Better Call Saul: Season IV

Cafe Society
1043

I would expect that his plan is to contact the embassy and claim that his passport is lost or stolen. The embassy can then arrange for his wife for wire him money for a ticket home and a temporary or replacement passport. This is a pretty routine thing for an embassy to do, it’s a pain in the ass and often takes a week or two, which is pretty devastating if missing an extra week of work gets you fired but not nearly as bad as being killed by a drug lord. If he didn’t have a solid history in Germany and a reliable contact in who could front enough cash to sort things out it could be much more difficult, but I’m pretty sure his wife can come up with the $1000 or so that he needs. The foreign people with no papers who have a problem are the ones with no network back home to identify them and no one to wire them cash.

He doesn’t really need to evade the authorities, just Mike (and the rest of Gus’s organization). To the authorities he’s just a German citizen who lost his passport, which is routine. In the worst case, he was working as an illegal alien which just means the US will want to deport him, which still gets him back to Germany, just probably with a ‘no reentry to the US’ stamp. In the more likely case, he’s a guy with some kind of long term work or tourist visa through Madrigal and wants to go home, in which case it’s really no big deal. As far as we’ve seen he’s not actually wanted for anything.

The riskiest thing IMO, and the part he probably hasn’t thought about, is that during the annoying week or so to get things sorted out, INS will probably detain and hold him since there’s no actual German embassy in ABQ. This would just be an inconvenience if there wasn’t a drug cartel looking for him, but while he’s sitting in a holding cell with a bunch of Spanish speaking people who also don’t have valid papers, he’s extremely vulnerable. I could certainly see him getting to the airport, calling the embassy, and arranging everything to be home in a week, then ending up dead or removed because Gus sent a guy or got Lalo to send a guy to kill him. It’s certainly not hard for a cartel to get someone into an INS detention center, they actually spend a lot of effort avoiding that!

That could be the ‘loose end’ that Lalo helps with in the summary. Gus getting Lalo to do a favor would work well for him - it would maintain the fiction of Gus being a wimpy distribution genius and not very capable of fighting or pulling off violent plans on his own, and play into Lalo’s ‘burying the hatchet’ idea to help keep the Salamancas off guard.

Yeah, but so is using something stronger than a padlock on the roof access. They may have felt that holding documents and cash was too likely to spook the engineers even with the big payout promised at the end and not actually done that precaution. Also, while Werner may not have been this paranoid at the beginning, it’s not unreasonable for him to hide some cash and documents in his luggage, like sewing an envelope into the lining somewhere. I certainly would if I was going into a shady situation like that, and we know he’s not flat broke to start off with.

1044

If that’s his plan, it’s an insanely stupid one, for the reasons you yourself point out:

Like I said, he hasn’t thought things through.

But even I think that Werner isn’t naive enough to go to the embassy. He probably has some other plan. But whatever he does is bound to fail because he isn’t just trying to hide; Mike knows exactly where he is going.

1045

I think the “Werner wife” thing is a red herring. There might not be a wife at all. I think he has been setting Mike up, giving himself a cover for his escape. The woman on the phone with him has been an accomplice that met him in the desert, now that he knows where they are following the R&R field trip.

1046

What would be the purpose of this? Why would he work hard for many months and then give up a payday that would set him up for the rest of his life?

1047

Yep, I think raw panic and/or despair is driving him, not deep critical thinking. This isn’t a meticulously blueprinted scheme to get out of the country, this is panic and improvisation with a lot of wishful thinking.

I have seen the theory that Mike knows where he’s going because Mike engineered his escape to let him go home, and is faking the search so that he can tell Gus ‘welp, guy got away’. I don’t think that fits Mike’s personality, or his intellect since it would be a dumb plan (Gus would track him to Germany and kill him). Another theory is that he has a contact from an old job or some other criminal/shady connection that he can work with to get him out of the area. I don’t think that’s the case though.

1048

What was with the panic Werner felt when he went into the room to check the wiring to the explosive charges? Was it simply being near those explosives (and I thought for a moment that the explosion would be premature and he’d die down there)? Or was he hiding claustrophobia all this time?

1049

I suspect there is more to this than we know. It makes no sense for Werner to bail right now. They are on the downslope of getting this finished, and if he runs he loses the payout that would have set up his retirement, and he has to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. So he had to have a really good reason for bolting.

For example, if his wife told him she was dying, of if he has a terminal condition, or even maybe if his wife said she was leaving him might be an acceptable motivation. But running out of the deal now is an extreme act, and it needs an extreme motivation. Being homesick doesn’t cut it.

1050

We saw Mike listening to his conversations with his wife though. So I don’t see how anything she said could be the catalyst, or Werner’s escape wouldn’t be such a surprise. Unless they were speaking in code or something.

1051

What was discussed? New puppy peed everywhere. They should go to Baden-Baden when he gets back?
What kind of code is that?

