I don’t think someone needs to be very Chuck-like to think that the stress of getting cancer doesn’t justify starting a meth empire and cutting a swath of destruction that leads to a plethora of deaths and earns you the contempt of everyone once close to you.
Well, he did accomplish his goal of paying for his medical care, on his own, and leaving a financial legacy for his kids, even if they’ll never know it came from him.
Rewatching Season 1 Ep 8, Chuck is asked by Jimmy to consider hiring him, and he says that he’ll take it up with the other partners, but says that he does not see how the other partners could refuse, and praises Jimmys drive.
He later is the reason why he is not hired and places the blame on Howard.
I also thought I remembered Chuck being in the conference room during his monkey/machine gun speech, but did a google dig and found this:
Jimmy worked his tail off - dove into dumpsters, wallowed in adult diapers - to get that Sandpiper account, was actually starting to turn his life around, was so happy that the McGill brothers were working together to fight the bad guys … then Chuck betrayed him, crushed him.
Two more things. There was a flashback where Chuck is fine with electricity as he and Rebecca prepare for her to meet Jimmy shortly after he moved to Albuquerque, he talked of working in the mail room. She was charmed of course, laughed at his lawyer jokes … but not Chuck’s.
Then in another episode flashback Jimmy is a lawyer and is at Chuck’s house to help him hide his condition when ex-wife Rebecca visits for dinner. Chuck grabbed her phone and threw it across the room because it’s rude to talk on the phone during dinner…
Are we getting any closer? 
He said it meant “Strength” and “World” I think.
Well, it was really because the phone was hurting him; except that it was really because he was jealous of the Director or whoever she was talking to. The EXCUSE he offered to her - or the blame shift he offered - was that she was being rude by using the phone while in company.
New Episode Tonight: S4 E8 Coushatta
Jimmy goes to great lengths to right a wrong, as Kim pulls out all the stops for a case; Mike lets his team blow off steam; Nacho receives a visitor.
To be fair, I did not say that Jimmy’s adjustments to pressure (or Walt’s) were healthy. I am not - and have not - suggested that either gentleman is a worthy example for other people to look up to for moral guidance.
I merely tried to explain their psychology. Again, I am not saying that this particular series of events would happen in exactly this way in real life. However, in the world of BCS and BB, it happens with some regularity.
Oh, and, please, chill, big guy. I know I am evil, but there’s no need making such a fuss about it.
I find it curious that the German engineer blabbing secrets in an Albuquerque bar found not one, but TWO interested young parties holding onto his every word. :dubious:Why, what are the chances??:rolleyes: How did that conversation come about? Mike leaves him alone at the bar for, what, 20 minutes, and comes back to find him talking about pouring cement on a secret project to a couple of rapt strangers… I felt that either the two bar guys listening were cops or Gus’ spies, or maybe it was a gay bar and the German was relaxing with a few cold ones and venting to a seemingly interested audience. In any event, there was a definite undercurrent of menace, and I wonder what will happen to him. Gus seemed to just barely acknowledge Mike’s reassurance the guy was OK, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he will be paying dearly for his loose tongue.
Also, it seems its a done deal, but Kim’s opponent just took the word of the strangers she dials up? what if she sent someone to Coushatta to check out the fake church and pastor, or talk to one of the ‘Huell-boosters’ in person.
Prosecutors are busy people, and don’t like to make more work for themselves. The judge told her to make a deal, and she did. That seems realistic to me. I wouldn’t put it entirely out of the question for her to get curious and call or visit the website again at a later date though. But Huell’s goose is saved now either way.
And I got confused, the “monkey with a machine gun” speech was not the same scene where Jimmy told Chuck he became a lawyer. I conflated the two. Still, it seems Jimmy becoming a lawyer was a prerequisite to Chuck’s electricity allergy.
I’m not 100% certain any more, but I think German Air Force units were at Holloman AFB in the 90s. Foreign pilots would come out to New Mexico to train, and I recall bumping into one at Cannon AFB in 96. With White Sands out there, I would think you could pawn any loose lips off as him being part of some secret military project.
I don’t presume to be smarter than Michael Ehrmantraut when it comes to planning R&R for clandestine German laborers (is there anything this guy can’t do?) but…I guess I am kind of doing it, because all I can say is that if I were in charge of arranging this thing - and other things as well - I would have done it differently.
