Better Call Saul

Lol

but also, he only ever wanted to sell Jimmy/Saul out to cash in

was he? it seemed to me like he was more just thrilled to recognize him. but I guess Gene doesn't really know what his intentions were.

I think there was a hint of a veiled threat in the way the original Jeff played it

Yeah, there was definitely a veiled threat.

Jeff says something like "You'll do better next time" after Gene does the "Better call Saul!" routine for him.

love the idea that we’re just in the gene time now for the rest of the series, that those were Mike & Gus’s last scenes* and that sequence starting with Saul waking up in Xanaxdu is the end of that part of the story

I know there’ll be a bit more in the bb time (Walt & Jesse, the Francesca call) but I’m thinking these will be small flashbacks (I’d be very surprised if we don’t also get a chuck flashback as well)

*and maybe Kim’s as well, idk if she has anything to do with the phone call or what - I’d be cool with following her into the show’s present, but in a standalone ep that never intersects with gene’s story

I don't think we're actually going to be in the Gene timeline for the rest of the show, since we already know Walt and Jesse are going to appear at some point in the last few episodes. I feel like there will be some return to the time period at the end of the last episode when Saul is embracing his new riches.

also curious what exactly the timeline is here. I saw that the last episode took place around October 2010 (someone was sleuthing out the sports conversation) - how far is that from when Walt's operation blows up and Hank gets killed?

The BB wiki says the series finale of that show took place over September 4-7, 2010, and Saul disappeared around April of that same year.

Disappeared in April, so yeah this could be October.

so I guess she's not going to drop "Gene, you should meet my other kid, Kimmy" That could be awesome! Kim as Chuck, the one who made good---but Mom favors Jeffie, not the one she groomed or encouraged to be a cool little bad girl (she likes kids to stay kids, dependent, malleable). Kim went rong by growing up, and by becoming a goodie-goodie lawyer, supposedly.

xp yeah I know about the Walt & Jesse thing, I’m saying I think/hope we are for all intents & purposes fully in the gene time & those scenes will just play as a couple of those flashbacks the show does now & again

ok so Saul is still very much "at large" - I'd thought more time had passed! don't you have to work your way up at Cinnabon??

I think there was a hint of a veiled threat in the way the original Jeff played it

sure but it didn't seem like he was gonna turn him in - more like "hey lets do some crimes together"

but I guess Gene doesn't really know what his intentions were. Yeah, this is the thing, seems like.

Also, later, Jeffie says he coulda picked up the phone any time. "But you didn't. Why is that?" He read Jeffie as dim, uncertain, kinda greedy, playable.

I feel like Kim would have mentioned a brother at some point.

In his interactions with Jeffy and the other one gene seems to be channeling not just his old Saul persona but also Walt, which makes perfect sense but made me hella nervous. & then when he’s feeding them the line about the hs chemistry teacher who had a pile of cash the size of a Volkswagen after a year, it’s like these bozos don’t have the sense to come out with the very obvious followup - cool and what happened a year after that? - but gene does… right? :sweat-smile:

Also many xps but re gene having to maintain the Cinnabon routine with the 2 security guards he may have inadvertently given himself an out by making it awkward with his emotional outburst - would kind of make sense if he just stopped coming after that

xp brother thing surely a joke about a lot of ppl jumping to the conclusion that a famous older actor joining the cast just had to be playing Kim’s mum

no, it really could be awesome: the wheedling, uncertain/defensive/determined pitch of Mommie's voice (gotta keep a firm hand on Jeffie and these other guys, even from her Little Rascal or whatever that 2010 brand of ride is) goes w what's maybe happened to Kim's manipulative Mom. A huge coincidence yes but so is the Jeffie connection and this is Cabletown buddy.

xp brother thing surely a joke about a lot of ppl jumping to the conclusion that a famous older actor joining the cast just had to be playing Kim’s mum

― Wiggum Dorma (wins), Wednesday, July 27, 2022 1:51 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf I'm not sure how else anyone could've worked out an 89-year old woman playing an important role in this show

extreme flashforward where Gene is married?

