Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Rock and Hard Place’
No show in television history has done death scenes with more panache than “Breaking Bad.” Think of Gus’s final moments, half of his face blown off after his nemesis, Hector Salamanca, detonated a bomb under his wheelchair. The slow and bloody departure of Walter White as he communicates sentimentally with his meth equipment. The demise of Hank Schrader at the hands of neo-Nazis in the desert, punctuated by a defiant f-bomb.
Finally “Better Call Saul” has contributed to this pantheon. Nacho Varga’s farewell in “Rock and Hard Place,” as the episode is so aptly named, was heartbreaking, tense, violent, sad, pathos and unforgettable. While on the run in Mexico, he decides the only way to save his father’s life is to dutifully return and “confession” to the Salamancas just before they kill him. Difficult task. But as with all of Nacho’s difficult assignments, he has no choice. And again, he delivers too much. Had he halfheartedly muttered the lie the Peruvian drug lords had charged him with the Lalo hit, the cloud of suspicion would have lingered over Gus.
So instead, Nacho acquits Gus by suggesting that the “chicken man” didn’t have the guts and deceit to arrange Lalo’s murder. What’s more, he continues, Gus saved Hector’s life by intervening when Nacho tried to kill Hector by exchanging his heart medication for sugar pills. (This is a nice, apologetic touch because it’s true.)
Nacho only strays far from the script when he snaps his zipper-bound hands and threatens to kill Don Bolsa just before committing suicide. Nacho wanted to show a modest degree of agency in a professional life dictated by a rotating group of murderous sociopaths. This was a pawn that said to a king, “I could kill you.”
Nacho removed the cutting handle from the zipper of the glass that Gus broke in the previous episode, which was in a garbage can in the office of the chicken farm. (The tip is that kaleidoscopic shot of Nacho’s face, as if the camera were shooting through glass into the trash.) The shard appears in the episode’s open sequence as the camera pans across the desert landscape where Nacho’s bullet-ridden body once lay, one of those bafflers that doesn’t make sense until the credits start rolling.
The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’
The prequel “Breaking Bad” returned for its final season on April 18.
In the run-up to his death, Nacho has to endure some final torments. These include hiding in an oil tanker, under a pool of oil, and getting beat up by Mike so that he looks pretty bruised when it’s show time. If Nacho experiences any joy in this episode, it is during the brief phone call with his father. He is relieved to learn that the man is still alive, or at least not a prisoner. And he can say goodbye.
Nacho has made some terrible life choices, but like Jesse Pinkman in “Breaking Bad”, he is punished too much for that. It’s hard to think of a single moment in his life, visible to viewers, that looked satisfying. When he was not being chased, threatened, shot or beaten, he was in a state of horrific fear or despair.
So a salute to Michael Mando, whose Nacho was a study in pent-up fear, a character who was bombarded with emotions only evidenced by superhuman efforts to control them. As a character, he can only express anger in the last seconds of his life, and it erupts from him like lava. It would have been great to see more of this great actor, but when you have to leave a show, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic and poignant ending.
On the side of our story, Jimmy and Kim steal Howard’s car as part of their ongoing campaign to scam him as a drug user. Once again, Huell Babineaux (Lavell Crawford) is hired to grab a bag and help make a copy of Howard’s car keys. When Jimmy tells this plan to Kim, “I’ve got it. Valet scam” — it has an aphrodisiac-like effect on hair. She suddenly falls in love.
It’s just a small hint that she’s headed for a state of mind that could be described as criminally rotten. This is especially evident in her conversation with Assistant District Attorney Suzanne Ericsen (Julie Pearl), who tries to convince her that Jimmy should talk about his presumed deceased client, Lalo, and help prosecutors and police solve the part of the crime. Mexican cartel that still exists. in Albuquerque.
Ericsen seems to believe that Kim is more susceptible than Jimmy to moral persuasion. wrong. When Kim relays this conversation to Jimmy, she’s playing it all but fair.
“Do you want to be a friend of the cartel,” she says when Jimmy asks her for advice, “or do you want to be a rat?”
Interesting way to frame it.
Keep in mind that even though this show was off the air for two years, the season 5 ending and the season 6 opening come within a few days of each other. Jimmy barely lost the sunburn he got when he trudged $7 million across the desert at the end of Season 5. And before that silly message came, Kim begged Jimmy to rethink the whole idea of working for drug lords south of the border.
So, what explains Kim’s radical transformation in just a few days? One possible answer is money. Maybe she got a glimpse of Jimmy’s share of the bail and changed her mind. Keep in mind that she believes Ruin Howard’s plan will net Jimmy and her a few million if it forces a class-action lawsuit to settle. She plans to use that money to open a law firm for the needy, which is a very noble idea. Maybe Kim is going to make a quirky kind of Faustian bargain, or she already has. She can cheat, cheat and even incite criminals, as long as the result is that she gets to defend poor people in court.
Consider the current trajectory of Kim’s terrible path and you can’t help but assume she’ll be in the meth game in a few episodes. Or she becomes a cartel lawyer. Or anything else that is very much against the law.
Odds and Ends
Shout out to Gordon Smith, who did an excellent job of writing and directing this episode. Special thanks to whoever came up with the look of the garage where Mike and Nacho have their talk and last drink. It’s ominous and perfect.
Speaking of grim touches: Nacho eats his last meal with plastic kitchenware†
Where is Lalo? And when does he show up and ruin Gus’s story by producing the “evidence” he mentions at the end of Episode 1?
So much for the theory that Nacho survives in the “Breaking Bad” timeline because Saul mentions “Ignacio” in season 2 of that show. Was that just a red herring, or did the writers have another plan to rectify that?
Can anyone help Your Faithful Recapper understand how Gus Fring explains to the cartel how he caught Nacho? He can plausibly say that he was just as eager to grab the man, as he is a suspect in the murder plot against Lalo. But Gus has no agents in Mexico, at least the cartel knows that. Doesn’t this all seem… weird, even if Nacho shows up bruised?
Please share your thoughts on these and any other details Your Faithful Recapper missed or overlooked. Or just didn’t fit the cruelly limited word count allotted to him.