Since Better Call Saul started, the story of Ignacio “Nacho” Varga has been defined by trying to take control of his situation and better himself. He gets out of kidnapping charges early in the show. To keep his father Manuel out of the cartel, he poisons Hector Salamanca, leaving him mute and in a wheelchair. After escaping death at Lalo’s compound, he evades the Cousins, eventually hiding in an oil tank before striking a deal with Gus and Mike. He lies about Gus’s involvement in the raid on Lalo’s compound to ensure his father’s safety.
At the end, rather than run and submit to death by Mike’s sniper skills, he turns the gun on himself.
Before Nacho goes, he gets a hell of an exit scene. In an echo of Walt’s “I watched Jane die” in Breaking Bad, Nacho tells Hector, “I put you in that chair. When you are sitting in your shitty nursing home and you’re sucking down your Jell-O night after night for the rest of your life, you think of me, you twisted fuck.” That’s how you go out.
Hector is denied his vengeance and is reduced to having his nephews assist him in shooting Nacho’s corpse (filmed from a distance to make the scene more disturbing). As Bolsa tells Nacho, “Today, you are going to die. But there are good deaths and bad deaths.” Nacho got a good death, something close to redemption in a world where people only seem to get worse.
Nacho was dead the moment he made the heartbreaking call to his father, who he loved dearly. Mike has enough of a code that he would honor his promise to keep Manuel safe, but who knows if Gus will care, and the remaining tension of the show may focus on that. I will miss Michael Mando. His performance as Nacho was always understated and soulful, and I hope the Emmys finally give him some recognition.
On the lighter side, the delightful Huell returns to exercise his pickpocketing skill, lifting Howard’s car keys to copy them for whatever scheme Jimmy and Kim are cooking up. This was a fun echo of his lifting Jesse’s cigarettes in Breaking Bad. Wasn’t that the same parking garage where Walt planted the bomb under Gus’s car? Anyway, Huell asks Jimmy why he is doing shady work when he already makes good money from his legitimate legal career, which is a really good question. Jimmy bullshits that the shady work will help a lot of people. “We’re doing the Lord’s work here,” he says.
The Jimmy and Kim drama takes a backseat to Nacho’s death this week. The DA is suspicious about Jimmy getting Lalo off under a fake alias, but not yet ready to believe he is working with the cartel. “It’s not a suit that fits him,” she says in a nice pun. Kim flashes the barest relief when the DA tells her they believe Lalo is dead.
Kim continues to be the impetus for Jimmy breaking further bad. He asks her what he should do and she says, “Do you want to be a friend of the cartel or do you want to be a rat?” Last season, Kim incredulously asked Jimmy if he wanted to be a friend of the cartel as a wakeup call for him, a warning that he was slipping. It is telling that now she is phrasing an opposition to the cartel as being a rat. For a moral person, not getting involved with the cartel would be the right thing to do. Kim has already taken a side and it’s not the moral side.
In just the third episode, the show dispensed of a major development, the fate of Nacho. There is still a lot of show left to go, which makes me think the rest will be focused on Kim and her continued descent with Jimmy.
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