If Saul ever met Jesse before BB it would have been briefly and not memorable. The first time we saw Saul and Jesse together on BB was when Walt and Jesse kidnapped Saul and took him out in the desert and in that encounter it was obvious that Saul did not know or recognize Jesse.
Considering how high-profile Saul was in BB, with all the slick TV ads, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to not remember everyone he had ever represented. It would be memorable to Jesse, but not necessarily to Saul.
I agree that they didn’t use Marie as much as they could have, but even so, the kleptomania thing does tie in with the show’s main running theme: Everybody is someone else under the surface, and everybody has a dirty secret. It could be small-scale stealing or running a meth empire out of the back room of a chicken restaurant, but it’s the same sort of thing. This world is populated by criminals hiding in broad daylight. I think Marie’s character shows how that theme gets into every nook and cranny of the BB universe.
Walter Jr. was underdeveloped, I agree. It feels like they had bigger plans for him at the start, that never got going. It could be worse, though. Looking at the ensemble as a whole, he is the one that represents innocence and purity. Actually, I think he’s the only major character that *doesn’t *have a dirty secret. He’s the only one uncontaminated by sin, and mostly completely oblivious to what kind of world he lives in. And I kind of like having the representation of innocence being a gloomy little punk like Junior, rather than something more obvious.
Still, the overall impression I got was that Saul was someone that Jesse knew about but had never met personally. He didn’t seem to have any expectations that Saul would recognize him.
I think that it’s entirely likely that we’ll get a sly reference or two scattered through the next season. I would not be at all surprised to see a Pollos Hermanos restaurant or Gus Fring shaking hands at a fund raiser or Gomez helping with a case. But, I think it’s very probable that the main story line will be something entirely new.
May I take just a moment to say that I really enjoy shows that have a larger, coherent story. Episodic shows always need resolution by the end, so they can reset by the next week. Shows like BCS and BB can let a story line play itself out much more naturally.
If the show runners haven’t mapped out the larger story lines for at least 5 seasons, I would be pretty surprised. In the show Bates Motel, for example, the show runners wanted the character of Norman Bates to be at the point of his life where we see him in Alfred Hitchcock’s original film at the end of 5 seasons of the TV series. They had that planned before they broadcast the first season. So, each season, they know where that character starts and where he needs to be at the end. Now, they need to develop a plausible way of moving him from one place to the other.
The first season of BCS had a lot of work to do. It had to tidy up loose ends (Chicago sunroof, his name, Nacho). It had to show his transformation, his Breaking Bad moment. What sort of person grows up to be Saul Goodman?
Walter White killed Crazy Eight. Jimmy turned down a job.
The second season … Well, if the show runners want J/S to be the man we see in BB after 5 seasons of BCS, they probably also know where they want him to be at the end of each season. Then, fill in the middle with some great adventure stories.
That is interesting. Thanks, Doc!
Well, hate to give up this Saul finale thread, I enjoyed all ten threads, found your comments to be witty, intelligent, insightful, entertaining, and informative. You’re the best group of commenters ever, many kindred spirits here, thank you for your patience with this SD newbie - but I’m sorta Saul talked out, and have some Real Life catching up to do, some serious golf to watch. See you next time.
Go Land Crabs!
BTW - my University of American Samoa and Better Call Saul T-shirts have arrived. LOVE them!
The latest insider podcast has further gelled my issues with the Howard Hamlin twist. (They are really undermining themselves with this look at sausagemaking, I have to say.) Patrick Fabian was on again, and made some comments, and posed some questions, that Vince and Peter couldn’t answer (they even “jokingly” griped “Caught!”).
He wondered, if Chuck is so important to the firm that Howard had to let Chuck call the shots and make Howard repeatedly play the bad guy with Jimmy, then why hasn’t Howard sent Chuck’s secretary to work at his home? Why hasn’t he gotten the best doctors to try to treat Chuck? And of course, the answer is that until the 7th episode, that is not how they were writing those two characters.
This also jogged my memory of a couple other elements that don’t fit this retconned scenario. (As I’ve said, I don’t mind writers shifting their plans on the fly, but I don’t like dubious retcons–once something is established as canon, I think you have to be bound by it.)
The way Howard treated Jimmy when the latter showed up at the Kettlemans’ house does not jibe with Howard actually liking and respecting Jimmy, and feeling guilty about what he has had to do to him.
And Howard showing up at the hospital and loudly spouting off about how the firm’s position was that this was a physical illness? It made perfect sense in the narrative Jimmy laid out at the time: that Howard was afraid of Jimmy getting legal guardianship, whereas Howard was perfectly happy to have Chuck just stuck in a limbo where he is out of the loop but leaves his capital in the firm for Howard to control. And I’m 100% sure this was intended by the writers at the time to be the truth. But when you look back on it in light of later revelations, it doesn’t fit.
I wonder if one or the other would be worse for the firm. Like to most people, hearing that someone is allergic to electronics sounds really weird but maybe like a real thing, but hearing that someone has been diagnosed as mentally ill and thinks they are allergic to electronics is more off-putting. They might rather have it be known that a partner is on a leave of absence for an illness, rather than he’s mentally ill.
