Didn’t I hear that Lalo had a double with even the same dental work that had cost Lalo a lot, wasn’t there a joke about it? I would think for him, a dozen passports in different names and nationalities would be along the same lines of an escape hatch.
I hate to belabor this, as it’s not important, but I want to be clear that when I say “risk” I don’t mean “difficult”.
There’s nothing implausible about using a fake passport to gain entry to a country. People do that.
The point is, if his fake passport gets flagged on any of the 4 times he passes through airport security over this trip, that’s it; he could spend the rest of his life in prison. Stealing Doritos is easy, but I wouldn’t do it if I thought that if I got spotted it’s life in prison and there’s dozens of armed security between me and the exit.
This entire argument is very silly. It’s not as though Gus’s whole lifestyle, standing behind a counter in a popular restaurant, driving himself to work and home, popping in on the DEA, and generally being a prominent member of his community, is conducive to hiding out from assassins. Why Lalo would take the smallest risk in (maybe) successfully researching Gus’s secret lab is simply implausible.
I think this is the bigger issue. BB/BCS has always had their share of intricate plans, but this is like silly levels of intricacy with way too many fail points. In fact, I was surprised Howard didn’t ask exactly what time it was that he supposedly kicked the prostitute out of his car and then tell Cliff that he was at the doctor and Howard can verify that with a quick phone call.
He has an alibi if Cliff happens to mention when, exactly, this happened. If Cliff says “I saw you throw a hooker out of your car last week”, he doesn’t have a lot to go on. If Cliff says “I saw you throw a hooker out of your car last Tuesday at 2:30”, then Howard can say he was at a therapy session. I think they’ll go that route. Since they made such a big deal about Jimmy losing the parking spot, that’s almost certainly going to come into play. I’m guessing the parking lot has cameras in it that will show his car started in one spot and ended in a different (possibly stop lapse that won’t pick up Jimmy being the driver).
I have to assume, however, Jimmy and Kim are well aware that he’ll have a perfect alibi at this time, which makes what they’re doing all the more confusing.
I was confused about that as well. The only thing I can think of is that the accusation is so completely out of left field, Howard didn’t know how to respond.* Howard, being an attorney, I assume is more than smart enough to ask Cliff when it happened so he can prove it couldn’t have been him.
As for what Kim and Jimmy are doing, my only guess right now is that they’re gaslighting him. He knows it’s them but has no proof and everyone else is going to think his addiction is just making him paranoid.
*Reminds me of the time I was probably 12 or 13 years old and and walking somewhere. Two kids came around the corner, one of them pointed at me and said to the other “HIM!, He’s the guy that stole my shoes”. I froze in my tracks thinking I was going to get the snot beat out of me and I had no idea what they were talking about. 30ish years later and that still plays in my head from time to time.
Seems to be the case. Cliff looked at Howard like he was a nutjob for blaming Jimmy for the pushing the prostitute out of the car.
Jimmy and Kim know Howard isn’t stupid. They knew he would be able to put two and two together with Kim being the one to set up the meeting. Neither of them seemed surprised that Howard confronted Jimmy.
Here’s Kim’s line from the first episode of the season:
I think there’s a way to get Sandpiper settled and leave him standing… Bruised, maybe, but still standing. Maybe the trick is, we’re not working on Howard, not at first. Maybe we start with Cliff Main.
~~
Well… it has to be paced right. We move too fast, they’ll see us coming. And it has to make sense. It doesn’t have to stand up in court, but there has to be a reason for everything.
Actually, that would be kinda fun. With the recent resurgence of (and IMO, improper) use of the word ‘gaslight’, it would be nice if they could stretch out Howard slowly losing his mind over the course of a few episodes.
So that sounds like she’s saying ‘it doesn’t matter if he/they catch us, as long as everything we do can be written off as circumstantial’.
I’m enjoying it.
It has been a long time and I watched all of BB in the intervening time between S5 and 6 so the plot lines are more than a little jumbled for me.
No matter, It is so well done and absolutely at my pace so it is a pleasant enough place to be and I do trust the loose ends will be neatly tied come the end.
As for the Howard plot, let’s wait and see but personally…I quite like Howard, He is superficially annoying of course but he is also clearly drawn as someone with a fair chunk of decency in him. I’m sure he won’t fully deserve whatever is coming his way.
Also, I can’t be the only one who thinks Betsy Kettleman is hot. In such a small part Julie Ann Emery fills the screen and is charismatic in the extreme, hopefully there is more of her to come. She surely must self-combust at some point and that will be great to see.
Brief aside. I was with a small group of friends and the subject of gaslighting came up. One of the most savvy of us claimed to have never heard of the term and kept asking us to explain it. It took like five minutes for us to catch on.
Howard can be vindictive (paperwork hell for Kim), unconsciously condescending (Kim again) and just a little predatory business-wise (trying to snake that bank deal from Kim, yet again). He’s also a walking billboard for the power of nepotism and inherited wealth. But his heart is generally in the right place and he seemed genuinely concerned about the well-being of Kim, Jimmy and Chuck at various points. At the end of the day, he’s not a bad guy. Certainly a more morally upright person than Jimmy and, increasingly, Kim.
