Better Call Saul S6E1: “Wine and Roses” Is the Beginning of the End

The following article contains spoilers for Better Call Saul S6E1 (“Wine and Roses”), written by Peter Gould and directed by Michael Morris.

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The much-anticipated final season of Better Call Saul is here, and like many fans, I was expecting the traditional black-and-white Gene opener in the Season 6 premiere episode. We were teased briefly with a black-and-white image of Saul’s ties floating around, but it quickly turned to color and I realized that the cold open of “Wine and Roses” would not only subvert expectations, it would set the tone for the final season in an incredibly interesting and detailed way. Of course I missed Gene, but I’m sure we will see him later on (and, if my prayers are answered, maybe we’ll even get a standalone Gene episode). After all, the story of Jimmy McGill is not just the story of Jimmy McGill; it’s the story of Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman and of Saul’s transformation into Gene. If Gene is the final chapter in Jimmy’s story, the show can’t end without revealing his fate. 

The opening montage of “Wine and Roses” is set after the events of Breaking Bad (or at least after Saul departed for Omaha to start his new life as Gene Takavic). I personally have been dying to see what Saul Goodman’s abode looked like and I was not disappointed. As the house is being cleaned out, we are taken on a tour of Saul’s home, which is somehow even gaudier and more absurd than I imagined. It’s a massive house, complete with the most ostentatious decor I have ever seen. Everywhere you look there is something to assault the eye: Greco-Roman columns and statuary and wall murals that belong in the palace of an emperor, not in the home of a sketchy lawyer in Albuquerque.

But that’s the point, right? Saul Goodman built his own personal empire (and was as much in the empire business as Walter White was), and his home was his sanctuary where he could surround himself with obscene displays of his wealth. I mean, the man had a gold toilet. You’d be hard-pressed to find an object that better encapsulates American greed, vanity, and wastefulness. This house is Saul Goodman in his final form. While we have not yet reached him in the Better Call Saul timeline, even though he has become Saul professionally, in his heart, he is still Jimmy McGill (if only hanging onto him by a thread at this point).

The song that plays over the opening is “Days of Wine and Roses” by the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, and it’s worth noting that the phrase “wine and roses” (from which both the song and the episode take their title) originally comes from a late 19th-century poem by English poet Ernest Dowson. Dowson’s poem takes its title (“Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam”) from one of the Roman lyric poet Horace’s Odes, and the title translates to “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long.” The phrase “wine and roses” has entered popular culture as a way to describe a period of happiness and prosperity, but (as both Horace and Dowson tell us) that period is always fleeting.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
– “Vita Summa Brevis” by Ernest Dowson.

Saul Goodman’s days of wine and roses have passed him by; the dream is dead. Now he’s living the days of dough and frosting as Gene in Omaha, longing for the days of technicolor ties and golden toilets. What the opening of “Wine and Roses” reminds us is that not only is Breaking Bad-era Saul coming but that he’s already gone. It’s a reminder that all the hubris and excess on display in that house is what will get him in the end. It’s what turns him from Saul to Gene. So while Gene isn’t there physically in those opening minutes, we can’t help but think of him. We know that’s what Saul is now. 

I spent more time than I care to admit poring over the details of Saul’s home, and I did so because I was looking for pieces of Kim Wexler. The question on every Better Call Saul fan’s mind while waiting for this final season is that of Kim’s fate. The conclusion I came to from what we saw of the house is that, at some point, it was the shared home of Mr. and Mrs. Goodman. While there was no real trace of Kim in the objects and decor of the home, one thing did stand out to me: in the bathroom, there is a mural of a god (presumably Zeus, knowing Saul) and on the opposite wall, above the massive bathtub of every woman’s dreams, was a mural of a goddess. That is a his-and-hers bathroom if ever I’ve seen one, and it (along with one other very specific detail) makes me think that Kim once shared that home with Jimmy before whatever happened happened (because I don’t think they are together by the end).

The other thing that reeks of Kim Wexler is the final thing we see in the montage: when a dresser is being loaded onto a truck, the Zafiro Añejo bottle stopper falls out of one of the drawers and into the gutter. It’s the same souvenir that Kim took in “Switch” (S2E1) after she pulled her first scam as Giselle St. Claire. It’s also the only thing she took from her office after quitting Schweikart & Cokely in “Bad Choice Road” (S5E9). That item held a deep significance for Kim, and the fact that it was in a piece of furniture inside that house leads me to believe that Kim once resided there as Mrs. Goodman. The fact that she left it behind… well, that has a lot of interesting implications I’m not prepared to get into without more information (but I will die on the “Kim is still alive” hill).

