hincandenza

It's worse than just him losing; when I watch a quirky little boutique show like Hulu's "Deadbeat" (which I binged on a month or so ago), or when I was into "Trailer Park Boys" some years ago, it's not that surprising when the leads- who are meant to be fairly dim stoner types- make dumb decisions. That's who they are as characters, so we laugh at their stupidity because we're in on the joke. The Richard Hendricks character is a tech genius, and his supporting team- including Jared, Erlich, and even Monica- are not remotely dumb either. While that's not a guarantee he'll be smart about other things, he's so consistently stupid and reckless about every interaction that his character is a walking paradox; we can't believe any more that someone this dumb could have ever invented middle-out. Three seasons in, he hasn't learned to just shut the hell up, and consult his smarter friends before reacting to everything like a hyperactive toddler throwing a fit. How did he even get a job at Hooli, when presumably his interview loop consisted of him screaming incoherently at random people, completely misunderstanding every question he's asked, and then eventually soiling himself? Heck, his closest friends have so little faith in him, his first act as CEO was... to find out they went behind his back and hired an entire outsource team. Nice job being CEO, dipshit. The only way any of this makes sense is if Mike Judge and his writing staff are so irrationally and profoundly hateful of the entire tech world that they can't imagine anyone in it being remotely competent. The first season was brilliant satire, in part because it poked fun at how SV is full of actually smart people who have- due to market forces and tech bubbles- channeled their energies into ultimately useless fluff: the idea that the best minds of our generation aren't curing cancer or working on nuclear fusion, but instead on finding the best way to make you click an embedded ad. The Cult of Silicon Valley is ripe for satire, for believing that they are "changing the world" with some of this crap, or their myopia for anything other than their own narrow culture and way of life. However, the last two seasons have abandoned that for something that is little more than "Ow, My Balls" levels of poking fun at the social awkward tech dummies, har har.

Of course! The bulldog = Bighead. You heard it here first! :)

Preach it. It's funny, I had that same thought: "Well, at least the writers sort of learned their lesson, and now at least the completely implausible screw-ups resolve themselves by episode's end", so at least this time I wasn't ranting and raving angrily after watching. But as RabbitEars says below, that just makes it more cliched sitcom. As a fun side note, I was reading through and literally ended up clicking "Like" on every single post in here. Turns out, I like kvetching about the show with you guys more than I like the show itself! :) Yeah, I've been in tech for about 21 years now, and outside of a couple of hilariously wacky characters I met in my earliest years doing Windows 95 tech support I've never encountered anyone as impossibly dumb, naive, or gullible as these characters. Since the hard drive thing didn't go anywhere (and I was actually worried when they first mentioned it that somehow, all of PP's code would leech to the web and instantly make it a free, open-source platform), it was literally just filler as a B plot. Which is fine, some of my favorite comedies of all time would have entertaining but ultimately meaningless B-plots. What makes the show frustrating is that they never learn from even their most glaring mistakes; this marks the what, 873rd time the PP code or algorithm has been at risk of being leaked/stolen/copied/deleted? And still not patented, I see... *le sigh*. And agreed, Jared is Love. I'm sure I've said this before, but I hated his character on "The Office" and yet I simply adore him here. He is less masochistic whipping boy than he was in season 1, and now just a goofily weird but interesting dude. And while they never acknowledge it verbally, the truth is the other characters don't really make fun of him at all, and whenever he speaks- they immediately listen. Richard's ego aside, Jared would make the best CEO out of all of them, since he knows the ins and outs of SV finance well, has shown almost unwavering business competence throughout the show's run, and is fiercely devoted to the company. And given the foreshadowing (as much as this cocktease of a show can ever foreshadow anything) of the previews with Bachman once again saying "past, present, and possibly future CEO" about Richard, who knows...? Right- gliding right over why this wasn't done ages ago given his now-acknowledged insanely poor conversational skills, you'd at least have him meet and train the day before, not at literally the same time. Was their plan to make sure the reporter was pissed at being left sitting there for an hour? Of course Richard said "I'm not a fucking idiot" and then didn't even establish who the person was, especially since he would have known the reporter was in the building. He'd have seen both entries in his calendar, what with them having scheduled the training and the interview at the same time. Since the show has apparently turned over a new leaf of not having multi-episode dickpunch plotlines, I think that too was resolved with the tit-for-tat trade. I also had the same thought about an NDA with Hooli and a potential clawback of that money, but we can (hopefully) fanwank that he was an anonymous source, and Gavin will more likely blame it on any of the other Nucleus employees he fired (or the 1/5 of overall staff cuts). Bighead was let go before Gavin insisted on the scrubbing, and his phrasing in that interview was "... and then they told me to my face that Gavin..." so he's clearly quoting one/some of the Hooli people with whom he was friends, further lessening the connection to him as the source. The reporter was a online muckraker, but even so would probably not burn a source; if anything, a failed intimidation of her to do so would only get her more clicks on her blog/site when the Hooli story blows up. Unlike PP, Hooli is actually fairly competent at the day-to-day business stuff, and they'd know better than to be so heavy handed once the story broke. That said, with this show, you never know what will be a meaningless side point, and what will be the next season-long existential crisis for one or more of the characters. At this point, I'd rather this show just churn out fairly amusing but empty sitcom episodes rather than be a sadistic voodoo doll for Mike Judge to continue working out his long-standing hatred of the tech industry.

