Dev F
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1 hour ago, SunnyBeBe said:
I knew the words and it took a few minutes to realize who recorded that….The Monkees! Love those guys.
I thought it was a really interesting song choice: "It cannot be a part of me, for now it's part of you."
Aside from the smartass irony of putting those lyrics over a montage about identity theft, I think it resonates with the themes I was talking about earlier, how I sort of saw the episode as being about Gene coldly throwing other people into the abyss to avoid being swallowed by it himself. If his marks and partners are just as lost and pathetic and corrupt as he is, if they all want to break bad and deserve to be punished for it, there's nothing especially awful about being Gene Takovic. It cannot be a part of him, because it's part of everyone.
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2 hours ago, Lonesome Rhodes said:
I didn't see a Marco in this ep. None of the marks were themselves grifters. None would engender the massive regard Jimmy had for Marco.
The first mark was definitely a petty grifter in the same vein as Marco. In Marco's first scene in the episode that bears his name, he's using bar tricks to shake down credulous bar patrons just like the mark, snatching a twenty dollar bill from the top of a beer bottle without disturbing the pile of quarters on top of it, exactly like how the mark snatches a hundred dollars from beneath Gene's hand.
26 minutes ago, gallimaufry said:I could be wrong but I feel like the same term was used in 502 of "Breaking Bad" about Ira's crew who Jimmy had been getting out of hot water for years and so I think it's also a bit of an Easter egg.
It's also, I think, another indication of the difference between original Saul and the Saulified Gene: Original Saul didn't want yet another reliable second story guy (yawn), he wanted a new, fun partner like Walt. Whereas Gene is going to force his guys to do the same goddamn scheme over and over again, and fuck them if they don't like it.
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18 minutes ago, Constantinople said:
He called Kim at a business from a pay phone. I don't see what's untraceable about that.
Right, it's not untraceable on her end. And I forgot that it's not the same pay phone either; he hangs up with Francesca and then drives around for a while before going to another pay phone to call Kim.
But if anything, that second part makes it seem less impulsive, since he wasn't like, While I'm here, I should call Kim . . . He drives around, ruminating; he stops and sits silently at a crossroads. The framing makes his choice look quite deliberate, not at all impulsive.
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The impulsiveness wasn't exorcised. He called Kim and broke into Cancer Man's house, which also shows a lack of control.
What about his call to Kim struck you as impulsive? It's not like he drunk dialed her; he called her on the untraceable line he'd just used to make his planned call to Francesca, in response to Kim reaching out to him.
As for his insistence on going through with the Cancer Man burglary, that stuck me as the perfect embodiment of his newfound obsession with control. Neither Jimmy nor Saul ever fixated on one particular plan and demanded to see it through to its conclusion no matter how badly it was going. They were always skating from one contingency plan to the next, keeping one step ahead of disaster. (Indeed, that's the central difference between Jimmy and Kim in "Axe and Grind": Jimmy is the one who's like, oh well, if the plan isn't working, we'll figure out some other way to screw over Howard tomorrow, while Kim insists that, no, we need to do this plan and we need to do it today.) Gene isn't riding the waves of chaos anymore; he's got a plan and he demands everyone stick to it. It's the carefully timed Cinnabon plot last week, only curdled into something foolish and dangerous.
QuoteNor is the emotional deafness exorcised in Nippy. In this episode he's visiting strip clubs and hiring hookers.
Yes, after he reaches out to Kim for the first time in who knows how long and it goes really badly. After years of convincing himself he was just a fun-time playboy, he dared to hope for a reconciliation with his one true love. And that hope is exactly what transforms his long-numbed feelings into phone-booth-destroying rage.
QuoteAnd I'm not sure Gene is less anxious. Lola82 here already compared the shot of him on his bed to Walt in Crawl Space. And Walt was quite anxious at the time.
I mean, I recognize the similarities, but as I said last week, I think such parallels often invite us to examine the ways in which the related scenes are different. Both characters end up entombed, but Walt is buried beneath a landslide of his own cascading bad choices, whereas Gene is encased in the icy grip of hopelessness.
