Better Call Saul season 5 (spoilers)

If you wait a week to report your car stolen, the police are going to be suspicious as to why you waited a week. If Saul reports it the next day, sunburned to hell and dehydrated, they will also get suspicious.

Maybe he was out of town (in Kim’s car) when it was stolen, only just came back to discover…? Or maybe he was carjacked, left to cross the desert on foot. Or it broke down and he went for help but came back and it was gone.

Kim can’t see the bullet holes, though. I also think that the car will be found at some point, so with the VIN there’s going to be some explaining to do. But I guess they could send a tow truck and remove the evidence.

Calavera,

OK - thanks

Dag Otto,

Los Lunas is not in the boot heel.

Out of town where? Was it business or pleasure? You both went? Well, Kim was at her job that day, in fact the prison records show that she visited your client. What car did she drive that day?

Oh, only you went? Was it planned? What hotel did you stay at? Well, sir, they have no record of you staying there. Do you have bank receipts to verify that?


You were carjacked? By whom? What did they look like? Did they say anything? Do you have any enemies? Sir, why do you think carjackers would steal your shitty 1992 Ford Esteem? So, it just so happens that you represent a Mexican guy on trial for murder and your car is carjacked to the desert and he posts his all cash bail the next day? For seven million, they couldn’t buy their own car, they need to jack yours?

In short, lying to the police is a very, very bad idea.

I agree with the above.

I didn’t care for this episode all that much. I kept expecting Jimmy to ask Mike “Who the fuck *were *those guys?” and other questions to help clue himself (and the viewers) in. That’s just human nature. But, no, we get 30 minutes of two men walking silently through the desert. This was a 20-minute episode padded out to an hour and 15 minutes.

I’ll forgive it, this time. I love the show overall, and have not minded the …deliberate… pacing over a season. But too many more individual shows like this will not keep the show on my good side.

And there’s another thing that’s been bugging me–I don’t like the “look” of the show. When I was a kid at home during the day, I, like any other kid, would flip through channels looking for something to watch. I always knew *immediately *when a show was a soap opera because it “looked funny.” Later I learned that soaps were shot on tape, rather than film, and it gave them a distinctively weird look.

BCS has that look. I just now put my finger on how off-putting it is, as I just finished bingeing through my newly arrived DVD set of Breaking Bad (my second time through the series). Those shows looked fantastic! The filming, the cinematography, everything. But BCS has that funny “soap opera” look that is miles apart from the look of BB. Not a fan.

I had missed divemasters point about “Who the fuck were those guys?”. Obviously Jimmy would have posed the question to the omniscient Super Mike. What else was there to talk about?

With only 3 episodes to go I’m surprised they wasted one on two guys in the desert. I hope we will see some resolution to Gene’s situation.

My favorite BB episode is the train robbery. With some effort I believe ‘Bagman’ could have been as good. Least favorite was ‘Fly’.

I’m guessing we are going to get 2 more Gene scenes, one at the start of season 6 and one to end the series, with that one being more extended than the others.

It’s a crappy car Jimmy was planning to replace so he sold it to some guy for a few hundred bucks, never saw him before, haven’t seen him since, is what he can tell the cops.

Saul crosses the bright line boundary into being radically unethical and immoral when he goes “outside the book” and falsifies evidence, assists in murders, advises clients to commit murder, engages in money laundering, engages in witness tampering, encourages his clients to manufacture methamphetamine, and a host of other stuff. There’s a huge difference between defending someone ‘guilty as sin’ and encouraging and assisting someone to be guilty of many more and worse sins than the initial one, and to be guilty of major sins (as in “felonies and major ethical violations”) yourself.

It’s really troubling that some people apparently can’t distinguish ‘force the prosecutor to prove their case and get illegally obtained evidence thrown out’ from ‘fabricate evidence, assist and encourage client to commit crimes, engage in multiple conspiracies to commit murder, engage in large scale money laundering,’ and all of the other stuff Saul does in the show.

Yeah, if New Mexico is like any of the states I’ve ever sold a car in, you get the cash, then sign a bill of sale and title paper when you sell a car. It’s up to the person to actually file the paperwork with the DMV and it’s not uncommon for them to take days or weeks to do so in a completely legitimate sale. And Saul can certainly produce a hand-made bill of sale on demand, he’s done much more difficult document forgery than ‘print a doc, sign it, put a hard-to-read fake signature on it’.

Are you in the right thread? I mean, this show is explicitly about a lawyer who engages in large scale lying to the police, courts, and DEA, and has already shown him telling multiple lies to the police on multiple occasions.

