Recap / Better Call Saul S6 E8: "Point and Shoot"

RECAP:
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Season 6, Episode 8:

Point and Shoot

Written by Gordon Smith

Directed by Vince Gilligan

Air date: July 11th, 2022

Lalo double demonstrating the title.

"I understand blood for blood. Hector? I kept him alive. Kept him broken. I will save him to the last. Before he dies, he will know... I buried every one of you."

— Gus Fring

In a flash forward, we see a pair of shoes wash up on a beach. As we pan around the scene, the camera reveals footsteps leading towards the water from Howard's car, door open and stereo on. A wallet and wedding ring are sitting on the dashboard.

Back in Jimmy & Kim's apartment, mere moments after Howard's death, Lalo talks Jimmy and Kim out of their hysterics, sits them down, and explains why he's there: Jimmy is going to drive Lalo's car to Gus's house. Once he's there, he's going to retrieve a gun from the glovebox, knock on Gus's front door, and "point and shoot". Kim is going to stay behind as Lalo's hostage. He has one hour.

Jimmy speaks up, and volunteers Kim to go instead. Kim is at first petrified and begging, but when Lalo agrees (mainly to stop their bickering), Jimmy and Kim share a brief glance where it becomes clear that Jimmy wants her to get herself out of there - probably at the cost of his own life. A shellshocked Kim slowly walks out the door, having to be reminded by Lalo to put on her shoes. With Kim gone, Lalo zip ties Jimmy to a chair, gags him, and tells him how Nacho betrayed him and how his entire household was killed. He then leaves to attend to other business, telling Jimmy that when he gets back, he expects the full story of whatever happened in the desert. After he's gone, Jimmy, in the process of trying to free himself, knocks over the chair, forcing him to lie face to face with Howard's corpse.

Kim, driving to Gus's house, nearly tells the police, but resolves to carry out the hit to save Jimmy's life. She arrives at Gus's door, rings the doorbell, steels herself, and raises the gun... before Mike grabs her from behind and shoves her into the house. Inside, she tells him that Lalo is at her apartment and that Jimmy is in mortal danger. Mike scrambles his troops, leaving Kim alone with Victor. At the laundry, Tyrus leaves with his men, and we see that Lalo hiding in his car right there, waiting for this exact moment. Gus talks to Kim through a phone and learns that Lalo originally intended to send Jimmy, but changed his mind - something that he finds suspicious. He takes the remaining men and leaves.

At the apartment, Mike and his men find Jimmy bound and gagged, with Lalo long gone. Simultaneously, Gus arrives at the laundry too late; Lalo gets the drop on the men he brought with him and holds Gus at gunpoint. Lalo takes out his camcorder and records his proof for Eladio, coercing Gus into taking him into the unfinished lab. Once down there, Lalo gives Gus a chance for some last words. Gus gives an angry speech denouncing Eladio and the Salamancas. He then kicks out a switch (turning the lights off), retrieves his stashed gun in the confusion, and blindly empties it at Lalo, shooting him in the neck. As he bleeds out, Lalo gives one last laugh, and dies with a smile on his face. Gus collapses, revealing that he was hit in the stomach during the shootout.

Lyle arrives early to open at Los Pollos Hermanos and receives a call from Gus. He tells Lyle that he'll be out of town for the week, and that Lyle is to take over as manager in his stead. From Gus's side of the call, we see his wound being bandaged with Mike at his side. After the call, Mike admonishes Gus for his recklessness, saying that things could have gone very differently.

As the sun rises, Kim reunites with Jimmy at their apartment, and Mike reassures them that Lalo is not coming back. His men begin the process of hiding Howard's body. His car will be driven to the coast, where they will stage his death as a drug-induced suicide. Mike tells them to call the police the moment Howard's car is found, and to tell them that he was at their house last night for hours, completely incoherent and clearly intoxicated. He adds, with some disgust, that that's the same lie they've been telling. In the meantime, Jimmy and Kim need to go about their lives like nothing happened. Jimmy and Kim look on as Howard's body is loaded into their fridge.

