Well we saw the emergence of the Saul Goodman name in ABQ.
Why was Kim buying office supplies?
Oh and Kim’s famous pony tail is back!
Clearly all of the cases that Kim mentioned to the DA prior to Huell are white people. I think that’s the angle to get him off.
They weren’t office supplies, they were crayons and markers and coloring books. My guess is that she’s going to push for house arrest and she’s buying him some stuff to keep him busy (though DVD’s would have been better, IMO) or she’s going to trying to make it look like he’s LD/mentally disabled/autistic etc. Perhaps if she can show that he’s only got the mind of [young age] he may still be able to pick pocket or attempt to protect jimmy (with a bag of sandwiches), but this man-boy just spends his days coloring and [doing other non-intellectual things].
As I think about it more, I think, but may be misremembering, that she also grabbed a stack of greeting cards. That threw me since it doesn’t line up with either of my ideas. If that’s the case, it could be to make it look like a a group of people, probably kids, wrote him cards. But even in that case, she wouldn’t need that many boxes of crayons and markers.
Does anyone remember the codes she asked to be pulled. Perhaps there’s a clue in them.
I think the strategy you are describing would come across as horrifically racist.
I think Jimmy is in complete denial about the distance between him and Kim - when he was looking at the property with Huell, you could tell that the ‘partner office’ was for her even though she doesn’t just have a good job, she’s got a really great career path that is looking really for her in the long term. Also, I don’t think he’s realized how far down the Saul path he’s gone - it’s a long way from sticking a sleazeball with a big bar tab to trying to make a cop look drunk in court to win a case. It’s the same way he’s dealing with Chuck’s death, just burying the feelings and moving on. I think the weird skiing explosion is a symptom of that, he resets Rich for ‘stealing’ her away from Wexler-McGill, and he was trying to score points against the guy in a ham-handed way because blaming the slick lawyer is easier than looking at himself.
I think she was clearly not a Jimmy fan, but I don’t think we can extrapolate that to the legal community as a whole - last episode, Rich didn’t seem to have any particular animosity towards Jimmy, for example. This episode no one at the office party seemed to have any bad feelings towards him until he did the weird Skiing thing. And let’s be fair, ‘a disbarred lawyer selling burner phones to criminals’ is a pretty spot on description of where Jimmy is now, she’s not exactly stretching to make him look bad.
Or his parole - Huell has a pickpocketing conviction and is now facing charges for assaulting an officer, so might count as a known criminal.
It didn’t look like office supplies, it looked like coloring supplies to me. My guess is that she’s going to have him doing some kind of project helping kids, and paint him as a guy who made a minor mistake three years ago and now tries to do good. Or maybe she’s going to have Jimmy doing the ‘helping kids draw’ thing, and have Huell as his assistant. She can then portray the burner phones as a noble way to keep kids in touch with working and distant relatives instead of a legal but shady enterprise, and push for Huell to get community service helping kids instead of prison time.
I like just how far Gus goes for revenge. He built a new wing of a hospital to motivate a specialist to come in and nurse Hector just enough back to health that he could torture him, and stopped treatment of Hector as soon as he knew that Hector’s personality was intact. And I like that Hector’s lechery was what let Gus know ‘there’s enough Hector left to torture, time to stop treatment.’ It’s interesting that the doctor didn’t pick up on Hector leering at the thicc nurse even when Gus replayed the scene.
Speaking of lechery, one thing we haven’t seen from Jimmy (except maybe for the Kevin Costner thing) is the sexist comments. Saul is constantly making passes and dirty comments at women in BB and talks the ‘happy ending’ massage place, but it’s not Jimmy’s way at all. It’s possible that part of his persona is an attempt to deliberately keep from getting as close to anyone as he is to Kim.
And even more lechery, I’m not really sure why it’s a surprise to Mike that keeping a bunch of young guys with money away from women for a year is causing problems, or why he hasn’t already solved it. Gus is running a major drug operation, while it doesn’t handle prostitution directly and Gus has little use for them himself (even if he’s not gay, he seems driven enough that it wouldn’t appeal to him) they shouldn’t really have trouble finding some pretty girls to entertain the guys who, for the right price, are willing to take a van to an undisclosed location. They don’t even need to use the warehouse, rent a cabin somewhere for a weekend of debauchery. Mike’s exasperated ‘within reason’ last episode struck me as really odd, my guess is that he feels that arranging for hookers is below him.
I took the “anything, within reason” just the opposite way: that he WAS willing to get them hookers. Although there are logistical issues there to keep these guys from knowing they are in Albuquerque.
