Nope I missed that. It is somewhat a mixed blessing that there aren’t throwaways. On one hands it is a TV show, so I want to be able to pet my cat, look at my twitter feed, and still follow it. On the other hand if I don’t pay attention all miss things like that, and I know at times I missed important stuff on Breaking Bad by not paying attention.
The inflatable man/wardrobe montage was masterful.
You know, I’d never really thought of it like that, but you’re absolutely right. I’ve been thinking of it as being about two characters, but there’s so much focus on Kim – and rightly so – that she feels like a third of the show. And Rhea Seehorn is every bit as good as Odenkirk and Banks. I loved her conversation with Odenkirk about what kind of lawyer he’s going to be if they start a firm. And that job interview scene was really memorable for how much she revealed by not revealing certain things.
-Tom
I didn’t need to know about the duces Jimmy left floating in the bowl.
Mike is the story that’s doing the heavy lifting in this show. It’s too much lawyering. I wanted Mike to kill someone. It’s like watching 24 when they’d go off onto a tangent of political intrigue and, just seconds before I’d give up, Jack Bauer would crash into the Oval Office and punch the Chief of Staff in the face.
What is the backstory to that interview with Kim? Can someone tell me? For some reason, my mind is a sieve with this show and I can’t remember why Kim came to New Mexico.
Wait, who is Gene?
Jimmy/Saul’s Cinnebon name.
And do I understand that your complaint is that a show about a lawyer has too much stuff about lawyers?
It sounds like Tim wants more badassery in his TV. Which I can understand. But Ehrmantraut is nothing if not patient!
Personally, I love what this show does with lawyering, particularly last season with the relationship between Jimmy and Chuck. I wish Breaking Bad had taken a similar approach to Walter being a teacher.
-Tom
Hahaha, thanks for the tip on the name.
I do like Jimmy and I’m interested in seeing how it all unfolds. I love how the flashback this week added depth to his brother’s story from last week. And I like how Jimmy and (apparently) Kim are both pull yourself up from your bootstraps kinds of lawyers. But I like Jimmy’s “colorful” approach to lawyering more than I like the slow pace of his awakening about who he is and where he fits best. It’s all got to come in the right measures and for the last few weeks Mike’s story is the one I’m really interested in seeing more about.
I do to. The episode where Kim was shown doing brain-numbing document review, I think should be shown prior to kids before the sign up to take the LSAT or declare they are pre-law. I always wanted to go to law school, but after talking to my friends who became lawyers, I think most lawyers spend an absurd amount of time doing with Kim did.
I hope the “moral” of Better Call Saul is not to be less colorful. It looks like that’s the direction we’re headed, and that’s so not with the Breaking Bad zeitgeist, I can’t believe it’s true. I hope it’s not true. Say it ain’t so!
Well we know that Jimmy evolves into the the peacock colored Saul, so I think we will be seeing more color. As for the moral lesson, I never really figured out the moral lesson of Breaking Bad.
Yep, it’ll get more colorful, that’s for sure. I just hope those depressing Cinnabon scenes come to something impressive.
As for BB, moral: If you get cancer, go down shooting a rigged .50 from your trunk, save your friends, and take out a bunch of Nazis. Boyaa!
Um, maybe the moral of BB was “know when to quit” or “don’t let your ego keep you in the game too long.” Walt definitely had a couple of opportunities to get out clean with plenty of cash to meet his original goal.
Maybe, but that’s not much of an interpretation. Let’s not forget the way the show used cancer (too bad it’s not a movie, or it might have showed up in last week’s 3x3). Walt was a dead man. Worse than dead, really. He was henpecked and had let his partner walk off with his woman, his fame, and his resources. At the beginning of season 1, he couldn’t even hang onto the stupid “talk” pillow long enough to express his wishes for how he wanted to deal with his cancer diagnosis. At the end, though, he’s rescuing his “son” from Nazis and fabricating 50. booby traps in the trunk of a classic convertible. You wanted him to call it quits sooner? For what purpose? I mean, dramatically what purpose would that serve? He made all that money on the backs of addicts and innocents. You can’t do that and then just call it quits and retire. He was a dead man who got to come back to life, so of course he had to go out big.
But, yeah. Definitely a big ego. He needed one to pull of the hat. Heh.
No, of course you’re completely correct about how the story was a million times more interesting the way it unfolded. It’s a tragedy in the classical sense: the main character comes to a bad end (or in this case manages to wring one good thing out of the bad end) due to his essential nature: at every critical juncture he does what he feels he has no choice but to do, but every choice causes his subsequent ones to be more constrained.
It was an amazing show.
I really liked the music choices in the intro of last week’s episode.
What a great episode. So many great moments. That one-shot drawn-out opening at the border. The reveal with the popsicle sticks (this guy has done this many times!). Patrick Fabian’s brief monologue about his dad talking him into joining the firm (Fabian is a really really good actor for keeping his character from being a buffoon/villain and that one beat is a classic example; we see him talking himself into believing he made the right choice). Rhea Seehorn’s warm competence in the meeting with the Mesa Verde bankers, her stunned elation at the new office with Jimmy, and then her despair later, and how Jimmy reacts to it. Michael McKean’s cunning dog-and-pony show for the Mesa Verde bankers. The whole bit with the B-29 for comedic value, with the unexpected payoff after the soldiers come tromping out onto the tarmac. Whatever shenanigans both Jimmy and Ehrmantraut are up to, respectively. I loved the montage with Jimmy in the copy shop. The way Ehrmantraut’s innocent project with his granddaughter reveals itself as something malevolent. And this show is good enough that I trust those scenes are going to take us to some, um, interesting places. Some really spectacular composition this episode, too: the symmetical lobby of the new office, key moments with Jimmy and Kim to the side of the frame looking off screen (hey, Mr. Robot, pay attention: sometimes less is more), the Mesa Verde bankers pulling up to HHM, Howard in the mirror while Chuck gets ready to put on a suit (that sort of shot is done to death, but it sure was slick here, perfectly framed for each actors’ stature). And even the new locations were standouts: the hot dog stand where Kim and Jimmy celebrate, the copy shop, the border crossing, the warehouse where the popsicle truck goes. What a great episode.
This show is already so much better, so much more mature and confident, so much smarter and more consistently creative and surprising than Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan has come a long way.
-Tom
So is Mike perhaps making a homemade spike strip there? That would be my guess. Also, I wonder if that artfully hidden gun is the reason Tío Héctor (it is Héctor Salamanca, right?) is as messed up as we see him in BB (or maybe I’m remembering wrong and it was that poolside visit from Gus in Breaking Bad).
I was under the impression that Tio Hector had suffered a stroke at some point. But now that you mention it, it’s possible he suffered some injury to his noggin that wasn’t of natural causes.
Yeah, Poppop is gonna go get himself some free lemon pops. We’ll get to see just what else is in those trucks - they spent a good amount of time showing us, we want to know too!