Why does the lead German engineer need to know he’s in Albuquerque? Well, you might say, “because that’s where he got off of the plane and got picked up at the airport.” And I guess the same is true of the German engineers, right? I could have set it up so that none of them had any idea where the hell they were working on the project. Have them fly in to Colorado or Nevada or wherever, and then pick them up from that airport either in a smaller chartered plane that flies to a private airstrip close to ABQ, or just a large unmarked truck that drives there, all the while keeping them blindfolded.
I was gobsmacked that Mike’s idea of R&R was to take a bunch of Germans to a public bar where they could get into who the hell knows what kind of trouble - potentially far more severe than what actually happened with that one unruly worker, mind you. I thought Mike knew better than that. He could have taken them to some private and remote building, hired a discreet escort service to bring women, had a private DJ, whatever…and before hand, given them all a very, very solemn briefing (preferably accompanied by Tyrus staring daggers at everyone) about how they are under no circumstances to say ANYTHING about the project to ANY of the entertainment there. They could easily circumvent the whole “what shady-ass company are we working for?” questions that might arise from the workers, by simply saying they are working for an industrial firm with strict NDA policies and they are expected to abide by the professional code of ethics.
The Babineaux hoax (Babinheaux?) also seems to be on shaky ground…seems like there are a hell of a lot of ways that thing could fall apart under scrutiny.
I’m willing to suspend my disbelief because it’s a good show…this isn’t the kind of thing that really rises to the level of a complaint about the show, just a nitpick from a more pragmatic standpoint.
I told you guys there was passion between Kim and Jimmy! It sometimes gets ginned up by mutual involvement in some kind of con, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. After all, they got hot and bothered earlier this season when that was not the catalyst; besides, “Slippin’ Jimmy” is a very real part of James McGill and certainly Saul in BB era was all about the scams. (Rhea Seehorn has suggested that Kim could have still been in a relationship with Jimmy/Saul during BB, just out of sight of Walt and Jesse.)
I agree that taking them to a strip club in Albuquerque was questionable—I had assumed they were still being kept in the dark as to where exactly they were. I think the scenario Lamoral outlined makes a lot more sense.
Huell’s case I find a lot more believable. If this were some kind of murder case or a celebrity or something where the DA had strong reason to investigate it to the max, okay. But it was a petty scenario with a bag of sandwiches and a cop who wasn’t even hurt, and the judge was freaking out. I buy that she would be like “okay, let’s just get this off our docket and move on”. I mean, would she even have the budget to send investigators out of state?
And Jimmy and Kim were very careful to use different envelopes, pens, handwriting, etc. A lot more care than was used, for instance, in a recent social media push for Ted Cruz (often thought of as one of the more sophisticated campaign strategists) that involved a bunch of separate Twitter users all tweeting (not retweeting, but supposedly writing themselves) the exact same message, verbatim, of support at exactly 2 a.m. So even people involved in much more significant shit take the lazy way. The fact that this wasn’t a bunch of identical envelopes with virtually identical messages written with the same pen and/or handwriting? That’s got to seem pretty impressive and not something to just dismiss out of hand as an obvious hoax. Especially since this is not a Senate seat on the line; nor is it the murder trial of a multimillionaire. It just isn’t going to leap to mind that anyone would go through such an elaborate con to keep a guy like Huell from doing a year and a half in the joint, perhaps less after good behavior or whatever.
ETA: Although it certainly broke all kinds of ethics rules and laws as Jimmy pointed out, this really was something done out of the goodness of his (and Kim’s) heart. Huell didn’t really deserve that jail time; and him becoming a fugitive for the rest of his life was not a great plan. If Jimmy just needed a bodyguard, there was still “Man-Mountain” and probably others the vet could set him up with. He did all this because he is bighearted and cares about Huell as a person.
I don’t know enough about American telephony to know but I’ve got some questions: Wouldn’t the DA be able to recognise that the numbers being called are to a mobile provider; in the UK It’s simple, mobile numbers begin 07 and in 2003 all landlines began 01. American numbers I think are not so neat but should be recognisable as mobile, right? Even if not, what did Jimmy do, buy 100 SIMs whilst in Louisiana to keep the area code right? Was it easy to just buy SIM cards in 2003?
More than a couple of mobile users in 2003 should be a big red flag.
In the US, the prefix of a mobile phone (for arguments sake, lets assume the number isn’t ported from a landline) is mostly random. It may very well be the case that they follow some type of pattern, I know there’s other people with the same prefix as my phone. However, no one is going to know what prefixes are mobile vs landlines in a backwater town a thousand miles away. Most people wouldn’t know what prefixes belong to what general neighborhood 20 miles away.
