Better Call Saul, S6 Part 2 Recap: No Regrets

You’ll look at the lab differently now

The second part of the final season opens with a stunning shot of the sunset at the beach. Music’s playing from Howard’s abandoned Jaguar, the door’s open, his wallet and wedding ring are on the dashboard, and his shoes are floating in the water: It’s the stage for his suicide.

Back up a few days to the night at the apartment. Lalo sends Kim to kill Gus and ties Jimmy before leaving for the laundry. Mike stops Kim and goes to free Jimmy. Against Mike’s instruction to stay at his home, sensing something is off, Gus also heads to the laundry. He realizes the place has been breached, but before he can react, Lalo kills all of his men. Gun to his head, Gus is forced to reveal the lab to Lalo, who continues to record it all for Eladio.

Gus manages to distract Lalo at one point. He kicks a power line, grabs the gun that he’s hidden on an excavator days earlier and empties the chamber on Lalo who, never changing, dies laughing.

Mike, the ever-methodical and effective crisis manager, gets his men to clean up the apartment. He sets out the next plan and cover story for both Kim and Jimmy: that Howard was at the apartment and incoherent, then he left – implying Howard’s drug use. “That's the story you were setting up for this guy, yeah?” Mike asks.

Outside in the living room, Arthur wheels Howard out in a refrigerator to be buried in the same grave as Lalo in the lab.


Kim’s in Florida

The aftermath takes a toll on Kim. She quits law and leaves Jimmy.

It is revealed that some time later she also files for divorce from him, who’s already a full Saul Goodman and has received the Sandpiper settlement by then – Kim had refused her share of the money.

Kim’s now trapped in a Florida suburb and a desk job in a sprinkler manufacturer company – saying yes to a mundane life and having no opinion, riddled with guilt. After receiving a call from Viktor St Clair “to catch up”, which ends up with them challenging each other to turn themselves in and Jimmy breaking the phone booth glass in anger, Kim returns to Albuquerque and files an affidavit, confessing what she knows of Howard’s death. She then visits Howard’s widow, Cheryl, confessing the same.


Nippy, Marion and Jeff

When Gene offers to get Jeff in “the game”, he’s just setting up a trap. Felon Jeff can’t rat Gene out. It’s going to be mutually assured destruction. Both actors who play Jeff are great in the role, by the way, but there is no way these two have the same personality. The old Jeff was a little menacing, and the new Jeff is kind of endearing.

Of course, earlier, to kick it off, Gene concocts a scheme to befriend Jeff’s mother, Marion. In the middle of putting up posters for his lost dog, Nippy, Gene pretends to help Marion with her stuck motorized chair only to totally jam it, so he could find an excuse to push her home. Nippy, by the way, totally does not exist.

Another step to Jimmy’s downfall – check.


The first game

Gene befriends the mall’s security guards next. Every night after closing Cinnabon, he brings them (those delicious, delicious) cinnamon rolls to see how long Frank, the one manning the surveillance camera, would take to eat the roll and be distracted from his work. It’s about three minutes.

He counts the steps from one rack to another at the department store and gets Jeff to practice snatching three items from each station on a grid that he builds in a field. Jeff’s friend Buddy will sneak Jeff into the store after hours through a fake delivery, Gene will distract Frank as usual, and Jeff will grab the expensive clothing items they have marked within the time window.

Then we all gasp in horror when Jeff slips and falls on his last leg, lying on the floor, unconscious for what feels like forever, with no hope – because we somehow don’t want criminals to get caught. In desperation, Gene breaks into a fake emotional breakdown, spilling his sad story to Frank to continue distracting him. And by some miracle, Jeff gets up a few minutes later and finishes the job.


The second game

After the department store heist, Gene says they’re done – they’ll part ways. Jeff and Buddy will leave him alone and even cross to the other side of the road if they ever see him. And this is all for a total of five minutes.

After his call to Kim, he goes to see the two again, laying out a new con: identity theft from drunk rich men they target at the bar. Viktor St Clair will make them drunk, Jeff will offer them water laced with barbiturate on the ride home and tape their doors, and Buddy will enter the houses and steal the men's information that they will sell later.

