YMMV / Better Call Saul S6 E12: "Waterworks"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Jeff speeding away in his taxi and crashing into a parked car in plain sight after seeing a parked police car behind him. Did he do it on purpose to create a distraction that would allow Gene to escape the scene (similar to how Walt intentionally crashed his car with Hank inside to avoid driving him to the meth lab), or did Jeff see the car behind him, assumed they were here to arrest him, and sped away in a panic, crashing his car by accident?
    • Considering how he observes them for some time and quietly prays for them to ignore him and to leave, it is almost certainly the former - he did it intentionally.
  • Kim's bus breakdown. Is she sobbing over destroying her current life? Upset that she won't face the consequences she feels she deserves? Missing Jimmy and her old life? All of the above? Word of God is that it's all the emotions she's suppressed both in her old life and this one, all coming out in a breakdown, and this is her rock bottom.
  • Kim tells Cheryl that the only other witness to Howard's murder is her ex-husband "if he's still alive". Either she's worried Jimmy was going to hurt himself (and she'd be right, Word of God is that he's trying to get caught), she's still protecting him, or a bit of both.
  • After he's confronted by Marion, Gene pulls out the telephone's cord. Was he seriously considering killing her, or was it just him trying to drive home how she shouldn't contact the authorities?
• Memetic Mutation: "Yep, yep, yep..." ^note Kim's partner's not-particularly-passionate sex utterances after the party.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • After sinking lower than ever before in the previous episode by insisting on robbing a kindly cancer patient, Gene goes even further down when said cancer patient wakes up just before he can exit his house. With the mark sitting down on the staircase, blocking Gene's only exit, Gene is seconds away from braining him with an urn containing the ashes of his deceased dog... only for the mark to fall back asleep, still under the influence of the barbiturate drugging.
  • Falls even further at the end of the episode, when Marion catches on to who Gene really is and tries to contact the authorities. Gene pulls the phone cord out of the wall so she can't call the police, and even starts moving towards her with the apparent intent of strangling her with it for a moment. Just before he yanks the LifeAlert dongle away from her, he realizes that he's gone too far, allowing her to contact the authorities and running away, but the fact that he was even thinking about it shows how evil he's become.
• Nightmare Fuel: When Gene realizes Marion is on to him, his glasses flash with color upon seeing his old advert, the only color seen in the present Omaha scenes up to now. This along with his facial expression of discontent indicates he's enraged, and he accordingly threatens Marion right after. While he doesn't go through with it, the fact "Gene" is about to attempt homicide, on an elderly person no less, illustrates just how far he's fallen.
• Tear Jerker: Jimmy's "My God, What Have I Done?" moment when Marion tells him that she trusted him as he tried to murder her earlier. You can tell that Jimmy realized he almost crossed Heisenberg-levels of evil by the look on his face as a terrified Marion tells the LifeAlert operator that wanted criminal Saul Goodman is in her kitchen.

---