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Posts posted by Dev F
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40 minutes ago, SimplexFish said:
Ya know with the fans that are forestalling other fans dislike for the finale by saying "its fiction", that is true. However I don't think I have ever once heard that excuse given for any other episode of BCS or BB. The reason for that is its never been necessary to remind fans its a fictional show because the writing had never left so many huge back to back implausibilities in a single episode before as Saul Gone has.
As I said, I'm fairly certain that the presence of "huge back-to-back implausibilities" is not the main difference between this story and the one on Breaking Bad in which Walt poisoned a kid to frame another drug kingpin for framing him (while also being careful to use a poison that would later make it look like the kid poisoned himself accidentally), to convince his former partner, who'd been swayed to the kingpin's side in an elaborate campaign involving the kingpin's fixer, who's also Walt's lawyer's PI, to switch sides again and take out the kingpin—which, after the first attempt to blow him up failed, involved attaching a bomb to the bell on the wheelchair of the other kingpin's nemesis and having him pretend to turn rat to lure the kingpin to his nursing home, and when the bomb went off it blew off exactly half of the kingpin's face to the bone, but he was still able to get up and walk out of the room and fussily adjust his tie one last time before he dropped dead.
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5 hours ago, aghst said:
That's even more stupid.
So it was self-motivation to have himself incarcerated for the rest of his life?
People just don't do that, no matter how much they feel guilty, how much remorse they may have.
I mean, people in the real world don't literally do that—in the same way that no one in the real world literally transforms from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into history's most notorious techno-wizard meth kingpin. But in the same way that people do become debased and corrupted by a festering sense of entitlement like Walter White, they also do sometimes insist on taking responsibility for their actions even though it means accepting a much greater punishment like Jimmy McGill. Is there really a "people just don't do that" threshold that disqualifies a sleazy lawyer choosing to spend eighty-four years in prison, but not a drug kingpin poisoning a little kid to frame another kingpin for trying to frame him so his onetime partner will switch sides and help him blow up the other kingpin? Over-the-top crime-thriller plotting is just the language of these series.
The only major difference, it seems to me, is that most of the comparable plot points are about the characters making over-the-top selfish choices rather than over-the-top selfless ones. But the Gilliganverse has never been seemed so cynical or cruel that it allows for hyperbolic gestures of resentment and cruelty but not hyperbolic gestures of decency and love.
What's more, this fictional universe hasn't just established a precedent of baroque crime-thriller twists in general, it's laid the groundwork for this twist in particular. In the Breaking Bad episode in which Saul is first introduced, we meet another character named Jimmy who volunteers to get sent to prison over and over, having spent "forty-four of the last fifty years inside" because, as Saul puts it, "he's actually more comfortable inside. The outside world hasn't been too kind to him." And in Saul's last Breaking Bad episode, he tries to convince Walt that he should accept a prison sentence instead of being disappeared, because he has a wife he can't leave high and dry. It seems like the writers have long suggested that this sort of thing both does and maybe should happen in their universe.
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51 minutes ago, aghst said:
Those who praise the ending said Jimmy was accepting his guilt, coming to peace with it.
Yet he was able to negotiate a relatively cushy deal and throw it all away for the chance to see Kim again and get her to like him again.
I don't understand the "Yet." These things aren't contradictory. The whole reason Jimmy became full-on Saul was to run away from the pain of his breakup with Kim, so sorting out his relationship with her is central to making peace with himself.
What's more, in one of the many interviews he gave following the finale, Peter Gould also pointed out that Jimmy's gambit wasn't necessarily just about making Kim feel better about him or her own decisions—he may have also worried that he wouldn't be able to go through with it if she wasn't there. He didn't just do it for her, some grand romantic gesture without a genuinely moral dimension; their reconciliation was the instrument of his self-acceptance as much as the other way around.
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18 hours ago, PeterPirate said:
From my point of view Jimmy did scheme his way to the end. He first maneuvered his way to a 7-year sentence, but then concocted a scheme that ended up getting him 86 years. In return he showed the love of his life that he was the same person she had known before, and also made sure they could never come together and poison each other's life.
