Better Call Saul, S5 Recap: Is It the Company We Keep or the Choices We Make?

Gene Takavic of Cinnabon, Omaha, Nebraska

The flash-forward of Gene has always been a combination of wariness and mundane routine until now, when a cab driver named Jeff recognizes him from his old TV ad. Gene calls for a new Vacuum but changes his mind, telling the seller he’s fixing the problem himself.


Lalo and Gus

Lalo’s obsessed about untangling the Werner Ziegler mystery. He asks Nacho if he’s noticed anything off in their operation. Nacho says they may have received complaints about their products not being on par lately, but complaining is what buyers do, so that’s not really strange. Lalo checks the products at one of the dealers’ places – Mouse and Arlo’s – and true enough, some of the drugs turn out not to be the cartel's.

He goes to Gus and Bolsa with this. Gus “confesses” that he had to outsource some of the drugs after running into some trouble recently: an engineer who did a construction work for his legit business stealing the products. The engineer’s name was Werner Ziegler, and he’s been taken care of. Bolsa later warns Lalo of his actions: spying on Gus and murdering the TravelWire agent. The latter was especially messy.

But what's more important is, Lalo's not buying Gus’s story.


Mike quits Gus for five minutes

The German contractors are sent home. The construction is not going to be continued as long as Lalo is still in the US. Gus wants to pay Mike a retainer, but Mike is angry and walks. He starts going out drinking at night. One night, a group of youths tries to mug him but fails. On another night, he’s not so lucky and is stabbed with a knife.

Gus sends Mike to a Mexican village to be treated by Barry Goodman and visits him there. At a fountain “Dedicated to Max” – built for Gus’s partner who was killed by Hector and Eladio – he tells Mike that he’s at war and needs Mike as his soldier because Mike understands revenge. O-kay then.


The Friend of The Cartel

The phone buyers are now Saul Goodman’s ready customers, but his biggest pay yet comes from representing Krazy-8 and later Lalo, made possible by duress and him not being able to resist money.

Gus wants Nacho to do more – gaining Lalo’s trust next – and threatens to kill Manuel if Nacho refuses. Just another asshole using his father to make his life miserable. Seeing an opportunity, Nacho retrieves their drugs from a building that’s being raided by the police, which impresses Lalo.

Krazy-8 is caught by the police on the same night, and Lalo gets Jimmy to cut a deal for him with the DEA, which includes making Krazy-8 an informant. The case is handled by two familiar faces: Hank and Gomez. Krazy-8 rats out three dead drops involving $700k drug money belonging to Gus, which Gus knows of beforehand from Nacho but is not able to stop.

Mike poses as a private investigator and coaches Lillian Simmons, a witness to TravelWire's Fred Whalen’s murder, with a new information to get Lalo arrested. But Gus’s ultimate plan is to get Lalo, who’s using the alias Jorge deGuzman while in custody, out of the US.

Mike gives Jimmy the information about Lillian Simmons being coached, so Jimmy can use it as grounds to get Lalo bailed. Jimmy – practically a friend of the cartel now whether he wants it or not – is to pick up the $7m bail money from Mexico. And in one of the best storylines in the series, Jimmy gets robbed. He’s thisclose to being killed but is saved by Mike. Jimmy is ordered to hide the story from Lalo. To explain the delay, he tells Lalo that his car broke down, and it took him some time to cross the desert on foot and avoid the main road.

Jimmy has PTSD from the incident and seeks advice from Mike. He tells Mike he regrets letting Lalo get away with the murder, and Mike says they are all put on a road in their lives by the choices they made in the past.


Kim, Acker, Tucumcari, Mesa Verde, Olivia Bitsui and Jimmy

Kim has to deal with a house owner, Everett Acker, who refuses to leave his house, which is built on the land purchased by Mesa Verde for its new call centre in Tucumcari. She tries from pleading to threatening, to pleading again with her own personal story growing up with nothing. Well, she also at one point lectures Acker about playing by the rules. If his neighbours can obey the law, why can't he? What makes him think he’s special? Lol, calm down, Kim.

Acker says Kim’s the kind of people who donate once in a while to make them feel better about the bad things they’ve done, and one who’ll say anything to get what they want.

Kim’s actually torn. She gets Jimmy to be Acker’s lawyer – so Jimmy can stop the demolition – while she's pretending to be on Mesa Verde’s side. Their final plan is to threaten Mesa Verde with a commercial, asking people to sue the bank for frivolous reasons, and get an injunction on its logo for using a photograph by Olivia Bitsui that Mesa Verde doesn’t own the copyright to.

