Better Call Saul

s4 now on Netflix!

Not in America, the first episode only aired tonight, and that one wasn't even on the AMC app for hours afterward. Guess the next 9 weeks' ratings'll plummet if we can torrent the entire season tomorrow.

It's not dropping all at once anywhere, AFAICT.

aw man. The email from Netflix literally says 'season 4 now on Netflix' but I guess it's only ep1. Never mind, I quite like watching this week to week.

I'd happily re-watch the whole series if I had the time

got lost during s3 and didn't manage to work out where i was

I'm seven episodes into the first season. I've liked everything so far, except maybe the episode with the billboard. Loved how they used Tuco as a link in the first episode.

got lost during s3 and didn't manage to work out where i was

Albuquerqe iirc

i accidentally ran across this analysis of chuck and jimmy recently and think it's worth sharing. spoilers abound, even in the title, so here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ddHGpQm9oE

like a lot of you, i haven't watched in quite a while and kind of forgot what was going on, so it also serves as a decent refresher of where at least one of the storylines currently sits

NO!! i thought my formatting would just make it a link instead of embedding the video. welp, sorry about that. chuck goes through some shit in this show, spoilers

v excited about this

this show is really outstanding. I probably prefer it to Breaking Bad, probably because I find the characters more likable and somehow what we already know about the characters who carry over from BB doesn't cheapen their appearances but deepens them. And whether or not a prequel was the plan initially (I sincerely doubt it), the writers seem to have left enough room, left enough unsaid, and planted enough clues throughout BB to allow for that richness. I'm particularly fond of the single mention of Nacho in BB turning into a completely outstanding character here, and what I imagine will be a lot of filling in of the gaps around Mike's comment protesting Walter and Jesse sparing Lydia (something akin to "you don't know what she's capable of" or whatever.) And surprisingly the Gus backstory has a lot of room to grow as well.

it is def better than Breaking Bad

also I've never seen Rhea Seehorn in anything before but she is *incredible*

it's not as exciting or as intense as breaking bad but it's deeper and more fulfilling.

I see Rhea Seehorn's outstanding role and performance as a (most likely) intentional corrective to the shitty material the women in BB had to work with

Breaking Bad is great but i guess my primary criticism was that it felt like a narrative vise from which there was no escape for anyone, and towards the end its grimness felt a bit OTT in places. I understand that was probably the point, moving from darkly comic to totally bleak (cf Mr Chips to Scarface) and it's more of a "me" thing than a BB thing.

I'm particularly fond of the single mention of Nacho in BB turning into a completely outstanding character here

Nacho was mentioned in Breaking Bad? Do you remember when/what episode?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8gM6_FCeiBA

Daaaamn, that's a deep cut.

a narrative vise from which there was no escape for anyone

yup, it's more like a contraption than a story.

Just watched the second-last season 1 episode--almost tragedy, Chuck's betrayal.

What was the Wire courtroom reference alluded to above?

anyone else momentarily confused by the Walter White type dude in this ep?

Yeah, we thought that was WW for a second too. Seemed obvious enough that we wondered aloud if the show runners were deliberately messing with the viewers a little.

It's down to one showrunner now! Gilligan didn't work day to day on this season.

didn’t recognise the name of the director of this episode but it is as brilliant as ever

GENE AND THE TAXI DRIVER 😵

taxi driver freaked me OUT
he looked like William Forsythe & I was so sure something bad was going to happen (mainly bcz I was so convinced it really WAS Forsythe)

The guy with the baseball cards (three episodes into Season--not sure if he'll be back): he seems to have based his performance on William Macy in Fargo, but he was great.

he looked like a nerdy Rob Cordry

My most bingiest binge since Mad Men: Season 2 on Friday, Season 3 on Saturday. No repeat of the Season 4 debut today, before the second episode tomorrow--I probably missed a bunch of them all week--so I'll have to wait on the new season.

I liked the first two seasons a lot, found the third wandered. The performances by the new actors are great (i.e., those not in Breaking Bad--I'll call them by their character's name): Kim, Chuck, Nacho, lesser roles like Ernesto and the baseball card guy. There were two things that lost me a bit in the third season. (Specifics ahead.) Mike's surveillance as he tried to figure out what was going on with Hector's crew--the gas caps and all that--seemed to go on and on. They could have scaled that back a lot. Also, as great as Michael McKean is, I thought his story should have more or less ended with his courtroom meltdown and the subsequent shot of him cowering behind his door. With everything that happened after that, I'd had enough of him. All I really learned that hadn't already been made clear was that the director and writers have seen The Conversation.

Loved "Sugar Town" to start Season 3.

