Favorite line: “No, I’m a pretty great lawyer! I just argued you down from a death sentence to six months probation!”
My guess is that, as his brother’s representative, “Saul” felt that accepting the $26K could be seen as a waiver of this brother’s rights to pursue a (much larger) settlement - presumably the reason it was sent.
I don’t know, but I was guessing it was for a few weeks or months of backpay of salary. The head lawyer guy at the firm said something about how they’re keeping his office open and ready for when he comes back. I was guessing that if they keep acting like he’s a current employee, and the check is cashed, then they won’t have to pay out whatever big settlement Saul/Jimmy wants them to pay.
Did Saul mention whether he’d ever been married on Breaking Bad?
As long as he’s still an active partner, they don’t have to remove him and pay him whatever his share of the firm is. Apparently the firm in it’s current condition couldn’t survive that.
Presumably Jimmy’s brother (what’s his name?) could cash out any time he wants, but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to.
Jimmy could try to go to court and have him declared incompetent. By keeping up the charade that he’s still an active partner on sabbatical the firm makes that difficult.
All of this of course, is to create a reason that Jimmy is desperate for money. He’s taking care of both himself and his brother and trying to keep his brother from being screwed out of what’s rightfully his by people taking advantage of his delusions.
All of this parallels with Walt’s attempts to provide for his family. In both cases we have someone trying to care for family and making major moral concessions in order to do so.
That was his salary. (It would work out to about 1.3 million per year). As long as they kept paying him they could argue that he still worked there and didn’t have to buy him out. It’s possible there’s a clause in the contract that states that once a partner is absent for a certain amount of time they have to buy him out. This was there way of “being nice” and saying ‘we know you’re sick, but we’ll keep paying you anyways’ & “being underhanded” and saying 'we’re not going to let that countdown start towards having to buy you out. However, Jimmy saw right through that and he’s trying to get the buy out process started. Why they sent the check to him, I have no idea.
Also, asking Jimmy to take the stuff to the post office, I understand what Jimmy was worried about, but I don’t know if he actually had to worry about it.
^ This seems likely to me (rather than it being mere back-pay). The set-up for the revelation of the check–the quantity of “past-due” bills in that one stack of mail–made it clear that Saul/Jimmie really did need the money. He wouldn’t have hesitated to cash that check unless there was a great deal more money at stake.
Loved the shout-out to *All That Jazz *in episode 2. And it’s becoming clear that this show may be providing the roles of a lifetime for both Bob Odenkirk and Michael McKean. Superb work from both.
Breaking Bad characters Wendy, Juan Bolsa and Mr. Pinkman are in the credits for the first episode and Krazy-8 in the second. I didn’t notice any of them.
Saul drinks about 10-15 cups of coffee in the episode. He’s be awake for days if that happened
Was Tuco’s henchman who is killed in the junkyard in this week’s episode?
Yes.
When Walt and Jesse took Saul out to the desert, Saul says something like “Did Ignacio send you?” Nacho is a nickname for Ignacio.
How many times has Saul been tied up in the desert?
I’m surprised he stuck his neck out for the skaters. That’s pretty ballsy. In BB he seemed like a spineless weasel.
Part of me likes the Tuco angle, the faux trial, the grandmother scene, all very funny, but the more pretentious side of me says it’s just pandering to BB fans and the chances of them running into each other is so improbable as to be contrived. And it’s only a matter of time before Jesse shows up and starts spouting his catch phrases.
Cinematography is still great.
Gilligan has something against windshields.
It makes sense that Saul would have had contact with big people in the meth game at some point in his past
that’s how he is connnceted in BB
Look, it wouldn’t make sense if you go backwards in time 5-6 years from Breaking Bad, and a character like Jimmy/Saul *didn’t *periodically cross paths with characters that Jesse and Walt would later encounter.
That said, I think Tuco (who, btw, was never referred to by name in the episode) was there (along with the doomed Gonzo and No-Doze) to introduce us to Nacho, who was not in BB and appears to be the guy who will lead Saul/Jimmy over to the Dark Side.
Once he’s dealing with that work regularly there’s no reason to expect that we won’t see him interacting with other BB characters in some fashion, such as Crazy-8 and Emilio (re-watch the BB pilot and tell me it’s not conceivable that Saul was the lawyer who got Emilio out on bail after Hank and Gomez busted him).
There’s probably limited room for encounters with the Albuquerque DEA, including Hank and Steve, when he is meeting with clients involved in drug activities.
I draw the line at people from BB who he presumably never met before that show, i.e. Walt, Jesse, and Gus Fring. While Mike will be presumably working for Gus at some later time (unless he’s working undercover for him at the courthouse parking garage, Saul told Walt in Season 2 that he didn’t know who this “connection” was, only that he knew of “a guy (Mike?) who knows a guy (Gus).” Unless he was lying to Walt, he had never met Fring before.