At the lab, Tyrus digs a large hole where Lalo and Howard will be buried together. Mike removes Howard's ring, wallet, and shoes, and looks on sadly as his body is dumped into the hole and buried.

Tropes:

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Jimmy and Kim plea with Lalo at the start, and he shuts them up with amused annoyance that neither of them can be quiet.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: As awful as Jimmy and Kim can both be, and Mike making clear this is partly their own fault, they still have Undying Loyalty and are the Unwitting Pawns in Lalo and Fring's games with each other.
• Alone with the Psycho: Both Jimmy and Kim know what Lalo is like and really don't want to leave the other alone with him. Jimmy does a Take Me Instead so Kim could have the chance to escape, and Kim has a panic attack at Mike because she thinks Lalo is still in the apartment with Jimmy.
• Asshole Victim: Jimmy and Kim pay the price for their plot against Howard, but are really put through the wringer. Jimmy, in particular, is forced to stare at Howard's corpse until Mike rescues him.
• Badass Boast: When Mike says (about Gus' encounter with Lalo) "This could have gone down different", Gus says "It could have", as if to say "but it didn't."
• Batman Gambit: Lalo obviously didn't expect Kim's assassination attempt on Gus to succeed. She was sent there to get most of the armed guard away from the laundry, which Lalo then went to. Although as he comments himself, it worked out even better when Gus himself shows up with far too few bodyguards. Pity about afterwards, really... It seems that Gus, having stashed a gun and being prepared to cut the lights, had anticipated the whole scenario and pulled off a Batman Gambit of his own.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Having spent most of the season quietly brooding, Gus audaciously challenges Lalo and manages to get the best of his savage opponent.
• Bilingual Bonus: When again appraising Kim’s attractiveness, Lalo calls Jimmy a chichifo, slang for male prostitute.
• Body Double: One of Gus's men standing guard inside the house resembles him very strongly, implying that he was set up for this purpose, especially when Kim points to him as the one she was supposed to shoot based on Lalo's description of Gus.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Classically so. Despite holding Gus at gunpoint, admitting how cunning he is, and already having all the footage to incriminate him, Lalo cannot resist the monologuing and Evil Gloating over his victory. He even gives Gus an opportunity to have one minute for some final words. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't end well for him.
  • Justified. Gus uses his ostensible final words to insult Eladio and confess his plots against the cartel, with Lalo getting everything on tape. Given that he's about to murder one of the cartel's biggest earners, it makes sense that Lalo would let him talk, ensuring that his justification is absolutely airtight. Word of God confirms this was his thinking.
• Book Ends:
  • Inverted order. Today, Gus shoots Lalo dead in the recently built superlab, before the facility is ready to commence its first meth production. Later, Walter will shoot a man dead in the lab during meth production, and then destroy the facility.
  • Doubling as Trauma Button for Saul because he's right back to this memory, Jimmy starts pleading in this episode that it was Nacho before he's cut off, and when the hood comes off in "Better Call Saul", he finishes the begging.
  • Jimmy and Kim are told to sit at the start and end of the episode. With Lalo they're manic and terrified, while with Mike, they're very still and barely talk.
  • One of the show's very first deaths is a man choking on his own blood after being shot in the neck with a revolver. So is the very last.
• Bottomless Magazines: Inverted with the Charter Arms Bulldog revolver Gus uses to kill Lalo, where he empties the gun in four shots, one or two less than the revolver's capacity.
• Break the Haughty: Jimmy and Kim were convinced it was a fun (often sexy) game to humiliate Howard, and they're both brought low in this one, Kim being forced to kill a man with her husband's life at stake, Jimmy is Bound and Gagged and forced to stare at Howard's corpse for over an hour. To put a cherry on top, Mike makes clear that their plot against Howard has to continue to help cover up his death, and forever define his memory.
• Bulletproof Vest: Lalo is amused to see that Gus is wearing one, and shoots him in the chest (or rather, in the vest) to ensure that he lets him into the lab.
