Better Call Saul (Spoilers here!)

[tommy]

Sorry, posted that from my phone and clearly the link did not work.

Here is the link to the phone call from 4x10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhuyLmXQE1E

Here is a video of a guy with an EXTREMELY deep voice going into more detail about this storyline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6-LLKxncKs

Excellent. Thanks so much for that.

[JasonEvans]

Whoa… did not see that coming.

Howard may be lucky that Lalo took him out. I suspect his life was going to be an absolute mess going forward. Some people would have thought he was a drug addict for life.

I guess the back half of the season will be Lalo versus Mike/Gus. This is where making a prequel saps all the drama out of the story. We know how Mike and Gus meet their ends and Lalo is not part of it.

[tommy]

Whoa… did not see that coming.

Howard may be lucky that Lalo took him out. I suspect his life was going to be an absolute mess going forward. Some people would have thought he was a drug addict for life.

I guess the back half of the season will be Lalo versus Mike/Gus. This is where making a prequel saps all the drama out of the story. We know how Mike and Gus meet their ends and Lalo is not part of it.

Maybe witnessing what she’s just witnessed is what causes Kim to leave Jimmy. Even if she’s thrown away the job of her dreams, she can’t be part of any life that involves drug cartels coming into her home and murdering people in cold blood. A bridge too far for her. And she knows Jimmy is in the game to stay. Maybe ?

[J4Kop99]

Wild episode. Plenty of drama left.

What happens to Kim?

What happens with Lalo?

The creators have mentioned that by the time BCS is over, you will see BB in a whole new light.

A few things others noticed during the episode:

-Lalo saw the cockroach and it reminded him of Jimmy. He even referred to Jimmy as a cockroach when speaking with Kim last season
-Howard twisting the seltzer can to "silence it" was foreshadowing to lalo twisting on the "silencer" to his gun

[budwom]

Lalo vs Gus sets up a great confrontation...the discussion after the episode was pretty entertaining.

[OldPhiKap]

I started streaming BCS a few mo this ago, and finally am up though the last episode. Fun show.

[Skydog]

The videos you guys are linking are helping me see all the intricate connections in this show. Thanks. The creators of this show deserve enormous credit for their planning and attention to every detail.

[jimsumner]

The videos you guys are linking are helping me see all the intricate connections in this show. Thanks. The creators of this show deserve enormous credit for their planning and attention to every detail.

Yes. This isn't like "Lost." They had an end result in mind from the very beginning and knew every step along the way towards arriving at that destination.

[gumbomoop]

I’ve caught a few episodes of the Breaking Bad marathon, leading up to this coming Monday night’s BCS restart. Have seen several teasers for BCS, including reminder b/w scenes with Cinnabon Gene. He’s on his phone, says he got made at the mall, but has decided to “take care of it” himself.

To whom is he speaking? (1) Most likely it’s Ed Galbraith (late Robert Forster), vacuum and identity fixer. (2) Unlikely but not impossible, Kim. (3) Other guesses?

[tbyers11]

I’ve caught a few episodes of the Breaking Bad marathon, leading up to this coming Monday night’s BCS restart. Have seen several teasers for BCS, including reminder b/w scenes with Cinnabon Gene. He’s on his phone, says he got made at the mall, but has decided to “take care of it” himself.

To whom is he speaking? (1) Most likely it’s Ed Galbraith (late Robert Forster), vacuum and identity fixer. (2) Unlikely but not impossible, Kim. (3) Other guesses?

It's Ed the vacuum cleaner guy on the other end of the line. The scene is from the first episode of Season 5 of BCS. After "Gene" is recognized by the cab driver in the mall he places a call to Ed look for another extraction. But then says he no longer needs service because he has decided to take care of it himself.

I believe it was the last flash forward scene to Gene in Omaha. The beginning of Season 6 began with a flash forward (from BCS timeline) of the dismantling of Saul's mansion.

[gumbomoop]

It's Ed the vacuum cleaner guy on the other end of the line. The scene is from the first episode of Season 5 of BCS. After "Gene" is recognized by the cab driver in the mall he places a call to Ed look for another extraction. But then says he no longer needs service because he has decided to take care of it himself.

I believe it was the last flash forward scene to Gene in Omaha. The beginning of Season 6 began with a flash forward (from BCS timeline) of the dismantling of Saul's mansion.

Thanks, now I sorta remember this original flash forward.

[OldPhiKap]

And, we’re off and running….

[J4Kop99]

And, we’re off and running….

What a start! At this rate we may catch up with BB timeline soon

[OldPhiKap]

Stolen from Twitter:

I want Mike Ehrmantraut to come to my house every morning and give me orders. “Here’s what your going to do. You’re going to get up, take a shower, get dressed and go to work. Tell me that you understand.”

[JasonEvans]

Can't believe how quickly they dealt with Lalo... wow, I did not see that coming.

Meanwhile, Gus would have been perfectly justified in firing Mike (or killing him). Lalo played Mike like a fiddle. He knew every move Mike would make and had Mike and his army of men doing exactly what he wanted at every single moment. Had Gus not figured out that Lalo was going after the meth basement, Lalo would have gotten all the evidence he needed and reported it back to Don Eladio, which would have likely gotten Gus killed. Gus gave Mike nearly unlimited resources and Mike squandered them (when we saw Mike and like 15 guys converging on Jimmy and Kim's apartment, I practically yelled at the screen out of frustration). The show has set up Mike as a really smart and strategic security/fix-it guy. They completely tossed that aside for this storyline.

