'Better Call Saul' Writer-Director on the Midseason Finale's Shocking End

Longtime 'Better Call Saul' and 'Breaking Bad' writer-director-producer Tom Schnauz spoke about the shocking twist at the end of the 'Saul' season six midseason finale, 'Plan and Execution.'

‘Better Call Saul’ Writer-Director on the Midseason Finale’s Shocking End

as Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul.Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Logo text

[This story contains spoilers for “Plan and Execution,” the May 23 episode of Better Call Saul.]

Although it was never intended as a midseason finale, Monday’s Better Call Saul absolutely ended with a jaw-dropping conclusion that will keep fans on edge until the AMC show returns with the remainder of its final episodes on July 11.

As the cheeky title indicates, the episode features the conclusion of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim’s (Rhea Seehorn) plan to bring down Patrick Fabian’s Howard Hamlin and then, in its closing moments, it contains a cold-blooded execution.

RIP to Howard, who definitely began the series as an adversary to Jimmy and Kim, but didn’t do anything to deserve such an ill-fated encounter with Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton).

This episode’s biggest challenge is that we have to spend 30 minutes at least somewhat rooting for Jimmy and Kim’s scheme to succeed and for Howard to go down in flames, but then … we have to be crushed, just like Jimmy and Kim are. What are the challenges of generating that whiplash, that balance?

Jimmy and Kim are very smart cookies, and we needed their plan to go off pretty perfectly. They needed to succeed. But just like in Breaking Bad, when Walt and Jesse did the great train robbery, something bad had to happen. In that episode, the kid on the motorbike paid the price. In this one, we struggled a lot. We knew at the end of this that their plan was going to succeed, but somehow something bad was going to happen. We thought maybe Kim gets disbarred or gets caught or something slips up with the plan, but every time we talked about that, it felt wrong.

The more we talked about it, it just felt like the two worlds coming together at this moment — Howard coming to confront them and then Lalo coming to use Jimmy and Kim for his next step to get to Gus and the SuperLab — was right. How that balance works out, there’s no magic formula. We just break the story, plot it out and those two separate storylines came together when they did.

In that hypothetical Kim-gets-disbarred scenario, what’s happening to Howard? Was there a part of the thought process that had Howard skating by and making it to the end of the series?

Oh, there were all different scenarios. We go down every different road. In the early stages, when we started breaking the season, we had discussions about the skate rats from season one coming back and somehow being part of the plan and tricking Howard so that he somehow thinks he accidentally kills one of them. There were all of these crazy different plots. We work on these stories for so long and so many days and we go down so many different roads that it’s hard to say when it felt like we were on the right road. We just go piece by piece. The characters take us where we want to go.

We had all of these different plot points with the Kettlemans and throwing Wendy out of the car in front of Cliff and these all sorta built up to this moment where, when we got to it, we thought, “We can’t not do this. Howard has to pay the ultimate price.” We certainly talked about, maybe, Lalo takes them all hostage? But Lalo doesn’t know this guy, and it’s a perfect way to scare the ever-living shit out of Jimmy and Kim, to put a bullet in this stranger’s head and move on to part two of his plan.

I find it interesting that it wasn’t a given going into breaking the season that Howard had to die, since of course one of the show’s structural challenges throughout is that you have a lot of characters who viewers know with certainty you can’t kill and there were people who were, let’s not call them “disposable,” but who were moving pieces you can have more control over. But when you were breaking the story, there wasn’t an, “OK, we know Nacho’s death is here and Howard’s death is here” structure?

No, we didn’t come into the season thinking that. There were certainly stories about Nacho going to either disappear or actually convincing his father to go away, which seemed like a real longshot because his father was so firm about, “I’m not running. We’re going to the police.” So there were certain things in place that guided us to Nacho’s death. And Howard’s death? Howard is a character who could have survived into the Breaking Bad world, we just never saw him and never saw Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. But the fact that we didn’t see him certainly helped us think, “OK, well, he is a person who can die in this world.” Just like Kim is a person who can die and there are a few others characters, but not many.

