DipperDolphin

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6

Damn, it must really suck to have been snapped while being on a plane.

Pros:

• First and foremost, props to its ambition.
• There are major goosebumps, as well as emotional, moments.
• The acting is top notch. And especially the people who need to be top notch, are really top notch.
• The action has fantastic ideas at play.
• The amount of cameos in this film is unbelievable. Spoiler: Loved the fact that Jarvis from Agent Carter got a cameo!
• It celebrates the MCU in a good, and sometimes also very clever, way.
• The right characters are highlighted.
• A good score, and finally some more musical continuity.
• The villain is still great.
• It wraps up in a very satisfying way. Characters whose story ends here, get a great wrap up.

Cons:

• The first hour is a little hard to get through. It's very dialogue heavy, which in itself isn't a problem, but the Russos aren't good at directing long sections with just dialogue, while keeping you interested. And when that's a problem, you also start to notice the slow pacing, as well as flavourless direction of those scenes.
• The time jump feels like a lazy way to force inorganic changes into the story (e.g. The Hulk & Banner issue, a big plot point in the previous film, has been solved off screen; or the Civil War conflict that has been sort of resolved now, neither one of those feel earned. )
• The choreography and editing of the action aren't good. Moreover, the action that involves a lot of CGI feels weightless.
• Not a fan of the direction they took with Thor. They made him a tragic, but badass hero in the last film. I get that he's sad in this film, but did they really need to turn him into a joke again, like Thor: Ragnarok so annoyingly did?
• The time travel mechanics in this film don’t make enough sense. As a result, the continuity of the MCU is fucked now, because of the huge plotholes in this film. If half of the population is now 5 years older, do we just have to assume that the entirety of Peter's school got snapped? Do we have to assume that all the important Wakandans that play a future role in Black Panther sequels got snapped? What about any of the tv shows that are loosely (although not as loose as once before) connected? Also, how come we can't bring back anyone who died? If a past Gamora, Nebula and Thanos can come to the future, then why can't we bring back Natascha, Gamora, Pietro, Vision, etcetera? Also, going forward, anything that goes wrong can now be fixed with time travel (as long as they don't place restrictions on the Pym particles). It's issues like these that make a lot of time travel movies fall apart, and Endgame is no different.

6/10

[8.1/10] For the entirety of this season, Kim Wexler, and the audience, have been waiting for Jimmy McGill to genuinely deal with his brother’s death, to confront it in some way, rather than moving on as though nothing happened. From the season premiere, where he brushed off Howard’s tortured confession with a happy air, to last week’s raging out, we’ve seen Jimmy sublimate his feelings about Chuck and his brother’s death. We’ve seen him repress them, run from them, and act out because of them, but never really face them head on.

Those feelings are at the core of “Winner”, the finale of Better Call Saul’s fourth season. The latest scheme from Kim and Jimmy requires Jimmy to cry crocodile tears at Chuck’s grave on the anniversary of his death, to get earnestly involved in the scholarship grants made in Chuck’s name, to loudly but “anonymously” throw a party for the dedication of the Chuck McGill memorial law library and seem too broken up to enjoy it. It’s all a big show, to attract as many members of the local bar as possible, in the hopes that word will get back to the committee judging his appeal for reinstatement as a lawyer.

It is an effort to put on grief, wear it like a mask, for self-serving purposes. The knock on Jimmy, the thing that held him back in his first hearing, was a lack of remorse or concerning or mournfulness about his brother. So he and Kim send every signal imaginable to the legal community, in lugubrious tones, that Jimmy is a broken man still shaken up by his brother’s passing, only withholding mention of Chuck because the memory is too painful to bear.

As usual, it’s a good plan! It’s hard to know for sure whether the signs of Jimmy’s faux grief make it back to the review board, but they at least seem to be effective on his immediate prey. And Kim is there by his side, shooting down his more outlandish ideas, workshopping his speech to the committee, and helping her partner mislead people in the hopes of regaining something that was taken away from him.

But the key to it all working is Jimmy’s speech to the review board. He goes in with a plan to recite Chuck’s letter to him. Jimmy wants to let his brother’s eloquence and feeling carry the day so that he doesn't have to put on that mask of true feeling and seem insincere. But he departs from the script. He improvises. He offers what sounds like an honest assessment of his relationship with his brother, the reasons why he became a lawyer, the difficulty of gaining Chuck’s approval, the truths about Chuck’s demeanor and the hardships their sibling relationship faced at times.

The the impact of those words is heightened by the karaoke cold open that shows Jimmy as needling but caring, Chuck as condescending but proud, and the two of them as loving siblings. It clearly moves the review board. It causes Kim to wipe away a tear. And you’d have to be made of stone to sit in the audience and not feel something as Jimmy offers what sounds like a heartfelt and honest eulogy for his brother and their relationship.

But it’s a canard, a put-on, a lie. It is an echo of similar faux-sentimental assessments from Chuck, and once again, I almost believed it. Jimmy revels in having put one over on the review board. His cravenness about tugging their heartstrings astounds Kim, underlining her worst fears about the man she loves. After tearfully echoing the passage from his brother’s letter, about his pride in sharing the name McGill, Jimmy asks for a “doing business as” form to practice under a pseudonym instead. Saul Goodman, scruple-free lawyer to the seedy underbelly of Albuquerque, is born out of the ashes of his brother’s life and name.

There was no truth in Jimmy’s seemingly sincere pronouncements. There was no outpouring of grief or real feeling in that confessional moment, or if there was, it was anesthetized and calibrated to be used for dishonest purposes. For ten episodes, we’ve been waiting for Jimmy to acknowledge what his brother meant to him in some genuine way, and instead, he gives us, the review board, and most notably Kim, what turns out to be just another performance.

It is, in a strange way, a negative image of how Mike behaves in this episode. When he speaks to Gus about Werner’s disappearance, he seeks mercy on his friend’s behalf, trying to avoid a mortal response from his employer. He pleads caution, forgiveness, the possibility of correction. But when he speaks to Werner himself, he’s colder, angrier, more taciturn and practical in the way we’ve come to expect as the default for Mr. Ehrmantraut. He too has a divide between the face he presents in his profession and the one he presents to his erstwhile friend.

But at least “Winner” gives us some good cat-and-mousing in that effort. For all the heady material in Better Call Saul, it’s hard not to enjoy the petty thrills of detective work and chases gone wrong all the more. Seeing Mike pose as a concerned brother in law, and piece together where Werner’s likely to be is an absolute treat. And the way he manages to loses Lalo Salamanca -- with a gum in the ticket machine ploy -- is a lot of fun.

Lalo himself, though, really drags this portion of the episode down. He’s a little too cartoony of an antagonist on a heightened but still down-to-earth show. The fact that he crawls through the ceiling like he’s freaking Spider-Man was patently ridiculous. And his single-minded pursuit of Mike and ability to ferret details out just as well veered too far into the realm of contrivance. I appreciate the promise of greater friction to come between Gus and Mike’s operation and the Salamancas, but the bulk of Lalo’s business in this one was unnecessary, and kept Nacho, who’s been underserved in general this season, on the sidelines.

Still, it leads to a tragic, moving, heartfelt scene between Mike and Werner where what needs to be done is done. Between Werner’s naive requests to see his wife, Mike’s matter of fact resignation about what needs to happen, and Werner’s slow realization of the position he’s in all unspools slowly and painfully.

The upshot of it is simple though. Mike found a friend, and he has to kill him. There’s sadness in Mike’s eyes, evident beneath the anger that it came to this. There’s pain in Werner’s, and for yours truly, when Werner tells Mike that he thought his little escapade would result only in frustration but ultimately forgiveness and understanding from Mike, because they’re friends.

There’s not room for friends in this line of work, at least not under Gus Fring. Ultimately, it’s not up to Mike, and underneath the stars of New Mexico, at a distance, with a spark and a silhouette, we see him have to end the life of someone he’d rather let go, because it’s his job. Werner is the first man that Mike kills for Gus, but he won’t be the last. And it all starts with a man who made one mistake, that can’t be forgiven, because the powers that be would never allow it.

That’s what ties Mike’s portion of the episode to Jimmy’s. Jimmy delivers what is basically the Saul Goodman Manifesto to a young woman who was denied one of the Chuck McGill scholarships since she was caught shoplifting. He tells her that chances at respectability like that scholarship are false promises, dangled in front of lesser-thans to convince them they have a shot when they were judged harshly before they even stepped in the door. The system is stacked against you. The rules are to their benefit. So don’t abide by them. Make your success without them. Do what you have to do. Rub their nose in your success rather letting yourself be cowed by something unfair and biased against you. The world will try to define you by one mistake, but fight back and don’t let them win.

That’s a comforting worldview, one that lets the viewer off the hook to some degree. We want to like Jimmy. He’s affable. He’s fun. He’s good at what he does. It’s easy to buy in Jimmy’s own sublimated self-assessment -- that the white shoed system is unwilling to overlook less credentialed but hard-working individuals who’ve had missteps but overcome them, so he has to fight dirty. It’s tempting to buy into that narrative -- that the people with the power aren’t playing fair, so why should he? Why shouldn’t scratch, claw, fight, and cut corners along the way to getting what he deserves?

But the truth is that “the system” hasn’t done much to keep Jimmy down. Howard Hamlin wanted to give him a job after he became a lawyer. Davis & Main gave him every opportunity to succeed. Even the disciplinary committee is not unreasonable in questioning Jimmy’s penitence when he offers no remorse for the person he hurt with his scheme. Jimmy’s made plenty of his own mistakes, but it’s not “them” trying to hold Jimmy McGill down; it’s “him.”

That’s the trick of this season finale. Despite all the put-ons and subterfuge, Jimmy does genuinely reckon with the death of his brother, he just does it in the guise of unseen forces set against him rather than a cold body in the cold ground. It’s Chuck who tried to keep Jimmy from being on the same level as him. It’s Chuck who instigated the disciplinary proceedings that continue to be a thorn in Jimmy’s side. It’s Chuck who judged his younger sibling solely on his mistakes, who overlooked his hustle, who saw those missteps as all that Jimmy was or could be. When Jimmy rails against the system that he sees as holding him down, when he uses that as an excuse to color outside the lines, he’s really railing against the brother, and his feelings of anger and pain and grievance, that no longer have a living object of blame to sustain them.

Because Jimmy has to be the winner. If Jimmy is denied his reinstatement, if a young woman with a checkered past but a bright future can’t earn a scholarship in his brother’s name, if it’s ultimately judged that someone like Jimmy isn’t allowed to be in the profession of someone like Chuck, then it means that Chuck won, and Jimmy can’t bear that.

Despite the loss of his sibling, we only see Jimmy truly cry once this season. It’s not in front of the review board. It’s not in a quiet moment with Kim. It’s in his car, by himself, when the engine won’t start, when he feels stymied, when it seems like the forces Chuck set in motion will pull him under for good, cosmically confirming his brother’s harsh assessment of him.

There is grief in Jimmy McGill, pain caused by a severe loss. But that loss didn’t happen when Chuck died. It happened when Chuck broke his heart, turned him away, told him that he didn’t matter. As with others on T.V. this year, death didn’t mean the loss of a confidante for Jimmy; it meant the end of the possibility of approval, of pride, of the sort of family relationship Jimmy had always wanted and thought he might one day gain.

There is truth in those tears behind the wheel of an off-color sedan, a mourning in private to contrast with the show he puts on in public. And Saul Goodman -- the real Saul Goodman -- is born. Because if Jimmy couldn’t earn his brother’s love, then at least he can win, he can try to become what Chuck never thought he would, reach heights his brother never reached, no matter what lies he has to tell, what corners he has to cut, or who he has to hurt or deceive to get there. That’s Jimmy’s truth now; that’s his response to his Chuck’s death, and that’s the force that moves him from the decency and concern of the man we meet at the beginning Better Call Saul to the amoral, win-at-all-costs mentality that comes with the new name that distinguishes him from his brother.

Sometimes you have to cross a line. Sometimes, you do everything right; you do everything the way you believe that it should be done, and you still lose. Your forbearance, your good deeds, your extra effort to do the right thing, only enabled the bad guys, only let them profit from their misbehavior. So you have to make compromises. You have break some of the rules yourself; you have to sully yourself by playing their game; you have to be like the bad guys to beat the bad guys, for the greater good.

These are the thoughts motivating Mike Ehrmantraut as he wraps his hands around the rifle he'd previously shied away from. But they're the same ones going through Chuck's head as he tricks his brother into incriminating himself on tape.

Mike has a code. He doesn't want to kill people. His shaky hand after his run-in with Hector's henchmen shows he doesn't even want to hurt people. And he certainly doesn't want an innocent person to come to harm because of a choice he makes. But as Asimov explored in the short stories involving his Three Laws of Robotics, sometimes these principles conflict; sometimes they pull a person in different directions and force them to make some hard choices.

The eminently capable Mr. Ehrmantraut tried to abide by his no-kill policy, and still deliver a blow to his erstwhile rival. He tried to exact his vengeance on Hector in a way that would take the crime boss out of the picture, but also keep the innocents out of harm's way, and insulate himself and his family from the Salamancas' reach. Instead, it all goes sideways. Bad luck keeps the cops off of Hector's trail. A Good Samaritan loses their life in the exchange. And the man Mike went to great lengths to leave still kicking is summarily executed in the desert.

Mike tried. He tried very, very hard to have his cake and eat it too, to earn the money that he thinks will help him buy his soul back after the death of his son, to dip his toe in the mud without getting too dirty. He tried, and he lost anyway.

So it's come to this -- a sniper's nest overlooking a Salamanca hideout in the harshness of the New Mexico desert. His silent vow not to take a life, his distaste for snuffing out another man's existence, have to be put aside. More harm will be done--at least in the final tally--if he doesn't violate that code. He buys the sort of weapon he turned down the last time he considered killing a Salamanca. He sets up from his far away vantage point, to where his enemies seem to be in miniature -- tiny lives off in the distance. He lines up his shot. And he waits.

Then, that pesky moral code comes back again. At the moment of truth, Nacho stands between him and Hector. The greater good says do it. The pure utilitarian says that Hector will continue to inflict misery and pain, that Nacho isn't exactly an angel himself, and that a semi-innocent man will be killed regardless of whether Mike shoots or doesn't, so he may as well take out the real bad guy in the process. The retributivist says that Hector deserves it, for threatening a little girl, for ordering the death of an innocent person, for having a man killed who may not be nearly as innocent, but whose only crime in Hector's eyes was succumbing to Mike's scheme.

But Mike can't. He just can't. It's the reason he caught a beating instead of taking a life in the first place. It's the reason he gave Nacho half of his money for taking the rap for Tuco. It's the reason he's spurred on to right this wrong in the first place. Only the people who kill the innocent--Hector Salamanca, Matty's murderers--deserve to die, and Mike just doesn't have it in him to stomach the collateral damage that would come along with preventing Hector from hurting anyone else. The moment passes; another undeserved death takes place, and Mike waits once more.

Until the sound of his car horn calls him away. He finds a branch lodged between the seat and the steering wheel, calling his attention to a note with a simple message -- "don't." Someone is smart enough to know what Mike is up to, and has a different plan. Who is that someone? [Speculative Spoilers here -- an enterprising redditor found that if you take the first letters of all the episode titles in Season 2, they make an anagram for the phrase "Fring's Back."] We don't know for sure yet. But it's someone who wants to stop Mike from going through with it. Mike is ready; he's been pushed past his limit and he's ready to do what needs to be done, but his conscience and outside forces keep him from crossing that line.

Chuck has no such limitations, either from within or without. But the episode's cold open gives us a window into what drives him, what's shaped the way he looks at his brother. Chuck has tried to be an upstanding man, at least from his own perspective. While Jimmy is reminiscing about a crazy time at their mother's birthday party, Chuck only remembers everyone else having to clean up Jimmy's mess, literally and figuratively. While Jimmy strolls off to grab a sandwich, Chuck waits dutifully with his comatose mom. And when he's alone, he breaks down. Chuck may seem heartless at times, but he is still a man of feeling, and his quickly recovered demeanor when the nurse comes in suggests that, like Hamlin, he may put on a mask to project the image he thinks he needs to uphold, regardless of how he really feels.

