Better Call Saul' Season 6

The second episode of Better Call Saul season 6 features a blast from the past. Here is a reminder of how Saul knows Betsy and Craig Kettleman.

As he descends further into “Saul Goodman,” Jimmy takes on more risks than he should. A recap of 'Wine and Roses,' the first episode of season six of ...

• A hilarious exchange between Wachtell and Jimmy when Jimmy implies that the club refusing Saul Goodman as a member is antisemitic. In “Wine and Roses,” we learn that Kim suggests that Saul would drive that kind of car — flashy but American. His current ride is a sputtering brown Ford Taurus, which could be understood either as a show of humility to his clients or a scrappy, doing-it-for-the-little-guy self-image he wants to protect. Crisis turns into opportunity for Jimmy, who gets to make a scene at the club (“It’s wall-to-wall mayonnaise in here”) while huffing his way into the locker room anyway. (Not sure what to make of that dog-eared copy of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine other than noting that high-end bathroom reading like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass got Walter White nabbed.) As the camera follows a Saul Goodman standee into the dumpster — shades of Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas there — the “Rosebud” emblem is not a snow globe but a Zafiro Añejo tequila bottle stopper. The bottle stopper symbolizes their relationship — the terrible fate of which we’ll spend these half-seasons learning — and its foundation in a renegade spirit and a shared hostility toward the elite. Continuing a tradition of flash-forward, black-and-white scenes to kick off a new season, tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul — the first of a seven-episode half-season, bifurcated just like Breaking Bad — opens with an homage to Citizen Kane, which is nothing if not a show of supreme (and earned) confidence.

Better Call Saul Season 6's second episode lays down the path Jimmy and Kim will follow while trying to destroy Howard. We recap "Carrot and Stick."

As if things were not tense enough, Mike receives a phone call from Nacho. Mike answers the phone, says a couple of words, and offers the phone to Gus. Nacho wants to speak to the big boss, and that conversation could seal the fate of everyone involved with the cartel. Nacho finds out the truth just as the Salamanca Twins (Daniel Moncada and Luis Moncada) get to his hotel with an army of goons. Nacho shoots his way out of the hotel, helped by the fact the Twins want to capture him alive. To make matters worse, the final scene of “Carrot and Stick” shows a mysterious car following the two after leaving the Kettlemans' workplace. Kim calls up a friend of hers in front of the Kettlemans and blatantly threatens to expose their new white-collar scheme. Nacho already has a fake identity that he can use if escaping to South America, so that’s all the cartel need to think they know the truth. Fortunately for Jimmy, Kim is right beside him, and instead of a carrot, she has a big stick to push the Kettlemans in the intended direction. It could also be that Saul’s previous involvement with the cartel will come back to haunt him as he gets dragged back into the Fring vs. In Better Call Saul’s first season, Jimmy gets in touch with a couple of potential clients, Betsy (Julie Ann Emery) and Craig Kettleman (Jeremy Shamos). Craig has been embezzling money from his job with the help of his wife, and Jimmy offers to represent them. Kim is ruthless in the final scene, surprising both the audience and Jimmy. It’s clear that Better Call Saul’s last season is exploring how Jimmy’s repeated mistakes may have robbed Kim of her moral compass, and now the crooked lawyer needs to face the monster he created. Unfortunately, the Kettlemans lost their money, and are now stealing pennies from the elderly, happy to get any amount of dollars they can while pocketing a portion of their clients' tax returns. The fake case must also be related to Howard's history as a lawyer, and the actor they hire needs to casually mention that Howard is addicted to cocaine.

Gus and the cartel chase Nacho, Kim and Jimmy pursue Howard — and everyone is conning someone.

Your Faithful Recapper wanted to run the number on the license plates of the car, then remembered that the show is fictional. It’s a crime Mike feels implicated in because he was on the take when he was on the same force. It’s at least possible that the same sniper has been instructed by Mike to kill Gus and Tyrus in the event that Mike is killed. And that he doesn’t know how to “run the number” on anything. But Jimmy and Kim apparently intuit that the Kettlemans will double cross Jimmy, then head straight to the office of Clifford Main and attempt to enlist him as their attorney. Precisely what that means is a mystery, at least to Your Faithful Recapper. He might be referring to the sniper set up outside of the office, with whom Mike is in radio contact. Speaking of bluffing, on to the Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler frame-up show, where “Operation Ruin Howard Hamlin’s Life” is entering Phase 2. But he knows that he poses a threat to Gus, and maybe there’s a way to set up a blackmail contraption that would keep a sword over Gus’s head. The sequence begins when Nacho realizes that a man across the courtyard has been hired by Gus’s underlings to keep an eye on him — time to flee. Mike ruefully adds a brown envelope to the switched-in safe, and it’s unclear, at least to Your Faithful Recapper, whether he knows that the documents include a bank statement with the phone number to Motel Ocotillo. When Don Bolsa later opens this envelope, Nacho appears to have only a few minutes left to live. Much of this superb and stressful episode, “Carrot and Stick,” is a study in damage control, overseen by a man who seems uncharacteristically ruffled and uncertain about what to do. The cartel wants Nacho taken alive — well, the Salamancas certainly do — so that he can be tortured into a confession.

He becomes Saul Goodman as a way to escape the smothering shadow of his deceased brother and esteemed lawyer Charles McGill (Michael McKean). He dates and then ...

Since the Better Call Saul already introduced us to a colorized scene from the Breaking Bad timeline with the "Quite A Ride" episode, there are plenty of reasons to see how the opening scene of Season 6 follows the timeline merging of the Season 6 promo photo. It most poignantly appears on the show in episode 9 of the show's fifth season, entitled "Bad Choice Road," when Kim quits her cushy job as partner and head of Schweikart & Cokely's banking division but makes sure to double back to her office to retrieve the bottle stopper she kept in her desk drawer. For the first five minutes of the episode, we're greeted by movers emptying what appears to be a palatial estate once owned by Saul. They clean out his massive bathroom equipped with golden shower walls and an obscene golden toilet, load his 1997 Cadillac DeVille made famous in Breaking Bad on the back of a truck to be taken away, and removes every piece of furniture not nailed down. Mike Ehrmantraut, Gus Fring, Huell Babineaux, and a bevy of other Breaking Bad characters have their stories fleshed out more on Better Call Saul than on Breaking Bad. But, while Breaking Bad characters enter the Better Call Saul universe, rarely do the two shows' timelines converge. We've seen it all in Better Call Saul, but now it's time to see how it finds its way into the Breaking Bad timeline that created it. Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould already confirmed America's favorite meth lab coworkers, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), would be reprising their Breaking Bad roles this season.