In the movie Rambo: Last Blood the last battle John Rambo has with bad guys takes place in tunnels Rambo dug around his house with numerous traps. (Incidentally the main villains in the movie was a Mexican drug cartel.)
Another possibility is that Nacho might now turn to Saul for help. That gives us both a mechanism for Saul knowing what happened in the compound, and a potential way to put Saul in fear that Lalo might think he was involved.
If you were Nacho, would you turn to Saul for help? Personally, I think the only people who might - might - be able to keep Nacho alive are Gus & a certain vacuum cleaner salesman.
If you go on youtube and look for LockPickingLawyer he has plenty of videos showing how to open a padlock with a shim, including shims he’s made from things found around the house.
He also showed a different/modified/improved way to break a lock with two wrenches.
Mike mentioned to Gus that the area has no cell service, which Gus seems little concerned with, dismissing it as a mere “technical problem.” When we see Nacho at Lalo’s compound, he sneaks a look at his phone which says there is no service. But then a few minutes later he receives the call from the assassins. As soon as the call ends, the cell network disappears and the phone again says that there is no service.
So we are meant to understand that these are sophisticated assassins who have a portable cell site with them which they turn on as needed.
Does he know the vacuum cleaner salesman? (or have enough money for him if he did)
I wouldn’t turn to Gus for help if I were Nacho, because Gus is the one putting the screws on him. From Nacho’s pov, it would be great if Gus thinks he died in the botched raid - all that’s going to happen to Nacho if he tries to approach the Chicken man again is more doing dangerous shit he doesn’t want to do, to save his dad’s life.
Saul may not be much for practical help, but at least Nacho could touch him up for money - possibly even try a little blackmail. And he can be pretty sure Saul isn’t going to shoot him or a family member in the head
He’s already got fake Canadian IDs in his safe, and he’s not wanted by any government agency. If he flees to Canada with a decent batch of US currency, he should be safe from the cartel, especially if they think he’s dead. He’s in more danger from Gus, but once he flees he’s useless to Gus so Gus doesn’t have a reason to put in effort to track him.
The Disappearer was Saul’s contact, and Saul evidently doesn’t even know him at this point. His fee was $125,000 per person, which I would guess Nacho could come up with, but Nacho wouldn’t know of him.
We don’t know yet how Saul came to know the vacuum guy. It could be through Gus, Mike, or perhaps the vet, all of whom know Nacho.
Saul doesn’t know Gus except as the owner of a chicken restaurant. (When he put Walt in touch with Gus, it was through Mike.) When Mike was going to go on the lam, there is no indication that he was planning to use the Disappearer, even though his go-bag looked like it might contain $125,000 when we first see it. The vet is a complete amateur and not at a level where he would be likely to know the Disappearer.
But the major reason they won’t use Ed the Disappearer again is because Robert Forster is dead, and it would be too jarring to bring him back played by another actor, especially since he’s already appeared in Better Call Saul at the beginning of this season. (Forster’s scene was shot during the filming of El Camino; he died of brain cancer the day El Camino was released.)
Man, does Kim misread Howard. He was sincerely trying to get help for Jimmy and she took it all wrong. I hope he comes out the other side from whatever they are going to do to him.
As pompous as he seems, he is one of the few reasonably good guys in this show.
Ok, finally got round to seeing it.
Enjoyed it on the whole. My favorite scene was the Kim + Howard interaction: the awkwardness in the elevator with both Howard and Kim clearly mulling over “Should I mention Jimmy’s shenanigans / leaving Sweikart…?” respectively and then it absolutely made sense that Howard would try to warn Kim, and that Kim would laugh it off, when you know what they know and their relative situations.
But I also had the same gripes as many posters here:
- Assassins were dreadful. I think they focused too much on Lalo being a badass and forgot that these are supposed to be Gus Approved[sup]TM[/sup] mooks.
I was looking forward to seeing 4 or 5 Ehmentraut-like bosses operating together, but maybe they didn’t have time in the episode for the delicate cat and mouse that might entail.
But one thing that wouldn’t affect episode length is the tunnel: a trap in the tunnel would have worked better than Lalo’s perfect timing and their incompetence. - Noticed old Don Eladio but it’s a pretty minor thing compared to Mike; at least Don isn’t out street fighting.
