Jimmy picks up the car shortly after Howard starts therapy and manages to return it just before he’s done. He also had to wait because Wendy wasn’t at the hotel when he showed up. He’s rushed the entire time.
He was sitting with Wendy in the car waiting for the signal from Kim that she and Main were seated. He should have been a block away as Main was approaching the table.
For that matter, he should have Wendy with him when he steals Howard’s car. Her time is being paid for, and every second he spends making an extra stop is wasted time, and idiotic planning.
Yeah, I started to rewatch the scene to go over this point by point but I figured it’s not worth it.
In that case they left to chance an absolutely crucial element. Yes the PI appeared right before the meeting, so Jimmy and Kim had set it up so Howard would need to rush off. But I still think it’s quite feasible that Howard would have put the photos in a briefcase or his drawer whatever. And just like that, everything would fall apart.
I think that’s what made Howard’s death so shocking is that it was really unnecessary. Howard could still be around practicing law during BB and really not have any impact on the story. As opposed to Kim, Nacho, and (TBD) Lalo, who would be somehow involved with Saul/the Cartel. Going back to that well with Cliff I think would seem like too much.
Lalo had already checked the laundry out from a distance in a previous episode; he’s done a lot of surveillance. He’s simply connecting the dots.
The determination and savagery with which they went after Howard confused me too, but I think Howard spelled it out himself; they’re bad people. We’ve always assumed Jimmy was the one with weak ethics and he dragged Kim down with him, but the truth is that she is a bad person, too. Deep down she’s vengeful and unethical when it suits her. I’ve always wondered why a gorgeous, brilliant woman like Kim was attracted to Jimmy, and now I know; she’s gross, and she likes that he’s gross.
Plotwise, maybe. Thematically it makes perfect sense. This and Breaking Bad are basically Shakespearian tragedies, and a key part of a Shakepearian tragedy is that the tragic hero’s tragic flaw leads them to do things that cause events to snowball and get worse and worse until finally the stage is littered with bodies. Walter White’s pride and Jimmy McGill’s lack of ethics end up killing people, some of whom maybe had it coming and some of whom didn’t. Vince Gilligan keeps saying “if you do the wrong thing, you might get away with it for now, but eventually, the innocent pay the price.”
Yeah, I think narratively it’s unnecessary to have Cliff meet a similar fate to Howard, not unlike how if they’d had Howard commit suicide, it would’ve felt too close to Chuck’s suicide. Also there isn’t too much time left in the season, and things should constrict towards wrapping things up for the major characters. The Nacho story finished in episode 3, now the Howard scam story is finished, and next should be the Lalo/Gus showdown and the end of Jimmy and Kim’s story. Plus then some amount of time dedicated to the post-BB timeline with Gene.
Also with Cliff, he’s obviously a moral guy, but also very pragmatic. Once he figured out what Jimmy was doing to get himself fired, Cliff just fired him and cut his losses. When Cliff says it doesn’t matter whether Howard is right or not, I think he really believes that, and will leave it alone. Now, that might change when Howard disappears or turns up dead, but my guess is that Cliff’s part in the show is done.
So here’s the thing - we can’t really complain that Saul and Kim’s plan was just barely enough to work, and that if anything happened a little differently, the whole plan falls apart, and then also simultaneously complain that things were done to attempt to protect the plan against the unexpected that didn’t end up being necessary for the precise set of circumstances that actually happened during the execution.
Someone might’ve got a better look at Saul - maybe they’d be at a stop light and someone recognizes Howard’s distinctive car and looks at the driver and notices it’s not Howard. Maybe Cliff sees the car coming when it drives past and not just notices it after the prostitute gets kicked out so he gets a better look at Saul. There could’ve been a scenario where someone got a better look at the driver and Saul wanted to be prepared for that. Because it didn’t happen turned out to make it narratively unnecessary, but practically it made sense.
Or, to put it another way, if Jimmy didn’t dress up like Howard, people could just add it to the list of ways of how the plan could fall apart. They could say “if anyone notices that Jimmy is driving the car instead of Howard, the plan could fail” - so you could criticize them either way. In general, it’s better if Jimmy over-plans and it turns out to be unnecessary, rather than under-plans and has circumstances perfectly fall in his favor to pull this off.
So, for example, I think it’s a totally valid criticism to say “so their plan requires Howard to go to the meeting without securing the photos. If Howard takes the photos with him, the plan fails, and it’s a plot convenience that he does not. They should’ve had a plan for this scenario”, but I don’t think it’s a good criticism to say “they planned for this eventuality that could make their plan fail (Jimmy not disguised as Howard) and it ended up not being necessary”
Yes we can, if they spent too much effort, and even were panicked, about things that didn’t matter, but didn’t put much effort into things that did.
This is true though.
Personally I didn’t have much of an issue with Jimmy dressing up. I didn’t find it funny, but I didn’t think it was as silly as some other elements.
They didn’t end up mattering, but they could’ve, if the situation unfolded a little bit differently. Good planning accounts for the things that could happen, not just the things that end up happening.
Now - there’s a conflict here, because good writing generally has an economy of storytelling, so we tend to think that good writing only has the elements to set up what actually ends up mattering in the story.
There’s kind of a conflict here - if writers use the economy of storytelling to have the characters only plan perfectly for exactly how the events unfold, then it becomes really convenient that every event that happens just so happens to conform exactly to their predictions and planning. But if the writing shows them planning for scenarios that didn’t actually happen, it seems like a violation of the economy of writing rules (why did you bother to show this scene/this part of the plan if it didn’t end up mattering).