Yeah, what I probably should've said is, "You can't scheme your way to the end if the scheming never ends." The issue isn't that schemes don't work—Gus, for instance, schemed his way out of Lalo's trap pretty effectively—but that you can't layer scheme on top of scheme in hopes of some perfect, transformative resolution down the road. That's what doomed Gus despite his victory: because even though he'd engineered the perfect ending for himself, he couldn't let it be the end, couldn't just lay down his burdens and become a successful businessman/kingpin with a hot sommelier boyfriend. He insisted on chasing a vengeance that had just almost killed him, until the whole thing literally blew up in his face.
Jimmy, on the other hand, hustles just enough to bring his story to an end. The point isn't that he learns not to be Slipping Jimmy anymore, it's that he accepts that he is Slipping Jimmy—and Saul, and Gene—and he'll only find peace if he stops trying so hard to be someone else.
12 hours ago, ShadowFacts said:I can never see Nacho's end as bringing him peace. He tried until the end to get his father to go to Canada with him but he refused. He "accepted" his consequences because there was no other way, and chose suicide to spare himself torture. If it had been possible I have no doubt he would have taken the route of going with his father as far away as he could. His choice to try and kill Hector, be busted by Fring and all that came from that sealed his doom. His father is apparently safe but he had no assurance of that except whatever Mike said. I think trying to rewrite his destiny would have been preferable to what actually happened.
Nacho spent most of the series trying to rewrite his destiny, pretending to be someone he wasn't and betraying everyone around him in pursuit of a goal that was never going to happen, because his father was never going to give up his business and start a new life regardless of the danger. Accepting all of the cartel's anger to keep it from blowing back on his dad was the only thing he could do.
And the series could've presented that as a pointless tragedy, but it conspicuously didn't. While everyone else is analogized to a little girl building doomed marble towers that climb too high, Nacho's death nourishes a flower that grows tall and beautiful in the desert rain. His actions are shown to be not futile but successful: the only thing he could do for his father ends up saving his father. Because he accepts the violent end he deserves, Manuel doesn't have to face the violent end he doesn't.
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4 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:
In this case, I think the inconsistency was the point, wasn't it? He was doing what he'd avoided for his whole life, practically.
Exactly. Jimmy spent his whole life tormented by regret, by the idea that if he could only go back and change that one thing he didn't like about himself, he could be happy with who he was. But every scheme to fix that one problem just created two more problems, a chain of regrets leading all the way back to his original sin: "So you were always like this." And yet he stubbornly remained on the same doomed path as most of the characters this season, convinced that if he just kept scheming, kept building a new version of himself on top of the old new version of himself, he'd eventually be free.
"See, you build it too high, your marble's gonna run off the track."
"It's not finished. When it's finished, it'll work."What Jimmy finally realized at the end of the season is the same thing Nacho realized at the beginning: You can't scheme your way to the end, because then the scheming never ends. As long as you keep running from who you are and what you've done, you're just building the tower higher and higher until you inevitably careen off the track. Jimmy's ending has a chance of bringing him peace for the same reason Nacho's did: because it actually is an ending. He's not looking for a way to rewrite his destiny and come out on top. He's just going to own who he is and accept the consequences.
"Jimmy, you are always down," Kim once snapped at him. Now he's down about as far as a man can be. But he chose to be there, made peace with being there. When the alternative was plummeting there from rickety heights of his own creation, that counts as a happy ending.
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4 minutes ago, Dobian said:
They sure made it like he was at Cinnabon a pretty long time. That's a lot to pack into two months, plus why would he be that fast to jump into another con game? I could see it happening after a couple of years went by and he was bored and depressed with his life, but after less than two months? You would think that he would still be laying very low at this point.
It was more than two months, because the end of Breaking Bad overlaps with Gene's time in Omaha. Walt and Saul use the Disappearer circa March 2010, so it's more like eight months.
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So did anyone else notice that in the flashback scene with Chuck, which takes place shortly before the first episode of the series (see, e.g., the moment when Jimmy talks about possibly getting Chuck a copy of the Financial Times, which he brings him for the first time in "Uno"), Jimmy is wearing what appears to be Marco's pinky ring, even though he didn't receive it until the end of season 1, after his and Chuck's falling-out?
