No, Kim recognized the photo from Kevin’s office as being essentially identical to the Mesa Verde logo and guessed( accurately, as it turned out )that Kevin’s dad had never bothered to get a release to use it for commercial purposes. Because many/most laymen, especially in the 1970’s, didn’t really pay attention to copyright law. So she sent Jimmy to start digging and nailed them on that oversight.
Which Kevin didn’t even realize was an oversight. Because his dad bought the print, right? And obviously if you bought it you can use it for whatever you want. But you can’t :).
Disagree completely. Jimmy pulled that scam to win, and while it’s true that he didn’t want to hurt Kim, her wellbeing was not the motive. He got started on sticking it to Schweikart and Kevin, and wanted to get to an actual win, not just a week or two of delays. The fact that it helps Kim was a bonus, but it was ‘in her best interest’ the same way that getting an immediate settlement on Sandpiper was ‘in their best interest’ for his elderly clients - it’s not really clear cut, and the main person who’s best interest it was has a name that rhymes with food pan.
Notably, this fixes the immediate problem for Kim, that Rich and maybe the MV people will catch on that she’s in it, but creates a long-term problem. Namely, what happens to her in the long run if she’s still living with this utter sleazeball lawyer who’s willing to run ultra-skeevy commercials tearing apart the bank that Kim is representing. Representing a guy who wants to keep his house is pretty normal lawyer behavior, but full-bore Saul Goodman is a bit beyond that.
Yeah, completely this. Jimmy is in his own way an artist. Once he has a scam underway, with all the loving details “We can’t change the number of spots, we can’t change the number of actors, we gotta keep all the locations” then he needs to see it come to completion. It’s what he lives for. That, and the joy of winning. Putting one over the marks.
(It’s not a co-incidence that he called the photographer immediately after watching Howard get smeared by his hooker “prank”. He’d tasted the thrill of a small victory, and it made him hungry for the big win.)
Kim was neither here nor there. As she said, rather than being his partner she became just one more mark to manipulate. She got a hint of Jimmy’s true nature after his disbarment hearing, when she completely bought what he was selling and was shocked to discover it was all an act. But she wasn’t the target at that point. Now she knows that Jimmy will happily lie to her if that’s what he needs to do to run his next scam. Lie, or go back on his word. Did he ever actually mean to abandon the scam like he told her he would? Not deep down. He said so at the time, but he never truly let go of the idea.
I was wrong upthread about Kim’s trajectory. She was happy to go a lot deeper and it was only really the plausible fear of getting caught that gave her second thoughts. Even now, when she can clearly see that she can’t really have a future with Jimmy, she’s still seeing getting deeper as being an option.
I can’t decide now if her future lies in coming to her senses or crashing and burning.
Last episode and this episode have really shown the full Saul Goodman coming out - him telling the 50% off guys to fleece grandma and the green screened commercials that he doesn’t even plan to air are things that I don’t see the early season Jimmy McGill doing, but are just part of the toolkit for the Saul Goodman we see in BB. He is past the point of cutting corners and pulling tricks to get what he wants, he’s clearly reveling in turning the sleaze dial up to eleven and embracing the ‘monkey with a machine gun’ persona.
No idea what Kim’s marriage proposal means - she’s always been hard to read, and I’ve really got to see the next episode to really grasp what her plan is. I’m guessing that it means she’s going to embrace Saul Goodman’s scams even more, and maybe that she’ll work with him behind the scenes (Ice Station Zebra associates) but keep up a good public face, but it’s hard to tell. I don’t think she’s going to be successful at what she wants though.
In one episode Mike showed why Gus was working so hard and spending so much effort to recruit him - Gus couldn’t really have come up with a way to strike at Lalo without making the cartel suspicious. Mike with his LEO background was able to push things to get Lalo arrested in a way that looks completely natural and definitely doesn’t point back to Gus. I think that once Lalo is fully out of the picture Mike is going to work something out to extract Nacho and his father from his current situation, threatening innocents is something Mike doesn’t do and I think he will pass that tendency on to Gus. I do think the ‘you’re the Michael they’re talking about?’ bit doesn’t ring true - I think that Hector forgetting the old bald man named Michael who negotiated with giant brass balls when Lalo is looking for an old bald Gringo named Michael and especially Nacho not connecting the old bald gringo ‘Michael’ guy he tried to hire as an assassin with Gus’s mysterious enforcer is a bit much.
I also like that the Salamanca’s tendency for extreme violence has significant consequences for them throughout the series. Hector threatening Mike way back with the Tuco situation got Mike to testify that the gun was his, but led to the end of Hector’s smuggling operation at Mike’s hands and to Mike working for Gus. Hector threatening Nacho’s father led to Hector being paralyzed and Nacho as a mole. The cousins destroying the other dealer’s compound led to them being out of the picture until Breaking Bad and expanded Gus’s operations. And now Lalo’s ramming the ‘blocking’ car and murdering the guy at the wire service place has landed him in jail without Gus having to appear to do anything.