For my preference, it’s far better to show the characters putting together elements of their plan that could have mattered, but didn’t. Overplanning makes it more plausible that the plan could’ve been pulled off even if everything didn’t go exactly perfectly as they expected.
So Jimmy dressing like Howard, Jimmy being on a tight schedule to make sure to get the car back and so not letting Wendy waste his time - all of this stuff could’ve mattered, if events shook out a little differently - so I don’t think it should be criticized because it didn’t end up mattering.
But what I think I’ve demonstrated above is that Jimmy’s plan neglected to maximize time-saving in obvious ways, such as stopping to pick up Wendy AFTER he’d taken Howard’s car instead of taking her with him before stealing the car. All of the objections to doing so, like maybe Wendy couldn’t make it earlier, fall apart: she’s unimportant to the scheme, it could have been any whore, and all they require is money, which Jimmy was willing to throw around. But by structuring the deal so that he had to hurry her up (for reasons unknown to us at the time) the writers introduce a phony time-element that Jimmy would have avoided if he was a meticulous planner.
He had to hurry up because she was late. Was with a client
He had to dress like Hamlin so that Clift thinks it’s him, along with using the car. He did say he say he saw Hamlin, despite Howard’s denials.
He had to park in the same spot so that Hamlin doesn’t have evidence of being framed. He’s arguing to Clift that he’s being framed, but if he says “my car was across the parking lot” that gives credibility to the claim. Instead he looks nuts.
All his arguing he’s been framed is what makes him look unhinged. The drug accusations/baggie gives a plausible reason why he’s acting unhinged.
So, at the mediation meeting he sees the judge in the photo (with the accurate broken arm), feels empowered to accuse him of corruption (having been primed with the phoney big withdrawal $$ photo). Looks unhinged, again!
Having acted unhinged prior and making “crazy” claims about Jimmy, and the big pupils, Clift doesn’t believe him and his credibility is shot.
At that point they have to settle, even if the truth comes out.
Lost of steps but not that complicated.
Let me begin by pointing out that I’ve already answered both of your first two points:
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Jimmy was paying Wendy a lot of money (and was willing to bribe her with more money just to forego a soft drink) so his fee would have been sufficient to be at his beck and call all day, or at the very least, to leave her last client well before he needed her.
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there was no way that Cliff could have seen the difference between Jimmy and Howard (or between Jimmy and a hippopotamus, for that matter) when Jimmy was 100 feet away, for all of five seconds, from behind, inside a car.
As your point #3, if it was that important to save Howard’s parking space, Jimmy could have used something more substantial than a traffic cone. But if he had to park in a different spot, then what would Howard have done? I know what I would have done: thought “Damn! I coulda sworn I’d parked over there this time” and gotten into my car. In retrospect, maybe he could have put it together, but then he’s sounding a little crazy, isn’t he?
As to
yeah, it bolsters his suspicions if the fake judge has a broken arm, but that wouldn’t be what Howard would be looking at when he sees the photo. He doesn’t know at that point that the judge has a broken arm, He’s just trying (at the PI’s urging) to see whether he recognizes this guy. When he sees the judge in the mediation session, it’s not the broken arm that tips him off, it’s the guy’s recognizable features. By the time Howard runs upstairs to take a second look at the photograph, it’s gone. Maybe this is a small matter that makes him think “Jimmy!” a few seconds sooner, but it’s no big deal, certainly not enough to motivate Kim to wreck her life’s dream and join the film crew, where she accomplishes just about nothing anyway,
Look, you got hoodwinked. The writers threw so much crap at the wall, you bought the idea that this was a clever, carefully constructed brilliant plan, just as they wanted you to think, but it really makes very little sense if you review it carefully.
You’re right. He made a mistake. Congratulations, you’re smarter than Jimmy.
Good grief, some people really like to show off with a lot of time and words how “hoodwinked” others are for liking a television show.
Nuh uh! A meth head prostitute would always be extremely careful with her time! And even if she promised to keep her day free she would never try to earn a bit more from one last client before the Jimmy job!
As i recall, people were spending much more time and effort arguing that this was a brilliant carefully constructed plan while i was expressing my frustration at the needless complications and my suspicions that this was a flimsily constructed house of cards
And Jimmy’s not clever enough to manipulate a crack whore into doing what he wants? Point is, he didn’t even try.
And if crack whores are too inscrutably clever for Jimmy, then he simply hires an actress to play a whore. Which is probably what he should have done to begin with.
Good lord, it continues. Maybe you should find another show to watch. This one doesn’t seem to suit you. It’s one thing to make a post or two about how a plotline doesn’t work for you, it’s another entirely to pollute an entire thread with absolutely nothing but posts telling us how stupid the show is and telling us how hoodwinked we are for liking it.
If you find this show/plotline so very offensive to your intelligence, it just seems maybe you’d want to not waste so much of your time explaining to us why it sucks so bad, or why we’re dumb for being drawn in by it. I find a lot of shows suck or fall off the rails after a while; I can think of about 100 things I’d rather do then go on for post after post detailing why I think they suck. And I sure as shoot wouldn’t accuse fans of being hoodwinked for having a different opinion as me.
How about you devote less of YOUR valuable time telling me how to post?