Raider Nation
Devil's Advocate
There weren't many office supplies to critique in this episode. :(
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***Official "Space Blanket" for Better Call Saul*** (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter TheIronSheik
- Start date
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
cstu
Footballguy
cstu
Footballguy
He didn't enjoy the legit life as much as a criminal one. He was not working for a decade because it was his dream to be legit - it was his dream to earn his brother's respect.
It rang completely true to me - no offense to lawyers here - but IMO being an honest lawyer seems like it was suck as a profession.
cstu
Footballguy
Ned, I take it you don't have a criminal bone in your body. If you don't then you'll never understand.
kentric
Footballguy
Sign me up. Sounds like a can't miss deal. How many racks you need?I know how to get some easy money, all we have to do is put up some "tarrif fees" to get access to a fortune that the Nigerian royal family can't right now, because they are in exile... They looted $400 million, conservatively estimated.Your secret is safe with me.
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
Jimmy turning his back on "the straight life" is a lot more plausible than a guy like Walter White "breaking bad" IMO.
Did you guys have a hard time with that?
Did you guys have a hard time with that?
Gr00vus
Footballguy
No, but I think that's mostly because the gas masks and tighty whities made it more plausible.
Zow
Footballguy
Not at all. I just don't call that "selling his soul" or "selling out" or anything like that.
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
Gr00vus
Footballguy
Yes. And I think that Ernesto guy is up to something. Who in their right mind would make someone eat granny smith apples?
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
comfortably numb
Footballguy
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
cstu
Footballguy
The Pulp Fiction quote came to mind:
Jimmy tried being the righteous man but after being beset by the inequities of the selfish (his brother) he became weak. His shepherd (Kim) tried to help him but it wasn't enough and he became a lost child who falls into hands of evil men.
shadrap
Footballguy
shuke
Black Ice Skeptic
shuke
Black Ice Skeptic
If you need to copy and paste "Vorakapich" in order to be condescending about Vorkapich, then maybe condescension just isn't for you.If you need someone to tell you that he modeled the montage on Vorkapich, then maybe critical review just isn't for you.Sorry for the delay, Tanner.
Last edited by a moderator:
shader
Footballguy
At first I thought the "breaking bad" segment was way too fast. All of a sudden he passed up big bucks just to go "hustle"?
But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The whole episode he was losing his interest in legitimate law. From the bingo speech to his binges in Chicago, he just has had it.
Now after all the disappointment I think he can't fathom pushing papers as a new lawyer in Santa Fe.
Personally I'm a little surprised with the turn the series took over the past two episodes. Before these two episodes, I thought the fall to Saul Goodman was going to take place over the course of 3-4 seasons.
But now he's basically there. Slippin Jimmy had no real morals, from what we could tell, he is a con man. So once he decides to revert back, he's just doing what he's already done, just with a law degree and to a presumably larger degree.
I guess the point is that there now isn't a lot of character development left. In a very realistic way they flipped a likable guy to slippin jimmy in two episodes. He's a name change and a little experience away from being the Saul Goodman we already knew.
But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The whole episode he was losing his interest in legitimate law. From the bingo speech to his binges in Chicago, he just has had it.
Now after all the disappointment I think he can't fathom pushing papers as a new lawyer in Santa Fe.
Personally I'm a little surprised with the turn the series took over the past two episodes. Before these two episodes, I thought the fall to Saul Goodman was going to take place over the course of 3-4 seasons.
But now he's basically there. Slippin Jimmy had no real morals, from what we could tell, he is a con man. So once he decides to revert back, he's just doing what he's already done, just with a law degree and to a presumably larger degree.
I guess the point is that there now isn't a lot of character development left. In a very realistic way they flipped a likable guy to slippin jimmy in two episodes. He's a name change and a little experience away from being the Saul Goodman we already knew.
Brady Marino
Footballguy
When Jimmy walked away from the Santa Fe law firm, it felt like Walt turning down Gretchen and Elliott's big offer to return to Grey Matter.
Bob Magaw
Footballguy
There was a level of tint on that vehicle, that to this day, I'll maintain was not legal for an Illinois-licensed vehicle.
Brought back memories in the "$800" half dollar bar scam, when he pretended to be calling a coin dealer, and it was time info. Is that still a thing? I can't even remember the number I used to call for it. Of course now, the time is already BUILT IN TO YOUR PHONE DISPLAY.
* Sir, sir, could you help me, are these today's numbers?
The montage went by so fast the first time I didn't pause to think about it, but after rewatching, it came to me in a flash and sort of unbidden, cracking me up. You could do that scam by altering a newspaper so that the announced "winning numbers" matched a loser in your possession. But of course an unsuspecting blind man wouldn't know he had "won" and could be preyed on and taken advantage of.
