Jimmy plays Superman by throwing Lois under the bus on a double-crossing Better Call Saul
TV Reviews Unknown
This episode needs to come with a special content warning: BELOVED CHARACTER’S PLANS WRECKED BY SELFISH IDIOT (BCPWSI). I swear, few things on television send me into as steep a tailspin. The night before I watched “Wexler v. Goodman,” I caught up on the episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel where (spoiler coming, skip down to the next paragraph if you must) Sophie Lennon just trashes the opening night of Miss Julie while Susie watches in horror from the audience, powerless to stop the destruction of everything she’d worked so hard to build. That one-two punch left me gutted and enraged at the same time.
It’s not just the betrayal and the out-of-control nightmare spiral that the two episodes have in common. Both turn on theater — doubly so, in the case of Better Call Saul. There’s the suite of commercial solicitations that Jimmy directs, with big auteur energy, to put pressure on Mesa Verde. We, the audience, knew that all of that activity wasn’t going to vanish without us seeing the results. And from a character perspective, Jimmy can’t possibly let it get memory-holed; he invests way too much of his identity in the performance, the spectacle, the excess of his attack-on-all-fronts approach. He just can’t stop giving in to the voice in his head: “They think they’re so much better than me. This’ll show ‘em!” So he talks himself into believing that his beautiful commercials can serve a dual purpose: convincing Rich that he and Kim aren’t in cahoots.
Contrast the way Kim commits to investing herself — by sacrificing, rather than indulging. Her idea is that she’ll write a check to make up the difference between Mesa Verde’s highest offer and what will make Acker take the deal. She eats crow to mend the relationship with Rich, too; that couldn’t have been easy after she made a point of publicly challenging him. Kim’s position is that she can fix it if she’s willing to do what she shouldn’t have to do, what a more prideful person would think is beneath her. Kim will face the situation head-on and carry through, just like we see in the lovely cold open where she sets off to walk home three miles with a cello on her back, rather than get in the car with her neglectful (and buzzed) mom.
That’s what stings so badly about the disastrous meeting at Mesa Verde. Jimmy has no conception of how much Kim has given up, how hard she has worked, to get everybody to the table ready to move on. Turns out he is the only person who is not ready to move on. He reminds me of Rod Blagojevich, a gem in his pocket, determined to extract the maximum value from it. It galls him to think that the Navajo photographer he tracked down based on the photos from inside Kevin’s house could go unused. In Jimmy’s world, if you can dream up a play, you have to use it. He’s the Anton Chekhov of nail salon lawyers.
Luckily, over in the drug-dealing storyline, we have Mike going to work and getting it done, no nonsense, no stress. Like he tells Nacho, who’s looking at Scylla Salamanca and Charybdis Fring on either side, the first thing to do is take care of Lalo like Gus wants. So we get to see him patiently triangulating: “reminding” the TravelWire customer of the car she saw, asking her to report it to the detective who interviewed her, maneuvering a hit-and-run report about the same car onto the detective’s desk, and radioing in Lalo’s location thank to Nacho’s surveillance. Boom, Lalo’s picked up and off the streets (though probably not for long). With some breathing room, what kind of escape plan will Nacho and Mike concoct? Two desperate men, both flirting with nihilism, both hanging on only because of people they love — we know Mike’s not going to get out of Gus’s clutches, but maybe Nacho still has a chance.
So what are we to make of Kim’s astonishing final proposal? “We are at a breaking point,” she says, and it’s about that old standby of narrative conflict: trust. Thank goodness she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a magnet in them and generate electricity. But here I did not even think about that toxic word “trust” until I started to write this paragraph. And it’s all because we watched that trust being broken, felt it in our bones. The creative team showed instead of telling. Going back to what I wrote last week about Kim and Jimmy’s differing approaches to words versus action, that’s both completely on brand and a remarkable accomplishment.
“I don’t believe you. You don’t believe yourself,” Kim observes. So there are only two ways they can go: their separate ways, or headfirst together into the lies.
Stray observations:
- Little Kim in the cold open flashback sets her jaw and drums her fingers in a very familiar way when her mom tries to coax her in the car.
- “I just feel like if we get out there and we hustle, we can do it,” Jimmy pleads, trying to somehow conjure his vision into existence without any outlay of resources, and sounding remarkably like my associate dean.
- One of my favorite things about Saul Goodman is that he allows Jimmy to indulge all his alter egos. Tonight: the auteur! Just watch him posing his actors in front of the green screen like he’s a photographer at Olan Mills, and coaxing just the right reading of “bare genitals”: “Conversational, to me, like a friend. But there’s fear there, emotion — will no one save you? But throw it away.”
- Mike uses the alias Dave Clark for his private investigator character. As in the Five? Were we previously aware that Mike is an aficionado of the Tottenham Sound?
- Poor Howard. There’s no indication that he’s anything but sincere in offering Jimmy a job, and for his trouble he gets humiliated in front of the whole country club.
- Jimmy is muddling through “Smoke on the Water” on his electric guitar when Kim comes home, because of course he is.
- Just a gorgeous shot when Kim pulls up outside the nail salon. In the bottom left of the frame she turns off the car and the interior light comes on as she pauses, mentally getting ready, while over her shoulder we see the nail salon ablaze with the light, people milling about doing Jimmy’s bidding.
- “This is like watching a walk-off home run just drift foul.”
403 Comments
Legally, a person cannot be compelled to testify against his or her spouse. Therefore Kim is proposing marriage because she is all in, in spite of everything.
I am floored.
Jimmy is officially dead to me. That was quite a heel turn.
But then, Jimmy was always going to end up dead to us in any sense that mattered. Don’t want to oversell the show, but I halfway understand how it must’ve been to be an attendee at the Theatre of Dionysus … where everyone knew how things must turn out, but attendance was all about watching what had to be unwinding in front of you.
I was as furious as Kim, but as he explained himself, as usual, there was a method to his madness.
But, she told him she did not want to do it at all—-it wasn’t entirely about ‘plausible deniability’ as Jimmy explained it—-Jimmy once again lied and went all in for his own selfish reasons, even if his overall goal of saving the residence was good. How much the viewer is expected to believe it was not about ‘making a name for Saul Goodman’ i’m not entirely sure.He could have very well ended her career at that firm with that humiliating backstabbing, and at no point during that ‘decision’ at the nail salon did she ever give him the impression that she wanted that.
there’s a side to Jimmy that cares only about self-preservation and lies to himself about his ‘moral obligations, and there’s the other side that genuinely does want to help the little guy, because he’s BEEN that little guy all his life.
Yeah Jimmy/Saul was just so far over the line with this one. It’s the moment he became totally irredeemable to me. I don’t see how you could possibly defend his actions on any level but I’m sure weird dudes on the internet will try
Not really. He was just throwing sh*t against the wall hoping it would stick. He has to know that he’s dramatically overachieved with Kim and saw that he was this close to losing her. She is far too smart to see through that argument.
There was a method but only if you accept Jimmy’s extreme ends always justify the means “ethnics”. He basically attacked, humiliated and embarrassed his romantic partner in a professional setting. Even if it was “all for show” on some level nothing justifies what he did in that meeting and that’s aside from how much he lied to her and hid things from her in the lead up to it
I didn’t really see it as strictly a heel turn he did it to protect Kim from herself. The idea that she was willing to pay Acker 30 grand to ease her conscience was crazy and I doubt Acker would have accepted anyway.
that’s part of it, for sure. her paying out of her own pocket horrified him.
Same here, and now I’m almost hate watching Jimmy/Saul scenes because the writing sucks and makes no sense to me. I cannot imagine Kim going through all that completely justified fury and then saying ‘let’s get married’. It is just a plot device that the show doesn’t need.Plus, I know that not everyone likes Howard, but it’s BS to vandalize his home and car, then send in prostitutes to embarrass him. Even Larry David wouldn’t do that. It’s BS.Too late, since the season is already written, but if this is the best the writers could come up with, then the show is limping towards the finish.Just my two cents.
I disagree on the ‘poor writing’ angle—-I mean, if you stop and think about it, what Kim did makes sense (to assure that he won’t ‘accidentally’ legally throw her under the bus in the future by getting married).And while I now disgust Jimmy, I consider that brilliant writing, because he’s been a fairly rootable guy up until this point. But stabbing Kim in the back, while being *in the room* driving the metaphorical bus over her again and again–I’m sorry, that’s just not right. Especially when he knows she’s not in on the con.
That’s a theory but quite a stretch. She was furious. Dropped an F bomb, told him repeatedly it’s over..he starts slinging a bunch of BS to keep her talking…and that results in her mentally switching to let’s get married? Given how much she clearly respects Rich S at her firm, the idea of her completely going rogue is a left turn that is both preposterous and a really bad idea. The audience tolerates Jimmy and we enjoy some of his stunts, but we love and respect Kim. Sure, she’s painted outside the #’s a little bit here and there, but marrying for the reason she wouldn’t be compelled to testify against Jimmy is a bridge too far.
No, I’m kinda with you. Season 4 was a letdown for me, and season 5 picked things up at first, but it’s started to slide into the same things. I feel like the show’s makers are obsessed with not showing us things going on and letting us figure them out later, and unfortunately that doesn’t work for those little personal dramas where we’re left to infer everything the characters are feeling 95% of the time, until these moments which don’t connect for that reason. And that’s true for pretty much every aspect of the show; most of the crazy capers we see, we’re left in the dark to piece together until after they happen, which is frustrating and alienating.
Honestly, I think a procedural of Saul owning fools in court and doing ridiculous shenanigans to get criminals off would have been a lot more enjoyable than what we’ve gotten.
i honestly don’t think he can help himself. it’s a compulsion. doesn’t make it excusable, but understandable. i don’t think he ever sets out to hurt anyone. he’s just addicted to the con like some people are to gambling.
are you fucking kidding me? i can understand jimmy just pissing you off and disappointing you despite the low expectations you have for him, but that this crosses some line between just being a really shitty professionally unethical scumbag and being a really shitty professionally unethical scumbag who is also shitty in his spare time is weird. i haven’t even seen the vast majority of saul episodes but if you think less of jimmy because of this then i’m just glad they let you watch AMC at nun school.
No, I am not kidding. There was a difference between how Jimmy acted in the past and how gleefully he (metaphorically) smacked his girlfriend around in that meeting room. No empathy at all—-as he very well knew that Kim was being completely blindsided and humilated publicly in front of her boss and her most important client. Didn’t even pause.Then, later on he tries to rationalize what he did despite Kim telling him definitively NOT to do it.I can forgive Jimmy for just about everything we’ve seen him do throughout the prequel—-yes, he’s always been a narcissitic self-serving shady lawyer, but usually the person on the other end of his dealings deserves it. Kim definitely DID NOT.
i’ll stop short of saying i believe jimmy and understand his motives, but i do believe he sincerely felt that railroading kim and watching her squirm was part of his scam . jimmy makes a living exploiting people’s own self interests and he’s a master at reading human emotions so i assume he expected kim to be super pissed cause, who wouldn’t be? i don’t think he’s stupid enough to expect her to just take his apology and laugh it off but what i don’t know is whether he did it to protect her, his plan, or himself. he’s a sociopath and if anything the lesson here is don’t rely too heavily on a sociopath because they can’t tell the difference between what’s good for them and best for others. i now think you were just being hyperbolic and that you’ll forgive jimmy because it’s funny when he’s a piece of shit and even funnier when he’s a bigger piece of shit.
I think Jimmy/Saul does everything he does for one of a few very simple motives. Everything’s motivated by one or more of the following factors: 1. desire for revenge against his enemies/”the man” in a more general sense 2. Desire to WIN and 3. The general thrill of the con/the game (Jimmy’s a lot like Trump if you think about it)Jimmy did everything he did in these last few episodes simply because he wanted to win versus Mesa Verde and the fancy law firm Kim works for. This for a time was what Kim wanted that as well for awhile but then she told him to call everything off but by that point he was so deep into the con and getting too much of a thrill out of it to pull out at the last minute.
Jimmy is not a sociopath under any reasonable definition of that term. Narcissistic? Sure, but not to even toxicly. There are many examples throughout BB and BCS, but just for one, hiding Jesse from Fring. He genuinely cares about other people and can empathize with them. He just uses his very high EQ to also manipulate people when it serves his interest.
you’re probably right, but by virtue of being a life long con man who is capable of just about anything and who is willing to do just about all of it to get what he wants i’d say he picked the perfect profession. i think it’d be very difficult to distinguish between a great lawyer and a complete sociopath, able to compartmentalize every single thing and justify any of it based on the task at hand.
