It really bugs me that they haven't tried to look for Dustin at all yet
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@abstractlegend I know right? And I know the kids have Nancy and Jonathan, but after S2, I’d expect them to get help from Steve.
Your father was still in coma after being shot and what you think the most urgent thing to do is walking your dog?
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@cooltomatos and having steamy shower sex with your girlfriend...
I find Jughead a bit exhausting at the moment.
Dude, you've been in the gang for like three months and even life-long Serpents like Toni can take the jacket off during the school day, so please chill and sit down, Jug.loading replies
@haibara Seriously. It's not that hard to temporarily take off the jacket. All of the other Serpents get it and don't take the rule so personally.
Shout by Wéjih M'zoughi
Mrs Andrews talking to her son like that was priceless. that boy needs to learn some damn respect and to think before he does or says anything stupid.
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@pato22 That scene was the most I've liked Molly Ringwald on this show. It's about time someone put Archie in his place.
I'm usually not a fan of musical episodes (though I hate black-white episodes even more), but I didn't really worry when I heard about the musical episode because so far Riverdale has really nailed all music scenes.
The only complaints I have is that some scenes had some really bad lip-syncing, and that Jughead's camera scenes seemed weirdly out of place and pointless the whole time. It was just a bit too much - I would have rather seen a different episode where they focused on these camera scenes instead of a musical episode and the reality show camera at the same time.Some random comments/thoughts:
- I have to admit Archie made me laugh again - Once again he's overshadowed by all the other actors who have impressive voices while he sounded so... normal.
- Why does the whole Hiram/Archie story seem more and more like some weird love relationship? "A young man never forgets his first car" - Hiram made it sound like he just stole Archie's first kiss, Jesus.
- Ugh, why did Hal and Alice have to get back together. I feel like they have no chemistry at all (and Hal no personality) and I would rather see them separated and see how Alice slowly starts a relationship with FP (which would make Betty/Jughead awkward, but it wouldn't be the weirdest thing we have on this show).
- Also, we're still not considering therapy or any kind of help for Cheryl? Really? No one? Well, then...
- What the fuck was that ending? It was so absurd and so typical Riverdale, Jesus Christ.loading replies
@haibara Jughead's camera shots were so awkward. It's like the show couldn't survive without his presence missing for one episode or something. Ugh.
Once more, they took out almost all the excitment of the "big" revelation. Oh and... Daddy issues much?
Also, remember how b.h. wanted betty "aaall for himself"? Yeah that's not cringy at all
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@majo618 Yeah who’s dad will be the killer of season 3 ?
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to feel sad that Archie is dead.
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@xadyu Sure, but this isn't one of those cases (where he's the least celebrated). Maybe he's a bit of a martyr, but i'd miss him. It would leave a huge vacuum in the show imo.
- I'm mostly just here to applaud Reggie because YES BOY, YOU TELL HER! Veronica doesn't appreciate him or what he did at all and I can't believe she really thinks they're even now just because she bought his car back. It shouldn't surprise me considering we're talking about Veronica here, but somehow I am baffled.
- I like Toni, I like Cheryl, I like them together, but I'm sure we all knew this relationship was going nowhere. It was like Toni was Cheryl's pet and they were both together just for fanservice. Give them some actual plot, please. And while I'm already complaining about queer characters with no plot - How about giving Kevin some plot that doesn't revolve around getting dick (which was literally his reason again for joining the farm). Crazy idea!
- And God no, Archie owns a gym now. So that boxing plot will drag into the next season? Christ have mercy. Also, how dumb must Archie be once again for actually agreeing to taking something from Hiram "with no strings attached"? His dumbness seems to be one of the only consistent things in this show.
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@haibara So true. Is back to kissing Hiram’s ass despite being framed by him. Among other things.
the blurring thing becomes annoying and distracting
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@tasa24 seriously I thought I was the one who noticed it in the first place.. they have to stop doing it yes :c
I really wanna like the show but this episode is a disaster. Political correctness all over the place. A girl with the size of a dwarf wants to join the basketball team. The coach says she cant because she is a girl. In the end women unite to get her into a test match and with Sabrina's spells she hits the basket.
Except for the gay brother and Sabrina's two love interests there is like not a single good man in this show they are all-out evil.
I love the the story and all around the witch stuff. But its really hard to watch it as a man especially THIS episode.
PS: Dont get me wrong its all fine the Susie -> Theo stuff or the gay brother or whatever, these are all fine to me but the fact that almost all men are written as bad guys shows how sexism (especially on netflix) really looks like these days.
4/10 for this episode
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@frozn1991 As a feminine woman I always enjoy watching women's voice on screens. But for this episode, I frankly say they r getting annoying. Not only feminism but also lgbt things. I dont care people's choices but this doesnt mean every damn episode they should put in audience's eyes these topics. Almost every minute in the episode, characters talk about feminism and homosexuality. I really couldnt wait new season and I started to watch 1st episode on the release day of the new season but I couldnt stand to finish 1st episode of 2nd season. In addition to this, I also totaly agree with what you said about netflix.
Seeing Marvin from Fresh off the Boat really threw me for a loop.
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@phug True but Reaper also came to mind. He was great as the Devil.
Watching this without any sort of idea what this is about kind of gave me that element of surprise. I've never seen Penn Badgley since Gossip Girl so I'm kind of excited to hear he had a new show coming up. A few thoughts about the pilot coming at you in bullets:
-Penn Badgley should narrate something, has he ever done anything like that in his career? because i think he should.