I think it's literally just that; it's like if you knew a kid named Costanza in school, and you started calling him "Can't Stand Ya"... well, only not as malicious. :) Richard and Bighead have known each other for years, so this was just a friendly nickname from their school days. Bighead is not dumb, he's just jovially incurious and pleasant.

It's probably too late to warn you, but I've got some bad news for you, Hootis...

Yeah, I was surprised, but this episode had a few really good laugh out loud moments. The whole bulldog rant from Gavin had me laughing my ass of- "Roll him back!"- as did their welcoming of "fresh blood" to Hooli (although now I'm curious how those two guys who went to EndFrame with Richard's algorithm on a silver platter made out in the $250M sale; they would have held out for an ownership stake given what they brought in, and thus at least have made BigHead money, no?). The earnest corporate stupidity of Hooli is one of the funniest things about this show satirizing SV. Depending on if/how he hired a financial planner (not that any of the idiots on this show ever think to do things like hire lawyers or accountants), BigHead could easily afford leasing/buying this home, since surely he didn't just pay cash for it. In any case, I agree with you that he seems to have the plot armor of always failing upwards; if this show and its writers had earned more credit, I'd suggest Erlich's "savvy businessman" comment about BigHead was yet another clear foreshadowing. They haven't, so I won't go that far. Still, he's sort of the passive Chauncey Gardener of this show, and there has been a lot of not-so-subtle hints that BigHead will go a loooong way regardless of what he actually does. I don't know why Laurie- or Jack- would ever agree to such a crippling contract with Maleant; projections or no, they're not idiots and they've worked in Silicon Valley. You might be revenue positive, but you'll have little valuation since you just gave up 5 years of earnings to another company. Still, it worked out least, and Jack is now quietly exit stage left. I also agree it's damned odd to do a no-CEO thing just after Hooli has helpfully given your startup a minimum market price: this is now one of the more valuable assets in the Rivega catalog, and a genuine unicorn, surely! On the other hand, we could choose to read that as Laurie subtly giving a vote of confidence in the tech people: you've been proven right, so no more meddling from the suits, as you are free to build your platform however you want. But probably not. :) On the downside, the opening sequence and turn of events suggests all the "Haversack" speculation that I was a part of last week amounted to... absolutely nothing. Yep, turns out Richard really was that stupid. Again. Huh. Well, at least they finally had a big win: on paper they've all become quite wealthy, and in practice even more so since we the viewers know that EndFrame/Hooli can't actually match PP on their platform. Gosh, can't wait to see how they inexplicably and improbably screw everything up next week! :)