If the episode wanted to show us that Gene was still anxiously looking over his shoulder, they could easily have done so, as they did in several earlier Gene flash-forwards. We instead see him eyeing the Cinnabon mixer with dread—which is not at all an image of "Omigod, I could still be found out one day!" nervousness. It's an image of churning, dreary sameness: this is how your life will be from now on, and there's no way to escape it.
Yet again, it's one of the positive developments of "Nippy" curdled into weakness and pain: because Gene is no longer preoccupied by the fear that he'll be found out, there's nothing to look forward to but endless days of empty mediocrity.
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14 minutes ago, Constantinople said:Another problem with Breaking Bad the episode, is that it completely undermines the need for Nippy.
I'm sure some will argue that Nippy was a kind of warm up for Jimmy. But that's not how it was intended, and they were completely different types of scams. At the very least, if it only took 20 or 30 minutes of episode time for home-invasion-financial-information-theft scam, it shouldn't have taken 70 minutes for the Great Mall Caper.
I really don't see why Nippy and Breaking Bad couldn't have been combined into one episode.
I don't think they could've been combined at all, since they serve essentially opposite purposes. "Nippy" was about Gene exorcising a big part of the ghost of his past—the anxiety, the impulsiveness, the emotional deadness, the lack of control—while "Breaking Bad" was about him realizing what still hangs over him even when that's all gone. Gene needed to get to the tentatively okay place he reached at the end of "Nippy" in order to get to the really awful place he got to tonight, bitter and cold and malicious in a way we've never really seen him before.
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31 minutes ago, WritinMan said:
I would say yes (in addition to Saul being someone who just doesn't like to give up). I think despite all the terrible things he's done, Saul sees Walt as the source of his ultimate downfall.
It's not just the cancer guy who's Walt. Jeff and his buddy are Walt and Jesse too. And the first mark, a big round guy with a gravelly voice who's a petty con artist, is Marco. It's their fault. They wanted this. They're the ones who broke bad. He's feeding them all to the darkness to keep it from swallowing him: "It wasn't me, it was Ignacio!"
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2 hours ago, nodorothyparker said:
Airdate 08/01/22
Make of the title what you will.
But seriously, I'm half expecting this to be another episode about Gene, Jeff, and Marion (and possibly Kim, paying off that mysterious November 12 phone call he planned with Francesca in the "Quite a Ride" flash-forward), with Jesse and Walt being saved for the second-to-last episode. As someone on Reddit pointed out, that would explain why a new episode of the Talking Saul post-episode roundtable is scheduled for that episode, so our returning faves can participate.
And I'm excited to see the shitstorm that would be sure to erupt if the show doesn't get the fireworks factory next week!
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38 minutes ago, Lalo Lives said:
NEXT EPISODE IS TITLED!!!
wow!
I'm imagining the hue and cry that would erupt if the episode is titled "Breaking Bad" and then focuses on Gene, Jeff, and Marion again instead of the expected Breaking Bad characters. I think there's a nonzero chance that's exactly what's going to happen.
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1 hour ago, sistermagpie said:
I wasn't talking about that reaction--Jeff was obviously pursuaded by the pitch Gene was making. I meant that if Jeff already knew that Saul and Walt were connected, which it seemed to me he would for the reasons you mentioned, he'd have no reason to have some obvious reaction to the fact that Gene was mentioning Walt. There'd be no reaction like, "OMG, you're talking about Walter White! The meth chem teacher!" Because he already knows Gene knows Walt and that Gene was part of Walt's crimes. It's the exact thing he's threatening him with. Gene's just putting a positive spin on it here.
Ah. got it, exactly. Especially since the scene plays with Jeff still being skeptical of Gene's pitch, and it's only when it turns out that his buddy is persuaded and is ready to take his place that he decides to stay in the game.
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14 minutes ago, peeayebee said:
I'm getting all confused. Like I've said -- I THINK I've said -- my memory is terrible. When does Jeff say that bolded part?
