Bagman (Better Call Saul)

The Cousins (Daniel and Luis Moncada) arrive at a cartel site in Mexico to pick up Lalo Salamanca's (Tony Dalton) bail money. As they depart, an informant inside the building makes a telephone call to report their presence.[1]

Lalo gives Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) directions to a remote desert pickup site. Jimmy reluctantly agrees to go after Lalo promises $100,000 for the service. Kim (Rhea Seehorn) begs Jimmy not to go, saying he is an attorney and not a "bagman" for drug dealers, but he says he will do it because it will be easy and no one will suspect him of being the courier.

The next morning, the Cousins deliver two duffel bags of cash to Jimmy at the pickup site and immediately depart. Jimmy starts his return trip but several trucks soon cut him off. Numerous gunmen exit the vehicles, take the money, and prepare to kill him. The gunmen are suddenly attacked by an unknown shooter. All but one are killed and their vehicles are disabled. The surviving gunman escapes in the only truck that is still drivable.

The unseen shooter was Mike (Jonathan Banks), who was tracking Jimmy's movements for Gus (Giancarlo Esposito). He finds his truck was also disabled in the shootout, so he places a still-shaken Jimmy and the money in Jimmy's car and begins driving back to Albuquerque. Jimmy's car soon breaks down. With no cell phone coverage and no vehicle, they push the car over the edge of the road and walk cross-country with the money in order to avoid the surviving gunman. As they camp overnight, Jimmy tells Mike that Kim knows of his work for Lalo, and Mike warns Jimmy that if she knows details about the Salamancas, Kim is now "in the game". Jimmy and Mike resume their trek the following morning.

When Jimmy fails to return, Kim pretends to be Lalo's attorney, tells him she is Jimmy's wife, and asks him for Jimmy's location so she can search. Lalo refuses and tells her Jimmy will be fine because he is a survivor.

A dehydrated and sunburned Jimmy reaches his limit and collapses, and Mike fails to motivate him to go on. Mike spots the surviving gunman, but rather than hide as Mike tells him to, Jimmy regains his motivation and runs into the road to attract the gunman's attention. When the gunman is close enough, Mike shoots and kills him. The gunman's vehicle flips and is destroyed. Mike and Jimmy resume walking, this time on the road.

Series co-creator Vince Gilligan considered "Bagman" to be one of the most challenging episodes to direct in his career.

"Bagman" was directed by series co-creator Vince Gilligan, who considered the episode one of the most challenging episodes he had to direct in his career.[1] Gilligan had been able to make arrangements to direct one episode in the fifth season after completing post-production of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Both co-showrunner Peter Gould and writer Gordon Smith, knowing this would be Gilligan's episode, planned for his directorial skills and continually teased Gilligan in the weeks leading up before the episode's filming that it was going to be well-suited for him.[2] They had compared the episode to Lawrence of Arabia in terms of how they wanted it to look, and even had considered renting out the lens used to film that movie, but were worried about the liability if they had damaged it.[1]

The episode took over 18 days to shoot, compared to the average nine days for most other episodes. Most of the filming location was located on the To'hajiilee Indian Reservation, about two hours outside of Albuquerque by car, though the pickup location where Jimmy meets the Cousins was only about 15 minutes away from the Albuquerque studios.[1][2] Gilligan credits his production team for making sure the cast and crew were protected from heat and had plenty of water to assure the shoot went on without any issues.[2] Gilligan wanted Bob Odenkirk to employ method acting techniques, and did supply him with weighed bags to tote, but Odenkirk had drawn the line at drinking urine.[1] Gilligan praised the script from Smith, which he felt established the bond between Mike and Jimmy that was seen in Breaking Bad but otherwise absent in Better Call Saul previously.[1] Gilligan's associate producer Jenn Carroll and assistant Melissa Ng helped to identify elements to add to Smith's script to further connect the relationship between Mike and Jimmy to what was seen in Breaking Bad.[2]

The shootout scene between Mike and the gunmen was a challenge for Gilligan, and he considered it "the most complicated single scene I've ever directed".[1] He wanted to have Odenkirk visible in all shots, even while the stuntmen and practical effects were going off around him, as to show the shootout from Jimmy's point of view as much as possible. The overall sequence took about four to five days to complete.[1] To film the scene with the flipping truck while Jimmy was in-shot, a temporary green screen was placed on site. Odenkirk's reaction in front of the screen was filmed first, followed by the truck flip without changing the camera's location after Odenkirk and the screen were removed.[3] The Suzuki Esteem that had been shot up and pushed into a gully was a duplicate of the one they normally used in filming; the original was still kept at the local studios, allowing them to reuse it for any later flashback scenes as needed.[4]

• "Bagman" at AMC
• "Bagman" at IMDb