I don’t know - if the money he paid for disappearing didn’t include a background that could withstand the scrutiny of Cinnabon HR, he got ripped off. Plus, I imagine the package included a job, and manager of a small corporate shop is something that could probably be arranged fairly easily.
It’s a franchise. If he bought out an existing franchise it could have been done through a lawyer as a corporate acquisition.
People paid a lot of money to disappear into a new life, I dam well would expect a job would be included!
A job? If Gene Takavic doesn’t own that Cinnabon I’ll eat my hat. He should still have a ton of money from his Breaking Bad days, and can’t launder it all, but I’m sure the Cinnabon is helping the money from his old life trickle into his new life.
Of course being “underground” really means controlling information more than controlling a person’s physical location. The only reason that the Witness Protection Program moves a person physically is to 1) reduce the person’s temptation to go somewhere familiar or contact familiar people and 2) reduce the chances that the protected person is recognized.
For Gene to really disappear, he needs to not work, to not travel (esp by car or plane), and generally practice social distancing however possible.
Having a job is risk. Leaving the house is risk. Seeing people is risk. All of life is risk. You didn’t see Walt doing those thing.
Why have a job? My guess is that the writers needed Gene to be employed specifically so that his story can move forward. They might not have known, at the beginning, all of the details of Gene’s future, but they knew they wanted to give him one.
For Walt to have a future, he had to leave the security of the bubble and seek out the risk. Gene’s security bubble isn’t as secure as Walt’s… danger is leaking in.
I don’t know if it’s debate-worthy, but I’m not convinced it makes sense for his new life.
Yes if I’m paying a lot of money to disappear, then I’d expect it to come with work, but I wouldn’t choose a job where I may see thousands of people a day, considering in my previous persona I frequently used TV advertizing (and then, after the WW fallout would have had my picture shown on at least the state news, so basically almost any adult from my home state may recognize me)).
I did consider that Jimmy may be the owner of the franchise, but that means dropping a big sum of money…it’s another thing to unnecessarily draw attention.
But more importantly, if Jimmy is the franchise owner, why bother working there? Why not just hire a manager and collect the money boxes?
Anyway, I’m prepared to suspend disbelief because Jimmy sometimes makes impulsive decisions, so we can just put it down to that.
Wasn’t there an episode a few weeks ago where someone recognized Gene as the TV lawyer from Albuquerque? Was that ever resolved?
I don’t know that we know how much cash Jimmy has. He may need to work to bring in some portion of his living expenses.
And total isolation sucks. Walt was paying big bucks to get his supplier to spend a few extra hours with him. And Jimmy, while he may have made the national news for a moment, was not a big fish. After a month or so no one who wasn’t from the Albuquerque area was going to recognize him.
Heck, in the real world I don’t know that Walt would have needed to stay totally off the grid after six months or so. Safer, obviously, but the odds of any individual recognizing someone who they saw on the news a long time is pretty slim.
That was in the flash-forward to ‘Gene Time’, so far they’ve only had one per season, but I expect that the series will end by moving forward to that time. This season’s flash forward ended with Jimmy contacting the vacuum man to disappear again, and then deciding to deal with it himself.
Well here is all I’ll say about tonight’s episode: the four main characters that to the best of my knowledge aren’t on Breaking Bad are Lalo, Nacho, Howard and Kim.
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I was responding to the point about What if Jimmy is the franchise owner?
Sure but there are many options inbetween total isolation and choosing a job that involves seeing hundreds or thousands of faces a day.
I loved last night’s episode. But the guys Gus hired to take out Lalo were uncharacteristically bad at their jobs. By all rights Lalo should have never seen it coming. And the spray and pray machine gunning of the ceiling and stuff made for good TV, but also made the assassins look like complete amateurs.
Anyway, great episode. I was expecting someone to die, but I guess they’ll deal with Nacho, Lalo and Kim (and Howard?) next season. Is Kim breaking bad now too? I wonder if this marriage has just been a big con to get a hold of Jimmy’s Sandpiper money?
Yeah, the assassins really didn’t seem competent - Lalo leaving the tunnel’s door open was a really obvious trap, and sending two guys into a narrow tunnel with one guy at the top staring down into the tunnel instead of being on the lookout for reinforcements was just bad. Also, it sems like no one did any recon on Lalo’s habits - it seems uncharacteristic to me that Mike or Gus didn’t know that Lalo tends to be awake at odd hours.
I think what we’re seeing is that Kim and Jimmy are much more kindred spirits than we thought at first. I think that Kim had idealistic ambitions of being a lawyer, put in the work to do it, and then had her spirit crushed when she got everything she wanted but it still didn’t satisfy her. I get the impression that she grew up on the wrong side of the law pulling cons with her destitute parent(s) and was trying to go away from that, and that now she doesn’t see any reason to do so.