Ah, yes, the two most romantic words in the English language: spousal privilege.
Spousal privilege isn’t terribly useful in criminal investigation. No prosecutor is going to hinge a case on an accomplice’s testimony outside of a movie.I think it’s more that she can’t be “the mark”, “the sucker”. She’s saying she needs to be in on the scam.
Financially Independent makes many lovers swoon as well.
or “Tax purposes”
Did not see that coming until about 2 seconds before it landed. I thought she was out.
After the “I didn’t tell you to protect you” worse thing that a person can say to their partner to destroy trust, by Jimmy, I was floored when Kim dramatically pauses and I said aloud “Get married?” and then she said it.
My mouth was fully agape.
I was a bit, but I remember Saul saying something about an ex-wife (who he never names) during an episode of Breaking Bad. During that show I thought it was just a throwaway line about Saul’s sleazy past, like when he said he got laid pretending he was Robert Redford. But then the latter thing actually happened in BCS so I began to think he really had an ex and she was Kim.
It probably was a throwaway line at the time; they’ve been incorporating a lot of throwaway lines from BB as actual traits of Saul.
I know and I love it! Same with Nacho and Lalo. helps weave the shows together even more, and it helps show that Jimmy/Saul are both the same guy with the same past even though they seem so difficult to reconcile at times.
In BB I’m pretty sure Saul said he had been married three times.
It was Kevin Costner. Easier to believe because who remembers Kevin Costner after the early 2000’s?
Spousal privilege varies widely by state and doesn’t always allow preclusion, the testifying spouse has to invoke it sometimes. New Mexico interestingly did have preclusion, but the state supreme court abolished it last year (several years post-show timeline).
It’s such a curious decision. Circling back to the review’s comments about how Kim sacrifices rather than indulges, which would this be? Her tendency to carry through (when she probably shouldn’t) can be just as much prideful as it is admirable, and I’m starting to question if she’s got self-destructive tendencies.
Kim Wexler commits to everything in her life. Work and relationship. It’s either all out or all in. No more half-measures, Jimmy.
She does. The opening alludes to an admirable intolerance to bad behavior that borders on excessive stubbornness. She pushes things too far but for her it is a sense of “justice”, for Jimmy it’s self preservation.
Like when she got in that wreck because she was staying up constantly and overworking herself to the point where she blacked out at the wheel.
I think she feels, deep inside, that she’d be more embarrassed by it not working out with Jimmy than sticking by him. She’s trying to ‘show’ the snooty fucks she works with that he’s worth something.
Again, deep inside, Kim isn’t one of them. She’s more like Jimmy than them.
She’s been dating Jimmy for years. Of course she has self-destructive tendencies.
Even better, from what I’ve heard They cannot arrest a husband and wife…for the SAME crime.
I’ve got the worst ******* attorneys.
I have the worst fucking lawyers.
But there’s always money in the banana stand.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s true, Dad.
but the cartel can murder one of them…
You’ve got the worst f*** attorneys.
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not but just “for the record,” as we say, that is not true.
Both during the meeting and during the final scene at home, there was something about Kim’s posture and expression that made her seem a bit, um, turned on. My husband thought I was crazy for thinking so, and I was ready to eat crow, but then came that last line.
Oh my Gos it makes so much sense tonow that you’ve said it.I think that Kim isn’t so much mad at Jimmy for turning heel and more angry that he doesn’t want to properly include her in his “breaking bad”. Tragic, but as someone who had hoped from day one that they’ll be a ride or die couple until the show catches up with Ozymandias, I am excited for this development.
Kim belongs in Jimmy’s world, but who’s to say that what Jimmy loves and protects about Kim is that she nominally belongs to the ‘other’ world? Maybe he can’t drag her fully into his schemes because it’d ruin his image of her, somehow?
Part of her rebellion towards injustice is her sense of right and wrong, part of it is her reveling in the excitement of rebelling. Jimmy appeals to the latter part.
they both believe in right and wrong, but Jimmy thinks the ends justify any means.
I mean, both anger and/or lust can be present in the adjective “aroused”…
I definitely had a sense of a good fuck session brewing, but as a final good bye thing.
I seldom, if ever, talk back to the TV screen but when Kim brought up marriage, I shouted “JESUS, KIM!!! WHAT THE FUCK??”
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…
My favorite Killface quote…
It’s originally a line from the poem ‘Ozymandias’ which inspired the Breaking Bad episode of the same name, Hank’s last episode, because it’s about glorious empires falling apart. ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’This came for Walt and will come for Jimmy. I dread it coming for Kim as well.
Walt didn’t even have much time to enjoy his empire. It was about a year and change total, the action on Breaking Bad, and he was terminally ill through all of it. So pointless.
He set out to help provide for his family and ended up destroying everything in his life in doing so.
I know. I was making a Frisky Dingo reference…
Love how his mother is looking over his shoulder when he says “I want it to be perfect”
It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of Mama Killface in season 3…
Isn’t the poem more generously about how everything ends and the hubris of men.
It can be, but most men don’t end up having giant statues of themselves built as a testament to their social dominance. In Walt’s case, the statue is metaphorical.
Right, I am not sure how that contradicts my point. Having just looked up its history, however, your more literal take may be accurate as it was written to commemorate the arrival in London of the remains of the statue upon which it was based.
Dude, that receptionist chick?
Speaking of which, I was amazed that AMC actually allowed the F bomb. I can’t recall that before on a commercial channel. Interesting.
I’ve heard it used on other basic cable channels (FX, FXX, TBS) on occasion but only after 9:00PM EST.
During BB I think Gilligan said that AMC allowed one f-bomb per season.
I know! That was surprising.
They used it a week or so back, too, to describe what that horse and that man were doing in that photo Saul gave Acker. These episodes open with a special, separate mature-language warning.
I think each series on a channel like that gets 1 or 2 per season.
FX does it all the time. The first time I remember the F-bomb was on “The People vs. O.J. Simpson.”
AMC did it for both Mad Men and Breaking Bad once a season, that was their rule.
Mad Men used it it’s final season
I dunno, I feel like it’s been done before, and I wanna say on of the other AMC shows, like Breaking Bad or Mad Men. But it certainly as rare as hen’s teeth on basic cable.It wasn’t too long ago that it seems like there was a big media buzz about Comedy Central letting South Park say “shit” but only after midnight.
So far as I know, they allow one per season. BB used it, too (“I fucked Ted,” etc)
Breaking Bad got one per season that they let slide by.
right? i mean, maybe it could work, but he’s definitely not the kind of person who should have a child (no judgment, a lot of people who’ve had kids and who haven’t shouldn’t have kids). he’s the wrong personality for settling down.
Am I the only one that thinks Kim is setting up a play on Jimmy?
Pulling a “Giselle”?
I keep getting the feeling that Kim doesn’t really like (much less love) Jimmy at all. She’s drawn to him and their lives are now entangled, but pretty much what I get from her is that she’s disgusted and fascinated by him at the same time (with the scales leaning heavily on the side of disgust). She finds his lack of scruples useful at times, but if she had a choice, she’d prefer to be with a person with integrity. She has such low self-esteem, though, that she maybe thinks she’s ended up with the person she deserves. I don’t think she has trusted Jimmy much at all since she found out about what he did to his brother to make him lose the Mesa Verde account.
I also think it’s an acknowledgement that there is part of her who loves him and part which can’t work with him at all. And she has to pick which part is in control.
I don’t know that she trusts him, but if she’s married to him, she can’t testify against him. I had a feeling this is where their relationship would go. He mentioned in Breaking Bad he’d been married, and I can’t imagine unless he went on a bender with some random woman, he’d recover very easily from losing Kim.
I was also thinking about that line in BB about Saul having an ex-wife. At first when I saw Breaking Bad initally I thought it was a throwaway line to give him some sleaze (I was picturing a drunken Vegas wedding) like when Saul said he got laid by convincing someone that he was Robert Redford. But then he actually did that last one in BCS so that had me rethinking his wife and that it was Kim.
It was Kevin Costner. I loved that Mike used “Dave Clark” as a fake name. I’d say again, but this happened pre the time he used it in Breaking Bad.
Oh yeah you’re right. On both counts. I forgot Mike had used that in the other series.
I thought it was Kevin Costner? Btw when I saw little Women, when Odenkirk first showed up on screen I really did think he looked like Kevin Costner.
Not exactly. In some states, the spouse themselves holds the privilege (Kim can refuse to testify against Jimmy), in other states, the other spouse holds the privilege (Jimmy can insist that Kim not testify against him). And, you cannot assert the privilege to refuse to testify about things that occurred before the marriage (too obvious a loophole, that).
I read it like that, but also that this makes conflict of interest official, meaning that she and he can no longer be on opposing sides (I don’t know if that’s a hard rule but I am guessing even her firm would err on the side of caution for a married couple). Meaning, her calculus is that she is removing the circumstances where Jimmy played her for a sucker (that’s her anger), and therefore he won’t play her. But of course the error in her calculus is that this isn’t Jimmy, this is Saul, and Saul has been playing her since his brother’s hearing in several ways. When she realizes that, that’s when she’ll be gone.
oh come on, there’s gotta be married couples who practice different kinds of law and have to occasionally work opposite each other, right?
yeah, I went looking and the impression I get is that while it varies by jurisdiction, most sets of ethical guidelines leave it discretionary, so it’d probably have to be decided by the presiding judge on the merits. Seems like there’d be a potential issue with marital privilege.
I believe it is primarily up to the clients to consent.
No, definitely a conflict of interest. It may have happened, but it definitely should not have. Any reasonable lawyer would say that they had to withdraw from the representation if it even seemed like their client’s interests would conflict with their spouse’s client’s interest.
She either needs to be all-in on life with Jimmy at this point, or get out and be the responsible corporate lawyer she’s still pretending she wants to be.
Agree. First shock and goosebumps of the season. Brilliantly acted by Seehorn and Odenkirk. Brilliant!
They cannot arrest a husband and wife for the same crime, Michael
I literally said out loud “What the fuck??” at her final line. It was as devastating a last line as Skylar’s “I fucked Ted” on Breaking Bad, but for entirely different reasons.
Also, they cannot arrest a husband and wife for the same crime.
I’m sorry this episode got an A. I would have given it an A right up until that “let’s get married” idiocy. I couldn’t even fucking believe it. This is why people like Jimmy always end up getting over, because they find suckers who just continue to let themselves be suckered. Poor Kim, but whatever comes from this, she brought on herself. 🙁
Okay hang on hang on. Didn’t Saul tell Walt off handedly that his second wife screwed him over by sleeping with step father? Well we know the story of Sauls first wife, she cheated on him with the guy who’s car he shitted on. I really hope that’s not the direction this is going. Because Saul marrying Kim and she cheats on him will break my heart in ways not seen since Hank died.
we have no reason to believe Saul was telling the truth there
Except that it was the single most important glimpse of Saul’s backstory Breaking Bad ever gave us—it’s his explanation for why he believes that “it’s a cruel world” and Walt needs to “grow up” and understand that the people who love him will betray him. If there’s one single line it would be most meaningful for Better Call Saul to pay off, it’s that one—maybe not literally, but I’ve always thought there has to be some essential truth to it.And I always thought it was highly likely that Kim was the wife in question, since her supposed betrayal would indeed provide a big piece of the puzzle of why sweet, caring Jimmy turned into bitter, cynical Saul. I also figured that the “stepfather” reference was the inspiration for the character of Chuck, but then the writers decided that they needed a more intimate relationship and made him Jimmy’s brother instead.In fact, before Chuck died, I wondered if Jimmy might have to create a fake backstory to explain why Jewish lawyer Saul Goodman has some familial relationship with older Irish Catholic lawyer Chuck McGill, and might’ve started introducing him to people as his stepdad. But now that he’s gone, I find it interesting that Howard seems to be trying to step up and become a mentor figure to Jimmy in his departed brother’s place—sort of a stepfather figure, if you well.Which is to say, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jimmy walks in on some interaction between Kim and Howard and sees it as an unforgivable betrayal—maybe not a sexual one, but something one could imagine Saul reframing for public consumption as “I caught my second wife screwing my stepdad.” That seems like a much more interesting possibility than the notion that Saul, the guy who told Walt his real name a couple minutes after meeting him, was just telling tall tales about his marital history for shits and giggles.
I think you might have called it.
