Better Call Saul

I thought he was great in Orphan Black, but he's even better in this show.

I still have a hard time placing the prequel stuff on the timeline...A couple of years pre-Breaking Bad?

Better Call Saul’s “present” starts in 2002, with mailroom flashbacks... five years before? and Slipping Jimmy flashbacks in the early ‘90s. There’s been a year or so of actual stuff happening onscreen, plus the one episode last season where most of a year passes during the opening split-screen montage of Kim & Jimmy’s joint / growing apart lives. (rewatched this and the season finale last week as prep)

Breaking Bad mostly takes place over one year, except the final season which spreads over another year, including Walt’s winter in the wilderness. They don’t really make an effort to keep it as a period piece, though.

So we’re still about four years from the start of Breaking Bad. Plenty of time for Jimmy to ruin Kim’s life over the next two seasons and still be an established success & singleton by the time he first appeared

Kim in a stairwell--was that the actual end? On her own, she carries out Jimmy's suggested scam-on-the-client-for-the-client(and-wife-and-kid-and-embryo)'s-own-good. It works, but she doesn't admit it to Jimmy, just tells him again not to suggest such a thing. He's really continuing to stress her out.

Esp. since this really did seem to justify the means, assuming the client has learned his lesson (would a first on this show, or any other law etc. show, right?)

Ah, I didn't realise there had been 2 eps. Cheers!

The sequence with all the long takes in Monday's episode, of Saul schmoozing and networking and wearing a colourful suit in the courthouse corridors, made me wish that the entire serious ongoing-plotlines series wraps up this year, and we get one season of the originally-intended sitcom adventures of Saul Goodman before it's all over. As a palate cleanser, if nothing else!

But

Normally when you watch a show part of the excitement is finding out what happens next but this show wouldn't be as good if we didn't know what happened to Jimmy. It's how he gets there that's interesting

Both of the series are so interested in how things happen, with long visual sequences of people doing careful work, that it's certainly no disjunct that it turned out like this.

show does not disappoint, although I found a couple sequences straining credulity (selling phones out of a circus tent under a freeway, Nacho grabbing the endangered stash)

Looking forward to Gene taking out the cab driver

A while since I watched BB: did Saul ever kill anyone?

not directly iirc

as much as I found the circus-tent-phone-store nice the use of Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" was a nice touch

as I much as I found the circus-tent-phone-store *ridiculous* the use of Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" was a nice touch

yeah the circus tent thing coulda been dialed down several notches + on the nose "criminals" casting

spoiler: this is apparently the plan for the two final seasons

A while since I watched BB: did Saul ever kill anyone?

lalo’s running commentary/audience reaction as a fun distancing effect (“what’s he doing now—is he really going to—damn!”)

ha ha, yes

it’s tuesday, man
50% off!!

The ants around the ice cream cone: symbolism? a 2001 reference? just a bunch ants around an ice cream cone?

What song was playing when Mike was in the bar? Sounded '70s. Him turning his back on that street crew stretched credulity.

It feels like every Saul-Kim conversation is Fraught with Significance. I kind of wish they'd move that relationship along.

This show is incredible. The scene when Kim went back Mr. Acker was done so well, I was anticipating one kind of horrible but it turned into a completely different kind of tension and outcome (purposefully being a little vague to avoid spoilers). I thought the last shot was kind of sweet and reminded me that those two really do like each other.

The guy from No Country for Old Men...As he listened to Kim on her second visit, his reaction was much different than I expected.

That's who he was! Couldn't place him, but it was nagging at me. Yeah that reaction was, in some ways, a more horrifying resolution than what I thought was going to happen. Just watching her intentions get so crushed was painful. The scene with Nacho and his dad was great too.

I think you mean the guy from Northern Exposure ...

Was wondering if any more Breaking Bad characters would show up in this show... these two make sense to bring in. Seems likely we will see them in upcoming episodes too

I can't remember--have Badger, Skinny Pete, or Combo shown up in BCS? They'd seem like sure things (having lots of time on their schedules, I'm guessing).

They have not as of yet

loved how the guys rampaging around yelling “fifty percent!” made Badger and Pete seem like complete geniuses in retrospect

The two guys from the bust? I actually thought they were Badger and Skinny Pete at first! They were in the car and you couldn't see them very clearly--one of them especially looked like Skinny Pete.

I’m a little behind and was thinking of the two guys who were rolling around town causing chaos in maybe ep2 of this season

jfc Rhea Seehorn is soooooo good why is she not getting other acting roles

she was criminally underused in the final season of veep as tom james' chief of staff

also loved Odenkirk's face when Lalo told him "not yet" about swallowing condoms full of heroin

I'm having fun guessing how Lalo is gonna get dispatched.

As far as who will carry it out, that's fairly obvious

Hank and Gomie warmed my heart

it's weird watching this show and wondering how p much every character is going to die

I had completely forgotten until this last episode that Crazy-8 was revealed to be an informant in Breaking Bad. Cool idea to use that for BCS.

Speaking of BB, we know that Lalo is still in the picture (or at least Saul thinks he is) when Saul first meets Walt and Jesse. So he surely won't be killed off in BCS unless the timelines start overlapping heavily.

huh really? I've completely forgotten so many incidental details.

I had to double-check real quick on a fan wiki but yeah!

“seven thousand... nine hundred... twenty-five?”

lol someone really doesn’t yet know the scale of who he’s working with

"jfc Rhea Seehorn is soooooo good why is she not getting other acting roles"

she is amazing, I'm completely in awe and in love with her and her pony tail. Actually I'd just remarked to my wife about her amazingly curled pony tail and about two minutes later someone on the show mentioned it.

holy shit how is the old man delivering the line “a man.... fuckin’ a horse!” not a viral clip by now

“picture me as the man, and mesa verde as the horse”

holy shit, i am dying

Loved that grumpy old obstinate guy, you could tell Kim was trying to pull at his heartstrings with her story but he was having none of it

Oh shit I think I'm an episode behind... Carry on

So was Kim's story true?

The one about her upbringing that she told Maurice from Northern Exposure? Probably, but it's good that the writers of this series enjoy ambiguity imo

Totally. Her making it up would be just as heartbreaking in a completely different way.

The horse line was brilliant.

When Howard gave his big pitch to Jimmy, I have to admit I was at a loss trying to remember how everything ended with Jimmy and his brother's firm--couldn't remember a thing.

I also wondered after the fact if Kim's story was true. She's caught a bad case of Slippin' Jimmy, and I fear it will be her downfall.

good catch on identifying the actor, sic. didn’t quite place him or know he was still acting

still stuck on the absurdity of Saul just handing a dude a picture of... that

I had no idea either! but I looked him up after ep 2 and he's super-busy for anyone, let alone a 79-year-old.

Yeah, you want to assume she's telling the truth, since she's going out on her own time and dime to try and sway him into acting in his own interest. But we've already seen her refuse and then slip into dissembling for a good cause this season, and her brooding & bottle-tossing on the balcony could just as well be at herself, as at Mesa Verde or Everett Acker.

(also my very lapsed Northern Exposure memories have been lightly stirred by visiting Roslyn, Washington Cicely, Alaska twice in the last year, and recently watching the first ep of Man In The High Castle to see it playing "Canon City, Colorado")