Then his mother lurches back to life for just a moment, and Chuck is captivated once more. But with her final breath, does she call for the son who stayed by her side? The one Who made something of himself? The one who was there to help his parents rather than exploit them? No, she calls for Jimmy. The hurt, the jealousy in Chuck's eyes looms large. This is the final insult, the last thumb in his eyes that for all Chuck's good deeds, for all his effort to do right, to be right, everyone, even his own Mother, loves the personable Jimmy McGill just a little bit more. Chuck keeps their mother's final words from his brother--better to keep him from enjoying the fruits of his misbegotten labors--but their sting lingers.

(Incidentally, it's a great little swerve to show Jimmy waiting beside at the hospital, only to then reveal his brother sitting next to him, letting the audience know that this is a flashback and not the aftermath of Chuck's incident at the copy shop.)

That's how Chuck processes these events, and that's what's lurking in the back of his mind when he realizes that Jimmy has sabotaged him. Jimmy can't be allowed to him win. He can't continue to prosper and benefit from stepping outside the lines just because he knows how to work a crowd. He can't be a bad actor and still be rewarding by living so large and so well on the back of so many lies and cheats and shortcuts. As Jesse Pinkman so memorably put it, he can't keep getting away with it.

To prevent that, to expose Jimmy for what Chuck thinks he really is, he has to take a page out of his brother's playbook. Chuck's plan to entrap his brother into confessing his misdeeds on tape is nigh-Machiavellian, but also feels like the sort of scheme that Jimmy himself would cook up.

One of the interesting things about Better Call Saul as its developed over the course of two seasons is the way it's explored the idea that as different as Chuck and Jimmy seem on the surface, there's a great deal of common ground between them. Chuck's shown a certain duplicitousness before -- in how he's used Howard as his hatchet man or pushed his partner to punish Kim as a way of getting to Jimmy. But this is something different, something more elaborate and even sinister. The layers to to Chuck's ruse, the misdirection, the orchestration, the cleverness in how he pulls it off all reek of Slippin' Jimmy. The younger McGill brother may be more personable, but there's a craftiness that he and Chuck share. Chuck may not have his brother's golden tongue, but he still knows what buttons to push when it comes to the CEO of Mesa Verde, and he knows how to pull off a plan as meticulous, manipulative, and perfectly-calculated as any of Jimmy's.

What's ironic about is that at the same time Chuck is becoming more like the man he misguidedly believes his brother to be, Jimmy is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. "Klick" may be the most overtly moral and upstanding we've ever seen Jimmy be. He rushes into the copy shop and starts directing traffic to get his brother some help, even though it will expose his attempt to cover his tracks. (And kudos to Michael McKean, who was amazing throughout the episode, but was especially good in his wordless but meaningful reaction when he sees Jimmy as he regains consciousness.) He stays by his brother's side throughout Chuck's recovery. He draws a line in the sand that despite everything that's happened, he won't commit Chuck, because it's not what he brother would want. He agonizes over subjecting Chuck to those tests even if he believes it's in Chuck's own best interests. He gives up his temporary guardianship even if it would leave Chuck, as he puts it, right where Jimmy wants him. He has a look of guilt when he watches the commercial he worked so hard to make and realizes he hasn't quite lived up to being the paragon of honesty and virtue he presents himself as.

And in the end, he confesses to his brother. Jimmy comes clean when he believes that the chain of events he set in motion caused Chuck to retire and dive even deeper into his psychosis. Jimmy may not believe he's really risking his career or his livelihood by doing so, but he is exposing himself, making a sacrifice by playing into Chuck's image of him. Jimmy absolutely loves his brother, and after all the effort he put into covering up his misdeeds, the lengths he went to in order to prevent Chuck from confirming his suspicions, the thought of his actions wounding his brother deeply motivates Jimmy to lay it all out there for him.

What's so tragic and deplorable is that Chuck is taking advantage of that. He's using his brother's love to hurt him. In a way, he's making the same choice Jimmy did when he obtained temporary guardianship over Chuck and forced him to take those tests at the hospital. He's taking the choice out of his brother's hands, because he doesn't trust him to make the right one. But it's also cravenly manipulative. Chuck is playing on Jimmy's own deep-seated concerns for him in order to undermine him. There's something especially cruel in the poetry of that, something that feels particularly wrong about turning someone's care for you against them in such a cold and calculated fashion.

It can be hard to explain what makes Better Call Saul great because so often it comes out in the little things. It may be the direction and editing, which convey Chuck's disorientation by flipping his perspective upside down beneath the hospital lights, or communicating Kim's pride in Jimmy by putting her beaming smile in the frame as his commercial plays. It may be the small but significant performance of the doctor who looks after Chuck, who manages to be a steady and caring voice of reason between each of the mercurial McGill brothers. It may be the little bits of dry comedy in an episode as significant as "Klick," from the "no offense," "none taken," exchange between Mike and the arms who wipes his prints off the rifle, to Ernesto's beleaguered wish that he was back in the mail room. Or it may be something like the quiet moment where Ernesto explains to Jimmy why he lied on his behalf -- for the simple reason that Chuck seemed out to get him, and Jimmy's his friend.

That, more than Chuck's fierce intelligence, more than Jimmy's golden tongue, more than one brother's pride and the other's lack of shame, is what truly distinguishes the McGill brothers from one another. When Jimmy plies his trade these days, when he employs a little subterfuge, he's usually trying to help people -- sometimes himself, but also the woman he loves and people like the seniors at Sandpiper. When things go awry, when it looks like people will really be hurt, he doesn't sit on the sidelines; he acts to rectify his mistakes, whether it's by talking Tuco into commuting the death sentences of his twin collaborators in the desert, or by admitting his actions to his brother to prevent Chuck from giving up his life and his sanity. Jimmy is far from pure, but he cares and he tries, and people like Ernesto see that.

But Chuck only uses those same skills to hurt people. Sure, he justifies it by seeing himself as an agent of morality, as it being part and parcel with his self-given duty to uphold what's right and just in this world. And yet even if he thinks what he does is for the greater good, when push comes to shove, Chuck uses that craftiness to deny his brother the seat at the table that he'd earned, to punish Kim for Jimmy's transgressions since she was the only one within reach, to wrest away a client when someone more deserving had done the legwork, and to incriminate a brother whose confession he was only able to wring out because of Jimmy's love and concern for him. Jimmy serves individuals; Chuck serves some greater sense of righteousness, and unlike Mike, he cares little for who's caught in the crossfire.

Chuck has a very personal, very exacting moral code, and it leads him to hurt the people who care about him the most. Jimmy's ethical mores are much more fluid, much more apt to let the ends justify the means, but he means to do good, more or less, and to help people, especially those close to him. And Mike is somewhere in the middle, intent on protecting the most important people in his life, trying to live up to the high moral standards he sets for himself even as he gets his hands dirty, and most of all trying not to hurt anyone in the process. "Klick" wraps its characters in these little moral conundrums, and teases out the connections and distinctions between its heroes and its villains as each tries to find their way out of them, and the lines they are and are not willing to cross to do it.

[8.6/10] For a split-second, I believed him. I believed Chuck when he told the Assistant District Attorney handling Jimmy’s case that his brother has a good heart, that he would never actually hurt Chuck, and that maybe there is an easier way to end all of this unpleasantness. Perhaps, I thought, Jimmy’s speech to Chuck, uttered while sitting on the curb waiting for the cops to pick him up, had made an impression. Chuck could be remembering all that his brother’s done for him, believing that Jimmy means well, and wanting to avoid selling him down the river.

Then, Jimmy sees the deal the A.D.A. offers him. It is surprisingly light, one that would allow him to avoid jail time and, assuming he can maintain some good behavior, even keep it off his record. The catch, undoubtedly concocted by Chuck in the meeting with Ms. Hay, is that the deal is conditioned on Jimmy writing a letter of confession to the felony charge, that would lead to him losing his law license.

The truth becomes clear. Chuck does not care for Jimmy’s well-being. He is not flush with the memories of the times his brother has been there for him. He just wants Jimmy out of the legal profession. Chuck still sees it as an insult, a joke, that his screw-up brother can, let alone would, be able to call himself the same thing as Chuck. That has always been the grandest affront to the elder McGill brother -- that Slippin’ Jimmy is allowed to be an officer of the court, and he aims to put a stop to it. He does not care about anything else in this, let alone his brother.

But Kim Wexler does. There is an inherent tragedy to even the kindest, sweetest scenes between her and Jimmy. We know that she is not around, or at least unseen, by the time Saul Goodman pops up on Breaking Bad, which makes every time Jimmy tries her patience or brushes her aside come off like a stepping stone to the seemingly inevitable dissolution of their partnership, personally and professionally. For the time being though, Kim is Jimmy’s best ally, the one who, unlike Chuck, truly believes that he can be good.

The episode shows that off in its name, “Sunk Costs,” a reference to Kim’s notion that she has invested too much time in Jimmy to give up on him now, but it also shows it off in its visuals. While the acting and writing are top notch every week on Better Call Saul, what sets the series apart from its peers is how much it uses its cinematography and other visual tools to tells it story on top of that. Even if it were not clear from the superb performances of Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in their characters’ responses to this news, Jimmy and Kim, framed by the glass-decked front of their office, turned to silhouettes bathed in light, holding hands, tells the audience everything its needs to know about how it’s the two of them against the world.

The same aesthetic acuity is on display in Mike’s half of the episode. Prior to any of the fireworks of “Sunk Costs” -- either the aftermath of the phonecall that teased us in the prior episode or the incident between Chuck and Jimmy -- we see a perfectly-orchestrated little scene of a Los Pollos Hermanos truck rambling through the New Mexico desert. Flanked by sharp yellow and saturated blues of the arid landscape, the shots of an old pair of sneakers, hanging on a wire, falling to the earth below, set the stage, both for the episode’s visuals, and for the trap set at end.
That trap is the natural outgrowth of what is, as far as we know, the first ever meeting of Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring. This is a momentous occasion, one that lacks any particularly grand declarations or big arguments, but shows the pair of reserved but perceptive men sizing one another up and finding each other worthy, or at least potentially useful to one another.

That’s communicated in how well each is able to perceive what the other is after. Gus has the advantage of his goons, but he’s done his homework. He knows Mike’s name. He knows what Mike’s done. And most importantly, he’s able to figure out why Mike is still at it, even after taking Hector Salamanca’s money, even after knocking over one of his trucks, even after it would seem the threat against his family has been settled.

Mike, for his part, shows that his intelligence does not just extend to piecing together how he’s being tracked, but to his ability to quickly understand the lay of the land. Fring, he reasons, is fine with Mike messing up Hector’s trucks because he’s the competition, and like that, he’s managed to peel back one of Gus’s protective layers and the veneer of respectability and mystery he keeps up to preserve himself in this business. The two men stand face to face in that desert, realizing that while they stand in different positions, their minds work in similar ways. That generates a quick mutual respect that lays the groundwork both for the working relationship we see in Breaking Bad and for the escapade that immediately ensues.

After the meeting, Mike shows off his wit and creativity once again, using the stretch of highway the viewers witnessed in the cold open to thwart Hector once again. “Sunk Costs” takes the time to show Mike being careful and deliberate -- whiffing on his first few throws of the new sneakers (a sharp contrast to Walt’s pizza-throwing adventure), and shooting his gun in the air to assure Hector’s goons that there’s just a hunter out there. When all is settled, he aims true, and dusts the same ice cream truck we saw back in [[Episode]] with enough suspicious white powder to tip off the Border Patrol's guard dogs and strike another blow against Hector. It’s an instance of two individuals’ aligned interests, and shared philosophies, coming together nigh-perfectly.

The same cannot be said for Jimmy and Chuck McGill. As Jimmy sits on the sidewalk in front of Chuck’s house, smoking a cigarette from when his car’s doors were all the same color, the depth of his hurt, of his anger, of his sense of betrayal is palpable. In a curt but devastating monologue he tells his brother one of the harshest things one family member can tell another -- that when you’re hurt, when you need help, when you’re dying -- I won’t be there.

And yet, Chuck declares that he is trying to help his brother, and as much as I look askance on his methods and his intentions and his perspective, in a way, I believe he really means it. I believe Chuck’s reasons are selfish and self-aggrandizing, that keeping Jimmy out of his domain is his main objective, whether he realizes it or not. But I also believe that Chuck really thinks it will be better for Jimmy if he’s not a lawyer, that it will help keep him out of trouble, that he’ll be happier and maybe even better.

That catch is that it’s a view that comes from a place of condescension, from a notion that everyone has a place in this world, and that Jimmy’s is under the bootheel of smarter, better folks like Chuck. To that end, Chuck can justify his actions because he’s simply putting everything back in the proper order -- him the successful lawyer, his brother the decent enough guy who does well enough to get by -- without allowing Jimmy to supersede him based on the charm and craftiness that’s sustained him thus far.

Despite a certain duplicitousness from Chuck, he genuinely believes, in his own way, that he’s doing what’s best for his brother, that is actions are a sign of caring. The problem is that they’re also reflective of a worldview, one that says he is meant to be on top and Jimmy is meant to be on bottom. Chuck may never admit that to himself, he may also cloak his prejudices in the guise of justness and righteousness, but his form of caring, his “tough love,” is the harsh, patronizing act of a man who thinks himself superior, ready to snuff out anything that would challenge that, by any means necessary.

If you love infinite panty shots, uncensored breasts and hundreds of tentacle scenes (with a splash of spectacular raunchy comedy), then To Love-Ru is the perfect ecchi show for you. To Love-Ru and High School DxD are probably the two best ecchi anime that I've seen and if you're a fan of the genre at all, this is a must watch. To Love-Ru is an ecchi comedy SOL harem that involves aliens and creatures of all sorts who lead our fateful protagonist, Yuuki Rito, into countless jaw-dropping and cringe-worthy situations over and over again. I never got tired of Rito falling headfirst into the breasts of an unsuspecting female student. And thanks to Lala's countless inventions (and the help of many alien friends/foes), the scenarios keep coming and always seem fresh. The greatest strength, by far, of the series is the cast of female characters. This is one BIG harem. There are easily 10+ women at the end (each with varying affection levels for Rito) and I can honestly say that I love them all. Each girl has a very distinct personality and ability along with different motivations and background. And they interact marvelously with each other as they try to chase Rito or fend off his unwitting sexual harassment. My personal favorites are definitely Yui, Yami, Momo, Lala, Mikan and Oshizu.

The quality definitely differs from each season by getting better and better. The first season is by far the weakest and has the least to do with the manga. It's still funny and a good introduction for most of the characters but don't drop the series just because you think the first season wasn't that great as there is plenty of quality to come. The first set of 6 OVAs after the first season revert back to the manga material and this is where the comedy starts to get good and we finally get introduced to the full set of characters (for the most part). The second season (Motto To Love-Ru) swings into full force and adopts a different format from the first where each episode is broken into 3 separate independent sections that are different stories entirely. I thought that this format really allowed the comedy to come alive and keep things fresher and interesting. Also, the ecchi really starts getting pumped up in this season. The third season (To Love-Ru Darkness) is absolutely fantastic and the best of the bunch. While Motto didn't really have an overarching story, Darkness does a great job incorporating that into the fray especially by delving into and really focusing on the characters of Yami and Momo (who are two of my three favorite characters). Also, Yui Kotegawa starts to get more and more screen time (which I love). And my god... The ecchi reaches borderline-hentai levels here and it is glorious. And the last set of Darkness OVAs just keeps on bringing the same goodness.

If you are an ecchi fan, you better watch To Love-Ru and don't drop it just because you think that the first season was a bit weak. Power on through. It only gets better. As the Darkness OVAs have just concluded, I hope that they announce a new season in the near future because I need my fill of the best harem in the universe getting caught up in tentacles.

[7.4/10] I miss the approach -- popularized by The Wire and practiced by shows as distinct from it as BoJack Horseman -- of having the penultimate episode of the season be where the major fireworks go off. It gives you a chance to recover and collect yourself, as a show and an audience, in the actual season finale. And it helps avoid the sense in the lead-up to the end that you’re getting more setup than payoff until the show pulls the trigger on its biggest events of the season.