There are many other items of note in the house, and going through them is something of a walk down memory lane—Jimmy McGill’s Greatest Hits, if you will. Mounted above the entrance to Saul’s enormous walk-in closet, we see a massive gold replica of the JFK half-dollar (with JFK facing left, of course)—a call-back to the coin scam that Jimmy and Marco ran in Cicero in “Marco” (S1E10). We also see several pairs of the fancy walking shoes that Jimmy gifted poor Irene Landry in “Fall” (S3E9), and I still contend that Jimmy’s treatment of Mrs. Landry is the worst thing he’s ever done. (Yes, I’m including accessory after the fact to a child’s murder in this and, no, I will not be taking any questions at this time.) We see a collection of beanie babies, presumably meant for the court administrator who collects them and who Jimmy successfully (“Mijo” – S1E2) and unsuccessfully (“Rebecca” – S2E5) bribes. We see the guitar that Jimmy extorted from the music store owners during a Slippin’ Jimmy-style scam in ‘Slip” (S3E8). We see a box with a few cell phones and CC Mobile bouncy balls (“Talk” – S4E4) as well as a copy of the Olivia Bitsui photograph that Mesa Verde stole their logo from (“Wexler v. Goodman” – S5E6). (I’m sure there are more things I missed, but watching screeners on my dirty laptop screen isn’t the most effective way to catch small details.) These things all serve as fun easter eggs for fans of the show, but they serve a larger purpose, too. Even in Saul Goodman’s palace, he kept small pieces of Jimmy McGill. He never fully let go of Jimmy, and perhaps that was because, when he is with Kim (no matter what name he is using or what messy thing they are doing together), he is always Jimmy. Or maybe he’s just a hoarder.

One thing of note that we see outside the house (besides the two-story gold colonnade that makes my eyes bleed looking at it), is a large sign for SAUL GOODMAN & ASSOCIATES (although most of the word “associates” is missing and you only see the A, the second S, and the O). The missing portion of the ASSOCIATES part of the sign is telling on its own, but it’s also interesting to note that this is not the same sign as the one that appears on his office in Breaking Bad. This one looks like it belongs on a nice (or nice enough) office space, not the dumpy strip mall space Saul was working out of. I’m interested to see this other office space and what Saul Goodman once was. Given what we see later on in S6E1 and the way Kim is trying to shape and mold Jimmy, I suspect it’s more of the Saul Goodman that Kim envisions as opposed to the one we end up with.

Which brings us to the episode itself, which picks up with Nacho Varga right where we left him at the end of Season 5 finale (“Something Unforgivable”). After letting Gus Fring’s mercenaries into Lalo Salamanca’s compound, Nacho flees the scene and runs north. He’s got no idea where he is or what Gus’s plan is to pull him out (if there even is one), but he gets a call from Tyrus informing him that Lalo is dead and to head to a motel where he’ll be safe until they can extract him. It’s all very sketchy, and Nacho clearly doesn’t trust any of them—well, except for Mike Ehrmantraut, but Mike’s not picking up the phone.

Of course, we know that Lalo is very much alive, having bested the mercs Gus sent and ensured that everyone would think he was dead. Not only did he have the final living mercenary report his death before he killed him in the Season 5 finale, in “Wine and Roses” we see that Lalo has an even more macabre solution to ensure that his death is believed not just by Gus but by the cartel and the federales, too. We see an injured Lalo visit a nearby couple, Sylvia and Mateo, who he obviously has a preexisting relationship with considering he helped Mateo get his teeth fixed.

At first, this whole scene seems odd. Why do we care about some brand new character’s dental problems? Why is Lalo gonna kill these two nice people with half a pair of scissors? But later, it all makes sense. As Mateo goes to shave off his mountain man beard (or are we calling that a quarantine beard these days?), Lalo implores him to keep the mustache and soul patch—the same facial hair that Lalo currently has. So when later on in S6E1 we see the crime scene at Lalo’s and discover a burned body in the kitchen that everyone (including the Salamanca Cousins) thinks is Lalo, we know who it really is. It’s a bit of a long con to cover this guy’s dental work so that one day he could have a body to pass off as his own, but Lalo Salamanca is the embodiment of chaos so I suppose I’ll allow it.

