Good point.
Gus/Mike didn’t kill the French engineer either, and they knew he was a blabbermouth. They felt their OPSEC was good enough so they could let him go, even though he knew their plans.
There’s an episode of The Wire that delves into this around the same time (like the episode actually aired in the early 2000s), in that particular season of the show burner phones are a major plot element, and there’s an episode where they go more in depth into how the drug gang is acquiring burner phones. Most of them are indeed bought by a foot soldier in the gang driving around the greater Baltimore/NoVA/DC area (sometimes upwards of 150 miles away) stopping at different convenience stores each time.
Yeah–I have zero experience as a criminal but my hunch from watching a lot of organized crime fiction 
is that you both need to scare them and send a message. Beat them into a coma? No. Give them a few serious whacks to the torso with the bat, breaking some ribs? Maybe. Or like you say, busting a few fingers. Something to let them know that you can do more than just threaten.
The Howard scene reinforces my impression that he is the Omaha cabdriver. He’s on a downward spiral. And I’m patiently waiting for Kim to form Ice Station Zebra Associates with Jimmy. She may not want to be his law partner, but ISZA would be a little side venture she can embark upon with him.
Right. I had him pegged as an intellectual psychopath, but not a sadistic one.
:eek:!
!:eek:
Holy crap. I missed that entirely. I just watched it again on youtube, and do you know, I think you’re right! ! !
The cab driver is played by Don Harvey, a different actor than Patrick Fabian, so I’m pretty sure he’s not actually supposed to be Howard in the future.
I agree. The point of the elaborate ‘hood on head’ sequence first shown with the French engineer, and the workers’ confinement in the warehouse with the amenities, was to establish that Gus and/or Mike had worked out a way to acquire workers who would do their job and go home without learning anything that could cause a problem for Gus.
As I said earlier, though, I do think one of the workers (at least) will end up dead and buried in the concrete of the lab. I suspect it will be something to do with Kai’s interest in “girls.” The showrunners would not have established the elaborate system of cameras and monitors, unless at least one of the workers would eventually try to get past it.
ISWYDT. A deep cut Bobby Ewing reference—nice!
I’ve said it before: I wish they hadn’t actually made him a Cinnabon manager, especially in Omaha. There’s no way he would be stupid enough to tell Walt that. It was a great, cheeky little throwaway line, meant just to say “best case, I’m working a regular Joe job somewhere and keeping my head down”. I love this show, but they shouldn’t have literalized that.
Interesting. I am thinking this was probably after season two, because I’ve seen just the first two seasons and I don’t recall that.
It dovetails nicely with what I said upthread about it being suspicious to keep going back to the same place and buying lots of phones. So they can schlep all over the place to buy them, or they can just do one-stop shopping with Jimmy, and pay a little more.
I’m agnostic on whether this was or was not intentional, and I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. But I would push back a little on Gus’s origin. It’s true that they never laid it out for us in BB, but if they didn’t have something in mind beyond “he grew up in Chile, then the stuff happened that we know about”, why did they have Hank and Mike say they couldn’t find out anything about him before 1986? Are we really supposed to take at face value Gus’s explanation to Hank that the Pinochet regime was guilty of poor record-keeping, among other things? What about the character (was it Hector?) who said “I know who you REALLY are”? That’s an awful lot of hinting if they just intended him to be a regular dude who grew up in poverty in Chile, before later getting into crime.
I mostly agree with this, and I absolutely do not believe Gus will have the workers killed (as long as they don’t try to escape or anything).
However, I do feel that Mike is often portrayed as more decent and honorable than he really was. Remember when he told Walt there was a chemical leak, so he could lure him down into the lab and kill him? Walt hadn’t done anything to deserve that.
Later, Mike delivered a high-minded speech about how “we had a good thing going” and they were making lots of money and Walt could have kept the gravy train going if he just kept his head down or whatever. “We all would have been fine”. But that’s not true: Walt could have avoided being marked for death only by letting Jesse die (and he had worked mightily just before that to peacefully de-escalate the conflict, recall).
By the time Mike delivered his contemptuous speech, he had become quite fond of Jesse. But he seemed oblivious of the fact that his “we all would have been fine” logic had a giant hole in it. (It also didn’t make sense that Gus was ultimately willing to keep Jesse around as a cook while killing Walt, since it all went back to Walt protecting Jesse. I think the writers lost the thread there somewhere.)