But devious Jimmy resents him over the Chuck stuff and brilliant Kim likely hates him for a whole laundry list of reasons. So too bad for him, he’s another decent person who’s going to suffer because the Fates are fickle and unkind.
Anybody else get the sneaking suspicion there’s more to Kim’s vendetta against Howard than she’s letting on? I mean, I know she wants money for her practice, and I know Howard is a rich asshole and jerk boss. But that doesn’t seem like enough, and literally every fan is talking about it. “Howard doesn’t deserve it!”
We know Howard paid for Kim’s law school. She tried to pay him back a few seasons ago when she left HHM, but he ripped up the check. Why did he pay for her schooling? The implication is that she was a promising employee and it was a good investment for the company. Makes sense.
But what if it was something else? Kim worked in the mail room, with Jimmy. Is it common practice to send mail room clerks to law school on the company dime? My guess is he assaulted her at work, or raped her or something else, and tried to apologize and sweep it under the rug by giving her tens of thousands for law school. And she took advantage of it to improve her career prospects, but always held a grudge.
I expect we’ll see something like that, either in a flashback or in dialog. It will make Kim’s revenge plans seem more justified. It may not entirely justify what they’re doing to him, whatever that ends up being, but it will probably make it more understandable at least. It may have something to do with Kim’s family. We saw her in a flashback with her drunk mother, and I keep waiting for her background to come back into the picture. We really know very little about Kim.
Wasn’t the only reason that HHM didn’t pay for Jimmy’s law school was that Chuck was against it? Edit: wait… Jimmy did law school himself and passed the bar and Chuck prohibited hiring him after that.
And I do know some firms have paid for their paralegals to go to law school.
Maybe she had his baby, and sent it off to be raised by her alcoholic mom. Maybe it’s identical twins who are now being groomed to pretend to be the same individual so they can get away with crimes, to produce income for their grandmother. Maybe grandma pretends to be their mom, so they don’t even know about Kim, and grandma is blackmailing Kim for money to support her lifestyle with the threat of running off to Chile with the kids, to live with a family named Fring there.
I love speculating!
Deserve has got nothing to do with it 
. Of course Howard doesn’t deserve it. And? Again, I think her heel turn towards Howard makes perfect sense and the fact that he’s a decent guy about to get shafted by someone who has learned to despise him isn’t fair, but it is life.
Kim seems like a fundamentally decent person interested in helping people, so folks hate seeing her as the bad guy. But in this context she absolutely is. She’s been sliding ever so slowly over five seasons and Howard has been the constant low-key irritant in her life. He might have still been absolutely fine, but he stands four-square in the way of her and Jimmy’s financial independence. She may feel a pang of regret in the end, but the best day of her life was just spent defending indigent cases and helping the little guy. She will self-righteously tear down that champion of the connected and moneyed to help the down-trodden and justify it to herself as a very necessary evil.
I hate the fact that so much wild speculation is necessary, or even possible. It’s a cheat. Viewers should be more informed than BCS’s writers have made us.
I don’t know, it feels like normal storytelling to me. Like in season 3, we didn’t know Chuck’s full plan for using the audio tape, and then we didn’t know Kim & Jimmy’s full counter-plan while they were putting it in motion.
I don’t feel that way. If it ties up at the end I’m happy enough and have no problem with a slow drip feed and not being in possession of all the facts.
I don’t see it as a logic puzzle that I need to work at. It is more like when my daughter draws or paints. She starts with all sorts of shapes and lines that make no sense to me but at some point it all clicks and comes together and even if she’d told me at the start what it was going to be she does not start where I (a non-artist) would so I don’t even know if that would help me follow along nor increase my satisfaction with the result.
It is definitely a show that requires patience and trust.
Not saying you’re wrong, just how the barrage of info and the paucity of resolutions seem to me. The problem with waiting until the final episode to get clarity is that by that time I’ve forgotten some of the things that confused me early on, or that I speculated in several directions just to find a plausible path, and the writers will choose to leave some of those unclear, which is what I mean by “a cheat.” If you’re just throwing spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it sticks, you hope no one will notice the pieces that fell to the floor. There’s a lot of pasta flying here.
Maybe. Is there any particular pasta you think was left on the floor in either BCS or BB?
My favorite tidbit from the latest episode is something I saw online. Gus is at the register, and suggests that someone add “their signature spicy curls” to their order. He then goes blank and panic-stricken. Why? Just to show that’s paranoid about Lalo showing up? Sure - but they’ve already shown that.
No, it echoes back to when he met with Madrigal a few seasons ago to arrange for the Germans to come build his meth bunker. The cover for the trip was the development of a new menu item. Spicy curls. The look of realization on his face was that he knew Lalo knew about the chief German (name is escaping me), and knew that when there was going to be a confrontation, it would be at the meth bunker.