I wonder how long it took David Costabile to learn that song. That was impressive. He does something similar in BB.
Gus and Hector were both transporting. The cartel’s decision to go with Gus only is what triggered Hector’s collapse (Hector lost his transport with the loss of the ice cream business, and was trying to start again with Nacho’s dad). That left Gus with control over transport. Now, with the cartel telling Gus to go with local manufacturers, he’s setting up to control production and distribution.
Tuco didn’t take Hector with him. Hector was already at the house before Tuco arrived, entirely alone despite the fact he was completely unable to take care of himself.
Tuco was on the run because the DEA had found No-Doze’s body and ID’d Tuco’s fingerprints. They raided his hideout and scooped up all his crew. Tuco managed to get away and kidnapped Jesse and Walt and went to the house where Hector was because he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t have Hector with him, and no one else would have been available to take him there. The whole thing was unplanned. Tuco called the twins to come and get him after the raid.
Hector needed full-time care. He couldn’t feed himself or go to the bathroom. Tuco would hardly have had the time to care for him entirely by himself, especially if he were at a house way out in the desert, so he presumably would have had someone taking care of him. But there was no sign of such a person.
Back when HHM was treating her shitty and that high-dollar firm was plying her with Moscow Mules trying to hire her away, I think she told them her hometown was on the Kansas/Nebraska border. They asked why she left and she looked sort of uneasy when she said, “no opportunities.”
We all jumped on that and said, “yeah, there’s more there than meets the eye!”
Goid point. A bit of a problem plot point that somehow I didn’t even consider when I watched Breaking Bad.
Me either when I watched it the first time. But Breaking Bad was usually moving along at such a headlong rush that you didn’t have time to think about this kind of question.
Maybe BCS will get around to addressing why Hector was out there. It wasn’t to hide from the DEA, because when they found him they knew who he was but didn’t care.
It might be that Tuco realized that Gus was planning to kill Hector, and hid him there because of that. But that still doesn’t explain why Hector was alone. Maybe the henchman whose job it was to take care of him was arrested by the DEA when he was in town.
I wondered if he may have bought it from Ed the Extractor.
Maybe in Nebraska she’s “Slippin’ Kimmy” 
Regarding Chuck’s letter to Jimmy: the letter was clearly written before Jimmy passed the bar exam - it was undated and only references Jimmy’s work at HHM. Also, it says something like, “although we don’t see eye to eye, and probably won’t in the future” - not exactly the wording one would use if the letter were to be read posthumously. It actually sounded a lot (in tone, not content) like a letter my dad wrote to me before he went in for heart surgery back in the 80s (he survived, but gave me the letter anyway). Probably a letter he wrote some years before but never gave Jimmy. I think the purpose of the letter is not what the letter says or Jimmy’s reaction to it, but rather Kim’s reaction.
Kim has a deep, dark secret.
Do we know that the cartel is dealing in meth yet? The packages seem to my untrained eye to be cocaine (fine powder rather than crystals). Recall that in the BB flashback to when Hector met Don Eladio that Eladio was vehemently opposed to meth. I’m thinking that Gus will take the interruption in the cocaine supply to start switching over to meth production and distribution. The cartel will be pissed off until they see how much money Gus is bringing in.
Good points, Pantastic. I guess I’d forgotten that it was implied that Jimmy did spend a lot of time with Mrs. Strauss.
By the way, the plot device of the ‘variants of widely-differing values’ seems to be invented–at least with regard to Hummels. There IS a ‘Bavarian Boy’ Hummel, but it doesn’t resemble the Wanderer one.
The writer(s) may have gotten the idea from Ty Beanie Babies. I believe there are some look-alike variants that have widely-differing values.
I think you’re right about that. I’m one of those who believe that Kim’s strong reaction in the room with the bank-expansion models had to do with the mention of Nebraska in particular. But we shall see.
Heh. Could be! The writers do love their Easter eggs!
That is TOO good. 