I think it’s implausible that someone as cautious and observant as Jimmy could get into a cab driven by Howard and not immediately notice that it’s Howard.
Also, “random taxi driver who turns out to be the villain” is a cliché that’s been done to death. I’d like to think the BCS writers are clever enough to avoid it.
Sure he had. Walt had killed two of Gus’s dealers, to prevent Jesse from killing them. In Mike’s eyes, they had both screwed up and it would have been legitimate to kill them at that point. The fact that Jesse thought the dealers had killed Andrea’s brother, and that Walt was trying to protect Jesse, wouldn’t have entered into it. Walt and Jesse had betrayed his employer’s operation, so they were fair game. Likewise Mike accepted Gus killing Victor because Victor had screwed up.
In either show, Mike never kills anyone aside from the two corrupt cops who killed his son, and members of opposing drug gangs.
Ah yes, but he certainly WANTED to kill Hector, didn’t he? And he was close to doing it too if Gus hadn’t stopped him.
I could argue some of this, but I’ll not contest it and simply ask: do you at least agree that Mike’s “we all could have been fine” speech makes no sense? Or that it didn’t make sense for Gus to later decide he wanted to keep Jesse around but kill Walt?
I can’t really answer this without rewatching all of the various falling-outs and reconciliations between Walt and Jesse, which I am not going to attempt now. The relationship between Fring and Walt really begins to unravel when Jesse finds out that Fring’s dealers had Andrea’s brother kill Combo and decides to poison them. But Walt rats on Jesse to Fring, which results in the brother’s death, which results in Jesse trying to gun the dealers down, which results in Walt killing the dealers to save Jesse. At points along the line there were probably ways in which Walt could have prevented the falling out between Fring and Jesse (and ultimately himself) by acting differently but this being Breaking Bad every situation goes from bad to worse, almost always due to some action by Walt.
After Gale’s death there’s an equally complicated series of machinations between Fring, Walt, and Jesse in which one or the other of them is trying to kill the others. But it’s usually Walt who is at the center of the web. So maybe Mike isn’t correct that everything would have been fine for everyone, but Walt was the principle engineer of disaster.
Heh, indeed–it’s midway through season 3, which aired in 2004.
The de facto (since the real leader is away) leader of the gang at this point is Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), it is his rule that his grunts have to buy the phones in small numbers spread around a lot of stores–and they aren’t allowed to go to the same store a second time for months. The guy whose job it is to actually go buy the phones, his girlfriend is on him the whole time to just “buy all the phones at one store”, because she says Stringer will never know and she thinks it’s “stupid” to have to drive for 8+ hours all over the region visiting random stores. But Stringer is the trust but verify type, he actually requires his guys to provide the receipts and you can rest assured there would be hell to pay if his guys couldn’t produce the receipts (this in itself ties in to an even bigger plot point, and pertains to how the police actually get up a wire tap on the burner phones–but I won’t get into open Wire spoilers.)
I loved how that was followed immediately by a shot of Jimmy pureeing the oranges.
Why doesn’t that label go on Jesse? Because in trying to kill those drug dealers he was being noble? But wasn’t it noble of Walt to save Jesse at great risk to himself?
As far as killing the Germans, these Germans are criminals, including the engineer. The French guy was a criminal, too. Doing this type of engineering work on the down low is what makes them special compared to some random civil engineering company out of the Yellow Pages (they would still have used the Yellow Pages back then).
Presumably, they’re not dumb criminals; you don’t build a reputation as a criminal civil engineer by being dumb. They most certainly have some type of insurance policy against being killed after a job, and it would be something that’s effective even without knowing the location of the laundry.
And killing off your contractors is akin to a reported releasing his sources. If you build a reputation for such, you’d find pretty quickly that other people don’t much want to conduct business with you.
I agree. And Pantastic points out it was a different actor, anyway, which I didn’t know. But it looked to me like Jimmy did recognize him, which is why he got out of the cab looking over his shoulder.
I didn’t interpret that Jimmy recognized the driver. I saw it as that Jimmy thought the *driver *recognized him. His Spidey-sense was tingling: “Have I been made?”
Jimmy (as Saul) was rather high-profile in the SW, what with TV and billboards. And his voice is quite distinctive. Jimmy would be looking over his shoulder quite a bit, I would think.
(I don’t believe for a second that the driver was Howard.)