That’s the problem with “Wiedersehen”, a perfectly good but not outstanding episode of Better Call Saul. It’s not as though nothing happens in the show this week. Lalo Salamanca starts making overtures and feints toward Gus. Werner makes a daring escape from the workmen’s facility. And Jimmy not only faces a denial of his reinstatement, but in his rage and disbelief, manages to sabotage his relationship with Kim that had otherwise seemed on the mend. But all of this feels more like setting the table for the resolution of the finale than anything complete.

Now maybe everything falls into places in this year’s finale and in hindsight, “Wiedersehen” ends up looking like a brilliant prelude. And maybe, when you load up the second-to-last episode of the season with the big happenings of the season, you just make your third-to-last episode the setup episode instead. But it’s hard not to feel like this episode amounts to one big question (or, perhaps, three subsidiary questions) that Better Call Saul only intends to answer next week.

That’s the job of television in some ways. For as daring and stylistically audacious as Better Call Saul and its predecessor series can be, they’re also both sound in terms of the fundamentals and attuned to the core rhythms of television. The show still knows how to end on a cliffhanger, on a tease, on something to leave your jaw on the floor and make you desperate to tune in again next week to see how things resolve.

Rest assured, I’ll be there next week, there to find out whether tension between Gus and the Salamancas reaches the next level, whether Mike is forced to make a hard choice after his ostensible friend flies the coop, whether Jimmy can rescue his legal career or relationship or sense of self. But “Wiedersehen” left me wishing we could just head on to those parts of the story, not just because those teases are so tantalizing, but because this week’s proceedings feel incomplete and even a little insubstantial without the other half of what’s set up here.

That’s especially true for the Nacho/Lalo/Gus portion of the show. Lalo is still a new character, introduced more than three-quarters of the way into the season. ‘Wiedersehen” makes good on the promising setup we’ve seen since early in season 4 -- where Nacho is trapped between the exacting demands of Gus’s well-oiled machine and the unpredictable, trigger-happy Salamancas.

But there’s more promise than proof in this episode. Sure, the conversation between the poised but firm Gus and the loose, freewheeling Lalo is tense and portentous. The prospect of Lalo nosing around Gus’s meth-distribution site portends significant moments for all involved in the episode to come. For now though, this feels like the beginning of the story, the introduction, rather than the culmination, or even a turning point, in the story between Gus and Nacho that Better Call Saul has been toying with this year.

(Don’t get me started on Lalo giving Hector his infamous bell, replete with painful backstory. Maybe I’m still just smarting from the fan service excesses of Solo: A Star Wars Story, but by god, not every iconic snippet or feature or accessory of a character needs an origin story. Sometimes, people just get a bell, or a pair of dice, or something practical to help them communicate, and you don’t need some writerly monologue to deliver weak exposition on how a character came into possession of whatever the object du jour is.)

The same’s true for Werner’s great escape. There’s meat on the bone in that portion of the episode, both in terms of character and scene construction. Rainer Bock absolutely sells Werner’s desperation, his simmering distress at having to remain separated from his wife, his crumbling efforts to hold it together and put a good face on things and do his job. And he also sells Werner’s cleverness, the Walter White-esque ingenuity of a middle aged nerd to find ways to be a spanner in the works for an otherwise well-oiled machine. His ability to find weak spots in the facility, and disguise camera flashes as energy surges, frames him as resourceful and desperate man, and the show manages to communicate that almost solely through the images of the aftermath of his escape.

Series co-creator Vince Gilligan’s also on board to direct this one, which means more than the franchise’s cinematographic trademarks like a shot from inside the hole drilled for the dynamite. It means extended, slow burn, tactile sequences where Werner goes very Hurt Locker in trying to check for faulty wiring. As there often is in the show, there’s a foreboding energy as this gentle man is in a tight spot. His hyperventilation, strains to hold it together, and careful efforts to fix the problem are all stretched out expertly through Gilligan’s camera’s journey through the darkness.

Maybe that’s enough action for one episode, especially one that’s leading in to a presumably eventful finale. But it also can’t help but seem like the show is saving the real excitement -- the inevitable dilemma between Mike’s understanding of and affection for Werner and the duties of his job -- until next week.

But you can make the argument that we get the majorest of major happenings on the Jimmy/Kim side of the episode this week. (Though I suspect I might feel differently after the season finale.) “Wiedersehen” opens up with Jimmy and Kim pulling off another brilliant scheme. It turns out that Kim demuring on Kevin’s request to change the Mesa Verde designs in Lubbock wasn’t a sign of her regular work seeming dull in comparison to her con artist thrills, but rather a prelude to her combining the two to pull off a miracle for her client using a less than savory method.

The entire sequence of her and Jimmy -- posing as a crutch-hopping single mom with a deadbeat brother -- earning the trust and sympathy of the Lubbock clerk and pulling the ol’ switcheroo on the plans is another enjoyable outing for the pair. It plays in the space this show has long lived in -- between wanting to pass judgment on these people for fraud and manipulation, but having so much fun watching them work. But a good con doesn't fix what’s eating Jimmy, his renewed and once-again rejected efforts to have Kim be his partner in law, not just his partner in crime.

That comes to a head when, after a trademark Jimmy McGill performance in front of the review board, his request for reinstatement is rejected. He gives all the right answers to the questions, quotes Supreme Court decisions, includes letters of recommendation, talks about what the law means to him. But he never mentions Chuck, the ghost who’s been haunting this season of Better Call Saul and proves a hindrance to Jimmy’s life even from beyond the grave.

Despite some complicated things going on under the surface, Jimmy has tried to separate himself from Chuck, to move past things, and so he expresses no remorse for what happened with his brother, what effect it had on Chuck’s life, anything specific to the man who used to be the most significant presence in Jimmy’s life. So of course he doesn't mention his brother at his hearing, and it’s what eventually dooms him.

It’s too much for Jimmy to bear. He acts out in a way we’ve rarely seen before. He feels the frustration of a year’s worth of (comparatively) good behavior down the drain, with another year in the offing. He experiences the despondency of expectations being punctured. And worst of all, he takes it out on Kim.

It’s a point I’ve probably beaten into the ground by this point, but Kim has stepped into the role that Chuck used to play for Jimmy. There’s loads of complicated consequences of that, but one of the biggest is that Jimmy projects his insecurities and his anger toward his brother onto her. He lashes out at her for seeing him as insincere, for seeing him as a “low life”, for thinking he’s not good enough to share an office with, charges he might as well be leveling at his dead brother.

Kim, to her credit, pushes back, pointing out how many times she’s been there for Jimmy, how often she looks out for him, takes care of him, drops everything to clean up his messes. There is this one pinnacle dream that Jimmy uses as the yardstick to measure whether he’s loved, overlooking all the other ways in which he has an incredibly good thing going that he sure as hell shouldn’t mess up in fit of pique after a bad disciplinary hearing.

But that’s what happens. I’m done trying to predict whether or not the Kim/Jimmy relationship will end, but after a brief dead cat bounce, there’s enough acrimony that Jimmy starts packing up his stuff. Issues that have been bubbling under the surface for both people in this couple breach here, and it’s hard to know whether things can be put back together.

The title “Wiedersehen” -- a German word meaning “meet again” or “reunion” -- suggests there’s more to come, another chance for Kim to help Jimmy become a lawyer again, through an appeal or a hail mary or whatever new scheme the duo can come up with. But damage has been done. That much is undeniable.

Even then, it feels like there’s more to the story. Season 4 of Better Call Saul has been superb as ever, but also interstitial. After the incredible build that gave us the McGill bowl and Chuck’s death in season 3, the show has been in reaction mode. It gives us the rocky road of Jimmy’s recovery, Kim reckoning with what she’s been a part of, Nacho falling into a tug of war between Gus and the Salamancas, and Mike starting his work with Gus in earnest. The former two are post scripts to stories, and the latter two seem like the beginnings of new ones. It remains to be seen whether the series will give us any resolution at all in its season finale or, like “Wiedersehen”, is waiting for something greater to come.

[8.5/10] Better Call Saul is a show that zigs when you expect it to zag. As a prequel series, it makes its bones as a tragedy, where the events are all the more sad, all the more pitiable, because (most of) the audience knows the opprobrious ends waiting for the show’s heroes. And yet, the series still has an impressive ability to surprise, to delight, to lead the viewer down one path and make you think you know where things are headed, only to take a sudden left turn toward something you might never have expected.

Which is to say that the last episode made it seem like Kim and Jimmy were headed for an irreconcilable split. The slow disintegration of their relationship, the frosty air between the two of them, suggested a grinding down of something that had once been beautiful and a source of strength and solace for both. “Coushatta” starts out pointing things in that direction. Even as Jimmy and Kim are prepping their scheme together, Kim is quietly unperturbed by Jimmy leaving for the night. She’s unbothered by him staying late at his office. She barely seems to notice or care that he’s gone.

It’s enough that Jimmy’s landlord even notices and, in a rare act of kindness, pours him a drink and tells him to make it right. But Jimmy himself admits that it might be too late for that. Maybe their relationship is too damaged. Maybe the people that they are, the things they want out of life, are too different for them to work over the long haul. It’s sad, but Jimmy seems to be slowly but surely accepting a tough truth.

But even if the couple aren’t on the same page personally, they’re still a formidable team when t comes to accomplishing whatever the two of them set out to do. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good scheme on Better Call Saul, and the one “Coushatta” features for Jimmy and Kim is a doozy.

The pair mount a multi-pronged attack to get Huell off the hook. It starts with Kim’s idea to send an avalanche of letters that cast Huell as a hometown hero from a small hamlet in Louisiana. It goes deeper with her “shock and awe” tactic of bombarding the prosecutor with motions and discovery and potential countersuits to try to make the case too much of a hassle to deal with. And it crests with Jimmy, ever diligent when he needs to be, using his array of drop phones and hiring his old film crew to pose as all the concerned citizens of Huell’s homeland, thereby convincing the prosecutor there’s a groundswell of grassroots support for the man.

The whole damn thing is just delightful. This has been a pretty heavy season of Better Call Saul, and rightfully so. Chuck’s death hit several people in a variety of different ways, and it’s worth exploring that. But it’s also nice to get to see our protagonists simply be good at what they do, in a way that makes you laugh. Everything from the joyous pictures of Huell on the “church website,” to the judge complaining that he must be Santa Claus with all the mail he’s getting, to Bob Odenkirk busting out his old Senator Tankerbell accent, drips with the show’s great comic chops.

Better yet, the plan works! After all the meticulous but enjoyable steps “Coushatta” shows our heroes taking, it also gives them a victory. The prosecutor is flummoxed, and Huell gets off without jail time. The episode toys with the audience a bit, letting us share Jimmy’s anxiety and anticipation as he watches Kim jaw with opposing counsel. But Better Call Saul delivers the news in the best and most unexpected way -- a kiss from Kim to Jimmy that packs all the passion and enthusiasm that’s been drained from the frame up to this point. Right at what seems like the brink of a break-up, there is that spark and joy that brought them together, even as another empty bedside suggests this may be more of a blip than a save.

But the surprises aren’t limited to the flim-flam that the team of Jimmy and Kim cooks up. Just as their frosty relationship turns suddenly warm, the friendly rapport between Mike and Werner suddenly takes a turn for the curt and business-like.

That shift proves a swerve within a swerve. “Coushetta” sets the audience up to expect that the mutual admiration society of Mike and Werner will keep on humming, while the continued bad behavior of Kai will prove the sticky wicket between the German workers Werner is supervising and this corner of Gus’s empire that Mike is overseeing.

And initially, it seems like that will be the case. Mike and Werner both skip out on the strip club-centered “R&R” that Mike’s graciously provided for the boys to blow off steam. The two men bond over brews, with Werner affectionately detailing the achievements of his architect father, Mike lamenting the useless of his, and Werner reassuring his new friend that Mike is his father’s legacy and the best thing that Papa Ehrmantraut left behind. Their moment of camaraderie is popped by Kai’s predictable misbehavior, but Mike is adept, as usual, at quelling these sort of monkeyshines, and what could be the spark that ignites the problem turns out to be an easily snuffed out cinder.

The rub, however, is that gentle, gregarious Werner turns out to be the problem. Werner, having had a few too many hefeweizen, strikes up an architectural conversation with a few locals, and has scribbled a rudimentary design of Gus’s lab on a coaster, threatening to let word of this top secret project leak. Mike whisks Werner away, and confronts him about it the next morning. There’s apologies and efforts to minimize, but the damage is done. A relationship that had grown friendly is now one of employer and potential liability (never a good position to be in under Gus Fring). But sadder yet is the sense that Mike had once again grown close to someone, had some sense of equilibrium, only to see it disturbed once more by his business.

The same holds for Nacho, whose quiet command of the Salamanca empire (over what we can assume to be months) seems poised to be disrupted by the arrival of someone who carries the family name. We don’t get much of Nacho’s story here, even after he’s been missing for a few episodes, but what we do get is potent.

We see a version of Nacho who calls late-series Jesse Pinkman to mind, another young man finding steady success in an ugly business who finds that success only hollows him out. The cold way Nacho tears out the earring of a dealer whose tithe was too late, the curt and confident air he takes on when chastising his lieutenant for not doing it fist, the desultory fashion in which he tosses product at his harem in a decked out apartment, suggest a man who, like Jesse, thought he wanted out, and only finds himself a deeper or more vital part of this machine.

Or maybe not. The arrival of another Salamanca cousin presents a problem, another unpredictable element in a machine that needs to work efficiently and expectedly in order to work. There is a spiritual deadening to the ghost of Nacho we see skulking through his home in “Coushetta”, but the appearance of a new cook in the kitchen might give him a way out, one way or another.

Not everybody wants out, though. The specter hanging over the show over the past few episodes has been the apparent impending demise of Jimmy and Kim as a couple. There’s been a growing disdain (or at least what seemed like it) from Kim for Jimmy’s less-than-above-board methods, given how they brought down Chuck, how they tore a sick man down because of a mutually petty (if longstanding) feud.

But what if Jimmy’s powers could be used for good? What if his talent for persuasion and suggestion and theatricality could be applied without hurting anyone? What if his skills could be used to help decent people have another chance?

Why, then, you could enjoy the con-artistry, the creativity, the performance and presentation. When Kim sits in an office with the head honcho of Mesa Verde, who wants her to pull another rabbit of her hat to help them get approval for a new building, she demurs. The old Kim would once have jumped at that chance, to put in the legwork, to pull off a miracle of filings and applications and zoning exemptions. But in the shadow of a multi-pronged scheme to pressure an opposing lawyer into letting her client off with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist with an aisle’s worth of supplies from M.J. Designs and a boatload of trickeration, the thicket of regulatory challenges can’t help but seem dull.

So when Kim asks to speak to Jimmy, he worries that it’s a death sentence for their relationship, but it’s really an invitation. Kim pauses a moment to consider the possibilities before she answers Kevin’s query. Later, she caresses the little souvenir of her and Jimmy’s first little scam. She leans on the wall, smoking a cigarette, the small vice that brought her and Jimmy together. And with those symbols and moments on her mind, she tells Jimmy, the man who’s afraid this is a kiss off, that she’s not mad – she wants more.

It’s the last thing you’d expect after seven episodes of growing revulsion and concern from Ms. Wexler. But there’s a charge to this “line of work,” a fulfillment from defending people who need a second chance combined with the excitement of using her boyfriend’s amusing and impressive abilities to grease the wheels of justice, that she can’t find in her otherwise straight life.

Better Call Saul is a show that gives you both the slow grinding pain of inevitability and harsh realization, but also those jolting, tantalizing, anxiety-boosting shifts that come as a shock, but not quite as a surprise. We know these characters – what Kim wants, what Mike wants, what Nacho wants – and the show never forgets that. When it’s time for a change of direction, each is recognizable in their denuded concerns, their disappointed resignation, and their dangerous hope to delve deeper into the world of tricks and treats that Jimmy McGill can’t help but conjure. We understand where most of these characters are headed, what much of their futures like it, but Better Call Saul still finds ways to surprise us.

