You’re forgetting that Jimmy’s story requires the copy guy hanging tough. You think that’s likely when presented with a recording of Jimmy admitting to bribing him?
The kid is kind of useless as a witness now. The tape recording is the damning evidence. I don’t see this going to court though, it’s leverage for Chuck.
What a fantastic episode. I think this show just barely edged past Fargo, The Americans and Game of Thrones to be the actual best show currently on TV.
The sad thing about Chuck is that if he took a moment off and stepped back he would see how much Jimmy loves him, how good care Jimmy is taking of him. Instead he’s so fixated on the one time when Jimmy ratfucked him that he’ll likely end up destroying both of them. Or at least hastening the transformation of Jimmy into Saul Goodman.
The scene with Mike and the sniper rifle was fantastic, although it kind of doesn’t make sense, in that whoever blew the horn and distracted him (we assume someone Fring-related) would have been way too late had it not been for Nacho randomly standing in the wrong place and blocking Mike’s shot. Unless that was not actually an accident. But that sure seemed like an accident.
The Chuck and Jimmy relationship is so much the “Prodigal Son” story.
What really sets Gilligan’s work with this and BB so many of the main characters are not straight good or straight bad characters. Everyone are shades of grey.
I think this is going to utterly destroy the value of the McGill name in legal circles, leading to Jimmy switching to Saul Goodman and HHM to get rid of the M. We know it can’t permanently hurt Jimmy since he’s still practicing law in BB, and a felony conviction or major ethics violation would disbar him.
I think Jimmy on his own wouldn’t be able to follow through with Chuck, but Kim is clearly all-in at this point and will push him to tie up all the loose ends. If Chuck manages to bring Jimmy down, it will also torpedo her career, she’ll lose MV and be forever tainted by her association with Jimmy’s forgery. OTOH, if Chuck goes down, she gets to keep the MV cash cow and her reputation. I think we’re going to see Kim fully break bad and push Jimmy into destroying his brother to protect the two of them.
To this and the other comments about copy guy, I think the copy guy is likely to stick to his original story to the cops and not admit to any wrong doing, especially when the Angry Baked Potato Man who was already threatening him and had a breakdown in front of him starts making more threats. Jimmy’s story to the copy guy, that his crazy brother is making accusations against him and Jimmy just wants to quiet it down, looks even more sensible, it seems like ‘the right thing’ and ‘the safe thing’ for him to do. Admitting to taking a bribe probably means losing his job, and Chuck might well have him convinced he committed a crime, and deleting the tape definitely violates store procedure and counts as tampering with evidence (a pretty serious crime) but if he just shuts up there’s no way to pin that on him.
And as we talked about last week, if copy guy does decide to admit to taking a bribe, in addition to almost certainly losing his job, it still fits the narrative that Jimmy was trying to calm his crazy paranoid brother down. Jimmy can just say he was originally in the copy place because he was stressed and couldn’t sleep so did work for his new practice, and only bribed the guy to try to stop Angry Baked Potato Man Chuck from continuing his paranoid rampage. Ernesto’s testimony, the existing tape of Chuck’s ranting breakdown, and the rest of the pattern will help back that.
As Chuck himself said, and multiple witnesses will attest to, no one ever accused Jimmy of being lazy. Using his anger over Chuck’s unjust campaign against him to try to help snap Chuck out of his breakdown is pretty believable and fits with the narrative that Chuck is a baked potato coming up with paranoid theories. And remember, Jimmy doesn’t have to 100% prove anything about this, he just has to come up with reasonable doubt (criminal) or preponderance of the evidence (civil) to win against Chuck, and Chuck has made himself a horribly unreliable witness.
Yeah, I liked the Mike scenes as neat stuff to watch, but I feel like the Mike story flopped in this episode. Mike’s grudge against Hector seems too intense and out of the blue - much like Walt with Gus, he’s already out of Hector’s sights and has made a tidy profit, but he just keeps escalating for little real reason. Like you said, the Fring horn guy would have failed if not for the coincidence. (And I don’t think Nacho’s postion can be deliberate, how would someone even pass the information on to Nacho or convince him to put his head in line with a sniper?)
I did like that the actor either had some firearms experience or got some training for that scene. I know enough about guns that his adjusting the gun and moving his finger on and off the trigger as he prepared to take the shot looked really convincing, and one thing that movies and TV usually get badly wrong is gun handling. I also liked that Mike had a pistol with him in addition to the rifle and didn’t go back to the car trying to use the rifle at close quarters.
I think Mike sees Hector as a continuing possible threat to his granddaughter and he can’t tolerate that. He probably even realizes that Hector likely won’t bother him or his family anymore if he just walks away from all of it, but he can’t take that chance. Keep in mind also that there is a possibility that Hector will somehow discover who robbed him.
But Hector is not a lone wolf. If he is killed, he has lots of family members who will make it their business to avenge his death.
So I agree with the point of view that the ‘Mike seeks to kill Hector’ plotline is weak; as established, the character would know that his beloved granddaughter would be made less safe, not more safe, if he killed Hector.
I also agree with Pantastic that Chuck won’t succeed in bringing down Jimmy–the copy-shop clerk has strong incentives to hold to Jimmy’s storyline, Chuck is simply too compromised to be credible, and the tape can be explained away.
It is possible, however, that if Chuck does make the all-out effort to destroy Jimmy (put him in prison or at the least, get him disbarred), that Jimmy will be so dismayed and heartsick that he will voluntarily become Saul, in an attempt to put it all behind him. This story is headed for a tragic conclusion, with Chuck either dead or committed to a mental hospital. When it happens, Jimmy will do his best to start a new life for himself.
