If I recall correctly he met him as you say, but didn’t know who he was.
Right. At least from what he said on BB, he wasn’t aware that Fring was the meth kingpin he was putting Walt in touch with. And he apparently wasn’t even aware that Mike worked for Fring directly.
Of course, this could have been some kind of misdirect by Saul to conceal from Walt that he knew Fring, but Saul was more inclined to boast about his capabilities. I’m not sure why he would have wanted to obscure the connection from Walt.
Sort of a random gripe, but did anyone else get extremely annoyed at the eating noises of the judge as he was talking to Kim? Damn was that annoying!
Kind of like Allfather’s noodle slurping noises on Preacher.
Sort of. But Allfather is supposed to be a disgusting blob. The judge in BCS was just a normal guy.
It just really irritated me - “smack, smack, smack”
ugh.
Absolutely! Nothing sends me to the Mute button faster than shit like that.
Preacher. Jeez, is there a thread for that trainwreck?
I think it was supposed to be irritating - it’s highlighting the lack of glamor in real law, like Jimmy’s vending machine food and bringing a burger as a bribe back in S1. In S3-4, we haven’t hit much of the ‘real world’ law; the Chuck trial was very ‘proper’ and the elder escapades were more silly than dingy. I think they’re trying harken back to that ‘realistic and slightly gross’ feel they did as a precursor to having more things happen in the courtroom.
“Met” is technically correct but gives the wrong impression. Mike hired (or asked a favor) Jimmy to stake out Gus’s restaurant and figure out where a bag was being handed off to. Gus realized something was up, made Jimmy as up to something, and quietly called off the switch. Jimmy thought that they did something with the trash can, and started digging into it. Gus noticed this and confronted him in polite manager mode to ask what he was doing, and Jimmy took off his watch and pretended to have lost it. Gus then helped Jimmy recover his watch and offered to help clean it (or maybe pay to clean his shirt, something like that).
Jimmy thinks something was going on at that restaurant (why would Mike want him to poke around otherwise?) and can probably guess that drugs are involved, but has no idea that Gus is anything other than a restaurant manager. Gus knows that Mike got Jimmy to do some minor spying for him, but might not even know who Jimmy is or care much.
I haven’t seen Ep 4 in case it sheds any light
- I agree, I’d be really surprised and would think it out of character for Howard or Kim to play some game with the letter, separately or together, for Jimmy’s benefit. They both care about him in their ways, but that’s not how either operate.
I guess it’s just Jimmy’s weird reaction to Chuck’s death. The letter itself isn’t so surprising as others have explained well. Undated, it does not contradict the picture we have of Chuck at certain times: willing to be an ostensibly good big brother to Jimmy as long as Jimmy was on the right side of the law far enough below Chuck in the pecking order of life. What stirred up Chuck’s deep, dark resentment of Jimmy, and he’d never write something that conciliatory when that resentment had surfaced, was when Jimmy showed any sign of remotely challenging Chuck’s relative status, and especially cutting corners to do it and not being held to account for it.
- Internet timelines say BCS Season 4 is taking place in 2003, Season 1 is generally thought to be in 2002. Likewise BB progressed less than 2 calendar years over 5 seasons, premiering in 2008 and besides the general assumption it was set ‘now’, Walter turned 50 not long after and his birth year was given at one point as 1959. So BCS would have to have an uncharacteristic time jump (like when Boardwalk Empire shifted from 1924 to 1931 between second to last and last seasons) and also run into BB time to get to the bottom of the financial crisis. Some mortgage stuff started souring noticeably in 2007 but even that’s multiple seasons away the way BB/BCS have normally inched along in time.
I think that the phone store will be to showcase Jimmy’s amazing sales abilities. The store will go from quiet to bringing in the most business of all of them.
That sounds very plausible.
Nitpick: BB actually extended a little over two years. We saw three Walt birthdays altogether. But the the first 50 of the 62 episodes take place in the first year, except a brief flash-forward in the 47th episode. The next 11 episodes take place in the second year, and the final episode in the days or weeks just beyond the two year mark.
A lot of people get worked up over these sounds—also about podcasts in which lip and tongue sounds are prominent. I either don’t notice (as in this case) or don’t care. Interesting psychological phenomenon.
There are areas of many cities where even an ambulance will not go, much less the police. Camden, NJ is an example. But honestly I don’t think anyone who remained in that neighborhood after the dealers took over the motel site is the type to call police over anything. They’d be far more afraid of the cartel than of stray bullets going by.
True. And Jimmy is specifically targeting the cash end of the business. The “privacy” seekers are the burner phone buyers, who use cash. Jimmy is finding his target demographic. He has an affinity for this kind of work.
Yes, a deep personal peeve for me. The local NPR stations all got HD microphones a couple of years back, and still occasionally I have to choose between switching the station or listening to somebody’s mouth moisture between words. When they first got them it was constant and horrific. Blech!
As for Kim, I think she is trying on a different sort of future. In the end I don’t think criminal defense will be for her. But she’d be very good at it.
I watch the show with the closed captions on. They said “smacking noises” throughout that scene.
