Just wondering if this is a joke, if so, then very good… 
Otherwise I’ll explain…
You can stop wondering. Though there are Chili’s in Chile.
I mean, that’s clearly why Jimmy wanted Kim to go. And Kim almost told the cops next to her at the stop light. But you’re expecting people in a heightened emotional state to make a purely rational decision.
Did Lalo know for sure that Kim didn’t have Mike’s cel # and wasn’t about to phone him the second she got out of earshot for him to bring armed men to the apartment while he was tying up Jimmy?
No. But she also almost left the apartment without shoes on, so she wasn’t a completely rational actor at that point. Lalo got out of the apartment pretty quickly - I assume he didn’t factor in much margin of error should Kim have done exactly that.
My point being that he couldn’t have known that his plan couldn’t have blown up badly in his face. Let me put it like this: in that situation, if you were instructed to murder a stranger and return home in an hour, would you have complied? Or might you have done any number of other things than complying with Lalo? I think the odds are pretty good (especially if I was supposed to be guarded by Mike’s troops, and I had Mike’s cel) that I would have found a way to ask him for help STAT.
Lalo’s plan is plausible and clever, until you think about it from his perspective for eight seconds. Then you see all the ways Kim (or Jimmy) could have done things to bring the wrath of God, in the form of Mike, down on him, including going down to the car, getting the loaded gun, and returning to the apartment because you forgot your driving glasses (or some such) and blowing him to Kingdom Come. Not so clever, then, right?
I mean there’s a bigger issue, right? Lalo is a lifetime cartel guy, who has risen pretty high in the ranks. What percentage of people in that level of the Mexican drug cartels live out their days to die peacefully in their beds aged 90? The entire drug business is fraught with high risk, high reward.
I don’t think it is reasonable to conclude that the only good plans Lalo has are ones with no risk of failure, if that was how Lalo thought he wouldn’t be in the cartel to begin with, he would’ve stayed in school and become a bureaucrat or something.
Lalo’s plan isn’t to get Kim to kill Fring, it’s to occupy Mike. It worked. It would have worked if Kim had called Mike or the cops the moment she left the apartment.
This whole show, and much of Breaking Bad, is a series of clever plans going exactly as planned. Or NOT going as planned, to even more interesting results.
You gotta let go to enjoy it. Otherwise you’re stuck on “how did they build that underground lab?”
Well, duh? Of course it worked–as a TV script, for the minutes you were watching it. It just isn’t all that clever or foolproof or brilliantly conceived as we’re meant to think. There are many, many ways Lalo’s plan could have reasonably resulted in his death (I just came up with two examples off the top of my head–I’m sure there are dozens), and if we think about it, there are lots of other, surer ways he could have distracted Mike that don’t happen to involve our (yours and mine) particular focuses of attention, Jimmy and Kim.
A third way I just thought of is that Mike was supposed to have a team of guards watching Kim and Jimmy 24/7 (remember, she was pissed that there was no one still watching her) and Lalo had no way to know that this detail had been pulled off. For all Lalo knows they’ve got a camera implanted inside their apartment, and the second Kim opens the door to leave, they’re going to burst through that door with AR-15s blazing.
No, you really didn’t. Lalo’s plan works the moment Kim leaves the apartment.
But anyway, nitpicking this show is boring and tedious. Feel free to think there are massive plot holes if you want to. I mean, the episode ends with Lalo’s plan unraveling, Fring finding out, and Lalo buried forever - is there a significantly different outcome under any of your perceived unravelings?
He literally watched Kim go to the car and drive away.
The whole point behind Lalo’s fake call to Hector was to pull the guards to Gus’s house. He saw Mike leave the laundry to go to Gus’s house as soon as he made the call.
If you’re going to constantly criticize the show, maybe you should actually watch it.
Mike told them in no uncertain terms that Lalo wasn’t coming back this time, and I expect that Saul will believe that. The thing is, no one in the Cartel knows what happened to Lalo. He’s been largely off the grid since he was attacked at his house, so no one in the cartel is expecting him to call any time soon.
I’m pretty sure that, at some point, Saul will be told to just play dumb if anyone asks about Lalo. If the cartel eventually sends someone around looking for Lalo, Saul will just act as if he has no idea where Lalo is. Which is what we see in BB, when he thinks Walt and Jesse are cartel guys, and he freaks out. He’s freaking out because he expects the cartel to expect him to freak out.