[8.8/10] Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because the episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of Jimmy as the Saul Goodman we met on the prior show, in the midst of his fleeing from justice. It’s just because Gus Fring seems to nail down the plans for the facility that will one day be Walter White’s laboratory. It’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and hangout where Jesse Pinkman sold meth.

It’s because this is an episode about people who are outstanding at what they do, who have near unrivaled skills, and what direction that takes them in. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a story about a man who had an undeniable talent, and who could not set it aside when the recognition and lucre came with a side of human misery, and who didn’t know when to walk away until it was too late. It’s a show that lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone so skilled ply their craft, and earned its emotional resonance from both the uncertainty and foreboding sense of where it would lead him.

“Quite a Ride” positions Jimmy in the same way, as someone who has a gift for persuasion, the ability to make an anthill sound like Mount Everest, and a lack of scruples that mean he doesn't mind skirting the law if it suits him. The difference is that Walt was running from a life he resented, whereas Jimmy seems to be running from his own grief.

There’s a version of Jimmy that could maybe have been happy, at least temporarily, working at the mobile phone store in a semi-normal way. Sure, his efforts to convince a passing customer that he can evade the taxman by buying these phones that are allegedly selling like hotcakes isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, but it’s a pretty straight job by Jimmy’s standards.

But it’s not enough, at least not when he has a moment of quiet, a moment to let his grief catch up with him. Sitting on the couch, watching Dr. Zhivago, Jimmy starts to tear up, as the pain of the events with his brother seem to flood back in a way he’s been able to keep at bay. So Jimmy turns to his drug of choice, his favorite distraction, and the thing that makes him feel better than anything else -- a nice, lucrative hoodwink.

He buys a heap of burner phones from his own store, and ventures to The Dog House to unload them to whatever criminal element is around to purchase them, in another one of the show’s sterling montages. There’s a sense in these scenes that Jimmy is both at the top of his game, but also wants to be punished for it. He doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, and seems to be pulled between the part of himself that wants to see exactly how far his talents will take him, and the part that wants to push him into something so bad that it’ll be the wake up call that snaps him out of this.

That wake up call comes. It doesn't happen when Jimmy wanders into a crowd of bikers who are enough to scare away the rest of the riff raff. It happens when the three young hoods who turned him down earlier in the night rough him up and take his spoils from the evening. He returns home, worse for wear, and after a sweet scene of Kim tending to his wounds, he agrees to go to the shrink she recommended.
He seems to realize that this isn’t healthy, and enough is enough. Just the image of Kim standing across from him, a symbol of his conscience and the better life he can have, is enough to spur him to be better and not let another night like this happen again.

Kim, however, is running as well. Instead of grief, she’s running from guilt, and instead of devolving further into a life of questionable morality, she’s hurtling herself headlong into an effort to regain her ethical moorings. That means working as a public defender in her spare time, going toe-to-toe with the same local prosecutor that Jimmy himself used to joust with. But unlike Jimmy, Kim isn’t just using subterfuge and bombast to get criminals off. She’s using prosecutorial screw-ups to hold the other side accountable, telling the young man she works out a deal for to get his life right or she won’t be there to bail him out, and goes above and beyond to help a young woman too scared to show up to court do what she needs to do.

This is all wildly successful, because Kim is damn good at what she does. She knows how to put the prosecution through their paces; she knows how to read a young screw-up the riot act in the hopes that he won’t be back here, and she knows how to be sympathetic but forceful with her clients who need both a helping hand and a little push.

The problem is that it means Kim is shirking her responsibilities elsewhere, specifically with Mesa Verde. She blows off a call from Paige, her contact at the bank, so that she can see things through with her pro bono client. It’s the negative image of Jimmy’s choices in this episode -- a decision that’s foolish and a little self-destructive, but noble, and one Kim promises never to make again. Both Kim and Jimmy are trying to regain their souls, but in very different ways, and for very different reasons, even if both use their god-given skills to great effect in the process.

Mike is employing his expert skills as well. The top of the line, undetectable meth lab that Gus is putting together is part of his grand plan, and so he needs people he can rely on. That’s why he brings in Mike to scout the architects for his place. For one thing, Mike’s shown -- through his escapades at Madrigal -- that he knows how to cover every detail to make sure that their illicit dealings aren’t found out or shut down -- something the show again conveys with a great visual sequence involving point of view shots from under a hood and communicating the passage of time through quick cut changes in sound and lighting in the back of a rocky van.

But he also knows people, like we saw last week, and he can tell when someone is blowing smoke at him and when someone’s being straight. That’s why Gus trusts him, and why Mike sends the boastful guy who claims he can build the lab in six months packing. And it’s why when Werner Ziegler, the nauseous German architect who tells his would-be employer straight up that the job is not impossible, but that it will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Mike and Gus are birds of a feather, they’re frank, thorough, and careful, and it means when taking on a project of this size, they want people who’ll treat it the same way.

We know, though, that no matter how cautious Mike and Gus are, how close they come to bringing this long-brewing plan to fruition, that it all ends in ruin. No matter how well you plan, how good you are at what you do, there are unpredictable elements that can disrupt everything. For Gus Fring, that unpredictable element is Walter White, but for Jimmy McGill, it’s Howard Hamlin.

After his incident with the burners and the muggers, Jimmy seems on the straight and narrow again. But then, during a trip to the courthouse to check in as part of his suspension, he runs into Howard in the bathroom, who looks worse for wear. This typically ever-composed individual is out of sorts, looking disheveled, complaining about insomnia, and stressing over a case that he admits isn’t particularly significant. It’s clear -- to both Jimmy and the audience -- that Chuck’s death has gotten to Howard, that’s Kim’s speech landed, that the very thought is torturing him. It’s enough for Jimmy to offer some kindness, recommending the same shrink that Kim passed on to him.

It’s then that the worm turns. Howard tells Jimmy that he’s already seeing a therapist twice a week. It’s startling admission to Jimmy, one that changes his path yet again. Howard has all the advantages Jimmy doesn't -- his wealth, his position, and his father’s name. He has lived as traditionally successful a life as someone like Jimmy could imagine, the kind of life Jimmy was once trying to emulate.

But Howard is haunted by the same grief Jimmy is, and he’s no better for all the more that he has. Howard’s visible unmooring in the wake of the same loss sends a message to Jimmy -- that following the right path, doing what’s expected of you, doing things the normal way, don’t get you where Jimmy wants to go, and don’t seem to make you better either. So when he speaks to the D.A. about his plans after reinstatement, he speaks of wanting to go bigger, go better. His refuge from grief is his refuge from everything -- to follow his talents to their apex until it either makes his dreams come true or leads to his end.

“Quite a Ride” suggests the former rather than the latter. We know the heights that Jimmy will hit: the Saul Goodman billboards and commercials running 24/7, the suitcase full of money, the cheesy but lucrative law office he maintains. But we also know his fall, his paranoid, button-down life as Cinnabon Gene, that requires him to be demure and inconspicuous, the greatest punishment there is for someone like Jimmy.

And maybe “Quite a Ride” suggests and end even beyond there. After Jimmy is laid out by the thugs who rob him, he lays on the ground in pain as the camera pulls back skyward. It’s the same shot Breaking Bad used in Walt’s final moments. It’s a visual echo and a portent, one that seems to preview what a myopic quest to make use of your own greatest talent, regardless of the ethical or practical consequences for you and the people you love, gets you. We know where that sort of quest ended for Walt, and as he veers ever nearer to going full Saul, Jimmy gets a taste of that too.

Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad, and that’s bad news for Jimmy McGill.

Uhh.. not really sure how I felt about this episode. Some thoughts:
1. Didn't really have any idea what was going on during the first quarter of the episode (mainly unclear as to why Linda was so mad and why that chairman business upset her so much?)
2. Gotta second Aid45's comment about that guy dying at the end... seemed uncharacteristic of Tommy, I feel like usually he'd just make the threat and leave it at that. (But I guess the journalist touched upon an extremely sensitive topic so.. I guess it makes sense).
3. It just feels so weird to see Tommy making speeches representing working class people when his family is the one profiting off of them in the first place and probably a large cause behind many of the grievances they're having (but I guess this is what many politicians in the real world are like, eh).
4. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about Tommy marrying Lizzie following the end of season 4 but at the same time I'm disappointed because I still think May should've wound up with him </33 yes my heart is still stuck in season 2 lol
5. Didn't know that Sam Claflin was in this season! I love Sam Claflin! I also just finished The Queen's Gambit so now I love Anya Taylor-Joy as well!
6. Cool to see that Aberama is still working with the Peaky Blinders; I remember at the beginning of the last season they were wary of him cuz the Golds were alleged to be crazy but it's good that he hasn't wronged them in an extreme way (yet).
7. Wow Finn and Karl really grew up so much :pleading_face:
To be honest this was a meh episode for me and I felt like it was all over the place, but of course I'm still looking forward to watching the rest of the series.

Rather than Smitty, Flula Borg's Skiptracer Randy is the real entertaining dummy of this show. He's charming and inoffensive in pretty much every meaning of the word.

But good grief the nonsense in this episode. First of all I feel like making a broken arrow joke. I don't know what's worse. That they just casually have a headless limbless body or that it happens so often they have a name for it. That's ridiculous. Then there's the central point that inspite of the fact that Randy clearly isn't behind the crimes every cop is perfectly willing to arrest him for it. Except our cops who have hearts of gold. There's no motive, reason or logic but they're like "nah this is gonna be the easiest collar". There's a real problem with policing and it starts with cops keeping score. The job is vital and essential you don't keep score on something like that. That's like doctors keeping score on how many patients they keep alive. But copaganda has taught us to not see this as the same. Hey if cops are competing to close cases that's probably a good thing right? Nevermind how many corners are cut because of it. Nevermind how many innocent people get locked away because it "closes the case fast" nah this is a common trope in TV Cops that actually makes them MORE honorable. Even their competitive nature helps to "lock away bad guys". Nevermind that in the rush to close a get a put another notch on the metaphorical bedpost they don't even bother to get the name correct. He's german. He's covered in blood. we call him Dieter and whatever.

LOL. Okay it's been FIVE years of this nonsense. You guys need to stop trying to make patrol cop seem like the most dangerous job on earth. When Nolan is telling his hot rookie: "Oh you don't know? Valentine's day is the most dangerous day of the year". I nearly died laughing. I thought Halloween was the most dangerous time of the year? I thought summer was the most dangerous time of the year. I thought the fourth of July was the most dangerous time of the year?

Every day can't be the most dangerous time of the year. Next year Christmas will be the most dangerous time of the year because parents will go nuts for the presents. Uh oh look out for Labor Day the secret most dangerous day on the force because workers unite and bosses get heavy handed.

I was promised a fight between Nolan and Bailey and they can't even do that right. I don't hate Bailey. She's not Ali Larter but she's fine. But this fight felt like "oh right we haven't had them fight right? We can do that for a story have them fight." It was over something silly. Honestly it really felt out of character for Nolan to snatch someone's phone without so much as a "May I?" I actually thought going into it that the point of the scene was that Nolan was using his male privilege to get them to listen. Which would have made sense. Instead our good guy Nolan snatched his girl's phone and just did it for her which we're supposed to think is in character? I do think the people of this show are performatively perfect a lot of the times but this isn't the sort of real people mistakes I was expecting. This is just silly. It was a cro-magnum level fight. The fight between Tim and Lucy was much better. It was seeded it was in character. Even though Tim says it wasn't about being emasculated it still fits everything we know about Tim who CAN be above such things but sometimes isn't. Which is fine. But that fight was handled better because it was treated like what it was which was a small tiff and minor manipulation but for a greater and personal good.

Nolan and Harper are a fun combination. Good, that they found a new partner for Nolan.
But I do think that, especially in this episode, Nolan's behaviour was in parts rather out of character.
The humour surrounding him is somewhat too slapstick-y as well. Like the things he needs to fix at the beginning of this episode.
A broken door is supposed to be funny but I think it's just stupid. It's a thing you use daily, should be working to give a basic sense of security/privacy. If that is the level of craftmanship he brought to his former job, no wonder he changed careers.

In this episode it might have been to show his happy-go-lucky mood to get a bigger impact on the end.
But it just felt silly. Just like the end. If my son would bring home his fiancé I never met before without telling me, a police officer in training, that she has a certain history with the police and behaving that snarky towards me...
I'd wipe that smug off his face pretty quickly (not with slapping him, mind you). But I would have approached the whole topic differently in the first place as well. But it's TV, so we need that conflict, right?

Despite those pet peeves overall a fine episode.

Léon is a film I've watched many times and it never fails to affect.

I could watch it a hundred times more just see to Léon's face as he watches Singing in the Rain; such unabashed joy. He turns around in a near empty theatre looking for someone else lost in a moment of bliss, but finds no one. Rarely has both joy and loneliness been captured so perfectly.

Jean Reno's naive and emotionally challenged Léon is 12 year old Mathilda’s knight in blood soaked armour. He immediately fills an emotional void and she clings to it, starting to play house; cleaning, shopping, washing. Léon and Mathilda need each other in a very basic human way; to love and be loved. The inevitable slide towards her sexual stirrings is uncomfortable and deftly handled by Natalie Portman. Her desire for revenge seems to slip away, lost to just being and working with him, until when pushed he denies any feelings of love for her. She takes incomprehensible action to exact her vengeance on Gary Oldman’s insane DEA agent, but with an unconscious belief that Léon will save her if it all goes wrong.

The “International Version” of Léon, the only I’ve watched, adds 25 minutes to the theatrical release, mostly depicting their growing relationship and brings the gravitas that makes their final scene together simply heart breaking.

An efficient way to understand the ideas Kakegurui (2017) is concerned with is to begin with a lengthy quotation from Slavoj Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies (1997):

Someone can be happily married, with a good job and many friends, fully satisfied with his life, and yet absolutely hooked on some specific formation (‘sinthome’) of jouissance, ready to put everything at risk rather than renounce that (drugs, tobacco, drink, a particular sexual perversion…). Although his symbolic universe may be nicely set up, this absolutely meaningless intrusion, this clinamen, upsets everything, and there is nothing to be done, since it is only in this ‘sinthome’ that the subject encounters the density of being — when he is deprived of it, his universe is empty. At a less extreme level, the same holds for every authentic intersubjective encounter: when do I actually encounter the Other ‘beyond the wall of language’, in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it. (49)

Departing from this point, one might argue that it is in fact the taking on of certain risk that makes jouissance possible. It is unlikely, or perhaps impossible, that jouissance could occur without being “ready to put everything at risk.” The sinthome necessarily interrupts one’s symbolic reality and represents a danger to continuous, well-adjusted, normal life. Furthermore, Zizek may be incorrect in his description of the “authentic intersubjective encounter.” Alenka Zupancic writes in Ethics of the Real (2000), paralleling Kant and Lacanian jouissance:

The subject is ‘attached’ and ‘subjected’ to her pathology in a way that is not without ambiguity, for what the subject fears most is not the loss of this or that particular pleasure, but the loss of the very frame within which pleasure (or pain) can be experienced at all … Kant’s point is that this fear is groundless, since it belongs to the subject who will no longer be around. (9)

The Kantian ethical, in this way, is the same as jouissance. To experience jouissance is to annihilate the subject, to make impossible subjectivity as such. It is always something else that experiences jouissance, never the subject, because of its annihilating and disruptive force. This cessation of subjectivity and something else is part of what facilitates the ceaseless metonymy of desire. The subject is always on the verge of jouissance, but never experiencing it.

These concepts are at the core of Kakegurui and embodied by its protagonist, Yumeko Jabami. Jabami is a transfer student into a private school where the student hierarchy is determined through various games of chance. Jabami, who gambles for the thrill rather than accruing capital (social or otherwise) disrupts this system. Jabami seems to have two distinct affects, the unassuming, quiet, and kind transfer student and the manic, demonic, thrill-seeker that emerges as she gambles. Jabami is described as having a genuine affection for the thrill of gambling and is appreciative of anyone who can make her experience more challenging. In the first episode, Jabami says, “I absolutely detest games in which I will definitely win and games in which I will definitely lose.” Despite betting 10,000,000 yen on a single game of rock-paper-scissors, Jabami never experiences stress or anxiety but only an ecstasy bordering on sexual. Jabami, as she gambles, is depicted with the “compulsive gestures” and “excessive facial expressions” that characterize jouissance.