Cool post, thanks for sharing. I have to disagree about your premise, though; that reasoning makes sense in the "normal" work world, where even a month without steady paychecks could really hurt someone's ability to pay the bills, and not finding greener pastures immediately makes you seem like you aren't "good enough" to be employed elsewhere. No one would hold it against you for seeking out a better paying, reliable gig when the company is obviously going down. By comparison, TV land is littered with the hollowed-out husks that were the once promising careers of actors who decided they had grown "too big" for a show. Actors are used to sporadic work, where the pay from one guest episode gig might have to last months. I'd imagine a casting director would actually have a much better view of career character actors- guys like SWM and Russell Hornsby- who earn their pay because they are reliable, professional, and stick it out unless a can't-refuse offer comes along. Sure, when a supporting character is given a shot to be the lead on another show elsewhere and it's handled professionally, no hard feelings about asking to be written off the show. But wanting to leave because it'll end soon anyway would seem odd; the way I see it, with all the countless variables to be planned and coordinated when making a show (actor/personnel schedules, set locations, filming permits, etc), being a reliable supporting actor means the people running the show can safely put a checkmark next to your name, which is worth its weight in gold. In other words, it's because guys like SWM wouldn't just up and leave, that guys like SWM keep getting steady work. Besides, it's not like you get severance packages and unemployment insurance when you leave a TV show! :) That's not to say SWM won't be the one leaving, or Hornsby, but I doubt either would throw away the gig on this show simply because of fan discontentment or meandering plot lines. If RH has a major film role coming out, it might make sense if it's him- he's also the only unattached character, unlike SWM. But otherwise I'd imagine all of these people- especially those with shorter resumes prior to this show- know that it's a golden goose, and you don't kill the golden goose over minor creative differences. Even on a Friday night, the supporting characters on a network show will easily pull down solid mid-5 figures per episode. For less critical roles like Wu or Rosalee, that's easily in the range of $25-40K an episode if not more, 20-22 episodes every season; for more vital supporting roles like SWM and RH, that number is considerably bigger and probably represents the highest annual earnings in their careers. "Grimm", for all its flaws, likely paid for the homes of people like Bitsie, Claire, David, and others, and you don't walk away from that easy, steady, network TV money unless you have to.

It's reaaaally funny you say that: I ended up watching this episode while getting ready for work this morning, and chuckled a couple of times- mostly at Jared being off the hook with his funny making- but likewise had a "Ugh, seriously?!?" reaction to the end. This is both for the seemingly failed Ocean's 11 plot, and because as scrb noted the absurdness of a CEO looking to pump-and-dump his stock before a bubble would think a datacenter appliance, and not a user facing platform, would be the way to go. Also, that PP box would take engineers all of a week to design: take a generic 2U chassis, throw in some drives, plenty of memory, some higher end GPUs, and a Linux distro, and add in a straightforward v1 API for receiving raw data and returning compressed data and vice versa. They built a functioning platform for hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users in their garage in the matter of a few days; making a turnkey appliance for a narrow usage shouldn't be that hard. Now at my desk, I glanced over at the subreddit for r/SiliconValleyHBO- who have been more charitable to this show than we have- and the same Ocean's 12/Haversack/audience misdirection is a popular theory now... and not without merit. The original Haversack included as a key part of the ruse a fake agent losing fake papers detailing an entire fake plan- so the enemy would think they'd caught onto the ruse, when in fact they'd only caught on to a fake ruse. So perhaps for once, Richard's bumbling wasn't stupidity, but cunning? While they referenced Ocean's 11, which had plenty of misdirection even on the audience, Ocean's 12- another movie with Julia Roberts and 11 men- has a haversack as the entire plot: even we the audience don't know until the end that the gang had pulled off the caper ages ago, and the rest was just misdirection. Erlich makes a conspicuous point of mentioning his growing rapport with the Japanese gardener... who is then there to conveniently "trip" Richard with his hose. Earlier in the episode, Hiroki (the gardener) was using a watercan, not a hose. Richard is visibly wearing knee pads under his jeans in the scene; this is possibly just a production gaff, but it was pointed out he's wearing them in the shots in the elevator, when they wouldn't be needed for the actual fall. The trailer for the next episode has Richard getting a nosebleed while in Jack's office just after the last scene of this episode; in the original haversack, the ruse entailed not only fake documents being "recovered" by the enemy, but dousing them with blood to make it look like a wounded courier had been carrying them. The entire opening sequence basically speaks of a vast, cavernous place with plenty of rack space, plenty of network capacity, and no oversight, and where a PP engineer would be sadly "stuck" at all hours of the day- a perfect place to quietly spin up the platform away from Jack's eyes (leaving aside that you can't legally just co-locate yourself into someone else's datacenter) Gilfoyle's encounter with EndFrame may be a key point. Either they'll be a key part of the "plan" as some speculate, or are another target along with Jack: can the gang's Ocean's 11 master plan take down both Jack Barker and EndFrame, and leave PP on top of the heap? One possibility is Gilfoyle fake-defecting, and feeding EndFrame "hush hush" news that PP is lined up for the appliance space, causing EndFrame to pivot to that same direction- leaving PP ready to suddenly jump into the user platform space uncontested. Heck, those former Hooli employees would probably see another stab at a Nucleus as a disaster waiting to happen! https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/4ihro0/meinertzhagens_haversack_explained_or_why/ I'd love to believe that's true, that Judge & Co. heard the criticisms and decided to give us the ol' one-two, by pretending they were doing another lame retread of last season's manufactured drama and conflict... only to switch it up and show the gang had a genuinely cunning plan that ends in them launching a kick-ass platform and finally achieving real success. And it would be kind of awesome if the lately-underused Erlich ended up as the hero and CEO by season's end. But, while the theory is appealing... I'm still going to take a wait-and-see approach. I've... I've been hurt before by this show. :)