That's at the beginning of this episode, when Jeff is confronting Gene about homing in on his mom. In the previous episodes it's all subtextual, as blackmail often is, but it seems pretty clear that he's not just looking for an autograph. He brings his friend with him to the mall as a witness, tells Gene he's never more than five minutes away by cab, and says of Gene's anemic rendition of Saul's catchphrase, "A little rusty, but you'll do better next time."
And none of this is stuff a halfway normal person would think they could get away with just because they saw a celebrity living in a new town, absent any reason to think he can be blackmailed. Surely we're not meant to think that Jeff is just a weirdo with poor boundaries who accidentally stumbled onto the one celebrity who couldn't say no to his creepy overtures!
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2 hours ago, peeayebee said:
I just rewatched that scene, and I see no evidence that Jeff knew what Gene was referencing or that Gene was telling him the story of Walter White knowing that Jeff knew what he was talking about.
How does he not know? He's aware that Saul is a fugitive ripe for blackmailing ("All I have to do is pick up the phone and it's bye-bye, Saul Goodman"), he understands that Saul is someone who can get him in on the criminal high life, but he's unaware of why Saul is on the run or what his most significant criminal connection was? That's certainly not how I read it.
My assumption is that Jeff saw some news coverage along the lines of the American Greed episode featuring Saul and at least knew the rough contours of Saul's connection to Walt. Otherwise I don't see why he would've thought to blackmail him at all.
59 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:If Jeff already knew that Saul and Walt were connected, he'd have no reason to react to him mentioning the guy, after all.
Well, no, Saul's point isn't just that he knew Walt, it's that he was instrumental to his success. His implicit point was I can do for you what I did for him, which probably isn't something the coverage would've made clear, since I'm not sure it's even true.
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54 minutes ago, peeayebee said:
Nevertheless, I'll say again that I don't have a problem believing Jeff was unaware of the Walter White story.
Wait, why does Jeff have to be unaware of the Walter White story? I thought the whole point was that he does know what Saul was talking about when he mentions the "fifty-year-old high school chemistry teacher." He's saying, You heard about Walter White's criminal empire? That was all thanks to me, and I can do the same thing for you.
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54 minutes ago, Constantinople said:
In their first meeting, Frank the Security Guard sat down first, facing away from the monitors. During the montage, one time it appears as if Frank is sitting alone, indicating Gene hasn't sat down with his coffee.
Very plot convenient.
It looks like Frank has his own cushy office chair, which he prefers to roll over to the table instead of going around to sit in one of the rigid metal chairs on the other side. Which, yeah, is a little bit convenient, but part of the reason why Gene spent weeks ingratiating himself with Frank is to probe for those kind of weaknesses and make sure they're consistent and predictable.
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1 hour ago, Constantinople said:
We already know Jimmy is willing to put in an incredible amount of effort to pull of a scheme, that he's good at improvising on short notice and that he can turn the tables on someone who thinks he's got something on Jimmy. I don't need to see yet another variation of the same theme.
Neither do I! In fact, that's my precise point: I'm the one arguing that each new con has a unique and specific meaning to the story based on the subtle ways it's different from Jimmy's previous cons, against the counterargument that the differences are not significant and that the only point of Gene's newest con is that it's the same as all of Jimmy's previous cons.
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1 hour ago, BC4ME said:
Is there anything to glean out of that choice of name WRT the episode? As in someone getting "bit" by what went on?
I saw it as being more about what Nippy is. If this were Breaking Bad it would've probably been titled like the episode "Problem Dog" and "Rabid Dog": "Lost Dog."
1 hour ago, Blakeston said:The only reason Gene was able to convince Jeff to walk away, when Saul wasn't able to do the same with Walter White the first time he tried it, was because Walter was more powerful than Saul. Jeff was a pathetic loser who no longer had any power over Gene. If Jeff actually had the ability to make Gene a lot of money and give him a lot of thrills, and Gene turned that down, that would have sent a different message.
Sure, the circumstances are quite different, but to me the point isn't what Gene was able to accomplish in that scene but what he wanted to accomplish. Considering he clearly did have the upper hand with Jeff, I think it's significant that what he chose to do with it is reenact that earlier moment with Walt. Which, again, speaks to Gene's interest in control, something Saul and Jimmy never seemed to care that much about as they rode the waves of chaos.