Howard had Chuck’s approval (until the very bitter end), has healthily dealt with and moved past Chuck’s death and any guilt for it, and is lawyer who is well-respected by the legal community and society as a whole. Jimmy thinks he’ll never have any of that, so he’s lashing out with full-on Saul Goodman tactics to try to bring Howard down a notch, especially since he probably sees Howard’s job offer as a chance to turn his back on ‘full Saul’ but rationalizes to himself that it’s not genuine. This has as much point as the time “HE DEFECATED THROUGH A SUN ROOF” (to quote Chuck’s tone) - there isn’t a master plan, he’s just giving in to a desire for revenge.
I didn’t see anything to indicate that he was screwing them over, I assume he just hired from the same pool TV and movies draw on for extras, lots of aspiring actors and people who just want to be on TV will work really cheap.
I mentioned upthread how much I loved the contradictory directorial advice. On the Insider podcast, the showrunner was ruefully chuckling over how it seemed to be parodying all his moves when he directs episodes, and the actor who plays Kim said she has had a few directors just like that.
On a per capita basis, we lost more than three times as many in the Civil War, but people did “give a fig” about the election of 1864.
I actually had to think about this for a while. You must pronounce “food” or “Good” differently than I do.
Ziegler got his wife to wire him some money, (I think?). Mike tricked Fred, the wire guy, into giving him some info so that he could track Ziegler. Lalo tracked Mike, and when Fred wouldn’t show him the video he broke in and killed Fred.
Right! I’d forgotten that Lalo actually was the culprit - I thought maybe Gus was just going to try to put him away for it anyway.
I … guess? It still doesn’t seem right to me for either Jimmy or Saul. Too mean for Jimmy, and not ruthlessly self-interested enough for Saul. Jimmy pulls scams because they’re fun (and sometimes because they’ll make him money) - Saul pulls scams purely for the bottom line. I don’t think Saul would ever put in that amount of effort to hurt someone he hated, unless it would make him money. Jimmy kind of might, because he’s a real human with actual emotions that can be hurt, but this seems too much.
I still think there’s an ‘angle’ somewhere that we’ll find out about some weeks down the track
I understand what you’re saying, and I definitely wouldn’t have predicted Jimmy/Saul would go this far. But I doubt there’s a hidden angle to it. I just think he’s not having any of Howard’s turning over a new leaf, and he resents him for more or less the reasons **Pantastic **described.
Some of the stuff we’ve seen or heard Jimmy do that is outright mean, isn’t fun, and doesn’t make money: Shit in a guy’s sun roof. Attempt to beat up an elderly parking attendant for following procedure. Break into his brother’s house, break into his desk, and destroy a tape. Fake a breakdown to let the Malpractice company know about Chuck’s issues and push them to raise HHM’s insurance. And we’ve seen Jimmy lose his temper at people a number of times (notably at the cop just before Huell arrives with the fateful sandwiches), so he clearly has a lot of background anger that he controls when he can’t express it.
I simply don’t believe your claim that causing mild property damage (like shitting through a sun roof or breaking into a house and destroying a tape) or even injury (like beating up an elderly parking attendant if it hadn’t been Mike) is beyond Jimmy. Nor do I buy that causing major reputation damage is beyond him, since we saw it with the address switch on Chuck (which did have the motive of getting Kim a client) and with the ‘sudden breakdown’ at the Malpractice institute people (which he gained nothing but revenge from).
I also don’t buy the claim that Saul pulls scams purely for the bottom line - it’s quite clear that, while he loves making money, Saul also loves winning and sticking it to what he thinks of as the stuck up rich people and legal community that loved Chuck and would never accept him. I just don’t buy that he put as much effort into trashing Kevin and Mesa Verde as he did simply for whatever contingency fee he’d get from the photographer and Ackerman (if he even has one), he clearly wanted the victory.
I don’t rule out that he has some angle on the Howard stuff, but it’s not at all inconsistent with what we’ve been shown of his character for him to just be giving in to what he wants to do and tormenting Howard.
In addition to the above, remember that in Season 1 Jimmy was devoting quite a bit of time to pissing Howard off. Doing ads in his style, playing fast and loose with trademarks and generally trying quite hard to be a pain in the arse.
It turned out this was Jimmy “looking out” for Chuck. He felt that HHM - specifically Howard -were treating Chuck unfairly or trying to maneouvre him out and this was his way of putting pressure on them. But a lot of it was petty and none of it really achieved his ostensible goal - he was just pissed off and putting hurt on people he thought had done him/his wrong. The only thing you could say about it is that it shows he cared about people who weren’t Jimmy, but that ship has long since sailed.
