Better Call Saul: Season IV

Cafe Society
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The episode serves more functions than that.

We know that by Breaking Bad Stacey is keeping Mike at a distance. This is showing that fracture’s start.

It is also the insight into Mike’s psyche. Established in visual metaphor that Matty’s memory (and likely his sense of guilt) is fixed in cement for Mike. Stacey’s comment about being able to not think about Matty as constantly, not having his memory in the same cement that Mike does, (even if feeling guilty and even scared about that) is psychological attack on that. Mike’s go-to defense mechanism, his coping strategy, is “intellectualization”. He uses going to reasoning, his professional skill set, to “block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress.” He thinks to avoid having to deal with his feelings. And he punched down liar guy to displace his anger at Stacy beginning to move on and put grief in a box rather than front and center all the time.

It is why he is not capable of just sitting around watching ballgames and cashing the checks. He needs to be keeping his mind working in his professional reasoning capacity.

This is what drives him as a character.

There is a parallel I think to Walt. Mike ends up saving lots of money for his granddaughter and likely convinces himself that doing that is why he does the unsavory things he does, just as Walt tries to think of himself as doing it for his family. But we as viewers know better. They are not really doing what they do to provide or for the money. Neither of them.

Liar guy was lying. Maybe for good psychological reason maybe not. Certainly if his attacking liar guy causes harm the fracture with Stacy will accelerate. Minimally it has walled Mike off from furthering his friendship and possible budding romantic relationship with breakfast woman.

It also creates a parallel with Jimmy. Both have a hard time tolerating people who can be scammed. Mike attacked the scammer more than the chumps and Jimmy the chump, but they both have some contempt for the gullible.

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Very nice analysis.

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Good eye for detail, DSeid.

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+1

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Yes, excellent analysis from DSeid. It made me realise two other things:

  1. Mike will tell himself that the reason Stacey can go for some time without thinking about Matty and he can’t is because he loves Matty more deeply and that she is betraying his memory. The truth of course is that he is still wracked with guilt over how he revealed himself to Matty as corrupt in order to protect him - and still failed. “I broke my boy”. Part of that guilt will be about how he, unlike Matty, tolerated corruption. Which brings us to

  2. Mike, albeit through criminal means, now has a role which involves enforcing rules. And by God, every rule will be enforced to the letter. A guy who turned a blind eye to cops taking bribes (and took a few himself?) now can’t and won’t overlook some minor fraying on a cargo belt. Everything will be done according to the rules, and everybody Mike has power over will get behind that or go jump. Because the rules matter, now more than ever.

Left to himself, Mike would probably not have pursued further criminality. He’s got a job which suits him, and even once the laundering of his money is complete and (presumably) Madrigal let him go, he could use that to get more work in a similar line. But… Gus dragged him out there. And while Mike is obviously quite prepared to die if that’s what Gus had ordered, he also seems prepared to hear what Gus is going to ask.

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I think Mike is building a distribution op for Gus. All these little things are the type of stuff that can get you selected for inspection at the border or by highway patrol. A tight, safe, operation never gives the authorities an excuse to dig deeper.

When Lydia called Gus, he figured out that Mike had identified a large potential benefit for him and was examining the processes in depth. Mike is learning a whole more than how the boxes are stacked as he walks through the warehouses.

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Huh? She was letting him take her daughter, unsupervised, right up to the last day of his life.

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New Episode Tonight S4E5

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I agree, I don’t think Mike is just being a control-freak to deal with his problems, he’s making sure this operation doesn’t blow up in his face since he’s on the books for it now. He knows Gus has something to do with moving drugs and he suspects this is going to be part of it, even if it’s not now. Things like putting ‘do not stack’ boxes on each other is an ‘oh well, minor loss’ if you’re moving legitimate cargo, but if the box that gets squished has contraband in it then it’s exposed for authorities to see or dogs to smell.

I don’t think they did that in the shootout scene - the knife the two guys in front, then rush in and start killing people as fast as they can before anyone can react. After the initial surprise wears off, they’re both using cover and surprise (one popping out of the door, the other sneaking around to attack from behind), and neither one is standing in the middle of the space terminator-like just shooting. I don’t see where they acted like they couldn’t be shot in the back in what we saw. Also, there were clearly two ways this could have gone badly - if it wasn’t for Nacho, the cousin using two pistols would likely have been shot by the guy with a rifle who rushed back in his truck, and if the Espinosas had actually hit the Salamancas they’d be way more prepared and the cousins likely would not have fared as well.

An interesting thing I just realized - in the two big fights that we see the cousins involved in (the duel with Hank and this firefight), Gus is actually pulling the strings for success or failure. He framed the Espinosas for the attack on the Salamancas here, and sold/gave them the stolen drugs so they were complacent (and possibly stoned). Meanwhile with the Hank attempt, Gus called and warned him that the cousins were about to kill him giving him enough warning to fight back. In either case if Gus had changed his mind about warning or not, the fight would probably have gone the other way.

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They do believe they have protection though. They also spend a fortune on clothing, so it’s reasonable to think they have bullet proof shirts. Have we ever seen them remove their jackets? And let’s not forget their upbringing.

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Was that the first “during Breaking Bad” scene we’ve seen so far on BCS?

What was wrong with the first excavator guy? Seven months was too long? Or was he too confident?

What’s the over/under on how many episodes it takes Jimmy to get his money back and/or revenge on the juvenile hoodlums?