QuoteAs for Gene constructing a methodical plan, and keeping calm and embracing pain to pull it off, I don't think that's anything new.
I can't think of a single other caper over the course of the series that involved Jimmy/Saul doing the same thing over and over again to work out the precise timing. Usually his elaborate plans involve a lot of different moving parts that he sets in motion one after another—e.g., the "Inflatable" montage, which has a similar rhythm but depicts Jimmy perpetrating increasingly outrageous acts of chaos at Davis & Main in order to get fired.
It's a fairly subtle distinction, but that's often how the show conveys meaning: by depicting similar events and inviting us to notice the small ways in which they're not the same. And I find it it's particularly conspicuous in this case, when multiple other characters have previously been characterized by their patience and precision in contrast to Jimmy: Mike with his extended scenes of watching and waiting, Chuck with his metronome, Lalo with his egg timer, etc.
QuoteJimmy's plan to get Chuck's malpractice insurer to drop him depended on Jimmy having a brilliantly thought out plan - and the plan hinged on Jimmy speaking emotionally about Chuck's struggles to the insurance company employee.
Jimmy getting his bar membership back also depended on him manipulating others by making a very emotional speech that undoubtedly contained some deeply felt truths about Chuck.
Well, I agree with nodorothyparker that Jimmy's insurance con was extemporaneous rather than brilliantly thought out. But I also think there's a difference in Jimmy's use of emotions there, since they're altogether fabricated. He doesn't actually fear for his brother's life; he's just putting on a show to screw Chuck over. And it's this fabricated emotional outburst that causes Jimmy's actual emotional turmoil, since it's a big part of why he feels such intense guilt over Chuck's death.
The bar hearing is a closer match, but again, I think the subtle differences are informative. At the bar hearing, Jimmy was letting out a little of his genuine grief, but then he crammed it back down again with his Saul Goodman–esque glee about how he manipulated those poor suckers. In this episode, after he distracts the guard, saves the con, and makes it to his little spot off-camera, there's no such glee—not even the subtle hand-rubbing excitement he expressed in the exact same spot earlier in the episode. He's alone and unobserved, but he still looks genuinely pained. And that carries over into the rest of the episode, in which it turns out that his whole plan was to put an end to his criminal chicanery, whereas his reaction to the bar hearing was precisely the opposite: Woohoo, I can see the Matrix! Time to do more cons!
And obviously, this is far from the healthiest or most direct way to deal with trauma. But I do think it demonstrates that, in his own dysfunctional way, Gene is working through some of his shit.
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44 minutes ago, SharonH58 said:
I don't see why Will and El are so wild about sad sack Mike. Sorry Will, but he isn't the heart of the group.
I think that's another example of how the writers can be too concise with their character arcs. In retrospect, season 2 is where they lay out the story of why Will would fall in love with Mike: He's sweet and supportive, the one person Will doesn't resent for treating him like a baby who can't handle things on his own. When Will is trembling with fear, Mike holds his hand. He reaches him through the Mind Flayer's possession with a story of how becoming friends with him was the best thing he's ever done. I totally get why Will would fall for him after that.
But, having established all that, the writers sort of just hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner on that part of the story and move on. We don't really get more scenes of Mike being a great friend to Will in seasons 3 and 4, just scenes of him apologizing for not being that great a friend recently, since that conflict is what the story is now about. It hangs together in a Screenwriting 101 way, but it makes it harder to feel how significant their connection is supposed to be, because we have to look past the current conflict and remember how close they were two seasons earlier.
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2 hours ago, peeayebee said:
Didn't Jimmy do a methodical scheme in setting up Howard? Of course he did it with Kim, but he played a major role there. I don't see how he's more controlled as Gene than he was back then.
The scheme with Howard was elaborate, but it wasn't methodical in the same way as his plan here. And it ended with Saul running around like a maniac to keep everything on track—in marked contrast to his deliberately paced routine here.