How aware were you of how Gordon Smith had staged Nacho’s death in “Rock and Hard Place” and was there any consideration of having them be visual complements or contrasts?

I didn’t see any of Gordon’s shoot. I was there during the breaking of the story, so I know how he plotted the story out and planned it.

Are there visual connections?

If you ask me what they were, I wouldn’t know what they are, except that they both get shot in the same place in the head. When I was on set, it was not scripted like this, and standing in the place where Howard was going to get shot, there was this coffee table there and I just felt like, “He has to fall and his head has to slam in, just to make it even more brutal.” It’s not enough that he gets shot in the head, his head has to slam into the coffee table and make a sickening sound when he rolls to the floor so that it’s extra-shocking. I knew that I wanted the blood spatter to go onto that painting that’s over the couch, that’s their idea board. So those are the two elements that I planned out when I was getting ready to shoot the scene, but as far as any visual connections with Gordon’s episode, I’m not sure besides where he got capped.

The scene, looking long-term, is so much about the consequences for Jimmy and Kim and the emotional blowback. What was the thought process in terms of how much you wanted the camera to be on them and their reactions in both the bargaining with Lalo and then the immediate aftermath?

It was a little bit tricky in the fact that Kim knew something that Jimmy didn’t, which is very unusual for a moment like this. Kim knew that Lalo was alive, so when he walked through the door, she was scared, but Jimmy was seeing a ghost. He was convinced that Lalo was dead. Marshall Adams, my DP, and I, we came up with all of these different shots. If you go back and watch episode 509 when Kim is using the juicer and there are these intercuts with Jimmy’s face when he’s having these reactions to the sound and the buildup, I did all of that for this scene. I shot a close-up of his pupil dilating. There was a reflection of the TV screen in his eyeball and all these cool shots that I tried every which way to edit together and it just wasn’t working. In the end, the simplest way of just having this slow-motion shadow coming in behind Howard, was the scariest. So Jimmy’s reaction, the way Bob played it, is just grave, stunned silence and Kim is the one trying to bargain and say “What do you want? Howard, get out of here.” Because she knows that Lalo isn’t there for a good reason and she’s just trying to usher Howard out the door.

You mentioned 509 and that was, of course, the first of the Lalo-Jimmy-Kim showdowns in that apartment. Is this a particular niche that you feel deeply invested in, or is it a coincidence that you keep getting these episodes?

It was total coincidence. It’s really weird how these things work out. Like throughout the seasons, my characters always ended up at this weird factory where they were doing drug deals and it was just a total coincidence, so now I’m the person who whenever Lalo comes into the condo, I just happen to be the writer-director of that slot. It was not intentional, but I’m glad I got it.

What do you like about that space? The lighting in there is particularly evocative and makes it an especially interesting place for suspense to unfold.

What I love most about it is that it’s onstage so we can go there and rehearse it! This is one of the few scenes of the episode that we got to rehearse with the actors. We rehearsed this one and then we rehearsed the park scene, which was the big oner moment where everybody is wrapping Lenny’s arm and searching for stuff. So we got to come in on a Sunday and rehearse those two scenes.

We’ve shot the condo so much, and it’s very hard to shoot it differently. I don’t want to say anything about episodes coming up, but both Vince Gilligan and Michael Morris do great jobs with the condo set. It’s a great set and I just let the actors walk it through. I kinda give them their end-marks of where I wanted Patrick to be, so that he wasn’t facing Lalo when Lalo walks in the door, but other than that, I asked Patrick what he would do when he came in to confront these guys and I let him walk the space and I planned the scene from there.

What were Patrick’s spirits on that day, and were there particular grace notes that you and he wanted to make sure were conveyed in this final Howard scene?