I tried to work out a way that it's not just a wardrobe flub—say, by reading it as another take on regrets and paths not taken, if Jimmy used to wear his own tacky pinky ring but stopped just before the start of the series because of the itch of Chuck's disapproval, only to start wearing Marco's after his falling out with his brother. But that really doesn't seem to jibe with the end of season 1, which makes a big deal about the fact that the ring is a new affectation for Jimmy—he even mentions at Marco's funeral, "I'm not a big ring guy"—so I'm having a hard time reading it as anything other than a whoopsie.
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2 minutes ago, MJ Frog said:
I think it benefitted her quite a bit to know that Jimmy McGill, someone she loved, was back and Saul Goodman, a man she niether knew nor cared for, was gone.
Exactly this. A big reason why Kim broke bad is because she despaired at what the system did to people like Jimmy. That's why she ended up screaming at stubborn old Mr. Acker that he doesn't get to play by his own rules, then colluding with Jimmy to help him keep his house. That's why she deemed herself personally responsible for representing every downtrodden defendant in Albuquerque, even if she had to scam the Sandpiper case to do it. And it's why she ended up burying herself in a life where she didn't have to make any choices at all, because she convinced herself that even her noblest aspirations could only be achieved via her worst and most destructive impulses.
But here Jimmy showed her that she could redeem the hopeless not by conning the system into a fairer outcome, but simply by providing an example of decency for him to follow. He affirmed that her fondest hopes were possible without unleashing her greatest fears. After the events of the last episode seemed to suggest exactly the opposite—that Kim coming forward would benefit no one and only make her own life more miserable—it's quite an important thing to show her.
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57 minutes ago, PeterPirate said:
Hmmm, okay. Why don't you give it try? Come up with an explanation for the change that preserves the value of the pipe-hitting line.
I've been making that argument up and down the thread for days. The basic gist of it is:
- You are arguing that the explanation is inconsistent when it is merely overdetermined, in the sense that people often have make decisions based on a converging web of interests and not one simple idea. For instance, if someone makes the general choice to change their name, they still have to choose a particular new name to change it to, so there's nothing contradictory about saying that Jimmy changed his name because of "the Jew thing" and changed it to this particular Jewish name because it sounds like "S'all good, man."
- When a decision is overdetermined, you can choose to share different parts of that decision with different people without any of those parts being untrue or contradictory. For instance, it makes perfect sense that Jimmy wouldn't tell Kim that he chose the name Saul Goodman because he wanted to pretend to be a Jew, because he has every reason to think that she would find that explanation uncomfortably racist.
I totally understand why you don't want to rob a previously established character point of its meaning; I've mentioned before that I'm exactly the same way. What I don't understand is why you'd insist that the show just repeat the same character point that had already been established. We already know from Breaking Bad that Jimmy wanted to pretend to be Jewish, so why would BCS have keep harping on it? Isn't it more interesting to add additional nuance that further fleshes out his name change?
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1 hour ago, Cinnabon said:
It’s truly ridiculous and disrespectful to those who have subscribed to AMC to make most of the current season unavailable. I don’t understand that decision.
It's probably not their decision. AMC doesn't produce Better Call Saul, it just licenses the broadcast rights from Sony Pictures Television. They probably only get the right to stream the episodes for a limited window after the initial broadcast, so that Sony can make more money renting the episodes to people who missed AMC's window.
Compare it to The Walking Dead, a show AMC produces itself. AMC has the entire current season of that one still available to stream on its website, even though its earliest episodes aired almost a year ago.
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3 hours ago, SunnyBeBe said:
I’m trying to imagine why Skyler would be in it, unless a flashback right before Saul left Albuquerque. Hmmmm…,,present day Gene meeting with Skyler would be wild.
I don't think we have any particular reason to believe Skyler is in the finale. IMDb cast lists are only accurate once the show has aired and they can be officially verified against the opening and closing credits; before that they just list whatever actors random users claim will appear.
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1 hour ago, peeayebee said:
Another history for 'Saul Goodman' could be that when Jimmy first came up with it, he thought it was clever wordplay, fun, and memorable for the type of lawyer he wanted to be. Then as he REALLY became Saul Goodman, criminal lawyer, in his mind he dropped the fun, punny name, and took on the uglier, racist origin.
