You wouldn’t want to leave Saul’s car there if you could help it. Even without plates, the cops will be able to identify and trace it by the Vehicle Identification Numbers. You can be sure they’ll want to do that for any vehicle found at the site of a massacre. (I’m sure Mike knows where the VINs are, but there wouldn’t be time to remove them.)
Pushing it into the arroyo was a desperation move when they had no choice. Mike may be hoping against hope that no one notices it from the road when the cops have such a juicy site to work on a few miles away. But if the cops do a thorough investigation they’ll find the car and trace it back to Saul. He’ll have some 'splainin to do, and not just to Kim and the Salamancas.
Why would the cops even find out about this; it’s literally thirty miles out in the desert. If anything, I feel this strengthens the argument that Jimmy should definitely not have brought his own vehicle to the pickup. Mike, upon noticing that the Sunfire had been hit (and oddly didn’t inspect it right away, just crossed his fingers and tried to start the engine) could have taken one of the jeeps left by the thieves and come back later if need be with a tow truck to retrieve Jimmy’s car. For that matter, when the Sunfire broke down, it might have been better to head back to the ambush site to take a jeep, rather than press forward with the burden of the two heavy duffel bags.
And for that matter, they could hide the money literally anywhere in the desert and Mike could just leave his gas-cap tracking device (the same one that let him follow Jimmy in the first place, we are clearly meant to presume) with it to come back the next day for it.
The episode has an odd mix of meticulous planning and slapdash action. This kind of thing was a little better done in an early episode of Breaking Bad where Walt and Jesse got stuck out in the desert, but that’s relatively understandable since neither of them is nearly as professional or experienced as Mike.
Yeah, they could have run an off roader on the rims or they could have salvaged water cans and nursed the leaking truck. Sometimes you can make it from one cattle trough to the next with a blown hose.
But they didn’t need to because Jimmies car was running.
I like your idea of the decoy. When Jimmies car boke down they could have faked a crash in the arroyo and used the wreck as a decoy.
Or maybe a good Samaritan shows up like some native American from Isleta or Acoma (with lots of character) and they buy his res car for a few thousand and give him Jimmies car in the bargain. The native chews some juniper tips, spits on the alternator and the car starts just as the bad guys ominously appear in the far distance. The native takes off as a decoy and they make the shot that destroys the last of the bad guys and then they flee the scene in the res car.
Jimmy’s car wasn’t running when Mike took the wheel. Mike saw the Sunfire had been hit at least twice in the hood and started the Sunfire’s engine with some trepidation, uncertain if it would work at all. He didn’t inspect the damage and didn’t even check the jeeps to see if any of them were in better shape.
I’m kind of left with the impression that somebody in the writer’s room asked “Well, if Jimmy’s car has been hit, why don’t they just take one of the jeeps of the dead guys?”, and the room paused for a moment, then someone piped up with “Because Mike shot out all their tires.”
Then somebody asked “Why would he do that?”
“So the thieves couldn’t get away.”
“Then why doesn’t he just shoot them? He’s already shooting them anyway, right?”
“Look, Vince, it’s 11 p.m. and I just wanna get the hell outta here.”
“Geez, Gordon, fine… whatever.”
It may be an dirt road in the desert, but it’s not on the moon, and someone uses it at least occasionally. The massacre scene may not be found right away, but it most certainly will be found eventually, and Jimmy’s car and it’s VIN will be sitting there. Mike is going to want to avoid that.
Sure, but Jimmy isn’t an experienced bagman, and clearly wasn’t thinking things through. He didn’t even have spare water in the car.
Coming back with a tow truck enormously increases the chance of discovery, either by the cops or confederates of the ambushers, compared to removing the car in the first place.
You forget the guy who escaped and came back looking for them. It was absolutely vital to get off the road as fast as they possibly could. And we don’t know how far they made it before the car conked out.