I'm really wondering what the show does with the final few episodes now. In the span of about 45 minutes of TV time, we have done away with the primary antagonist and plot driver for Jimmy/Kim (Howard) and for Mike/Gus (Lalo). Where does the show go next? I guess we need to tear Jimmy and Kim apart and we need to resolve whatever is happening in the black and white flash forwards to Jimmy the Cinnabon employee.

Meh, feels like a limp to the end after what we just went through with Nacho, Howard, and Lalo.

[OldPhiKap]

Wow. I enjoyed it a lot more than you and am very optimistic for the conclusion after last night. There’s plenty of ground to cover in the last five episodes.

[gumbomoop]

Meh, feels like a limp to the end after what we just went through with Nacho, Howard, and Lalo.

Curb your tongue, knave. I'm with this fellow here...

Wow. I enjoyed it a lot more than you and am very optimistic for the conclusion after last night. There’s plenty of ground to cover in the last five episodes.

What happens to Kim is no limp-to-the-end deal for me. How's she gonna recover from breaking so, so bad? Can she ever recover? Hard to imagine they'll kill her off. For example, if she's a suicide, hard to imagine Saul being the functioning guy in BB.

I recall that the BCS creators have said something to the effect that "You're not gonna believe what happens to some of these characters." Well, I wouldn't have imagined that Lalo and Howard would be buried, symbolically-ironically holding hands, beneath the lab that was the setting for many scenes in BB. So I guess like you, JE, I do wonder how they're gonna top that. But I don't discount the possibility. Also, we expect to see Walt and Jesse, right?

Cinnabon Gene's story has my attention, too. Any chance Kim ends up back in Nebraska, the state where she lived as a child?

[JasonEvans]

My post above sounded overly harsh. I want to be clear that I have faith in the folks writing and running BCS that there is a lot more story to tell and that they will tell it well (I mean, given what they have done so far, why would I lose faith?), but I am kinda amazed that they took care of so much stuff so quickly and left us with really not all that much for the race to the finish. Whatever these final episodes hold, it will have to be built up and resolved solely in them because very little runway has been laid thus far.

[gumbomoop]

... I am kinda amazed that they took care of so much stuff so quickly and left us with really not all that much for the race to the finish. Whatever these final episodes hold, it will have to be built up and resolved solely in them because very little runway has been laid thus far.

Ok, we have a fair disagreement. I find this interesting, and fun. I will say, seriously, you just know a lot more than I about films, filmmaking, directors, scripts, etc. So I surprise myself a little in disagreeing with your take on the race to the finish.

I’ll focus on your runway metaphor. I don’t agree that “very little runway has been laid” for the 2 most obvious issues.

(1) Kim’s breaking bad — Surely we’ve noticed this, just intermittently in earlier seasons, but much more ominously in her insistence in the first half of this season on destroying Howard. It was Kim, not Jimmy, who didn’t want to drop the take-down of Howard. In fact, Jimmy was a little surprised, saying something like, “Oh, are we still doing that thing?” Kim’s decision to miss her dream interview, symbolically her positive future, to return to Albuquerque to implement “D-Day” was a portentous Kim-breaking-bad moment. She’d been fully invested in all those Post-It notes, The Plan. Making that u-turn ... oh, Kim.

All this is to say that a clear runway has been laid over many episodes to Kim’s breaking-bad trajectory. That runway either parallels or is the same as the runway to probably the single biggest question left on BCS: what happens to Kim? That’s no newly constructed runway.

(2) Cinnabon Gene — Can’t remember the very first b&w Gene-scene, but it’s morphed from a quirky-cute coda to Jimmy’s story, and into... what? A Gene-mini-sequel within this Saul-maxi-prequel?

Whatever it is, though, it’s not a newly constructed runway.

(3) Lest we forget, there’s still the story of how last night’s trussed-up Jimmy gets rich and then loses it all, not only before we first met him in BB, but between last night and the dismantling of his mansion in the flash-forward that introduced this final season, some 8 episodes ago. I guess he gets rich working for Gus? Is that either obviously right or obviously wrong?

Given the events of last night’s episode, I have to assume we’re in for more big surprises. But I do not assume we’re in for “really not all that much.”

[OldPhiKap]

My post above sounded overly harsh. I want to be clear that I have faith in the folks writing and running BCS that there is a lot more story to tell and that they will tell it well (I mean, given what they have done so far, why would I lose faith?), but I am kinda amazed that they took care of so much stuff so quickly and left us with really not all that much for the race to the finish. Whatever these final episodes hold, it will have to be built up and resolved solely in them because very little runway has been laid thus far.

I commented to my family last night that the episode reminded me of the first Breaking Bad episode after the fifth-season break. The cliffhanger was Hank finding the book; within the first 15 minutes of that first episode was the garage scene where it all went up to eleven. I would have thought that confrontation would have been milked for several episodes, instead they just hit it early and kept building from there.

Anyway, that was the vibe I got last night.