Better Call Saul's midseason finale was a short con on its audience

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https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-r...ution-1353680/

"Though Lalo returns to Albuquerque in the teaser, for a long time it seems as if the episode is just going to concern itself with D-Day for Jimmy, Kim, and Howard," says Alan Sepinwall. "It is all fun and games, with Dave Porter conjuring up some of his jauntiest caper music of the series’ entire run, Jimmy and Kim both running around a lot, the revelation that Howard’s 'private eye,' Genidowski, has really been working for Jimmy this whole time. TV writers like to refer to overly complicated jokes or story ideas as “sweaty.” Between Jimmy and Kim’s sprinting and Howard suffering the effects of Dr. Caldera’s drug, the whole scheme is both figuratively and literally sweaty, even though it all works out as planned. Howard swallows the bait about Jimmy bribing Judge Casimiro and makes an embarrassing scene during the mediation, and the contact high he received from the tainted photos only makes things look worse. It’s to the creative team’s credit that they treat Howard as smart enough to recognize every single move Kim and Jimmy made after the fact, but as an exasperated Cliff points out, it’s too late to matter. The damage is done, and they have to take Rich’s deal ASAP. If you’re a fan of Jimmy and Kim schemes, if you’re eager to see a smug rich guy like Howard taken down a peg, and/or if you’re rooting for Sandpiper plaintiffs like Irene (Jimmy’s very first elder law client from early in Season One) to get paid while they’re still alive to enjoy the money, then this all plays out incredibly well. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about the state of Jimmy’s soul — and even more about Kim’s — then there’s not a lot of pleasure to be taken from seeing the con go so smoothly."

ALSO:

• Writer-director Thomas Schnauz on Better Call Saul's two worlds converging: "Jimmy and Kim are very smart cookies and we needed their plan to go off pretty perfectly," he says. "They needed to succeed. But just like in Breaking Bad, when Walt and Jesse did the great train robbery, something bad had to happen. In that episode, the kid on the motorbike paid the price. In this one, we struggled a lot. We knew at the end of this that their plan was going to succeed, but somehow something bad was going to happen. We thought maybe Kim gets disbarred or gets caught or something slips up with the plan, but every time we talked about that, it felt wrong. The more we talked about it, it just felt like the two worlds coming together at this moment — Howard coming to confront them and then Lalo coming to use Jimmy and Kim for his next step to get to Gus and the SuperLab — was right. How that balance works out, there’s no magic formula. We just break the story, plot it out and those two separate storylines came together when they did."
• When prepping the season, Schnauz didn't expect the midseason finale to end the way it did: "No, we didn’t," he says. "I mean, at the beginning of the season, if you’d asked me when we started breaking it. I didn’t know. I probably could have guessed that he wouldn’t make it, but I didn’t know how."
• Patrick Fabian defends Howard Hamlin: "I don’t think Howard has done anything necessarily wrong," he tells Variety. "That includes the corn fields (shorthand for demoting Kim to doc review). The only wrong thing he did was really not standing up to Chuck and doing Chuck’s dirty work in the earlier part of the series. Other than that, I think you can make a case that Howard is acting in the best interest of not only his firm and himself, but also in the best interests of Jimmy and Kim. On the internet, some people have a lot of sympathy for Howard, and then other people remind me quickly that he screwed Jimmy out of his money. For some people, it’s unforgivable. I think Howard’s a good guy, and I think he’s tried to do his best. But there’s absolutely a case to be made that some of the things he did helped push Jimmy into his becoming Saul."
• Did Fabian prepare on weekends with his roommates Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn?: "Yeah, they helped me make sure I was stone cold on this stuff," he says. "We would run the lines a lot, which is always our hallmark of being stone cold and rehearsed. We came in for a special rehearsal on a Saturday because we wanted to do a blocking rehearsal with camera and everything else. So we walked through it and talked through it, but didn’t really do much acting or work on it. It was more mechanics. But on Monday, the day that we did it, wham! So Rhea and Bob helped a lot in the weeks leading up for memorization, but in terms of what was going on, they were hands off."
• Rhea Seehorn says "I audibly gasped reading the script": "Because I was just kind of oh, this is dangerous. Oh, my God. This is going to be bad," she says. "Oh, my gosh. Oh. What’s going to happen, and then, it’s written in the same kind of language that you witnessed it as far as like it’s a regular sentence and then it just cut off, you know, like that pfft and you’re like wait, what. Then he falls and hits his head. It’s brutal."
• One of the masterful strokes of “Plan and Execution” is that it’s not built on mistakes
• The staging of the final scene's entire sequence is masterful, particularly the device of the candle
• Better Call Saul fans expressed shock on Twitter over the midseason finale: "I fully understand why Bob Odenkirk had a heart attack filming this season. Christ," tweeted one viewer.
• 15 details on Better Call Saul's final season you might have missed
• Bob Odenkirk spoiled the midseason finale in a tweet posted on Dec. 7