Better Call Saul

I had completely forgotten until this last episode that Crazy-8 was revealed to be an informant in Breaking Bad. Cool idea to use that for BCS.

Speaking of BB, we know that Lalo is still in the picture (or at least Saul thinks he is) when Saul first meets Walt and Jesse. So he surely won't be killed off in BCS unless the timelines start overlapping heavily.

huh really? I've completely forgotten so many incidental details.

I had to double-check real quick on a fan wiki but yeah!

“seven thousand... nine hundred... twenty-five?”

lol someone really doesn’t yet know the scale of who he’s working with

"jfc Rhea Seehorn is soooooo good why is she not getting other acting roles"

she is amazing, I'm completely in awe and in love with her and her pony tail. Actually I'd just remarked to my wife about her amazingly curled pony tail and about two minutes later someone on the show mentioned it.

holy shit how is the old man delivering the line “a man.... fuckin’ a horse!” not a viral clip by now

“picture me as the man, and mesa verde as the horse”

holy shit, i am dying

Loved that grumpy old obstinate guy, you could tell Kim was trying to pull at his heartstrings with her story but he was having none of it

Oh shit I think I'm an episode behind... Carry on

So was Kim's story true?

The one about her upbringing that she told Maurice from Northern Exposure? Probably, but it's good that the writers of this series enjoy ambiguity imo

Totally. Her making it up would be just as heartbreaking in a completely different way.

The horse line was brilliant.

When Howard gave his big pitch to Jimmy, I have to admit I was at a loss trying to remember how everything ended with Jimmy and his brother's firm--couldn't remember a thing.

I also wondered after the fact if Kim's story was true. She's caught a bad case of Slippin' Jimmy, and I fear it will be her downfall.

good catch on identifying the actor, sic. didn’t quite place him or know he was still acting

still stuck on the absurdity of Saul just handing a dude a picture of... that

I had no idea either! but I looked him up after ep 2 and he's super-busy for anyone, let alone a 79-year-old.

Yeah, you want to assume she's telling the truth, since she's going out on her own time and dime to try and sway him into acting in his own interest. But we've already seen her refuse and then slip into dissembling for a good cause this season, and her brooding & bottle-tossing on the balcony could just as well be at herself, as at Mesa Verde or Everett Acker.

(also my very lapsed Northern Exposure memories have been lightly stirred by visiting Roslyn, Washington Cicely, Alaska twice in the last year, and recently watching the first ep of Man In The High Castle to see it playing "Canon City, Colorado")

I would regularly have to rush out the door to get to a class during my freshman year of college because it followed reruns of Northern Exposure and Night Court, which I couldn't not watch

the Gus Fring/meth plotline continues to be a total drag on this show

Nahhh

The way gus is filmed and portrayed in this series is ridic, somewhere between a terminator and Satan

I just don't care about it. We know where his story goes, we aren't learning anything about the character, it just feels like fan-service wheel-spinning.

Mike is at least a little more interesting, his internal morality+guilt struggle is a new wrinkle

No way, the Fring stuff this episode hit pretty hard for anyone that's spent time toiling in a minimum wage job for a manager/boss with very specific requirements for how he (ime, it's always a he) wants his ship run but in no way intends to actually tell his staff what that is, preferring to browbeat and insinuate that everything you do is incorrect.

we already knew Fring was an asshole boss

his single-minded sense of purpose is kind of his defining characteristic

Well, yeah. It's also true that this particular episode landed in a very particular way, but maybe just for me.

Man Patrick Fabian is always so good as Howard, such a finely-tuned character. In the lunch scene - basically sauls grey matter moment - you can see that his regret over how he treated jimmy is real, as is his sleazoid admiration. Unlike Walt tho Jimmy’s tantrum isn’t just about resentment at being patronised, it also parallels Mike’s response to Kayleigh talking about her dad being killed by “the bad guys” in that the lashing out is more about his own guilt & self-loathing than anything

xp this whole show is about inevitable outcomes tbf. We know mike dies and Jimmy becomes an amoral criminal, who cares

Better Spare Kim

it's the journey, not the outcome re: Mike and Jimmy. Gus isn't on a journey, he's already at his end-state.

Maybe his identical, ne'er-do-well cousin is about to come to town and inadvertently instigate wacky hijinx, bet you never thought of that.

lol

His end state is dying having killed every member of the Salamanca family*, as a journey that frickin operatic! Not much personal growth tho true

*this is why lalo doesn’t survive the show btw

Gus isn't on a journey, he's already at his end-state.

I'm not sure that I agree this is his "end-state". I mean, he's clearly already in a position fairly similar to where he is when he enters BB, but surely there are moves for him to make yet that can play out in an interesting, unexpected way.

*this is why lalo doesn’t survive the show btw

I don't understand Lalo's deal - some fan wiki cited upthread noted that he was referenced as still being alive at the start of Breaking Bad, but i don't recall anything about him from BB at all

I thiiink that might be Saul’s intro where he says “it wasn’t me, it was Ignacio” or something which is the basis for the character of nacho - maybe he refs lalo as having sent them to kidnap him but I don’t remember

ie it would be a throwaway line

Gus's entire purpose in doing the unappeasable manager shtick was to keep someone at the restaurant with him, giving him an alibi in the long term, right?

We're also getting the backstory on why Hank seems like he has a really good rep in the DEA despite being a big dummy by the time Breaking Bad rolled around -- he was spoon-fed info in order to make certain busts!

that's how I read it mh

xps

Nice, I hadn’t caught on to either of those!

(Although hank does show some good cop instinct in bb, he was onto gus before being told to back off iirc)

xpost With the parallel utility of symbolizing the 'it is...acceptable' loss the money drop as part of a larger game.

Murdered that sentence like a German architect.

so Lalo never appears in BB, right? ergo he must die over the course of BCS at some point?

Yeah he’s only in bcs - doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s dead, could just be out of the picture (cf Kim we hope) but gus makes a big deal of having killed all of hectors surviving relatives

So yeah he’s dead

ahem, German engineer

As well as the possible alibi, Fring keeping the manager back shows us something of him that we haven’t met before. He’s not been an asshole boss in the past, he’s caring and respectful of people despite his very precise and demanding expectations. But here we get to see his weakness and stress during the bust under the gathered, mannered exterior, via him channeling his anger onto an innocent bystander. He has to endure this massive blow to his business without being able to ever show that he knows it’s his partner who’s responsible, and he vents that by making someone else inexplicably suffer at work, through no fault of their own.

Yes, well-put.

I thought the deal with the manager was just about Fring not wanting to be alone in the building when the call came in about the DEA sting. There was also a conversation on the way out between the manager and one of the staff about the fryer not being done properly (the manager said something about how he would fix it) so it wasn't just Fring being picky.

Uh, besides whatever of his own reasons Fring had for keeping the kid around, it was very explicitly about Fring being picky! Not sure how you read it another way.