Jabami describes her modus operandi when she’s called “crazy” after betting 10,000,000 yen cash on the single game of rock-paper-scissors:

The true essence of gambling is madness, is it not? In our world of capitalism, money is as valuable as your life. Entrusting your life to a game of chance is no feat for the sane. In spite of this, people gather at casinos to experience the ecstasy of putting their lives on the line. Gambling gets more fun the crazier you get. Now then, let’s lose ourselves gambling.

This connection between madness, risking one’s life, and pleasure makes clear that we can understand this desubjectivized version of Jabami as embodying jouissance. Her classmates, and even her opponent who agrees to the bet, regard her with fear, suspicion, and hostility. Jabami becomes distinct from herself as her facial expressions change and her eyes glow red. In these moments, it also seems clear Jabami is experiencing something akin to sexual satisfaction. Kakegurui’s interest in meditating on jouissance makes the show fascinating. However, there are ways in which Jabami’s embodiment of jouissance may miss the mark in connection with certain tropes of Japanese animation.

Though jouissance is always at least “minimally obscene,” it is not necessary that the embodiment of jouissance in film or television generate sexual titillation in the viewer. In the case of Kakegurui, it is clear that Jabami is crassly sexualized. I cannot think of a better word to describe the sexualization of animated high school children than “sleazy,” and that is being exceedingly generous. However, this mode of sexualization is fairly common in the context of Japanese animation. Still, Jabami’s predisposition toward jouissance could be read as a means to an end in sexually titillating a certain kind of viewer. In that way, what I read as Kakegurui’s interest in jouissance might be a happy accident. If the conscious ‘intent’ of Naomura and Kakegurui is to be sexually titillating, perhaps facing jouissance is the unconscious desire of the creator and his anime. 

Even with the unsettling sexualization of Jabami, I cannot help but find Kakegurui thrilling and fascinating because of its depiction of jouissance, accidental or otherwise. There is something about the way so many familiar anime tropes come together in Kakegurui that reveal how Japanese animation often depicts jouissance, or something akin to it, in ways that no other medium has done. Even after watching one episode, I am eager to see how Kakegurui’s treatment of jouissance might develop and become more complex. And perhaps the grossness of the sexualization of the characters drives home another point about jouissance: its obscenity and unpleasantness. jouissance annihilates, disrupts, and offends. Perhaps, too, Naomura has never heard the word jouissance and has no understanding of the concept. That reveals something else. Jouissance is always an accident.

[8.3/10] I still don’t know what to make of our black and white flash-forwards to Cinnabon Gene. I’m always apt to take The Wire’s approach to introductions like these, where they’re meant as microcosms of the season’s themes. But the problem with that approach is that we’ve already seen that from Jimmy.

Our cold open sees Cinnabon Gene panicking, worrying that he’s in too deep trouble to recover and looking for a way out, only to decide to take matters into his own hands. That was his trajectory last season and before, recovering from his disciplinary suspension and crafting scheme after scheme to topple Chuck and reclaim his place on the mountain.

But what strikes me about our glimpse of Cinnabon Gene in “Magic Man” is how hard he’s working not to be identified as Saul Goodman. He waits it out in the diner. He stays holed up in his home listening to the police blotter to make sure no one’s coming after him. He seems willing to kill, or at least color outside the lines, to keep this random cab driver from Albuquerque from outing him as the once and future Saul.

And yet, when we see him in the past (present?) as Jimmy McGill, we see how hard he is working, how much effort he’s putting into making himself into Saul Goodman. No one knows for sure where those black and white segments are going or what they mean, but there’s a contrast at play. Cinnabon Gene is doing everything he can to run away from the life and persona of Saul Goodman, and Jimmy McGill is doing everything he can to establish it.

Unfortunately that may come at the expense of his relationship with Kim Wexler. Look, I’ve been unhappily predicting the death or departure of Kim Wexler for multiple seasons now, so take this all with a grain of salt. Better Call Saul is a slow-burn show, and the rare seeming dissolutions between Jimmy and Kim have all settled into detente.

Still, however much she may sublimate it, Kim is clearly still taken aback at how ready Jimmy is to throw away his brother’s name after his speech in the season 4 finale. She’s clearly not enamored with him tossing aside his elder law practice and embracing his mercenary efforts to represent abject criminals using unsavory methods. It feels, as it has for some time, like this is headed for a breaking point, but for now Kim just makes gentle comments and winces when she sees Jimmy’s plan and doesn't want to interfere despite her disapproval.

That’s the subtle theme to “Magic Man” -- partners with different styles who are each, in their own way, trying to make it work despite cracks forming at the seams. That’s certainly true for Nacho and Lalo. The former still finds himself being the subtler, more subdued businessman who is content to keep a good thing going, while the latest Salamanca boss to show up shares his relatives’ more impulsive and violent natures.

There’s tension there, and “Magic Man'' only teases at how the differences in their approaches -- to scouts complaining of a stepped on package, to the operations of their safe house, to relations with Fring -- might create fissures later. But the simple methods of how the two deal with people seem to suggest there’s problem along the way.

That’s magnified by the hint that Nacho might be tipping Gus off as to what his boss is thinking. Nacho and Eduardo don’t have the only strained partnership here. Lalo sniffs out the fact that Gus is giving him inferior product and is suspicious of the construction problem that “Michael” and Werner were involved in.

Despite that, “the chicken man” has perfect excuses ready-made. He blames inferior drugs on Werner absconding with the originals and Gus replacing them with the local supply. He blames Werner’s run and Michael’s chase on internal theft. He credits the construction plans to a “chicken cooler.” It’s the perfect set of alibis, ones that even the preternaturally prepared Mr. Fring probably wouldn’t have been able to foresee without a little help from inside the Salamanca organization.

That’s what makes Nacho’s position so interesting, despite the fact that he’s only officially a small part of this episode. He is, once again, potential caught between two very dangerous men. Lalo is not like Tuco or even Hector. He seems smarter, knowing when the product is substandard, piecing things together, and choosing to mistrust Gustavo rather than hate him. He seems like a worthier adversary to Fring and a greater threat to Nacho than his introduction last season suggested.

But all’s not well in Gustavo’s organization either. While Fring may have staved off the threat of the Salamancas vis-a-vis Werner, Mike is still smarting from it. This is Better Call Saul, so it’s dramatized nicely and subtly. As Mike is sending the remaining members of Werner’s crew on their way, replete with different destinations and means of transportation, he gets little bits of the business from Werner’s guys.

When one of them tells Mike that Wenrer’s death had to happen, because he was “soft,” Mike knocks him over with a right hand that punctures the already awkward air of the moment. It’s easy to think that Mike, having just told these guys to keep their mouths shut about what happened in perpetuity, is punishing his charge for already breaking that code. But when another of his men simply tells Mike that Werner “was worth fifty of you,” he lets it slide.

It’s a moment of discretion that reveals that Mike’s beef wasn’t with the first unfortunate recipient of a knuckle sandwich opening his yap. It was that he badmouthed Werner. Mike is a professional. He does what needs to be done. But Werner was his friend, and he’ll brook one of his guys standing up for their deceased boss, even if it breaks the vow of silence, but he won’t stand for one of them spitting on his grave like that.

It’s also enough to spark a temporary divorce between Mike and Gus. Breaking Bad fans know that this split won’t last forever. But however professional Mike is, it’s interesting to see him stand on principle once again here. He knows how to keep his own mouth shut and keep the heat off. Despite that, he’s still sore from what Gus ordered him to do. He scoffs at Werner’s widow receiving “compensation.” And he’s angry enough at what he had to do to his friend that he’s willing to forego getting “paid to do nothing” while Gus waits for Lalo’s departure before restarting construction.

It’s the kind of principled stand that Jimmy seems almost wholly unwilling to make at this point. Instead, free of the burden of being “Chuck’s lousy little brother” he has the freedom to indulge in his showiest, most colorful shtick. Look, there’s something still a bit tragic at seeing Jimmy continue down this path toward criminality and a lucrative lowest common denominator life. But there’s also an absolute thrill to seeing him work his titular magic.

For one thing, his business plan is legitimately clever. It’s neat to see him parlaying his dangerous phone business into the start of his criminal practice. Plying those contacts, understanding the need of that crowd for legal representation, is a smart move. At the same time, it’s fun to see the montage where he pitches his services to an array of motley customers. It’s a treat to see his old film crew pop into the courtroom and put his old colleague on the spot in a dose of guerilla marketing. There’s surely more/worse to come, but Saul Goodman has been taken off the leash, and it’s entertaining, if nothing else, to see him barking at full volume.

But it seems to portend bad things with Kim. It’s not lost on the show the couple are, more or less, in the same business at this point. She is helping the indigent and those who need a second chance pro bono, while he’s representing anyone with a pulse and rap sheet. But they’re operating in the same courtrooms, fighting the same DAs, and surely, likely to conflict in meaningful ways down the line.

The first, and gentlest of those conflicts comes when Kim tries to convince one of her clients to take a plea. She tries her way, the honest method, the frank method, and gets nowhere. Jimmy offers one of his usual schemes -- pretending to be a DA who’s pulling the deal for new evidence -- and Kim rejects it. After he pushes harder, she rejects it more curtly, and yet another of cracks in the foundation emerge for the couple who could be partners at home but not at the office.

At the end of the day, though, Kim goes for it. She does it without Jimmy’s help, but she uses his plan, and sure enough, her client listens to reason (or fear) and goes along with what she believes is the right thing for it. Afterward, though, she walks into the stairwell and looks like she’s going to be sick, like it hurts doing this in a way that it doesn't, and hasn’t, for Jimmy, another burr in the saddle for another pair in a partnership that’s having trouble.

That’s the problem though -- Jimmy’s methods work. They’ve always worked, and as long as he strived to rise above them, to put his hustle to good use, to harness his powers for good, now Jimmy is formally going by Saul, and intends to unleash that beast. It’s a thrill to see him in action, but also a touch sad, because we know where that path leads.

It leads, among other places, to a man willing to do whatever he can to shed that name. It leads to a sad middle aged schlub slinging cinnamon buns to mall patrons. It leads to guy who has to quake in his boots that the cops could be around any corner, and that some loudmouth in a tracksuit could be an old ghost coming back to haunt him. “Magic Man” gives us both ends of the Saul Goodman spectrum here, the before and the after. And neither portends great things for the man trying desperately to get your call, and the man who resolutely ends his own call for help.

(As an aside, rest in peace Robert Forster. It’s nice to see him make one last(?) appearance in the Breaking Bad-verse after his great turn in El Camino.)

At least this one is entertaining. Despite the fact that it mainly warns us about the dangers of adolescent popstar live.

It's also very long to start. Its 1h10 could easily be packed into 45 minutes. The whole Rachel awkard teen's story and how she can so easily be influenced by a toy telling her to believe in herself is way too long. First as usual with this type of character, I have a very hard type believing that a girl that looks like her would be in this situation at school. And it's not like she's even useful in anything as a character. She's just a plot device. She wants the Ashley Too, and she wants to do what she says. That's it. She's such a huge fan and that's her whole character. OK, the fact that she says that when face to face with Ashley that is tied to her bed and just woke up from a coma a few seconds ago, that's funny. But she doesn't do a single thing. She's in a back fangirling while Jack drives. She does nothing while Ashley Too unplugs the real one and Jack is handling the bodyguard. She does nothing at the end while Jack is actually playing with her idol. Such a loooong exposition for a character that has nothing to do after. I mean it goes through all the cliches and then deliver nothing...

I'm not really in the Miley Cyrus demographic, never seen her, maybe heard one song, I mostly have seen her in tabloids stories. But wow, I found her very good. As the cheery popstar, as the depressed ex child star (but maybe they're not such composition roles) and very much as the robot voice. Through the whole beginning the only interesting parts were hers, and the real story starts at Ashley Too's awakening.

This second part was fun, though it looked more part of a teen show than a BM episode.

As for the tech part, it's a lot less dark than usual. There's basically no downside. Previous season had a way harsher treatment on the duplicating consciousness thing. That was a constant theme in last season, with very dramatic to horrific consequences, but here it's like they wanted to show, look, it can be fun too. Very not Black Mirrory.

However it's not like we're talking about every day technology as it is usually the case. Even in this world, the tech used seems to be revolutionary. And that makes no sense in the story. So the aunt, or her company, or people who work for her anyway, manages to map an entire mind, industrial scale, and they use it for... a pop star doll ? Also it was cheaper to have a miniature doll with the capacity of containing and running the whole thing and put a limiter on it, than to just map and put the tiny part you want to use ?

Then their holographic tech, that seems pretty good too. Though weird moment when Catherine is in front of the (probably mostly teenage fangirls) audience and does her Apple keynote, being happy to be back into the most lucrative part of the business. She actually says that. Not at a tech investor meeting, in front of the live audience. Also fully customizable (even her clothes!) and scalable, like that's not the easiest part of an hologram.

And then there's this machine that allows to decipher songs from the brain of a coma patient ! That's fucking amazing. The applications just for medecine, are unimaginable. And the other ways it could be exploited...

I can think of a thousand ways to make a shitload of money with that without needing to drug your niece into a coma ! They litterally invent technology worth hundreds of billions of dollars just to make a few millions out of a teenage pop star ! Pretty weird when the aunt's character is just presented as being driven by money.

And what's with the dad's machine ? It shows a brain, so I thought he was working on rat's brains, but he just has a small rat chasing robot ? And, without knowing anything (it's repeated enough), you can plug a toy, see it's brain and edit the limiter on it ? That was worse than any hacking scene in movie history, but maybe it was a joke on that ? Didn't feel like it.

Anyway, by far the best episode of the season, but that's not saying much. And still not a Black Mirror episode. I rate it 7 because it was entertaning, but if I was to rate it as if it was a BM episode, that would be lower.

A real BM episode would have gone over the spying part of the Ashley Too technology. A lot to do with that alone. And like I already said, all the brain mapping thing, there was a lot of ways to exploit that, though it was kinda alredy done in last season, there were still lots of possibilities.

Kinda liked the suggestion that if you're not kept under hallucinogenics drugs you would real music instead of pop :)

I’ve known the evenings, mornings, and days alone,
I have measured out my life in Mesa Verde awards and burner phones.

[8.7/10] With my sincerest apologies to T.S. Eliot, it’s amazing how Better Call Saul can move so slowly, and then so quickly, without missing a beat. It’s hard to know how much time has passed up until this point in the show, but season 4 picked up right where season 3 left off, and has more or less crept along in the aftermath of Chuck’s death and Hector’s “accident” ever since.

Until now. I spent a great deal of time talking about how the last episode set Jimmy and Kim on diverging trajectories, to the point that it was even occasionally literal. “Something Stupid” takes that idea up a notch with a cold open set to the titular crooner melody. The show’s unrivaled montage abilities depicts the passage of time with unwrapped statuettes, file cabinet labels, and holiday sale signs. But Better Call Saul once again gets a little formally creative, using a well-placed split screen to show how both Kim and Jimmy are flourishing in the new lives each has embarked upon, but also how those lives are slowly but surely pulling them further and further apart.

It’s an interesting choice, since Better Call Saul is very much about the slow burn. But it’s part and parcel with one of the most noteworthy creative decisions the show consistently makes -- how Jimmy and Kim are meant to be a real relationship with slow ups and downs rather than the constant shocks and fireworks of romance on a standard network drama. When this season started, I feared for Kim, because the show seemed poised to concoct some grand accident, some big mistake on Jimmy’s part, that either scares her away or worse.

Instead, “Something Stupid” gives us the death of a thousand cuts, and it gives us small scenes and the changing of the seasons to make it happen. The show may still be building to that grand incident and gesture, that will sever the only couple it’s ever truly put together. But Jimmy and Kim didn’t start with fireworks on this show, and rather than end them with something explosive, Better Call Saul is content to just show them drifting apart, more and more living separate lives, until that division just happens without either of them realizing it, or wanting to admit it.