On review of the cold open, I’m a little curious about how this gang operates. Judging from the garbage can full of license plates from numerous U.S. states, it looks like they steal expensive/classic cars from American tourists and further judging from the shattered windshield and bloodstained seats of the Cadillac, sometimes the tourists’ strong objections are overruled.

I assume this will become Saul’s as a thank you, as though the $100K wasn’t enough?

He very well might have, it’s just that the information hasn’t been shared with us (yet). And Mike probably doesn’t know himself. If he knew about the existence of any such gang, he would have brought backup.

While “Dead Freight” is a great episode, like a lot of Breaking Bad it’s not exactly plausible. First, it requires Lydia to know offhand the existence and size of the dead zone where an alarm wouldn’t be sent in order to convince Walt and Mike not to off her. BUT she only gets the information of the position of the car in the train between midnight and 2 AM, and says they have a six hour window to set things up. (They would have needed to start work in the dark to have enough time to dig the hole and install the tanks before the train got there. However, it appears to be just after dawn when they arrive.) Although a train goes through once a week, they haven’t scouted the area in advance, but have brought out an excavator, a tank truck, and two large tanks in expectation that they’ll be able to plan the details of and execute the robbery in just a few hours. By a fantastic coincidence, it turns out there is a bridge at EXACTLY the right distance from the road so methylamine car will be positioned over it, enabling them to conceal themselves while draining the tanker. Also, the engineer manages to stop the train only a 10 feet from the stalled truck; if he had stopped a second sooner the tanker wouldn’t have been in the right position.

There were any number of ways in which they could have made it more plausible, such as there being multiple methylamine cars, or even having them scout the route to find exactly the right place in advance. But that would have been less tense and exciting. Like most “heist” shows, it’s a lot of fun but requires a huge suspension of disbelief. Everything has to go exactly as planned for it to work. Mike being able to take out bunch of ambushers single-handed pales in comparison.

Yeah, a concealed sniper taking out multiple people from a nest up on high ground doesn’t strike me as particularly implausible at all. What are those guys supposed to be able to do against a guy with a scope?

I’m hoping it’s a whole episode or a couple episodes. Which is funny because when the series started I predicted, and hoped, that we would never see Gene again!

Lol, I love the way you put that.

It’s not the same Caddy, although that would be a nice touch.

For all the talk about the desert vistas, I actually thought that overhead shot of the car interior was the most beautiful bit of cinematography in the episode.

More questions arise about how that pattern of bloodstains could be produced, with an such an even spread of blood on the seats. From the pattern of bullet holes in the windshield, it appears the occupants were killed with shots to the head, but I don’t know how a headshot could produce bloodstains on the back of the seat and all across the seat itself. There don’t seem to be any bullet holes in the seats themselves.

They also seem to have a severe inventory problem. I count at least 15 very valuable cars that they haven’t been able to unload yet.

The staining of the seats looks odder still. If possession of the car was taken after the original driver and passenger were “bought out”, as it were, you’re expect the stains on the seat to be smeared when the corpses were pulled out and more so for the driver’s seat if a member of the gang moved in to drive the car to the warehouse, or at least away from the scene of the crim… er, sale.

Alternate theory - the acquisition of the car was in fact perfectly legal and non-violent. The former owner was happy to let it go for a fair price after he discovered he’d inadvertently parked it beside a strawberry jam factory and some of the stock had fallen from a window, the jars smashing the windshield and liberally splashing the interior with fructose-fortified fragaria.

I do like how completely petrified one of the cleaners looks when the cousins walk in.

No, of course not. But Antelope Wells where the transfer took place is in the boot heel. If the cousins brought the cash all the way to Los Lunas, the hand off of the money could have taken place in the Allsup’s parking lot.

Any thoughts on how the bail out of Lalo is going to pan out, presumably in the next episode?

A seven million dollar bail casually appearing is going to blow a hole a mile wide in Lalo’s “just an ordinary Joe” alter-ego. Presumably the plan to deal with that is simply that Lalo disappears to Mexico and writes off the seven million as the cost of doing business - but at this point he might as well have put up a big neon sign saying “Yes, I was a major figure in organised crime.” for the police to read.

It strikes me that there’s only one plausible lead they then have to follow in order to figure out who Lalo really was, and how to get at his operation - his lawyer.

I’d love to see some Hank-leaning-on-Saul goodness in the last few episodes of the season. Just having Hank appear briefly for the Crazy-8 subplot (it was Crazy-8 that he was interrogating, wasn’t it? unless I misremember…) seems like underusing the character