I guess I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. It was obvious to me all along that "Saul Goodman" was a riff on "s'all good, man." My friends and I used to do almost the same riff in college: instead of saying "No problem" we'd say "S. Saul Goode." But that's just an explanation for how Saul came up with that particular Jewish name; it doesn't preclude him from having chosen a Jewish identity in general because he thought it'd confer certain advantages.
Even its origin as a name Jimmy used to sell his unusable commercial time doesn't conflict with the original explanation, because he could just as easily have thought that a Jewish name would lend authority to a television production company, given the prevalence of Jewish TV moguls. Indeed, "Saul Goodman" sounds pretty similar to "Mark Goodson," whose name would've been announced loudly at the end of half the game shows his clients would be watching in their retirement communities.
Edited to add: It may also be worth noting that Jimmy comes up with the "S'all good, man" joke in the S1 flashback after he tells his and Marco's mark his fake name and the mark replies uncomprehendingly, "Saul?" The subtext seems to be that the mark was like, What kind of name is Saul? so Jimmy turned it into a joke to keep him from thinking too hard about it. There could very well be an ethnic angle to that as well: the Irish Catholic Jimmy realizing he'd come up with an alias that's suspiciously Jewish and then vamping to cover for it.
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7 hours ago, ShadowFacts said:
He's not honest as a default. He has been lying for fun and profit for years.
Sure, but that's sort of the central tension of the character: he's a shameless con man who is also desperate for people to see him and love him for who he really is.
QuoteNow he's gotten caught in one by Marion which may end him.
Yep, and the only reason he was caught is because that same tension was at work: to shut her up would've definitively confirmed that he's no longer Jimmy McGill, the lawyer old people can trust, and even at that moment, when he was at his lowest, that would have been more than he could bear.
QuoteHe was only doing business as Saul Goodman, was still known around the legal community as Jimmy, Chuck's brother. He schmoozes people, looks for commonalities, like ethnicity, when it might benefit him.
Sometimes, but his grifter instincts tend more toward self-deprecation rather than ingratiation or insinuation. His go-to cons are the slip-and-fall and the pigeon drop, both of which entail making himself look pathetic and weak, setting himself apart from his marks, so they'll think that either they'll get in trouble for wounding him or they can take advantage of him. Even when he's just throwing out razzle-dazzle to keep people off balance, he'll generally claim to have an embarrassing medical condition or ad lib a story about how someone else impressive is associated with the thing he's messing around with—e.g., oh, did you know the guy who wrote "The Piña Colada Song" went to this school?
He can lay on the charm when he has to, like with Marion or Frank the security guard in "Nippy," but that's usually more of a hallmark of his non-grifter endeavors, like his elder law practice. And it's somewhat telling that two of the most prominent examples of him charming people to do a con are in the episode in which, it turns out in the end, he's actually trying to escape the grifter life. And when he falls into uglier cons in the next couple episodes, he becomes really careless about being sweet to Marion, thus rousing her suspicions.
So, again, I see his tendency to charm and search for common ground as something separate from his default con man instincts—indeed, as a counterbalancing urge to pull himself out of the humiliation and degradation of his typical cons. In other words, it's not that he's pulling one grift on the "homeboys" and an equally calculated grift on the supposed Mr. Mayhew; it's that he's genuinely grateful to meet a fellow Irishman, because it means that for one brief moment he doesn't have to grift quite as hard.
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3 hours ago, Starchild said:
I'm thinking that at the time the line was written, it was to underline Saul's sleaze, that he'd even compromise his own identity for personal gain.
At the same time, it indicates how fragile his sleazy persona is: he made up this whole alternate identity for himself, but then immediately cops to it and blabs his real name as soon as he meets someone who he thinks is "a fellow potato-eater."
That's why I'm especially resistant to retcons that depend on the idea that Saul is just a guy who likes to lie a lot for fun. One of the first things we learn about him is that he's actually eager to tell the truth at the flimsiest opportunity! Hence my assumption that something like the stepdad story is not just made up out of whole cloth but is as close to accurate as Saul is able to stand.
