting with 3 years before ultimately ending up at 25.
- Shame If Something Happened: Mike looks like he really wants to give Gus "The Reason You Suck" Speech. Gus advises Mike to consider his next words very carefully. Mike realizes what exactly Gus is implying, and settles for rejecting the retainer.
- The Snack Is More Interesting: ADA Oakley is so fixated on eating the chips he purchased from the vending machine that he's like a deer in the headlights when the film crew ambush him for an interview.
- Sore Loser: Mike has plenty of other reasons to detest Lalo, but it's implied that his rudeness towards Lalo is a grudging admission that Lalo outplayed him during the prior episode.
- Spot the Thread: Though Bolsa seems satisfied with Gustavo's demonstration of the industrial chiller, Lalo sarcastically tells him that the "south wall" Werner mentioned in the phone call is coming along nicely.
- Stupid Crooks: Bobby, Kim's client, is a dim-witted, self-absorbed thief with an attention span of a child. He also has a big file of felonies behind his belt, including selling stolen goods to an undercover cop. When he's presented with a perspective of taking an amazingly good deal (5 months rather than 4 years of prison) without having to go through trial, he decides to... try going into a trial, cancelling the deal entirely, on the hopes than there is a very slim chance will get acquitted. That despite Kim repeatedly telling him he's realistically facing decades of inprisonment as a result of a trial and she will be powerless to help him. The fact he's still willing to gamble anyway only further reminds Kim about her talk with Jimmy about his potential clientele as Saul Goodman, consisting solely from people like Bobby.
- Survivor Guilt: Mike feels this way, given that Werner Ziegler died and he didn't for his part in trusting Ziegler and getting the underground superlab noticed by Lalo. He punches Kai for describing Werner as soft, lets the comment that '[Werner] was worth 50 of you' from another of the construction crew pass, and angrily refuses Gustavo's retainer after Gustavo talks about the widow being told Werner died in a 'construction accident' and was compensated – insufficiently in Mike's view.
- That Man Is Dead: Jimmy tells Kim that he can't go back to being "Jimmy McGill" as that name has been burned. As far as he's concerned, that name will always be associated with Chuck McGill's loser brother, and Saul Goodman is a chance for him to start anew.
- Title Drop:
- The taxi driver that recognized Gene a couple of days prior forces him to prove it by "[saying] it". "It" being:Gene: [resigned] ..."Better Call Saul".
- While giving out his cell phones in his tent, Jimmy brings up how he managed to get Huell out of a potential prison sentence.Jimmy: That's why he calls me the "magic man". I asked him not to call me that, but he insists...
- The taxi driver that recognized Gene a couple of days prior forces him to prove it by "[saying] it". "It" being:
- Wham Shot: Gene finally empties the contents of the rusty band-aid kit, which are revealed to be cut up diamonds.
- Worthy Opponent:
- Lalo asks permission to meet Mike in person, and then tries to cozy up to Mike like he was finally meeting his childhood hero. Although there is also a bit of Evil Gloating on his part during the interaction.
- Mike by comparison is rude, standoffish, and wanting to have as little to do with Lalo as possible. Being a Sore Loser is to a degree informing Mike's coldness, but that in itself admits to a grudging admission that Lalo is himself a Worthy Opponent.