- Kim’s transform was too far IMO – if she goes through with it, it’s her “killing the younglings” moment. Yes she has seen Howard as a hardass but she’s also seen him be fair, and always honest. I think she would know his concern is genuine and it’s not “about him”.
I’ve always felt that they’ve done a good job of writing Howard into the show, even at times where the main characters had few remaining ties to HHM. This looks contrived though.
Yeah, the finale really screwed up my reasoning for what I thought would happen. Gus tells Hector in BB that the Salamanca name dies with him. And that’s not the sort of thing he would lie about. Torturing Hector is his life’s goal, his driving passion. He wouldn’t just say all the Salamancas are dead, he would make it happen. So I was sure Lalo would die, and in BCS too, because having him die off screen in the Breaking Bad timeline is lame and underwhelming. But now it’s possible that Gus only thinks Lalo is dead.
I also figured that Saul may or may not know Lalo died, hence asking “Lalo didn’t send you?” when he meets Walt and Jesse. Mike is his only source of knowledge about that, and Mike is famously taciturn. So it was entirely possible Lalo died but Mike never told Saul. But as of the finale last week, Saul thinks Lalo is dead because Mike told him so. Somehow, next season, Saul will find out Lalo is still alive, and may not ever find out that he dies, if he does. But if Saul finds out Lalo is still alive, certainly Gus will have to know, right? So that brings us back to point one, if Gus knows Lalo is alive, he wouldn’t tell Hector that the Salamancas have been wiped out.
So Gus has to kill Lalo, again. And I don’t think he’ll screw up this time. I can’t see Lalo faking his death twice. And Saul won’t find out he died the second time, so he’ll always have Lalo in the back of his mind to fear, which is where we find him in Breaking Bad.
I also think the amateur assassins will be explained in some way. Gus says he hired the best, but the surviving assassin said there was a middle man. Maybe the “highly trained, best in their business” assassins farmed out the job to a lesser crew for some reason? Some reason like divided loyalties, a bribe, whatever. Or even just because they thought it would be an easy job and wanted to train some new guys? Gus has Mike, who can kill an entire cartel gang in a few minutes just two episodes ago, but then he sends Moe, Larry and Curly to take out Lalo? I don’t think mere suspension of disbelief can cover that. The violence on these shows is over the top, but it’s still usually somewhat realistic. Like Mike taking out the guys who ambushed Saul, or even Walt blowing up a nursing home, for example. In comparison, these guys letting themselves be seen by Lalo before killing him, and then machine gunning the ceiling and following the crazy, armed psycho who just killed their friends into a tunnel to be sitting ducks, well, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Another thing I haven’t seen talked about yet is Don Eladio’s talk with Nacho. It seemed like Eladio wasn’t too thrilled with Lalo, and wanted to support Nacho. I’m not sure the relevance, but it seems to me Lalo can’t count on the cartel backing him up to get his revenge on Gus. Lalo is backed into a corner and like a cornered dog will do anything to break free. So I expect a lot of crazy violence from him before he meets his end. He definitely knows Nacho was in on the assassination plot, so maybe he goes after him first.
Completely disagree. I don’t think that she thought that Howard punishing her for Jimmy’s commercial at another firm was fair, nor him keeping her in doc review after she brought Mesa Verde to the firm, nor him trying to steal Mesa Verde from her. There was a major scene where she chewed him out about how unfair, dishonest, and self-serving his coming to Jimmy to say that he thought Chuck had killed himself was, especially the fact that Howard didn’t feel the need to share this insight with Rebecca.
And he’s always treated her with paternalistic condescension - like when he came up to her at the Mesa Verde lunch and she responded by writing him a check for the last of her student loans. Or when he approached her this time telling her that Jimmy was controlling her decision (instead of opposing it).
And I don’t think she found honest his multi-year campaign of lying to Jimmy about the fact that Chuck was keeping him out of the firm and Chuck’s relationship with the firm (which, incidentally, kept Jimmy working his ass off to try to ‘protect’ Chuck from HHM). Or that she found him backing Chuck’s decisions in dealing with Jimmy honest and fair. Or him lying on the stand about the reason that the firm didn’t want to hire Jimmy.