Unless
LALO NEEDS CONSUL
DEATH UNPLANNED
They said E8 would be a really big deal, this series Ozymandias. And while it seems premature for worlds to collide hell hath no more indiscriminate fury than a Salamanca looking at charges above the border. And now that Howard certainly knows whose been screwing with him he could easily choose to involve himself in business far beyond his ability to deal with.
Hmmm a very good point. Its the sort of small line that points towards bigger events. It’s like how the few references to Mike being a Philly cop was paid off with Five O. I don’t want that to be the outcome, but this series has always prided itself on taking the route you expect but dread deep down.
He has all the reason he needs to believe the world is a cruel place. Mostly from Chuck and his past. The line from breaking bad that most excites me on future possibilities was him wondering who sent Walt and Jesse “Ignacio or Lalo?”
Same, BCS has done a really good job taking some lines and references and minor characters from BB and turning them into important mysteries that we need answered.
Yeah, it really feels to me like the only reason Howard’s character is still around at this point in the story is to, in some way, be part of the end of Kim and Jimmy, whether intentionally or not. As much fun as the scene with the two hookers was, his continued purpose isn’t just to be Jimmy’s occasional humorous punching bag.
I know. I just rewatched the whole series this week and for some reason my mind went to that line, plus he wasn’t lying about being married at least once. Your probably right though.
I think it’s safe to assume that Saul had a different “My second wife…” story for any given scenario.
I disagree. Saul sounded sincere with Walt. I think it was a rare instance of BCS ignoring a detail from the world of Breaking Bad, pretending it didn’t exist. Not the first time. BCS changed the age of Mike’s granddaughter. Generally, the two worlds are pretty consistent. Like Mike’s Dave Clark alter ego, Judge Papadoumian’s fondness for Saul and the return of APD Detective Tim Roberts in this episode.
For what it’s worth, Jimmy’s mom died several years before and it doesn’t look like she remarried so that story doesn’t sound true. I don’t really see Kim cheating. It’s kind of a lame drama development that isn’t in the BB/BCS style.
Maybe you would consider Skyler’s dalliance with Ted less cheating and more spite sex, but I’d say stuff like that is pretty firmly in the BB/BCS realm. Would be lame to do again though.
He does tell.Francesca she’s got the good booty, which is really the only hmm moment
I mean, Kim meets a horrific, Hank-like end, doesn’t she? She’s too good of a person tiptoeing a little too close to some really bad people via her relationship with Jimmy.
We don’t know that the Sunroof incident was his first wife. Maybe she was his second wife and Chet had at one time been in a relationship with his mom.
If it wasn’t clear to us before, Kim lamp-shaded it in this episode: Jimmy/Saul is a liar. From here on, we can assume anything he told Walt was just a some kind of fabrication. Or not, depending on what Saul was trying to accomplish at the moment.
“The bank manager couldn’t explain where all the extra fees are going. So I followed the money trail. The evidence was as clear as day. My bank was funding terrorism.”That meeting was excellent cringe tv. I love how ridiculous the “testimonials” kept going.
I was dying when “BARE GENITALS” appeared on the screen in the background
YYYYEP made me lose it
BLACK MOLD in the cheesy horror movie font.
“YUP!”
in Comic Sans!
That was such an extreme thing to claim that you just gotta love it. At that rate maybe Jimmy would have been a fantastif political campaign strategist. Also obligatory YEP!
The text that went across the bottom of the screen read “ACTOR PORTRAYAL BASED ON ACTUAL INCIDENTS OR FICTION.”
Nice legal cover there, Saul.
Best part of the whole thing
It struck me during that scene that Jimmy’s strategy was the same as what Nacho described as Lola’s strategy with Fring. Just keep throwing junk at them until it becomes more trouble that it’s worth.
Donna, I love your incisive writing, but it’s weird that “trust” never entered your mind since Kim says, flat out and directly, “I don’t trust you” when Jimmy asks what she didn’t get that she wanted.
also can someone ungrey me already
Kim isn’t totally innocent. She pulled Jimmy into this mess in the first place. Jimmy went ahead after Kim told him not to, but it was Kim’s plan. Kim and Jimmy have been running schemes together for a few seasons, and at first it was Jimmy getting Kim to go along with them. But the last couple times, Kim has been the instigator and she has been the one to enlist Jimmy’s help, only to flip on him and chastise him for acting like “Slippin’ Jimmy” the next day. Also, I believe Mike used the Dave Clark alias in Breaking Bad. I vaguely remember him referring to the Dave Clark Five at some point but I might be wrong.
I can’t respect Kim because of her hypocrisy. She hates her job? OK, quit! Oh, no; she wants the prestige and money that her boss and her client giver her. She lies through her teeth. She looks them both in the eye and claims to be all honest about what is happening.You are not the good person you think that you are if your fight for the little guy is based on lies, betrayal, lack of ethics and outright criminality (that scuzzy PI she was fine in dealing with).
I have a more charitable view of Kim. Life’s biggest challenges involve us getting caught between two principles, where you can’t fully honor one principle without also fully neglecting the other. So compromises and half-measures ensue.Kim is trying to do her job as an attorney in a respectable fashion, but she also sees justice requiring her to bend the rules. The simple answer would be to just do her job and not think about justice. It’s hard to say what is the right balance to strike all the time, but Kim does her best.Jimmy, on the other hand, loves proving that he can run rings around everyone else, and then throws in good deeds so that there is plausible deniability about his motives.
I really hope we eventually get a cold open flashback (possibly towards the end of the show) of the exact first moment Jimmy and Kim met each other. I bet it will be a moment that showcases how Kim has always, deep down, been attracted to his con artist ways from the start.
This is what Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are about though: People are not all good or all bad. (Well, with the possible exception of the Salamancas who seem to be pretty much all bad). Kim is flawed, just like most of the people you know. Part of her craves security and mainstream respect after her chaotic childhood, but she also does have a fierce desire to do the right thing. The problem is that those things conflict, and that it also isn’t always easy to do the right thing the right (aka ethical and legal) way. Seeing her struggle with these choices – particularly with Jimmy sitting as the devil on her shoulder – is one of the reasons why I love this show.
That’s my trouble with villains like Lalo and Hector. This show is so good at morally ambiguous characters, and these two always seemed very moustache-twirly to me (along with Eladio, and henchmen like Tyrus, Victor, and the Cousins).
The cousins were basically killer androids! It’s interesting because there are plenty of low-level drug dealers who are shown as highly sympathetic (Nacho, for one) but the Salamancas just seem to be sadistic bullies.
I agree, I find the drug cartel story line(s) so much less interesting than the Jimmy/Kim lines. Are we supposed to care much about Nacho? Because I for one don’t.
I have a case for the Salamancas! They care about family. Consider the brutal lesson Hector taught the cousins as children. He forced them to understand that nothing mattered more than their bond with each other and by extension, family. None of them abandon Hector when he is disabled. They all treat him with love and deference. Lalo isn’t just there to mine Hector for wisdom, he loves his uncle. They never turn on each other and protect each other as much as possible, with no jealousy or infighting.They’re monsters, but they are strong family.
Maybe ,,, but I’d say it’s more that Kim has two sides to her personality—both of which she’s very true to, but which are incompatible in the end. I think she loves her Mesa Verde job at the same time she hates it, and wants to do it well … and not just because of its perks, either. It’s as real a part of her as being Jimmy’s sly accomplice is. And that’s what I fear will end up dooming Kim somehow.
Kim is right to blame Jimmy for not respecting her decision, but she also has herself to blame (and she knows it), because Jimmy clearly warned her at the beginning that she should think twice before going full Slippin’ Jimmy. And it was clear, knowing Jimmy as she does, that it was a no-turning-back moment: once she agreed to set Jimmy in motion, she wasn’t going to be able to put the genie back into the bottle.
I knew people would be saying stuff like this and I completely disagree. This reminds me a bit of dudes who defended Walter White in the later seasons of Breaking Bad. You’ve bought way too much into Jimmy’s self-mythologizing. In real life an adult should be able to stop doing something if they’re firmly asked to by a loved one. This isn’t a video game with a Slippin Jimmy power up that can’t be stopped once you start it. Kim told him firmly and clearly that she wanted him to clear his play off. Him deciding to go forward with it anyway, and especially in the spectacular manner he did so, was extremely deceptive and disrespectful and dangerous to Kim’s livelihood. The only way that it was in any way justified or not reprehensible is if you buy into JImmy’s the ends justify the means no matter what mentality
In a healthy relationship you are correct. Jimmy and Kim do not have a healthy relationship. She is attracted to him, in no small part, because he is a con man and runs scams on people. That’s who he is and she can’t expect him to just stop on a dime.
Yes. I agree. They have a sick relationship. That’s part of it too
“In real life an adult should be able to stop doing something if they’re firmly asked to by a loved one.”Really, that’s been your real life experience?? Not mine.
A specific thing like one thing like “please call off what you’re planning tomorrow. I’ve decided to handle things a different way” yes not all the time but generally yes. If we’re talking about something more general like addiction or a deeper pattern of behavior then no
I am loving this. Kim’s story isn’t about Jimmy breaking poor ol’ upstanding gal Kim, it’s about her reluctance to accept that she actually loves this hustling shit. It’s a nice thematic Breaking Bad parallel – Walt loved being Heisenberg, Jimmy and Kim want to be the outlaw couple.
The reason why Breaking Bad is such an incredible and legendary show is all in the arcs. A number of the main characters have incredible arcs on that show (not all of them, naturally, but some). Walt thinks he’s doing what he does for his family, but the image and mythos slowly reveal that what he really wanted was power, the power to be feared and be remembered as more than some schlub chemistry teacher. He didn’t care, in the end, who it hurt. All he cared about was that feeling of glory. And on the other side of the coin, Jesse grows up and becomes a lot more mature and decent of a human being as the series goes along, so he’s able to free himself from it all. I don’t think it’s an accident that he survives where Walt succumbs (and not in a hospice surrounded by loving family, but alone in a meth lab).
It’s like opposing coins – toxic masculinity on one end, and the destructive end that can lead to, and on the other end someone maturing and becoming a positive example of masculinity.
She loves it but she would’ve had a perfectly nice life and never discovered how much she loves it if it hadn’t been for Jimmy. Like Walt, Jimmy IS cancer
She’s not totally innocent. But she still probably has a right to be upset about him ambushing her like that. She had gotten everyone to a good place. Mike used it when he called the police station, pretending to be a postal worker (inspector?) concerned about Fring’s laptop, before they used the magnets to destroy it. “Dave Clark, as in the Dave Clark Five. Before your time I guess.”
He used the Dave Clark alias when he was trying to find out where Gus’s laptop was in the evidence room. It’s the infamous “magnets” scene, I believe.
I really didn’t think this was just a heel turn by Jimmy that he was doing only because he was selfish. He’s also trying to protect Kim from herself paying 30 grand out of her own pocket is a bad idea. She doesn’t seem cut out to work at a firm like that she should be working for a non profit that helps poor people.
I’m not even sure how to articulate how I felt after what I just saw.The cold open. The look on Jimmy’s face before he decides to pull the con on Howard. The dread you felt before Saul even said a word in the Mesa Verde meeting room.And of course it all felt like obvious buildup and foreshadowing for what was going to happen in the last scene.And then the last ten seconds happen.
I hate to offer any criticism of a show that is telling such a beautifully executed A-story, but it’s kind of hard to feel the weight of Lalo’s arrest when that one-minute scene was the first time we’ve seen him in the last three episodes.
Sometimes it’s just satisfying to see a plan come together. I can’t recall Mike ever be this methodical before, but it was a joy to watch him get to do some manipulating for a change.
Mike’s method of getting the Kettleman’s ill-gotten loot and Jimmy out of that jam back in Season 1 was pretty methodical.
Mike is methodical AF. Remember him taking apart his car down to the nuts and bolts to find the tracking device Fring had planted?
Oh yea! With a healthy dose of OCD sprinkled in there too
He’s always this methodical when it calls for it. Still fun as hell to watch though yes.
But what a great way to pull him back in. You know shit’s gonna get hectic when he gets out.
And you know just who it is that will get Lalo out of jail, too.
Ooooh, that did not cross my mind.
They’ve got to get the 2 separate stories in this show to come together at some point, right? I think this is that point.
This is gonna sound crazy, because cartel shit is supposed to be good TV, but at this point I am 100% more engrossed in Jimmy and Kim. We all know how Fring and Mike end up- we don’t know anything about how Kim ends up.