Heh. Yep, maybe she’s so super ethical and such a stickler for the rules because she doesn’t dare draw attention to herself.
She does have a natural talent for it, remember how exhilarated she was after she and Jimmy conned that obnoxious stock market guy into buying them the most expensive tequila in the world.
BTW - I loved the way she jumped Jimmy’s bones on movie night in “Breathe.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something along those lines, because she doesn’t seem to have a natural inclination to follow the rules the way that Chuck or Howard do - she liked pulling the tequila scam, she helped Jimmy cover up the Chuck sabotage, and she liked hearing about the Squat Cobbler situation right up until Jimmy admitted to outright faked evidence. The way she responded to Squat Cobbler read to me more like ‘you could get caught at that, it’s too risky, and by telling me about it I could get in trouble too’ than ‘that is fundamentally wrong and I want no part of it’. Then again, I don’t seem to be able to predict much with Kim lol.
She does seem to enjoy the thrill of small cons, but would never really profit from them, other than tequila. Remember that the second con was all Kim’s idea. She was in a bar, sleazy guy hit on her just minutes after she saw his wife drop him off. She smiled, became Giselle again, phoned Jimmy to join her, he did and they somehow got a $10,000 check for their phony company. A check that she just wanted to keep as a trophy.
I still don’t think she did anything crooked in Nebraska, just sense that she doesn’t want to think of something that happened there.
Gilligan and Gould must have such fun playing with our minds.
I have a feeling Nebraska is where Kim returns to when Jimmy becomes Saul. And so maybe Gene will meet up with her again someday.
Well, Kim is attracted to Jimmy, so it’s a good bet her father is slippery. Fooling people is play for her, so she likely was introduced to it early. Maybe she just comes from a notorious family, and knows that in Nebraska her clients will hear about it?
Traveler stock would fit her pretty well. Or is there such a thing as Nebraska mafia? LOL! She doesn’t fit as a mafioso’s kid though.
It could also be that she has really poor family who would suck her dry if they knew she was a high falutin’ lawyer. . . Or who lost their farm to predatory lenders and so being part of banking in farm areas is another kettle of fish for her morally speaking. I don’t know why I think she was a farm girl, is that canon?
Or - and this is my actual prediction - there is something she got nailed for as a juvenile. It’s been expunged from her record, so didn’t show up when they did her background check for the bar exam, but was in the papers back when and folks back home will remember.
[quote=“Pantastic, post:231, topic:818792”]
…
Jimmy spent a lot of time with Mrs. Strauss going over her Hummel collection, including who was getting which one. I’m confident that one of the things she went over is distinguishing the different ones so that the wrong one didn’t go to the cousin she didn’t like, and that’s where Jimmy learned to tell them apart. He also wasn’t trying to figure out if something a random person handed him was real or fake (which would take more expertise), he’s presuming it’s real and just has to distinguish which one it is. Since they’ve actually spent screen time showing him learning Hummel identification, him being able to recognize a collectible one doesn’t seem surprising at all to me.
This raises an interesting point. Why did they spend so much time on Hummels back then? What season was this? Were the writers setting up the current plot point way back then? Are they planning that far ahead?
I think it’s just simple characterization, not some elaborate master plan. Hummels are a thing that old people collect (especially back then), and showing Jimmy painstakingly going through and making sure that each figurine goes to the right relative shows how much time an energy he was investing in his clients. They also showed that he’s got a decent knack for spotting valuable collectible items when he would snipe valuable coins while working the till at his father’s shop. Now 2-3 seasons later, they want Jimmy to spot something valuable that the owner doesn’t realize is valuable, and they realize they have a perfect item for him to spot. Seems more likely that they’ve given the character these traits, then draw on them for a new situation than that back in the first season, when they weren’t sure they’d even get renewed, they decided they were going to use the figurine as a plot point in three years time and deliberately set it up.
I don’t think they’ve ever said she’s from a farm. I got the impression that she was from some kind of non-noteworthy general middle class or lower middle class background, but I think they’ve left it wide open.