There seemed to be some symbolism in the final shot from above looking at the two parallel yellow striped lane dividers, like two paths, fates or destinies, the one he could have gone down, and the one he ended up traveling instead.
The Moral Message in Better Call Saul's First Season (from The Atlantic)
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-morality-fable-of-better-call-saul/389820/
One season in, and Better Call Saul viewers have yet to meet Saul. Breaking Bad’s lovable scumbag lawyer still goes by his birth name, Jimmy McGill, even though there have been plenty of times during the first 10 episodes of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s show that he’s been both lovable and a scumbag.
What is a scumbag, though? Are they born or made? It's now clear that Better Call Saul is, like Breaking Bad, a great meditation on the nature of wrongdoing, which incidentally is much the same question pondered by basically all great religions and philosophers. The Albuquerque (and, sometimes, Chicago) of Gilligan and Gould’s imagination bustles with normal-seeming individuals somewhere in the process of breaking bad. Under the crummy surfaces of strip malls and tract homes, accountants, teachers, veterinarians, parking attendant, cops, and lawyers are all playing the angles.
For many of these folks, morality isn’t quite black and white; instead, it’s invisible, unconsidered, something whose bounds are transgressed in dumb fumbling. Take those white-collar Stepford crooks, the Kettlemans, who try to absolve their misdeeds through sheer force of denial; Craig barely bothered to cover his tracks as he bilked the county government for millions. Or take the pill slinger in dad pants who goes by “Price” and hires Mike Ehrmantraut. After selling drugs to a cartel worker, he’s shocked to be told that he’s a criminal, stammering, “I’m not, like, a bad guy.” To which Mike gives the clearest explanation of how the BB/BCS universe, and maybe our own, works:
"I’ve known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves. You can be on one side of the law or the other. But if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word. You can go home today with your money and never do this again. But you took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit. You’re now a criminal. Good one, bad one, that’s up to you."
It's up to you: This is the Ehrmantraut ethos, and it might be why he’s possibly the best character Gilligan has served up. In Breaking Bad, the old man turned out to be terrifyingly competent whenever he opted to make a move, which wasn’t often. The episode “Five-O,” Better Call Saul’s most raved-about hour, gave Mike a classic and tough backstory involving crooked policemen killing his son, the only upstanding guy on the force. It became clear that Mike's capable of doing terrible things even when not on a job, but only after great preparation and with great intention—as when he avenged his son with a double murder. He’s realpolitik, with heart. Should his daughter-in-law keep dirty money? If it helps her and her kid, Mike says, yes, of course.
Jimmy can, and does, learn something from Mike’s clearheadedness. The proto-Saul has a gift for deception and knows how to persuade. But in last night’s finale, viewers saw that Jimmy, for a time, got caught up in a confused swirl of emotions, pride, and expectations as he tried to make something of himself. Back in his Slippin’ Jimmy days, a lewd prank landed him in jail; his stuffy and successful brother freed him, and offered him a role in his law firm’s mailroom. Jimmy saw this as an opportunity to do more than straighten out—he could go good. It was Walter White in reverse, a guy trying to prove himself as a normal human being, not a monster manipulator. He buckled down. He passed the bar.
But brother Chuck, afflicted by both delusions about electro-magnetic fields and a vicious kind of pretension, didn't think reform was possible. He secretly resented and undermined Jimmy’s moves toward lawyerdom. When it finally became clear last week that Chuck had been ankling his younger brother, Jimmy seemed deeply wounded. But in the finale, hurt turns to bingo-calling rage turns to self-reflection. He realizes that all along, his desire to become a respectable person wasn’t actually driven by his own pursuit of self-respect. It was about his brother’s admiration—but his brother's admiration was never on offer.
Which explains why Jimmy turns around when offered a chance to get back in on the Sandpiper case. His parking-lot epiphany in the closing moments of the finale felt abrupt to me, until I thought back on the arc of the episode and the series. The visit to Chicago reminds Jimmy of what he's good at. If Chuck, who Jimmy thought was the best person in his life, is just going to cheat him, why shouldn’t Jimmy cheat too? With his new legal skills, he should be able to score Kettleman-level cash—as his con-artist pal Marco says, if you’re just getting by as a lawyer, you’re doing it wrong.
So it’s a mix of retribution and self-interest that powers him as he drives away, grunting out “Smoke on the Water.” But more than that, it's a deliberate choice. Michael McKean, who plays Chuck, nicely explained the new Jimmy philosophy as “the American escape hatch” to Salon: “If everything else goes off in your face, if your family can’t stand the sight of you, if you can’t hold a job, if you can’t stay away from drugs and booze, well, at least you can make a lot of money and have all this f-you money stacked up.”
