Vince Gilligan directs a shocking episode that richly reconsiders a key setting from Breaking Bad.
Prequels are tales of doom, even when they don’t want to be.
Writers and viewers know how things will end up for the characters and the world around them.
Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
Famously dead characters may live again but their future already arrived in our past.
Anyone who watchedBreaking Badrecognizes that whole sentence as a graveyard.
Mike will be shot to death.
Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
Tyrus will get exploded, collateral damage in a three-way underworld feud.
And the whole Superlab will go down in flames.
Saulhas never hidden from fate.
Occasional flashforwards reveal Jimmy/Saul (Bob Odenkirk) double-renamed as snowbound Omaha Gene.
In “Point and Shoot,” that tragedy’s scope becomes brutally clear.
In their moment of victory, they had passionatejob-well-donesex.
Will that be their last truly happy moment together?
After all,Saulhas always split itself between two distinct Albuquerque worlds.
“You two and your mouths,Dios mio!”
Lalo swaggered into this final season looking like the ultimate villain.
Lalo uses Jimmy and Kim as unknowing pawns.
After Kim leaves, Lalo teases Jimmy with a bit of intel that baffles the clueless lawyer.
If you’re a freak for canon, things are getting interesting.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I barely know Ignacio.
Whatever he did, he did alone, not with me.
Listen, listen, listen, I don’t know him.
I don’t know him!"
The dialogue should sound familiar.
Way back (forward?)
The lawyer is initially terrified:
“Oh no, no, no, no!
No,it wasn’t me!
It was Ignacio,he’s the one!
Oh no, no, no, no.
Siempre, siempre soy amigo del cartel…Lalo didn’t send you?
Oh, thank God, oh Christ!”
That single throwawayBadline formed two gigantic character arcs inSaul.
(“Oh, thank God!
Oh, Christ!")
“Point and Shoot” ties forward to that utmost Saul Goodman moment in an unexpectedly poignant way.
Does he ever even learn that Nacho is dead?
“I travel in worlds you’re free to’t even imagine!”
Jimmy once told Howard Hamlin.
“you could’t conceive of what I’m capable of!
I’m so far beyond you!”
Here’s an epic-showdown episode where the title character is literally tied up and removed from the action.
And it’s Kim who gets a phone call fromSaul’s man behind the curtain.
She is ascending higher (or lower) on the scale of awareness.
Mike follows Lalo’s decoy game, bringing a full contingent of Fring men to the Goodman apartment.
He goes to theLavenderiawith a couple bodyguards.
Lalo got their first, though: Goodbye, bodyguards.
The renegade Salamanca demands that Gus show him the secret construction project downstairs.
We know Lalo won’t kill Gus.
And I think we know Gus will kill Lalo.
The second comes later.
Gus just survived the (first) great face off of his life.
He is wounded, and tired.
Time for an apology.
But I was wrong.
“Gustavo thought he was building an empire,” Lalo narrates to his videotape.
“But all he built was a tomb.”
He’s right even though he’s wrong.
Lalo doesn’t realize he’s stepping into his own tomb.
And doesn’t know how completely this Superlab will make and break the Fring Empire.
Just another tomb, really.
Add it to the list.
Lalo’s death leaves the Salamancas without a top dog, except for drug-addled Tuco (Raymond Cruz).
Will more empires fall?
you could sense theSaulendgame in the final scene between Jimmy, Kim, and Mike.
Jimmy looks at Kim, who looks very distant indeed.
Is she traumatized by what she’s seen or is her conscience reappearing at the worst possible moment?
But the end of “Point and Shoot” is the real flourish.
I’m just sure there’s an easier way for the Fring operation to dispose of a couple bodies.
But burying Howard next to Lalo in the yet-unfinished Superlab is a perfect-on-every-level moment of nasty-funny artistic expression.
NowSaulshows us where the bodies are buried.
Episode Grade: A
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