Reading this forum first, sounds like I don't exactly have to rush out and watch this one, then. :) Richard and the gang doing something stupid, ill-conceived, and ultimately unsuccessful, for reasons no one watching can understand? What a twist!

Very true (about SV). In their first seasons, SV seemed brilliant while HCF was decent- certainly well acted- but felt a bit unfocused. Now, with a full second season and change under their belts, I'm finding that I've basically given up on SV being watchable anymore, while HCF got significantly better in season 2, and seems to have found both its dramatic footing, and retained a sense of plausible realism about the industry. I hope they don't kill off Gordon either; Scoot McNairy has grown on me as an actor, and honestly the only person I'd be okay with leaving is Lee Pace- even though I think he's a fine actor. They still, as you mention, don't seem to know what to do with him; on this show he's basically like Arya in GoT, off having his own story line with only a tangential connection to the main plot. Last we saw, he'd yet again stumbled ass-backwards into wealth and success, but there's not really a natural connection between the businesses that will use AV, and the home internet user base that Mutiny is pursuing which is still largely in its infancy. The show will likely keep Joe around, but I hope they can come up with something better than another round of "Joe tries to do something right, everyone distrusts him, as a result it implodes for everyone, and Joe moves on yet again without a scratch on him". If I wanted to be frustrated watching characters repeatedly fail with the same character flaws and avoidable mistakes, I'd be watching HBO's "Silicon Valley". :) That's a good point, but I think on the show timeline the "1984" episode of season 1 was in November of 1984, and season 2 started with a jump to 1985. If we have a similar jump to them being settled in the Bay Area, we'd probably be up to 1986, enough to get past that crash you described. Besides, the Mutiny gang are basically now co-inventing the birth of the consumer Internet, which should be unaffected by the woes of Atari et al. As an aside, I believe it was you scowl who would write those interesting observations on the early tech industry in the episode threads; I hope you continue to do so, as the perspective was always interesting. I was about 10 when this show is taking place, and think our family's first computer was the famed TI-99/4A and I didn't start working in tech until 1996, so this show is to me what something set in the first dotcom boom would be to teenagers and young adults watching today. :)

Ewwwwwwww.... o.0 :)