Because “Something Stupid” isn’t just about the passage of time. It’s about the little signs that things have changed or are changing, the ones that are almost imperceptible but nevertheless tell the story. That comes through in our glimpse of Hector. Time has been kind to the old man after the incident with Nacho. During some rehabilitation exercises with the expensive doctor Gus provided, Hector knocks over a cup of water. The medical staff writes it off as an involuntary reaction from a man still trying to regain control of his motor functions. But the perspective shots and editing let the audience know otherwise -- that this was a minor stunt from Hector so he could leer at his nurse.

Gus, observant man that he is, sees it too. He recognizes more than that his longtime foe is still a lech. He recognizes that Hector, the awful man Gus wants revenge, is still in there. Vengeance is no good if there’s no one but the shell of a man to appreciate. Gus too has his own almost impercetible moment, a slow malevolent smile, that conveys his recognition that the man he wants to punish is still awake and aware enough to appreciate it.

So Gus turns the knife a little. He sends the doctor onto her next assignment. In effect, he halts Hector’s progress, despite the doctor’s protestations that there’s more recovery to be had. Hector has recovered enough to appreciate what Gus has done, while still being limited enough to hate it. The simple flick of a cup sets in motion a series of events that changes Hector’s life, and lays the groundwork for Gus’s death.

That’s the interesting thing about the passage of time in “Something Stupid.” It can either elucidate how much progress has been made and imply the trajectory that’s being halted, or it can show how much things have deteriorated. When we see Mike and the Germans, it’s very clearly the latter. The crew that Werner the engineer hired have made great strides in constructing Gus’s underground meth lab, but there’s miles to go before they sleep, and it’s starting to get to the workers.

When an accident on the job sets them back months, on a job the whole group knows won’t be finished anywhere near on schedule, tempers flare, scuffles break out, and it becomes clear to both Mike and Werner that things can’t continue on as they have. There’s more suggestion than development here, as we see more of the restlessness bubbling under the surface for the workers than anything actually coming to a head. But we see a growing camaraderie between Mike and Werner, a shot down suggestion that things might flow easier without Kai that feels portentous, and the slightest change in expression from Mike to show us his acceptance of the idea that the workers need some “R&R”, lest things spin out of control.

But bad feelings are bubbling under the surface for Jimmy and Kim as well. Jimmy and Kim have growing resentments about one another, but are either too ensconced in the status quo to rock the boat or, more charitably, care about each other too much to make an issue out of them, so they come out in odd ways.

When Jimmy tags along with Kim to a Schweikart office party, he can’t help taking a powder in her office. And there, he starts to get a little jealous. He walks the floor and finds out that her office is almost twice as big as his. He looks at a framed note from a pro bono client, and sees that Kim has already had more success, engendered more appreciation, in her spare time as a substitute public defender, than he had when it was his regular gig. Jimmy is scraping by and seeing his partner soar. It bothers Kim, but he loves her, so he lashes out in other ways.

That means causing trouble at Schweikart, using his small talk expertise to “spitball” a fantastical company trip to Mr. Schweikart himself, with all the employees in eartshot. After Jimmy finishes laying out this extravagant ski trip and creating expectations, Schweikart will either have to break the bank to pull it off or disappoint his employees when the real trip fails to live up to the image of a winter wonderland that Jimmy creates. It’s Jimmy’s way of stomping on the Schweikart sandcastle that Kim’s helped to build, a quiet little F.U. and “you’re not so big, huh?” His little conversation has plenty of plausible deniability for the trouble it’ll cause, but Kim knows better, even if she’s unable or unwilling to call him on it. The icy trip home says as much.

But they’re still a team. So when a misunderstanding with a bag of sandwiches, a pair of headphones, and a plainclothes cop leads to Huell facing jail time, Jimmy goes to Kim for help. It’s a well constructed conundrum because it has good and bad elements to it. There’s some real injustice in Huell potentially having to go to prison because of a legitimate misunderstanding as regards a less-than-legitimate business. But there’s something questionable at best about Jimmy’s wilful blindness and obstinance to the cop about his burner phones, and something mixed about Jimmy’s motives, even if it seems unfair for Huell to have to take the fall.

And then there’s Kim’s role in all of this. The most striking reaction, in an episode full of them, is Kim practically suppressing a gag reflex when Jimmy suggests solving this problem by making the policeman crack on the stand. It’s too close to what she helped Jimmy do to Chuck, too much like the sort of life destroying ploy to save one’s own bacon that she’s been trying to make amends for since. So she takes the case but rebuffs Jimmy, resolving to do it her way -- with facts and precedents rather than hustles and manipulation.

But that fails. The prosecutor not only rejects Kim’s tactics, but questions why Kim’s even doing this, and unwittingly slags Kim’s partner in the process. It’s a tense scene, of Kim trying to do everything in her power to make this work, the right way, to help Jimmy even as she’s seeing more and more the ways that he is not the kind-hearted soul with rough edges she once thought. The edges are starting crowd out the parts of Jimmy she always appreciated, even as, in true Breaking Bad fashion, the show puts her in a tight spot and dares the audience to find out whether and how she’ll escape it, and what it will cost her and Jimmy, to do so.

The close of the episode seems to be setting up the sort of dramatic, high stakes moments that drove Breaking Bad. But Better Call Saul has been a show about slower burns, about more gradual, softer transformations than the collection of inflection points that pushed Walter white from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” And it’s taking the same tack with Jimmy and Kim. Even as the seasons shift, there’s not some big moment that changes everything. There’s just a gradual winnowing of the trust and mutual admiration they once shared, until the image each had of the other is too tarnished to go on.

[7.3/10] Despite a few similarities (trunk shots for one), Better Call Saul rarely goes for the non-linear storytelling tricks that you might see in a Quentin Tarantino film. Sure, we may get the occasional flash forward to Cinnabon Gene, or the occasional flashback to some animating events in Jimmy McGill’s life, but it’s rare that we get the proceedings in the present in something other than chronological order.

It’s noteworthy, then, that we see the end of Mike’s little speech in group therapy before we see the beginning of it. The episode opens with a scene from Mike’s past, of him meticulously laying down a slab of concrete, and letting his son write his name in it. It’s a sweet moment, but one tinged with melancholy. And then the episode cuts to Mike in the present, looking out at a stunned room, gruffly remarking that they wanted him to talk. There’s a tease in that -- the suggestion that Mike bared his soul to this room and stunned them into silence -- leading the audience to wonder and want to know what was said to prompt such a reaction.

It’s not like Better Call Saul to try to mortgage tension from later in the episode like that. But maybe that sort of tack is necessary in an episode like “Talk”, one that is very gradual in terms of plot pacing, even by this series’s patient standards. Despite the excitement of a firefight, this isn’t an episode where much of plot-significance happens. It’s more about what’s eating all of our main characters’ up inside, what’s gnawing at their souls while they, and the audience, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The most obvious of those is Kim Wexler, who’s skulking around the public defender-trod hallways and courtrooms than Jimmy used to inhabit. A judge (played by Star Trek Voyager’s Ethan Phillips) immediately recognizes the look of a lawyer feeling morally bereft and seeking redemption, and in a bit of a supercilious way, tries to talk her out of it. It’s a nice scene, that gives the underrated Philips a chance to shine, riff on The Verdict, and softly chastise Kim for barking up the wrong tree with his low-level criminal cases if she wants to buy back her soul.

But Kim is undeterred, because of course she is. Lord knows Kim’s faced greater setbacks and discouragement than one judge telling her to make lots of money for Mesa Verde and donate some of it to charity instead. Kim is feeling the moral stain of her part in the McGill drama, and hopes that she can wash some of it away by using her legal skills to help the downtrodden.

Jimmy’s trying to remain on the straight and narrow as well. Despite initially turning down gainful employment the same way he did with the copier company, Kim’s encouragement to see a shrink is enough to convince him to, at a minimum, put on a show that he’s okay and is getting his life together. He takes a job at a shift-manager at a slow local cell phone store, and whiles away his time with nothing to do.

It’s an interesting look for Jimmy. We know from his misadventures at Davis & Main, and even his interludes picking up trash as part of his community service, that Jimmy has real trouble sitting still and doing things the normal way. He can only do things his way, even when his intentions are good. So a flip remark about people listening to phone conversations from his Hummel co-conspirator causes him to paint the windows of the store he’s managing to frame himself as selling privacy. It remains to be seen whether this is the type of (nigh-literal) coloring outside the lines that made him a bad fit for other people’s shops, or if in the brighter world of cell phone sales, his splashy style will be a well-received hit. Either way, it plants yet another seed for the flashy showmanship, that truth-bending salesmanship, that will be harvest, tarted up, and put in the most self-serving light by one Saul Goodman.

But Jimmy is at least, for the moment, able to fit his more colorful impulses into the role he’s been given, which is more grace than Nacho’s received at the moment. He continues to be a pawn between Gus and the Salamancas, having to prove loyalty to one side and feign it to the other so his forced flip isn’t found out. That continues to be a harrowing effort for Nacho. When he fingers a rival group as the ones who knocked him and Arturo over, the twins don’t wait for backup. They storm in and take the place, and Nacho’s expected to help out, having to take more lives and tear up his still wounded body in the process.

That’s enough to earn him some trust with the Salamancas (via a subtle head nod), and allows him to figure out Gus’s plans, but it also makes him miserable. As tense and dangerous as that firefight is, the key scene for Nacho here is when he returns to his father’s house. Nacho’s dad banished him for being associated with the criminal element, and seems incensed that his son would have the temerity to return, but as soon as he sees the state Nacho is in, his demeanor immediately shifts.

Whatever you want for your kids, however angry you may be when they don’t do what you believe they should, it’s almost impossible to stay mad at them when they’re in trouble, especially when they’re hurting. It’s obvious to us that the events of the last few episodes have taken a physical toll on Nacho, but it’s just as clear to Mr. Varga that it’s taken a mental toll on his son as well.

That’s what connects him to Mike in this episode. We see Mike returning to group therapy, flirting with Anita, and listening to Stacey for the first time in a long time on Better Call Saul. But even in that setting, he can’t turn off his cop instincts, which lead him to challenge the B.S. of one late-coming, story-changing attendee (who’s on loan from The Good Place), and eventually deride the entire group therapy exercise, alienating his love interest and his daughter-in-law in the process.

But that’s the beauty of Better Call Saul’s momentary exercise in playing with the timeline. Jonathan Banks does a great job showing his physical discomfort with hearing Stacey talk about potentially forgetting Matty, but that cold open is a creative way to plant the seed of what Mike was thinking in that moment. Those thoughts, those remembrances, and the pain that comes with them are always going to be dancing in his head. The scene of his little boy writing his name in wet cement is always going to be there in his mind.

That’s what makes someone lying about that sort of thing such an insult, one that Mike can’t abide. That’s what makes the idea of group therapy, of some people’s sense of performative grief, to be such anathema to an old school guy like Mike. To him, the pain is real and inescapable, leaving any efforts to prop it up, to paint it and make it palatable, seem like nonsense.

Mike isn’t exactly the kind of character who’s open with his feelings. That means the show has to find other ways to tell us the important things about what’s going on in his head: how Nacho’s predicament dredges up feelings in Mike about his own son, how he still feels pain and regret over what he lost with Matty, and how he’s willing to tear it all down, to lash out at everyone else, when that pain is too much to bear.

A little formal audaciousness goes a long way toward illuminating what this taciturn and guarded man is thinking and feeling, and it helps spice up an episode of Better Call Saul that seems to be marking time until the next big boom.

[8.2/10] One of the most interesting questions to ask, both about real people and characters on television, is why they choose to do things they don’t have to. Life and circumstance often force a person’s hand, causing people to do what they feel they must. But there are situations in which there’s no external force, no rules or sticks or carrots, just a raw choice to be made. It’s these sorts of choices that can reveal who a person is, and what they’re going through, in a way that’s clearer than for choices muddied by need and force and inertia.

Those are the types of questions that “Breathe” is interested in. Why is Gus Fring not only trying to keep Hector Salamanca, a man who inflicted unspeakable pain on him, alive, but also moving against those who tried to kill him. Why is Kim Wexler attending a meeting to determine Jimmy’s share of Chuck’s estate when Jimmy himself is blowing it off? Why is Mike Ehrmantraut determined to run his “security consultant” routine on all of Madrigal’s outposts over Lydia’s objections? And why is Jimmy McGill ready to sabotage himself out of a job offer, one he’d just hustled like crazy to earn?

It's the first question that interests me most – why Gus would go to the effort and expense of trying to ensure Hector survives when, as his lieutenant notes, it would be far easier, and perhaps more just, for Gus to let him die.

I write most of these reviews assuming that the average Better Call Saul-watcher is at least roughly familiar with Breaking Bad, and I suspect Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and the rest of Better Call Saul’s creative team work in the same way. There’s too many hints and callbacks and Easter eggs (see also: the Salamanca twins) for that not to be the case. But oddly enough, Gus’s story here makes the most sense if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad.

Without the prior series’s flashback to Gus’s first encounter with Hector, you might assume that Gus and Hector are just standard issue rivals in a dangerous business. You could read Gus’s preservation of Hector’s life as him protecting the cartel from what he suspects to be an outside attack. You can read Gus as disliking Hector as a rival who treats him with disrespect, but not wanting his erstwhile ally dead. You can read him as a man of principal, who believes that the captain of an organization should be protected, even if he’s not especially fond of one of his peers.

But if you have seen Breaking Bad, Gus’s behavior is all the more puzzling, precisely because you know exactly what Hector has done to Gus, and how easy it would be for him to let Hector perish. Keeping Hector alive, let alone with the help of someone from a renowned medical facility, is absolutely something that Gus does not have to do, especially when mere inaction would allow this dastard to meet his maker without Gus having to take the risk of enacting his revenge himself.

Lydia has a similar, if not quite the same, sort of confusion about what’s motivating Mike to inspect the Madrigal facilities as part of his made up job as a security consultant, and maybe that helps shine a light on Gus’s perspective as well. Despite my sharing a similar puzzlement over Mike’s behavior in the last episode, Mike explains himself here – telling Lydia that this is a way of covering his tracks, of making sure that if anyone asks about this “rounding error,” he’s been seen. Lydia (gently but firmly) encourages him to reconsider, but he won’t be deterred.
When she raises the issue with Gus, he’s not exactly sympathetic. Instead, he inquires as to whether Mike’s causing a real problem, and when she admits that Mike isn’t, he leaves it at that. Gus and Mike are birds of a feather, who recognize something in one another – a combination of a particular sort of honor, a meticulousness, and a sense of pride in their work. “The man has his reasons” seems to be Gus’s thought process, and if he deems that good enough for Mike, he may deem it good enough for himself.

Or maybe it has to do with wanting the chance to do right by someone. That seems to be Kim’s motivation for representing Jimmy as Howard is administering Chuck’s last will and testament, something Jimmy himself seems to have no interest in. As a final insult, Chuck leaves his little brother $5,000 dollars, enough to let any reviewing judicial body that Jimmy wasn’t overlooked, that he wasn’t disinherited in a way that would leave the will open for Jimmy to contest, a way to make sure that his good-for-nothing little brother doesn’t get anything but the most meager slice of Chuck’s estate despite how much time and effort and love Jimmy put into looking after his brother.

But that’s not the insult Kim is worried about. In a powerhouse performance that, if there is any justice in Tinseltown, will help Rhea Seehorn get the Emmy recognition she’s deserved for some time now, she turns her recriminations on Howard. Kim is a little inscrutable in her motivations too. There is the sense that she means what she says when she chastises Howard for telling Jimmy about his theory that Chuck killed himself, for “putting that on” Jimmy. She’s seen the effect Chuck’s death had on Jimmy, the sort of hardship that he’s dealing with under his surface-level calm, and it’s possible she genuinely blames Howard, at least in part, for complicating Jimmy’s grief.

Still, while Kim isn’t necessarily mercenary enough to try to strongarm Howard into doing something more for Jimmy than Chuck did, there’s the sense that she’s also frustrated with Chuck, frustrated with this situation, and maybe even a little frustrated with Jimmy. But you can’t yell at a dead man; you can’t yell at a situation; and if you have a shred of decency, you can’t yell at a grieving man.