Mike's surveillance as he tried to figure out what was going on with Hector's crew--the gas caps and all that--seemed to go on and on. They could have scaled that back a lot.

get out

lol otm

Mike might be the most meticulous character on television

almost to the extent I’m convinced that if every character he advised did exactly what he said, nothing would ever go wrong

if that happened we wouldn’t get his glaring and exasperated looks, though. and those are truly rewarding

I get that it was totally in character with Mike; I already knew that. As a viewer, for me, it just dragged on.

Actually, the post before is part of why I was getting impatient: I love Mike's interactions with other characters so much--his words, those looks--having him out there in the desert on his own isn't as interesting.

Mike Doing Stuff whether laying concrete or inspecting a warehouse is one of the joys of this series - not just him, tho, it’s full of long scenes of intelligent ppl meticulously doing shit (often but not always schemes). Very here for the ambient heist movie vibe in general, this was one of the few tv shows I thought of when watching the new twin peaks - particularly the pre-reveal dr jacoby scenes where he carefully painted shovels for several minutes

I really liked him setting up the playground, especially the subtle flirtation with Anita. If they launch another spin-off, I would absolutely watch Mike Saying Stuff. Mike Doing Stuff, maybe.

I’m still laughing at “oh the soaker hosea you were making!”

mike itemizes his tax deductions to absolute perfection, saving over $1400 compared to the standard deduction: season 4

mike is one of the best all time tv characters

SPOILERS for last night's episode to follow.

I don't understand how Gus knows about Nacho scheming to kill Hector with the fake pills. Or, for that matter, how he's so sure that Nacho had anything at all to do with Hector's stroke. All we're shown, as far as I remember, is Gus looking intently at Nacho handing off the pills to the EMT. How does Gus infer anything at all from that?

Something to do with the report he was staring at in this episode confirmed his suspicion maybe?

Oh yeah, that could be it. But in that case the report would have to have clearly indicated that Hector hadn't been taking his medication. There's no reason to think Gus would be able to infer that on his own from the results of a brain scan--he's a chemist by training, not a doctor.

I'm worried that we're just supposed to accept that Gus figured it out because he's really really smart. Kind of like how we were meant to accept that Walt found a way to poison Brock near the end of Breaking Bad, even though it's never shown or explained and Vince Gilligan has admitted that he doesn't have a specific idea of how it was done.

I guess that's a pitfall of having shows based around brilliant, hyper-meticulous characters. "Whenever you notice something like that... a genius did it."

Come to think of it, I feel similarly about this business with the doctor from Johns Hopkins. Gus "got a grant to come through", got everything cleared with both hospitals, and got a specialist to come from Baltimore to Albuquerque all in what, a few days? I don't know about that.

$$$$

Sure, but you'd still have to make all the bribery and threats look legit on paper. It can't just be "hello, I'm a wealthy businessman from New Mexico. I want one of your doctors immediately. Here's a zillion bucks. We'll tell everyone it's a grant" and it's a done deal inside of a weekend.

We are supposed to accept it cause in this world everyone who isn’t an idiot is a genius. Gus was portrayed as virtually omnipotent in bb!

I never got the complaint about the brock thing either. We’ve seen Walter pull off so many outlandish stunts by that point that it’s not exactly difficult to swallow that he managed to put some berries in a dumb kid’s food or something. I’m sure that writers’ room would have come up with something if they intended to show it to us, but that would have ruined the reveal. At its heart breaking bad is genre fiction and it thrives on unlikely convolutions, but it takes way fewer short cuts than most shows of this type

I mean a guy who left work as a professional scientist and was working as a high school teacher was able to jump into meth cooking and within a short period somehow come up with product that was better than what an established cartel was working on

I'm perfectly fine with unlikely convolutions--in fact, I demand them--as long as they're depicted in an exciting and understandable way. Nacho's scheme with the pills was unlikely, but it was riveting to see how he pulled it off.

On the other hand, it's no fun at all for the show to say, in effect, "we've shown you that this character can do all kinds of devious things, just give us this one". The whole reason it's fun is because we get to see how they do it. It's better to be shown than told.

(And it wouldn't have ruined the reveal for Brock's poisoning to be explained after the fact.)

I mean a guy who left work as a professional scientist and was working as a high school teacher was able to jump into meth cooking and within a short period somehow come up with product that was better than what an established cartel was working on

Well sure, but that's just the conceit of the show. Some people are extremely brilliant in a way that their station in life doesn't reflect. I don't need a scientific explanation of Walt's chemistry genius any more than I need a neurological explanation of how Jimmy is such a good con artist. But once the conceit is established, I want the plot to make sense, or so help me god, I'll post mildly-worded complaints online.