• Call-Back: Mike's crew haul out Jimmy and Kim's refrigerator (with Howard's body inside), and Mike tells them that a replacement fridge will be coming, much like the way they hauled away Nacho's safe and replaced it with another.
  • Gus's "The Reason You Suck" Speech about Don Eladio and the Salamancas is strikingly similar to Nacho's last words.
  • Kim recalled to Mr. Acker that when rent was due, her mother would say "we gotta go" and she'd have to run out of the house with no shoes. Trying to save her and say goodbye, Jimmy says "you gotta go", and she's so shellshocked that Lalo casually reminds her she forgot her shoes (which at least brings her back to give him death glare).
  • When Lalo sees the lift that moves a machine to reveal the superlab's entrance, he comments "I had a tub that did that!". That tub (and the hidden tunnel under it) helped save him from Gus's hit squad.
• Call-Forward:
  • Lalo dismisses Jimmy's (and Kim's) panic with "I know, you're a lawyer, not a killer". It's not just the fact that a corpse of a guy they indirectly got killed is right next to them, but calling forward to Saul's casual Running Gag of Murder Is the Best Solution.
  • Mike was introduced as the guy Saul sent to clean up a home where someone died so that the home's owner, Jesse, wouldn't be arrested. Here we learn how Saul knows Mike can do that, because Mike does it to his home.
  • Lalo accuses Jimmy of being involved in setting up his attempted assassination because he was connected to Nacho, who was part of the plot, telling him in a threatening tone that he'll want to hear everything. Later, Mike tells Jimmy that Lalo won't be coming back without confirming that he's dead. This all sets up the first mention of Lalo and Nacho way back in the Breaking Bad episode "Better Call Saul":
    Saul: No, no, no! It wasn't me, it was Ignacio!
  • Lalo’s instruction is essentially what happened in the Season 3 Finale with Jesse and Gale.
  • While trying to break free of his restraints, Jimmy ends up tipping his chair to the floor where he's forced to face Howard's dead eyes from the side, similar to the way Gus was ordered to look into Max's eyes.
  • When goaded by Lalo to tell his true opinion of Don Eladio, Gus spitefully declares that he kept Hector alive and broken and boasts that he will kill every Salamanca and save Hector for last so he can lord all of their deaths over him.
  • Mike tells Kim and Jimmy to be Meryl Streep and Laurence Olivier, burying the trauma they just experienced and pretending like it's any other day. It isn't the last time he will use Meryl Streep as his go-to example of female acting talent, as he will later dismiss Lydia's story by claiming 'everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head.'
  • Kim trying to steel herself to shoot Gus is a mix of Jesse crying as he shoots Gale, and Walt trying to shoot Gus before he's stopped.
    • The shot of Kim approaching Gus' house, filmed from very high above with a crane, shares identical framing with the shot of Walt, dumbfounded in the same spot, after Tyrus warns him off in "Thirty-Eight Snub".
  • More than one to "Face Off":
    • Lalo's Evil Gloating and Bond Villain Stupidity became his undoing. Gus will later commit similar mistakes that also end him in his showdown with the last of the Salamancas.
    • Mike warns Gus that by going to the laundry himself instead of communicating with Mike he put himself needlessly in danger but Gus is dismissive of Mike's cautioning because the outcome was that he killed Lalo. Gus acts similarly when he finds out the Hector has had a meeting with the DEA and ends up being killed because he wanted to kill Hector himself instead of having someone else do it for him and never considers that Hector's meeting with the DEA was a ploy to get Gus out in the open.
    • Gus surprises and shoots Lalo to death in the superlab with a small, short-barrelled revolver. Walt will do the same to the lab's guard to rescue Jesse. Both then drop the guns on the ground afterwards.
    • Much like his final encounter with a Salamanca, Gus remains standing and composed for a brief time after killing Lalo, before suddenly collapsing from his injuries.
  • Gus exhibits the same hubris that will eventually be characteristic to Walt by the fifth season of Breaking Bad. Whereas Walt expressed confidence in the success of the magnet caper by stating, "Because I say so", Gus acknowledges that the showdown with Lalo could have gone down differently. Could, but didn't.
• Cassandra Truth: Lalo believes Jimmy was involved in his botched assassination because Nacho was, and he's the one who introduced the two in the first place. Jimmy pleads and pleads that he had nothing to do with it, but Lalo won't hear any of it and makes clear to Jimmy that he wants the whole story from him next time they meet.