It was thrilling to see Mike the expert operator, plant the seeds for Lalo’s undoing and the setup come to fruition. The way some of the shots were framed just added to the noir P.I. type of vibe.I was momentarily hopeful when Kim seemed to call things off after coming to her senses on the Kevin gambit. Only seconds later to fear how things might unravel even worse since this is Better Call Saul after all, the Mesa Verde situation couldn’t end cleanly.It was after Saul’s boardroom antics and the sheer panic, fury, and pain so perfectly presented by Rhea Seehorn, that I was convinced her fate was going to be incarceration for attempted murder, because she is definitely going to kill Jimmy when she gets home. Getting married? Didn’t see that coming.
Rhea Seehorn is amazing as Kim.
Someone get Rhea an Emmy already, please. I mean, come ON. Can we start a Kickstarter or something? Would that help? I don’t know how these things work.
I’d prefer a Emmy tie with Rhea Seehorn and Rachel Skarsten from Batwoman. Both consistently hit it out of the park nearly every episode but with vastly differently styles and characters. More likely scenario is both get completely ignored for nominations.
Haven’t seen the latter, but we’re five seasons deep with Rhea Seehorn. Long overdue.
Batwoman?
I could be wrong, but I don’t think she’s ever been nominated. Hard to believe.
Exactly! The time has come.
The way her voice broke as she was suggesting they break up was phenomenal.
True, saying that is such an understatement, like saying Nacho has pretty eyes or Mike is good at what he does hahaha.
I was convinced her fate was going to be incarceration for attempted
murder, because she is definitely going to kill Jimmy when she gets
home.
Lol, that’s good XD
Honestly, for Jimmy’s sake I’m glad we know he survives this show (relatively) intact. Because while Kim is a Good Person who probably wouldn’t murder anybody without good cause, she’s also kind of scary and you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of her when reached the end of her tether…
Marriage is attempted murder, so you’re not wrong.
The way she was rolling up her sleeves I definitely thought she was going to punch Jimmy in the face.
The thing is though, for Kim calling off Jimmy and apologizing to Rich was GETTING INTO THE CAR. It wasn’t what she thought was the right thing to do or even what she wanted to do, but a choice she made to just get along. She asked Jimmy to help her in the first place and doubled down even when he advised her against it, because she ultimately feels the folks at Mesa Verde are in the wrong. So Jimmy did get her the outcome she wanted. That being said, of course she was furious because Jimmy lied to her, and also because she has a moral compass he just doesn’t have. She both wants to do the right thing and do it the (at least sort of) right way by staying within the letter of the law. But Jimmy just wants to win no matter what he has to do, for the primary purpose of making money instead of helping people. And it’s clear those competing agendas are going to meet in a head on collision somewhere down the road.
Also how he managed to pick up eight classic books for Kayleigh for the low low price of two dollars! Like, those are the two main constants for Mike, love for his granddaughter and being a smooth operator.
Which is why it was so out of character when he yelled at her earlier this season. Of all the wild things that go beyond belief in this show, like chicken entrepreneurs being secret meth kings, Mike yelling at Kayleigh was too much for me to take in even if I get that he was sad about his boy.
This was also after he murdered a man he genuinely liked. The talk about his son who refused to be corrupted and his own continuing corruption really played into his self-loathing and his anger at her was just his anger at himself.
Oh yeah I hadn’t even thought of the parallels between his own corruption and his son’s anti-corrupt stance, and the disconnect between the two fueling his sadness. I thought he was just sad about his boy and lashing out, not about how that contributed to his own self loathing. good call! I still think he would never yell at Kayleigh and that was a bad call by the writers. They could have shown him maybe break a board out of anger and his granddaughter getting scared, instead of him directly hurting her feelings.
You don’t think it’s realistic that a person would, at some point, get angry at another person – even if he/she loves that other person? I mean, come on. This show is trying to depict characters like real three-dimensional people – just as Breaking Bad did. Mike, a generally violent person, losing his temper once and yelling at his granddaughter isn’t really out of character or unrealistic. It’d be out of character or not fit into what we’ve seen previously if, for instance, we saw him hit her. But I don’t agree that the fight he had with Kayleigh was bad writing.A lot of people seem to act like Mike isn’t actually a violent, psychopathic asshole just because he’s really good at it. He’s good at it, but that shouldn’t make people view him as a morally better person. He’s a cold-blooded murderer throughout the stretches of BB, and people often act like he’s some sort of hero in BB just because he’s opposed to Walt, who’s also a cold-blooded murderer. I don’t know, man. People are weird.
Mike isn’t a psychopath. Tuco is an example of a psycopath. Mike has killed people in cold blood, though as we see in BCS he tries to avoid killing whenever possible. To me Kayleigh is the one person he wouldn’t yell at, no matter the situation, because Mike is extraordinarily good at compartmentalizing his life. Also, while he is violent he only takes out that violence on people seeking to do him harm. He doesn’t enjoy violence like other characters do, even though he’s good at it, Mike does his best to circumvent violence even if it costs him time and money. Like paying people on his list off instead of killing them like Lydia wanted to.
While BCS has established that Mike needs to “be a soldier” in order to have purpose in life, unlike Walt, he really does do it all for what is left of his family and not out of vanity or ego. So I do think him snapping and yelling at Kayleigh is out of order compared to what we have seen of Mike in every one of their interactions in both of the shows so far.
Agreed, and I’d also factor in the audience’s anger at Mike — or at least mine — as I’ve always liked Mike but was hating him these past couple episodes.
Yeah he didn’t really sell the anger at Kayleigh. But it’s implausible enough I don’t blame him for it.
Also how he managed to pick up eight classic books for Kayleigh for the low low price of two dollars! Like, those are the two main constants for Mike, love for his granddaughter and being a smooth operator.
Which is why it was so out of character when he yelled at her earlier this season. Of all the wild things that go beyond belief in this show, like chicken entrepreneurs being secret meth kings, Mike yelling at Kayleigh was too much for me to take in even if I get that he was sad about his boy.
In the words of Seinfeld, she’s into it.
I’m not sure why so many people are acting as if that final line means that Jimmy and Kim are definitely going to get married. I mean, maybe they will but this show is seldom that straightforward
Poor Howard. Long in the grave, and he still has to pay for the sins of Chuck McGill.
Poor Patrick Fabian, too. Is his character still in the show uniquely to be the object of Jimmy’s pranks?
I don’t think Jimmy is doing it directly because of Chuck, Jimmy is doing it because Howard’s genuine effort to be kind to Jimmy does not compute with his current worldview.
I think there’s a little more to it than that. On the one hand, Howard is “sticking up” for Jimmy now that it’s easy for him to do so (now that Chuck’s dead — it’s interesting to think that it’s not only Jimmy that resented the hold Chuck had on people), so Jimmy is thinking “Where were you when I needed you?” On the other hand, Jimmy is, in his own way, as brilliant a lawyer as Chuck. He can work the system, and the people in it, better than anyone else on the show — he even bested Chuck. So Jimmy has the upper hand and is playing it (even though he’s playing a completely different game from Howard).
Also I think that Jimmy saw it as not 100% genuine and maybe a little condescending. I thought Howard was trying to be straight up with him, but Jimmy may have heard that “Jimmy Hustle” line and gotten some bad flashback vibes and thought it was always going to be the mailroom Jimmy that Howard sees even though Howard has acknowledged he’s a good lawyer on multiple occasions.
These guys always have a weird vibe, like that one time Jimmy offered Howard the number for a shrink and then Howard said he was already seeing one and then they had the most awkward pause. I still think Jimmy is going way too far, even if Howard inadvertently offended him.
Agreed. Jimmy saw Howard for who he is: the untalented rich kid who rode everyone else’s coattails. He actually has zero respect for Howard and for Howard to offer him a job is an insult in his own mind.
I dunno, to me Howard seems like a way more dickish/less funny version of Roger Sterling from “Mad Men” as both of them are smart and have talents of their own but have never needed to test them because their fathers owned the firms where they work and their name is on the building. Then after losing Chuck/Lucky Strike they have to work to reinvent themselves but people still have animosity to them for the times where they cruised by in life on the coattails of their fathers. Roger is way nicer and more likeable than Howard, but he still does a bunch of dickish stuff cause he’s used to getting whatever he wants (like Howard).
That’s a good comparison. Roger is definitely far more charismatic than Howard is, but long enough into the series, you do start to wish people would maybe not kick Roger quite so much, even though probably he kind of deserves it. It seems like we’ve seen less pettiness from Howard. He did treat Kim poorly once, but mostly seems pretty professional and like he does have some sympathy for others, including Jimmy. It definitely doesn’t come off as a good look for Jimmy going through all of this work just to prank/harass Howard, even if Jimmy does have some resentment and animosity towards Howard for a multitude of reasons.
I almost wonder if it was percolating in the back of Howard’s brain that Saul was a loose thread that might hurt his firm, and he needed to get Saul working for him instead of against him.
It’s hard to imagine Howard thinking that Saul would be satisfied with standard big firm clients, or in a make work job, and I’m curious what role Howard saw for Saul. Was he hoping Saul would be a Michael Clayton?
I fucking love that movie. Kinda wish there was a TV show focusing on that kinda character. That ‘unpleasant cleanup’ character most big law firms have.
Yeah, agreed, I think Howard sees Saul as someone useful to the firm in ways he doesn’t even want to imagine.
Howard is the neighborhood checkers champ in a tournament full of chess grandmasters.
That opening absolutely wrecked me. Growing up in small town Wisconsin, with a handful of townie bars full of the same people for hours each day, made me see wat too many parents pulling the same shit that we saw with younger Kim. That hit home hard.
but As The World Turns got cancelled?
It’s interesting how the show indicts Jimmy’s resentment at the legal establishment by repeatedly showing that the people at the top of the ladder that he hates are actually pretty decent guys. We’re trained as audience members to instinctively sympathize with the protagonist, and so without really knowing better we just kind of assume that Howard and Rich must be awful douchebags – they just look like evil lawyers (no one plays smarmy douchebag quite like Patrick Fabian). And yet everything we see of them (excepting the first season or two, when the show deliberately faked us out with Howard) indicates that Howard and Rich are reasonable, ethical dudes. And we know that Clifford Main’s a solid guy. It’s like that Simpsons episode where Homer goes back to college and he insists on treating the cool dean like a stick-in-the-mud hardass administrator from the movies.
Poor Howard. That was a good one, though. “I don’t know any tugboat” got a laugh out of me
Patrick Fabian bats clean-up in a lot of these episodes, but man, he connects every single time. He’s never been bad. Ever.
This is probably old news to you, but just in case you haven’t seen it – don’t let the terrible title and found-footage format dissuade you from checking out “The Last Exorcism”. It’s actually really good, thanks in large part to Patrick Fabian’s performance in the lead.
I usually don’t watch horror movies, but if I’m ever in the right mood, I’ll give it a look. Big fan of his from this show alone.
Ditto. It’s worth watching for his performance alone, but it’s actually very solid, even if you don’t like where the ending goes.
Yeah his performance is really what saved Howard from being just straight up the worst in the early seasons, there was always a tingle of humanity and a shot of him being genuine under all that old money douchebag strut. Except that one time he sent Kim to Siberia, not cool! Anyway, in later seasons he’s really been able to show a lot more emotional range and I think the character has improved exponentially post-Chuck. Especially now that he sort of has to reinvent himself. Like Roger after he lost the Lucky Strike account in Mad Men. I don’t know why Jimmy is still fucking with him.
Because Jimmy can’t ever let anything go. Same reason that he ALWAYS needs to put a play into motion whenever he thinks of it. In his head, he’s infallible, and incapable of a bad idea that really just needs to be discarded. Donna’s invocation of him as the ‘Anton Chekov of nail salon lawyers’ is dead-on. Once something comes into his head, he can’t ever let it go. Couple that with his incessant need to both get back at and avenge Chuck, and it’s a dangerous combination.
Yeah Jimmy is so used to being kept down or being in second place due to his unhealthy relationship with Chuck that he still thinks he’s the little guy constantly fighting the good fight no matter what he does. While Jimmy has helped out a lot of people who really need it and gone up against some big corporations with a ton of resources, scenarios where he needed a bag of tricks and lateral/unethical thinking, now he’s crossed over to being the bully and he can’t stop because he’s hooked.
Yup. In a way, it’s the exact same situation that Walt was in. Started off with good intentions, and then got sucked into it with no way back.
