Okay, first, great ending. I’ll go into details, but I want to get that out of the way.
I liked Nacho’s whole ending. It felt appropriate and well paced. The scene where he hides in the oil is a stroke of genius.
The whole D-Day plot is pitch perfect as well. It stretched credulity a little that Cliff fell for everything so easily IMO, but it all served the plot, characters, and themes so I’ll let it slide.
Wrapping up Lalo in basically one episode after the “cliffhanger” between parts surprised me a bit, but I think it was done decently well. I think his fate was a bit too much wrapped up in continuity to feel like it had actual dramatic stakes if you were paying attention, but at least the moment-to-moment stuff was good.
Kim’s whole… deal in the last half is really the heart of it. I literally exclaimed at the screen “kim! yes!!” when she showed up in the post-BB scenes. Her guilt over Howard’s spiral and subsequent death feels like the true thematic throughline. I really like that they didn’t just kill her off and let her be Jimmy’s true foil.
My only real complaint with this half is the whole Jeff storyline. It’s… fine? It does the job. But I feel like it takes a lot of screentime and ends up being only mildly interesting outside of the ultimate consequences. Also, the fact that so much time is spent in the post-BB timeline means that we get a shitload of black and white. As a visual motif it made sense when we were seeing snippets of “Gene’s” life, but it felt weird for whole or majority of episode runtimes.
I think the ultimate ending being post-BB makes everything work better. It sidesteps the typical prequel problem where your ending is just the beginning of the original. And honestly as much as I did like Breaking Bad’s ending, it did feel a little.. incomplete. This one feels a lot more emotionally true, and not just to Better Call Saul. It compares a lot more favorably to El Camino as well, which just feels like tying up a loose end more than anything. This instead feels like actually properly built up ending.