Better Call Saul Showrunner: Season 6 Episode 9 Answers "So Many Questions"

By Cameron Bonomolo

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6 Part 2. It's not all fun and games for the Goodmans on Monday's Better Call Saul. In the first half of the final season, Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) executed their plan to ruin HHM lawyer Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) and force a settlement of the lucrative Sandpiper case. But Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) had his own plan and execution: shooting Howard for showing up at the Goodmans' apartment when the drug cartel player needed to talk to his lawyers about taking aim at Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).

"So many of the questions we had at the beginning of the series are answered in this amazing episode," series co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould tweeted Monday. In response, Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall warned in a tweet: "You will want to watch this one live or turn off your internets until you can get to it." 

Titled "Fun and Games," the fifth-to-last episode of Better Call Saul sees Fring attempt to smooth things over with Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) and the cartel while Mike (Jonathan Banks) ties up loose ends. That could mean meeting with someone not in the game: Manuel Varga (Juan Carlos Cantu). Earlier in Season 6, Manuel's son Nacho (Michael Mando) chose suicide as his only way out of the cat-and-mouse game between Fring and the Salamancas — and the only way to guarantee his father's safety. 

Now that Saul's finale season has revealed the fates of three main players not present in Breaking Bad — Nacho, Howard, and Lalo — only one remains: Kim. Does Kim die? Does she use the services of Ed the Disappearer and flee New Mexico? Or does she suffer a fate worse than death? 

"I don't think it's saying anything that people won't understand to know that there's got to be some reckoning from this," writer and producer Gordon Smith told EW about the fallout from Howard's death. "[Kim's] in a not quite catatonic state, but she's processing. So at some point I feel like all the tumblers are going to click into place and what happens then? They're going to have to deal very directly with the consequences of this."

As for "Fun and Games," Smith teased, "It's bigger still in a lot of ways. Episode 9 is bigger and badder, and to my mind, even more heartbreaking than [Episode 8, 'Point and Shoot']." 

New episodes of Better Call Saul Season 6 premiere Mondays on AMC and AMC+. 

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