Truth. Though I do like how the shows have established Walt/Jimmy as different types of dirtbags who used to be well meaning yet were put down by the establishment and have chip on their shoulder, a thing for nom de plumes, and attractive + talented blonde ladies. Wait… JK, they really do make Walt and Jimmy pretty different, but just enough alike to bond over stuff like “making hay while the sun is shining” etc.
The common thread between them for me is clearly never being able to reject a bad idea. Doesn’t mean it’s not a smart idea, or a cunning idea, or one that really is two steps ahead of everyone else in the room, but it’s still a bad idea.Walt could’ve made just meth for Gus until he was ready not to, but instead, he chose to move his queen into the back row and take him out so he’d have no one to report to except himself. Jimmy could’ve made a fine living at Davis & Main, but instead, he chose to make an ass of himself to throw off the stink that he thought his brother put on him and then set off on his own. Two guys who never realized how good they had it until they don’t anymore. And you’d think they’d learn from that, but they don’t.
Yeah, I hope there’s a good reason why Jimmy is being so cruel to him.
Is Jimmy’s resentment at the legal establishment just ultimately his continued unresolved resentment towards Chuck?
I think so, yeah. In his eyes, everyone at that level is Chuck.
And to other people who did him wrong. I thought he should have left them alone after earning his legal victory in getting his law practice back, but he really wanted to put a screw to them.He should have not done that. Yes, Howard was an ass, but he was trying to turn corners and change himself for the better. He doesn’t deserved crushed car and public embarrassment.
That’s how I take it. I think he views Howard as a bit of a coward too. Howard says he wanted to hire Jimmy way back when but his brother was against it. So for him to now come offer Jimmy a job only after his brother died probably pisses him off all the more.
Just my opinion, but I don’t think so. I think Jimmy moved on from Chuck in previous seasons, but Howard is something worse. I think Jimmy viewed Chuck as a formidable foe, but views Howard as a capricious lapdog. Howard is spinless and has no moral value, unwilling to force Chuck out, and now that he’s gone, wants to cash in on getting Jimmy to join the team.I think he doesn’t see Howard as a representation of Chuck, but rather an annoying leech he can mess around with.
I thought of that Dean in that scene too. Howard is great, I think they even gave him humanizing moments in S1 or 2, something about him reflecting on how because of his father’s pressure he had to take over the firm, and then he stares off into the distance for a brief brilliant moment.
Yeah, I remember liking Howard from the start too. There was always something so genuine about him. Like he just genuinely always seemed like a good guy deep down.
“It’s like that Simpsons episode where Homer goes back to college and he insists on treating the cool dean like a stick-in-the-mud hardass administrator from the movies.”This made me laugh very hard. Kudos!
I texted to a friend that Jimmy/Saul was being such an asshole he was actually making me sympathize with a bank
Howard is maybe my favorite character on the show. He’s only ever seen through the lens of other characters. He’s a scumbag from Jimmy’s point if view, a good friend from Chuck’s, decent mentor from Kim’s. It’s a tough trick to pull off, but this show nails it.
mike used the dave clark alias when he was calling the albuquerque police department to find out where they stashed gus fring’s laptop! it’s how walt and jesse knew where to park the magnet
Kim: You suckered me, again! Perhaps some of this anger is spillover from last season’s finale when Jimmy conned the bar association (and Kim) with his emotional performance about Chuck. BB/BCS does the best montages and when Bob Odenkirk gets to riff (I’m guessing he’s got carte blanche to improv) as he did directing the commercial, it’s gold. Poor Howard. Poor naive, overmatched Howard. It can’t be that easy to get Lalo off the board, can it? Well maybe. Tuco got played similarly. Speaking of which, perhaps Tuco gets out just as Lalo heads to prison. Kim’s ultimatum of breakup or marriage was as unexpected as anything I can remember in BCS. This might be it for Barry Corbin’s run on BCS. It was great to see him. Now please cast more Northern Exposure alumni for small parts! How about Elaine Miles (Marilyn Whirlwind, Dr. Fleischman’s receptionist) as the photographer who made the photo that Mesa Verde based their logo on?
Hope it doesn’t ruin it for you in retrospect, but she *did* say, when asked why she said they couldn’t continue the way they’ve been, “I don’t trust you.”
Not to be that guy, but Kim definitely does say, verbatim, “I don’t trust you” in the final scene.
I am now more convinced than ever that Kim Wexler is the real main character of this show. It’s been assumed from the beginning that the tragedy of Kim would be either her being led astray by Jimmy, or her death as a consequence of some Saul Goodman misadventure. But here’s the thing: Kim is an agent of change, not a bystander or victim of it. I have thought for a long time that, in the end, it will not be Jimmy that leads Kim down the dark path to her doom… It will be Kim that leads Jimmy there. Kim loves the con more deeply and thoroughly than Jimmy ever has: her scams are always more clever and more elaborate than his, and the dark satisfaction she gets when the scams work is obviously more addicting for her than it is for Jimmy. Thus far, Kim has had a stronger grip on her demons than Jimmy has had on his. But when her demons are finally unchained, I feel sure they will dwarf anything Jimmy has ever dreamt of.
That’s an interesting take.
Mike uses the alias Dave Clark for his private investigator character. As in the Five? Were we previously aware that Mike is an aficionado of the Tottenham Sound?He uses it in Breaking Bad, when he pretends to be a postal inspector investigating meter fraud to figure out if the cops have Gus’s laptop.
Shout out to that actress playing Young Kim. She nailed all the mannerisms and even the speech patterns of Adult Kim.
“The manager couldn’t explain where all the extra fees were going. So I followed the money trail…My bank was funding terrorism!” Lol, Saul is unbelievable. If I was nervous about anything, it was actually the Mesa Verde boss’ reactions. Jimmy offers a handshake deal, and I wonder if he’s gonna punch him. Kim comes home, and I wonder if she was fired. Credit to Rex Linn who despite the funny accent, has been a powerful presence.
“
Jimmy offers a handshake deal, and I wonder if he’s gonna punch him”.
Another thing they get so right about Jimmy is a grifter’s aversion to being on the wrong end of violence. Most of them never carry guns, and may, at best, carry a knife, which they may have no idea how to use.
“That’s your spot. Do not move from it, okay? But also, don’t be rigid, okay? Try to be natural. And speak to me. You know, conversational, everyday, like a friend… There’s fear here, there’s emotion. You’re searching for a hero, you know? “Will no-one save you?” But don’t hit it too hard. Just throw it away, but with feeling. There’s cue-cards if you need them. But don’t look at them, look at me, okay? But you know, they’re there.”That’s a lot of direction.
Wow. There’s a lot to unpack here. Great episode!First, that cold open explains a lot about who Kim is today. Growing up where she did and raised by the mother we saw in this episode is what kindles the fire in her belly. It’s why she moved to ABQ, why she worked so hard to become a lawyer and why she finds purpose in her pro bono work. And it’s why she couldn’t play Mesa Verde’s game and put old man Acker out of his house to build Kevin’s call center.Jimmy’s plan got the result she initially wanted—keeping Acker in his house. But Jimmy is like a compulsive gambler in Vegas, he simply cannot let it ride. He has to go for the big win. His best trait is also his worst—he doesn’t do anything halfway. He’s right in that Kim has plausible deniability, but in order to get there he had to shock, surprise, and ultimately, devastate her to do it.Meanwhile, Mike’s plan to deal with Lalo was yet another masterpiece. He didn’t fake any evidence. He actually saw the dead TravelWire clerk before the librarian did and knows without a doubt that Lalo killed him. He’s not framing Lalo. He’s ensuring justice is done. The librarian had seen the car, but didn’t make the connection that it belonged to the man with the mustache. And the detective didn’t make the connection that the hit-and-run might be a related crime. All Mike did was connect the dots for a detective who was too old and too lazy to follow up on the case.That said, I doubt Lalo is going to walk on this one, especially if he left any physical evidence in the TravelWire store. There’s a witness who can place him at he scene of the crime and another who can place him within 20 blocks of it getting involved in a hit-and-run, ostensibly while fleeing the murder scene. If there’s a random print or bit of DNA that places him behind the counter, he’s done.
Here’s the thing that bothers me: Mike knows how ruthless the Salamanca’s are. He has to know that librarian, and maybe her whole family, is going to have targets on their back. The answer to witnesses is to not have any.
He’s shown before that he can underestimate the evil others will do. Also since he was setting the trap so fast, maybe he hopes they will also get him on something else like the gun in his car and just running his background/history.I do fear for her too though, I hope our fears aren’t warranted this time. Mike wouldn’t really know this, but Lalo isn’t AS sadistic as many others in his family, which is a plus.
True, but I think Mike deep down still has faith in the system—even though he’s has every reason to doubt it actually works. When weighed against the threat to his own family, he’s willing to take the risk of exposing the innocent to possible retribution.
One of the things BCS is known to do well are the thrilling montages, but I’d argue they do the inverse of that spectacularly as well. When they show scenes like Chuck’s final spin-out of his sickness where he tore up his house to mournful jazz, or tonight when Jimmy’s meeting shifted hard as he played his insane cavalcade of libelous commercials (followed by everything else), I get this queasy feeling in the soul of my stomach like I would seeing a particularly depressing episode of Hoarders. Jimmy’s desire to control anyone he feels deserves it has him taking a perfectly fine businessman and his bank that didn’t really do anything wrong to anyone and deliberately layering waste and dead cats as high as standing clearance allowed him to.Anyway, did anyone think Jimmy was going to use the hookers on Kevin Wachtell? I didn’t. For one, Kevin already fell for a hooker-related scam, like, 24 years ago 8 years before the meeting:
Yes! It’s easy to imagine the Mesa Verde commercial and copyright spin to have been put on a montage in any other episode, but the way it was framed and edited here (as distinctly not funny) made it feel really bad.
Exactly. Since the show’s Saul-stories are often arguably from the perspective of Kim, we’re seeing the other, more harmful side of Jimmy’s bullshit. At first it was seductive and fun to watch Jimmy take down the big guys and use the law against the privileged on behalf of the “low-life’s” like him. Now we’re watching Jimmy coming into his own as – in Chuck’s foretelling – “a chimp with machine gun.”
I did a out loud “What?!” at that ending. A shocking and violent end (like a great Breaking Bad episode) done only with very surprising, nerve-wracking words. You know, the end of a classical comedy—getting married—isn’t supposed to be the beginning, or middle, of a classical tragedy.But it’s a great psychological bookend to the beginning of the episode, right? Maybe Kim thinks that by marrying Jimmy, she can change him, like maybe she thought she could change her mother, if she did think that. Adult Kim, with Jimmy, metaphorically got into her mother’s car; a thing child Kim was strong enough not to do.
I thought this episode was about loved ones, or at least people we care for, loyalty, and our own selfish, egotistical ways getting in the way. The contrast with Mike and Nacho is that the former is looking out for the latter in a much better and actually selfless way than Jimmy is supposedly looking out for Kim.It was that instant decision Jimmy made in the car after seeing that his hookers prank worked. What was he thinking? That maybe continuing to prank Howard was mean and so to do a good thing, after he did a bad one, he’d keep the old, ornery man in his house and get restitution for the Native American photographer. Maybe that on the surface, but of course he also just wanted to scam, like the addict he is. And speaking of Howard, I was surprised Jimmy kept pranking him. It’s turning malicious, and maybe Jimmy will go too far and the dead person as a result won’t be Kim but innocent Howard.Rhea Seehorn, man. Joins Keri Russell in phenomenal TV acting performances by women who might not get proper award recognition.
The cold open, when the woman in the car came up to the girl, she looked in the dark enough like Kim that I quickly thought whether this was a flash forward and Kim was now a drunk, bad single mom. I hope whatever’s in store for her in this at-times devastating show won’t be that bad. But it very well could be.
I hope you guys never get to experience the pull a sociopath can have on the people who care about them. Kim doesn’t want to change Jimmy; she wants to save him because she knows ultimately where this goes. “I didn’t tell you to protect you” gives way to “Let’s get married”, which equals “I can’t be compelled to testify against you” because she already knows she can’t change him. All she can do is try to keep him from giving in to his worse impulses. She’d have better luck catching a gust of wind in her bare hand. Jimmy is one of the best portrayals I’ve seen of this kind of person who’ll work twice as hard to pull off a scam as he ever would by simply being legit. And everybody else who believes in him, even that wonderfully sweet makeup girl, eventually becomes collateral damage.