When Rich asks Kim to drop herself from the Tucumcari dispute, citing his doubts about her looking after Mesa Verde’s interests, Kim fights back but ultimately stops Jimmy from continuing with the plan. She tells Jimmy she’ll make up the difference of whatever amount Mesa Verde’s offering Acker, up to $75k. Jimmy reluctantly agrees, but it looks like they are settling. Then, he ambushes Kim and Mesa Verde at the meeting by going back to the original plan, asking Mesa Verde for $4m, to Kim’s anger. While his lawyers are scrambling to find a way to get out of the situation, Kevin meets with Jimmy at the car park and agrees to Jimmy’s demand to compensate Acker and Bitsui, and move the call centre to another site.

With the close calls they had, Kim gives Jimmy an ultimatum to not go behind her back again – or she says they could get married, so they are covered by spousal privilege. So they do.

Eventually Kim realizes her heart is no longer in Mesa Verde work, so she quits Schweikart & Cokely to focus on public defense cases full time.


Howard drives a NAMAST3, offers Jimmy a job and insults Kim

Howard is all zen these days, and he offers Jimmy a job at HHM. Jimmy responds by throwing three bowling balls over Howard’s fence, two hitting his NAMAST3-plated Jaguar, and hiring two prostitutes to embarrass him during a lunch with Cliff.

Hearing Kim’s quitting Schweikart & Cokely, Howard assumes Jimmy must have something to do with it. He warns Kim about Jimmy and tells her of his recent shenanigans. Kim's insulted – as if she's not capable of making her own decisions. She's suddenly motivated to get back at Howard. She and Jimmy are playing at first. What prank would they pull on Howard? Then she sounds more serious. What if they set up Howard for misconduct, making him settle the Sandpiper suit quickly?


Gus has warned us multiple times that he’s not letting people go

So I’m not sure why we’re all hoping he’d let Nacho go.

Nacho has been doing what he's asked to do. He has replaced the Salamancas' drugs and has been relaying information to Gus – from Lalo's order to burn down an LPH store to Lalo's location so he could be arrested.

If Mike understands revenge, he also understands loyalty. He tells Gus they should release Nacho of his double agent duties and not have his father threatened anymore – he’s earned it – a request that Nacho has begged for again and again. But Gus says a dog that keeps biting its owner's hand needs to be disciplined or put down.

Gus knows Bolsa was behind the attack on Jimmy and the bail money as Bolsa thinks it’s in everyone’s interest for Lalo to be locked up in the US. Gus tells Mike he needs Nacho to be an inside man for a group of assassins he's hiring to kill Lalo in Mexico.


What happens in Chihuahua

Lalo, skipping bail, is driven south by Nacho. But when he finds Jimmy’s bullet-riddled car in the ravine, he returns to Albuquerque and demands Jimmy to tell the bail money story again. Kim saves Jimmy by stressing that it’s not hard to figure out that an old, abandoned car would just turn into a shooting practice target for fun. Lalo has a bigger problem if he’s not able to trust his own men to pick up the money.

So Lalo returns to his place in Chihuahua. At the meeting with Eladio, he gives the boss the usual money tribute, but this time with a Ferrari. Eladio as usual needs to insult someone – so he insults Bolsa, who’s bringing money from Gus, noting the amount seems less. Bolsa says Gus ran into some trouble recently, but things are being fixed.

Lalo promotes Nacho up the ranks and introduces him to Eladio. In the interview, Eladio asks what Nacho wants for himself, which Nacho says respect: making decisions on his own, not getting played and not having to look over his shoulder. Eladio approves of Nacho but says Nacho’s in the wrong business for his last answer. Well, exactly the point. Nacho has already made fake IDs for him and his father. And he got a family friend to make an offer to buy Manuel’s shop, which Manuel refused because he's not living on the run.

Nacho receives a call instructing him to open Lalo’s gate at 3AM. He’s about to do that when he finds Lalo's in the yard, drinking. He makes an excuse to go to the kitchen and create a fire, so Lalo will go inside. Then he opens the gate, so the highly-skilled-but-could-not-open-a-door mercenaries can get in.

Lalo survives the attack, but the rest of the household does not. He kills all of the intruders except for one, whom he orders to call and tell the middlemen that the mission was a success. He leaves the compound and also realizes that Nacho has disappeared.

Image: AMC