Not that bad an idea, but they still have the guy who escaped looking for them, who would be likely to bring reinforcements the next day. They won’t be able to drive in on the road, since they could be ambushed again. Considering the terrain, I’m not sure they could count on getting back to the stash even with an SUV or ATV while avoiding detection by the ambushers confederates.
He’d shot out the tires on the jeeps in the ambush( they specifically focused on him hitting tires )and I doubt it would have been worth the time to try and start swapping tires instead of driving out when he could.
Now I’m sure shooting out all those tires but missing the one vehicle the bandit got away in, was certainly a plot contrivance. But I’m okay with that :).
Surprisingly, given how closely I have followed this show, I did not clock the space blanket thing being a callback whatsoever until it was mentioned on the podcast–even though I did catch an arguably more subtle callback, to the gas cap tracker. I guess it’s because I never really enjoyed the Chuck aspect of the show?
I really loved Jane and the moment Walt caused her death was when I lost all sympathy for him. But even there, Jane was playing hardball in blackmailing Walt to get Jesse’s drug money. And what about Skyler, Mike, and Jesse? They tend to be treated as “good guys”, but they all voluntarily engaged in criminal conspiracy they knew would wreck people’s lives (and that’s putting it charitably).
What was unethical about that? Seemed to me like it was just good lawyering.
Do you watch The Good Wife or The Good Fight? I think it’s a nice illustration of how the principle of providing every client the most vigorous possible representation can wander into ethically queasy areas. But I still see those characters as generally “good guys”.
You acknowledge that it “isn’t completely certain”, but I would go furter and say it’s pretty ambiguous. I think if he knew Nacho was dead, he could still easily say “he’s the one” (who betrayed the cartel). I don’t think it’s that likely he’d be sure to say “he WAS the one”. Like Pantastic, I don’t even believe it’s a grammatical error to say “he’s the one” there, and I’m pretty picky about grammar.
But I agree that it indicates he doesn’t know Lalo to be dead.
That’s a good idea. Also a fair point about using the gas cap to find the place they hid the money later.
But isn’t Saul’s car an Esteem rather than a Sunfire?
They already spent a night out there. I think it was pretty strongly implied that there was a criminal gang of a certain size, and (other than the contact/mole inside the Salamancas), they didn’t have more confederates or people they could feel comfortable going to and saying “hey, so there’s these two guys with seven mil in cash out in the desert, and one of them already killed the rest of my gang, so how about we go after them?”
Crane, it is Jimmy, not Jimmie. I don’t recall if it has been spelled out in the show, as any paperwork would probably say “James McGill”. I expect we have seen it witten out canonically at some point though. However all official summaries and suchlike agree the name is Jimmy just like everybody else in this thread. Please stop saying Jimmie.
I’m not sure where you got that from; at least it wasn’t something that Mike could have known at the point he decided to head out in Jimmy’s car, or even when they started out on foot. That’s not apparent until the guy who fled comes back, and he doesn’t bring reinforcements right away. But I sure as shit wouldn’t count on him not being able to find some overnight if my life depended on it.
Hell, it looks like a graded maintained road, which would be a County road. Even in the bootheel of New Mexico a road like that would see a dozen or so vehicles per day with a few of those being Border Patrol. Remote roads that see less traffic would be unmaintained two track jeep trails.
Cellphone coverage in the bootheel at that time was poor, but was better the closer you were to I-10.
Edit: actually it wasn’t poor. It was non-existent.
What I said it that it’s a scam he pulled on blameless people. It is, however, blatantly and flagrantly unethical for a lawyer to engage in blackmail, which is what he did when he threatened to reveal the damage his client did to the house if Jesse’s parents refused to sale the house to him. Engaging in felonies is not ‘good lawyering’.
Haven’t watched either, but if the lawyers in those encourage and assist their clients to arrange hits, cover up murder, secure drug deals, launder money, kill innocent children, and all of the other stuff Saul does, they’re not “good guys”, they’re unethical and immoral scumbags who are incidentally guilty of dozens of crimes. In Saul’s first episode, he arranges for a client to give false testimony (at the behest of someone who’s not a client), then arranges for someone else to give further false testimony and go to prison while falsely confessing to several other crimes. That’s not ‘ethically quesy’, that’s ‘outright ethical violations and criminal acts’.