“I can’t be compelled to testify against you because we’re married” is a Hollywood trope. Maybe it could have protected Skyler in Breaking Bad, but marrying Saul doesn’t really shield Kim. The marital testimonial privilege doesn’t apply to conduct before marriage, and Kim would still be exposed to attorney disciplinary complaints.
Kim has 2 parts: Fight for the underdog because it’s right, stubborn rebel who pushes it too far. Sometimes these parts work together, sometimes opposed. Notice how she lost interest in Mesa Verde once it stopped being hard, it stopped serving either part and so she had to go back to fighting for underdogs. Jimmy appeals to only the latter part, and so the marriage vs break up is basically her saying she has to choose herself which she will put in control.
Jimmy is not a sociopath.
Jimmy is not a sociopath.He’s just a selfish greedy manipualtive asshole.
Yeah, really thought that was Kim in the car for a moment. They did a great job on that entire scene. (Which is a statement that can be applied to just about any scene in this show.)
I honestly worriedly read the end of the opening scene with those glowing lights coming up behind her as being headlights. Upon rewatch I realized that couldn’t be the case because of the geography. But the implications of what I thought they might be suggesting would’ve been dark as hell.
The actress playing Kim’s mom uncannily sounded JUST like her! Looked like her too.
The girl did as well. She nailed Kim’s speech and physical mannerisms.
Reminded me of the younger Chuck from the season 3 finale. That kid also killed it!
The casting department, even for small or one-off roles, is always superb in BB/BCS. Reminds me of the X-Files where they can bring someone in for a small role and it ends up being incredibly memorable. Makes sense, Gilligan was on that one too.
Ed Begley Jr. is always a pleasure to watch on this show, for one.
It’s how Bryan Cranston got cast, too
Oh yeah I remember that “Drive” episode it was really good! Makes me wish Duchovny could have guest starred on Breaking Bad cause he and Cranston had some great chemistry.
I read a couple things different in the episode than you:1. Her not getting in the car was about her stubbornness. To do the wrong thing for the right reasons, Jimmy excites that part, even though he just does the wrong thing because it’s fun and because he thinks the world is just people all conning each other anyway.2. Jimmy is “pranking” (harassing) Howard because he represents something he can’t conceive of: A decent hearted person who wants to be kind to him. “It has to be a trick by Howard, and so I’m going to get Howard first.”
Exactly right with the second point, and I’m worried for Howard as a result. He doesn’t deserve this and certainly not anything more serious.
Right. I agree. Her NOT getting in the car was the part of her that decided to just go along with Jimmy’s schemes and marry him. It was her incredible stuborness and willingness to do incredibly stupid ridiculous things to prove some point or because it’s ultimately “for the right reasons” in her mind as you say. Her telling Jimmy to call off his play was the equivalent of if she’d gotten in the car with her mom, deciding she’d made her point and reasonably leaving well enough alone. The cold open was meant to show that she’s always been incapable of doing that.
Mike is starting to genuinely care about Nacho (maybe he sees some of his son in Nacho), and that worries me for whatever ends up happening to Nacho as we catch up to the Breaking Bad timeline.
This was a great, thrilling episode but, as a lawyer I need to say – holy crap Rich and Kim could have slayed Jimmy in defense on all counts. This ends badly for Jimmy – the copyright claim is flawed for tons of reasons, Jimmy is violating tons of ethics rules (notably regarding attorney advertising, duty to his clients, and abusing his position to harm a third party), and still hasn’t resolved the Acker situation reasonably. A lot of clients would go scorched earth here. It works because Kevin is spent but it strained credibility on the law – a rarity in this show.One note I didn’t get – what was Nacho going on about when he saw Mike and Gus at first? I could only understand him protesting too much about Mike to make Gus not suspect the preexisting Mike-Nacho relationship, but Gus already knows.I’ve been puzzling about the big picture point of telling Mike and Nacho’s stories as parallels to Jimmy and Kim, and here’s what I have now – Mike and Nacho chose to be on the wrong side of the law (they both affirmatively made this call, considering their backgrounds before), and their noblest intentions can’t save them from the dark forces that lag there. Kim and Jimmy chose to be on the right side of the law, and their fundamental characteristics (willfulness, pride, and love/respect for each other) will pull them down. It’s sort of a Greek tragedy, told twice.
The biggest violation was talking to a represented client about the matter at issue without his attorney present. I agree the last few weeks have been the “worst” as far as the show has been on the legal side of things where previously it was pretty good. Entertaining as hell though.
I don’t think Jimmy intended to have a solid legal plan. His whole angle was to annoy the shit out of Kevin by further delaying the call center. He was conning Kevin- he knew it would never go to court.
Yes, that was the point of bringing Kevin’s father on screen. Saul was figuring that Kevin wouldn’t want the image of his dad to be permanently fixed in people’s memories with the word “genitals” next to it.
Yeah, I think we’re actually meant to be seeing the emergence of the “criminal lawyer” that Saul becomes. It’s a huge, unethical, possibly illegal bluff. Rich and Kim all but say that nothing he’s doing will really hold up, but Kevin gets the point that the billion dollar bank probably has more to lose in terms of public perception than a skeevy small time attorney.
It’s an outrageous, risky tightrope act that can’t work forever, but that’s exactly why Saul ends up working at Cinnabon.
Of course these are all losers. If he airs the commercial he will get sued, successfully for libel. If he sues for copyright infringement, he will probably lose (although I sense he has a colorable case there). That’s not the point. Just putting the commercial out there can do reputational damage. It is not going to repair the reputational damage when Mesa Verde wins a judgment in 18 months. They’ll win the copyright lawsuit, but it is not going to repair the reputational damage from headlines about a lawsuit by an old native woman whose artwork was stolen from her.
Also we are committed to setting up the relevant players in BB. And Saul mentions Ignacio and Lalo in his first encounter with Walt/Jesse.
Sure. But we’re not getting tales of Marie the klepto. I’m positive these characters were picked for thematic reasons. The mission of Breaking Bad was to watch a “good” person who chose to turn to the bad, through many bad choices. Walt revealed his inner badness.Here, it’s quite different. Jimmy is in torment. He broke bad early, tried to break good and was denied it, so he broke badder. He may drag Kim down too.
What are the flaws in the copyright claim? That actually seemed reasonable they didn’t spell it out but I assume what Kim saw in the break in photos was a number on the photo next to the signature which meant it was a print and not the original so they had no right to use it as a logo. The commercials made no sense it seemed like they would be able to charge Jimmy with extortion for that one.
The photo wasn’t a perfect match to the logo, and there are undoubtably public domain photos which match the logo just about as closely. Saul would have needed a lot more evidence than just a resemblance to win the case. Kevin’s statement would give Saul a bit of ammo, but the odds of even getting an injunction would be pretty low. You can bet Marlboro fought off a million claims about its cowboy.
But Saul would have enough to extend the legal process for a long time, which was the main threat he was making.
Those public domain photos weren’t hanging above the founder’s mantle. Marlboro didn’t have to worry about lawsuits over their logo they hired an Ad company to create the photos.
No, but you still have to prove more than the fact that he had a similar photo, in the same way that one musician proving that another musician had gone to his concert and owned his CD isn’t proof that his tune was stolen. There are all kinds of questions over whether the tune was original, how similar the two tunes were, how much two tunes overlapped… Typically the burden of proof in copyright and trademark cases is a very long and complicated road.But since most of these cases never go to trial, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis of issues like how long will this go on, whether there are other lawsuits that need to be scared off, what kind of reputational damage there might be, and so on. So in that sense, $200K to settle might have been a bet Saul had reason to make regardless of the result of a hypothetical trial and appeal years later.
The song thing isn’t a good example
Lots of reasons. Off the top of my head here’s my defense strategy for Mesa Verde:Start with no actual copying – the work is not a literal copy. Instead, the cowboy photo included some elements that were also in the MV logo. I’d argue that extending the copyright of the photographer to encompass a silhouette logo impossibly and illegally extends the scope of the protection. I’d also find hundreds of examples of prior similar works to show the similar elements were all well known.I’d fight damages on at least two fronts. First, laches. This show is pre Petrella and I think New Mexico allowed for laches as a defense then. So I’d argue that she is barred full stop on recovery because MV was well known for years and she never enforced rights. Second, I’d bet anything that she didn’t register her work yet, again modifying the damages.This is no slam dunk for Jimmy and his damages theory is preposterous.
I’m not a copyright lawyer, but for one thing, it’s such a generic image. How many western movies have the same image of a man on a horse next to a cactus? Mesa Verde could find any one of them, or plenty of public domain images and say they were inspired by them, not hers.
The legal stuff on this show has always been completely ridiculous
Having practices for several years, I disagree. It’s more accurate than most shows I’ve seen, with keen and accurate insight into how law works. I’m particularly impressed with how they handled the dynamics of small/solo firms vs. big ones, what business development looks like, how solos get stretched out of comfort zones, and how firms treat associates. The biggest leap, I think, is that Chuck and Kim are somehow hugely competent in transactions, litigation, and regulatory compliance. That’s unusual these days. The ethics panel was theatrical, I’ll admit and I doubt most state bars would have given the leeway both sides got.
I guess what I’m thinking of when I say the show is ridiculous about this stuff is primarily Jimmy/Saul’s practice as a criminal defense lawyer. (I’m not a lawyer but I was a paralegal in the New York County DA’s office for awhile so that’s the part I notice the most) The stunt that he pulled with seating the defendant in the audience and a guy who looked like him where the defendant should be would’ve been a huge deal and would’ve resulted in way more than a talking to from the Judge in reality I would think but again I’m not a lawyer.
Admittedly I know nothing about life in a big, private law firm. And I’m sure BCS is way more realistic than say your LA Laws and your Boston Practices. But it just seems ridiculous to me that Mesa Verde wouldn’t think something weird was up when out of the blue Jimmy (who’s now dba another name?), Kim’s boyfriend, is now all of a sudden representing Acker when 5 seconds ago it was clear that Kim had sympathy for Acker and was willing to move heaven and earth to avoid kicking him out of hims home. I just can’t imagine either Mesa Verde or the firm she works for would let that continue to happen. And no I don’t have any particular jargon or anything to back that opinion up it just seems like common sense to me.They really wrote their way the hell around it but it’s still a ridiculous plot point
I agree entirely on the MV storyline. I can only explain it this way – this is the season Kim and Jim go off the rails, so the risk and brazenness will jump.
Kim’s position is that she can fix it if she’s willing to do what she shouldn’t have to doBut Kim knows that’s not a fix at all. Acker wouldn’t be happy with $75,000. Heck, he wouldn’t be happy with $4,000,000 either. He only wants to keep his home. Kim knew that by going to settlement they were basically admitting defeat, and betraying “their” client. She was willing to add money out of her pocket to make herself feel a little better about it, but you can be sure Acker wouldn’t even care for that. That was not what Acker demanded. trust. Thank goodness she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hardErr, I hate breaking it to you, but… maybe you should rewatch that exchange? Because Kim does say “I don’t trust you” at about 49:00.
“Because Kim does say “I don’t trust you” at about 49:00.” I was going to post this also as she explicitly says that which made me do a double take when reading the review. Then I found you commented on it already.The thing I was wondering about the most was her “again”. Is that in reference to the time Jimmy ran those commercials without Davis and Main approval while letting Kim think he had it which put it her in Howard’s doghouse back in Season 2 or is there something else she’s think of here? The fact that there are multiple cases for what could be this again just made her ending proposal that much more of a shock.
I think the first time she actually felt included as one of his suckers was when he talked movingly about Chuck to the board to get his law license back. She thought it was sincere herself until later when Jimmy kind of mocks them all for being such easy marks. She gets this look like she got slapped.
I think she was referring to being played by Jimmy during the hearing for the readmission, in last season finale/this season opener. She seemed to be over it fast, but I guess the feeling festered.
Indeed she does.Also (and apologies for this pedantry) Kim says ‘it was strongly inferred’ when counselling Kevin, which I think should have been ‘implied’. But what a great episode, and an amazing ending!
I think Donna does go on to acknowledge that Kim actually did say it on the way to making some kind of convoluted point that usually she (Donna) hates it when characters say it but here she likes it. I agree it’s a really poorly written part of the recap
I have’t seen it remarked yet, but I thought Jimmy’s change of expression after he successfully pranked Howard to be noteworthy. The camera lingers on his closeup and for a brief moment, you can see him go from dark joy and satisfaction to what appears to be sheer pain, and there are many nuances there. Maybe he was suddenly reminded of Chuck, and the reasons why he’s still hating on Howard. Maybe he realized the emptiness of that hatred and yet the impossibility of letting it go. Great silent understated performance by Odenkirk in an episode where elsewhere he gets to go big a lot.
