6x07 Plan and Execution

[8.3/10] I kept waiting for it all to go wrong somehow. Things don’t simply “work out” in the world of Better Call Saul. This show is a tragedy, after all. People succeed, but only at a cost. There’s always some unexpected wrinkle, some unforeseen consequence, that makes victory more complicated and bittersweet than anyone on either side of the screen imagined.
Time and again, season 6 presented the plans of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim(Rhea Seehorn) as nearly falling into ruin. If Howard (Patrick Fabian) spots his erstwhile foe in the country club locker room, if a valet walks a step quicker, if Jimmy can’t summon the strength to move a parking sign, the whole scheme falls apart. With each step, they were this close to being discovered. Every time they flirted with disaster. Surely their luck couldn’t last forever.

For its part, “Plan and Execution”, the midseason finale, gives the two of them one last hurdle to leap over. As established in the previous episode, the Sandpiper mediator unexpectedly wears a cast, screwing up their whole plan to stage photos where it looks like he’s taking a bribe from Saul. Now, Kim and Jimmy have to scramble to reassemble their team and restage the pictures, with the ticking clock of the impending mediation to add to the pressure.

By god, it’s fun! If you step back and look at Kim and Jimmy’s trickery, it’s easy to see how they’re destroying someone’s life for thin reasons. However much Howard may deserve some comeuppance for his own misdeeds, this is, at a minimum, disproportionate retribution. But competence in stories is thrilling and competence with flair is captivating. What Jimmy and Kim do isn’t good; but good lord are they good at what they do.

Jimmy persuades his actor to do the job via a stirring speech about the love of performance. His director parlays the “emergency” into more cash in a canny fashion. His make-up artist is dressed up like a Gelfling but no less dedicated to her craft. His boom operator rushes to the scene with the proper equipment in tow. Kim herself fashions a makeshift cast (who would know better?) and races, shoeless, to adjust the blocking for the “scene.” These are pros working their magic in a crunch, and the delight of seeing them work is only matched by the underhandedness of their deeds.

The pièce de résistance comes when the episodes reveals that Howard’s private eye is in on the deal. The ploy of switching the phone number for Howard’s usual detectives is a little convenient. But it adds one more flourish to the scheme: a chance for the P.I. to seed the misleading photos, for Kim and Jimmy to lace them with the drug that will mess with Howard’s head (and, importantly, his eyes), and have their inside man switch them out with some phonies to make Hamlin look like a clown.

It’s the perfect crime. And the last minute change in plans, forcing our would-be heroes to scramble to overcome one more monkey wrench thrown into the proceedings, only shows how brilliant they are at this sort of thing.

So something else has to go wrong, right? Maybe the AV kids realize something’s amiss and decide to call the cops. Maybe poor Irene, the class representative who Jimmy originally recruited, comes into contact with the chemical agent intended for Howard and faints in the middle of the mediation. There have to be complications, unforeseen problems, something to show that for all their skill, all their talent, Kim and Jimmy are flying too close to the sun here.

There aren’t, though. The plan goes off without a hitch. Howard becomes unhinged the second he sees the mediator and makes the connection to the bribe photos. He rants to all involved about how Saul clearly set him up. His pupils are dilated as he cuts the image of someone unwell. He raves like a madman, sounding paranoid, delusional, yelling at strangers about a conspiracy whose only proof is pictures of Jimmy returning some jogger’s frisbee. This is it. This is Jimmy and Kim’s con artist masterpiece.

The mediator walks. The other side lowers their offer, smelling blood in the water. And Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) has no choice but to blink. Maybe he believes Howard. Maybe he can envision a world where his longtime colleague is telling the truth, and the former employee who once bilked his firm out of a signing bonus is devilish enough to orchestrate all of this.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Because Jimmy and Kim want their money and their revenge. Howard wants to do anything to prevent Saul from winning. But Cliff, the most decent man in this universe, only wants to do what’s best for their clients. That means salvaging what he can from this disaster, avoiding the shaky uncertainties that lie ahead, and taking the offer.

It worked, by god. Kim and Jimmy’s plan worked and worked perfectly. It may have cost Kim her chance to supercharge the pro bono practice that supposedly motivated all of this, but at the end of the day, their plan went off without a hitch. As Kim’s mother might say, they got away with it.

The same can’t be said for Lalo (Tony Dalton). He’s had preternatural success to this point. The cunning drug lord tracked down Margarethe Ziegler. He found one of Werner’s “boys.” He uncovered the location of Gus’ (Giancarlo Esposito) superlab. But to this point, he has no proof. “The Chicken Man” is too good at covering his tracks. Instead, all Lalo can muster is a video intended for Don Eladio, spelling out his theory, and a plan to murder Fring’s guards to secure the evidence he needs to support it. It’s a hard-fought plan, one born of sleeping in cars and lurking in the sewers until the time is right.

Except he slips up. He calls Hector (Mark Margolis), maybe to say goodbye in case things go wrong, maybe just to make his uncle proud before he dives into a dangerous situation. But Mike (Jonathan Banks) has tapped the nursing home’s phones, and now Fring’s men know Lalo’s back. The full court press surveillance worked. Unlike Saul’s scheme, Lalo’s plan ran aground on his opponent’s defenses.