This transformation is a little bit more complicated, and a little bit truer to life's messiness, than Walter White's linear descent to evil ever was. Accordingly, it hasn’t been accompanied by nearly as many lethal confrontations as first-season Bad served up. As entertainment, Better Call Saul has been more scattershot, and it wasn’t always clear that the show knew what it was. But when it was great—I think back to the desert standoff in episode two, the Mike episode, and the swindler’s montage last night—it reminded that Gilligan and Gould are experts at filming crime scenes that feel like no others on TV. Surely there are more of those scenes to come once Saul Goodman shows up. Jimmy knows where he’s driving now, and the show does too.
Brought back memories in the "$800" half dollar bar scam, when he pretended to be calling a coin dealer, and it was time info. Is that still a thing? I can't even remember the number I used to call for it. Of course now, the time is already BUILT IN TO YOUR PHONE DISPLAY.
* Sir, sir, could you help me, are these today's numbers?
The montage went by so fast the first time I didn't pause to think about it, but after rewatching, it came to me in a flash and sort of unbidden, cracking me up. You could do that scam by altering a newspaper so that the announced "winning numbers" matched a loser in your possession. But of course an unsuspecting blind man wouldn't know he had "won" and could be preyed on and taken advantage of.
There seemed to be some symbolism in the final shot from above looking at the two parallel yellow striped lane dividers, like two paths, fates or destinies, the one he could have gone down, and the one he ended up traveling instead.
The Moral Message in Better Call Saul's First Season (from The Atlantic)
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-morality-fable-of-better-call-saul/389820/
One season in, and Better Call Saul viewers have yet to meet Saul. Breaking Bad’s lovable scumbag lawyer still goes by his birth name, Jimmy McGill, even though there have been plenty of times during the first 10 episodes of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s show that he’s been both lovable and a scumbag.
What is a scumbag, though? Are they born or made? It's now clear that Better Call Saul is, like Breaking Bad, a great meditation on the nature of wrongdoing, which incidentally is much the same question pondered by basically all great religions and philosophers. The Albuquerque (and, sometimes, Chicago) of Gilligan and Gould’s imagination bustles with normal-seeming individuals somewhere in the process of breaking bad. Under the crummy surfaces of strip malls and tract homes, accountants, teachers, veterinarians, parking attendant, cops, and lawyers are all playing the angles.
For many of these folks, morality isn’t quite black and white; instead, it’s invisible, unconsidered, something whose bounds are transgressed in dumb fumbling. Take those white-collar Stepford crooks, the Kettlemans, who try to absolve their misdeeds through sheer force of denial; Craig barely bothered to cover his tracks as he bilked the county government for millions. Or take the pill slinger in dad pants who goes by “Price” and hires Mike Ehrmantraut. After selling drugs to a cartel worker, he’s shocked to be told that he’s a criminal, stammering, “I’m not, like, a bad guy.” To which Mike gives the clearest explanation of how the BB/BCS universe, and maybe our own, works:
"I’ve known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves. You can be on one side of the law or the other. But if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word. You can go home today with your money and never do this again. But you took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit. You’re now a criminal. Good one, bad one, that’s up to you."
It's up to you: This is the Ehrmantraut ethos, and it might be why he’s possibly the best character Gilligan has served up. In Breaking Bad, the old man turned out to be terrifyingly competent whenever he opted to make a move, which wasn’t often. The episode “Five-O,” Better Call Saul’s most raved-about hour, gave Mike a classic and tough backstory involving crooked policemen killing his son, the only upstanding guy on the force. It became clear that Mike's capable of doing terrible things even when not on a job, but only after great preparation and with great intention—as when he avenged his son with a double murder. He’s realpolitik, with heart. Should his daughter-in-law keep dirty money? If it helps her and her kid, Mike says, yes, of course.
Jimmy can, and does, learn something from Mike’s clearheadedness. The proto-Saul has a gift for deception and knows how to persuade. But in last night’s finale, viewers saw that Jimmy, for a time, got caught up in a confused swirl of emotions, pride, and expectations as he tried to make something of himself. Back in his Slippin’ Jimmy days, a lewd prank landed him in jail; his stuffy and successful brother freed him, and offered him a role in his law firm’s mailroom. Jimmy saw this as an opportunity to do more than straighten out—he could go good. It was Walter White in reverse, a guy trying to prove himself as a normal human being, not a monster manipulator. He buckled down. He passed the bar.
But brother Chuck, afflicted by both delusions about electro-magnetic fields and a vicious kind of pretension, didn't think reform was possible. He secretly resented and undermined Jimmy’s moves toward lawyerdom. When it finally became clear last week that Chuck had been ankling his younger brother, Jimmy seemed deeply wounded. But in the finale, hurt turns to bingo-calling rage turns to self-reflection. He realizes that all along, his desire to become a respectable person wasn’t actually driven by his own pursuit of self-respect. It was about his brother’s admiration—but his brother's admiration was never on offer.