Sure, Saul crosses more bright-line boundaries, but those shows’ lawyers find every trick in the book to keep their big, well-paying drug kingpin client happy and out of prison even though they know he is guilty as sin. The prosecutor characters on the shows regularly express their disgust with the defense lawyers, but those defense lawyers are still presented in personal terms as generally sympathetic (if ruthless) characters. There was also a storyline involving highly suspicious “found” voting machines where, quite amusingly, they flipped their arguments in court on a dime when they discovered the ballots had the opposite effect on the candidate they were representing than they had initially assumed. I guess this is why many people hate lawyers, but I love the idea that they just get so creative to come up with any angle to shoot and let the other side do their best to do the same*, and then let the judge act as the arbiter.
*Although I do believe that prosecutors have more of an ethical responsibility not to do absolutely anything to win a conviction than defense attorneys have to refrain from doing whatever it takes to get an acquittal.
On the Post-show Recaps podcast about this episode, they go on and on about theories of either Gus or Nacho or even Lalo himself being behind the attempt to hijack the $7 million. They then say that if it’s not one of those three, it must be someone else we have met in the Breaking Bad universe. They don’t even consider the possibility, which I took as a given, that it is just some other random (and now defunct) gang of criminals that we have not met and will not learn anything more about.
It’s actually depressing to me if people think that everyone has to be either connected to Breaking Bad or else we need to learn all about them as some group of new characters who have now been introduced. I hope the show and viewers can learn something from David Chase in terms of how sometimes you don’t find out what happens to people, or where they came from for that matter, and that’s OK.
It doesn’t make any sense for it to be Gus or Lalo or Nacho. If it turns out to be any of those, especially the first two, that will be a very sad shark jumping moment for the show. And for it to be some other criminals we have met at some point (like the Nazis) is just too cute and too coincidental. But there has already been a little bit too much of the cute and coincidental stuff in this show for my taste (one of my few criticisms of it), so who knows. I personally would prefer the show be mainly a story about Saul and Kim (less about Mike and Gus) that pretty much stands on its own, as long as it doesn’t explicitly contradict anything that happened on Breaking Bad—rather than trying to fill in every midichlorian detail behind what we already saw on BB, from how the superlab was built to how Krazy Eight got his nickname. YMMV
Those are TV shows. As a defense attorney I have the duty to zealously represent my clients’ interests within the bounds of the law and the rules of ethics. I cannot murder or intimidate witnesses nor can I suborn perjury or participate in criminal conspiracies. If you believe that is “good lawyering” then maybe, respectfully, get a little more of your information from real life instead of fictional television shows.
About Saul’s car…I think at some point he was going to have to abandon it. I say that because it had bullet holes and he wouldn’t want Kim to see them. Couldn’t he later just report it to the police as a stolen vehicle? When the police eventually find it, the police will conclude it was stolen to commit a crime. Now I’ll grant you, Suzuki Esteems are not very gangsta so maybe the thieves were dumb kids and he’d left his keys in it so it was easy pickings or something.
As far as Super Mike taking out all those guys: is he lugging enough firepower to validate that? I would have bought it better if yes, he had a couple guys helping but both of them got killed so he’s the only one walking out of there. I guess he could have left some equipment behind, but fingerprints and all that…?
For the spectacular SUV crash, I’m going with Mike shot out the tire, the driver panicked and jerked the wheel suddenly, overcorrecting.
Seemed to me like it was just good lawyering.
They then say that if it’s not one of those three, it must be someone else we have met in the Breaking Bad universe. They don’t even consider the possibility, which I took as a given, that it is just some other random (and now defunct) gang of criminals that we have not met and will not learn anything more about.