Better Call Saul

I haven't seen this latest episode yet (been camping in Big Sur) but looking forward to it. I wonder how Chuck is going to be removed from the picture, since that obviously has to happen at some point.

http://www.amctv.com/shows/better-call-saul/client-development-comic?startpage=20

go land crabs!

or better yet
http://www.amctv.com/shows/better-call-saul/client-development-comic

I wonder how Chuck is going to be removed from the picture, since that obviously has to happen at some point.

I hope he just starves to death because Jimmy won't bring him anymore food. This show must be really well written because I fucking hate Chuck right now.

Even if his law degree is mail-order and he's got a huge mouth, Jimmy is at least as good an advocate for his clients as Chuck and Howard because he always has his radar on and brain working -- loved that scene where he's walking away from Mrs. Intestate, stops, walks back and says "...allowance?" Him leaving and coming back is what makes it.

on one level the most obvious/melodramatic thing would be for Jimmy to have Mike kill Chuck for some reason. not that I think that that will happen but it's occurred to me.

That's kind of the other thing -- lawyers like Chuck go to nice schools and end up working for nice firms with conference rooms and clients with money or cases they can take on contingency. Successful people go to them because they know they'll get their money's worth.

Lawyers that poor people can afford... well, it's like the couple who embezzled the money said, "you seem like someone who represents people who are guilty." Rich people with nice lawyers are never truly guilty the way poor people are, even if the rich people embezzled millions of dollars and some poor guy didn't even commit the crime he was accused of.

For what it's worth, it's not just economics, but race as well. That's part of why OJ Simpson not being convicted of murder was such a landmark thing -- a rich black man was able to get out of being convicted just like a rich white man could have. Conversely, you can work your ass off, be really successful, and still seem like you must be guilty of something. Chris Rock sure does seem to get pulled over by the police a lot more than white people driving the same cars.

I haven't seen this latest episode yet (been camping in Big Sur) but looking forward to it. I wonder how Chuck is going to be removed from the picture, since that obviously has to happen at some point.

You'd think so, but it would be kind of great too if it just receded into the background as a constant source of anger and shame like Grey Matter

Wait isn't Chuck already removed from the picture? I mean what's left to keep Jimmy interacting with him at this point....

http://36.media.tumblr.com/a1aab1d70cf38c50d739c44d2497c297/tumblr_nm60z2OIlr1qh9fgxo1_1280.jpg

Very strong finale. This and The Americans are pretty unabashedly doing 70's-film Americana in long form which I am 100% into.

yeah, loved this as a wrap-up to the series so far, and as a tantalising frustration that I can't have MORE, NOW

The steady accumulation of shit leading to jimmy's inevitable turn towards criminality felt nicely organic, so I could have done without his "from this day forth, I vow never to have a moral objection to anything ever" at the end. He may as well have looked at the camera & said "I guess maybe it's time for me to... break bad?"

That said smoke on the water was lol

Yeah, it looked for a second like he was moving past the insatiable hollowness of his old buddy, who only had crime to provide The Purpose-Driven Life. But I guess now he can have be an ambulance-chaser, a mensch, a Robin Hood (Robin was one of the poor, so kept a Robin-determined, sliding-scale percentage of the goods), and do it in Duke, in Chuck's face, even if Chuck never gets near an operating TV again (so can't see the Better Call Saul ads). He'll hear about it from his delivery guy etc.

Can have it both ways, I meant: if he chooses to, fight the good fight for fellow underdogs, while getting money from the Establishment anyway he can (also providing shady services as well, like for Walt and Jesse). And pissing off Chuck in the process (yet tending to confirm and justify Chuck's opinion and screwing of him, because he, Jimmy/Saul, buys it too, now. Maybe he always did, either way was fighting the self-image, in trying so desperately to please Chuck)(also using Chuck to vindicate himself).

The coin scam scene was so great.

I felt this episode was perhaps dramatically a bit too neat (Marco just happens to die while their performing their last scam, Jimmy just happens to get an offer for a proper lawyer job just as he's contemplating what to do with his life, and of course his final speech to Mike was a bit too much of AND THUS SAUL WAS BORN!), but on the other hand the previous episode was the one that provided the real dramatic turning point of the whole season, and they managed to get there quite organically (Chuck's "you're not a lawyer" speech felt like an unexpected shocker, but it was totally in line of how his and Jimmy's characters had been established in the previous episodes, so it was really about as masterful as plot twist can be), so I could forgive them for wanting to tie up things neatly in the finale. I'm not sure what's left for the next season, though? Are we just gonna see the same kind of stuff as in BB, except from Saul's/Jimmy's point of view?

He is nowhere near the position we see him in in bb

There is a fair amount of space between deciding to be less scrupulous and being a money-laundering criminal defence attorney with ties to the meth business

He might just be thinking of taking advantage of his geezer clients at this stage

this show is so good

I liked how Mike was seemingly caught in between thinking Jimmy had lost it and thinking he was right.

Still wondering how much mileage they try to get out of pre-BBad Jimmy and how much time they'll spend with post-BBad Saul-Jimmy. And the best part is that I have absolutely no idea.

I've said it before but I really don't need to see any more post-bb Saul

In any case I don't think the whole show would jump to the gene part of the timeline cause that would mean getting rid of Jonathan banks

I agree with Tuomas that the finale felt too neat and contrived, narratively - but that doesn't bother me so much when the execution is this good and the details this rich. The scamming montage was incredible, like a live action version of Bart and Milhouse's squishee rampage.

