Simon Boccanegra

The divorce papers and the Jesse/Kim meeting were still in 2004, the jam-packed year of essentially the second half of the BCS series. The nine-month jump in season 4's "Something Stupid" put us in 2004, and there we stayed except for flash-forwards to 2007, the Walter White era, and the Cinnabon-and-sprinklers era. I suspect that scene is going to be an enduring point of confusion, because the personality Jimmy shows is so thoroughly "Saul Goodman," and Jesse is there doing lawyer scouting for a crony. But Jimmy's reference to the Sandpiper settlement money coming through made it sound as if that were a recent development, and we know what went into moving the Sandpiper matter along. Some of Jimmy's portion went toward the makeover of the office. We also knew that Jesse's association with Emilio long predated Breaking Bad; they'd known each other since elementary school. It would also be on brand for Kim to move fast on the divorce and on getting out of Albuquerque. Then, there was Jimmy's comment to Kim on the phone, "It suddenly occurred to me it's been six years." As much of a show of indifference as he was making when they were signing the papers, that meeting wouldn't slip his mind. So, Paul was 41 or 42, playing 19. The character was 23 in the Breaking Bad pilot.

Among many things I learned from "Waterworks": Sober Jimmy can murder Blondie as brutally as drunk Jimmy murdered ABBA. Chuck definitely got the ability to carry a tune in that family.

According to a new addition to the Breaking Bad Wiki, "Emilio's actor John Koyama has the most time between appearances in the Breaking Bad universe, with fourteen years spanning his last Breaking Bad and first Better Call Saul episodes." For anyone who hasn't seen the first season of Breaking Bad in a while, And Curb Your Enthusiasm's Porno Gil, who entertained his dinner guests with "the Tabasco sauce story." (McKean was on that show too, later, playing a pompous hack TV director with a special-needs son.)

I suspect part of what makes this guy acceptable company to Florida Kim is that he's incurious. If he asks any questions at all about her past, they would be very easy questions to deflect. He'd accept the surface she presents and not look for more. A guy who actually intrigued her would have her running in the other direction.

Gilligan, EW interview on "Waterworks": "[H]ere in the moment where they're on the phone together, she has turned into something else, too. She's kind of dead from the neck up, purposely so. And by the way, there's nothing wrong living down in Florida working for a sprinkler factory; there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It's just [that] she has a legal calling and she's denied herself that calling. She's denied herself a great many things. And when this grotesque caricature of the person she used to love calls her up and berates her, I think she thinks about her [sic] for a few days, and then she thinks, 'You know what? As unpleasant as the messenger may be, the message is probably correct. I need to pull the Band-aid off here. I need to atone for my sins. I need to come to life here and do the right thing.' So I think that's where that comes from." https://ew.com/tv/better-call-saul-vince-gilligan-on-waterworks-episode/

On Kim's life in Florida: It's not really that it's such a bad life; it's just that she seemed to have turned her light way down. If you think of Kim as we saw her in most of the series as Kim on 8 (legal dynamo. up to any challenge in several kinds of law, seemingly respected by all), and then her corruption in season 6 was an uninhibited "Kim on 10" in the worst way, in Florida she's Kim on 2 or 3. She's not venturing opinions on anything. She's barely present in conversations. She's dressed and styled as if to escape notice, and there's no trace of her dry wit in her agreeable monosyllabic replies. At her job, she's just showing up, taking a place behind the partitions. She's probably still valued and liked at the sprinkler place, because a Kim Wexler just idling, not challenging herself or trying to stand out, is more than good enough to get by in that context. But as others have said, she was a shell of herself. I found it an effective "Cinnabon equivalent" for this character. Most of his anger and excitement came after the call had ended, with the smashing of the booth glass. This week, we were getting him as Kim would over the phone, minus the animated gestures. Last week, we couldn't hear him. (Well. The people who saw the German dub could. It that version, the German voice actor covering Jimmy/Saul/Gene was made too clearly audible over the trucks. There was a Reddit thread on it, and the dialogue when back-translated into English matched what the rest of us eventually heard this week. "Why don't you turn yourself in? They can only hang me once!" et cetera.)