You can, however, yell at Howard Hamlin, who is, at best, an accessory to the ills Chuck suffered and caused, but who’s there and willing to take it. It feels like there’s more in store for Kim and Howard than this bitter rebuke. But for now, Better Call Saul leaves us to wonder why Kim chose to stand in for Jimmy in a meeting he himself blew off – whether it’s to stand-up for someone who’s been disrespected or wounded, or to let something out that has no other place.

Jimmy’s comparatively brief, but just as potent part of the episode sees him looking for an outlet as well, but in a very different way. With his suspension still in effect, Jimmy is hunting for jobs, and his first stop of the day is to interview for a position as a copier salesman. As usual, Jimmy gives the sort of brilliant pitch you’d expect from him, where he shows that he knows the inside and out of the product, ingratiates himself to the folks interviewing him with his affable charm, and wins them over with his powers of persuasion. And when even that’s only enough to net him a very positive “we’ll be in touch,” he doubles down, makes the hard sell, and gets the job offer.

A job offer he just as soon rejects.

Jimmy doesn't have to do that. He doesn't have to throw away an opportunity that he sold like hell to get. He doesn't have to build up his prowess as a salesman and a potentially valuable member of this company just to instantly self-sabotage all of it, and go so far as to shame his would-be employers for having the recklessness to fall for his schtick.

But Jimmy wants to punish himself. He wants to test himself. No matter what face he puts on, Chuck’s death, and his hand in it, has gotten to Jimmy. So when he walks into these places, he tries to be the silver tongued devil who could talk his way into anything, but he hears his brother’s voice in his head, the one that tells him that everything Jimmy’s ever done is built on a lie, that he doesn't deserve to have any sort of success, that what he does is dangerous and dishonest. This is Jimmy’s form of self-flagellation, of self-sabotage, and it’s a tribute to Bob Odenkirk and the show’s writers how well-constructed and well-acted and well-suited the scene is to tell that story.

And maybe that’s the lesson and the connection between Jimmy’s story and Gus’s strange decision. Maybe it’s a question of punishment and of control. The final scene of “Breathe” is the most frightening that Gus Fring has seemed since he threatened to kill Walt’s infant daughter. There’s a gentility to Fring (and in Giancarlo Esposito’s performance) that makes him plausible as someone who could pass without notice in the respectable world, but that makes him ten times as scary when he let’s the hounds of the chain and speaks in clear but unnerving threats and demands. His threat is implicit in the death he orders, in his statement to Nacho that he knows what was done to Hector and by who, and his demand comes earlier in the episode.

Gus tells his lieutenant that he when Hector dies: not a stroke, not some low level soldier, just Gus Fring and Gus Fring alone. Maybe he still believes that Hector is deserving of punishment, that he deserves to suffer, but he wants to be the one to dole it out, to decide when Hector has had enough, which might not come until Hector is forced to watch Gus conquer the Salamanca empire. Gus doesn't want Hector to die, but perhaps it’s not because of any sort of mercy or professional courtesy. Perhaps it’s because he has a plan for Hector, he’s playing the long game, and death’s too good for his enemy, at least right now.

So he does something that neither circumstance nor pressure forces him to do -- he spends his money to keep a rival from perishing, just as Jimmy undercuts himself, and Mike takes on duties no one asked him to, and Kim stands up for someone she cares about. In a show centered on a man who moves the world with his equivocations and manipulations, there’s a purity to these sorts of actions, the ones that aren’t required or forced. Instead, they come from what these people really want, and show what’s important to them, what’s bothering them, and what might be worth more to them in the fullness of time than what’s in front of them right now.

If you feel strangely sad at the funeral scene, it's because it's sinking in: we will no longer have the brilliant Michael McKean in this show :(

Overall it was a slow episode, even by Better Call Saul standards, but that's understandable considering where we pick up from. Chuck is gone and Jimmy, Kim and Howard have an increasingly strong feeling that it was no accident. I like the fact that Jimmy started the day happily, probably doing his best to brighten up Kim's morning (she only just got involved in her car crash despite it feeling like a year and a half for us) but then... stark contrast in his character during almost the entire episode as he deals with what happened to Chuck.

Jimmy's ridiculous reaction at the end suggests that far from mourning his brother, his biggest concern all along was whether he would be the one to blame for Chuck's mindset - but once he can pin it on Howard, it's all good, man. However, I think this is a coping mechanism and he truly mourns Chuck/feels guilty, which will likely manifest through destructive behaviour during the season. We saw the beginnings of a shift towards the Saul we know after his friend Marco died (end of season 1) and that wasn't even his fault... but Chuck's demise may be the point of no return.

Other than that, we had Mike doing Mike things - in this case, an infiltration in Madrigal. I thought he was trying to find out something specific, but in the end it seems he was actually working as a security consultant, which I could see becoming an issue for Lydia/Gus... but it's definitely too early to tell. One thing is for sure, there's an eerie entertainment value in the most mundane scenes with Mike, I feel like if it was 40 minutes of that I would still be fine.

One thing I love about Vince Gilligan and his team is this habit of repeating the last moments of one particular scene from the previous finale in a season premiere. They do this since Breaking Bad and I always love it because it brings you back to that moment immediately without trying to dump information on your brain while you actively try to remember the details. You don't have to be like "ohhhh right, Hector had a stroke, Gus looked at Nacho" because they show you, then continue it. On that side of things there was not a lot more other than Nacho and the other gentleman receiving orders from Bolsa... and Gus identifying a new opportunity and mentioning DEA.

(First thought: Gus' Spanish seems to have improved, which was terrible in BrBa, but they also have him talk less so far)

(Second thought: is Hank going to show up?)

I almost forgot to mention the intro but there isn't a lot to say, really. I'm starting to think these little teaser scenes of the future are... just that, teasers. Which is not a bad thing exactly, yet could be disappointing for viewers expecting more. But I could be wrong, they could always be saving some surprises, I guess it all depends on them using these future scenes in episodes other than premieres.

[8.6/10] The opening of “Slip” is a little more direct than episodes of Better Call Saul tend to be, as it fills in some gaps Jimmy’s backstory and perspective. When pressed by Marco about Jimmy’s parents’ shop, about how they worked hard and everyone liked them, Jimmy admits it’s true, but questions the value of it. He declares that it got them nowhere, and characterizes his own dad as a sucker.

Jimmy’s philosophy becomes a little clearer, snapping into place with the flashback to his youth. His dad was someone who refused to bend the rules, who wouldn’t take even so much as a valuable coin for himself, who wouldn’t sell cigarettes to the kids from the local religious school to make ends meet, and in Jimmy’s eyes, that got him nothing. It’s a little too tidy and pat, but Jimmy sums it up nicely -- Papa McGill wasn’t willing to “do what he had to do,” and Jimmy definitely is.

That’s the thrust of “Slip,” which is as much an ensemble piece as any episode of Better Call Saul so far. Jimmy, Mike, Chuck, Kim, and Nacho are willing to go the extra mile, to do the difficult thing, not because they want to, but because they believe it needs to be done. It’s what unites those disparate individuals and their different challenges here. Each of them strains a little more, goes a little farther, in the name of biting the bullet and doing what needs doing.

For Jimmy, that means going back to his old ways. What’s interesting is that Jimmy tries to be good here. He tries to build on the success of his first ad with the owners of the music shop, and all they do is try to squeeze him. Granted, it’s Jimmy, so he’s probably inflating costs a bit, but still, the episode sets them up as jerks, and Jimmy as at the end of the rope. So hey lays out a drumstick, asks them one more time if they’re committed to not paying him what they originally agreed to, and then he intentionally takes a painful looking spill in their store to get leverage. Look out, Slippin’ Jimmy is back.

He also returns to his huckstering to get back at this community service supervisor and make a little scratch in the process. His big show of a potential lawsuit and deal with a fellow worker grow a little farfetched in terms of persuading the grumpy supervisor who eventually gives in, but the purpose of these scenes is clear. Jimmy tried doing things his parents’ way, the good way, and the only thing it got him was an empty bank account. Now, he’s back to taking the (literally) painful, less-than-savory steps that ensure he has enough money to hold up his end of the bargain with Kim.

But Kim’s willing to go the extra mile too. When Jimmy offers her the money, she obliquely hints at the idea that he might need time to regroup, that she’s willing to carry the load for the two of them for a little while. It’s not entirely clear whether she’s worried he’ll return to conning people full time and wants to alleviate the financial incentives to do so, or she’s simply concerned that whatever his assurances, unreliable Jimmy may not be able to come up with his end on a monthly basis without his legal practice. Either way, she takes on a new client, one where she already seems pretty slammed, to make sure that they’ll be able to make ends meet, with or without Jimmy’s contributions.
The Mesa Verde head honcho refers that client to her at a lunch meeting, where she just so happens to run into Howard. Howard, ever the politician, is plastically cordial, but Kim, unlike her beau, still has pangs of guilt and offers him a refund on the law school tuition he put up for her. Howard, letting the scales fall for the first time in a while, reveals that he too is working overtime, having to reassure scores of clients after the incident with Chuck gets out. Kim’s willing to take the (figuratively) painful step of handing over $14,000 dollars to assuage her conscience, and Howard is out there hustling to preserve his firm’s good name after his partner’s public breakdown.

But some good seems to have come out of it. Chuck is back with his doctor and (self-)reportedly making great progress. He may be overestimating himself a little bit, but he’s pushing through his exposure therapy and accepting that his illness is a mental not physical one. When Dr. Cruz warns him about taking it easy and not setting his expectations too high, he remains optimistic, anxious to get better.

In a tremendous sequence, without a word of exposition, “Slip” suggests that Chuck might overexert himself in this effort. He’s using the coping techniques the doctor suggested for him when standing in front of the blaring fluorescent lights of the grocery story. He lists the colors and objects he sees, taking his focus away from the pain. Director Adam Bernstein uses the tools in his toolbox to underscore the severity of what walking through the freezer case does to Chuck, the zooms, the noise, the vertigo of it all. It seems like Chuck has pushed himself too far, that he’s about to suffer another attack

But when we see Chuck later, he has the groceries and is no worse for wear. These things are difficult for him, painful for him, but he is ready and willing to push, to take that damn step, in the same of what he wants to achieve.

The same is true of Mike, who is clearly still haunted by Anita’s story from the prior episode of her husband dying in the woods without anyone ever finding the body. He digs and digs in the New Mexico desert, metal-detector in hand, until he finds where the unfortunate Good Samaritan was buried by the cartel. He calls it in anonymously, presumably in the hopes of ensuring that another family won’t have to go through the uncertainty that Anita did.

But he’s worried about leaving his own family in a state of uncertainty too. He still has his cash from his various extra-curricular activities, but he’s worried about how he could get it to his family should something happen to him. So he goes to Gus Fring, in the hopes Gus can help him launder it. It’s a scene that shows the two men’s growing mutual respect. The meaningful handshake that closes the episode (along with Gus turning down Mike’s offer of 20% to launder it) signifies the ways that their values are the same. They are both smart, decent men who get mixed up in indecent things, and they’re willing to do what it takes to make that work.

That just leaves Nacho, who has what is possibly the most difficult task of all. What I love about this series of scenes is the way they show how meticulous, how careful, how deliberate Nacho is about all of his. There is nobility in Nacho wanting to protect his father from Hector, but he is not in any way reckless about it.

Instead, he does the legwork, he takes the extra steps that will make his operation successful. He is delicate and careful as he grinds the poison into dust and fills the lookalike pills under a magnifying glass. He practices, over and over again, the act of palming the pill bottle and depositing it into a coat pocket, so that when the moment comes, it will be second nature. And he even goes so far as to climb onto the top of the restaurant that serves as Hector’s headquarters the night before, messing up the air conditioner so that Hector will have a reason to take off his jacket.

The subsequent scene where he actually makes the switch is masterful. “Slip” holds the tension of each step in the process: from the would-be fake bill, to the probing of the wrong pocket, to the pill switcheroo, to that grand moment of truth where Nacho has to make the move he rehearsed so many times and land the pill bottle into Hector’s jacket without him realizing. It’s a great outing for Michael Mando, who conveys the way that Nacho is trying to exhibit a practiced, casual calm, but inside is anxious beyond words. His deep exhale and clenched fingers in the back after it’s all done says everything.

Each of the tasks taken up by the main characters in this episode -- planting poison pills, finding a dead body, braving the height of your illness, taking on extra work, and even breaking your own back -- require something extra, more sacrifice, more pain, more difficulty. But when something important is at stake -- your livelihood, your well-being, or your family -- the major figures of Better Call Saul are the type of people who face that head on and take whatever measures the situation requires, even if that means drastically different things for each of them. Those steps are painful, tense, and even dangerous, but for better or ill, Jimmy McGill and the people in his orbit, are the people who do what they need to do.

[7.3/10] Better Call Saul is a fairly slow show. To some degree that is a necessary consequence of it being a prequel. If you move too fast, then you’ll start hitting the series’ known future too quickly. If you do too much, then it starts to seem all the more glaring that big events and shared histories were not mentioned or only grazed on Breaking Bad. The slow burn is a feature, not a bug, letting the events and conflicts of the series simmer as it explores the development of the characters involved before things froth over to a boil.

But even by Better Call Saul standards, “Witness” is a slow episode. That’s not a complaint, necessarily Much of the episode centers on Mike tracking down the people who are tracking him, enlisting Saul in the endeavor. The show is content to play this out, evincing the sense of Mike’s dogged determination, and the complexity and sophistication of what he’s up against.

That comes through in the cinematography and framing of the episode. “Witness” is directed by series co-creator Vince Gilligan, and his penchant for interesting shots and sequences is on full display. There are several scenes, particularly as part of Mike’s surveillance, where the camera lingers on one shot for a long period of time, letting the scene breathe and develop.

Those sequences often show characters changing space and position and size relative to the observer. Someone seems to get bigger and larger as they move closer. Figures emerge in tableaus that make them seem like tiny parts of a bigger machines. The steadily-paced chase is given form in the deliberate rhythm of Mike’s pursuit.

In truth, it feels a little indulgent at times. Many of these scenes are visually arresting, and signify how gnarly this knot of a problem is, so that even the preternaturally adept Mr. Ehrmantraut has trouble untying it. But at others, it feels like Gilligan and company are enjoying the camera work at the expense of advancing the story or more efficiently delivering the meaning of these scenes.

Still, the nature of “Witness” is the slow reveal, the sense of watching and being watched that permeates the episode. The show takes its time, showing Mike snooping around a brightly-colored parking lot, cutting to more and more of the familiar setting until it zooms out to reveal the “Los Pollos Hermanos” sign. By the same token, as Saul is sitting in the booth of the restaurant, spying on the man Mike is pursuing, we see a fuzzy but recognizable figure sweeping up in the background. He moves closer and closer, with the episode not underlining his presence in a strong or showy way, until he pops into the frame. Suddenly, yet innocuously, there stands one of the most notable figures in the Breaking Bad pantheon.

That’s right, as the anagram of first letters of last season’s episode titles portended, Gus Fring is back. To be frank, while I can appreciate the craft of the way the show gradually unveils Fring, the way that the promotion for this season has focused on Fring, to the point that even a spoilerphobe like myself had no misconceptions that he would do anything but feature prominently here, took some of the oomph out of his return.

Still “Witness” is, in many ways, a tribute to Fring. One of the defining characteristics of Gus is the combination of his meticulousness and his ability to hide in plain sight. While he could obviously make mistakes at times, part of what made him so good at what he did was how cautious and deliberate he was about everything. You could see it in the way he’d instruct an employee on the proper way to clean a piece of equipment, or dot every “i” and cross every “t”. Here is a man who was careful and measured, and that kept him successful in a fraught line of work.

“Witness” follows that tack. It takes time to show every step of the surveillance, to offer the return of the franchise’s biggest villain (short of Walt himself, depending on how you want to think about the character) not in some display of dominance or grand, ballyhooed entrance, but by him sweeping the tile of a fast food floor and digging through the garbage. There is a quiet dignity to this man, a slow but steady manner about him that the episode borrows. It’s only one, subtle knowing look as Saul walks away that shows how crafty he is beneath that calm, ease-inducing exterior.

