Better Call Saul, S6 Part 1 Recap: Some Can Keep a Secret If Many of Them Are Dead

The aftermath of Chihuahua

Nacho hides in a motel as instructed by Tyrus. He’s to wait for a pickup in a few days. There are money, gun, clothes, food and bed – and there’s someone secretly surveilling him from a small building across the room that he’s aware of, but not sure who and why.

Meanwhile, Lalo goes to a house in the village belonging to a man whom he’s helped pay for dental treatment recently. The wife treats Lalo's wound and serves him coffee. Then Lalo kills the couple, burns the man’s body and plants it as his own back in his compound. As far as the world’s concerned, dental records checked out and all, Lalo Salamanca is dead.


“The mercenaries are dead. And yet their mission was a success.” – Gus Fring

Bolsa tells Gus that Lalo’s dead, killed by hired gunmen, which could be the Colombians – or traitors close to home.

“We know this much. Ignacio Varga is a rat. Don Eladio has put a price on his head. Every man we have is searching for him,” Bolsa says.

Gus asks Tyrus and Mike how the mission is a success if the mercenaries are all dead against one man, but Mike says it can happen 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Mike wants to retrieve Nacho quietly and says loyalty goes both ways, but it seems that Gus has other plans.

After visiting Hector to show “solidarity”, Gus realizes from Hector's reaction that Lalo’s still very much alive.


Nacho dies

Turns out, Gus wants to put all this on Nacho after all. I wasn’t paying attention on my first watch, so this was baffling to me.

Under Gus’s order, Mike replaces Nacho’s safe and plants a bank document along with the motel’s phone number for Bolsa to find. Mike finds the fake IDs and hides Manuel’s.

The guy across the building is to watch Nacho while Bolsa finds the planted evidence and sends the cartel’s men to find Nacho. Just before, sensing that something is off, Nacho sneaks out of the room and holds the guy at gunpoint to confirm his suspicion that he’s being double-crossed by Gus. He’s about to flee when the Mexican twins and the cartel men arrive, pursuing him.

Nacho manages to speed away on a damaged truck before stopping on a dirt road. He goes against his original plan to wait for a shootout and hides in a nearby old oil tank instead. Him submerging in the oil has to be a metaphor for something – many say it’s him cleansing his soul. The entire “Rock and Hard Place” episode is a journey of beautiful and tragic references.

Again, Mike wants to bring Nacho home before Nacho gets caught in the crossfire. Gus refuses and wants to bring Manuel in instead, but that doesn’t sit well with Mike.

Nacho cleans himself at an auto shop the next morning and makes two phone calls. One to his father and one to Mike. Realizing the only way he could save his father is by taking the blame in front of the Salamancas, he says goodbye to his father. He asks for a guarantee for his father’s safety, specifically from Mike.

The rest of Nacho’s story is a storytelling delight. We see him next, lying under Gus’s truck floor, being smuggled back to the chicken farm – he’s already in a sealed coffin. Then he’s served his last supper and shares a drink with Mike.

They go over their story and plan – Nacho’s going to pin this on their Peruvian rivals. He’s assured that at the end of it, “it’ll be over quick”.

Nacho’s brought to the desert the next day. Bolsa, Hector and the Mexican twins are already waiting. Hector, through his bells, still insists that the Chicken Man is the traitor. To save Manuel, Nacho has to sell the story and berate Hector in his rant, revealing the switched pills.

“Your heart meds? I switched them for sugar pills. You were dead and buried, and I had to watch this asshole bring you back. So when you are sitting in your shitty nursing home and you're sucking down on your Jell-O night after night for the rest of your life, you think of me, you twisted fuck!”

Ok then.

Nacho grabs Bolsa’s gun and shoots himself in the head.


Lalo goes to Germany

Lalo only tells Hector that he’s still alive. He goes to Berlin to find info on Werner. At a bar, he flirts with Margarethe Ziegler, who tells him that her husband saved his workers in a cave-in, but he himself did not make it. Strangely, her husband’s beloved workers, “his boys”, did not attend the funeral, but they did send her flowers and gifts. Lalo walks Margarethe home but does not spend the night. The next morning, after Margarethe leaves for work, Lalo returns to her house and finds a Lucite gifted by Casper. He tracks Casper to his house and injures the man to extract info from him.

He returns to New Mexico and sets up camp under a sewer, watching the laundry from underground. He shoots a video for Eladio, telling him Gus’s activity.

He calls Hector at one point and, while waiting on the line, realizes that the phone is being tapped by Gus. When he gets to talk to Hector eventually, he changes his story and tells him that he couldn’t find any proof on Gus, like Hector advised, and will return to an original plan – to Hector’s protest. Mike’s listening to this, so he gets Gus to return to the man's fortified home and mobilizes most of their men to protect him. Lalo sees a cockroach in the sewer, thinks of Jimmy and seems to be changing course too.


“Wow. They really did Howard dirty.” – me, while still at the conference room scene

Kim and Jimmy go on with their plan to ruin Howard’s reputation by making him look like a drug addict. It’s elaborate and long and sounds exhausting just to hear.

First, they plant a small bag of cocaine-looking powder in Howard’s golf club locker for it to drop in front of Cliff.

Next, they get Huell to duplicate Howard’s car keys, so Jimmy can steal the car for an hour. They pay Wendy the prostitute to act as if she’s being thrown out by Howard from the car in front of Cliff, who’s with Kim at an outdoor cafe. Huell asks why Jimmy and Kim do all this, being well-educated, well-paid lawyers and all. Jimmy says it’s part of them “making a difference”.

Then, they dupe the Kettlemans into believing that Craig could get exonerated on the grounds of receiving poor counsel due to Howard’s drug use. The Kettlemans shop around for lawyers, spreading the rumour in the process.

Finally, on Sandpiper mediation day that they call D-Day, they hire the film crew to take photos of Jimmy “getting a bribe” from an actor who looks like the judge mediating the suit. They get the PI that Howard hires, who’s actually on Jimmy and Kim’s payroll, to pass the drug-laced photos to Howard, so Howard will make a scene at the meeting. The mediation is a chaos and cancelled. Rich Schweikart says they are back to their old offer, which will be reduced by a million for each day delayed from that point on.

Howard goes to their apartment to confront Jimmy and Kim and ask why they are doing this to him. Howard says he’s gone through worse, though – debt, depression, marriage falling apart – he’ll be ok again, but Jimmy and Kim won’t as they are both soulless sociopaths. Howard says Jimmy can’t help it, but sadly Kim – one of the smartest and most promising human beings he’s ever known – chooses this life.

Then the fire from the candle sways, and a smiley ghost by the name of Lalo Salamanca walks in to Jimmy and Kim’s horror. They beg Howard to leave, but Lalo shoots Howard in the head with little warning. ✨ Cries ✨.

Image: AMC