Better Call Saul ended its fifth season by birthing a villain. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) has always been trouble, but after the events of “Something Unforgivable,” the cheerful, murderous younger cousin of the Salamanca family has vengeance on his mind—and he knows who betrayed him. The episode ends with him lurching toward the camera, as if pure rage is propelling him towards us.

His mission sets up the final season of Saul—an unquenchable thirst for bloody justice, a ruthless killer who, we know, will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Dalton joined the show late in season four, and brings an unpredictable, savage charm to it; he’s funny, perceptive, and absolutely terrifying, a cold-blooded killer with no conscience. We probably would have believed the depths of his rage without a season of getting to know his ways. But this is how Better Call Saul flexes its power on the viewer: even though you know what’s going to happen, you can’t stop watching it unfold.

Saul makes for brilliant quarantine viewing. Baking bread and regrowing scallions are slow, time-intensive processes; so too is the making of Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), a lawyer without a conscience. Saul’s reach is so wide, and so seemingly incidental, that it’s sometimes frustrating: To understand how Jimmy McGill became a frightening drug cartel’s flashy, unscrupulous defense attorney, we’ve first had to understand Jimmy’s relationship with his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), his girlfriend Kim’s (Rhea Seehorn) relationship with her mom, and the angst Mike Ehrmentraut (Jonathan Banks) felt upon killing a German engineer. Every week, the pattern is a little clearer—but it’s still drawing from a mysteriously vast universe of experience.

Yet even as Saul reaches wider, it also assembles its scenes with painstaking care. This is a show of staggering moments, strung together on threads that span years.

The emphasis on moment feels especially keen right now. Saul has been stuck in the early 2000s for years now; its characters are still snapping flip phones shut to hang up on each other. But even if it’s disconnected from our present, the show is deeply rooted in its own. Even when its characters are pressed for time, Saul itself is never in a rush; in scenes suffused with dread, it meticulously clocks every detail. That care fills these moments with their power—their complexity, their reach, their potential.

But again and again on Saul, the promise of the moment is also squandered. Old patterns persist. Old grudges don’t die. Need rears its ugly head and demands to be satisfied. Becoming Saul is not one day’s decision, but a thousand tiny movements, accumulated over the course of years.

In one episode this season, “50% Off,” Jimmy drops an ice cream cone on the curb so he can go meet Lalo. The next episode, “The Guy for This,” begins with ants swarming over the ice cream, in a close-up that reveals their chaotic, greedy harvest. We’re brought so close to the ants that they appear not as pests but conquering kings, scrabbling over the green ice cream en masse, legs slipping into the melt. It’s disgusting, and entirely revealing: A massive windfall leads to a horde of creatures mobbing to seize their cut. If Jimmy had paid a little more attention to the ice cream and the ants, maybe he could have foreseen what would happen a few short episodes later—the tense shootout in “Bagman.” The patient laws of nature are always visible, if you know how to look for them.