It doesn't exactly make sense- especially since Gavin just initiated an effort to purge 1/5th the work force to save money. But pondering it, I suppose the thinking is that he wants Bighead gone- he was after all just an unwitting pawn in a power move against PP- but had also made the mistake of building him up as the next big thing, to the point of magazine covers and gushing press speculation. So they couldn't just axe him like a regular rank-and-file. Maybe $20M is their standard Principal Distinguished Senior Engineer Partner buyout, since Bighead had been elevated to a top-tier position in season 2. There are probably enough top-tier people in the valley, and at Hooli, that setting a precedent of a much smaller severance package would cause unnecessary ripples among the remaining elite- so fuck it, that $20M is a pittance compared to the piles of cash they saved by firing a bunch of people and reclaiming unvested stock. Which really, is the lesson of the real SV that this show could probably focus on more: how, despite all the "meritocracy" claims, it's not really different from the way wealth has operated in every industry since, well, the invention of money. The elite take care of each other- sharing board seats, golden parachutes, absurd stock/compensation- regardless of actual value, while Richard Hendricks and his friends are seen as nothing more than playing pieces on a giant game board. When one of those peons stumbles across a billion dollar idea, you either buy them off, steal it (go read about Philo T. Farnsworth if you want to be depressed), or welcome them behind the velvet ropes.

Oh god, that mental image. From your mouth to Satan's ears... :) Yeah, I know I'm totally nerding about this to the umpteenth degree, like a Star Trek fan debating minute details of a particular episode or season. It's gotta be like doctors, lawyers, or cops watching their respective TV shows, and thinking "Gah, this is so unrealistic, and unneeded since there's actual, interesting stories to explore!". Probably unhealthy for me to fret so much over what is, after all, a 30-minute sitcom.

My god, this a thousand times. What the hell happened to this show, and why does Mike Judge apparently talk to no one in the tech world anymore?!? He seems to be stuck in the same late-90's tech world that the admittedly brilliant "Office Space" hails from, but the tech world has changed a lot since then and Judge and the writing stuff have not kept up. We're quicksanding in non-existent or archaic problems! While Jack is apparently our new "villain", he's not wrong. You want to change the world, Richard? Then you should have released PP as open source and let the world run with it. Since you didn't, and since you allegedly want to make money... why are you fighting so hard on the making money part? As I've labored at mind-numbing length here in the past, big businesses- streaming companies like Netflix, Hulu, even Spotify, cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google- would pay good coin, today, to leverage that amazing compression. chocolatine is right; anyone who'd be an early player in using the PP compression would have plenty of their own data to hook up to a neural net and reap whatever additional benefits (although 2x-5x compression of video isn't exactly begging for an additional boost). License the tech, then go swim in the piles of money while building your neural net and awesome customer platform that can change the world four years down the road. I mean, what does it say about how dumb the PP gang are after 2+ seasons that the one brogrammer proclaimed immediately that he wouldn't give it to Gavin: "Do you realize how much money we could make selling this to someone?!" Huh... imagine that, selling your product to interested businesses! Seems that guy, not Richard, is the real genius of this show (oddly, of course, Gavin now has a legitimate lawsuit against those Hooli guys, since they developed the entire thing at the office; if we're lucky, we'll have a whole new season about legal battles, whoohoo!). Not to mention we're no doubt in for some more "oh no, the funding is running dry" story lines, based on that line of dialogue when they first walked into the offices and Richard asked how they could afford it. As if a genuinely valuable idea wouldn't get more funding if need be, when dumb ideas can be funded through several rounds before collapsing. Also, are we now in season 3 and still haven't seen a mention of patenting the freakin' algorithm- even after the protracted lawsuit with Hooli? Wouldn't this be job #1 for Jack, given the history of PP? While software patents get a bad rap for things like patent trolls and frivolous patents, people can and do patent compression algorithms; things like gif files, mp3 files, video files, and general data compression. That's why you get a patent: so that if eventually someone literally jerking off at their desk stumbles on the same idea, you're protected from a bigger company with deeper pockets simply shoving you out of the market place. Yeah, it's sad to imagine the writers laughing themselves silly about their "subtle" callbacks to the infamous dick joke, and how that magically gave some random brogrammer the same idea that Richard had (although how he got it all from just a single hand motion, while guys like Gilfoyle and Dinesh still apparently don't understand the algorithm they actively work on...). Actually, it's really sad that they think the only source of humor to be found in this show is by making our main characters implausibly stupid or passive. Why is Jared going without sleep as a homeless person? He has money from Hooli, and presumably savings since he's not exactly a big-spending baller, and is now drawing a paycheck from PP. Go get a hotel room while you search for a new apartment, dipshit! And yeah, while he was funny in season 1, there's no good reason Richard should still be taking abuse from this random low-rent doctor, when as CTO he probably has a better health plan. In short: write new jokes, you uncreative hacks! I think I'm like you; this show just makes me mad and depressed. I don't laugh anymore, the plots are increasingly bizarre, and I can't begin to imagine what end game they have in mind for this show besides petering out and getting canceled. Maybe I should just get back the 30 minutes a week and call it a day.