There are lots of moments in the show where Bob is acting on like 3 different layers. I think his actions towards Howard are the most fascinating because they come from such a conflicted place. He is “pranking” Howard because he believes Howard’s gestures of kindness and empathy are a prank towards him, but he does feel the pain of the twinge of doubt that eats at him.
I think his brain knows Howard is sincere, Jimmy doesn’t know him as the type of person who wastes time on… the kind of petty things Jimmy wastes time on. 🙂
Yeah usually it is Kim/Rhea who gets the “silent understated” moments and Jimmy/Bob gets to go wild so I liked it when last week Kim got to do the ridiculous Kevin impersonation and also shout at people a lot and this week Jimmy got to be haunted by his decisions.
Has the A. V. Club drifted so far away from its Mr. Show-loving roots that it fails to even point out a Jay Johnston cameo? Are the commenters so lost that it falls to a schnook like me, stuck in the grays of Kinja, to point it out? Good Lord, what have we become?
I just couldn’t believe he was cast as something besides a police officer this time.
I thought that was him! Had to go back to the opening credits to confirm.
There was no mention of the construction site foreman in last week’s episode being played by John DiMaggio who voiced Bender Rodriguez on Futurama either.
A commenter pointed it out. Also gotta give love to Jake the Dog.
Wow! Did not realize that was John Dimaggio!
I guess that should have been obvious when he say bite my shaky wooden ass.
Mustmayostardanyonnaise. Don’t be a slave to the two-jar system.
I noted it on Twitter but not here, because here didn’t exist at 9:10 or whatever
I came here just to say the same thing! I was hoping that Kevin would make a comment about his dad climbing Everest!
Was that the Mr. Show alum to make it on the show? I think it might be
So….are we thinking maybe the possum that was making all the noise was Scrabbles? And the caller was none other than Jesse Pinkman?
“He’s the Anton Chekhov of nail salon lawyers.”Holy cats, what an episode. Plans on plans on plans on plans. Saul (and yes, I say Saul because that was all Saul, not Jimmy) was stutter-stepping out there like his name was Cassius. I knew he was about to drop a bomb on that conference room from the spring in his step as he walked up the hall, but DAMN. That was unbelievable. And on one hand, he was right! He needed the genuine anger from Kim to sell it. Rich was already sniffing bullshit in Kim’s story, so Saul knew he needed that extra little oomph of over-the-top emotion in the room to sell it. If Kim had known about it beforehand, maybe Rich would’ve seen through it again and called her bluff. Who knows? All I’m saying is that it’s possible, and it would’ve been very bad for Kim going forward.
But on the other hand, holy shit, Saul. It’s one thing to fuck over Kim Wexler in such a public way like that (we know our Kim, and Kim is not to be fucked with), but when said Kim Wexler is also your girlfriend… I’m not even sure I have the right words. Ballsy? Sure. Stupid? Oh, hell yes. I think Saul just sealed the deal in assuring the only way Kim Motherfucking Wexler will ever marry him is to protect herself from having to testify against him. Brutal. Absolutely fucking brutal. That last moment of the show showed me why we got that bit at the very beginning with her mother. It’s no wonder she has such a hard time trusting people when all they ever end up doing is screwing her over in such dramatic and selfish ways.And speaking of that opening bit, I would not be surprised if that woman who played Kim’s mother is somehow related to Rhea Seehorn. She absolutely looked like a blood relative. Face shape, smile, everything. The young actor playing Kim was spot-on, too.Vince Gilligan calls the actor who plays the director in the trio of students that Saul hires from time to time ‘young Kubrick’, and it was great fun watching that that actor living up to his nickname this week. Not just in physical resemblance (Google ‘young Kubrick’ and you’ll see), but also in his mannerisms and attitude, as well. I love watching those three, especially this week’s performance by the young woman who does makeup. Watch her scenes in the nail salon again and keep your eyes on her face. Electric.And good gravy Marie, when Lalo gets out in a day or two… batten down the hatches. Storm’s a-comin’. It’s funny how Breaking Bad’s MO of getting rid of characters was killing them. Here on Better Call Saul, it’s about outsmarting them.
Honestly, the actress who played Kim’s mom looked so much like her that at first I thought it WAS Kim. For a moment, I thought we were getting a flash-forward showing Kim, years later, as an alcoholic mom and it made my hair stand up on end.
Oh MAN, I didn’t even think about that! That would’ve been even worse. It would’ve been her own version of the black-and-white flashforwards we’ve been getting of Saul.
Oh that’s great. Though it would be really sad if that was Kim’s ultimate fate, to become a copy of her mother because Jimmy divorced her to be full time Saul Goodman in the future and the depression got to her.
i thought it was her, just in early 80’s attire to play her mom. in any case, very well cast
I was struck by how her voice sounded 95% like her, which was so much more on the nose than 100%. I was mistaken for my dad on the telephone from the age of 14 every single time I answered the phone.
Not just looked – go back and watch the end of the scene where Kim is walking down the sidewalk & her mom is yelling at her from the car. The cadence in her words was uncannily Kim Wexler/Rhea Seahorn-esque.
Lalo didn’t get to his position by being stupid. He knows exactly what’s happening and why.
He knows it’s Gus and Mike. Does he know they’re implicating him in the engineer’s murder? Does he know it’s Nacho?
He might not have at first, but I’d bet he figures it out. Like the poster above said, Lalo’s not stupid. He knows what’s up.
Oh absolutely. He knows he’s being targeted by Gus by way of the law. But now he’s all tangled up in that side of things, so it’s going to be interesting to see how he gets out of it, and then what happens next.
Mike uses Dave Clark as a postal inspector in Breaking Bad, so I assume he has a bunch of cards printed up. I like the subtle nods to both BB and Mr. Show. I kept thinking “But IS there a higher number than 24?” when I saw Jay Johnston. Bravo for a stellar episode.
Why would Lalo get out in a day or two? He had a handgun in the car, and is highly likely to be a felon? The fact that he’s now a murder suspect doesn’t help either, although any bail set I’m sure he could pay.I guess there’s a chance he has a green card and a clean record in the US, but even then he couldn’t legally carry a firearm in the cab of his car. So maybe the two felonies of hit and run and unlawful firearm would get him out quick, but it still seems highly likely he has a US record. Of course, Mike undoubtedly has a plan for this, too.
[QUOTE]Thank goodness she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures
drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t
think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a
magnet in them and generate electricity. But here I did not even think
about that toxic word “trust” until I started to write this paragraph.[/QUOTE]
Umm….what?!? She absolutely and quite noticeably used the word “trust” (she verbatim says “I don’t trust you”). Go ahead and roll your eyes as hard as you can while I do the same about you somehow missing this detail.
“trust. Thank goodness she never says that word”She explicitly says “I don’t trust you.”
Is no one here ready to speculate about the fact that Mrs. Wexler’s plates were from Nebraska? Was this something already established (e.g. that Gene ends up in Wexler county)? Could be a hint at how things will unfold.
Early on in BCS, Kim mentioned that she was originally from a small town on the Nebraska/Kansas border where her only prospects were to work as a cashier at the supermarket and marry the guy who ran the local gas station so she left. I tend to believe that’s the “short version” of a story that there’s far more to
There’s a theory that Gene and Kim meet up again in the ‘black and white’ scenes of this show once all is said and done.
Because the architecture of the school kind of looked like the architecture of a mall I briefly thought that this was part of the black and white fast forward but now we’d gone color for some reason!
I agree..that is how it ends.
Yes I noticed that as well, i think it has to do with Jimmy being in Omaha Nebraska in present day at the Cinnabon as he was relocated there. Got to be where the show ends.
Random thought. I think detective Tim Roberts was on the phone with Jesse Pinkman talking with about BB “Fly” episode’s possum. I thought it was his aunt at first, but he says “yes sir” at the end.
“In Jimmy’s world, if you can dream up a play, you have to use it. He’s the Anton Chekhov of nail salon lawyers.”Hehe I like that 😝
“Smoke on the Water” is about a careless, reckless, and stupid action that burned a venue to the ground. Metaphor!
Mike identified himself as Officer Dave Clark when he called the police to ask about Gus’s stolen laptop’s storage location during the prep for the Breaking Bad magnet heist.
I think the cold open gave us a glimpse. She grew up with an uncontrollable mother. Maybe she thinks she can control Jimmy/Saul if they get married?
Yes, Mike used the Dave Clark alias in BB, as a mail inspector trying to find Fring’s laptop.
Considering what may and will ultimately happen, that glimpse into her childhood, makes Kim overall all the more tragic. All that hard work and sacrifice to get out of such hardship will be all for naught at the end, and all because she fell in with Jimmy McGill. And what will it take for Seehorn to at least get nominated for an Emmy and/or Golden Globe here?
At 48:30: Saul: “What didn’t you get that you wanted?”Kim: “I DON’T TRUST YOU.”<<< whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a magnet in them and generate electricity. >>>
Donna you are completely on point with line in the review “They think they’re so much better than me. This’ll show ‘em!”. This is exactly why Jimmy’s stuff with Howard is so informative. For a bit it felt out of character for Jimmy to be cruel like he is to Howard, but it’s his response to an irreconcilable notion: There are good people out there who want to forgive and help you. Not everybody in the world is trying to con the other, some people are sincere and deep down decent. I love how this show has somehow made that sincere decent person be Howard Hamlin. He’s my favorite tangential character and probably should be the subject of the next spin-off: “Healing Hamlin”
That’s great. Jimmy’s hatred is so misplaced. He’s trying to ‘get back’ at someone who doesn’t really think that much about him. Julian Fellowes has a great quote (i’ll mangle it horribly) about how there are people in your life that you are completely obsessed with that have very little awareness of you at all – and vice versa.
This show clearly doesn’t have a legal consultant because Saul would get disbarred for attempted blackmail with claims that would be thrown out of court. No way would Kim be allowed to represent Mesa Verde with him opposing either, as it’s clearly a conflict of interests.
Also what country club admits hooks without a maitre’d escorting them to a table?
Disbarred by who? In order to get disbarred, someone has to make a complaint to the state bar, and no one really has an interest in publicizing Saul’s claims.
He threatened blackmail in front of witnesses. That is both unethical & illegal, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t call the cops & report him to the state ethics board.
Well, the blackmail wasn’t explicit…he was careful in the meeting not to say “I will not run these ads if you pay my client $4 million.” But in any event, they don’t want to publicize the claims. They don’t want him to drop those ads. They don’t want him to go forward with a lawsuit claiming that Mesa Verde ripped off an old woman. Sure, they can get him sanctioned, probably disbarred for his unethical actions, but that will be months down the line. They are concerned about immediate reputational damage that will not be reversed from Saul getting disbarred in a few months.
In the video they never claim any of those things. They have actors who say “my bank” over text that says “ACTOR PORTRAYAL BASED ON ACTUAL INCIDENTS OR FICTION.”. At the end Saul comes on and asks a question. Yes they could get it thrown out, but likely at very great cost, and the video could leak anyway.
The ads are close enough to libel that I doubt any TV station would let them run. They’re clearly meant to evoke one specific bank. If Saul couldn’t produce any real people the ads were inspired by, they’d definitely be found to be malicious.The federal statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years. If the bank had been using that logo for decades, it’d be unreasonable for the photographer to only bring this claim now.
Saul and Kim representing opposing clients definitely stretches my belief. Even if Kevin was OK with it, I can’t imagine Rich not intervening sooner as a business decision rather than a purely legal one. It’s one of those situations where a senior lawyer knows the risks are too high of a client getting mad later if anything goes wrong.
Yeah I’m surprised Howard goes to a country club that even lets in unescorted women, let alone ones wearing the uniform of a prostitute.
Were they actually *at* a country club or just talking about that Judge’s golf game? I never got the sense there was golf happening nearby, especially since Jimmy was able to observe the fracas from his car parked on a city street.
I thought it was just a restaurant.
It was a downtown ABQ restaurant, not sure where the reviewer gets country club.
I’m not sure but this review says country at the bottom.
Mike uses the alias Dave Clark for his private investigator character. As in the Five? Were we previously aware that Mike is an aficionado of the Tottenham Sound? Episode of Breaking Bad Live Free or Die- Mike pretends to be Postal Inspector Dave Clark on the phone with APD.