Her laughing at Jimmy’s Howrassment and massively escalating the situation is a big change for her. Jimmy doesn’t drug people and do stuff to them, and hasn’t been out to really trash Howard in a meaningful way. Howard having to pay a deductible and have people whisper about ‘Howie’ for a few weeks weren’t anything like destroying his professional reputation to get at 8.3 million dollars. She definitely is willing to con to get the Sandpiper money, whether she’s conning Jimmy or going all-in with him is an interesting question. I think something definitely has to happen to some of the Sandpiper money before BB, if Saul actually has most of $8 million around then he doesn’t really need to jump into the highly dangerous but lucrative Walt train.
I also think she gave up her immunity to death - originally I didn’t think they would have her die, because it would reduce a solid, independent character to just the standard ‘innocent girlfriend dies, motivating the guy to…’ trope. But at this point, if she dies it’s not going to be purely because of Jimmy, it’s going to be because she’s decided to get ‘in the game’ herself. I don’t give that a strong chance of happening, but I think that it’s no longer off the table for her to die.
I’ll have to think about it more, but I didn’t really like the finale. In the moment, didn’t buy Kim’s transformation. Obviously she’s been gradually going down a bad path, but pretty much everything she’s done so far has been 1) saving her/Jimmy, 2) against people that seemed shitty, or 3) can argue it’s victimless. Trying to destroy Howard doesn’t fit and rubbed me the wrong way.
Agree on the assassins being amateurish.
So, Lalo’s going to have to be killed pretty soon, no? I don’t see how that wouldn’t start an open war between the two factions if he can talk to anyone else in the cartel.
Anyone else think the actor that plays Don Eladio has aged the most? He looks 30 years older.
Just a note, but I believe $8M is the total cut for all lawyers and Saul is entitled to a percentage of that. I think he said his final cut would be in the ballpark of $2M given Kim’s estimate of the settlement.
The thing I love about Howard is that both Kim and Jimmy have the wrong idea about him, due to their particular perspectives and history. Howard is not a bad guy. He’s a spoiled rich kid with cheesy, stereotypical rich kid tastes and a sort of fake, ultraprofessional corporate attitude, but he’s not a bad guy. But he sided with Chuck against Jimmy and played the hard ass boss to Kim, so they both see him as worse than he actually is. I could see them ruining his life while thinking they’re just taking him down a peg. You can see that with Kim saying “it’s just a career setback”. They’re already minimizing in their minds what they plan to do to Howard.
Also, I don’t think a couple million dollars is going to prevent Saul from becoming the guy we see in Breaking Bad. The Cadillac, the cheesy strip mall office with the columns and big desk and Constitution wallpaper, the ubiquitous over the top advertising, all his cheesy suits, those seem like just the sort of things a crooked lawyer with a big bankroll would spend his money on. Also, I expect he and Kim have a falling out, they split, and she takes half his money. I’m crossing my fingers that all this foreshadowing of Kim’s bad ending is just setting us up to subvert our expectations. Certainly Lalo, and probably Nacho, will die next season, but I think Kim’s ending will be sad but not violent or deadly. While I think it’s possible Saul and Kim are still together during Breaking Bad, I don’t think that’s actually going to be the case. Bob Odenkirk said he doesn’t think Saul in Breaking Bad is going home to Kim at night, and I believe him. I still don’t think she’ll die.
OK, I thought his cut had gone up that much. $2m is much easier to run out, even if there isn’t a disaster of any sort.
Probably nothing, but Kim’s ponytail (that used to look like a boingy spiral bedspring) is looking straight and bedraggled now. In fact, she let her hair down last night which doesn’t happen often.
It worked for me and I believed it. Not only has she been pushed to the edge in the moment, but also because Howard to her is the worst. He is the opposite of her - a rich kid who became the head a multi-million dollar firm purely through nepotism. No doubt he’s competent. But he’s no Chuck who carried that firm. And no Kim.
Kim who worked her ass off, from neglected child to mail-room clerk, to actual lawyer by being better and more determined than anyone else in the room. All so she could help people, not watch the rich get richer by using her skills to eat everyone else’s lunch.
Meanwhile little rich boy Howard who had everything handed to him on a golden plate pettily retaliated against her by banishing her to paperwork purgatory. Howard backed the idea to snake Mesa Verde from her despite all the work she’d put in. Howard went along with Chuck’s play to ruin Jimmy, a man who had acted unethically but unselfishly to save her position out of love. Howard who had the unmitigated gall to condescend to her and imply she wasn’t in control of her own decisions. As far as she is concerned “nice guy Howard” with his android emotions, his love of money and superior namaste bullshit can fuck right off - he’ll probably still die rich no matter what happens. Meanwhile she gets to actually help people. It’s worth the collateral damage. Because Kim has just about had enough of being the tool of the elites - Jimmy had it right all along.
Also who had the insensitivity to tell Jimmy (but not Chuck’s ex-wife) that he thinks Chuck killed himself and ask if Jimmy wants to sift through the ashes of Chuck’s funeral pyre for semi-damaged household tools. While it was an understandable screw-up from the outside, I think to her that really comes off as a nasty attack on Jimmy at a vulnerable time.