That is the other theme of this episode -- that Saul and Mike are so used to being able to rely on their particular sets of skills to get out of any scape or scrap, but that each is faced by someone who seems to have figured them out and who, despite their best efforts, manages to get one step ahead.

The episode dramatizes that with Gus in the way that he moves around the restaurant, entirely unassuming but nevertheless aware and monitoring Saul after he’s been sent by Mike to surveil the place. The normally peerless Mike can’t get a bead on who’s tracking him or what the drop at Los Pollos Hermanos. Instead, the tease of a cell phone resting on the gas cap he’d been using to pursue his pursuers shows that for all of Mike’s wiliness and talent, there is someone who knows enough not to do him one better.

It’s the same story with Jimmy and Chuck. In an amusing scene that introduces the woman we would come to know as Saul’s secretary, we see Jimmy coaching Francesca up on how to play the elderly folks that make up his client base as she starts taking calls. Her presence serves to once again distinguish Jimmy’s fly by the seat of his pants style from Kim’s more carefully considered approach, but also to exemplify the ways in which he knows how to push people’s buttons to get his way -- it’s his stock-in-trade.

And yet Chuck does him one better, just as Gus did to Mike. It’s a tremendous reveal that what appeared to be a mishap with Ernesto last week was, in fact, a calculated move by Chuck to leak the existence of the tape to Jimmy without implicating himself directly. The news filters from Ernesto to Kim and finally to Jimmy, who starts to realize his brother can be as manipulative, and as much of a chessmaster as Jimmy has been at times.

What’s striking is how little concern Jimmy has for his career or the risks of the tape’s exposure that Kim is walking him through. Instead, all he can think of is the fact that his own brother would do such a thing to him. It’s not subtle, but rather than gently rolling the painter’s tape off of his office walls, as the meticulous Chuck instructed him in the prior episode, Jimmy rips it off in frustration.

It adds to that same sense of an episode meant to fete or at least shine a spotlight on those meticulous planners, those that consider every angle and act with great caution and reserve, who are able to entrap their prey. It seems odd to consider Chuck and Gus as the same sort of antagonist, but when Chuck uses that tape to lure Jimmy into breaking and entering, forcing his way into a locked drawer, and destroying the recording in front of witnesses, it’s hard not to see a certain diabolical, ruthless quality that the men share in pursuit of their goals, different though they may be.

That’s the rub of even a slower episode like “Witness.” Better Call Saul, like its predecessor, is not averse to drawing out the prelude to a conflict, to dig into the in between spaces that make for the show’s most memorable moments. It’s those quieter, more deliberate scenes that feed into the personalities and approaches of the characters on screen and make those eventual explosive and dramatic moments more meaningful. “Witness,” like the characters who populate it, is a restrained, meticulous episode, that likewise gains strength when it shows its hand.

8.9/10. I love the theme for this episode. I love the fact that Jimmy is genuinely distraught at the idea that he went the extra mile, proved that he is better and more committed than his well-heeled competition when it comes to these big fish clients, and they still won't hire him because he's "the kind of lawyer guilty people hire." And so he uses his hush money to both imitate and antagonize the kind of lawyers that respectable people hire, who are inadvertently and intentionally making his life harder. He both resents and envies their respectability, and so when the Kettlemans pay him off, he uses it as the rock upon which he will build his church.

But then he realizes that aping someone else's respectability isn't enough. Instead, he has to inject more of himself and what he does best into the routine in order to beat the big boys at their game. So he stages a rescue, makes the paper, and now has a name in the public consciousness to go along with his new, more respectable look. Everything in the episode is an effort to level the playing field, but with a fractured method for doing so that fits in with the rest of the fast talking conman ways Jimmy has mastered. He tries to go straight, in an almost cartoonish reaction to Hamlin, but eventually melds Hamlin's veneer with his own tactics to carve out something for himself (and win the minor admiration of his semi-perfunctory love interest)

And yet, he knows his brother won't approve. The scene where his brother, ever the voice of disapprobation, shifts from pride, to a frenetic and incredibly well-shot sequences that conveys his panic and sense of unwellness in venturing into the outside world, to the resignation and disappointment when he realizes what Slippin' Jimmy has pulled off, was an incredible way to end the episode.

And if the thematic stuff didn't do it for you, it was also a hilarious episode! Just the very image of Jimmy's billboard (and Hamlin's bewilderment at it) was great. The exchange about "Hamlindago" was a hoot. Jimmy's nigh-three stooges routine with the local college camera guys had a great comedic rhythm to it, and even little details like Chuck finding a rock to put his five dollar bill under in the midst of his disorientation was a stealthily hilarious character detail. One of the most easily forgotten parts of what made Breaking Bad great is how it wasn't afraid to be stupidly, or dryly comic even in the midst of its intense, dramatic stakes, and "Hero" seemed to embrace that element of its predecessor.

When you have a political system and society built on the absolute control of information, and the projection of being all powerful and always infallible, then, when something disastrous happens, the first inclination is denial, then a cover-up, and finally finger pointing, deflection and blame storming with the various people having any sort of authority or power trying to save their own asses. The fact that the party bosses and ministers were "Apparatchik's", the Soviet equivalent of bureaucratic hacks, who had been gifted their appointments with minimal or even no knowledge of the actual workings of the bureaucracies they oversaw, poured gasoline and threw a match on an already untenable situation. It's easy to strut around in a cheap suit and impress the peasantry, especially when you can have anyone who calls you out on your BS sent to the Gulag's or even worse. It gets a bit trickier when peoples hands and faces start melting off, and they're detecting abnormally high radiation 1000 miles away.

I feel worse for the civvies, whose naive faith and trust caused them to believe the lies and half truth's they were being fed, and kept them from not only questioning the official story, but, willingly living and working in such close proximity to a disaster waiting to happen, and, thinking it was a privilege to do so. They had no idea of the dangers lurking near them, and, like Lyudmilla, who even when warned not to get too close or stay too long, hugs, caresses, and even places her irradiated husbands hand on her growing womb, thinking he just has some severe burns, because no one has the courage to speak the truth, even at the cost of thousands of lives.

Granted, it really didn't matter after the fact, because the battle now was to keep from decimating the ENTIRE Soviet Union and most of eastern Europe, so, what's 10 or 20 thousand dead if it means saving the country? So, if the neighborhood cheap suit pulls your name from a hat at the point of an AK-47, you tend to cooperate and not ask too many questions. Unless you're a coal miner extra enough to work butt nekkid in a radioactive hole with no hope of survival, and no thanks or glory. I tip my hat to them. Hero's all, even if Moscow never acknowledged them.

This is where I finally feel a really strong affection for Violet as a character and the journey she has gone through during the series. She has felt a bit like a plot device to let the author(s) tell their episodic minor stories, but it's all coming together now and I feel the necessity of earlier episodes for Violet's character arc. It's still really not the best solo episode of the series, though it is bringing the show to a close!

I'm really really touched by Violet's coworkers protecting her and standing up for her, even when she's not there - it's not something they had to show even though it sure is powerful! She is important to other people!

The scene going from the father & daughter reunion to Hodgins wondering about Violet is so? relieving? I love found family tropes, but today's anime studios unfortunately don't stay away from pairing teen/preteen girls (or just alluding to the romance/attraction) with adult men (which they are literally guilty of here too). I'm so so glad they are actually showing it as parental affection and not leaving it "up to imagination". Hoping for something similar with Violet actually being there, but I don't have that much faith.

If they manage to do the ending well I'm definitely rewatching <3

This show is a really nice anime to watch when you want something light and relatively cheerful. The characters are built out well, and they each have different personalities. The conflict between Sena and Yozora is well done, and you can clearly see their personality contrasts. In addition to this, it's nice to see how the group bonds over time - despite them not realising it, they are in fact becoming friends and achieving the groups goals.

There are also good parts of humor, especially in the special at the end of season 1, and scattered throughout the anime. Whilst some of it did fall flat, there was enough of it to give me a chuckle every now and then.

I love the soundtracks of this anime, especially the end one. They are really well done, and if I could listen to them on Spotify, I would. I rarely watch outros and intros, however I found myself listening to the outro on multiple occasions as I liked it so much.

The second season was certainly my favourite - the character development had been done, and here, it was exploring the characters in a deeper way, as well as improving the bond between Kodaka, Sena and Yozora.

All in all, a good watch if you want something light and fun, and in the classic 'main character doesn't notice all the adoring girls around him' harem style.

I'm certainly going to pick up the manga, and hope for a third season of the anime.

Would recommend.

Wow, quite a lot happened on this one. I guess that on all storylines, the main message is the same: Whiterose fooled everyone: Elliot, Mr. Robot, Angela, Tyrell, Price, the FBI, the world, and most of all, us - the fricking viewers.

Tyrell finally finds out what happened with his wife and son from that piece-of-shit of a FBI boss. I swear I'm more pissed off at that guy than anyone involved in the Dark Army, despite the mom issues that are displayed to us at some points. I was not a fan of how they got rid of Joanna early in the season, but seeing the effect it takes on Tyrell and how it might affect his approach to the Dark Army, it makes me think it's for a good cause. And he was lied to as much as the others, including Mr. Robot himself, which means there could be an anti-Dark-Army revolution soon enough. That shot with Tyrell and the brown-ish background before he was told the truth had an eerie, fitting look.

When the "previously on" montage before the episode showed Trenton and Mobley, I got very excited - we finally get to see what happens on that side of things! (and by the way, I loved the editing done on the "previously on" in pretty much all of the season so far) Then... I continued watching, and got very sad. FBI learns from Tyrell the identity of those responsible for the attacks... and of course they are Trenton and Mobley. The way they set it up during the whole episode was so unpredictable, because they made things to look predictable. Not just showing that couple after all this time, but the attempted escape and all those scenes, it makes it seem like there is something these characters will do - the scenes and those great TV discussions with Leon make it seem like we shouldn't worry (I'd love to have a conversation with that guy, quite honestly, as long as the Dark Army isn't involved).

And even at the end, when the agents are approaching, even when it's clear they are staging this, I'm still thinking "this is typical TV, I'm sure they are suddenly in some other basement, and they are deceiving me"... but they were not. Trenton and Mobley are dead and Mr. Robot is fucking far to being typical TV.

Dom, a character who I didn't really pay attention to (compared to others) until this season, immediately knows something is off and, without skipping the beat, goes to the wall with all the persons of interest and knows Whiterose is responsible. I think she is also aware that something stinks regarding her boss, shown when she almost confronted him - I'm hoping she starts realising this and calculates her moves towards not getting kicked out of the FBI. If that Tyrell-Mr. Robot alliance ever happens, it would be interesting to have an FBI source...

The episode had almost no Elliot this week and small amounts of Mr. Robot, who went looking for Irving. But before he did that, he made Krista - a character I'm always glad to see appearing again - realise that Elliot/Mr. Robot could be involved in Five Nine and the attacks, which is an interesting wrinkle. I'm shocked to see that Mr. Robot has also been deceived and was unaware of the plan regarding the attacks - and pleasantly surprised at his disapproving reaction. I imagined he might excuse the attacks for other purposes, but he didn't. Perhaps the low point of the episode was Irving taking Mr. Robot to that place, showing him that odd party only to waltz in and leave him there, it feels like a careless loose end to spark Mr. Robot's anger. I wonder what follows from that.

The work Portia Doubleday has done as Angela Moss has been wonderful, but this season in particular her scenes leave me in awe. This actress has portrayed every emotion in the wide range of emotions Sam Esmail required in a way that feels demanding of admiration. I keep thinking that I cannot imagine Elliot's story would have been possible with another actor, but now I've added Angela to that train of thought and I really hope Doubleday gets the deserved recognition for this season. I feel like a fool for still being confused at the "back to the future" hints, but at the moment it feels like Whiterose blinded Angela with science and she was the most tricked of them all. Can she bounce back after being one of the main instruments of thousands of deaths?

Perhaps the best scene overall was the conversation between Price and the big culprit, Whiterose, with the revelation that Whiterose's motives are a grudge against Price because he had to ask for something twice. The intensity of the conversation, the little glimpses to blurred figures in the background looking at them as Price's tone was being raised - until everyone looked - and that stupid pink color, how memorable can a scene be?

Also, for those who watch the show on Amazon Prime (I do in the UK), I just noticed the description for the episode and it's hilarious, just had to share it, it says exactly:

"mr. robot wants answers. price whiterose. fbi closes in. knight time in the desert. angela hits the rewind button. a lot."

After a second season that barely had any Tyrell, we get a full episode set between the night of the hack and Elliot getting shot. As a fan of the show, I'm very pleased that they decided to do an episode like this - we knew bits and pieces, but now we know exactly what happened between the hack and Elliot waking up on that alleyway (unless they throw something else at us, which I wouldn't put past Mr. Robot) and we have Tyrell's full perspective during all of season 2 as they did an outstanding job of showing/mentioning specific moments that allowed the audience to appreciate the passage of time perfectly.

I feel like there was a need for a Tyrell episode that was fulfilled with this one. The psychopathic weirdness of the character has been entertaining to watch, but I always felt like I never understood him. The "you're not looking at what's above you" bit was always thrown at us as the moment when the character had this "enlightenment", but this episode shows the true meaning of that: he truly believes that fate wants him as a God-like figure along with Elliot. I was also intrigued by the amount of importance the Dark Army are placing in Tyrell and by how he basically took care of Stage 2 for the most part.

This episode had a different feel to it, I like to think we were supposed to be in Tyrell's mind much like we're constantly in Elliot's mind/perspective. It felt a lot more clear, linear - Tyrell, psychopath or not, is not delusional and nor is he suffering mental issues. If anything, the editing with quick cuts at various moments could be interpreted as his frustration/rage and obsessions.

Also: I particularly enjoyed the Cisco/Darlene and then Cisco/Dark Army moment, expanding Mr. Robot's storytelling. This is how you do a meaningful flashback - reminds me of Person of Interest.

I will be writing about Episode 1 and 2.

This season premiere was perfectly paced and very atmospheric. I think the general theme of the episodes and also this season is illusion. Mr. Robot talks about how reality is just an illusion, Phillip Price talks about how the government creates an illusion and Elliot tries to build himself an illusion of a normal life. This illusion equals normalcy and routine. There is this IT-saying: "Never touch a running system". And i think Mr. Robot (the show) tries to transfer this proverb to the real world. You should never touch a running system, even if you can improve something, because it causes disruption. That is what government and the society is about in general (in the thinking of Mr. Robot). But what does a hacker? He/She touches a running system. Sometimes to cause harm and chaos, but often hackers hack something to improve it. Lifehacks become a whole new meaning in this context.
The second part of this illusion-theme is the connection to magicians. The show confirms this magic connection in the QR-Code Easteregg, which leads to http://www.conficturaindustries.com/. If you google Confictura, you get to a handbook for stage illusionists . I remembered what i learned about magic tricks from The Prestige: There are three stages. The Pledge, where you set up the trick ("Look at this bird. Just a normal bird!"), the Turn (Bird disappears) and finally the prestige (Bird reappears). I think you can see this three stages in the season one finales and the two episodes in season two. Tyrell Wellick meets Elliot in the season finale (The Pledge), Tyrell disappears (The Turn) and at the end of episode two he reappears (The prestige). . Maybe we see more magic tricks in this season.
Some other observations: I really liked the acting, specially of Rami Malek and Portia Doubleday (Angela). Angela turned full American Psycho, i was amazed by her powerplay in the PR department. I would like to see her rise to a corporate power woman (and then her eventual fall). Rami's pivot of acting was the scene where he started laughing at Mr. Robot. That was a Joker-worthy performance. It really frightened me. We are also introduced to FBI-Agent Grace Gummer. I think she will be the counterpart to Elliot and fsociety in general. I liked her performance (Anyone else thought of Elsbeth Tascioni from The Good Wife?) and i am looking forward to see more of her.
To sum it up, this season beginning was fantastic and shows how good Mr. Robot is. Pacing, Atmosphere, Acting: It all was on pint and although the series is often slow paced it never gets dull.