So, an unsteady but slightly optimistic season opener. Pros: By episode's end, Richard has apparently come to his senses, and we're going to be moving forward from the stumbling-CEO era to something new. Maybe during the off-season, Judge and the writers took the criticisms to heart and realized they need to progress the story before people tune out. Cons: I didn't really laugh that often, even at the usually reliable Dinesh/Gilfoyle, and most of the episode I just wanted someone to slap the hell out of Richard. Reviga has made the funding official, holding 10-15% of the company. Richard meanwhile still holds the lion's share at 60-70%, so on paper he's already valued at $30-35M, Erlich at $5M, and I think the rest of the gang got like 3% each so $1.5M. Seeing how much he absolutely hated being the CEO last season, he should be thrilled about being able to sit back and let the experts make him rich while focusing on the tech- not throwing childish tantrums that jeopardize his own very real wealth, and that of his friends. Yeah, I'm kind of okay with Gavin sticking around, if only because he's a great character, but that was an obvious between seasons "do-over" if I ever saw one. I hated the reasons Hanneman was introduced in season 2, but he was undeniably hilarious during his time on the show. I kind of hope Bighead is being written off now, since they don't do much with him other than laugh at his improbably meteoric and wholly undeserved rise. Totally agree on Richard: we spend an entire season watching him stumble and fail to a level that transcends mere awkward nerdiness into a probable case of severe brain damage, all while clearly hating being a CEO. Now, he wants to quit his own company- which has just turned him into a paper millionaire with a decent chance to be a billionaire- simply because he thinks CTO is a demotion? It's not at all a demotion; in a tech-heavy company like this, CTO means a lot. He gets to focus on leading the entire tech side, which is the one thing he's good at, actually enjoys, and for which he is rightly respected by everyone. Leave the schmoozing and business agreements and money to the experts, who could rightly turn Richard's angry and arrogant "you couldn't possibly do what I do" speech to Dinesh/Gilfoyle against him based on his ineptness in season 2. I agree that we the audience are supposed to see Richard as clueless and in the wrong here, but it gets hard to laugh when your characters are so willfully stupid and blind. That's why I'm actually a little optimistic that they've apparently wrapped up his pointless indecision, and PP's constant financial woes, for the time being. The RIGBY thing was one of the few highlights, although Gilfoyle read as strangely angry- he's usually so perfectly chill. Jared continues to cement his position as a key pillar in this show's dynamic; he's sooo great in all his fawning obsequiousness, he's close to supplanting Bachman as the reliably funny character. I think I root for him to ultimately succeed, more than any of them. :) I think Flutterbeam's mustache thing was a direct rip on Snapchat (again!), since that's a big new feature in the last year, the real-time overlay effects on the face. It's what this show does well: skewering these bright minds all focused on solving something as pointless as the mustache app without a trace of self-doubt or perspective. For example, Richard's funnily snide "guy who can't even cure cancer" line, since I know in my own techie circles we often used to say "Eh, it's not like we're curing cancer!" whenever some web deployment went awry.