• Character Death: Gus shoots Lalo in the neck making him bleed out with the gun he secretly stashed in the lab site.
• Chekhov's Gun: The gun that Gus stashed inside the lab construction site comes into play here, when he uses it to shoot and kill Lalo.
• Combat Pragmatist: Held at gunpoint by Lalo and permitted to speak some Last Words, Gus stalls for time with scathing putdowns of Don Eladio and the Salamanca clan, then puts his knowledge of the lab's technical layout to blind his foe and seizes the opportunity to grab the revolver he'd hidden down there beforehand.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: As Gordon Smith explained, as traumatised as Jimmy is by the experience (and will continue to be even with the Saul mask on), he's been a Hostage Situation before and bits of him have been chipped away since Chuck's death, while this is the first time for Kim, and her Thousand-Yard Stare at the end has nothing left of her except quiet rage.
• Continuity Nod:
  • For the fourth time now, Mike is involved in getting an innocent person killed. Unlike with Matty's death where he went to grief group to deal with his trauma, the Good Samaritan's death where he tried to get revenge before giving himself closure by uncovering their body, and Werner's death where he suffered a major breakdown over what he did, he forces himself to discard Howard's death as soon as the body's buried.
  • Even though he's terrified, Jimmy catches on pretty fast that Lalo still wants to know about what happened in the desert, and Lalo remembers how Jimmy was about to break under questioning before his wife stepped in, so takes the opportunity to torment him a little, promising he'll come back so they can talk.
• Contrived Coincidence: The man watching surveillance at the laundromat happens to get up and leave for a minute right at the moment where Lalo is visible on one of the monitors, allowing him to sneak in undetected.
• Crazy-Prepared: Not only does he have his own body double, Gus has at least one gun hidden somewhere in the lab. The latter allows him to get the drop on Lalo.
• Defiant to the End: Not knowing whether he will survive the lab encounter with Lalo or not, Gus follows Nacho's example and gives a venomous rant at the camera directed towards Eladio and the Salamancas before going for his hidden gun at a hail mary attempt to kill Lalo.
• Desecrating the Dead: Howard's Undignified Death gets worse, his reputation is irrevocably trashed as a man who got addicted to cocaine, cheated on his wife with prostitutes, messed up his career, and then committed suicide, because it's a story that's convenient for everyone else. Then he's buried in an amateur unmarked grave, which he's forced to share with his killer because digging two graves would be too much trouble for Mike. And Nacho has largely been forgotten, only getting brought up to mention his betrayal of Lalo.
• Didn't Think This Through: Mike thoroughly scolds Gus for "playing detective" and going out without informing him, which left four men dead and himself nearly killed. Gus even concedes it could have been fatal and didn't think it fully through.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Rather than surviving to the end of the season, Lalo is killed here with five episodes left to go.
• Distressed Dude: Jimmy, which ties into why Saul is so terrified when Jesse and Walt kidnap him. He offers himself up to save Kim and face the music with Howard, but the combination of Lalo thinking he had something to do with the assault on his home, the promise he’ll come back and ending up having to lie next to Howard’s corpse restrained and silenced for over an hour, breaks him that little bit more.
• Dirty Coward: Not actually Jimmy, who while terrified, plays up this aspect of Saul to try and make Lalo think he's a pathetic slimeball who is sending his wife out to do his job. Really he just wants to give Kim a chance to escape.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Howard and Lalo's bodies are curled up together in the grave they share like they're lovers Together in Death.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Mike assures Jimmy that Lalo will never be coming back again. Unfortunately, he already told Jimmy once that Lalo was to be killed and that turned out false, so it makes sense that Jimmy doubts him enough to still be paranoid of Lalo well into the events of Breaking Bad, even though by that point Lalo truly is dead (and that in fact, his body, buried in the superlab, will be constantly laying right under the feet of the two men Saul initially thinks were sent by him).
