Last night BETTER CALL SAUL aired its series finale. It was a rich episode, with some really wonderful callbacks both to SAUL and BREAKING BAD, and an unexpectedly gorgeous end aesthetic.
This week I want to talk about some of the interesting choices SAUL made in its final half season of episodes. And today we start with SAUL 608, which begins with Howard dead on the floor and Lalo making demands, and ends with him finally head to head against Fring.
One of the great things about the SAUL writing team, maybe the greatest, is their absolute fearlessness when it comes to story problems. SAUL and BAD are the very rare shows that insist on painting themselves into corners from which there is no easy way out. And at the same time, somehow they always seem to find a way forward that seems true to the reality.
And maybe SAUL's greatest choice in this regard is Lalo Salamanca. From the moment we first meet him he is a force of nature, but in that last season he becomes something almost mythical in the eyes of Fring and consequently us. The more that Mike does to protect Fring the more clear it becomes, Lalo is absolutely going to get to Fring.
But by the time the two meet he's become such a figure of resourcefulness to us that the question is, how can Fring possibly overcome him? And 608 only builds on that: Lalo manages to use Kim as a decoy, and then kills every single man guarding Fring. When the two face off in the future drug cooking basement, there is no possible way out for Fring. The quintessential SAUL/BAD position.
And how do they get out of it? They've previously planted the idea that there are plenty of guns hidden around the chamber. So Fring is within reach of one. But to get to it, he needs to knock out the power cord for the lights. And that's how they play it out, right? He kicks the cord, gets darkness, runs to the gun and the two shoot it out.
But that cord…it’s really thick. It does not seem highly kickable at all. Also, Lalo stands there for so long letting this moment go on. It mostly works, because Tony Dalton and Giancarlo Esposito are both so damn charismatic. But it's all a bit of cheat, when you come right down to it. Something SAUL really never does.
In some ways it makes sense that this would be the moment they couldn't quite find their way out of the corner. The writers put so much effort into building toward this moment, it was going to be nearly impossible to fully earn a resolution. In a sense I cheer them on for reaching a problem even they could fully crack.
And there's also an argument to be made, it has to come down to dumb luck in the end. For a character as overcontrolled and overplanned as Fring, luck and random chance is the thing he is most afraid of and therefore must face to finally take control. But still, on an emotional level dumb luck is hard to make feel satisfying.
But it’s also worth noting how the writers still try to make that little sidestep palatable. After Lalo is dead we discover Fring, too, has been shot, emphasizing he did not by some random miracle escape unscathed.
It all speaks to an important rule in escaping the corner: You have to earn it. A character can only win out in an impossible situation at a cost. The bigger/harder the win, the higher that cost must be.