Hamlin can be compassionate regarding what Chuck is going through, but still making calculations on what is best for the firm overall. The writers could have planned things out better, but I don’t think they’ve written themselves into a corner.
I didn’t see Howard’s actions as conflicting. To me it appeared as if he was just protecting his interests based on the way the Jimmy/Chuck situation played out. Howard wants to maximize his power and money.
-Before Chuck cracked Howard was happy to align himself with Chuck’s power and proved himself to Chuck by taking the bad guy role willingly.
-During a time when it looked like Jimmy might become Chuck’s guardian Howard would act in ways to minimize Jimmy’s influence including trying to block Jimmy from any lucrative work. It was shown that Jimmy in guardianship could bust the whole law firm and Howard acted in order to prevent that.
-Later when Chuck started to show the ability to cope Howard was more than happy fall back into a supportive role as Chucks hatchet man.
-Once Jimmy discovered that Howard had no need to trash Jimmy anymore and basically told him that he respected Jimmy.
In other words Howard always acted like a sleazebag power grabbing lawyer.
Interesting take, but the showrunners are talking as though Howard has been “vindicated”, is now proven to be the “good guy”, etc. They probably should have taken the tack you are describing, and they still can–so hopefully they will, as that will make the switcheroo go down more easily.
There was quite a bit of this going on with Breaking Bad, too, I think. At least going by the BB podcast (and just the feel you get from watching the show).
The writers would get to a point where they would be asking the characters: “Wait, what is going on here, why are you doing this, what are you thinking?”. Thing is, though, the characters were so strong that there would be answers, and it would make sense. Going by the conversations on the podcast, it wouldn’t be a matter of “this is a plothole, we’re fucked”, but “this is interesting, the characters have motivations and sides to their personalities that we didn’t know about, and if we listen to them, we can suss it out”.
It’s almost like the characters themselves come to life and take over the writing. Or at least tell the writers what is going on and how they should carry on. Just because the writers’ reason was “well, we didn’t think of that when we were writing that episode”, the characters’ reasons turn out to be something else. The creators (and the audience) could trust the characters to be “real” enough that it would work out.
The question now is whether the writing on BCS is strong enough for this sort of weird alchemy to work on this show as well. Personally, I’m not as convinced as I was with BB, but I suppose YMMV.
Also, I’m not a writer, so I don’t know whether this level of making it up as you go is a common way of doing things or not.
I don’t think it’s common at all but it’s Gilligan’s hallmark. As you said very well, it worked great in BB but faltered some in BCS. I bet that they do a better job in Season 2.
It’s very common for U.S. TV. Not so much for novels.
As soon as he couched his first cough, the first thing that went through my head was “advanced-stage lung cancer”…
The theme for this episode, and I think for the rest of BCS, was Marco’s final words: “That was the best week of my life.”
I think it’s quite common, with varying results (on *LOST *it was horrendous, and not just in the series finale). On Breaking Bad it often worked out well, but I didn’t like at all that they had Bryan Cranston believing he was in fact innocent of having anything to do with Brock’s poisoning when Jesse had the gun to his head. And that whole plotline was too much of the LOST-esque “twisty for twisty’s sake” that was so awful on LOST. But this was the exception rather than the rule, and that is still my favorite show of all time.
ETA: Some more interesting info from that podcast included the revelation that as originally mixed, the montage of scams was twice as long (good lord), and the whole scene in the bar was significantly longer as well. So that could have been worse–I found both of those too long even in their final form.
Me too. I could have done without the montage at all. It did set up a good joke when we found out that it took place over only a week but it wasn’t worth it.
I don’t mind at all that Bryan Cranston thought that Walt was innocent of the poisoning. Walt knew that he was guilty, so it works out. I think it’s part of the “alchemy” (for want of a better word) that I mentioned. The characters take over. There’s something slightly magical about it.
I agree that the poisoning plotline as a whole was gawd-awful. Breaking Bad was always at its best when it was characher-focused rather than plot-focused. Or rather, when it was written as a “psychological experiment”, as it were, just performed on fictional rather than real people. Write the characters honestly, see what pops out. The slightly magical part is that this worked with fictional people. In the BB discussion threads, we could talk about the characters as if they were real. On the BB podcast, you can sometimes hear the creators themselves doing it, and the various writers, directors, actors etc. don’t always know or agree with each other about what the characters are thinking or why they do what they do.
Conversely, as you say, BB was at its worst when it got into Rube Goldberg style plotting, and they had to get the characters from A to B via twist C.
The thing is, though, that the problem with the poison plotline isn’t that the plot itself is terrible, or doesn’t make sense (at least IMO). It’s just that it makes the characters look more like trained seals and less like real people. One moment that sticks out to me (and I’ve bitched about this before) is the scene where Jesse lights up a joint in Saul’s office, so that Huell has a reason to pickpocket his weed. It just screams “he’s doing this to advance the plot”.
It sticks out and breaks the immersion. It doesn’t fit with the tone.
(I miss the BB discussion threads, BTW, as I guess you can tell… sniff… oh, well, such is life.)
That’s a good point–and it’s part and parcel of the fact that I feel the original poisoning plot was bad, and revisiting it in the last season was “fruit of the poisonous tree” (all the more noticeable because that stretch of episodes was otherwise so fantastic).