Yeah, I think Howard and HHM would have survived in some fashion in the end. He was after all going to get a good chunk of the Sandpiper settlement and Howard is nothing if not resilient. But permanent damage for sure - the whispers would always be there, a weight to carry as HHM tried to convince current and potential clients they were trustworthy. They likely survive downsized and serving lower-end clientele less clued-in on the debacle or just swayed by Howard’s charm.
However as much as Kim and Jimmy’s plan was morally reprehensible and just wrong, robbing the agency of the Sandpiper clients, I can easily see how they convinced themselves they were right. Because I’m half-convinced they were right in the sense that time was of the essence. Some of the Sandpiper clients were simply not giving to survive until end of a long trial and others were not going to be in a position to enjoy it. Not to mentions trials up the risk of losing altogether. Settling for a substantial amount was the morally expedient choice, just sub-optimal for the law-firms (and perhaps the Sandpiper client’s heirs). Kim wanting to help people dovetails directly into that. She shouldn’t be making decisions for others - that’s paternalistic. But Howard also shouldn’t be blowing rainbow-colored smoke up the client’s asses, but should have been more bluntly upfront on the risks/rewards of going to trial. Howard was more concerned with profits and was also being paternalistic and snowing the Sandpiper claimants, rather than properly advising them as an advocate.
I completely agree with this. If I were a Sandpiper client, taking money now is definitely the best choice. Howard’s plan was screwing them for his own gain.
Absolutely not. Howard didn’t lie, mislead, or confuse them. He made an argument for that plan of action and his clients agreed with him, simple as that. Had the clients decided on getting the money now after he made his pitch, they would get it.
I also disagree money now is the best course of action. Always giving a low payout to elderly because they may die is a green light to abuse the elderly because you can get away with a lower than deserved fine.
Ehhh… I think they downplayed how long it would take. And it terms of percentage, each member of the class won’t get that much more by taking it to court. The big winner will be HHM. The class representative even says she’s only going to take a deal if Howard and Cliff say to. That isn’t to say Saul is any better, but I don’t think either them have the clients best interests at heart.
There was one lady who made the decision for all of the clients. She was the representative in the meetings. She trusted whatever Howard advised and didn’t really fully understand the implications. If she were my grandma and in this specific instance, I would have strongly advised talking the settlement.
In the business he’s in, it would made little sense for the violent death of a mere business associate to trigger an obsessive single-minded decade-spanning long game of revenge.
Coke only stays in your system for two or three days so he would have had to move quick but whether or not he was on drugs, he still made the seemingly insane false accusation.
The discussion of the Max/Gus pool scene in BB reminds me of one still unanswered question: Who was Gus in Chile? In the aforementioned pool scene Eladio makes a point that he isn’t killing Gus because he knows who Gus really is, but warns Gus that “he is not in Chile anymore.”
Probably true, but Gus is shown as being quite OCD which might play into his behavior as well.
There is open talk of a prequel Gus series that would delve into his backstory; there has been general speculation that Gus was involved with the Pinochet dictatorship in some way.
On BB, it was heavily implied that “Gustavo Fring” wasn’t actually his real name; Hank mentioned that he did a background check on Fring and couldn’t find anything on the name until Gus immigrated to the U.S. (this was one of the primary reasons Hank was suspicious of Gus). Gus blamed this on the poor record keeping and general chaos of Chilean government, but this was far from convincing.
Kim’s only purpose in destroying Howard was to get Jimmy his share of the Sandpiper money now. Plus some revenge. She may have justified it by thinking she was helping the plaintiffs, but she knows she doesn’t give any more of a damn about them than any other lawyer in the case.
Gus & Kim are my favorite two characters. I’d love to a spinoff that is part Gus prequel, flashing back extensively to Gus’s backstory; part a parallel story for where Kim goes post-BCS, does she break bad? Then Gus & Kim’s stories converge somehow between BCS era and BB era.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.
For one thing, it’s 100% clear that Kim genuinely cares about helping “the little guy”. And it’s also clear that she really loves “the game” when it comes to the scams that she and Jimmy pull.
So I think if you asked her why she was doing the scam, she might say, and, at the time, believe, that it was to help the little guys. And that’s partly true. But she was so committed to it, because she loved doing it so much. And the combination of those two factors tugging on her let her convince herself that Howard was a bad guy who deserved it… but of course being a bit of a dick to her at various points along her career did not actually make him a bad guy, and she realized afterwards that of course he didn’t deserve what actually happened to him, no matter what she had talked herself into believing.
But then she realized that if she stayed with Jimmy, the same pattern would repeat itself.
But that’s a common theme among con artists. There’s the notion that “you can’t con an honest man”, which gives them a patina of moral coverage. If you were honest, you would never have fallen for the con, so you deserve what you get. Look at all the short cons we saw Jimmy pull prior to moving to Albuquerque, and the cons Jimmy and Kim were pulling off before they went after Howard. They all played on exploiting the marks’ inherent greed.
Hector at one point calls him the “big generalissimo.” While he says it deridingly, the context of the scene suggests that there might be some truth to it.
I think some people viewed BB as a macho fantasy of high crime too, and being gay didn’t fit into this story.
It wasn’t openly stated though, so it was ambiguous. Also, was there any scenes with Gus’s supposed family in BB? Still, even that might be a cover anyway, or a real thing (later life out of closet).
It also seemed to be an undercurrent of why the macho cartel people hated him too.