I had trouble maintaining sympathy for Ziegler the first time around, even. I think the only way to read him is that he was a brilliant mind in his work and startlingly naïve (to the point that "clueless" would not be hyperbole) in other ways. People like that can lead long, untroubled, successful lives, but this one got involved in things he never should have been near. Even in his last scene, it takes him so long to realize how much trouble he's in.

This reminds of discussion of the 2019 film Hustlers with Jennifer Lopez et al. Jimmy's scam was very similar to what the dancer protagonists of that film started doing with rich Wall Street guys who came into the club. They would pretend to drink with them, then give them a ketamine/MDMA mix and raid their credit cards. I didn't see a mention earlier in the thread, but I hope I'm not the 15th person to bring it up. Re: BCS and gender. In some of the old episodes, Chuck is 100 percent right about something down to the last detail, and Jimmy is saying, come on, Chuck, don't you see how crazy this sounds? You're tired. You bumped your head. Etc. I was thinking, if Chuck were Jimmy's wife or girlfriend or even an older sister, no matter how much of a bitch she was and how much reason we as viewers had to dislike her, I think a lot more viewers would have turned on him. Charges of gaslighting would be thrown around a lot more. That term gets used a little too broadly these days, but some of Jimmy's actions with Chuck were the real deal. In the play and film(s) that started it all, the heroine was correct in her perceptions, and her villainous husband was trying to make her believe otherwise -- and doubt her sanity -- for his own agenda.

I've been rewatching selected highlight episodes from the first few seasons. I see even more in hindsight how Jimmy and Chuck tend to regress to childish versions of themselves when one of them is really under the other's skin. In that scene when Kim comes over to Chuck's to pick up the Mesa Verde files (the "1216/1261" address scam having worked), and Jimmy accompanies her, Chuck starts off making his case like the distinguished middle-aged lawyer he is. But when Jimmy goes into his gaslighting routine, Chuck begins sounding like a preteen, with Kim in the role of Mother. It isn't that the things he's saying are immature; it's the tone, which always makes clear that it's about more than the issue of the moment. It's a whole lifetime of feeling like the misunderstood one. Michael McKean was really good at those shifts. It works in the other direction too. In 3-1, that young soldier played by Brendan Fehr comes to the Kim/Jimmy rainbow office and rips into Jimmy for tricking him with a fake WW2 hero to get base footage for a commercial. As their argument escalates, Jimmy begins projecting his resentment toward Chuck onto the soldier (who's set himself up as an arbiter of what's respectable and honorable). Even the soldier is weirded out. Chuck was universally respected, but wanted to be liked/loved too. Jimmy was widely liked/loved, but wanted to be respected too. Chuck had substance, and he envied Jimmy's flash and charm. Jimmy, vice versa. Another thing I've noticed, and I'm far from the first to comment on it, is that the casting of smaller roles in this series is so good. All those people just doing a job: the guy at the photocopy place, the insurance woman to whom Jimmy "lets slip" that Chuck had a meltdown in the hearing, the woman in hospital registration having trouble getting "Gene's" Social Security number to go through, dozens of others. Their faces, their expressions, their line readings, everything, tend to be documentary-perfect.

A Redditor claims that in the German-dubbed version of the "Breaking Bad" episode, Gene's mysterious inaudible phone call to Florida is more audible -- at least, part of it is -- and that these are Odenkirk's intelligible lines translated into English: "You have no idea what I did or didn't do, okay? Why don't you turn yourself in? You don't have to be considerate of me. I can only be hanged once. Okay, look, Kim, why are we even talking about this? We're both too smart..." https://www.reddit.com/r/betterCallSaul/comments/weu97h/the_inaudible_conversation_in_the_phone_booth_is/

I remember a lot of complaints about the season 3 BCS premiere, when so much time was spent on Mike searching for a tracking device (that long, French Connection-like scene with him taking the car apart in the junkyard), finally locating it in the gas cap, getting one like it, testing it out at the kitchen table. I don't genuflect at every decision Gould and Gilligan make (nor did I with David Simon, Matthew Weiner, David Chase, Aaron Sorkin, et cetera), but I often like those scenes of detail work.