The theft goes on for some time until one night when Jeff calls Gene, saying Buddy refused to go through with their latest mark because the guy has cancer, like Buddy’s dad. Gene recklessly insists on finishing the job himself, even though Buddy has pulled the tape on the door. Gene goes to the house and breaks the door. In a flashback, Saul Goodman is seen entering Walter White’s high school to start their partnership. It’s the beginning of an end.

Gene could leave after finishing the job but he decides to stay longer, looking around the house, drinking the man’s liquor and stealing his watch, which is when the guy wakes up. Gene’s ready to knock the guy with an urn when he thankfully dozes off again. Meanwhile, outside, a police car stops behind Jeff’s cab – the police just want to have a meal break – preventing Gene from leaving. Jeff, in panic, speeds away and hits a parked car, which gives Gene the opportunity to leave. Jeff’s arrested.

Jeff calls Gene from the police station the next day, asking Gene to get him out. Gene calls Marion to get her to bail Jeff out and promises to drive her there. Listening to Gene spill his legal knowledge on the phone, Marion gets suspicious. She goes on Ask Jeeves (who?), and when Gene arrives at the house, he finds her watching his old Saul Goodman ad. Gene tries to threaten Marion, but she manages to press her Life Alert button for help. Gene flees.


The diamonds, the stupid go-box and the dumpster

If I were a criminal on the run who scans police radio daily and has diamonds for financial security, I wouldn’t have a stupid, flimsy shoebox as my go-bag. Get a knapsack and a getaway car, Jimmy. Pack a toothbrush, clean underwear and disguise gear smh. But no, in haste, Jimmy grabs the shoebox, one that is too big for his scoop of diamonds but too small to keep a pack of burner phone in. In the chaos of running away from the police who are swarming the town, Jimmy hides in the dumpster, pulls open his burner phone to call the Vacuum and drops the diamonds all over in the process. Seconds later, the police knock on the dumpster. Looks like Gene Takavic’s not reporting for work tomorrow.


Regrets

The finale revisits the ghosts of the villains' pasts, confessing things in their lives that they would change if they could. Mike regrets the day he took his first bribe. Walter regrets letting go of the company he co-founded. Jimmy regrets getting injured in a slip-and-fall scam – which sounds kind of no regret actually.

“Jimmy, if you don't like where you're heading, there's no shame in going back and changing your path.” We see Chuck say this to him in one of those flashbacks.

“Oh, when have you ever changed your path? Hey, think on it,” Jimmy replied.


Having a cigarette at ADX Montrose

Jimmy’s prison sentence goes from life plus 190, to 30, to 7, to 86 years.

He’s offered with 30 years at first but negotiates it to 7 with perks, like choosing a prison in North Carolina instead of the notorious ADX Montrose – much to Marie Schrader’s protest.

He begins his plea by recounting the night he met a man named Mayhew at his office ie the same night he met Walter White. It concludes with the argument that he is a victim himself. He worked for Walter because he was afraid for his life.

Then, dangling one last info in front of the AUSA – the details of Howard’s murder – Jimmy, who is with Bill Oakley as his advisory counsel, is shocked to learn that Kim has already volunteered them.

Back in Albuquerque for his hearing, Jimmy opens with the Mayhew story again to everyone’s eye-roll. But this time, he changes the course. Ultimately, Jimmy’s loyalty is always towards Kim. With all his crimes and scheming – probably unlike Walter, Mike and Chuck – Jimmy changes his path in the end. He tricks Kim to attend the hearing, but he has no intention of setting her up. Looking at Kim in the audience, Jimmy admits his crimes to the court, from helping Walter build his drug empire to hurting Chuck.

So Jimmy gets 86.

He seems to be doing ok at ADX Montrose, as ok as one can be in a prison. He has his fans, a job as a baker in the kitchen and seems to be making friends as well. If it were up to some of us, we might want to see a sequel of him in prison, giving legal advice to his fellow inmates.

He’s working in the kitchen one day when told that his lawyer is there for a visit. The lawyer turns out to be Kim; her New Mexico bar card has no expiry date. They share a cigarette like the old times in the HHM’s basement.

“You had them down to seven years,” Kim says.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Eighty-six years.”

“Eighty-six years. But, with good behaviour, who knows?”

What a shot, in the end, of two extraordinary characters separated by two fences, sending them to two different worlds. Maybe it’s a forever goodbye, or maybe Kim will visit again. The ending feels lonely, like a beginning of a forgotten life, but I hope they both will find peace.

Image: AMC