But it seems to me that characters working within ABQ’s drug world at the time Walt entered the fray (presumably anyone Walt encounters in the first two seasons) would almost have to have dealt directly with Saul Goodman at some earlier point…
I loved that they bring in Tucco. I’d actually be thrilled if through Nacho and Tucco(and I agree that Nacho is probably going to be a bigger role than Tucco that they bring in the Cousins.
I’d forgotten just how much I enjoyed Tucco and his really explosive mood swings and loved the Cousins.
Tuco was referred to by name by Nacho while in Saul/Jimmy’s office at the end of the episode.
Saul/Jimmy was well known to Jesse in BB. So, it’s entirely plausible that he (S/J) had previously worked for people in that circle. Although, when Saul/Jimmy represents Badger in BB, they did not seem to have met before.
I expect Better Call Saul to be more of a “good guy caught up in a whirlwind of chaos” story rather than another tale of the creation of a drug empire.
We might see Fring at a fund raiser, for example, or maybe speaking to a city council meeting. But, no, I don’t think that we’ll see Saul/Jimmy put any pieces together. This is not that story.
It’s simple. Jimmy thinks that the law firm is screwing over his brother. Jimmy is trying to support himself and his brother and he really does need their checks to do it but he can’t take it. You can see how it hurts him to rip up the much needed lifeline. He feels that his brother is not going to ever get better and more importantly he believes the firm believes the same thing and that they are using his brothers name and money to keep their firm going and not giving him his due so he doesn’t have to live off his brother.
i do not believe he is right. That’s why the lawyer tells him that spiel about sometimes you have to listen to your heart not your head (which Jimmy actually is doing so he’s wrong about Jimmy as well but I’m sure he knows him as Slipping Jimmy so it makes sense that he believes Jimmy is just after the money). I believe he believes that Chuck is going to get better too and what does it hurt to keep that dream alive as long as Chuck wants it to? In fact he says as much . Its clear to me that he was remarkably patient when Jimmy burst into his meeting. It’s all about respect for Chuck.
It could well be that the firm is disrespecting Chuck and lying to Jimmy but so far the only proof of that is the opinion of jimmy, not exactly an impartial witness.
As I see it, Chuck is mentally ill but not mentally unsound. I don’t think he would be so easily manipulated like Jimmy thinks he is. When he is dropping the hammer on Jimmy about his name it doesn’t sound like he disagrees with what the firm is saying and it doesn’t look like he is just parroting a line. I think he believes it and wants to see his brother succeed on his own merits rather than trying to help him with help he doesn’t particularly want. I just think he wants his brother to grow up.
Watched the first two last night. Even with guardedly high expectations, I thought both episodes were really good. There was a definite feeling of that old BB magic, with the dark humor (a little more in the mix here), and the nice camera work, like the close-up of the city treasurer’s hand about to sign the retainer doc, with Saul/Jimmy’s anxious face in the background, until his wife places her hand over his to stop him.
I saw Vince Gilligan’s name as the co-writer on at least the first episode. I thought he wasn’t going to have any direct involvement- that a couple of the BB writers were going to do all the writing. Hope Vince reconsidered, because these first episodes felt like they had the Gilligan touch.
I wasn’t entirely clear on the whole HHM / Brother Chuck thing. When Saul/Jimmy burst into the HHM meeting, the angry way he spoke about the situation made it sound like the firm did something to Chuck to cause whatever problem he had (which hadn’t been revealed yet). So it turned out Chuck, who helped start the firm and is a 1/3 partner, developed mental issues (a severe form of OCD?). So his infirmity has nothing to do with the firm apparently. Saul/Jimmy’s anger seems to come from the fact that the firm is trying to pay Chuck his salary and keeping his job open while dragging their heels on a payout. But Chuck himself doesn’t want to cash out, partly because he thinks he’ll get better (which is probably delusional) and partly because he doesn’t want to bankrupt the firm and put a lot of people out of work (which seems like a very reasonable point). Unless there’s more to the story (which there probably is) I almost felt sorry for the Big Bad Law Firm and the position they were in. It seems like in the real world, they could work out a buy-out payment plan where the firm pays his salary with an option that it goes toward his buyout assuming he never gets better. But of course there has to be a dramatic moral/financial crisis, similar to Walt walking away from Grey Matter. There seems to be a lot of jealousy and resentment like with Walter and Grey Matter, as when the treasurer and his wife showed up to talk to the smarmy lawyer at HHM after he got done with Saul/Jimmy. Got to think he’s labored under the shadow of HHM for a long time.
Pretty sure that was a time-lapse composite of how he was knuckling down and taking on a lot of PD cases, rather than one day’s effort.
The scene in the desert, where Saul negotiates a reduced ‘sentence’ with a pyschopathic killer, was outstanding. Tuco is well-known to BB fans, but he works perfectly well as a new character for new viewers. I think it’s clever of Gilligan to have Tuco and Mike in the opening eps; it may be pandering a bit, but it grounds the old audience in familiar characters and helps keep them on board.