Better Call Saul

When the Kettlemans chase down Saul/Jimmy to sign the contracts, Craig calls out "Mr. Goodman!" Was that a mistake? They don't know him by that name, even if he just reintroduced himself like that (can't remember if he mentioned it or not).

I was also confused by the safe scene.

Why did they replace it with another safe but put the same stuff back?
If that envlope did have the number on it for Nachos hiding place (which is how I read that bit), that meant Mike was throwing Nacho in the shit which makes no sense.
So who was directing the guy watching Nacho from across the road? Was that Mike too? He got called immediately after Nacho called what I assumed was Mike and said he was running away.

I made the mistake of trying to watch both eps at once with a severe eye strain headache/dry eye attack and could barely keep my eyes on the screen which did not help.

I assume the Kettlemen couple were from S1 or something? I came into this show just before Jimmys brother died so I prob missed that.

Also: the scene where Jimmy fucks up and refers to his client as "Lallo" is going to come back to bite his arse right?

I think the Kettlemens were in the first or second episode--early in the first season, anyway. There was a great scene where Jimmy tracked them down hiding in the mountains, with Bobby Bare's "Find Out What's Happening" playing on the soundtrack.

That "Mr. Goodman!" does sound like an oversight.

Simon Grim shuffling through his day job at the country club

Trayce, the reason they had to go through all the trouble with the safe was because in order to plant the envelope inside they had to drill their way in, so they needed a fresh safe to make it look normal again.

Oh god, of course. I really wasn't following things well with the headache I had going :(

The person Nacho was talking to on the phone, and who had the spy in th eouthouse, was Gus Fring's henchman, the one who threatened Mike with a gun near the end of ep 2.

Ohhh ok that makes more sense.

I'm more conscious that things have to dovetail with the beginning of the Breaking Bad first series than I think I have been.
Nt sure how sui generis I was thinking things were before, but did seem like there had been a bit more leeway or seemingly. Not sure how sketched out anything was during Breaking Bad.

did wonder how a safe was going to have the same settings as teh previous one if it was replaced but that of course becomes clear.

The 2 stoned babes were in taht same apartment weren't they? Oh right is this the supposedly dead Mexican gangster's pad? I was trying to remember if he was in Breaking Bad in more than flashback as it was. Still can't.
& was the guy with the beard a close relative he found superfluous or something. Or is that just an illustration of how callous he is.

sorry not sure how taht happened I seem to have lost the end part of that bracket.
now looks like I just placed it in the wrong place. meant to include taht last paragraph

this review explained a lot of these points pretty well btw: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-recaps/better-call-saul-season-6-premiere-recap-1333400/

Oh yeah noticed that HG Wells paperback at the start. The copy of First Men In The Moon I bought in Canada was from the same series but I don't remember where that fits into Breaking Bad.
I didn't quite place when that scene was supposed to be. I thought Saul was down at heel from the office and car I remember him using. In BB at least.

Easter egg rundown

https://screenrant.com/better-call-saul-season-6-house-easter-eggs/
hit the wrong button

I was thinking the anti-Semitic ruckus was an improv when the bank guy recognized him and tried to get him thrown out.

Yes this obviously

The motel number iirc was scrawled on a bank transfer that would be plausible to be in nacho’s safe (and in itself incriminating) and its purpose is to direct the cartel toward nacho - this is fring’s plan not mikes

p sure at the start of the kettleman scene jimmy says something like “it’s goodman now, long story”, not that hard to believe someone would retain something he heard 10 minutes before although this thread has me wondering

what I do enjoy about everything in the Breaking Bad universe is it really wonderfully illustrates what a terrible life being a gangster is. like the end result of your work is that you're rich, but you spend your entire life looking over your shoulder, dodging bullets, and wondering if innocent family members are going to be killed for what you did. what you get is a status that initially feels great ("I'm a BOSS"), but you never really get to spend your money as you get addicted to simply having it, and the job takes up every waking day of your life so you can't vacation anywhere.

Yes!

