Better Call Saul

I think they could actually leave out the b&w scenes altogether!

They do one at the beginning of each season, any Gene-haters have to wait an entire year before you get to be irritated by one for 3-4 minutes again.

also, chap otm.

Also, the nitpicker in me was super irritated by the whole "locked in the trash room" opening in the latest episode, because that door didn't make sense! Any doors that you can lock are always designed so that you can open them from the inside without a key, exactly so that people wouldn't get accidentally locked inside like Saul did.

he's outside the door. that's the point. he's locked out. the inside is the mall.

I'm not really in any position to say so authoritatively, but I would assume that viewers who are coming to this show fresh wouldn't have any real problem rolling with the Gene scenes. They wouldn't need to know what went down on BB specifically to discern that something eventually goes south in Jimmy's life. It may prove ultimately frustrating to those viewers, though, that the chain of events that lead to him working in a Cinnabon will likely never be explained within the confines of this show.

But the garbage bins aren't outside, they're in a room within the mall. Otherwise he could just walk away.

(xpost)

(I kinda can't believe we're having this conversation but) dumpsters are sometimes kept in a room that's locked off from the rest of the business. So that, for instance, garbage collectors can collect the garbage without gaining access to the back of the store. It's entirely possible that Jimmy had a key but didn't think he'd need it for the two seconds he'd be in the room.

This is not a stretch on the level of 'how did Brock wind up eating the lily of the valley berries'?

This is just dumb/irrelevant. Maybe the door sticks, and he knows that, and that's why he's stuck? There, problem solved.

Yeah, but...how does he know that? Has he been stuck in there before? Or did he just hear about it happening to someone else? And what happened to the door to make it start sticking? I'm sorry, but I find these unanswered questions really narratively unsatisfying.

haha

i think i must have looked away momentarily during this bit cos i was confused about it too. why didn't he just open the emergency exit? did he not want to draw attention to himself?

i can imagine if it locks from the outside only, it's for security purposes, i.e. so burglars can't hide in the bins and sneak out after hours or something.

emergency exit -> alarms -> cops

If you really stop to think about it (which, why would you, but here we are) it is daft that the doors are set up so that it is incredibly easy to get yourself into a situation where the only way out involves contacting the police, but like I said it's daft in a way you would plausibly encounter irl

Also it is a good scene

that's how 90% of buildings in the us are designed, iirc

in the least convenient way, I mean

how does he know that? Has he been stuck in there before?

He's the manager! The way he races to the door indicates that, yes, he knows what will happen. Thousands of businesses no doubt operate with similar flaws and short-sighted shortcuts, from lights that "just never work" to chained exit doors to mysterious keys that fit no locks to sticky doors. I mean, this is an episode with a light switch in a top law firm that nonetheless has a hand-written sign taped on that says "never turn off!" or whatever. Why not fix whatever the problem is? Because we are people, and we are lazy/cheap.

So was the door stopper defective or just improperly wedged under the door? And if it was defective, a) who would have been responsible for replacing it and b) why had they shirked their duty? Was this an intentional act of malice on this individual's part? Did Jimmy know that the stopper was defective? Why didn't he have it replaced himself? Door stoppers can't possibly cost that much. It's almost as if he wanted to be trapped, using a door stopper which is clearly of such an inferior grade that it can't hold a door open for more than a few seconds. Did anyone catch the brand name of the door stopper? I think that's an important clue.

OL has this routine locked down

xpost Save it for the second spin-off.

The door stopper wasn't defective, because we see the janitor use it when he lets Jimmy out, and it works then. I guess Jimmy might've just put it under the door too carelessly.

...which I guess is symbolic of his character arc: no matter how high he aims, he always eventually fails because he doesn't consider all the contributing factors.

Tuomas also very locked down

But why was he so careless with the door stopper? Was he in a hurry to get home, or perhaps too concerned with his employees getting home safely? It seems possible that he was too focused on getting the trash into the dumpster. Or that he stopped to read some of the graffiti on the wall. There are any number of distractions that could've easily informed his carelessness. I'd like to think it was an entire gestalt of distractions fogging his mind in that moment. I think this will be explained in an upcoming episode.

I'm interested in the shirts worn at the Cinnabon. Are those authentic for the time period being represented? Was that actually their advertising slogan? Why don't I have a Cinnabon?

The shirts are period-accurate as they've been in continual use since 2009, but the cage that Jimmy put over the baked goods wasn't in standard use until late last year, which may be anachronistic depending on when the flash-forwards take place. Based on the version of the Cinnabon logo that we see and the hats that they're wearing, I'd place the Gene scenes somewhere around late 2013. I hope someone addresses this inconsistency on Talking Saul.