How long until Kim is done with Mesa Verde? Or did she get the “public defender” stuff out of her system and she meant it when she said it wouldn’t happen again? She’s gotta be slipping if there was a mistake in the first place. I really can’t judge where her story’s going next.

Oh and Howard looked rough! Good to see him again but man. I felt bad for him. I wonder how he’s holding it all together. And how HHM is doing now that he’s the only captain at the helm.

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Yes. When they are sneaking into the US in Breaking Bad, they discard their fancy suits and put on clothes they get from a Mexican family. At this point they don’t have bullet proof vests. Somehow they acquire new identical fancy suits by the next time we see them in Albuquerque visiting Hector. I always wondered whether they had just stopped by the Hitman Store to pick up suits in their sizes.

They do buy bullet-proof vests for their attack on Hank, and that saves one of the twins when Hank shoots him in the chest. Hank eventually kills him by shooting him in the head. However, this implies they were not in the habit of wearing bullet proof vests before this.

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Did I see a 1982 Chevrolet Monte Carlo at the Dog House?

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Why did Kim not brush off Paige with the old reliable; “can’t talk now, in Court”, especially since its true?

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Not sure, but I get the impression as far as Mesa Verde are concerned Kim has no other clients. Brushing Paige off with no explanation is better than saying that she is prioritising another client. There are many things that could happen in someone’s personal life that would trump any client. Kim could later imply it was one of them, and a one-off thing.

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Unless she was working as an inhouse Counsel, they have no specific rights to her time.
Everyone involved needs to understand that sometimes she will be working on other things.
Clashes, being double booked are things which happen with some regularity* and both women should be experienced enough to know and handle it.

*I had one today infact. Spent 45 minutes sitting in Court on my smartphone dealing with it.

(As an aside, how did people work before the BlackBerry and Smartphones and cheap LTE? ;)).

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The effort of creation of the secret area for the lab seems really over the top here, especially as in Breaking Bad they rely on numerous laundry mooks to keep their eyes shut and say nothing.

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I loved this episode! One of the best of the series IMO. The little unexpected taste of Saul was great, and the “normal” parts of the episode were really good too.

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This one kinda bugged me. The box said “Do not double stack”. Those boxes weren’t double stacked. “Do not double stack” doesn’t mean you can’t stack them, it means you can’t take one pallet and set it on top of another.

Be that as it may, they can certainly fire her for making mistakes and hanging up on them when they call her.

We made a lot of phone calls.
At my business we have some delivery drivers, before cell phones if you needed to get a hold of someone, you’d start calling all the places they were delivering to on that particular run. You’d ask if your delivery person had been there yet, if he hadn’t, you’d have them tell him to call in when he gets there.
That was a pretty common practice until the late 90’s when business would start sending their drivers out with cell phones.

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I liked the symbolism in the Breaking Bad time opening - Jimmy cutting into the constitution wall to at the section outlining the makeup of the courts to get his shoebox of memories was really good. The shots and music in the scene closely mirrored Chuck’s final scene at the end of last season, and watching Francesca silently bargain with Jimmy was great. The hiding place is excellent, I can just picture some cops getting a warrant to search in that place and Saul in court shouting to a judge that they’re literally tearing up the constitution.

Jimmy taking the phones to sell himself was great, and a really smart idea. The fact that he didn’t notice the kids hanging around and ended up getting mugged shows that he’s slipped a bit from slippin’ Jimmy. Liked the symbolism of him having “The Man” left on the store while he was cleaning. I don’t think cc mobile is going to let Jimmy walk away from his burner phone sales concept - someone is going to notice that his store did several months worth of sales in one day, and they’re going to want him to repeat it. My prediction is they’ll push him to repeat it, and he’ll end up needing to do late night sales again, and will work out some kind of deal with Huell or the bikers to guard him and maybe teach the juvenile mugging squad a lesson, pushing him further into the Saul world.

How badly could the French engineer screw up his pitch? He brags about another secret job, half-asses looking around the property for five minutes, then promises to have it done within six months, seven at the outside. Gus doesn’t have our advantage of knowing that it will take five years (the lab is completed in the BB time frame), but I’m pretty sure he knows six months is absurdly optimistic.

Getting a few low-paid workers to ignore people coming and going once in a while is not that hard, especially if they’re illegal aliens or have family who are (since they won’t be inclined to tell the authorities anything). Also the amount of traffic would be less if Gus had stuck to his plan and used Gail, who wouldn’t be dragging in all the trouble that Walt did. Bringing in an engineer is different, if you get someone legitimate then they’re going to want to pull permits and file blueprints for the work. Same thing with blasting, the nearby town is going to be perturbed if their is major seismic activity going on, and the ATF tends to frown on that kind of thing.

Sure they have that right. Part of Kim’s pitch when she was trying to get them to go with her over HHM was that she’d be dedicated to Mesa Verda, that while she wouldn’t be as big or experienced as a large firm, she’d be focused on them and driven, that MV wouldn’t just be one among a huge list of clients. I’d say that Kim needs to understand that if she can’t deliver on her promise, they’ll just do the safe thing and go with a big firm that can easily do what she’s failing at.

If this is going to happen with some regularity, Paige and Kevin will have the experience of hiring someone that it won’t happen with. A large firm like HHM or D&M will have enough people and procedures that if they call with a major problem today, someone can help fix it today. Also note that if Kim was really handling it, there wouldn’t be a problem - her paralegal would be in place to cover for her, but she failed to do that. She needs to get her mid-career crisis under control, she’s going to burn up her goodwill pretty quickly at this rate.