Probably all of the Gus/Salamanca/cartel back story episodes have another dimension to them now that we have seen more of Gus and Hector’s relationship before BB.
I don’t think it was ever said or implied on BB that Gus had something to do with Hector’s stroke, for example. Of course, that was actually Nacho. However, Gus made sure Hector survived, but also that he didn’t recover too much.
True that it was Walt who screwed things up. But since it operated for a such a short time, we don’t really have evidence that it would have been a secure strategy for the long term. What we do know is that it took six years and enormous expense to come into production. On this basis alone I think we can say it wasn’t such a great success.
One of the enduring mysteries for me in the series is what exactly is Gus’s motivation for trying to make such enormous amounts of money. For Walt initially it’s ostensibly to help his family (but actually because of his ego), for Mike it seems to be definitely only for the sake of his granddaughter, for Jesse it was originally just for money to party with, for the Salamancas and the cartel it’s for the traditional drug dealer reasons, fancy houses and cars, bling, and women.
Although Gus tells Walt he has a family, we never hear more of them, and since there’s evidence that Gus is gay, this is probably a lie. Maybe he has parents or siblings back in Chile or wherever he’s actually from, but again we never hear of them. He lives very modestly himself.
Even before the Superlab, Gus is making enough money to fund a hospital wing and finance construction of the Superlab itself. The only things he seems to spend money on is investment to increase his own production, planning his revenge on the Salamancas and the cartel, and the charities he finances as a smoke screen or for other ulterior motives. The whole thing seems kind of circular: he’s investing money to make more money, but why does he want to make so much? The Superlab is designed to make hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Is amassing ungodly amounts of money just an end in itself for him, like it is for Walt?
My guess is that for Gus it’s power. Money is a symbol of power and a tool to be powerful.
This post is only a place-holder.
I think that’s one of the interesting unanswered questions in the series. During BCS and BB timeframe I think it’s clear that Gus sees his entire operation as just a means to destroying the Cartel’s power, killing the heads of it, and wiping out the entire Salamanca family. But if he had decided to just let the cousins kill Walt, he’d then go on to complete all of his goals and then end up in control of a huge drug empire, large fast food franchise, and more money than he knows what to do with. We don’t know what drives him other than that - does he want vast sums of money? Does he like being a respected citizen and drug lord at the same time? Does he have a political agenda? Does he have unfinished business in Chile or elsewhere? Did his deceased partner have something unfinished?
While it hasn’t been done before AFAIK, I would enjoy watching an alternate timeline series that opens with Gus deciding to allow the cousins to kill Walt, shows Gus completing his revenge against the Cartel, and then has Gus continue from there. Would also allow for more Mike time if he’s still working by then.
What if Gus is seriously just interested in bringing America the best fried chicken possible, and the drug trade is just a means to that end? Maybe his proceeds from the meth empire just get funneled back into Los Pollos Hermanos, with the goal of expanding restaurants, offering more menu items, improving the quality of the accomodations at each store, acquiring locally-sourced poultry, and ultimately dominating the fried-chicken niche in the country and perhaps eventually the entire world? Maybe chicken is indeed his true calling.
I think the secret ingredient in Gus’s chicken recipe is just a little touch of meth. It keeps them coming back for more!
Money is always useful when your goal is vengeance. I mean, it’s useful in other contexts, too. But if you want to be able to pursue any new schemes that may occur to you, and hire and finance the best help for those schemes, then you don’t want to have to pinch pennies.
True, but it just seems out of scale to what is necessary. The Superlab was largely to make Gus independent of the cartel, but it didn’t need to be so enormous to make a huge amount of money. Walt made 80 million in six or seven months with the mobile lab, which had a much smaller capacity. In the event, Gus’s revenge against the cartel wasn’t that expensive: beside the bottle of Zafiro Anejo the main cost was the mobile hospital he recovered in.
I’m surprised by this question. Look at people like Jeff Bezos, who could never spend all the money they already have—but keep driving for more, and more, and more. Is Gus even a billionaire yet, much less on Gates/Bezos level?
Yeah, I’m thinking Gus was just…driven. I doubt that he ever sat down and calculated exact amounts of profit his lab would have to generate and such. It was just Get more get more get more so I can buy revenge revenge revenge…
But people like Bezos or Gates get public recognition and respect for their accomplishments and their philanthropy. Gus can’t reveal how much richer he is beyond the level appropriate to the owner of a successful restaurant chain, and so can’t get public recognition beyond that. Somehow I don’t think he’s in an immoral and murderous business for the purpose of having more money to donate to hospitals.