Man, that was an extremely compelling episode. Saul has well and truly “broke bad” in this episode, revealing his true, true colors to people who matters and have deep connections to wide swat in their professions.I liked what Saul felt toward the hands that feed, but he crossed too many lines here. Yeah, Howard was an ass and got rightly turned down by Saul. But he was trying to turn his corners and doesn’t deserved the crushed car and public embarrassments. Mesa Verde is a mixture of sheer corporate greed with righteous and legitimate business to serve the public, but at least they does followed the laws. Saul turned his back on their preliminary agreement and tore their supposed integrity apart just because he want to win rather than trying to work for the goods of both side.No wonder Kim is so pissed off. This is the straw that finally broke her camel’s back, seeing Saul for who he truly is now.
That fake Mesa Verde video is straight from the Mr. Show playbook. Note perfect, especially how it pauses right when Saul is pointing into the camera.
A great review! I almost look forward to the recaps as much as the show. However, as Rich said, “if you have a bone to pick with me, pick away…” Ok, so, I will. She does say almost that exact phrase at 1:06 of 1:11 minutes, I’m afraid. Perhaps it’s a testament to just how amazing Rhea Seehorn has been this season and all series long.
Trivia that only I probably find interesting:In the Mesa Verde commercial after the first commercial break, Kevin’s dad was played by Bob Odenkirk’s fellow Mr Show cast mate Jay Johnston.
Props for putting in Mr. Show alum Jay Johnston to play Mesa Verde founder.
The shot in the warehouse? was beautiful how they framed it, Nacho’s car the natural light. Simply Gorgeous
Kim will face the situation head-on and carry through, just like we see in the lovely cold open where she sets off to walk home three miles with a cello on her back, rather than get in the car with her neglectful (and buzzed) mom.
Wonder if a later cold opening will revisit Kim’s childhood and specifically that incident of drunk driving mom and defiant Kim walking home.
For some reason I thought the actress that played Kim’s mom was the same one who plays Flo in the Progressive ads.
I recently rewatched the first season of Mad Men and was shocked to see both Flo and Kristen Schaal are in the pilot.
She was in the Mister Show reboot for Netflix so she has some kind of relationship to Bob Odenkirk!
Noted…—That “Outlaw Justice” movie poster on Jimmy and Kim’s apartment wall.—Kevin did steal his logo from that photographer. So Kim can still tell herself—as she said in an earlier episode—that they’re still using their questionable powers “for good.”—Saul/Jimmy really is an auteur of the courtroom. He wants justice for the little guy, he loves using his jujitsu on an arrogant sucker, but it’s the beauty of the scheme that he loves most—so much that he can’t throw out all his hard work on those wonderful commercials, even when the copyright infringement case alone would probably be enough to get what he wants.—I was afraid for a minute that we were seeing a flashforward not flashback in the “young Kim” scene. I checked to make sure that wasn’t actually Rhea Seehorn + CGI playing the mom. The voice was so like her that I wonder if Seehorn dubbed it.
Anyone catch that Kim’s mom’s license plate in the cold open was for NEBRASKA??? I’m calling it. The series will end with Kim in a disguise picking up “Gene” in a getaway car. They will drive off into the sunset as the black and white fades to color.
And the school name. Kim is, specifically, from Red Cloud.
“Nacho, who’s looking at Scylla Salamanca and Charybdis Fring on either side” I loved this, and the comparisons make sense. Salamanca might be the more obvious and scary monster but Gus will suck you into his orbit until you can’t escape and get pulled under.
I still don’t get why Jimmy is messing with Howard, the car and now the hookers. Like, Howard has always been condescending (sometimes unintentionally) to Jimmy, though also honestly appreciative of his talents when they’re on the same side. I think Howard was sincere and Jimmy is just trashing his life because he’s insecure about his own.
“Nacho, who’s looking at Scylla Salamanca and Charybdis Fring on either side” I loved this, and the comparisons make sense. Salamanca might be the more obvious and scary monster but Gus will suck you into his orbit until you can’t escape and get pulled under.
I still don’t get why Jimmy is messing with Howard, the car and now the hookers. Like, Howard has always been condescending (sometimes unintentionally) to Jimmy, though also honestly appreciative of his talents when they’re on the same side. I think Howard was sincere and Jimmy is just trashing his life because he’s insecure about his own.
“Nacho, who’s looking at Scylla Salamanca and Charybdis Fring on either side” I loved this, and the comparisons make sense. Salamanca might be the more obvious and scary monster but Gus will suck you into his orbit until you can’t escape and get pulled under.
I still don’t get why Jimmy is messing with Howard, the car and now the hookers. Like, Howard has always been condescending (sometimes unintentionally) to Jimmy, though also honestly appreciative of his talents when they’re on the same side. I think Howard was sincere and Jimmy is just trashing his life because he’s insecure about his own.
I don’t fully understand Kim’s logic in a marriage proposal. Yes it protects them legally but she just said she can’t trust Jimmy anymore, that he played her and they’re at breaking point- why would she want to get married now?
You just said it. It protects them legally. Now is the best time to do it in case things go south real quick. It’s a defense tactic.
Maybe she knows that, if this doesn’t make her leave, nothing will and she may as well acknowledge that’s she’s committed.
I said this upthread already, but underneath it all Kim loves Saul, and she really loves the scam game. Kim was angry both at the meeting and later in her confrontation with Saul, but it was a confused anger. She knew that she should be furious but there was something holding her back.
Because she finally realizes how much of an unrepentant con man/criminal he is at heart and that’s the only she can keep him in her life
At this point I’m just hate-reading reviews here for the inevitable extended analysis made about something that provably didn’t happen in the show. I thought it’d be a miss this time, then, *boom*, a paragraph on how Kim never said the word “trust.”
I’m pleasantly surprised. I thought she’d just walk away from the relationship at the end of this episode. It’d be entirely understandable. But inside, there’s something about Kim that she knows is just as reckless and desperate, despite her well-acted role as the more ‘adult, responsible’ one, the lawyer who plays ‘by the book’. She doesn’t believe in that role, not deep inside herself. She knows she’s more on Jimmy’s side than on Rich’s. I still incredibly fear for whatever fate awaits her (and fuck, Nacho and his dad, too), but maybe the show will surprise me again. We’re all expecting horror and loss, but maybe a happy ending might be the most unexpected twist of all?
Also wow…Jimmy’s attempt at the chord progression of ‘Smoke On The Water’ is miles off. Despite being a low-rent strip-mall lawyer, he’s a damn good one, which I think even folks like Rich and Howard would admit. He is not a good guitarist, though.
Yeah I really thought this would be the end of the relationship between Jimmy and Kim and he’d get even more twisted and broken because of that, similar to the way Chuck’s death affected him
I wish there was more analysis of the camera work. I understand plot analysis is part of what these blogs traditionally do, but with a show like this it’s really missing much or even most of what’s interesting.
Have you seen John Teti’s basement breakdowns on his Ological youtube channel? They’re fantastic analysis of just what you’re talking about
Separately, it seems like you’re really analyzing things in a binary way of Kim good Saul bad – not defending Saul, but Kim is *in* this, and it’s worth asking why (not to judge her necessarily, but to understand)
Mild distraction: Credit crawl goes to almost the 11:00 mark of the episode. I have no idea if that’s a record, but it’s a little ridiculous, and a little annoying.
Reminds me of the endless producer credits The Simpsons have accumulated over the years at the beginning of every episode.
Jonathan Banks used to be a radio DJ in Baltimore so the Dave Clark alias is probably a nod to that.
I just rewatched Breaking Bad and in Saul Goodman’s first episode he brings up Ignacio (while standing in his would-be grave), so I don’t think Nacho is getting out any time soon…
He also mentioned Lalo.
Oh, Jimmy.
“Thank goodness she never says that word (Trust).” She does though, she says it right after she told Jimmy that he wont today and she didn’t win, because she realized she can’t trust him anymore.
You need to stop calling him Jimmy. He’s not Jimmy playing Saul Goodman or pretending to be Saul Goodman or slowly turning into Saul Goodman. He’s not Slippin’ Jimmy under a different name. He IS Saul Goodman. Jimmy McGill no longer exists. He’s as dead as Chuck. This is who he’s always wanted to be.
sir this is a avclub
Kim’s mom drives an AMC Eagle. One of the ugliest cars ever made.
Serendipity: last night TCM ran “Ice Station Zebra” as part of their run of submarine-themed movies they showed most of the day.
This was the first episode in either BCS or Breaking Bad where a montage just didn’t work for me. The whole bit filming in the nail salon felt forced compared to past montages that they’ve done.
The AMC Eagle was the Pontiac Aztek of its time…
My first high school band director drove one. She lived with her mother and the mom drove one too.
Hideous cars.
Relating to the Superman allegory, I just found out that the guy who played the 1998 Phantom of the Opera in the movie where he rapes Christine also went on to play Jor-El in Smallville.
Thank goodness she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a magnet in them and generate electricity.She literally said “I don’t trust you.”
Thank goodness she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a magnet in them and generate electricity. But here I did not even think about that toxic word “trust” until I started to write this paragraph.Um, what? It’s right there in my closed captions: “I don’t trust you.” (Kim to Jimmy)
I thought their breakup was inevitable, and I was still almost in tears with how it went down, and then the swerve. Fucking hell, man. Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and the entire BB/BCS team are absolute geniuses.
Please don’t let them get married. There are only two ways Kim didn’t appear in Breaking Bad. Either she was long separated from Jimmy or she’s dead. Yes, they could separate through divorce, but I like the odds better (given the timeframe) if they split up now.
I thought this would mark Kim’s exit from the BB universe with her and Jimmy breaking up. So I was very surprised she suggested marriage! As much as a mourn Jimmy becoming Sleazy Saul, there has been a nice comic edge to the last few eps and his scams. That video was a hoot.
Mike used Dave Clark as a phony name in Breaking Bad (I’m pretty sure it was when he was calling the police to see whether or not they had picked up Gus’s laptop after Gus was killed). In that episode he even said something like, “Dave Clark, like the Dave Clark Five. Before your time?”
The actress playing Young Kim absolutely nailed Rhea Seahorn’s vocal tone and cadence.
Is it any coincidence that Jonathan Banks was the bad guy’s henchman in Beverly Hills Cop, and that Mike uses the Axel Foley trick of walking into a place he has no business being and cowing people into believing he’s an authority figure? I’ve got to think that every time he does it, it’s a little nod to BHC.
I dunno if this it nit picky but the prostitute characters seemed pretty dated. Probably could have gone without that subplot entirely because this was a stunner otherwise.
There’s so much about this season that I straight up don’t like.I don’t like the fact that Kim made crusty old Barry Corbin the hill she was going to die on. She gave him plenty of chances, he’s just an unsympathetic old jackass who deserves to get kicked off his shitty piece of dirt. I can’t believe that Kim would have invested SO much in him.I hate Jimmy’s cruel and needless sabotage of Howard for no damn reason. I don’t buy that Howard would be legitimately courting Jimmy to work for HHM. To me, it smacks of the writers trying to keep the character in play after his usefulness to the story has come to an organic end. The show always did a great job of making Jimmy sympathetic so you at least understood WHY he kept making incremental moral compromises, but having him be just an unmotivated petty asshole is a terrible character move.Given the truly awful other shit he’s doing, it’s like the writers said, “well, we played it down the middle for four seasons, but it’s time to just run Jimmy off a cliff right now and never look back.”This has easily been my least favorite season. All subtlety is dead. And no fucking way Kim would stick around after that shit.
What about the Nebraska License plate of Kim’s Mom’s car in the cold open..Can that link back to Jimmy being in Omaha Nebraska at the Cinnabon in Present day?
Donna, Kim literally says, “I don’t trust you,” at the beginning of their fight. That second to last graf is painfully inaccurate.
Did I just watch a different version from Donna?
She says: “it’s about that old standby of narrative conflict: trust. Thank goodness
she never says that word; whenever a TV show manufactures drama in a
relationship by having a character tell another “I don’t think I can
trust you anymore,” my eyes roll so hard you could stick a magnet in
them and generate electricity. But here I did not even think about that
toxic word “trust” until I started to write this paragraph.”Kim very clearly says “I don’t trust you.” – right after Jimmy asks “What didn’t you get that you wanted?” – about 3 minutes towards the end. Literally spells it out. I feel gaslit!?
What the fuck does she mean, married? All of her psychological making sense to me went out the window there.