Does anyone else think they’ve painted themselves a bit into a corner as far as Mike’s abilities go?
He’s been well established as ultimate bad ass, to a ridiculous degree. As a result there is never any dramatic tension, because Mike is simply unbeatable in any situation involving violence or stealth. Not really buying it from his background either, supposedly he’s been a dirty cop for many years. The training he has seems more like someone that was special forces or something else…
Kind of doubt that ordinary beat cops get anywhere near his level of skill even after being on the force many years.
Well, that is sort of a danger inherently built into the show, it being a spin-off prequel and all. For very many viewers there is a handicap in knowing exactly where some characters are going to end up. In those cases the journey has to be the destination and from a writing standpoint that’s quite a tightrope to walk, dramatically. To its credit so far I think BCS has been pretty successful in making that concept work.
To be honest I don’t really care about that. Walter White was a middle aged teacher. Within an episode or two he was a killing machine in the gangster underworld. I think the secondary characters are so good that we care about them. The guy supplying the pills for example. A number of these minor but enjoyable characters will get bumped off to maintain the tension.
Aren’t there going to be scenes in all 3 time periods, (pre, during and post BB). All we’ve seen of post BB is him reliving his memories through the VHS tape, but I think they’re going to expand that at some point aren’t they?
It might be interesting if they explored more post-BB. But I doubt it. I’m not saying they couldn’t pull it off, being the brilliant writers they are, but he’s supposed to be in indefinite hiding, scared shitless from who he was involved with because of Walter White.
He certainly won’t become Saul again, let alone move back to New Mexico.
My interpretation was that the call he made in his office immediately after talking to Kim was to the phone company. It matches what he said to Chuck perfectly. He told Chuck that he knew he had turned off his phone so he checked with the phone company. Kim’s warning probably also made him suspicious, but I’ll be a little surprised if they show a conversation where Kim tells Jimmy about Chuck when they didn’t include it in this episode.
The actress portraying Kim actually did a great job in that scene. I believed completely that she was trying to hint to Jimmy something sneaky was going on without explicitly saying what.
If he was suspicious, and found out that Chuck called H., why would he not call Kim? Like he told his brother, he would then know for sure that he had unfairly insulted her, basically his only friend, when she was trying to help him.
At the least, he’d want to apologize; at the same time, he’d confirm that his suspicions were correct.
Along with The Americans thread on this board, lots of good reading material.
I think Chuck is going to suffer big time for his betrayal of Jimmy. Either he blows up his house with all those gas canisters, or he starts a slow but epic decline into further mental illness.
About his electronic gadget allergy, meh, part of me looks at Chuck as a kind of attention-grabbing little kid. This is how he kept Jimmy in line, by assigning Jimmy to menial tasks, or blocking Jimmys path in general, by keeping him in the mailroom, denying him the benefit of the Sandpiper case and ultimately, making sure Jimmy would never see his law career blossom. Sure, Chuck is always there to remind Jimmy that his days as a grifter will always haunt him, but deep down, Chuck was insecure and needed Jimmy to stay rooted in place, as his caregiver, for example. Meanwhile, Jimmy chafes at these strictures, and for such good reason. Jimmy is talented in a way that Chuck couldn’t touch.
So now, Jimmy has turned his back on Chuck, but he’s in a no win situation. I think Chuck deserves to be abandoned, but Jimmy will find it too tempting, as we know, to go for the easy con.
I am confused about what Jimmy is going to do with his case. This week he talked about “blowing up the case,” and in the previews it looks like he is not pursuing it, but is going back to his routine of calling bingo games.
Is he just abandoning the claims? Because that’s kind of a big no-no once you have undertaken representation of someone.
I only watched it the one time, but it looked like he punched the dude in the throat (which is pretty incapacitating if done correctly) after grabbing his gun.
I like to assume the confrontation went down the way it did was because the younger guy was really just a wanna-be blow-hard rather than Mike being some kind of Uber BadAss. Makes it a little more believable to me.
That’s exactly what he did; but it’s the gun-grabbing that I was curious about. How do you just reach out and take a gun from someone who is expecting you to do just that?
Maybe he wasn’t exactly expecting some little old man that’s standing around with a pimento sandwich, shuffling his feet, not even smart enough to bring a gun to a protection job to actually try and do that.
On top of that, Mike knows* this guy isn’t going to shoot him in a parking garage so what’s the worst that’s going to happen, he get’s a little roughed up if things go wrong and this guy is as big of a badass as he is?
*Mike knows? Mike assumes? I don’t know.
Has it been addressed whether Gilligan named Hamlin after Harry Hamlin (who played the pretty boy lawyer on L.A. LAW)?
Michael McKean has only grown as an actor for his entire career. Another “he is incredible on this series”, and it’s also probably his best role in a long career.
I think the implication was that Mike could tell he was all talk and didn’t really know how to use his toys. He did have an unknown amount of time to size the guy up while waiting for their employer.
Since the next episode is the season finale, I’m hoping we’ll get another scene of present day Cinnabon manager…just to see if it’s going to go anywhere, plot-wise.