What would be cool if it was revealed that this was where Gus first started auditioning the German team of meth-lab engineers.
I wonder if Gus’s tunnel is mainly another way to juxtapose his slick operation with the Salamanca’s. Lalo’s tunnel was a lot more rough and cramped.
No I’m not forgetting that, because I’m not an utter moron.
What I said was:
And lo and behold: https://i.imgur.com/TbrrWAR.jpg
Saul: A guy whose been doing this 20 years and never got caught
Walt: Well, what’s his name?
Saul: I have no idea.
BB Saul like to present himself as some mobbed up cartel lawyer in touch with the highest levels, but that’s bullshit. He’s on the fringe and in the dark about the key players. He represents low-level riff raff because, among other things, Mike doesn’t think he has the stomach for the harder stuff. And really, he’s right.
I think the meth lab construction makes more sense. The only part of that that really bothered me was visas and whatnot for the workers. If they were smuggled in over the border fine, but being secret and then “Oh, we’ll tell Werner’s wife he had an accident on the job site that doesn’t exist” didn’t make sense.
The domestic tunnel you could create, but I don’t think any overt construction like a pool really helps much. Why is the pool backed up to two different houses? Why is there no pool after construction is finished? I think you’d have to start in the basements and connect them.
What would be cool if it was revealed that this was where Gus first started auditioning the German team of meth-lab engineers.
We saw that the Germans were not Gus’s first choice. He auditioned another guy that bragged about his prior work first.
From what I see online, basements are very uncommon in New Mexico. (I live in a state in which few houses have basements, so the thought naturally occurred.)
You could pretend to build a pool in one yard and later say that you’d underestimated the costs, oh well (and so just filled it back in). Once you were down there you could get over to the other house without needing much excuse for disruption/construction in that yard–you’d just pull all the dirt out of the “pool” house’s yard before giving the ‘too expensive’ excuse and covering the hole.
So: dig a hole; do construction, including pouring concrete or installing precast concrete tunnel lining; fill the hole back up, and then pretend like you just couldn’t afford the pool?
- Hey Joe, where’s your pool?
- Oh, we underestimated the cost and turns out we couldn’t afford it.
- So you didn’t get an estimate, you just told an excavator to show up and start digging?
- Yup.
- But then why did you have 4 concrete trucks show up and pour concrete? They were here 2 days. Woke me up Friday.
- Uh…
- And why did they dig a trench to your house and your neighbors’ house? Pools don’t go up to the edge of a house and your neighbors have to be pissed you dug up their flowerbed.
- Smokebomb
Well, Saul started out a pretty connected guy because it’s only a couple of episodes after his character is introduced that he gets Walt the meet with Gus.
Yeah, he said he had no idea who the guy was but of course we know he DOES know quite a lot about Gus, having been roped in by Mike to do surveillance at Los Pollos Hermanos. It’s generally a great idea to say you don’t know the biggest honcho around, safer that way.
As for Gus’ housing situation–does nobody buy a house with an existing bomb shelter? Maybe that’s exactly why he bought those houses (and who knows how many on the block he owns because surveillance cameras are from all over the place including what looks to be right across the street so I’m assuming he has control over quite a bit of area around “his” house), for the bomb shelter he then proceeded to make larger and more elaborate. For that matter, maybe he just straight up got a permit to install a bomb shelter–Albuquerque is right at ground zero for a nuke attack, I bet there’s bomb shelters under more than a few houses there.
But wasn’t that through Mike? Saul told Walt he knew “a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy”. The implication that one of the first two “guys” is Mike, the other, in retrospect, is probably Nacho, the last one is Gus.
Or Nacho wasn’t part of that and Saul tacked on the ‘…who knows another guy’ part to keep some distance between himself and Gus.
Did a lot of concrete get poured? I don’t have an image to hand–was the tunnel made entirely of concrete, or was it dirt that was shored-up with supports and panels?
And why would the tunnel project require digging up the flowerbed of the house being connected? It seems unlikely that the tunnel would be within just a couple of feet of the surface–it seems more likely it would be deeper than ‘two feet down.’ So the flowers should be fine.
