Better Call Saul finale recap: Season 5, episode 10: 'Something Unforgivable'

There's a sense of dread hanging over this season finale of Better Call Saul, and not just because we've got a fear hangover from last week's confrontation with Lalo Salamanca. The next time we sit down for a premiere of this show, it'll also be for the last time. There's only one season left, just 10 short episodes of television to fully transform Jimmy McGill into the scheming, slimy, venal attorney we knew (and couldn't help loving) on Breaking Bad. How will he get there? What's going to happen?

All in good time. For now, we can let go of that breath we were holding: Kim slides the chain lock into place, and she and Jimmy watch from the window as Lalo drives away. Jimmy retrieves his phone and asks Mike—still waiting on the line—if he heard everything.

"I heard enough to know she saved your ass," Mike says. Then he clicks off, and when Kim asks who was on the phone, Jimmy tells her the truth: about the desert, the gang, the gun to his head, and the man who saved his life.

He waits until they've checked into a hotel for the night to ask a question of his own: "Am I bad for you?"

It's an interesting way to put it, and the confused expression on Kim's face says it all—as if the real issue here is not that Jimmy's dealings with the cartel nearly got him killed, twice, but that he got Kim involved. "You crossed a line. You're not gonna do it again," she says, emphasizing the second sentence so that it sounds like she's stating the obvious, nevermind the fact that crossing lines is Jimmy's entire brand. But Kim really seems to believe that what happened was a one-off, terrifying but over, and something to move on from. Instead of letting Jimmy persuade her to take the day off and hide at the hotel, she goes to court and asks her friend in the public defender's office for more pro bono work. Not the easy stuff, either: she wants felonies. She wants juveniles. She wants, more than ever, to feel like she's making a difference.

She also doesn't want anyone telling her what to do or what's best for her—not Jimmy, but also and especially not Howard Hamlin, whom she runs into at the courthouse. Howard pulls Kim aside and tells her about how he offered Jimmy a job, and what happened afterward. He seems to think she'll be shocked. Instead, and maybe it's just because prostitutes and bowling balls are such small-time trouble compared to what she and Jimmy have just been through, or maybe because Howard is so earnest and self-serious about all this ("Actual prostitutes!") that it can't not be funny, she starts cracking up. He tells her she shouldn't have quit her job; she tells him he's being insulting. (And he is! Even if he means well, which he probably does, because the most frustrating thing about Howard—and this will come into play down the line—is that he's pompous and annoying but ultimately not a bad guy.)

While Kim goes to work, Jimmy goes to Mike's house in search of answers and also provides the episode's only moment of levity: "You didn't think I'd find your super-secret bat cave!"

Mike isn't happy to see Jimmy—he's coming from yet another unsuccessful attempt to get Gus to stop threatening Nacho's family and cut the poor guy loose before he gets killed—but when Jimmy breaks down with worry over Kim, Mike softens. Not a lot, but enough to give Jimmy some reassuring news: "Lalo Salamanca will die tonight."

This would come as a big surprise to Lalo, who is being greeted with applause and hugs at his home in Mexico. He's brought Nacho with him to meet the cartel's top brass, with the promise of a promotion if Don Eladio likes him. (Unspoken but clearly implied is that if Don Eladio doesn't like Nacho, Nacho will die—probably in Don Eladio's kidney-shaped pool, which has to be drained and deep-cleaned every other week because Don Eladio keeps murdering people in it.)

This is a good time to start getting anxious on Nacho's behalf, since not only does he have to meet with Don Eladio, but he also has to open the back gate of Lalo's compound in the middle of the night to let Gus Fring's assassins in. Nacho's got to be feeling pretty torn right now about where his loyalties lie; when he tells Don Eladio that he wants to be respected, independent, and not constantly looking over his shoulder, you know he's thinking about Gus holding a gun to his father's head.

Meanwhile, Jimmy gives Kim the good news, albeit leaving out the part where Lalo is going to die.

"It's over," she says.

"This time," he says.

"There's not gonna be a next time," she says with such confidence you almost believe her. And over dinner at their hotel, she and Jimmy move tentatively in the direction of normal. She tells him about Howard's annoying attempt to play the white knight—let's not forget that we know how Kim feels about being saved—and asks Jimmy how they could humiliate him next. The prostitutes and bowling balls were a good start, but what if they knocked him unconscious and shaved his head? Or…

And thus unfolds a nice, relaxing evening of Jim and Kimmy plotting to ruin Howard's life, one increasingly implausible plan at a time. Until later, much later, Kim says: "Or… what if Howard does something terrible."

Not terrible like murder, but terrible like misconduct—the kind of thing that would cause such a huge scandal at HHM, they'd have to go to extremes to manage it, including … wait for it … settling the Sandpiper case. Oh. OHHHHH. That case, the first and last one that Jimmy and Chuck ever worked on together, would mean a $2 million payday for Jimmy and Kim. Wouldn't that be nice? Kim could set up the pro bono practice of her dreams. They could buy a house! But, Jimmy says, it's impossible. They'd have to destroy Howard to do it. It's fine as a fantasy, but Kim wouldn't be okay with it.

"Wouldn't I?" Kim says—and then, just like Jimmy did to her in last season's finale, she flashes those double finger guns. S'all good, man.

This is where we leave behind our primary couple because the rest of the episode is all about what's happening south of the border. In the wee hours of the morning, Nacho goes out to let the assassins in—and finds Lalo awake and waiting, because hi, Lalo is like the ne plus ultra of the Guy Who Doesn't Sleep and it's frankly ridiculous that anyone thought they'd be able to sneak up on him in the middle of the night. Nacho manages to create a diversion (the incendiary uses of hot oil a repeating motif this season!) that distracts Lalo for long enough to open the gate and admit the waiting group of masked men. The last we see of Nacho is his shadow, gliding along the wall as he runs.

And then, of course, it all goes completely sideways, and we're just lucky that Tony Dalton is so good—in general, but also in this scene particularly—that it almost makes up for the credibility-straining notion that these men, these absolute buffoons, are the best and most effective killers that Gus Fring's money could buy. The entire operation unfolds in a series of completely avoidable errors in which the assassins kill everyone except their target (honestly! You had one job!), while Lalo escapes through a secret bathtub tunnel and then circles back to pick them off one by one. In the end, there's just one man standing… and one man missing. Lalo considers the empty table with two glasses of tequila sitting on it, untouched. And the last shot of the episode, and of the season, belongs to him: his mouth twisted in a determined sneer as he strides past the camera and into the night.

Whatever happens next, and whoever it happens to, it's going to be ugly.

And as the credits roll on this penultimate season of Better Call Saul, here's an interesting point: we didn't see Saul Goodman in "Something Unforgivable." Jimmy was very much his old self during a surprisingly small amount of screen time this week. Instead, we're left knowing what the characters don't: that Saul is lurking just out of sight, waiting in the wings, as is a tragedy terrible enough to make the transformation complete.

Like Mike Ehrmentraut says, we make choices, and the choices put us on a road. Here's to one last season of finding out where the road goes, and where it ends. And until then: To sleep, and those who need it.

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