I've said it before but I really don't need to see any more post-bb Saul

If they make it interesting sure, why not?

I thought it was a neat detail that the one thing that forced Jimmy to change his habits wasn't getting caught while scamming (which the previous episode lead the viewer to believe was the case), but getting caught while shitting inside his nemesis' car. There was some implication, though, that he'd had legal trouble before, but it still seems that his crooked life never gave him such pain and disappointments as his straight life, so it's not that surprising he'd return to it.

in the earlier episode when he's in jail it's explicitly stated that he's in for indecent exposure, not scamming

he uses the term "chicago sunroof" in that earlier ep too

his bingo meltdown was so good

Yeah, beautifully written and performed scene.

the big revelation for me there (apart from finding out what a chicago sunroof is, lol) was the suggestion that chuck deliberately got jimmy facing a harsher sentence so he could manipulate him into coming to new mexico with him

Was that really suggested? If Chuck was Jimmy's defense attorney, how could he make the prosecutor go for a harsher indictment?

re the gene years, it just feels redundant to me. I like the fact that we know how saul's story ends: he works a boring job, lives in fear of being recognised, that's it. I'm not interested in seeing him on the run any more than I want to see jesse driving around in an rv solving crimes

xp unless I'm misremembering, jimmy says in the bingo speech that chuck pulled strings

yeah just went back & checked, he says "chuck was connected, like cicero connected[...] he's got the DA saying 'indecent exposure'"

No, I think he said the guy in whose car he shat in pulled the strings?

Okay, maybe I misremember that scene.

It wasn't Chuck's car he shat in was it? It was confusing as he ranted on about how the car-owner was his worst rival and gave him a fake name that sounded similar to Chuck.

Also, fat guy having a heart attack at *that* moment was a bit hmm, as they've never really gone for the obvious soapy plot thing before. One of the most impressive parts of the last episode was Jimmy explaining how he rang the phone company to get details of calls made - would have been v easy (& lazy) to just have Jimmy check his 'dialled calls' settings and see lawyer guy's number pop up. Nice example of Chuck's slyness that he went through and deleted that manually after his phone call, despite not being shown onscreen.

It wasn't Chuck's car he shat in was it? It was confusing as he ranted on about how the car-owner was his worst rival and gave him a fake name that sounded similar to Chuck.

No, it was just some guy he hated called Chet, who'd apparently also slept with Jimmy's wife. Also, I checked that scene with the Netflix subtitles on, and this is the line Jimmy says:

Now Chet was connected,see? Like Cicero, connected.

Odenkirk says the name "Chet" a bit unclearly, so I can see why Wins misheard it as "Chuck". But it wasn't Chuck who got him the indecent exposure charge, it was Chet, which makes more sense to me than Chuck doing it.

Ahhh, I totally misread that scene as Chuck pulling the strings to teach Jimmy a lesson or what have you.

But yeah, since that scene has Jimmy rambling about both Chuck and Chet, maybe they could've given the car-shat guy a name that sounds a bit more different from his brother's.

(xpost)

This is why I always watch movies and series with loads of realistic dialogue with the subtitles on, even though my English is pretty good.

Chuck was a good brother and bailed him out, and Jimmy having some sense of obligation took the ultimatum to get his shit together seriously, to the point where he didn't even say hi to his friend when he was in town for a funeral a few years back.

It turns out Chuck had limits on how much he wanted his little brother to turn his life around, though.

xp my bad!

Terrific first season, but I didn't believe that payoff/turnaround in the last minute. If the point of the season was to build us up to an inevitable moment where Jimmy finally turns, it hasn't worked for me. Ultimately who cares, though, if the next season stays at this level.

The heart attack at that precise moment was a little too convenient, yeah (Gillgan's team can fudge the way from points A to Z sometimes, like how did Walt get anthrax or whatever into Lydia's untorn sugar substiute packets), but that goes with the scurry of their characters, after all. And they do get there, often enough.

I suspect that Mike, who is an old school expert at much deeper and darker shit than Jimmy's ever thought of ("That precinct was a sewer," says the older of the detectives from Back East, easing up to fellow vet M.), has something to do with his continuing education (although Jonathan Banks has just been quoted by Hollywood Reporter re Season 2, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen.")

Or maybe they lead each other down the road to BB.

Jonathan Banks has just been quoted by Hollywood Reporter re Season 2, "I have absolutely no idea what will happen."

Terrific first season, but I didn't believe that payoff/turnaround in the last minute. If the point of the season was to build us up to an inevitable moment where Jimmy finally turns, it hasn't worked for me. Ultimately who cares, though, if the next season stays at this level.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, April 9, 2015 12:46 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I didn't buy it. Felt unearned.

Re Mike and deep dark etc: maybe I'm just remembering the future of these characters, maybe he really does, so far, think in the terms of his little Sunday School lesson about how you can be a criminal without being a bad guy, maybe that's how he could have been a good cop who just took the bribes to fit in and stay alive. Then again, he's good at compartmentalizing: in the future, he can do dark shit before and after buying balloons for his granddaughter at the park. Still, even he may have a ways to go, BB-wise.

Agree with the A-Z fudging -- Walt's character was all over the map in season 2. Not so much a gradual descent as "oh, right, he's evil now."

I think the problem is, Odenkirk's so (surprisingly) good, so three-dimensional, that if the script has is motivation pivot in a sudden and cheap way, it's all the more noticeable. Whereas Walt was a mystery, even to himself, and his unexplained mood shifts worked well as part of his enigmatic character (rather than as signposts of rushed storytelling).