  • Gus's final Badass Boast to Lalo, while describing his future takedown of the cartel pretty accurately, is laced with this in his final statement that he will save Hector until the very end of his revenge plan, a petty obsession that ultimately becomes his downfall. On top of this, Gus dies at the hands of Hector through a bomb that's wired and triggered through his bell... the same one gifted to him by Lalo. In the end, Lalo really did get the last laugh on Gus.
• Due to the Dead: Downplayed. While Lalo's body is tossed into the hole with zero prejudice, Mike orders them to take it easier with Howard's body. He also gives Howard's corpse a soft frown of sympathy as he's tossed in, recognizing that he was just an innocent bystander.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: Exploited. Gus makes Lalo think that he's giving one of these, but it's actually a ruse to trick Lalo into dropping his guard so that Gus can turn the tables on him. And it works.
• Evil Gloating: What does Lalo in. He could have shot Gus in the head at any time and fully intended to do so once he got all the evidence he needed, but he wanted to rub his victory in Gus's face, keeping him alive just long enough for Gus to turn the tables.
• Fat Bastard: Gus calls attention to Eladio's weight several times in the instance he's given the chance to speak out by Lalo.
• Females Are More Innocent: Not that he thinks she'd actually do it, just wants her to get out of there, but it's the basis on Jimmy's argument to Lalo that Kim should go shoot Gus, as a distressed blonde woman in a pink hoodie coming to the house in the middle of the night is going to garner more sympathy than a guy.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: During Gus's speech denouncing the Cartel, a gun hidden in an excavator is put in focus. It signifies that Gus plans to kill Lalo when he finishes the speech, which is what happens.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Whether it was Jimmy or Kim who followed Lalo's orders to go to Gus's house and shoot him, it was bound to go south either way since Gus survives to Breaking Bad.
  • Lalo records a video for Don Eladio while forcing Gus to show him the superlab excavation and reveal his secret plans. Since Gus is still on good terms with the cartel by the time of Breaking Bad, it's a given that none of this was ever going to reach Eladio or the rest of the cartel, especially when Gus flat-out states to the camera his resentment of Eladio and the Salamancas, and his plan to kill all of them. Likewise, since Gus survives until Breaking Bad and Lalo was not in that show ^note  Saul mentions him once, when Walt and Jesse kidnap him it's a given that Gus will be able to turn the tables on Lalo, then win and survive the ensuing fight.
• Foreshadowing: While mocking Gus, Lalo declares (for the benefit of the video for Eladio) that Gus has built his own tomb. By the end of the episode, Lalo himself will be buried there, along with Howard.
• Go Out with a Smile: Lalo dies with blood coming out of his mouth but a smile on his face.
• Graceful Loser: As implied above, despite abruptly losing his entire gambit and life, Lalo goes out highly amused over the turn of events.
• Heroic Sacrifice: When Lalo tries to send Jimmy and keep Kim as a hostage, Jimmy convinces him to send Kim and keep him instead. It's implied that he's very aware of the risk that Lalo will simply shoot whoever stays behind once they're no longer useful. It's also implied that the only reason he didn't shoot Jimmy right away was to question him further about the desert shoot-out and Jimmy's suspected scheming with Ignacio.
• Hidden Villain: After everything, Kim and Jimmy remain in the dark about who Lalo was targeting and who Mike works for, though they do know Gus' home address now.
• I Have Your Wife: Exploited. Lalo doesn't really care who is the hostage (though he has a good time putting the fear of god into Jimmy) as long as whoever goes thinks their spouse is Alone with the Psycho. If he hadn't wanted to know what happened in the desert, Jimmy or Kim, whoever stayed, would have joined Howard on the floor.
• Impossible Task: Lalo tells Kim that she has one hour to drive to Gus's house, kill him and get back. Given the elaborate security measures in place, that notion is laughable, especially for someone like Kim. Of course, Lalo knows this, the whole thing is a diversion so he can sneak into the laundry.
• Internal Homage:
  • To "Mijo", as Jimmy tries to deal with this Hostage Situation by remembering that one, and that introduced him to the cartel, but unlike that experience where he was untied pretty fast, Nacho was there to talk sense into Tuco and he could use his powers of persuasion, it's revealed he didn't manage to talk Lalo into anything, he really thinks he's going to die as soon as Kim leaves - also thinks he deserves it, unlike in that episode where he said he didn't, and he's kept helpless, having to look at a corpse of a man whose death he and Kim were indirectly responsible for (in contrast to his successfully talking Tuco out of killing the two skaters).