She’s seen Howard be a condescending, sanctimonious, lying, unfair, self-serving jackass to both her and Jimmy for years. And she’s called him out on this multiple times, sometimes loudly and sometimes in a courtroom. And we’ve never seen her show a shred of moral restraint in going after rich people - she genuinely cares about her pro bono clients, but the only concerns she’s expressed about scams and rip offs of wealthy people are practical like ‘I could get disbarred for that’. I don’t think what she’s doing is out of character at all, I just think that the show has been letting us think she’s a sweet, innocent ‘good girl’ who likes to dip her toes in with a bad boy sometimes when that’s not really who she is.
I think Eladio likes the Salamancas for historical and loyalty reasons, but thinks they’re not really all that great anymore. He really wants the fat stacks of neatly wrapped cash that Bolsa and Gus send him, but he’s not ready to turn on the Salamancas, especially when they bring him showy gifts like Lalo just did. He doesn’t know about Lalo sabotaging Gus’s operation, but if Lalo wanted to take revenge against Gus I think that Bolsa and/or Gus would let him know about the sabotage, and that in the end Eladio would come down on the side of big, steady money and not a Salamanca-provoked vendetta.
There have been a lot of back and forths; a lot has happened over the 5 seasons and we can also find instances like where he admitted he envied her for starting out on her own. And the fact she chewed him out about his dumb comment* makes it far less likely that she would feel some need to get even or see him as an enemy now. She dealt with it. She put him in his place.
- This was great writing btw; as an audience we know the truth and it’s totally normal for a character in a TV show to share such a theory; but Kim behaved as a real person would, not a TV character, in being angered by such a suggestion.
I don’t recall Howard lying on either of these occasions. What was the lie?
I don’t agree with these adjectives, particularly “lying”, but I will say this: most of the sympathetic moments Howard have had were with Jimmy or Chuck.
So I’d agree she has more reason to dislike him. But the hatred required to want to unfairly destroy the man? No, I don’t see it.
No one asserted that “she would feel some need to get even”, so I’m not sure why you’re arguing with that position. It perfectly well shows why she would think of him as a dishonest, sanctimonious asshole who’s wellbeing does not concern her, and certainly not as someone who is “honest” or “fair”.
Howard made a variety of statements leading Jimmy to believe that Howard and not Chuck was behind Jimmy being kept out of the firm, and actively worked to maintain the fiction. If you’re trying to play some kind of ‘exactly which sentence on screen was unequivocably literally untrue in a specific, provable sense’, I don’t play that game in real life and certainly am not going to go back and rewatch episodes to nitpick exact phrasings. If you don’t believe that Howard was actively deceiving Jimmy about who was behind his rejection from HHM, you’re missing something very basic about the show.
On the stand, he claimed that the decision not to hire Jimmy was based on wishing to avoid the appearance of nepotism. Kim called that out by asking him what the letters in the firm’s name stand for. Later on in the hearing, Chuck’s own testimony shows that what Howard said was not true. Very clear-cut, and again I’m not going to play some kind of ‘but can you explicitly prove it wasn’t true’ game.
She clearly doesn’t hate him or want to destroy him, she just dislikes him and thinks he’s a stuck up rich asshole who is standing in the way of her getting enough money to live her dreams. She didn’t have any particular reason to hate Kevin, he was just a rich dude doing rich dude stuff, but she was willing to use the fruits of breaking and entering to hit him on a very personal level with the copyright on the Mesa Verde logo, and that wasn’t even for personal gain. Note that she is EXPLICITLY not out to destroy Howard, she’s telling herself (and Jimmy) that she’s just going to cause a little career setback.
IIRC we don’t even hear what Howard tells Jimmy regarding not hiring him, we only see the reaction in the mail room. Howard tells Kim that the partners decided against it, which is 100% true. I’m fairly certain Howard doesn’t lie to anyone about that decision and all the deception is by Chuck.
It’s bedtime here and I’m travelling tomorrow so it might be a little while before I give a response to some of the points raised here. But can I just ask, respectfully, for you to calm down a little, Pantastic?
Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong, it’s not important.
Your tone seems to have begun at 10 and is still increasing. What’s going on?
I’m not going to stop discussing the show on the thread about discussing the show, or referencing the show. If you want to read the ‘tone’ as a ‘10’, whatever exactly that means, it’s up to you - I’m just responding to what you’ve posted, and it’s not within my power to control what tone you decide that it is. I do think it’s hypocritical to post things disagreeing with me and stating that I’m wrong when talking about the show, but then to complain that I need to ‘calm down’ if I respond to you in the same way that you’re posting to me.