Or, even funnier, Gene is old now and he's in a care facility, run by Sandpiper, and Burnett is one of the fellow residents

xp - it's not just the old lady gets cast thing, it's also the Gene timeline being set in Nebraska where Kim grew up

Old Gene in and out of various timelines, sees other characters, incl. Lalo in wheelchair w little bell, dingdingding

xp brother thing surely a joke about a lot of ppl jumping to the conclusion that a famous older actor joining the cast just had to be playing Kim’s mum

― Wiggum Dorma (wins), Wednesday, July 27, 2022 1:51 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf I'm not sure how else anyone could've worked out an 89-year old woman playing an important role in this show

it wasn't really known that we'd be going to the Gene storyline with 4 episodes left though

To be clear, I'm not sold on her being related to Kim in any way at all, but I don't think it's a huge stretch for people to make the possible connection, considering how often BB and BCS end up tying these seemingly loose ends together (cf the air traffic controller dad).

xp - it's not just the old lady gets cast thing, it's also the Gene timeline being set in Nebraska where Kim grew up

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, July 27, 2022 3:34 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya I feel this is a big clue that Kim will likely be back in some capacity during the Gene timeline, if not why would he choose Nebraska of all places? (iirc the vacuum guy did let you choose where you wound up, right?)

that said, I kinda take issue with the fact that Gene's working in a mall - its not far after everything goes down in Breaking Bad, so presumably a nationwide manhunt for Saul Goodman is still underway. why he would wind up in a public facing job at a mall with hundreds or maybe even a thousand people passing through in a given day is beyond me.

Oh, hadn't thought of that. Well, he's got a big stache and shades, kinda disguise-y but does look different, and malls were on the way out in a lot of places by 2010, kinda dark and not too crowded in there---but yeah, why would he do that, unless something about Kim maybe? I mean, if he did insist on Nebraska, because of her, the chance that she might turn up (does he know something we don't about the odds of that?), maybe the Cinnabons gig is the best/only thing the vacuum cleaner guy had there?

Otherwise, why not NYC area, good place to get lost.

Walt, Jesse, Saul, they all go to snow places, it’s the last place anyone would look for a desert guy

it’s always been a bit of an odd detail how right at the end of bb Saul says to Walt “best case scenario I end up managing a Cinnabon in Omaha Nebraska” & it’s p clear in the moment that he’s just coming up with an offhand example and then in bcs that is exactly where he ends up, it’s like a gag - el camino clarified that you get to pick the place (maybe this was the case in bb too I can’t remember)

(But even there you would only pick the general region & Ed would set up the rest so it’s still an uncanny guess from Saul)?

xxpost Yeah, I was thinking that Walt managed to get into some difficulty up there, and of course, seeing the Charlie Rose interview was last straw---but could imagine Jimmy keeping his head down in gray, bulgy city or metro sprawl, maybe doing some back office, gray area job---unless/until couldn't resist Slippin' around again.

So maybe that's what he'll do, in a way that location etc. doesn't matter too much; he'd revert anywhere (and they're just screwing with us, re life details of Gene, and Kim also from and maybe in Nebraska etc)

tossing us catnip for fan fiction and so on

an 89-year old woman playing an important role in this show
The character doesn't seem that old to me---but yeah CB 89, Seehorn 50, Odenkirk 59! No wonder Jimmy seems antsy---but none of them are playing their actual ages all that much? (Jonathan Banks 75, sure, Giancarlo Esposito 64, Tony Dalton 47! Looks older to me) Main reason I mention it is that Kim's flashback Mom doesn't look as old as Burnett would have been when Kim was in middle school oh well)

I thought of Kim as being maybe 37, Jimmy a trollish early or mid-40s.

‘Better Call Saul’ Writer on the ‘Maddening’ Pivot to Gene’s World
Alison Tatlock explains why the show’s creative team felt the time was right “to take a sharp turn in a different direction” with the black-and-white episode centered on a mall heist

I realise actors' ages often bear little relation to their character's age but Odenkirk was 46 when he first showed up on BB so Jimmy being early 40s in BCS fits (Cranston was I think 51 playing 50yo Walt at the start of BB) xp

Yeah, that's how I always thought of him. So maybe Burnett's character is considerably younger than 89 (I hadn't thought of Burnette herself as being that old, although she would pretty much have to be, as a cast member on The Gary Moore Show in the 50s etc). So maybe she could be Kim's mom. Either way, if she senses that Gene is some kind of menace or rival re her kid or kids, she could take him down, is what I get from what she says and how she says it, to him and the others.

I could buy Kim having a brother, being estranged from her ma, never mentioning them- but I can't buy Carol Burnett as Kim's ma after we've seen the younger version. Just no resemblance in character, mannerism or anything. That's a no from me Clive.

