If there was some type of mechanical help involved, I withdraw my criticism. But, I have never seen any such device in real life. The reason is simply that the lines get too tangled between a person and the device. If someone were to really fall, the lines would pull taught wherever they happened to be at that moment. It would also very likely allow the person to fall a considerable distance, because you wouldn’t know how much rope to use, unless it was somehow retractable like a seat belt. Anchoring yourself close to your body prevents you from falling very far.
In real life, a person would be stuck there until the fire dept arrived. There’s also at least a 50% chance that they would rescue him by lowering him to the ground rather than trying to lift him onto the platform. This depends somewhat on what equipment your dept has available. For example, a dept with the appropriate ladder truck would just extend a ladder up to him & have a firefighter go up and do the necessaries.
The whole rescue thing required a lot of suspension of disbelief but the same was true a number of times with BB and that show was so good that I was easily able to forgive it.
So far, at least for me, the same is true for BCS.
The point is that Jimmy engineered a fake rescue scenario in order to get himself in the public eye in a positive way in order to advance his business. I can ignore the mechanics of it and appreciate what it’s saying about Jimmy and his lack of character or level of desperation.
I think a much more interesting conversation lies in that. There are obviously some character flaws as shown by the flashbacks to his younger days. I get the impression that he’s struggled to overcome those flaws - he does seem to have flashes of conscience - but desperation to support himself and his brother are driving him back to his old ways.
Did he ever give up the old ways? Has he been running scams all along and hiding it from his brother, or is he just recently backsliding due to dire circumstances?
I assumed it was a simple electric wench. Easy to find, easy to use.
I have it DVR’d and will re-watch, but I thought at the time that the line was pulling him up not Saul/Jimmy. It should be easy to determine… if the wench is hoisting him the line will remain taut… if Saul/Jimmy is doing it then it should be slack.
Just re-watched… safety strap stays taut. If you listen it even sounds like you can hear some ratcheting sounds (not sure how he would work a manual ratchet though).
Would a mechanical device be capable of pulling a person onto a landing? Yes. Are such devices in common use by people who do jobs such as the one portrayed? No. Why not? Well, because of the reasons that I already mentioned briefly. I could go on and on, but it’s clearly not too interesting.
A more interesting question (for me) would be - What would Walter White do in this case? He would probably be willing to build a device specially for the purpose of creating the ILLUSION that he’d been able to carry out the rescue. A magic act. We would see him buying parts or assembling them without a clear idea of what he was building, then we’d have the whole thing revealed in action later. (such as the machine gun apparatus in his car’s trunk or the bomb he built for Hector)
Maybe that’s what Saul/Jimmy has done. I would be completely, 100% alright with that. My only comment, given this reality, would be that I wish it was revealed just a little more, to be just a little more clear.
Designing / building / installing such a device for a one-time-only use in a magic trick would reveal significantly more investment in this scheme than just paying someone to take a dive. It would deepen his commitment both to this particular scheme and to his larger goal of taking down HHM.
It wasn’t something he would normally have on the job, but it was something to help facilitate the scam.
I’ll admit my first theory of using an electronic wench may be cost prohibitive, but an electronic winch is only around $100. Add in a car battery to power it, and you can get the effect for cheap.
Considering how much he paid for the suit… the billboard… the film crew… etc. An extra couple hundred dollars is nothing.
I’ve dealt with them quite a bit, and no, they don’t work that way. The lanyard is intended to give progressively so that the person falling does not stop abruptly when it pays out. Once it’s stretched out, that’s it. It could be attached to a winch of some kind, but this is not normally done for the sort of application shown in the episode.
It’s pretty much correct that (without backup equipment) the only way to bring the guy back up on the catwalk would have been to pull him up by the lanyard, and that clearly was being done by someone off-camera.
Loved the episode anyway. Jimmy’s telling off Nacho, and the scene with Jimmy and the lady lawyer in the massage chairs, were priceless.
It’s the exact same scam as the one from The Sting. It’s called a “Pigeon Drop.” And, as an extra-special bonus for being OCD about the background in the show, if you freeze-frame when the mark looks at the wallet the ID says “Henry Gondorff” (Paul Newman’s character from the same movie).
I remember that from episode 1. I live in the southwestern US and have developed a habit of making a fist and tapping all doorknobs before opening them, just to get rid of the static charge (if the lights are dim sometimes you can see the spark!).
Use your keys. If you ground yourself with your keys (or a paperclip or something) the spark will jump from that and it won’t hurt.
At work, all winter, I get statically charged every time I get up from my desk, and then walking out of my office I pass by a big floor safe and get a big shock when I brush up against it. I used to keep a paperclip near it and each time I walked that way I would touch the safe with the paper clip. It’s considerably less painful.
Similarly, I’ve found it’s better to hold a metallic part of your car as you get out of it so the static that would build up on your body as you slide off the seat never gets a chance to build up. You can feel it discharging, but there’s never any spark.
I suspect Jimmy’s accepting the money will come back to bite him … at some point they will tell the Hamlin crowd and they will use it against him.
Also, in any of the Cicero scenes have seen anything that suggests he is trained as a lawyer at that point? Perhaps the “break” for his brother was helping Jimmy pull a scam that convinced people he was a lawyer when he is not …
The brother looks like too much of a straight arrow for such shenanigans and also unlikely to put his own license at risk for them. I can see him helping Jimmy struggle (or partly bluff) through a third-rate law school to become a real lawyer albeit one of little prospect.
He’s such a crafted character, which of course makes sense given the core of the show is the empathy we feel for Jimmy/Saul: the crafting has to create a resonance, and it does …
So Jimmy only rips off greedy scumbags (as in the alley way) or sticks it to ‘the man’ as with the Cease and Desist. As a young man, he’s just a bit aimless and likes a bong with his mate. As an older man he hates to not live up to his brothers expectations.
He doesn’t want to take the money but forces himself and feels guilty, and at least it means he can trade p and actually do good work.
He’s kind of an everyman, or an every little brother – we can’t help but sympathise and see the good in the rogue.
In The Sting, the scam involves swapping the mark’s real money (that he was supposed to deliver on behalf of Doyle Lonigan) for a wad of tissue paper.
Unless I missed something – in the alley, Jimmy finds a wallet full of money, and his co-conspirator with a fake Rolex, and winds up trading the fake Rolex for the money. I assume he planted the money – so what did Jimmy gain?
With regards to “S’all good,man”… put me on the list of :smack: never-got-it-before.
The mark wanted to keep the watch and give Jimmy the $1000 from the wallet, because he believed it was a real Rolex worth $2-3000. Jimmy objected, so the mark threw in all his own money, some 500+ dollars, which is the profit Jimmy and his accomplice split.