  • It's Kim's version of "Bagman", wearing a pink hoodie ^note which means naivete in this universe to his pink shirt, being broken after displaying arrogance (in her case thinking Howard should suck it up, in his the "I'm so far beyond you" rant), having to keep going because her loved one is waiting, knowing far more than the criminal world than she wanted to, and being irreparably traumatised. Only she is far better than Jimmy was at clamping up completely afterwards, and he can't get through to her.
• Humiliation Conga: Both Jimmy and Kim get a swift Break the Haughty, but Kim knew that Lalo was alive, didn’t tell Jimmy because she was having too much fun and he might leave. This gets her a dead boss decomposing on her floor, Lalo initially wanting her as a hostage because he thinks vice versa she’d be as smartly sociopathic as he is and leave her husband to die, the fear that Jimmy is Alone with the Psycho she thought a chair against the door might prevent, Mike stopping her from shooting who she thinks is Gus, lifelong trauma and nobody telling her anything.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Lalo is finally shown the superlab under Lavandería Brillante. Gus also makes him aware of how deep his grudge runs against Eladio and the cartel, the fact that he kept Hector alive and broken, and telling him his plan to kill all the Salamancas while saving Hector for last, before shooting Lalo.
  • Jimmy discovers that Mike was privy to his and Kim's plot against Howard, something Kim had already known.
• Irony: Jimmy genuinely doesn't know anything about the attack on the compound, but Lalo thinking he does actually saves his life, as if not he would have joined Howard as soon as Kim left.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Gus tells Lalo, "You can't kill me," something the audience already knows to be true due to Gus surviving to Breaking Bad.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Mike as always doesn't relay all the details to Jimmy, and in this case only tells him that Lalo will never be coming back without expressly saying he's dead. This, coupled with Lalo's earlier survival when Jimmy believed he had died, unfortunately has the effect of making Jimmy believe Lalo is still out there and might come back for revenge someday, as seen in his initial appearance in Breaking Bad.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Gus, all business as usual, schedules Lyle to take his shifts as store manager for the next week, literally while being treated for bullet wounds.
• Musical Spoiler:
  • The musical cue that plays when Kim is about to assassinate Gus is the same one in "Thirty-Eight Snub" when Walter made the attempt.
  • As Howard gets lowered into the grave, Chuck's leitmotif plays.
• Never Suicide: Mike covers up Howard Hamlin's death by disposing of his corpse and then arranging for his car and shoes to be found at the side of a beach several states away with cocaine stashed inside, in order to make it appear that a drugged-up Howard decided to end it all after blowing up the Sandpiper negotiations.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Gus, who has never been seen as any combatant, outmaneuvers and defeats Lalo Salamanca in a gunfight. Prior to this, Lalo even dismissed him as a "house cat"; it's unclear how serious he is in believing Jimmy or Kim can kill him, since he's really trying to create a diversion, but he's able to present it as perfectly feasible in a way that suggests he might genuinely believe it on some level.
• Not So Stoic: Gus' rant against the cartel that Lalo intended to be his Dying Declaration of Hate is perhaps the most emotional he's ever been since the death of Max. And when he gets his gun, he fires every round, then continues obsessively pulling the trigger, with a look of abject fear on his face. This is one of the few times we ever see Gus so out of control.
• Oh, Crap!: Jimmy wisely keeps his mouth shut while Lalo ties him down and tells him about the compound attack, but panics when Lalo thinks he was involved and pleads a very familiar line before getting cut off.
  • Mike also gets one when he asks Kim to explain why she's at Gus's house and her answer is Lalo Salamanca.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Kim can steel herself to kill someone for her husband to be safe, but she's still crying and freaking out (and could be deemed catatonic at the end if not for the coldly hateful expression on her face), while Jimmy can't manage the smooth and slimy Saul Goodman persona without shaking badly, and has to be reminded to talk at the end.