Yeah, I keep meaning to rewatch some of the early episodes, to feel that same surprising change; Fimmel and others have done a fantastic job of showing us these characters growing, changing, reacting. I think that's when I like this show best, when the story and perspective seems more like a living documentary of things that happened, not a fan-driven plot about who we're supposed to "root" for as Good Guys and Bad Guys. The time jumps etc don't bother me: we're getting a personalized tour through history(ish) with this show, and it's not always going to be about Ragnar's personal quest for glory and fame, but seeing how the effects of these two civilizations clashing play out both immediately and over the years ; can you imagine if we had to watch ~20 seasons in real time to get this much story? :) To me, last night was a really good episode, because we see basically the last big siege of Paris from this generation's Vikings, and what that meant to all of them. As it happens, I was kind of rooting for Rollo, and you can't blame the man for "betraying" the Vikings: his life must be fantastic these days. Princess wife, probably a bevy of healthy, doted on kids; he's living in castles- heck, Charles has probably giving him one of his own at this point- being waited on hand and foot; not to mention he is adored and beloved as the mother-effin' Savior of Paris and Hero of Francia, every where he goes. Sure beats living grimy in some fishing village, having your older brother subtly mock you as a perpetual second fiddle! And kudos to Charles, who showed that his faith in his daughter, and by extension the savage northman Rollo, paid off big time. I do hope, while it's not a big plot thread anymore, we do "check in" on Francia and Rollo from time to time. Random thought, but was anyone else reminded of Rami Malek of "Mr. Robot" (great show if you haven't seen it, btw), when they first showed adult Ivar's face? I had a moment's thought that maybe we'll get a spin-off show focusing on Ivar's life called "Mr. Ragnar". :)

I was so confused skimming these comments at first, because I thought at first you were talking about the Benioff who is a co-producer of "Game of Thrones". :) Enthusiastic yes the points both of you make, it's been my complaint since season 2 started. By leaving the core group in this sort of Groundhog Day of failure loop, stuck in that same house all through season 2, it robs us of a chance to explore some of these weird cultural elements of SV. We've touched on it with Hooli, or the weasel-owning neighbor, but I think it's much funnier if we see our cast struggle with being on the other said of the fake "woo-hoo, crush it!" culture, or expand the stories beyond just going from one tech office to another. Truth is, I barely remember the overall plotline of season 2- something about a lawsuit, and ongoing financial issues?- whereas all the things I do remember were the funny little one-off set pieces or vignettes that weren't just about the challenges of series A funding. :)

Not saying it can't be true, but I've never heard anything like that, and it seems unlikely; from what I have seen, every person involved with that show has nothing but great things to say about the experience. And in particular, someone like Dean Norris had a golden opportunity to inhabit a fantastic, multi-faceted character for several seasons, including one of the most epic character endings you can wish for as an actor. The Hank Schrader role would be like the finest grade heroin to an actor, so I doubt he'd be bitter or nasty afterwards. Plus, Dean Norris made this funnyordie.com video "spoiling" the ending of Breaking Bad just before the actual BB finale aired, which is pretty good if you haven't seen it. I doubt he makes this if he's got some inexplicable bad feelings about the show.

Huh, I thought you were watching it for the first time, or did I misread that a few days ago? In any case, yeah- IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the law in basically every state takes an extremely dim view of someone pretending to be a lawyer if they aren't part of the bar. In fact, I believe Saul's first appearance in BB is him telling Walt & Jess to pay him a dollar, so that he can official be their lawyer (and thus save his own skin because now he can't testify against them). And since he has that future plot armor, it's not clear why Gilligan and Co. are spending so much time building tension about the dangling Sword of Chuck-ocles hanging over Jimmy's head: we know that Jimmy ends up practicing law for long enough that by the time of BB, he's a well established local sleazy ambulance chaser/"criminal" attorney, driving a fine white Cadillac and with lots of experience in money laundering.

Aw, they totally should have done that!