And this is just the kind of thing that makes him such a perfect adversary for Gus: they couldn’t be more different—Gus is the picture of control while Lalo’s chaotic energy can be felt from space—but they are both brilliant men who think ten steps ahead. There is always a plan with these guys, they both think on their feet and can adapt to problems in real-time, and they are both absolutely relentless. Watching them go head to head is a delight, and as a viewer you can feel Gus’s anxiety and tension because he knows it, too. This is not crazy Tuco or the bloodthirsty Salamanca cousins; it’s not even Hector, who would also fly off the handle when something set him off. Lalo is a different type of Salamanca: his blood runs as hot as the rest, but he keeps those impulses in check and always uses his brain first. That’s what makes him so dangerous. Gus knows he can outsmart the rest of them, but with Lalo, he’s not so sure.

Which is why Gus doesn’t believe the reports that Lalo is dead, even though everyone (the cartel and all the Salamancas included) do believe it. The fact that all his mercs ended up dead makes him suspicious and he just intuitively knows that Lalo got the best of him. Even Mike, who is always one to think through every possible outcome, thinks it’s completely possible that Lalo is dead, but he still offers to go down there, confirm it, and bring Nacho back. Of course, Mike quickly realizes that Gus has no intention of pulling Nacho out and it doesn’t sit well with him.

If there’s one thing we know about Mike Ehrmantraut, it’s that he’s a man of his word and he only has respect for people who also keep their word. Any possible paternal feelings or pity he may have for Nacho aside, Mike knows that Nacho did every single thing that Gus asked of him, and he doesn’t at all like that Gus is seemingly not going to keep up his end. “Loyalty goes both ways,” Mike tells Gus, but it’s not just about Nacho. Because if Gus is willing to burn Nacho, Mike knows he’d have no problem doing the same thing to him. If the man won’t honor his promises when they get in the way of his goals, he can’t be trusted, and Mike can’t do business with a man like that. He stops just short of giving Gus a piece of his mind, but Gus knows without him saying that Mike’s not happy with how the Nacho situation is being handled. He knows Mike will go along for the moment, but he’s rapidly approaching his breaking point.

As for Kim and Jimmy, we pick up with them where they left off as well. The Season 5 finale showed us that Kim is willing to go much further down the bad choice road than many believed. There are a lot of Better Call Saul fans who still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Kim is some sort of victim of Jimmy’s schemes—that she is so blinded by her love for him that she lets him drag her down into the dirt with him, but Better Call Saul consistently shows us that this isn’t at all the case. While some may have been as shocked as Jimmy was that Kim is dead serious about pulling a scam on Howard Hamlin, I was not. I was, to put it mildly, absolutely delighted, because frankly I am sick of the “Kim as a victim” takes—almost as sick of them as Kim is herself. And if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Rhea Seehorn herself, who spoke about Kim’s agency in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

I was very happy to see that Peter Gould continued to shepherd the season in a way that respects Kim’s autonomy and her agency as well. She’s not just in reaction to Jimmy, and never has been… If you think you know Kim, you don’t know all of Kim. But probably the even harder thing to wrestle with is holding opposing thoughts about a person in your head at one time. She is everything you thought. It isn’t just the side of Robin Hood do-gooding always, either, which I think people would like to assign her shenanigans to. There’s quite a bit of ego and quite a bit of God complex happening.
– Rhea Seehorn

Ego and God complex you say? Sounds like quite a few of the men in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. 

If you really look back and think about all the times the men on this show have spoken to Kim like she has no agency in her own life and how she reacts to it, there is a very obvious pattern: some man in a position of power talks down to Kim and tells her what to do, then Kim gets her hackles up and makes some sort of morally gray decision. One of the first times we saw Kim seriously break bad is in “Nailed” (S2E9), when Chuck forced her to confront Jimmy’s forgery of the Mesa Verde documents which led to her getting her first big client. Chuck tells her all the details (which of course he gets 100% correct) about Jimmy’s scam and that she has no choice but to go to Kevin Wachtell at Mesa Verde to disclose it. One look at Kim’s face tells you all you need to know about how she feels about being told what to do and what her choices are. Chuck even goes so far as to tell Jimmy that he’s “ruined this fine young woman,” and it’s all too much for Kim to take.

So what does she do? She knows without knowing that Chuck is right about Jimmy, but she throws it all back in his face, tells him that he made a mistake and that she pities him (and you just know no one has ever spoken to Chuck like this his entire life, which makes it that much more satisfying). Then, instead of doing “the right thing” (because Chuck—as condescending and irritating as he is—is not wrong about what she’s legally obligated to do), Kim decides to go all in to help make sure Jimmy doesn’t get caught. She proves to herself that she did have a choice—it just wasn’t the one anyone (including Jimmy) expected her to make.