Gus’s motive for making money may be the same as Walt’s (Walt’s real one), in order to inflate his own self-image. But that has to remain to himself, so doesn’t have the public rewards for people like Bezos or Gates. He doesn’t even want other criminals to know how much he makes. We’ve been shown the reasons Walt has the need to prove that he is smarter than everyone else; we haven’t seen exactly why Gus is driven to make more money than he can ever spend.
Gus does what Gus does partly for revenge, of course. But, for the larger part, I believe that Gus is a more successful Walt. It starts out as one thing (Revenge for Gus and Money for Walt) but quickly becomes about something else additionally. Each major character has “Broken Bad” in his or her own way. They have all - from Gus to Kim - responded to stress in ways that are not typical in society. It comes from feeling out of control of one’s life, one’s dreams, one’s goals… and wanting to control something, even if that is the wrong thing entirely.
Jimmy could be Jimmy the Elder Law specialist, but has chosen to become Saul Goodman.
Walt could have been the successful high school chemistry teacher, but chose to become Heisenberg.
Gus could have been a successful restaurant owner, but chose to become a high ranking member of a very powerful illicit organization.
I don’t agree with the assessment of Gus, though I think it’s true for the others. He is distinct from the rest, in that we don’t ever see him get a ‘legitimate’ offer or a lower-key criminal offer and decide to turn it down. He started off with something sinister enough in Chile that the Cartel only killed his partner, then used the chicken business as a cover for his drug enterprises. He didn’t ever get a ‘Elder law’ or ‘Grey Matter’ offer, and I think it’s likely that the reason LPH does so well is that he’s laundering drug money through it, which he obviously couldn’t do without the drug business.
Or the Davis and Main senior lawyer (even after a screw up that would normally get him fired)
Or a Grey Matter researcher, either back in the day or when they offered him the position back in S1.
Also Mike has a similar course, he could do a legit job like private investigator (or parking lot attendant, of course), and/or stick to low-key jobs from the vet instead of going into the high stakes Fring Empire.
IMO one of the reasons the writers run into trouble is that the Superlab is actually the size it is because it makes for a much better filming location to have all of the different angles and heights to work with. I think a lot of the overcomplication this season is because they have Gus trying to build something as big as the set, when in reality he doesn’t actually that much space and could have finished off the space when it was only as large as it was in the pre-strip-club shots and been fine.
He and Max already had a successful chicken business before they went to the cartel. It was their plan to cook meth that was Max’s downfall. Gus and Max could have decided just to be restaurant entrepreneurs and not get into the drug trade and they would have been OK. (However, Gus apparently financed Max’s education in chemistry with a view to that in the future.)
Right. I said something to this effect earlier in this thread. The Superlab was created as a cool location for Breaking Bad. In BCS, the writers have the challenge of explaining how it came to be. They chose to use its construction as a major plot element of BCS, and devised a very elaborate back story for it.
I think Pantastic and I more or less see this issue the same way, but I’m still going to weigh in with my own verbiage:
I partially agree with this, but I’d say his bold gambit to get Don Eladio to sell his meth early on showed that his ambition predated his thirst for revenge. And that’s without even speculating on what he was up to in Chile.
We actually don’t know if LPH would be successful without the drug business subsidizing it (it’s actually hard to launder dirty money through spectacularly successful businesses without the IRS getting suspicious). But even if it would be, those restaurants don’t allow him to have henchmen who will do virtually anything he commands–that’s got to be a rush, for someone who may have been a high ranking member of the Chilean military or secret police at one point. And we also have to keep in mind that Gus is a murderous psychopath. His story about the little animal he tortured, remember, also predated any need for revenge. Being a drug kingpin allows opportunities for murderous psychopathy that being a legit restaurateur just can’t fulfill, no matter what a downtrodden minimum wage employee may tell you about their boss.
Gus and Max already had a successful Pollos Hermanos restaurant in Mexico before Gus tried to expand into manufacturing meth. If he hadn’t done so, they could have continued as restaurateurs without getting into drugs. We don’t know how successful it eventually would have been, but at the time they went to Don Eladio it was very popular.
We were discussing whether Gus ever had a legitimate alternative to becoming a drug kingpin. He did, he just chose not to go down that path, for whatever reason. And there may be psychological reasons driving that, just as there were for Walt. One could argue that the psychological issues that drove Walt were also there from the beginning, in his decision not to partner with Eliot and his other missteps.
How much overlap is there with the LPH and Meth worforce? Not much. Plus Gus for the former is a fairly good boss, his anger and worry for his workers after Hector’s little play is clearly genuine.