  • On a lesser note, while Lalo is smugly smiling throughout Gus' hate-filled speech even up to insulting the Salamancas, when he specifically starts badmouthing Hector, Lalo stops smiling until he is finished.
  • The normally calm and sharply dressed Gus almost always acts through his proxies. However, when the situation starts getting out of hand, Gus sheds his trademark tie and confronts Lalo personally. During the shootout, he repeatedly tries to fire the gun long after he's run out of ammo, and immediately afterwards there's real fear in his eyes, and he's hyperventilating.
• Out of Focus: Although no effort is spared to demonstrate their reaction to the events around them, Jimmy and Kim play mostly a secondary role in this episode compared to the culimination of the conflict between Gus and Lalo.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Lalo gushes over how much he'd love to torture Gus while gloating over him, but with Mike and the calvary hauling ass, he grudgingly admits all he can do is shoot him in the head and make his escape.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gus finally gets a chance to air out his true opinions on Don Eladio and the Salamancas while stalling long enough to catch Lalo off-guard so he can kill him:
  Gus: [in Spanish] Eladio... you greasy, bloated pimp. You talk of honor, but you have none. A pack of stray dogs fighting for scraps has more honor. Jackals. That's all you are! No vision. No patience. No thought. Stupid and impulsive! That is how I did all this! You couldn't see it, couldn't even conceive of it! And you Salamancas...you're the worst vermin of all. You say you believe in "blood for blood" but you only understand blood for money! You're whores! [in English] I understand blood for blood. Hector? I kept him alive. Kept him broken. I will save him to the last. Before he dies, he will know I buried every one of you.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: Albeit with a lot of build-up, finally fully explains Saul's "it wasn't me! It was Ignacio! He's the one!". As he ties Jimmy up, Lalo explains there was an assault on his home, and because Nacho had introduced him to Jimmy, he thinks the desert trip involved them collaborating. Jimmy panics and pleads half of the above line before he's gagged, and Lalo promises him he'll be back. As a result, when he's held captive again, Saul's brain goes right to this moment and he's terrified Lalo is doing what he promised.
• The Reveal: Lalo is killed in this episode, and both his and Howard Hamlin's bodies are taken and buried in the ground of the superlab. They're probably still there throughout the entirety of Breaking Bad. Even after the lab is destroyed, the D.E.A. only discovers the two guards recently killed there by Walt, not the two additional bodies underneath the floor.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Jimmy is lying about the desert to Lalo, but he's so Locked Out of the Loop on the assassination attempt that he doesn't even know Nacho's real name, let alone anything about the actual attempt.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Jimmy's forced to look at Howard's corpse, literally forced to look at the consequences, and is Bound and Gagged so he can't run away or talk himself out of it like he did with Chuck's death. In a similar vein, Kim didn't want to admit responsibility for Howard either, so she's made to pull the trigger on Gus, and she has an hour to do it or her husband dies.
  • Lalo and Howard are buried together in the same grave, reinforcing the fact that the legal world and the criminal world, separated for most of this show's run, have been forcibly intertwined with each other and will both be brought to ruin by the actions of our main characters.
  • They're also buried right underneath the superlab. By the time of Breaking Bad, it will appear as a clean and professional facility but is actually housing some dirty secrets, just like the man who owns it. And the whole time Walt and Jesse will be working there, none the wiser to the dark things that have happened in this empire right under their noses... and shoes.
• Solemn Ending Theme: This is the second episode in a row where the usual end titles music is replaced by a darker tune. Like in all previous instances, the ending music is changed to reflect the death of a major character.
• Spotting the Thread: When Gus asks Kim why Lalo sent her, she answers that he wanted to send Jimmy first but Jimmy talked him out of it. Gus is taken aback at the idea that anyone could ever talk someone as stubborn and crazy as Lalo out of anything, causing him to realize that Lalo never cared in the first place who went to the house, because they were only meant to be a distraction.