1052

Well, Mike was getting a summary from the henchmen who was listening to the conversation and who presumably could understand and translate German. If that henchmen had been bribed by Werner, who knows what was actually being said during the call?

1053

He’s basically been in prison for 3/4 of a year. A nice one with a private room, bar, and big-screen TV, but he has been constantly watched by cameras and not allowed to just go for a quiet walk in the sun. He’s been feeling more and more trapped by his situation, and now he screwed up and talked to someone, then had his closest friend politely threaten to kill him for it. He’s losing his grip on himself and getting more and more ‘stir crazy’, wanting to get out of the (literal and figurative) hole that he’s stuck in. When he went in the room to check the wiring he was fine, the panic was when he realized the wire was fine all the way to the hole and that he’d have to handle live dynamite. It’s a dangerous thing that normally would be routine, but combined with the pressure of his situation it overwhelmed him with the thought of dying in this dark hole and his wife never even knowing his fate.

I wouldn’t rule out a reveal that there’s more to Werner than we know, but I think what we’ve seen is an adequate explanation for his behavior. I think he or his wife may have some kind of time limit that he hasn’t disclosed (like my illness theory), but it’s not a needed explanation. The fact that he’s mentally unstable from the conditions is what drives his escape, he’s not a rational actor starting a long-planned scheme just a desperate man who thinks he’s going to die alone and obsessed with escaping that fate.

1054

I don’t see how he could have worked for 10 months in those circumstances if he had been claustrophobic.

While I’m no expert on explosives, I don’t see why there should have been a serious risk involved in just reconnecting the loose wires. The explosives themselves should have been stable in the absence of a detonation current, and Werner was just reconnecting a circuit that had been connected before. The only way the charges should have been capable of going off is if someone flipped the switch up above. And Werner of course would have known this. So it would seem the panic attack may have been due to accumulated stress on Werner rather than actual risk.

1055

They actually showed proper safety procedures being used, too. After the red light went on, they not only shut down the controller, but they removed the wires from the box and secured them. Double safe. So there was no risk, really. But the scene was a metaphor for the entire situation, and perhaps what we were meant to get from it wad Werner’s sudden realization that the whole situation was basically explosive and he was in the middle of it.

Maybe his departure could be rationized by his deciding that he would never be allowed to live given what he knows of everything, and he was trying to escape while he could.

1056

This is undoubtedly all true, but I think it is the same as the quibbles with the Huell scam - what reason would anyone have to compare the multiple copies? In movie/TV world, there is always someone suspicious of what is happening and they dig and dig until they find the fatal inconsistency.

In the real world, for the most part no one cares. Kim got the official-official plans updated, and will give matching new ones to the contractors. In the highly unlikely event that someone thinks “hey, that building looks to be 16% larger than the approved plans allowed”, they are most likely to ask the nice lady in the planning office to see the approved plans, and, lo, they match. No reason to check other copies floating around.

Pretty sure this is all covered in Breaking Bad - when Mike’s original payoff plan for his guys fell apart, she wanted them killed, and IIRC did get at least one of them offed. Mike went to her place to kill her, and had a soft-hearted moment because of her kid.

1057

Mike’s plan to pay them off didn’t fall apart. She wanted them killed from the get-go, even though Mike assured her they were “solid.” As I mentioned above, she succeeding in having one killed and tried to whack Mike as well. He might have been influenced by her kid, but he was persuaded because she could provide more methylamine.

(Walt eventually had Mike’s guys killed with information provided by Lydia not because the plan fell apart, but because he was too greedy to continue paying them.)

1058

Also, as far as the Werner’s motivation question goes, they’ve finally put up the sneak peek for next week.

The letter he left apparently says that he’s going to visit his wife for four days. Looks like he really is just planning to zip off to Germany, and presumably he does have travel docs and credit cards available. And that he thinks he can leave and come back ‘no harm no foul’.
'Werner's Letter' Season Finale Sneak Peek | Better Call Saul - YouTube

1059

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1060

Actually the plan did fall apart. The DEA found the lawyer depositing the payoff cash into safe deposit boxes. The clue was a bank statement that was found behind a picture that was seized from Gus’ effects when the evidence room was destroyed by the electromagnet. Once the payments were intercepted, Walt was worried that one of the ten would talk. The lawyer was also killed while in jail.

1061

I had forgotten that was the sequence. But Walt was already pissed off because of having to make the “legacy” payments when Mike first revealed them.

Much to Saul Goodman’s horror. “They’re killing lawyers now!!!”:eek::eek::eek:

1062

Exactly right.

Remember when they were setting up and Mike went through the list of all the fun stuff to put in to keep the guys entertained, because “We don’t want them climbing the walls.” Other than the bar, Werner seemingly has no use for any of that stuff so now he’s climbing the walls.