I thought about that. Anyone who opens water bottles regularly knows the difference in feel between one that's been opened already and one that has an intact plastic seal ring. I fanwanked it that these cab passengers were all pretty drunk, but still. Water bottles are to Better Call Saul as Stevia packets were to Breaking Bad. Heh.

Still 2004. Flashbacks and flash-forwards to the side, everything we saw in the main part of Better Call Saul was between May 2002 and June 2004. The Sandpiper mediation, at which Howard erupted because he thought he had seen the judge with Jimmy in the photographs, was scheduled for June 24, 2004, a Thursday. A great deal happened that night into the next morning: Howard's visit to Jimmy and Kim's, his murder by Lalo, Kim's journey to Gus's house, the Gus/Lalo showdown at the lab, etc. Everything prior to the jump to 2007 was within the next several days, but still in June 2004.

In fact, there were strong suggestions that he wasn't a shitty person. There was no good dirt to be dug up on him, despite exhaustive searches. Kim had to reach for the infringement thing with the firm's cowboy logo. I kind of liked Kevin, in part because even though he was a successful "good ol' boy" businessman out of central casting in his voice and some mannerisms, he was a bit progressive too. He thought so highly of Paige and Kim. He might not have agreed immediately to everything they suggested, but he always listened to them and valued their input. To the degree that he acted like a blowhard with them, it's the same way he'd have acted with male counsel.

It's a small point, but then, flies are small. The BB episode was just "Fly." "The Fly" is the horror movie with Jeff Goldblum (or Vincent Price). Or the U2 song from Achtung Baby. Re: Carol Burnett. It's like when I see Albert Brooks playing a gangster (Drive) or an attorney (A Most Violent Year). I'm not expecting him at any moment to go into the West Coast Woody shtick for which he is most famous, because he's a solid character actor apart from that. I think they just wrote a part for a woman of a certain age, Burnett was right for it, and she agreed to do it. Marion could have been played by some other actress in her eighties who has a lower profile or is more known for drama, but Burnett's performance was quite good, and that's what matters most to me. I believed she was this woman in Omaha with a son who drives a cab.

I think the plan came to him very quickly; it was the gradual softening of the ground that took a while. It did seem to me to be unfolding over at least several weeks. Gene was reading up on football, contributing more to the discussions. They talked about several Huskers games played the night(s) before. His relationship with the guard who patrols the lot was improving. He needed a series of times for how long the stationary guard took to finish a Cinnabon, so he could have a reliable range. It's true there was a possibility they'd have gotten sick of Cinnabon, but pretty much any time I see an elaborate scam in a movie or a television show, I have to hand-wave the things that go right because it's what the story needs to happen. Sometimes the scam is scripted so elaborately that it's too much, and the viewer will get bogged down in "How did he know that she wouldn't...?" and "What would he have done if...?" This one wasn't too bad on that level, IMO. Another thing: Gene had to space out those visits. If he'd gone four times in one week, it would have been too suspicious, and there would have been a greater chance of his new friends getting sick of Cinnabon (and/or of him).

Details of those Gene scenes probably do fade on viewers who haven't watched the older seasons again since they initially ran. Here's a good quick-reference guide to what happened in all of them. https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Cinnabon,_Omaha The one for S4 could use a little fleshing out. They left out his anxiety when he thinks his fake Social Security number is responsible for the delay with the hospital registration woman (a false alarm, it turned out), as well as the cab driver eyeing him in the rearview mirror on the way back to the mall (a real alarm, it turned out).

That didn't seem implausible to me. It's common for a mall to have one anchor store that's ritzier and higher-end than the others. What the BCS people created here (and they did create it, within an empty space in the Cottonwood Mall they use) looked like a simulation of one of those. Omaha isn't a metropolis on the level of New York, Chicago, or L.A. , but it is the biggest city in that state, and one of the largest in its region.