I do like the mix of “procedural episodes” where a whole episode is focused on a scam, but I’m not sure they’ll have the same re-watchability as other episodes if I re-visit BCS later.

Kim’s aunt maybe? Anyway...

I enjoyed this episode, but I'm really not sure, this far along, exactly what we learned about Saul that we didn't know already, which made it feel like a bit of a waste of time, which is disappointing this close to the end.

I mean we learned how he got back into the game, as Gene

also this is interesting

#BetterCallSaul 6x11 title revealed:
"BREAKING BAD" written and directed by @TomSchnauz pic.twitter.com/95OWpAt9X9

— Arabella ⚖️ BCS fan account ⚖️ (@homewardove) July 27, 2022

ooh

That's wild the timelines are so close together. The wistful Gene scenes plus that whole piece being in black and white gave me the feeling there was more time in between.

I mean we learned how he got back into the game, as Gene

I don't think it was about him getting back in the game at all, I thought it was just to show it takes all his energy *not* to revert to old ways, and the only reason he did it this time was out of emergency desperation. For sure this caper did not seem fun to him, and while in the past he got a kick out of it, this time he seemed really stressed out, kind of like an alcoholic struggling to stay on the wagon. That's why he was longing for that loud suit, it was a taste of what used to be but which he knew could never be again.

But of course we know all this. Clearly Jimmy/Saul/Gene prefers being alive to being rich, which we can assume is why he grew a mustache, moved to Omaha and lives in black and white in the first place.

sure but it kinda goes back to the thing with the Kettlemans in S1, he doesn't really want to take the money and he knows what he's doing is wrong but he finds a way to justify it to himself and from then on he's a different type of lawyer

so maybe he's in panicked self-preservation mode now, listening to the police scanner all day and what not, but it's also pretty close to the BB timeline. once things calm down he'll become himself again.

...but will things calm down? Will make for kind of a boring end to the show.

Y'all missing the forest for the trees.

In the next episode, we rise on the clothing store manager, who gets a call from an unheard caller, and breaks down in tears, and says "is this real?".

Cut away and we go to a team building meeting where the same manager chews out two of her Loss Prevention employees for being disruptive in the meeting. She pulls them aside and tells them to look at the shrinkage report. They protest they already did yesterday, but she wants to be rid of them for a few hours. So she makes them do it again.

One of them is on thin ice with his wife and cannot lose this job so he tries to buckle down. He furrows his brow, as if he's reading something troubling, and is re-reading it. Then he runs to the store manager.

He tells her that it's bizarre, that the sales and expected inventory don't line up, and weirdly, it seems the big ticket items are all off by three.

Suspecting a robbery, she calls Jerry to review the security tapes. He watches them and sees the robbery in all its glory and then sees the fall and pieces together that it happened around the time Gene broke down.

As he picks up the phone, he holds his chest dramatically and falls over, dead from all the Cinnamon. But no matter - his buddy sees the tape when he comes in, and sees Jeffie, but has no reason to suspect Gene.

They call the cops, who pay Jeffie a visit. Mom isn't home. He tries to run, trips, and falls and hits his head, dying instantly.

A distraught Burnett breaks down in a grocery store, when an unseen gentleman hands her a handkerchief. We hear the voice. A familiar voice, the same one that was on the phone with the manager. It couldn't be, could it?!

He asks her what's wrong and she tells the story, saying that Gene had been on the straight and narrow for so long and relapsed into crime. She said the cops said they had duh further and found it was an elaborate scheme, with a fake palette delivery from a fake shipping company. With a fake shipping manager who had a homely voice, friendly but vaguely slimy sounding, who sent flowers.

The off camera voice goes sotto voce, and you hear him say "Only one mo'fucker coulda been behind this", and asks Burnett if she's met any new friends lately.

Three days later, Jimmy is driving in a residential area when he is T-Boned by a truck at an intersection. It was intentional. Gene will not survive, his injuries are too severe.

We see the shoes of the unseen truck driver emerge from the vehicle and begin walking towards Jimmy, who is rapidly losing consciousness.

He knocks on the door, and his eyes bug out at seeing a familiar face, which appears on camera for the first time.

The man grins - "Huell be sorry"...and walks away, having carried out his revenge for having been needlessly languishing in hiding for the last few years.

I mean it's obv dudes