• Stepford Smiler: Jimmy grins and speaks in his typical Saul Goodman tone as he smooth talks Lalo into sending Kim instead of him, but it's clear that he's on the verge of tears and shaking all over after witnessing Howard's murder.
• Suicide by Sea: How Mike intends to cover up Howard's death. He has his men leave Howard's car several states away with his wallet and wedding ring on the dashboard and cocaine residue on the upholstery, staging it to look like Howard drowned himself after being exposed as a drug addict. He notes that it's simply continuing the lie that Jimmy and Kim have already been spreading.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Gus survives being shot in the chest by Lalo thanks to his Kevlar vest, but the vest can't absorb all of the force of the bullet, and so even though the bullet didn't break the skin, Gus still has trouble breathing and walking afterwards. In the aftermath of the shootout with Lalo, he finds he's taken at least two bullets to the side, which penetrated this time due to the Kevlar losing tensile strength after the first shot. Gus is unable to remain standing, and is later hooked up to an IV and advised to remain lying down while he waits for a doctor.
• Tempting Fate: Lalo's (last) exchange with Gus before his death.
  Lalo: Big talk. You done?
  Gus: No. Not yet.
• Title Drop: Lalo does this while instructing Jimmy and Kim how to use the gun for his plan.
• Tranquil Fury: Kim is barely there in the scene where Mike is telling them off, and the only reason she's not catatonic is the dead eyed anger evident on her face.
• Translation Convention: Defied and subsequently invoked in the confrontation between Lalo and Gus; the switch to English (when they would probably both be speaking in Spanish) is presumably so viewers would not have to keep reading the subtitles as this crucial scene reaches its climax.
• Underestimating Badassery: Lalo's Bond Villain Stupidity largely stems from his belief that Gus without his security detail is a harmless "house cat". He somehow didn't expect that Gus would have more tricks up his sleeve despite (sarcastically) admitting to his cunning in deceiving the entire cartel.
• Undignified Death: Howard's already ignoble death gets even worse here. He's left where he died in a growing pool of blood for several hours before anyone is in a position to move him, and though Mike tries to show as much Due to the Dead as he can in the circumstances, he still ends up buried next to his killer. The cover-up requires Mike to perpetuate Jimmy and Kim's portrayal of him as a cocaine addict, from which he will now almost certainly never be exonerated. Howard will be remembered as someone whose drug-fueled downward spiral ended his marriage, his career, and his life, while in fact he was more motivated than ever after the Sandpiper debacle.
• Undying Loyalty: Both assuming that whoever gets left with Lalo will die, Jimmy tries to swap Kim’s life for his, and Kim steels her nerves the best she can to try and shoot Gus.
• The Unintelligible: After he's gagged, the only recognisable words out of Jimmy's mouth is the plot-relevant Call-Forward to how it wasn't him, it was Ignacio. After that it's just muffled yelling until Mike takes the gag off.
• Wham Episode: Lalo not only dies, he does so with five episodes still to go, leaving viewers with very little idea of what to expect next. Howard's death is framed up as a drug-influenced suicide, and with the threat of consequences from Mike in the air, Kim and Jimmy will have to live with the guilt of what they did to Howard without any chance of revealing the truth.
• What Does She See in Him?: Lalo openly ponders this with regards to Kim and Jimmy.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Kim loses her cool and viciously chews out Mike for assuring her that she and Jimmy were being protected from Lalo and instead turning his men away long enough for Lalo to spring in on them, to the point of screaming "WHERE WERE YOU?!"
  • While he saves them and reassures both that the other is safe, Mike treats Jimmy and Kim like they're reckless five-year olds at the end, telling them they need to continue with the lie about Howard, with a clear sense of contempt that they were messing with someone's life like this in the first place, and indirectly led to his death.
  • Mike also calls out Gus for going to the laundry without telling him and getting himself captured by Lalo as a result, noting that things easily could have gone down differently.

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"Now, I need to impress upon you: none of this ever happened. None of it. Understand?"