Lalo’s “I don’t sleep much” in the last season

The pallet of cash in the storage unit in bb, sprayed for silverfish periodically - what a grim piece of wish fulfilment

Sub in “capitalism” for “being a gangster” obv

the first two episodes were good. it's starting off a bit slower than i expected. they're setting things up a lot

also, rhea seehorn is absolutely beautiful

I feel like this show is slow and that’s a huge part of why it’s great

this was fun:

https://www.amc.com/blogs/better-call-saul-q-and-a-peter-gould-on-how-breaking-bad-era-saul-is-still-holding-on-to-kim--1053391

Speaking of Kim, at the end of Season 5, she's got her sights set on this plan with Howard. But it seems Jimmy is a little off of his game. Is that the PTSD from what he went through in the desert? Or is he pulling back because he's not happy with how he's influenced Kim?

Oh man, you hit all of it right there. Let's talk fundamentals. He loves Kim. He wants to stay with her. But you saw at the end of last season, he said to her, "Am I bad for you?" And soon after that, she proposes scamming with Howard as their victim. I always feel that those two things are connected. I think that she feels she wants to hold onto the relationship and the thing that lights their fire is scamming. And we've seen it before. We've seen when they were apart and they weren't getting along, that was when Kim called Jimmy from the bar and said, "We've got a live one." This is their thing. I guess some people play board games. Some couples travel or raise kittens and dogs. This couple scams. Maybe the couple that scams together stays together. We'll see.

“We’ll see” but the totem of their scamming-as-bonding is lying in the gutter at the end of that opening montage

Which was gorgeous btw, just instant we’re back vibes after the initial wrong-footing of no gene; the gold toilet felt a bit too much of a jokey trump nod but it does make sense in light of Kim’s sketching of the Saul persona later

As usual a lot of pleasure in tricksy plotting that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, in this case I’d wonder about the timeframe of lalo moving his dental double back to the compound but it’s such an effective scene wgaf

Speaking of lalo I LOVE LALO the idea of yet another Salamanca psychopath is so unpromising but from his first scene he has been incredible imo, one of the top baddies

My biggest worry with this season is nacho becoming s5-Jesse, he seems in for a rough ride and I fear they will go full miseryfest again

Michael Mando had been brilliant in this but yeah, it does seem like he's in for a bad time

Great to have the Kettlemans back. If they decide to do another BB/BCS spin off they'd be the ones to go for.

Yeah, they were the best thing, after Lalo went away: the whole slow murky tricky Gus-Mike sludge continues from last season, and Kim's current enthusiasm-plus reminds me too much of Skylor getting into Walt's Heisenberg thing, so does that mean Kim will also stredd out? Although Kim w zeal ov convert, pushing Jimmy further than he wants to go, kinda ("You gave them the money, didn't you"), pulled into and then taking over the Goodmanization, calling Saul, challenging him, that does go further than Skylor, I think??
But please remind me of why they're trying to destroy Howard's reputation---something to do with Jimmy's big brother? That seems so long ago---

er, "stress" out is what I meant, although "stredd" could be stress x shred

Yeah, it’s a bit baffling. Fundamentally Howard and Cliff seem decent, if rather corporate, guys who don’t seem deserving of the efforts to trash their reputations. Makes me find it more difficult to root for Jimmy and Kim.

So I guess this is the point, as with Walt, when we have to see that things are going beyond slow shred of sympathy: not just lonesome monster zone, but true reckless-to-crazy spendthrift-to-useless darkside.

So no rational motivation required, lucky for the writers. (But I guess Kim and Jimmy talked about what they see as justification?)

The impetus for the campaign against Howard was in the last ep of the previous season where he told Kim about all the fucked up stuff jimmy had been up to & she was pissed at the presumption she needed saving - or that was the stated reason but it’s just as much lashing out because the truth stung

It’s basically the grey matter thing again, Howard is kinda smarmy but the resentments being aimed at him are mostly displaced, in jimmy’s case to stop thinking about his own guilt about his brother

Kim as bad cop in the second ep, we’ve seen that steel before & some of where it comes from but oof

Agree re kettlemans, Betsy(?) in particular a great character/performance

with this and Atlanta and Barry it's good that there a few decent series actually worth illegally downloading rn. Nacho and Lalo have transformed into the two most watchable characters in this show now. Lalo was great from the start, Nacho was a bit iffy at first I thought.