It's also interesting how he has to respond this time when the con goes wrong: it's not about "Go, go, go," it's about stopping the momentum long enough for Jeffy to finish the burglary. And whereas Saul was all about filling his life with chaos and his earbud with chatter to escape the hurt, here Gene saves the day by embracing the pain, turning it into a sob story to keep Frank distracted.
12 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:Perhaps, I’m missing something, but wouldn’t it have been easier to have disappeared….changed identities again? I don’t recall the rules about how that worked.
The flash-forward at the beginning of season 5 dealt with this possibility. Gene actually calls the Disappearer and asks for a do-over, before deciding he doesn't want to keep running and living in fear but will handle it himself—by, it turns out here, reembracing and reimagining the very life he's been running from.
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1 hour ago, Cotypubby said:
I did laugh at how the “After all that, a happy ending” tag from the end of Plan and Execution actually meant nothing and was just part of the lie with Nippy. 😆
It's not just about Nippy, though. It's also about Gene contemplating the possibility that his own drama is at an end, and whether he really wants it to be.
Was I the only one for whom the combination of "little runaway dog" and "dreary black-and-white world contrasting with a wonderland of color" brought to mind a particular ambiguous happy ending, The Wizard of Oz? "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."
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1 hour ago, Blakeston said:
We know that Gene misses his days as a big shot con artist, so it wasn't necessary to hit us over the head with that. That was already quite clear from when he wrote the "SG was here" graffiti.
I mean, that wasn't the only thing that season 2 flash-forward was about. It was also about how Gene got locked in the trash room in the first place: because on the one hand he blundered forward through a fire door without thinking about how it was going to lock behind him, and on the other hand he was too afraid of blowing his cover to go through the door on the other side that was wired to notify the police. Which sets up Jimmy's entire arc for season 2, how he's constantly stumbling into some wild scheme but then timidly retreating to the straight and narrow when things get too hot. To me, that's what "SG was here" means—that Saul Goodman was born from that metronomic swing between temptation and respectability.
And the Gene in this new episode was emphatically not the same Gene from those earlier scenes, nor the Gene who impulsively shouted at the shoplifter, "Get a lawyer!" As suggested by the scenes of him methodically navigating the trash room day after day, this is a Gene who's starting to come to terms with both his timidity and his impulsivity. He plans an elaborate scheme that involves the sort of patience and precise timing that Jimmy frequently seemed incapable of, much to the chagrin of more tooth-achingly precise characters like Chuck or Mike. And to me that's interesting, the idea that Gene is reaching back to his Saul persona for something Saul never really had—a sense of control.
So I see as being somewhat more complicated than Jimmy just looking for a way to return to his old life as a big-shot con artist. On some level he's actually looking for a way to exorcise that history, to be Saul but to do it differently, to get it right this time. That's echoed in his kiss-off scene with Jeff and his buddy. He strong-arms them into telling him "We're done," which is something he was never able to do with Walt: "We're done when I say we're done."
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On 7/23/2022 at 1:22 PM, KarenX said:
They think that the stated reason for the Jamestown catastrophe was a hoax. That the Tracy/Gordon Heroic Act is a cover story for something. I sort of lost the thread on the specifics.
I think their conspiracy theory is that evil Russians and evil Americans were conspiring to divide the Moon's resources between themselves, and when some of the good and decent astronauts on the Moon got suspicious, the conspirators had them killed.
9 hours ago, xaxat said:One of the group is an astronaut who served on Jamestown with Tracy. Like many conspiracies, there is a kernel of truth in that the US and the Soviets did collude in order to cover up what actually happened. After Apollo/Soyuz they came up with a cover story that the Sea Dragon crashed because of a malfunction (when Ed shot it down) and I'm pretty sure that the fact that Ed, Dani, and "Sally Ride" all disobeyed direct orders is not part of the official history.
Yeah, and the US government was also covering up the fact that they'd installed a second reactor in the Jamestown base to make weapons-grade plutonium but hadn't gotten around to hooking it up to the backup cooling system yet. That's why people like Charles Bernitz the moon marine find the tale of Tracy and Gordo's heroic sacrifice so fishy—because NASA fudged a problem with two reactors and two cooling systems into a vague thing about something going on with the colony's one reactor, and it didn't fit with the details they knew about the base and its operations.