(Slight quibble with Pantastic above - breaking in for the tape wasn’t a purely malicious act, a la shitting through a sun roof, it was done with the purpose of furthering Jimmy’s self-interest by recovering incriminating evidence. I would put this as more akin to a profitable scam in that there’s a real pay off other than simply the harm caused to others.)
No, it was a straight up angry act with no payoff whatsoever. There is no way that Chuck, upon going through the effort to record Jimmy confessing to modifying the documents, would just leave the tape sitting in his desk for Jimmy to destroy. And Jimmy knows Chuck well, there’s no way he’d expect his brother to be that dumb with the fruits of a plot that he worked so hard on. Further, the fact that he had to commit breaking and entering in front of witnesses to get to the tape underscores that there was no self-interested plan at work - what he did to get to the tape was a significantly worse crime than the questionable evidence on the tape and is what actually got him temporarily disbarred. And finally, his destruction of the tape didn’t even render it useless as evidence - destroying a cassette case and crinkling the tape a bit doesn’t actually make it unrecoverable, as people who lived through the 80s can attest (though the show might have treated that as complete destruction, like they do with snapping cell phones).
It’s clear that Jimmy was acting on emotion (anger at his brother) and not a calculated plot to recover incriminating evidence. If it he was thinking clearly about it and embarking on a self-interested plot, he would A. have realized that Chuck would put the original somewhere safe and/or have HHM make a copy as soon as it was done, B. Go about getting the tape in a way that didn’t involve an easily provable worse crime than the tape is evidence of and probably C. rendered the tape unrecoverable instead of just doing enough damage that someone would have to spend an afternoon putting it into a new case.
OK, just got round to watching S05 E06, and I have to say: I think it’s the worst BCS episode I’ve seen. It really had the feel of an episode rushing to be somewhere for the end of season 5.
It pains me to say Worse Episode Ever because it’s my favorite TV show right now, but it is what it is.
I take the points above about the cinematography being good, and some of the scenes like Kim’s flashback were great, but on the dislike pile I have:
Saul is in full jerk mode, against Howard and against Kim+Mesa, in a way that I didn’t buy at all. The joy of the show for me has always been that you can understand all of the characters’ motivations and logic, even ones that appear spiteful on the surface (looking at you, Chuck). I don’t “get” jerkass Jimmy, and I don’t think he would risk his relationship with Kim in this way.
Lalo was a fascinating character and I was looking forward to seeing how his chess game with Gus would be resolved. Instead, we just got exposition, followed by calling the police on him.
Yeah, BCS is not the kind of show that is going to set up a rooftop flamethrower-vs-rocket-launcher shootout between the two bosses. But still, what they did was unimaginative. Using the police is fine, I just expect BCS to do it smarter than this.
And then the mother of subverting expectations: “…we can get married” :rolleyes:
Come on now.
All through the series Kim’s got increasingly impatient with Saul’s BS (in the professional setting, yes, I know she enjoys scamming people off the clock), and seems painfully aware of what it’s doing to her career. At the point where she should be catatonic with rage, and the audience is clearly expecting her to walk out on Jimmy, because that’s what’s been set up…Aha! Marriage! You didn’t see that coming!
No, I didn’t see that coming, because it’s stupid.
Bonus annoyance: IRL someone like Howard in the restaurant scene would just say “Leave me alone or I’m calling the cops”. But here, he can’t say that because it would instantly fix everything: the girls would have had to leave, and Davis would probably guess the whole thing was a prank by somebody (because if Howard really knew the girls how could he risk calling the cops?).
I really had to struggle to suspend disbelief that he wouldn’t just say that.
Well, we don’t know that he didn’t threaten to call the cops. He tried to be polite at first, because Howard has impeccable manners. The scene cuts away as the girls were getting louder and more shrill. Presumably someone, whether Howard, his lunch companion or the maitre d’, would call for police or security and have them evicted. But we didn’t see the conclusion of the encounter.
Yes Howard is a polite guy. But there’s nowhere for that interaction to go; after one or two times saying “I don’t know you”, and them ignoring you, you assume they’re just nuts and you call security or threaten to call the cops. Instead of being a solid set up, the whole prank relies on Howard pratfalling around to work.
It felt like a TV thing, not a real thing.
I thought about maybe a better set up: what if you get Howard to somehow meet one of them innocuously at first? Say she’s dressed in regular clothes and asks for directions or whatever. Then, in the restaurant, it works better because he recognizes at least one of them but struggles to clarify to Davis he doesn’t really know her, and maybe some of what she’s saying alludes to real events…it’s much more awkward, and there’s reason for the scene to play out longer.
How you do that on TV when the setup scene would seem a boring non sequitur, I don’t know. But if anyone can figure that part out, it’s G&G.