Which explains why Jimmy turns around when offered a chance to get back in on the Sandpiper case. His parking-lot epiphany in the closing moments of the finale felt abrupt to me, until I thought back on the arc of the episode and the series. The visit to Chicago reminds Jimmy of what he's good at. If Chuck, who Jimmy thought was the best person in his life, is just going to cheat him, why shouldn’t Jimmy cheat too? With his new legal skills, he should be able to score Kettleman-level cash—as his con-artist pal Marco says, if you’re just getting by as a lawyer, you’re doing it wrong.
So it’s a mix of retribution and self-interest that powers him as he drives away, grunting out “Smoke on the Water.” But more than that, it's a deliberate choice. Michael McKean, who plays Chuck, nicely explained the new Jimmy philosophy as “the American escape hatch” to Salon: “If everything else goes off in your face, if your family can’t stand the sight of you, if you can’t hold a job, if you can’t stay away from drugs and booze, well, at least you can make a lot of money and have all this f-you money stacked up.”
This transformation is a little bit more complicated, and a little bit truer to life's messiness, than Walter White's linear descent to evil ever was. Accordingly, it hasn’t been accompanied by nearly as many lethal confrontations as first-season Bad served up. As entertainment, Better Call Saul has been more scattershot, and it wasn’t always clear that the show knew what it was. But when it was great—I think back to the desert standoff in episode two, the Mike episode, and the swindler’s montage last night—it reminded that Gilligan and Gould are experts at filming crime scenes that feel like no others on TV. Surely there are more of those scenes to come once Saul Goodman shows up. Jimmy knows where he’s driving now, and the show does too.
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Dr. Octopus
Footballguy
I think there was also an element of him "chickening out", perhaps believing that some of what Chuck said was true. His brash unrefined style, doesn't fit in with a white collar type firm. No one got his "Go Husker's" joke when he mentioned Nebraska at the negotiation table as an example.
kutta
Footballguy
It's OK. If you think Gilligan is the greatest writer ever and can do no wrong you will love it. If you go in with a completely open mind just looking for a good TV show, you'll probably think it's OK.
I enjoy how Saul and BB work through the fatalism of the character. We watch as fate predetermines the outcome, even though outside forces offer what would appear to be clear ways out. White could have walked away. Saul could go legit. But fate sends them on a predetermined path to their end. The two series on the surface present the characters with what appear to be decision points where fate can be changed but we see that there are really no decisions that will alter where these characters are headed. The basic question presented is whether our status quo (Jimmy as the ethical lawyer or Walter as the teacher) is really just an artificial weigh station on the way to an outcome predetermined by who these people are. Although we fought the idea, we knew the entire time that Walter would end up bad, the name of the show told us that. We of couurse know how Saul ends up. Yet, in both cases there is part of us that identifies with the temptations to which the characters succumb, but we have this unrealistic hope that they will make differing choices. Mike and Chuck understand this linear progression while characters like Kim and Skyler ask the question on behalf of the audience--why not just make a different decision. But no matter what opportunities these characters may have and no matter what stasis they may achieve in the short term, their equilibrium will only be realized once they give in to their fate. For the viewer, we get to contemplate whether our current state is merely temporary.
In the end Oedipus killed his father married his mother. That's just where he was headed and nothing was going to stop it.
In the end Oedipus killed his father married his mother. That's just where he was headed and nothing was going to stop it.
PlasmaDogPlasma
Footballguy
jamny
Footballguy
Dr. Octopus
Footballguy
Dr. Octopus
Footballguy
TenTimes
Backhoe Operator
I was glad Howard got a little bit of redemption. Chuck put him in a really tough position there.
dhockster
Footballguy
Well, he did have an Oedipus Complex. He was doomed when they named him Oedipus.
JaxBill
Footballguy
Never saw BB, wouldn't know gilligan from the Skipper and look forward to the show every week.
Just my opinion.
cstu
Footballguy
What makes it great writing is that he's a complex character with a number of motivations. I agree that 'chickening out' was part of it.
Notorious T.R.E.
Showdown!™ Administrator
Agree with this. Was expecting something "big" to break him bad, but instead he just has a case of the #### its.
Notorious T.R.E.
Showdown!™ Administrator
cstu
Footballguy
It was big deal that the guy he admired his whole life who he spent 10 years trying to impress and the last year catering to his every whim utterly destroyed any sense of worth he had developed for himself.
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shuke
Black Ice Skeptic
Notorious T.R.E.
Showdown!™ Administrator
Notorious T.R.E.
Showdown!™ Administrator
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