Jimmy shares the story he rehearsed so thoroughly with Mike once again with Lalo. He went to pick up the money from the Salamanca cousins in the desert, his car broke down, and he walked back to civilization. It’s a good, believable story. So good in fact that Lalo wants to hear it again…then again…and again…and again.

If Jimmy McGill a.k.a. Saul Goodman has a superpower, it’s bullshitting. No one in the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul universe has a finer gift of gab than our favorite crooked lawyer. Jimmy/Saul has used his finely-tuned bullshitting ability to get out of jams time and time again across two different series.

Right here in this moment, however, something amazing is happening: that bullshitting ability isn’t working. It’s not working because Jimmy has come up against an antagonist that can’t be tricked. You ever hear the phrase “can’t bullshit a bullshitter?” Well here it is writ large. Lalo is every bit the smarmy con man that Jimmy McGill is, only from a drastically different world.

Lalo wasn’t always intended to be this way…this perfect Saul Goodman foil. The character’s origins actually date all the way back to Saul’s first appearance in Breaking Bad. When Walter White and Jesse Pinkman bring Saul to the desert to stage a mock execution (which we now know must have been particularly traumatizing for him, given his history), Saul yells “Lalo didn’t send you? No Lalo?”

Better Call Saul was therefore determined to introduce a character named Lalo at some point in its run (as it did early on with Ignacio a.k.a. Nacho, which is another name Saul mentions in that same desert scene). When Lalo is first introduced near the end of season 4, however, he almost seems like an afterthought. Hector Salamanca has been taken off the board by Gus and Nacho so the Salamanca clan needs to find another leader. So they simply bring another Salamanca cousin named Lalo north of the border.