I’m not sure I see the problem, though. The show isn’t about Masterminds who plan perfect plans, it’s about people active in the drug industry. It would seem any halfway realistic portrayal of the drug trade is going to involve people doing things of questionable wisdom, that sometimes don’t work out–note that Lalo’s plans here ultimately didn’t work that well. He ended up in a New Mexico jail for carelessly murdering the wire transfer clerk, which he barely got out of through luck and a lot of money, and he ended up actually dead from his scheme against Gus. I don’t think the intended portrayal is of perfection.
Did you read my post? In it, in the sentence you want so badly to contradict, I wrote that she could have gotten the
And actually Lalo doesn’t watch her drive away. Look at it again. He sees her locate his car and then he turns his attention to tying Jimmy up, But even if she pulled out of his parking spot and then pretended to need her glasses to drive, Lalo has to open the door to let her in or to hand the glasses to her and she fires the gun at him. This is just one of many possibilities not even involving Mike or his team of well trained guards (that Lalo can’t know have been pulled off) or the closed circuit TV that Mike could (and should) have installed in their apartment that cause Lalo’s plan to backfire on him. There are lots of ways to distract Mike’s men from the laundromat that don’t involve Jimmy or Kim or killing Howard–this was just the way the writers came up with that would get your juices flowing. It doesn’t have to make a lot of sense, and it really doesn’t.
You’re right. But I seem to be upsetting a lot of folks here by pointing out the weak points in Lalo’s scheme, which scheme mostly exists to maximize dangers for Jimmy and Kim where it should exist (from Lalo’s perspective) to get him inside the laundromat.
The plot got me, too, while I was watching it, but only afterwards I saw all the things that could have gone wrong with Lalo’s plan, and all the ways he could have gotten his objective much more surely.
That’s actually a really good analysis, I hadn’t thought of Jimmy’s abduction and reaction to W&J like that, it makes sense with what we now know happened and also fits with Jimmy’s character; he is 100% capable of such duplicity. I’m sure it wasn’t written like that in the original BB scene, in fact of course it wasn’t, but it totally fits. That’s the genius of this prequel, it has to contrive a lot in order to flow properly into BB, but it never feels contrived.
You should run with this thought. The only thing you clearly enjoy is pissing in people’s cereal, and steering the conversation into tedium and nitpickery just for the sake of nitpickery. Kim could have constructed a death ray and melted Lalo safely from a block away. She could have telepathically communicated with Mike to have him intervene.
Suggesting that Kim retrieve the gun from the car and return to “blow Lalo to Kingdom Come” has both the same likelihood of happening (you seriously don’t think Lalo hears the door open, or is going to win in a firefight with Kim? Ok.) as well as having the exact same outcome.
You may very well enjoy this sort of discussion. Scanning through this 700+ post thread suggests to me that nearly everyone else doesn’t.
You’re free to ignore my posts and I’ll be grateful if you would. I wasn’t aware that this was the “Let’s all suck Vince Gilligan’s dick” thread, as one of the nonexistent posters who never wrote in this thread at all has never written.
Eh, I think that’s a pretty visceral reaction–I like BCS and have enjoyed this entire storyline, I don’t think it’s wrong to point out Lalo’s or Kim’s or Gus’s plans have had holes in them. I don’t view them as plot holes, though, which may be where I and @Roger_That differ–my understanding of good storytelling is never that a character has to act with “perfect wisdom”, just that their actions have to follow some semblance of logic within the construct of the fictional world. I think Lalo’s actions are in line with his character–remember, he’s a Salamanca, the Salamancas as a group appear to all share one core trait–they put personal grievances and vendettas ahead of logic, good business sense, and rational thought. Lalo probably keeps his cool and is more deliberate than the other Salamancas we are shown (Tuco, Hector and the Twins), but he still has this core trait of putting grievance ahead of what might be the smartest option.
Lalo’s real smartest option would likely have been the same as Don Hector’s 20 years back–don’t fuck with Gus, Gus likely was not primed to be an enemy of the Salamancas until Don Hector killed his friend (vaguely suggested to be his lover)–and it is fairly obvious to me that while Eladio was in charge it was Hector who pushed for that outcome. There was a lot of money to have been made to have just dealt with Gus as a business partner, but the Salamancas were chronically incapable of doing that and pushed things to the point that they got all themselves killed.