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8 hours ago, sistermagpie said:
That's what it sounded like to me too. There's just something about the whole speech that makes it seem like the breakup would be on her side or mutual, like things would just die. She says he'd stop the scam, not just that he'd break up with her to protect her because Lalo was alive. He'd stop the scam and then they'd break up, like the two things are linked, but the latter is a result of the former.
Which makes sense to me, because one of the things Kim is most repulsed by is someone else martyring themselves to rescue poor, helpless Kim. "You don't save me. I save me." Jimmy would've put a stop to the scam primarily because he wouldn't be able to handle the idea of something happening to his wife or the guilt that it happened because of his stupid choices. And as much as Kim would probably want to be okay with that, she knows she'd end up resenting him for it.
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43 minutes ago, Simon Boccanegra said:
On Jimmy's marital history: Although I get what Dev F is saying about how things Saul said in BB could have been encoded, he said he caught his second wife cheating. That would be the one before Kim.
True, but that obviously wasn't what convinced Saul that it's a cruel world and you need to just grow up and deal with it, because we saw Jimmy for years after that moment and he didn't think that way—whereas Kim leaving him apparently did turn him into the kind of cynical asshole who would make that sort of statement.
My suggestion is that Kim's betrayal was so painful that Saul can't even acknowledge it directly, and instead couches it in terms of some sleazy event with his previous wife that, if it happened at all, certainly didn't have the same dire impact.
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25 minutes ago, Spartan Girl said:
Still, great acting from Rhea. Her confession that she didn’t tell him about Lalo because she didn’t want Jimmy to pull the plug on the scheme…wow.
I think I'm probably going to end up reading this as the moment Saul was really thinking about when he tells Walt, "I caught my second wife screwing my stepdad, okay? It's a cruel world, Walt. Grow up." It was the final betrayal that severed his most important relationship and his overall faith in the world, when his wife went behind his back with an older male figure whom Saul regards with a mixture of resentment and grudging respect.
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8 hours ago, Joimiaroxeu said:
Gus should've listened to Mike though. Lalo was playing 3-D chess, albeit with too much trash-trashing towards the end. That situtation could've gone hella sideways for Gus if Lalo hadn't decided to be a Bond villain and run his mouth too long.
One thing episode writer Gordon Smith pointed out in an interview that I don't know if I would've realized myself: It wasn't just a matter of narrative convenience that Lalo let the pre-show go on too long. Gus manipulated him into doing it based on his experience at Nacho's execution. "I thought of it in terms of taking what he saw Nacho do before he died and using it as a tactic. He saw that as Nacho was standing there spilling out all that stuff, Hector, all those people who could have killed him right then, they didn’t, because they all wanted to hear it, so their hate could be justified"
Which sort of ties in with what I was saying earlier about Gus seeming to get the better of dire circumstances by plotting harder than everyone else, but in fact he's only delayed his inevitable fall. Gus took a clever lesson from Nacho's sacrifice, but it was the wrong lesson. Nacho didn't escape the game and probably save his father by tap-dancing harder than everyone else; he escaped by giving up the tap-dance, accepting that the only way out was out.
To quote one of my favorite lines from Jesus Christ Superstar: "To conquer death, you only have to die."
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S06.E11: Breaking Bad
in Better Call Saul
Interestingly, writer Tom Schnauz has mentioned in post-episode interviews that the scene with Walt and Jesse was written and shot out of sequence: "We had a very small window, and I had to write the scene way ahead of the actual [611] script. And we shot it in April of 2021 while Vince [Gilligan] was shooting episode two." So it makes sense that it feels a little generic, since it couldn't be tailored to fit the precise contours of an episode that hadn't been written yet!
The rest of the Breaking Bad flashbacks fit much more snugly, not just the closing scenes at Walt's school, which you mentioned, but also the teaser over the open grave, which sets up the theme of Saul displacing blame when confronted with his own annihilation, and the scene with Mike, which reintroduces Saul's dumb foot gizmo and lays the groundwork to compare and contrast his reactions to a dangerous new criminal opportunity.