I took “within reason” to mean not having hooker/coke parties 24 hours a day.
Did Gus break the “fourth wall” ?
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Yesh, that was pretty good. And I think it suspended disbelief that the Doctor who specialises in strokes would miss it. Though Hector has not been shown as a leering type before
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Saul’s persona is an act. He leers at women and makes dirty jokes since that’s the clientele he deals with does. Jimmy does not do such things.
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Mike should have probably pointed this out to Gus. With their security, they could probably easily arrange for R&R every 6 weeks.
Yeah, even on the ‘what Gus sees’ film, his eyes are really obviously tracking the nurse. I just write it off that they had to make it obvious for the audience’s benefit, that ‘in reality’ it was more subtle. The fact that he was able to call off the doctor shows that they’re working together a little more directly than I thought before - I had the impression he just arranged things so that she would happen to show up, not that she knew who he was and that whether she left was up to Gus. I thought Hector had done a bit of leering before in the ‘visiting the cartel’ scenes (or maybe a flashback in BB), but I can’t swear to it.
By the way, if you call the number on the Better Call Saul business card, you get an amusing message.
For those of us not in the US could you summarise?
It was just a little rhyming verse about how he sells phones
Yeah, that bothered me. Why would Gus be using his own name (and Mike’s) in dealing with these hired hands? Surely the deal would have been made using cut-out corporate names, which would let Gus be “Mr. Jones” or such…?
It doesn’t make sense to give the Germans this information.
I think so, too—the fact that Gilligan (in BB) had given the character a German last name, is the reason that the team hired is German. If Mike had been Mike Rossi, the team would have been Italian.
I think Mike having German ancestry is just coincidental. I assume they were German because Madrigal, the company that Gus is connected with, is German. Presumably it was Madrigal that made the connection with these German engineers, in an under-the-table fashion. I think Gus himself has some personal German connection as well, because Fring sounds like a German name, not a Hispanic one. It was widely theorized during the run of Breaking Bad that Fring had partial German ancestry, and indeed there have been Germans in South America for a long time.
But they interviewed a French guy first. If he wasn’t such a twat, his team could have been hired.
I wondered about that too. Your brain goes fast when you’re upside down like that.
Jeez, you’re right. I missed that completely. What a couple of doofuses not to have used fake names!
I didn’t have the impression that he was fluent, just that he had troubled himself to learn a bit. Thus the lesson at the bar.
It might be a plan to make it look like a bunch of different people had signed a petition or something. I was watching for her to buy poster board, like she was planning a protest. Creating a racial justice protest just when this “unequal consequence” was occurring could convince the County to pressure the prosecutor.
Kim kinda threatened the prosecutor with the race card, and she kinda threatened back with discrediting Jimmy.
Gus seems to have a sense of himself as an overall positive in the community. He tries to do good even in the service of his next evil plan. What I can’t tell is whether he actually feels good about it, or if he’s just that good at camouflage. Good deeds as gilly suit, perhaps? 
Esposito did a stunning job in that scene. As she says “he could talk again” - with just a twitch of his face, Esposito let’s us know that that is not at all in his plans. He has Hector juuuuuust where he wants him. Disabled enough to suffer, and back enough that he feels justified in torturing him.
The Kevin Costner thing was seriously disgusting though. It shows the extent to which he has tried to twist himself for Kim.
As for the cabin debauchery, I think that’s where they are headed. I agree Mike clearly doesn’t want to go there, but he’s becoming convinced of the necessity. I hereby drop my two bits in the “Kai doesn’t make it” jar.
I agree that Mike “troubled himself to learn a bit” of German, to be a more effective supervisor.
I like your theory that Kim is planning a racial protest—which, from the sounds of it, would not just be a lawyerly trick but would actually be justified.
Mike clearly does not speak fluent German. He’s picked up a little in the past 10 months in order to communicate with the crew. He addressed them in English rather than German when they first arrived. Werner had to explain to him what Mittagsschlafchen (nap time) was, which Mike stumbles over when he tries to repeat it. Werner also explains the meaning of Ehrmantraut to him. Kai says to him in German, “Your German sounds stupid.” Werner translates this to Mike as “You sound like a real Kraut.” Mike calls bullshit on this but he probably understood Kai’s tone rather than the words.
It’s possible this crew was recruited with the help of Madrigal but the fact that Mike’s name is of German origin is of no significance. (Most German-Americans, like my own family, emigrated to the US so long ago that they have no German language and little German culture left.)