"Fly" was one of my favorite Breaking Bad episodes. For many, it seems it's either near the top or rock-bottom. It has the lowest IMDb score of the series. So, while "Nippy" was going on, as I realized we were never going to leave Gene's monochromatic world, the whole hour would be about this post-BB shoplifting scam, I was thinking, "This will be the 'Fly' of BCS" within the fan community. It won't be a "Fly"-like favorite for me, though. It was...fine. It was beautifully shot. I always love the way the mall is photographed and lighted on this series. It's so "Everymall," yet it can seem as threatening a location as any we've seen in either series. The episode was very well acted; the bit players popped, one after another. I especially liked Kelsey Scott as Kathy Deutsch, the steely manager of the department store, and Carol Burnett was well used. The unavoidable recasting of Jeffie the cabbie hurt. The new actor gave a good performance, but as others have noted, he didn't seem at all like the same character, even given the change in circumstances. The execution of the material was fully up to the standards of the show, and I can see that material's value on the big canvas. It's just that whatever was going on in any one of the 59 prior Better Call Saul episodes was more compelling to me.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler wasn't much better. The main reason I always put it off when I consider watching The Sopranos all the way through again is the AJ and/or Meadow material. But I think the whole BCS ensemble is first rate, decidedly including Rhea.

You know you're getting up there in years when you see Arye Gross playing a cranky judge...and doing it rather well. I still hear that name and think of the young actor from '80s teen movies like Just One of the Guys and Soul Man. Also Ellen's guy friend on the early seasons of Ellen. 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. When he and Kim got married, the clerk asked if he had proof that his two previous marriages had been dissolved. I think that that was put there for continuity with the "my second wife" line in BB, so we wouldn't be wondering if Kim was going to sleep around at some point. (With a never-seen stepfather or otherwise.) It's always a guessing game how much of what BB Saul said was literally true, but the Jimmy we've seen in the deepest-level flashbacks (like season 1's "Marco") seems the type to have had a couple hasty, badly-thought-out, short-term marriages. Which I guess his third one was too, as complicated and interesting as it was. Another great episode in a season to savor, and surely to be watched again someday.

Yep. It's similar to the experience of watching a Hitchcock film. We're feeling Norman Bates's anxiety when it appears the car won't entirely submerge in the bog. We're put there with the killers in Strangers on a Train and Frenzy when they're trying to retrieve an incriminating object, or with the protagonist of Marnie when she's robbing the office and her shoe is about to fall out of her pocket.

Kim is a great character of a kind I have not seen so often. She's done everything the right way and she's really good at it. She was a rising star at HHM. Schweikart and Cokely thought highly of her. The Mesa Verde people adored her. Cliff thinks highly of her. Judges and legal adversaries respect her. There's nothing in the way of her getting all the things she told herself she wanted, and still there's an internal force pulling her in a darker direction. I like that it isn't the obvious play of "love for a devious man" (as Howard or Suzanne Ericsen would assume from their vantage). It's something deeper in her. It's the same thing that made her so drawn to the devious man in the first place. I was one of those people who (usually) disliked Skyler White, and I thought the handling of the female characters on Breaking Bad -- the handful there were -- was one of its weaknesses. But Kim is fascinating to me, and I think she's one of the greatest creations of the Albuquerque Universe. Rhea Seehorn deserves credit too, of course. He was season 1's smokescreen antagonist, after all. We were led to believe until almost the end of the season (whether some guessed the truth earlier or not) that he was the one who didn't want Jimmy anywhere near HHM.

Well...beyond some point. The timeline of her early life is still mysterious. She sounded fond of her father when she mentioned him in an early season, how much he loved the movie Ice Station Zebra. (It might even have been "loves," present tense.) And that was a very casual scene with Jimmy, in which I can't see her feeling a need to embellish or invent nice memories.

'84 was arguably the best year of that decade for pop music. New faces and old, just about everyone who comes to mind when we think of pop music of the '80s was either just breaking through or having a peak year.