The tunnel doesn’t bother me at all. It doesn’t require supernatural intervention for there to be a tunnel. It just requires something clever and expensive. And Gus is nothing if not clever and expensive.
How are scary-looking guys with suits coming into and out of that house? I dunno… some amount of cover story or some clever logistics are required. But again, that’s what Gus (and Mike) are great at.
The one thing that seems like a loose end this season is that Mike clearly panted the address of the hotel where Nacho was staying. So that the Salamancas would be guaranteed to find him. But if the Salamancas found him, they would presumably torture him until he admitted it was Gus who ordered the hit on Lalo. So there has to be some other part of Gus’s plan. Maybe there was some other plan in place where Nacho’s room was rigged with explosives, so assuming Nacho didn’t suspect anything, the Salamancas would show up, they would barge in, boom, room explodes with Nacho and some Salamancas inside it, end of thread; or some such plan that would have worked if Nacho fully bought the cover story but ended up not working? (Now I’ve lost track of the details of precisely who showed up when.)
Kim is definitely a fascinating character… she’s obviously “good” in a lot of ways, as she seems 100% entirely sincere in her desire to do pro bono public defender work. At the same time, she’s utterly ruthless and heartless and seems to feel no remorse in seriously going after Howard. And she clearly gets off un the rush of the scam.
Overall, enjoying this season very much. At the end of each episode all I can say is “DAMN this show is so good”.
I mean we had an entire season’s plotline on the efforts Gus went through to create a secret underground meth lab. I don’t think we need to see him going through the whole process again to create tunnels under his house. We get that he has resources, he’s clever, and he knows how to get stuff like that done. Digging up a pool would be plausible cover - and he could just build a pool, too. No one is going to count the number of truckloads of dirt going out and say “hey wait a minute, that’s more than you need for a pool”
It was a concrete tunnel.
You’re positing using the “pool” as a launch pit and then pipe jack the rest of the way? I suppose. And that wouldn’t disturb the flowers. It’s a significant construction feat; It would also not pass the smell test for neighbors let alone cartel members watching Gus. You could definitely build a tunnel between two houses, you just wouldn’t do it with overt construction.
Through BCS and BB how many people know about Gus? BB made it seem like he was keeping it very much on the down low, but it’s gotta be a couple dozen at the minimum just local to Albuquerque. It goes against how his character was built up, IMO. Impossible to keep a secret with that many people in on it.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think Mike was supposed to be the “guy” at that point in season 2. I think he was just supposed to be Saul’s fixer. But then they brought Johnathan Banks back for season 3 and his story kind of got retconned into him being the “guy.” I don’t think they’ve ever explicitly mentioned in the show that it was Mike who made the intro, anyway.
I think “tunneling” can be a term applied to Straight Dope threads on a TV show where there’s about a thousand posts arguing over the practical implementation of something on a fictional show, rather than saying anything interesting about the show…
Agreed, Gus is the ultimate loaner. There were a lot of people loose in that house.
So he has someone else build a tunnel under their house and he buys it from them a few years later. There are plenty of plausible hand-waves that we can come up with, none of which break the existing narrative of “Gus is clever and has endless resources at his disposal”.
It’s hardly unique to this board. In fact, finding a way to explain something that could be considered a plot hole, is widely known as fan wanking.
If nothing else, it’s quite common when there’s a week (or more) between episodes. The main conversation cools down after a day or two and people start thinking about parts of the show outside of the A or B plot. Like, how did Gus tunnel under his house without anyone noticing?
And really, what if someone DOES notice? So what? It’s a ten day wonder just like the folks painting their house tomato red, at first it’s a kerfuffle then in a few months it’s just “that red house” with a shrug. So the Chicken Man had a big dig construction going for a few weeks years ago, how many people were actually affected and who’s gonna remember after a few neighbors move away? Any questions during the construction can be waved away by “big plumbing issue” or “putting in a bomb shelter,” which BTW if you google for Albuquerque bomb shelter it turns out there are several around that people know about–which means a ton of them nobody knows about. People are excellent forgetters and nobody cares or knows that the quiet guy down the street had a big dig event years ago.
The episode description for tonight is
While business booms for Jimmy, the vise tightens on the cat-and-mouse game between Gus and Lalo.