We see this play out over and over again. There are more times than I can count in which Howard Hamlin has disrespected Kim (and we will get to Howard soon enough), but I think it’s interesting to look at smaller moments, For example, even though Rich Schweikart never really mistreated her, she initially didn’t take the job at S&C because she didn’t want to be under the thumb of and in debt to another version of Howard. When she finally did come to S&C as a partner, things were good for a while until Rich told her she had to drop her PD work and deal with a Mesa Verde problem that Kevin wanted Kim to deal with personally. 

I don’t know how anyone can watch the whole issue of Everett Acker refusing to leave his house in Tucumcari playing out over the course of Season 5 and come away from it thinking that Kim is anything but fully in charge of her own decisions (for better or worse). In “The Guy For This” (S5E3), Kim is angry that Rich pulled her away from her PD work to deal with an angry old man, she’s angry that Kevin is treating her like an errand girl when she has an entire staff to deal with these things. And then there’s Acker himself who truly cuts her deep by presuming to know exactly who she is: some rich lawyer who pretends to be nice and does charity work to make themself sleep better at night. When Kim goes back to try and help him, she is actually honest with him about her background and shows him that she wants the best possible outcome for him, and he still thinks that she’s playing games with him—that she’s some insincere corporate shill.

To me, that’s the moment where it should be crystal clear to everyone that Jimmy McGill really has nothing to do with who Kim Wexler is or isn’t. Whether it was choosing to support Jimmy to keep Mesa Verde, overworking herself and ending up in a car accident, running playful scams with Jimmy, or getting her hands truly dirty to effect the outcome she wanted from the Mesa Verde/Tucumcari mess, these choices were always Kim’s. This isn’t some sort of Stockholm Syndrome situation; Jimmy is Kim’s partner in crime. When it comes to brainstorming the perfect scam, they are equals. They play off each other and each brings something to the table. And as we begin to learn in “Wine and Roses,” Kim may actually have more of a stomach for it than Jimmy does, because she wants to take Hamlin down bad.

Kim and Howard have a long, acrimonious history. For a long time, during her many years at HHM, she was grateful to him and the firm for putting her through law school and she saw him as a mentor—someone aspirational. But the longer she worked at HHM without moving up the ranks, the more she was disrespected by Howard. In what I think was an excellent choice by the Better Call Saul writers, none of Howard’s disrespect toward Kim has anything to do with her gender; it’s not some sort of completely misogynistic boy’s club over there (although that’s occasionally the vibe when Chuck and Howard are sipping their scotch and chortling). No, Howard treats Kim like trash just because he wants to and he can. He punishes her for things that aren’t her fault, he takes out his aggravations with Jimmy on her, and he doesn’t show her the respect she has earned and that she deserves.

Because Howard is just kind of an asshole! He’s not an evil man. He’s not a bad person deep down. He’s just a rich elitist prick, and Kim has become consumed with the idea of taking him down several pegs. Even Jimmy is shocked at the extent she’s willing to go to, and while the Hamlin scam is ultimately about getting Sandpiper to settle early so Jimmy can get his multimillion-dollar payout, it’s clearly not all about the money for Kim. She wants the money, sure, but she wants Howard to suffer while they get it. We’re starting to see some of that ego and God complex Seehorn mentions come out here, but it doesn’t end there.

I think my favorite part of “Wine and Roses” (besides the opener) is the scene where Jimmy meets Kim for dinner at a Mexican restaurant (which just so happens to be called El Camino). Kim is currently working with a juvenile client who got totally railroaded by his rich friend, who committed armed robbery and then blamed it all on Kim’s client (who knew absolutely nothing about it). You can practically taste Kim’s disgust for wealthy people who bully others with their money as she explains the situation to Jimmy, and yet she tells him it was one of the best days of her (professional) life. Kim loves to fight for the underdog—it’s what all the PD work is about, after all—but if she gets to stick it to some rich assholes in the process, all the better. We know that Kim grew up poor, and in moments like these, we can see how her childhood has shaped her views on class and wealth. 

And speaking of sticking it to some rich asshole, Kim is not done talking about the Hamlin scam (even though Jimmy very much wishes she was). As she continues to press it, we see that it’s Jimmy who is going along with it for Kim and not the other way around. It’s never been more clear that Kim is fully in charge of her own morally questionable choices. Mrs. Goodman has arrived, and she also has a lot to say about who and what Saul Goodman should be.