I guess with Mike's story in focus and progressing nicely while Jimmy spins his tires for a whole season... maybe they really should have called this show "Breaking Bald". :)

Awesome. I have two hopes for season 3: that your prediction is exactly right, and that it all happens in the first 10 minutes of season 3, episode 1. :)

This, 1000%. I too am a little disappointed in the finale, because it feels like more sideways non-progress; Chuck really needs to fade out of the story so we can continue with Jimmy/Saul's story, but this finale seems to suggest we're going to waste even more time on Chuck in season 3. I hope Gilligan and Co. realize that we're all pretty much done with Chuck. McKean has done a fantastic job, but so did Giancarlo Esposito in BB- and Fring was at least written off when the time was right, before overstaying his welcome. But you are dead on right: there is a gigantic mountain of evidence that Chuck is just a mentally ill lawyer losing his faculties and handling it badly. When I was watching, I did suspect something was up with Chuck- he suddenly got a weaselly look on his face when Jimmy had left the previous time, before going into the garage- and noticed that at no time did Jimmy really confess (although I also agree with a lot of posters that even then, Jimmy would have been smarter and kept to his story). As you say, his statement of how Chuck "got it all right, every detail, amazing!" just sounds like a worried man trying to cheer up his sick brother, and even his final statement when Chuck said "You do realize you just confessed to felony" is "I *guess*... but you do feel better, right?!". What bar association, much less Howard, would waste time when there's soooo much evidence that Chuck is losing his faculties, and the only "evidence" against Jimmy is a man apparently trying to comfort his mentally and medically ill brother? His partner Howard, HHM employees including Ernesto, the doctor who's seen him twice now- pretty much everyone Chuck and Jimmy know all see a guy who has a crippling mental illness. The story will be simply that Howard called Jimmy, Jimmy rushes to his brother who's acting literally insane, and says anything to keep him calm before heading back to Howard. To the world Jimmy will seem an almost saintly brother. Hell, we the audience know the truth and even then, we still don't care and hate Chuck. But yeah... I was hoping for more out of this finale. If we were going to spend the whole episode on Chuck, this should have been his "Face Off"; I honestly thought that he'd end up institutionalized by episode's end. Instead, we get no Fring, no real hint of the next phase in Jimmy's journey, and for me a general sense that this whole season was just pointless treading water. At times beautifully written, acted, and filmed, but still... treading water.

For me, I don't want him to be the complete Saul Goodman immediately- he's too good a character, and too interesting a show. But I do want there to be a clear sense of progress. If season 1 was introducing us to Slippin' Jimmy and the choices- his own and those of others- that started him on this path, and season 2 begins his initial descent into being a "criminal" attorney, then in season 3 I want to see crystal clear signs of Saul becoming his new identity. Maybe that's in the form of finally moving into the famous strip mall location, and starting to do some sketchy cases not unlike the Kettlemans. Before the show ever aired, I figured the prequel would be like a case-of-the-week type show, having Jimmy/Saul handle one "wacky hijinks" case after another, each a little more "out there" legally than the last. Now that we've seen how good the cast is- especially Odenkirk- I understand wanting the slow burn and character development... but it's still important to feel that the show isn't taking forever to start to tie into the beginnings of the BB world. Ultimately, whether it's 3-4 seasons or more, I hope we catch up to the BB world and get a glimpse of Jimmy in Omaha, reassembling his life and ending up back on top somehow. Call me crazy, but unlike that other show, I want Jimmy to ultimately have some kind of happy ending. Even if that's like Milton in "Office Space", sipping pina coladas on some sunny beach with a pile of cash in a Swiss bank account. Heck, if it weren't for Kim, he'd probably still be in that pool at the hotel.

Here's the twist, and there is a twist... they show it. The're gonna show all of it. Because what's the one major thing missing from Vince Gilligan shows these days? Full penetration. Guys, they're gonna show full penetration, and they're gonna show a lot of it. We're talking graphic scenes of Jonathan Banks really going to town on this waitress from the dinner. From behind, 69, anal, vaginal, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, all the hits, all the big ones, all the good ones. Then Mike goes off to fight the Salamancas, then back to the waitress's house for some more "shoveling her driveway"... Salamancas, shoveling, Salamancas, shoveling, Salamancas, shoveling, and that goes on and on, back and forth for about 60 minutes or so until the episode just... ends.