Oh I was all in on nacho fairly early, Michael Mando does wary so well

The character I’m least into is actually gus - I love all the characters so least into = still quite into but a lot of the time in this (partic last season) they are filming him like Kurtz and he is speaking in doomy supervillain monotone and it throws off the finely tuned calibration that made him so creepy in bb, he is more scary when he is less s c a r y

Tho I love him staring into space waiting for the flip phone to ring, I think we’ve seen that before

maybe I'm being harsh, in the first season I just thought oh it's that not very good stock thug character from orphan black. But he's definitely grown on me - even though he's just too capable sometimes! Yeah they are telegraphing Gus at this point, he's becoming quite a b character.

Booming posts, thanks yall!

he's just too capable sometimes!

there are so many supergeniuses on this show! is howard the only non-mastermind among the main cast?

Gus taking a backseat makes sense, especially a large part of his thrill in BB was the mystery of who he really was, which they slowly revealed over 2.5 seasons. now he's here more to fill in blanks.

he's in "ruthless ladder climber" mode now so really his M.O. is long-term scheming, through and through.

though I still kinda wanna know who Gus really is, I get that the menace is more in the mystery, but there being no records of him in Chile and Eladio saying he knows who he really is....did he run a death squad or somefing?

caught up on first two eps, so exciting to be back on deck … the slow burn of this story has me so ~jazzed~ lol

the carrot & stick play w the kettlemans in ep2 was fascinating.

Jimmy clearly loves the showmanship side of the scam, the sleight of hand, the backstory of the grift & playing out a role & being maybe a bigger, more convincing version of himself… but Kim loves the dark shit. She wants to plumb the psychological side & make it hurt, get true leverage & expose the weakness. when she finds out what the mark wants in their deepest heart of hearts, she will squeeze til they bleed to get them to say it & she is like a feeding shark. And that’s her “fun” but in essence it’s how she truly ~lives~. It’s the gas in her tank. She thrives on that feeling. And Jimmy I think hates that leverage, maybe it looks like sadism to him —- maybe he thinks, “would she do that to ME? I could be the Kettlemans”. He isnt into actually hurting people, even pathetic pathological striving scammers like the kettlemans. it clearly stops being fun for him right at the crossover point where it starts being fun for Kim, where it gets real.

But i think they are both currently trying to pretend that there isnt a crossover, that they want the same things. And maybe the fully formed PT Barnum of Saul Goodman is a larger than life reaction to, a rejection of, of Kim’s punishing instincts. A message, maybe.

Good post!

I was picturing Saul in the yellow car with the mismatched door. Now I'm not sure of the timeline was that earlier in Better Call Saul?
Am I getting confused about his relative affluence by conflating 2 different eras?

Yeah you’re thinking of jimmy’s car

Saul drives a caddy with the vanity plate LWYRUP

Which it’s implied might be a kind of response to Howard’s namaste plate, as we see jimmy still bugged by in this ep (after lobbing bowling balls at it last season)

p sure at the start of the kettleman scene jimmy says something like “it’s goodman now, long story”, not that hard to believe someone would retain something he heard 10 minutes before although this thread has me wondering

― gop on ya gingrich (wins), Saturday, April 23, 2022 12:23 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I had made a point to say when I asked about it that I probably missed him mentioning it to them. It wasn’t worth rewinding so I asked the thread.

I was more responding to the idea that it was a mistake “even if” (also def being a jerk, I just found it funny how the thread revive had a v… consistent flavour up to that point)

My biggest problem is Gus, echoing up thread, he’s acting and written too much for an audience that knows he’s a scary bad guy. He is supposed to be pleasant and hard to read, an organized businessman that is very formal but warm, someone who treats all of his businesses as equally legitimate and is overly professional. The box cutter scene was horrifying because he did it the same way a businessman does anything else. His disposition is all wrong now, all he’s got right is the posture. The two sides to Gus are supposed to be jarring. That’s part of why his character is so perfectly undercover.

Did I say even if? I mean, i suppose my point was that kettleman wouldn’t necessarily call out the new name, not without the cliche “mr mcg- uh, g-goodman!” read. Small details though.

Hector looking gus in the eye is the one that does feel like a bit of a discrepancy to me but you can explain it away, iirc gus’s thing was along the lines of “you never look me in the eye on these visits we have” ie the regular solo visits he makes to torment hector - makes sense that he wouldn’t count a diplomatic visit with Don Juan in these. But it’s as likely the writers just forgot