“Talk” seemed to bring all the main characters to some sort of crossroads - Jimmy, Kim, Nacho, and Mike. They seem almost hopeless, even angry. The decisions they’ll make will change everything.
One thing for sure, Kim is not happy. She sure wasn’t excited about the bank’s expansion. Could be Nebraska, but maybe she’s just bored with corporate law, overseeing Mesa Verde might overwhelm her. Remember how she threw herself into it last season, no sleep caused her car accident. Maybe that changed her priorites. She doesn’t need more work, she wants an escape. Maybe to get back in touch with the reason she wanted to be a lawyer in the first place?
When the judge told her that the cases he deals with every day are much less glamorous and career-altering than the movie ones, and warns her against “trolling in his court” again - she flat-out returns to the courtroom with a defiant look on her face. Why? Is she daring him to assign her to a case? Kim, for me, is the most compelling character. I can sort of “read” the other characters, but not her.
“All wrapped up in your sad little stories, and feeding off each other’s misery.”
Mike angrily turns on a loved one in group therapy. Maybe the Matty flashback was fresh in his mind. I was very moved by the scene where Banks acts with his entire body, his breathing, his eyes, but says not a word, when his daughter-in-law shares that she’s slowly forgetting Matty. Notice that he ignores a phone call from Stacey for the first time.
Jimmy Hustle is the only one who jumps in to make his boring situation work to his advantage. He tells Ira the Hummel thief that he might have more work for him in the future, (oh no, Jimmy, not the sweet old Hummel lady). Then Ira says his number will be changing, since he never keeps the same cell phone for more than one job. You can almost see the light bulb in Jimmy’s head.
The sign he painted will bring clientel who are right up his alley. He’ll tap into the market potential of petty-with-a-prior criminals, burglars, drug dealers … all who need burner phones. A tiny step closer to Saul. We’ll just see what Kim thinks about this…
I worry the most about poor Nacho, will he make it to the end of this season? He’s helplessly involved in the cartel fight, struggling to just stay alive, but sinking deeper into Gus’ murderous grip. There’s no way out for him. The scenes with his father beak my heart. How did he get caught up in a life of crime? Why couldn’t he just be satisfied working in his loving father’s upholstery shop? And will his father’s help bring down hell on them both?
The motel shoot-out was masterfully done, the dealer’s long walk to show the whole set-up, then all the blood, guts and gore happens off screen, while we watch outside from Nacho’s point of view. I preferred BCS’s easier handling of violence … but it looks like that’s not going to last.
sounds like a Face Off?!?
One thing that’s changed this season is that Jimmy is keeping Kim in the dark - in previous seasons she didn’t know everything he was up to, but she knew a lot of it and she certainly knew the shape of it. She joined him on minor scams, seemed shocked at fabricating evidence but found Squat Cobbler funny before that, and decided to help him cover his tracks in the Chuck forgery even though she clearly didn’t approve of what he did. She even covered for him on the decision to air the commercial, which was kind of weird to me since she could have put all the blame on Jimmy when talking to Chuck and Howard without hurting Jimmy. But I don’t think Jimmy is going to share the cleverness of his Hummel switch B&E with her, and when he starts building the circle of cronies that he has in Saul time, I don’t think he’s going to boast to her ‘look honey, I found a great fence this week’. Will be interesting to see what happens with that part of their relationship, I think Kim is going to find out enough that she has a hard decision to make.
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe this.
I don’t believe there are any areas that police consider no-go other than temporary emergencies, that would indicate a really major breakdown in the state functioning. similarly, I don’t think there’s anywhere where fire or EMT services absolutely refuse to go, fire services especially since an out of control fire can just spread. There are definitely bad areas in a variety of places where police won’t go alone and where fire/EMT services only go with a police escort, though.
BB/BCS have both stretched reality in terms of police non-response IMO. There is basically nowhere in the US where prolonged gun battles including automatic fire would not result in anonymous calls to the police and the police responding fairly soon, unless the place is so remote nobody hears or it’s many minutes from the police. IOW it was more plausible in the shootout at Hector Salamanca’s cabin in BB than this recent case.
But it’s a TV show(s), a good one(s) I think and few seem to think they aren’t good.
But on another relative weakness, you kinda have to have big shootouts to prevent people going to sleep if the other story line is going to feature watching Jimmy clean up and bounce a ball for minutes. 
Telling the story the way they want at the pace they want gets a little extreme, in BCS particularly, at times.
It was also not just for no reason that it was the writing of Matty in cement in his mind in that context.
Rob Cesternino and Antonio Mazzara chewed over this pace issue on their BCS podcast this week, and Chris Ryan referenced it on The Watch. (People made similar complaints about “The Americans”.) Antonio half-jokingly said they are not in trouble with AMC as long as they haven’t lost Alan Sepinwall. I agree with Rob and Chris: this is the show they want to make, and they have achieved enough in their careers that they will get to keep making it their way unless and until the viewership goes off a cliff. Even then, they wouldn’t likely change but would probably just stop.
And like Rob and Chris, I’m quite happy with the show’s pace. But I understand MMV.