Jimmy is surprised to hear that Kim has some thoughts about what kind of car he should be driving and what kind of office he should have. She suggests a showy American-made car (and obviously we are all impatiently waiting for Saul’s white Caddy to make its first appearance in the Better Call Saul present-day timeline). She also suggests—and I say “suggests” even though, to Jimmy, a so-called suggestion from Kim is essentially a command and she knows it—that his office be eye-catching—“a cathedral of justice”—which is a far cry from the strip mall dump office but may be an apt way to describe whatever office the sign we saw in the opener came from. As Kim pushes Jimmy to brainstorm the Hamlin scam further, he indulges her (“what’s the harm in listening?”) and the camera angle changes to an exterior shot of the restaurant. We can’t hear what Kim and Jimmy are plotting, but we can see them through the window, which has bars on it—a not-so-subtle hint that Kim and Jimmy are playing a dangerous game.

Now, never in a million years would I have expected step one of the Hamlin plan to be planting (fake) cocaine in his locker at the country club, but the whole thing is just so perfect because when you think about it, Howard Hamlin is exactly the type of guy who would have a secret coke habit. Kim and Jimmy pull their Bonnie and Clyde routine, with Kim as a lookout watching Howard and Cliff Main play a round of golf while Jimmy makes his way into the club as a prospective member going on a tour. Things start to go off the rails when Kevin Wachtell sees Jimmy (now going as Saul Goodman) on a tour with the membership director.

Kevin despises Jimmy/Saul, and with good reason since he did make his life a living hell during the whole Tucumcari mess when Saul represented Acker. Kevin also made it clear to Kim that he was disappointed in her choice of partner and straight-up told her she could do better—and do I need to say any more about how Kim feels about comments like that? Suffice it to say, Kevin is not a fan, and Jimmy and Kim feel the same, so when Kevin pulls the manager aside and basically tells him to blackball Jimmy, he’s not having it. There was a brief moment where it seemed like Jimmy was going to leave and go back to the drawing board, but (much like Kim) he just couldn’t let Kevin’s elitist attitude stand. He couldn’t let him win, so he went back and made a whole big scene about how it was the Jewish surname “Goodman” that turned the club off.

It’s played for laughs here, and it’s done well (because Bob Odenkirk is a genius with flawless comedic timing), but country club antisemitism is a very real problem that has been around for a very long time. By accusing the club (and Kevin personally) of being antisemitic, Jimmy automatically gets the upper hand. Jimmy knows that even a whiff of discrimination would tarnish the reputation of the club and all its members, but he underestimates Kevin a bit. Kevin isn’t the type who really cares about societal pressures or (and I am loath to use the term because it’s lost all semblance of its original meaning) “cancel culture”—he doesn’t appear scared to be labeled an antisemite because he knows that Jimmy isn’t even Jewish and his reasons for wanting him blackballed have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that he’s a scammer. In fact, Kevin has to be held back from physically assaulting Jimmy in public. Of course, all of this works to Jimmy’s benefit, and he’s able to make his way into the men’s locker room, plant the baby powder/cocaine in Hamlin’s locker, and wait around until Cliff Main sees it.

Because that’s the play: Jimmy and Kim need Cliff to see Howard as a liability and want to settle Sandpiper quickly. If they can just get Cliff to believe that Howard has a drug problem, it’s enough to damage his reputation, but it isn’t in Davis and Main’s interest for it to become public knowledge. They will just want to end their professional relationship with Howard and HHM as quickly as possible, thereby putting millions in Jimmy’s pocket. It’s a great plan. It really is. Of course, I’m sure it will all go horribly wrong in the end, but right now it’s incredibly satisfying to watch Kim take her revenge on Howard. If only he hadn’t left her down in doc review…

Better Call Saul S6E1 ends with Lalo making his way to the border crossing. He plans on crossing over with some coyote in a truck, but when he calls Hector to tell him he’s alive, he changes his mind. Hector (communicating with the alphabet system we saw him using in Breaking Bad) tells Lalo that he needs proof before he comes back to kill Gus. After thinking on it for a moment, Lalo tells Hector that he knows where to find proof and decides not to head back to the U.S. just yet. What exactly this proof is, I’m not sure. It would make sense if he went looking for Nacho, but since everyone and their mother is looking for Nacho and Lalo wants to stay dead for the moment, I don’t know how that would work. What I do know is that Lalo has a plan, and when Lalo Salamanca has a plan, everyone should be very, very afraid.