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2 hours ago, sistermagpie said:
But in this case it just seems like an unreliable narrator giving a reason for something that's not really the reason but by then might not be a lie either. Same as I don't think Jimmy and Chuck somehow just never talked about their sleazy stepfather who slept with Saul's wife even though Saul claims that moment was an important turning point in his life.
I'd say that my tendency is to presume that a reference is meaningful as long as there's a coherent way to do so. If something is just a casual lie on the one hand, or just a retcon on the other, then it may as well not have been mentioned at all.
With the story about Saul's ex-wife going behind his back with his stepfather, for instance, it's obviously not literally true, since Jimmy did not become a cynical asshole because of something that happened before the series even started. But I'd hate to completely discount Saul's explanation about why he became a cynical asshole, since that's something pretty important to the character. So my current read, as I've mentioned in earlier episode threads, is that it's a veiled reference to what happened between him and Kim, when he went behind his back talking to Mike about Lalo and it sent him into a nihilistic tailspin. But because that's too painful to even contemplate, he has to couch it in terms of this event with his previous wife that may or may not have happened.
It's the same with the "Saul Goodman" thing. Until there's no coherent way to make sense of his "pipe-hitting member of the tribe" explanation, I'm going to assume that it was part of his internal reasoning for changing his name, even if he didn't share it with Kim.
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2 hours ago, gallimaufry said:
He was using the Saul name already as of the 104 flashback. Not quite sure when it began - could have been an interesting young Jimmy flashback but I think they've got bigger fish now.
In that flashback, he just gives his first name as Saul, then makes a joke that it's short for "Saul good, man." That's obviously where he got the idea, but I don't think he starts to actually use Saul Goodman as an alias until he's selling his unusable commercial time in season 3.
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11 hours ago, PeterPirate said:
In BB Saul says he uses "Saul Goodman" because his "homeboy" clients like a Jewish attorney.
Just saying, it's a retcon. It's not a perfect fit.
Eh, I don't think the two lines of reasoning are mutually exclusive. The way he explained it to Kim was "The skells who've been buying my phones . . . sure as shooting, sooner or later, every last one of them is gonna find themselves in the back of a squad car. How do I get them to call Jimmy McGill? I don't! I stay Saul Goodman. They call the guy they already know." The fact that they'd also be drawn to a Jewish lawyer could've been part of why it suddenly hit him that "this is the way. Kim, it's gonna work"—but he wouldn't have told Kim that part, because it would've made him sound sleazy and a little racist just when he was earnestly trying to convince her of his clear-headed judgment.
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1 hour ago, Lone Wolf said:
Pretty sure I saw his name in the affadavit.
Yep. "Jimmy and I began a long-term, concerted effort to impeach the character of Howard Hamlin."
And Gene did give her explicit permission to do so: "You don't have to hold back on my account. They can only hang me once!" Meaning he's already on the hook for so many crimes that adding what he and Kim did to the pile won't make a difference.
Which resonates in a really interesting way with this viewer's reading of Kim's storyline on Reddit:
QuoteI think one of the most unique post-ABQ-Kim traits we're seeing in this episode is that Kim no longer makes decisions -- even small ones. She lets Yup decide whether or not Miracle Whip is close enough to mayonnaise, she has no opinion (let alone a decisive one) about the drugs/jail discussion, and she doesn't even pick vanilla or strawberry.
I'm guessing the last time she let herself be in charge of anything was being the decision maker in the Howard scam. For six years she's been terrified to be a leader in any way.
How sad, then, that when she finally makes a life-changing decision, flying back to Albuquerque to take responsibility for her greatest mistake, she discovers that Gene's right, and it doesn't really make a difference to anyone. What a contrast with the Kim we see in the flashback with Jesse, who could've changed the entire course of the Breaking Bad universe with the choices she made.
Kim's storyline, in a way, climaxes the same way Gene's does: with the realization that the mask she put on to escape from her pain has become who she actually is. Just as Gene is now the uncaring con man that old people were wrong to trust, Kim is the unimportant women who can't decide anything of consequence.
