Television Review

BETTER CALL SAUL, 6.5 — ‘Black and Blue’

While business booms for Jimmy, the vise tightens on the cat-and-mouse game between Gus and Lalo.

I love Better Call Saul’s cryptic cold opens (like rain hitting a shard of glass in a parched desert in “Rock and Hard Place”), which foreshadow something the story circles back to when you’ve forgotten it. In “Black and Blue”, that was an unseen man creating a Lucite block containing a wooden slide rule, engraved with ‘In Liebe… Deine Jungs’ (‘With Love… Your Boys’) and the manufacturer’s name Voelker. Your guess was as good as mine at that point, but we’ll get back to that…

This episode was primarily about people on edge and feeling distracted. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) can’t sleep after hearing Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is perhaps still alive, so Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) catches her working early in the morning after being unable to get some sleep. He confesses he also doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in their home now, as Lalo knows where they live and already paid them a nerve-shredding visit recently.