The catch is that Lalo is as clever and resourceful as Jimmy and Kim are. Realizing he’s been foiled, he calls his uncle back and declares it’s time to go back to Plan A -- a thinly veiled threat on Gus’ life. He knows Mike will hear it, that Fring will respond, and that the security apparatus will shift. So much of the conflict between Lalo and Gus is a game of chess. Fring’s operation makes a move, and the Salamancas respond in kind. Lalo’s remaining moves are dwindling, but it’s not a checkmate just yet.

The game is done for Jimmy and Kim, though. They relax at home with a bottle of wine and an old movie. No more marks left to fool. No more schemes left to deploy. Only a bit of clean-up left. Howard shows up to congratulate and confront them, and they dutifully permit it. At this point, he cannot win. They’ve seen to that, and he knows it.

His earlier parable about Chuck’s habit with soft drink cans speaks to a sort of vigilance the elder McGill brother internalized. It’s the kind that presumably helped him fend off prankster younger siblings who’d shake up sodas to get one over on their big brothers, the sort that Howard sorely wishes he’d adopted. Hamlin can’t win anymore. But he can dress Jimmy and Kim down for their misdeeds, speak to the rot in the soul that would allow them to justify such an elaborate and immoral act, and try to make it harder to live with.

Howard isn’t wrong. The audience is inclined to side with Jimmy and Kim here. They are our protagonists. They work together and love one another. They’re damn fun to watch in every scheme and scam. They work meticulously to win the day and plan for every eventuality. As their own victim highlights, they rose from humble circumstances while Hamlin had a leg up from his father. Howard’s done crappy things to both of them. The couple is entitled to some righteous indignation.

What’s more, television shows are more fun when the main characters achieve what they set out to do. There’s a natural tendency to root for perspective characters, to hope they’ll see things through, even if deep down we know it’s wrong.

Nevertheless, Howard speaks the truth. Jimmy could have taken a different path, but he was born to color outside the lines. Kim is a person of incredible talent and potential, who uses those attributes to aid those who need it most and to wreak vengeance upon the people who’ve wronged her. They do get off on this, with their sultry celebration during the announcement of the settlement as the latest example. Hamlin has lost, but he diagnoses them to a tee. He draws into stark relief how they ruined a man’s life -- a man who has his own sins to answer for but is still struggling and sympathetic -- and how they’ll have no trouble sleeping at night.

Or at least they don’t betray one iota of regret. Howard points out that they have to play it that way, to feign ignorance and innocence. But they’re both consummate actors, unbothered by the routine, barely suggesting a whit of remorse for their actions. In their eyes, this is karma. This is reaping what you’ve sewn. This is a game to them.

Until it isn’t.

It’s just a wisp at first. A wick bends. The flame flickers. Something is coming. Writer-director Thomas Schnauz and his team deploy the suspense masterfully. The way the mood suddenly shifts is brilliant. Those subtle hints pile up, until the expressions on Kim and Jimmy’s faces tell the tale. They’re no longer gently asking Howard to leave because they’re done with him. They’re imploring him to go for his own safety. Lalo has arrived.

The twist is fabulous. Lalo’s call to Hector was not a means to smoke out Fring or lighten security at the superlab. He knew it would prompt Mike to circle the wagons and pull security away from tertiary targets like Saul, leaving him and Kim exposed and vulnerable. There’s more than one way to get to Gus and, backed into a corner, Lalo found another one.

It’s a spectacularly terrifying scene: the way he emerges from the shadows, the way he’s unnervingly calm despite his overwhelming menace, the way his “lawyers” desperately beg the man who was, just a minute ago, their worst enemy, to get out now if he wants to save himself.

Only It’s too late. The shock arrives as Lalo grows tired of waiting, of tolerating potential witnesses, and puts a bullet through a well-coiffed stranger’s skull once he’s fully diagnosed the shared pathology of his antagonizers. This is the worst day of Howard Hamlin’s life, and also the last day. Holy hell.

There it is. There is where things go wrong. There is the cost for taking things too far and tiptoeing too close to danger and disaster. Better Call Saul is a show that, commendably, zigs when viewers expect it to zag. It doesn’t traffic in twists for the sake of twists. The surprises are earned and the natural consequences of the characters’ actions, rooted in what will affect them most.

The recompense for so many risky ploys to sully a man’s career and reputation is not that the scheme ultimately falls apart or exposes Kim and Jimmy instead. It’s that it crashes into their earlier grand scheme, the source of their blood money, that quickly becomes that much bloodier. There is great surprise, rich irony, and dark poetry in that.

Six episodes remain of Better Call Saul, half a dozen more outings to firmly and finally resolve how what’s left of the life of Jimmy McGill runs headlong into the life of Saul Goodman. In the moment when the barriers between those two personas tumbles down for good, there lies a firm reminder. The “magic man”, whom viewers know and love from his entertaining skullduggery on Breaking Bad, arrived at that colorful existence from a soul-shaking path -- one that always comes with a trade-off, a complication, and a price