… I’m going to miss this show so much. It wouldn’t be what it is if not for the time and care that Gilligan, Gould, and their team put into it, so by the nature of things we won’t have anything new from them for quite a while—dammit.
Those family members wouldn’t know who killed Hector. I’m sure that he has plenty of enemies and the old guy who Tuco beat up is probably the last person they’d suspect.
I disagree. While Jimmy was being truthful, his confession was condescending enough (“How you got every last detail correct is a-ma-zing!”) to raise a doubt of its sincerity. Very plausible that he was simply telling his brother what he wanted to hear, and laying it on pretty thick in the process.
It may be weak, but frankly I just think Mike is a little more emotionally driven than some people give him credit for. Yes, he’s basically smart about things but I don’t think it’s completely out there that he believes that if a guy threatens to kill your grand daughter, that guy gets put down like a dog.
In BB it seemed like one of his main motivations was his granddaughter.
BB Spoiler:Most of his illicit money was in an account in her name.
If you haven’t been seeing stuff from a god eye view on a TV show, which is really more plausible? That a guy who has to surround himself with foil to even go outside was brilliant enough to figure out his con-man brother’s every move and trick him into confessing, and that his con-man brother was exactly dishonest enough to commit a felony forging legal documents to make his brother feel bad but not dishonest enough to have his brother committed at the doctor’s advice and take his money. Or that a caring brother who’s been breaking his back trying to help his brother maintain independence in spite of crippling mental illness decided to tell his brother exactly what he wanted to hear to try to get him back on his feet, in spite of how terribly his brother’s paranoia has treated him.
Yeah, Chuck can bring in evidence of Jimmy’s past to impeach his testimony, but Jimmy can say that he has reformed since then, and point to his becoming a lawyer and doing legitimate work as proof. Meanwhile Jimmy can just ask Chuck about the coat he’s wearing in the courtroom to make Baked Potato Man look like a raving lunatic. And he can point to his old history as evidence that he’s good at saying what people want to hear, “I tried to con my brother back into being healthy.”
Yeah, I don’t think Chuck would be taken seriously. At the very least there’d be plenty of reasonable doubt.
Any half-decent lawyer type could make copy-shop-guy fold like a twig with that tape though.
I missed the first 5 minutes. Can someone briefly recap what the mother’s death thing is about?
TIA
Also, it wouldn’t surprise me if the first scene of the next episode is Jimmy getting to his car, turning right back around, going back into the house and over to the coffee table and saying “I’ll take that” as he grabs the tape recorder. I can easily see him figuring it out in a moment that he just got conned. Takes one to know one and all that.
Nah. Have to disagree. There’s three witnesses - photocopier guy and Ernesto (who will both crack under cop questioning) and Kim (who won’t lie under oath in court) plus a confession. And despite Chuck’s tin foil fetish, he’s not officially crazy and still practices law as the senior partner in a respected law firm.
Having said that - the fact that Jimmy is still a lawyer in Breaking Bad means that whatever happens he doesn’t get struck off. So either Chuck doesn’t pursue it, or he dies before he gets a chance or he loses the case (or something else happens).
It was actually a little before credits recap of a flashback that happened last episode:
They were both at the hospital as Mom lay dying. Jimmy goes out to get food. While he’s gone, Mom partially wakes up and calls out “Jimmy!” a couple times even after Chuck says “No, it’s me”. Then she dies. When Jimmy makes it back, he asks if she woke up and said anything and Chuck says no she didn’t.
Even if photocopier guy decides he wants to lose his job and risk evidence tampering charges, it’s not illegal to bribe a photocopier guy to try to get your brother to stop his paranoid delusions, which is what Jimmy will say he did. If Chuck wins, copier guy committed a felony, if Jimmy wins he didn’t do anything wrong, so he’s got a strong motive to stick to the story - and even if he doesn’t the story fits Jimmy’s version of events. And that’s your only witness for Chuck because:
Kim doesn’t need to lie about anything in court, I’m not sure what you think she’s a witness to that hurts Jimmy - she saw Chuck delivering a tinfoil-wrapped paranoid accusation with no basis in fact, she saw all of the stuff Jimmy did for Chuck, she personally experienced Chuck’s craziness, and she can testify that Chuck was secretly scheming to sabotage Jimmy’s law career at HHM. Same thing with Ernesto - if he disavows the phone call to Jimmy, Jimmy can just say he was keeping an eye on Chuck and was worried Chuck would freak out at the copy place. Other than that, all Ernesto can testify to is Chuck’s crazy behavior and increasing hostility to Jimmy.
I don’t know what you mean by officially crazy or why you think it’s relevant. In court, if you show that your opponent is acting mentally unsound to impeach the reliability of what they say, you don’t need any kind of formal diagnosis or court order. And Chuck is actually ‘officially crazy’, they got a temporary judicial order saying that he was incompetent to handle his own medical affairs. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Chuck no longer practices law at HHM when next season rolls around - he quit the firm, and Howard may well decide that he has become a liability and take his quitting as fact instead of letting him back out. Fake-quitting to try to trap Jimmy into an admission may be just a bit too much for respectable Howard. And non-respectable Howard may be only too happy to see Chuck committed and his shares of the firm left where they are by his guardian Jimmy.
She hinted that Jimmy might want to cover any tracks he might have left - and then Jimmy immediately upped and left the house in the middle of the night and was gone for quite some time.