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2 minutes ago, Bannon said:
Drugging Howard, which she presumably admitted to in her afadavit, is most definitely a felony.
And lying to law enforcement to cover up a murder is at least obstruction of justice, right?
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1 hour ago, ahmerali said:
At this point, I am just looking forward to seeing something from Jimmy' past, where the "I trusted you" line came into play and shines a bit of light on why those words caused him to stand down from hurting Marion.
Or did maybe one of the old ladies at Sandpiper say that at one point? I have to check...
Searching the transcipts, I did find a match, and a pretty interesting one: "These people trusted you" is what Erin Brill from Davis & Main says to Jimmy when he's pretending to be an uncaring shit so the Sandpiper residents will "accidentally" overhear and stop blaming Mrs. Landry for ending the lawsuit prematurely. I can see why that might be a shock to Gene's system, to be reminded that what was once an over-the-top performance of greedy contempt has become who he actually is.
Edited to add: Oh, and in both cases the expression of betrayal is a sad echo of Jimmy's motto as an elder law specialist: "JIMMY McGILL: A Lawyer You Can Trust."
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1 hour ago, Sailorgirl26 said:
So Kim inadvertently and ultimately sets off the entire chain of escalatory events of Saul getting embedded into the Breaking Bad world, Gus and the superlab, the worldwide distribution of meth, and all the BrBa deaths. Wow.
I especially appreciated the suggestion that if Kim had still been a lawyer, Jesse would've brought Badger to her instead, since he had essentially the same story about her working miracles to get Combo off that he had on Breaking Bad about Saul getting Emilio off.
3 minutes ago, Ellaria Sand said:Gene - the former elder law attorney - gets taken down by a perceptive elder woman using whatever technology is available to her. It’s perfect!
There's also the tiny glimmer of hope in the fact that Gene, who looked totally ready to brain Cancer Man with his dead dog's ashes if he hadn't passed out again, couldn't bring himself to raise a hand to the sweet old lady who lamented, "I trusted you."
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1 hour ago, SimplexFish said:
Personally the last thing I want from G&G, after 7 years and 6 seasons, is an 89 year old Carol Burnett in a wheelchair popping up in the last few episodes being the one to take down Saul.
It'd be a classic noir twist, though, if after all the grievous crimes Gene has been involved in, he's brought down by his relatively minor offense of exploiting his magic touch with the elderly. It's Irene Landry's revenge.
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2 hours ago, PeterPirate said:
Except that Saul is presenting Danny as a money launderer. I don't see why Saul would inform Walt about one crime but not another if he was worried about gaining Walt's trust.
Well, I think Saul's other clients are the money launderers in this scenario. Danny's not described as playing an active role; he's just the guy who's willing to "look the other way to keep his dream afloat." The fact that Danny may have bought the place with drug money rather than stock market profits doesn't really contribute to that characterization—if anything, it's presents a potential liability, since Danny is supposed to be the squeaky-clean face of their "legitimate business."
Which is another reason why Wormald makes sense as Danny to me: because he presents as the sort of guileless goober who couldn't possibly be mixed up in anything dangerously criminal—the perfect face for Saul's money laundering.
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1 hour ago, PeterPirate said:
I went back and watched the Danny portions of episode 311. Here's what Saul told Walt.
Danny followed his vision and opened up a laser tag business. Then he lost money in the stock market. Then he sought help from Saul, who turned Danny into a money launderer.
Everyone is going to have their own take on things. But the Daniel Wormald I saw in BCS would not open up a laser tag business for honest reasons.
I mean, he's presented as the kind of guy who spends lavishly on stupid and/or childish obsessions (baseball cards, "a school bus for six-year-old pimps"), so laser tag seems like something that might catch his eye. And Saul wouldn't be much of a lawyer if he went around confessing one client's crimes to another client, so I can see why he wouldn't say, "You can trust him because he bought it with the money he made selling stolen pharmaceuticals."
Edited to add: Someone on Reddit also pointed out that the Lazer Base sign is in the same red-and-yellow color scheme as Pryce's garish SUV.
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S06.E13: Saul Gone
in Better Call Saul
No he tells Walt it was for bartending school in the finale as well.