As long as Jimmy made sure, say, 80 or 90 percent of those phones had the correct area code, and maybe used the same two or three prefixes and a healthy chunk of them, no one would think anything of it.
ETA, the real problem would be if she attempted to look any of those names or addresses up. My thought is that Jimmy and Kim overwhelmed her so she threw in the towel. I think we have to leave it there. If she poked around too much she could have taken Huell down and possibly Jimmy and Kim if she could prove they orchestrated it. Maybe that’ll be revisited, I’m guessing it won’t be.
Slippin’ Kimmy!
" I was driving…saw your esteem in the parking lot…"
The engineer was buying the beers ?
Kim’s physical 180 last week was a metaphorical one too - I definitely didn’t see her diving into a Jimmy scheme so enthusiastically. All of the Jimmy/Kim stuff in the last bit has been extremely uncomfortable to watch, and this week was no exception, it just feels like something is about to crack in every scene. In the ‘examining the show’ sense, I think this puts Kim into extreme danger - when she was on the drifting away track, I expected her story to end with her walking out of Jimmy’s life. Now I think she’s much more likely to get mixed up in Saul’s “Criminal Lawyer” schemes and end up deceased or disappeared. Will be interesting to see if she embraces this side of her or turns her back on it, she clearly doesn’t get anything out of her day job anymore.
Their scheme also seemed a LOT riskier than past ones - Squat Cobbler, for example, only required Pryce, Mike, and Nacho to stay quiet, and all of them have good reason to. This one has a whole host of people who know something was up (notably the film students), and if the ADA did a real investigation like checking to see if the Church property exists it would fall apart pretty quickly and point pretty clearly to Kim doing something shady. Kim’s line on what lying is acceptable is interesting, she made a point to tell the judge that she didn’t ask the people of Coushatta to write letters (a technically true statement) even though if the scheme did fall apart that particular lie wouldn’t matter.
Did anyone else think the drink Mrs. Nguyen brought Jimmy was the cucumber water at first? I thought she was giving him ‘customers only’ water to show how much she cared. I really like how all of these incidental background characters seem to be real people, it would be really easy not to give her any depth like that.
I was right that the Kai setup was all misdirection, though I didn’t expect Werner to be the problem child. I feel like the superlab security setup has gotten worse in each episode, not in a ‘things are slipping over time’ sense but in a ‘this doesn’t make sense’ way. At first they seemed to be keeping the engineers in the dark about their location, but they let them see a pretty good bit last episode, and in this one they know the city (Also the name of the laundry was visible when they were loading into the truck). I don’t get why they need the elaborate secret lair for the Germans if they’re not keeping them in the dark about their location. I’m liking the Jimmy line a lot, but the Mike line just doesn’t seem that well thought out.
As far as the field trip goes, taking them to a strip club in town seems like a really bad form of R&R. It’s just one night, doesn’t seem that great of a thing, and has huge security risks. Since the schedule is off by months, knocking of for a long weekend or week of vacation isn’t going to make a big difference. For location, why not rent a private cabin by a lake or mountain and bring some girls there? It’s the kind of location regular people can afford easily, it’s not some expensive over the top idea. Lets the ones who don’t just want a seedy bar get some time outside (they haven’t seen the sun in months) and is much more secure. And you can bring in some type of prostitute who doesn’t have ‘look but don’t touch’ rules. Or if you are going to a strip club, at least go out of town - they could charter a plane and fly an hour to a legal brothel in Nevada, or Vegas, or another casino area really easily if the 8-12 hours road trip is too much. Not cheap, but not superlab expensive either, and German tourists rambling about construction aren’t even going to be noticeable.
Liked the look at Lalo deliberately antagonizing Nacho with the loud music and cooking. Will be interesting to see what kind of person he ends up being, he’s the last major reference from Breaking Bad that needed to be filled in. I suspect that whatever he does will drive Nacho back to working with Jimmy.
I’d have to watch again to be sure, but the impression that I got was that Mike had rented the entire strip club. The only people in there were the Germans and the staff. At least it looked pretty empty to me.
But then he saw Werner wasn’t enjoying himself, so he got a little soft-hearted and took him to a nearby quieter bar. If he’d stuck with his original plan, or if he hadn’t had to abandon Werner to go deal with Kai, then there would have been much less chance of a security problem. Presumably nobody was going to be discussing pouring concrete with the strippers. Maybe laying pipe.
I also think we saw in the interview with the French engineer that they flew him into an airport a considerable distance from Albuquerque, at least several hours drive in the back of the van. I’d assume they did the same with the German workers.