Patrick just came in and he nailed it. I didn’t have to give him very much direction at all. It was just him coming in and speaking his mind and telling the truth and really asking, “What did I do to deserve any of this?” Because Howard Hamlin didn’t do anything! He just happened to be the guy who was Chuck’s partner. And Howard did do some things that were crappy, like putting Kim in doc review and siding with Chuck when Jimmy could have joined HHM. So there were things that Howard did that were absolutely crappy, but Jimmy took it way over-the-top and he sees this guy who took on the burden of Chuck’s death. Howard thought it was his fault when it was really Jimmy’s, and Howard went through all of the steps he needed to go through. He saw a therapist and he went through depression and all these bad places and he came out the other side with a “namaste” point of view and plan to be a better person when that’s the thing that Jimmy should have done, and he watched this guy and got so angry that he just needed to attack.

That’s what started last season with sending the prostitutes in to his lunch and throwing the bowling ball at his car. It’s so strange that when we did those last season, we didn’t think that they would ever work into our continued plan this season. We just happened to take that thread and run with it.

Going back to the oner and the scene in the park, that’s such a fun, heist-y scene and a part of why it moves so well is the intersection of visual with Dave Porter’s score. What was in your head as the right musical accompaniment for that scene and how did the conversations with Dave go?

For the longest time, I didn’t think there would be any music in the scene. I didn’t plan on any music, and when we sat down for our spotting session, he offered ideas and I really didn’t give him much guidance except that I wanted it to be fun and heist-y. He gave us a couple of different versions, and I kept leaning toward the drums-only version for that scene, which we eventually went with. I think when I heard the first couple of versions, I just wanted a little more improvisational-sounding drums, where it didn’t sound so steady, just some more weird off-beats here and there. I just wanted it to be a fun piece that carried us through to the end.

With a scheme as elaborate as the one that carried from last season through the seven episodes of this season, are there specific people in the writers room who are more involved in structuring and keeping track of all of the moving pieces?

No. no. Mostly it’s all hands on deck when we break these things and everybody’s keeping track. One person will pitch something and somebody else will say, “Well, they can’t do that because this, this and this” and everybody’s contributing, so I wouldn’t say one person is better than the other. Luckily we have everything written down on cards. It was just a strange season this year because we weren’t in the room together. That just made it harder. So it was me writing down on an index card like I would always do, except now I would have to take a picture of it and I’d send it to Jenn Carroll, our producer, and she’d digitally construct a board for everybody to see on the Zoom screen.

But I can’t say that anybody is better at doing the Mission: Impossible stuff than another, but this is the closest I’ll ever come to writing an episode of the classic Peter Graves Mission: Impossible.

I want to touch on the two big pop culture references embedded in the episode. First, Lenny with the grocery cart reciting the Roy Cohn monologue from Angels in America. Was it more for the “love is a trap”-ness of it or the Roy Cohn self-rationalizing of evil? When did that come into the episode?

That, for some reason, was right away when we started talking about this guy rehearsing in the supermarket parking lot. I almost feel like it was Peter Gould who for some reason said, “He’s doing a scene from Angels in America.” And I thought, “OK, I’ll write that down and then I’ll change it to something else.” And then it stuck and we got permission to use it and it just felt right. I had it in there and I was like, “Boy, this just really feels good with the overall episode.” It thematically felt like it tied in.

And we know that Jimmy and Kim are fans of watching screwball comedies together. Why, in this moment, was Born Yesterday what they were watching?

I’ll just admit that we do this: We have a catalog of films that we can use for free. There’s a list. We go through them. There are certain films like Scarface in Breaking Bad where we’d have to pay for whatever, but there’s a list of films that’s like, “These will not cost us anything.” We don’t have this grand budget. We needed a movie and that was just one that felt fun for the scene. It’s that simple.

You’re killing the TV critic part of me that wants to analyze it! Come on, give me some subtext!

I wish I could! It’s a long list and we looked through all the scenes and that was the one that just felt funny and cute. I wanted to have a really good moment. This is Jimmy and Kim at their happiest. Their plan is successful. They’re cuddled together. They’re eating dinner, drinking wine and watching a movie and this is when they’re at their happiest. And then it all falls apart. So I really wanted to show that moment of them together before first Howard comes in and then Lalo opens the door and the little candle-flicker happens and it all goes to shit.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

The final six episodes of Better Call Saul begin airing July 11 on AMC.