But what if those anahchronisms are intentional? What if the neo-Nazis actually caught and killed Saul in BB, and the b&w scenes are really his dying fantasy of how his life could've turned out? (Whereas the colour scenes are your typical "whole life flashing before ones eyes as one is dying" scene.) That would also explain why mall door doesn't work like real doors should, his brain is trying to tell him it's not real... Did I blow your mind?

This theory also explains why the younger Saul in the pre-Albuquerque flashbacks doesn't look like someone in his 20s at all, it's just the same middle-aged guy with more hair. Our self-image is always the same physical age as we are now, it's hard to change it into someone younger, so Saul is simply projecting his current self-image into scenes set in the past.

it is daft that the doors are set up so that it is incredibly easy to get yourself into a situation where the only way out involves contacting the police

The sign is almost certainly bullshit, or possibly once true but nobody bothers anymore (and this schrodingerian nature obv ties in with the light switch in the office) - but it's the chance that makes his inaction so poignant. It's probably fine to open it and go, if the cops were called they might not get there in time to even see him, if they WERE called and DID bother showing up and came FAST enough to find him and if he WAS questioned then his story of being a Cinnabon manager who got stuck in the bin room would check out immediately and entirely. It's that the chance of there being any police involvement at all is so minuscule that shows his sad conscribement, and sets up contrast with the desperate, rule-breaking (light switch! cucumber water for customers only! charge it to my room), changing-his-life-on-whim-after-whim Jimmy of the episode AND SERIES that follows.

(mind blown)

btw Years ago I and a colleague did once get stuck in a room in at the Brazilian Embassy in London, which was designed so as not to allow access to the rest of the Embassy. I can't remember the exact details now, but I and a colleague did end up having to call the Police. It was at the tail end of an evening reception and there seemed to be no one around. Alcohol may have been consumed.

did you call and tell them you were stuck in brazilian territory? sounds like a comedic entry point to a diplomatic incident

Schrodinger's Trash Room and Light Switch otm

Have also been stuck in a stairwell that had doors that could only be opened from the outside.

ditto

What you are all overlooking here is that doors in Scandinavian countries (genuinely) open the opposite direction, so cut a Finn some slack for his confusion.

Also My Mother never watched Breaking Bad, but she has somewhat accidentally become engrossed in this, all I needed to tell her about the Gene stuff was "Yeah, he becomes a sleazy lawyer for meth dealers and such, everything goes south and he has to go work in a cinnabun under a fake identity. No, I don't know what that is either, some American pastry thing I guess."

boston cream splat

Does this stick out so much from the landscape because (it's a desert, i mean) there's so little legitimate tragedy out there that isn't really something else - beautiful loserdom, exploitation, gore, just dumb, etc. - or do I have a greater taste for it because of the comedy and romance (if that's the word)?

People who come to this without watching BB must also bee nonplussed by the title, right? I mean, I'm more than a year into this show and nobody called Saul has even showed up!

He deploys the name in the "Slipping Jimmy" era flashbacks. S'all good, man!

hadn't connected his fear of pressing the bar on escape door where the (v possibly false) consequences are clearly labelled to his flipping a mystery switch in his new office for the hell of it

The world is a rich tapestry, my friends. But trust me, you don't wanna see it.

serviceable episode this one, but I think s2e01 is one of the best of the show so far.

hilarious episode. jimmy looking regretfully at his new sunroof cracked me up along with the whole boston cream splat story. chuck shaping up to be a proper villian

This was great, I really hope we see more of baseball card dude at some point.

Given the constant parade of hubristic chumps they have to deal with, it's easy to see how Mike and Saul agreed to work with Walt, he would have just looked like another out-of-his-depth idiot, which of course he was to some extent.

I cannot unsee baseball dude as a Bruce McCulloch character, his delivery is just *so close* to Gavin

show continues to deliver - Chuck as a background villain is great

that brilliant shot of him playing the piano

How long can they continue to use Jimmy's internal conflict between being good and bad as the axis of the show? I feel like they've already covered this in S1...

His conversion from pitiable figure to villain is pretty chilling. Hates his own brother so much it overrides a real and debilitating mental health issue, yikes.

How long can they continue to use Jimmy's internal conflict between being good and bad as the axis of the show? I feel like they've already covered this in S1...

he remains something of a conflicted character all the way through BB so yeah they're going to mine this

he's done criminal, he's doing lawyer, and now he's learning how to be a criminal lawyer

Why would you keep dumpsters in a long skinny cell like that? Most are emptied by robot truck arms. What, does the garbageman come in and drag the dumpsters out... through the too-small-for-a-dumpster door that calls the police whenever it's opened?

I think it's pretty common for restaurants to hide their dumpsters in an outbuilding or utility area like that. Can't believe we're still talking about the dumpsters.