-This girl doesn't have curtains in her apartment, and her bedroom view is across the side walk. it's literally a feast for the eyes of peeping toms and stalkers
-Please stop romanticizing stalkers PLEASE...and a thief.
Hopefully this show gives us Badgley's best performance of his career, knowing it's a mystery, thriller show I hope to see some of that psycho-killer type of actingloading replies
@davidisrad I agree, he should do more narrating it's seriously so good.
wait.. did they compare taking in a black teenage athlete to taking in a large dog?
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@tballw32 they compared a big, clumsy, dumb teenager with a big, clumsy, dumb dog. They constantly make fun of Luke (and Dylan) for the exact same reasons and i didn't see anyone complaining about it. You are the one seeing skin color in that joke. Who is being racist, the writers of the show or you? In fact, Luke was compared to a dog a long time ago. Stop this political correctness madness, you are not helping.
I really liked the dance :)
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@ngear Me too, had to see the dance more than once. It is brilliant.
why has their always got to be incest in shows???
it feels like its happening in more shows than ever! - got the vibe from episode oneloading replies
@wakandanforever ...you know they've all been adopted, right? It's equivalent to orphans falling in love with each other.
As dark as what Walter did was, she deserved it. She was completely full of herself and blackmailed Walter for the money. Not to mention she was basically making Jesse's decisions for him. While she may have truly loved him, she would've definitely used that money to continue being an addict. That's most likely the very reason she even wanted the money. I'm not going to feel sympathy now that she's dead.
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@legendaryfang56 Agreed. But I do feel bad for her father, as he really tried to turn it around. Also, makes me dislike Jesse - he was essentially the one who got her back into it - if she hadn't met him, things would have likely turned out better for her.
Mysterious end! Can't wait to watch the next episode!
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@bjarne-castelein just imagine u had to wait 1 year after this cliff hanger.. !
This became very violent. I didn't like that. I liked this series because of his lack of violence (I mean, almost lack of it) and now it has been many deaths.
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those are the consequences of crimes bro
whats episode 23? netflix has it.. im about to watch it but its not here ...
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Episodes 23 & 24 were released as a movie called "Prison Break: The Final Break".
This was the closure we were all waiting for! Fantastic series I just wish is didn't have to end so soon.
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@anthony_muld As sad as it was, I did think the Season 4 finale was a beautiful ending. I didn't think this season was necessary, but it was nice to have.
What I love about Better Call Saul are the little things, the subtle touches that communicate something powerful about who a character is or what's going through their minds in a clear, but artful way. When Jimmy returns to his nail salon beginnings and goes to record his voicemail, he starts off with his faux-British secretary routine. Then he stops, and tries it again in his regular speaking voice, not as James M. McGill Esquire, but as Jimmy McGill, attorney at law. It's a small distinction, but a big difference.
It is, on the one hand, a concession to Kim's way of thinking, and a sign that she's gotten through to him, if only a little bit. When she turns down his offer for partnership a second time, he's clearly hurt, but takes it as well as can be expected. He cares about what Kim thinks of him, and the fact that his "colorful" ways were enough to scare her off may not be enough to make him straighten up and fly right, but it's enough to make him forego a little piece of the trickery that rubs her the wrong way. Davis & Main was too much and too fast for Jimmy. He was never meant to be that guy, as much as he wanted to for Kim. But he can be a better version of the Jimmy we know and love.
On the other hand, it's also a small reject of Chuck and an affirmation of himself. The pretensions of having a fancy secretary, of Jimmy's strange conception of sophistication manifested in a stuffy, mildly foppish voicemail, is a strange reflection of how he sees his brother, or what being a fancy pants attorney means. By moving away from that, he's turning away from chasing his brother's shadow. That doesn't mean he's going to immediately revert to being a con artist again. But he's going to be bombastic. He's going to be rough around the edges. As the name he uses on the answering machine suggests, he's just going to be himself.
Kim has a small but meaningful moment of her own. After a successful interview with Rick Schweikart and his fellow partners, Kim says goodbye and thank you to her potential employers, and accidentally calls Rick "Howard." It's a Freudian slip, but also a sign of how Jimmy's caution that it would be a lateral move for her, that Howard Hamlin and Rick Schweikart are interchangeable, has gotten through to her as well.
In that interview, Kim explains that she left her hometown because she wanted something more, and she's starting to realize that even if that doesn't mean coloring outside the lines like Jimmy does, she's too much of a free spirit as well, too much the kind of person who's not satisfied to be another cog in one nigh-identical machine or another, that she once again wants to bet on herself.
It's little moments like these, that say so much while saying so little, that make me frustrated with scenes like the cold open. That opening flashback takes us back in time to Jimmy's childhood, while we watch his father get taken advantage of by a grifter who tells Jimmy that there are wolves and sharks and he has to decide which one he's going to be, prompting Jimmy to take his (presumably) first few purloined dollars out of the till. After all, if Papa McGill is going to be bilked anyway, it may as well go to his family.
It's not an entirely bad scene. It lines up with Chuck's description of his father, and small touches like young Jimmy pretending to sweep or hiding the Playboy behind Boy's Life or refusing to give the grifter his cartons of cigarettes before getting the money show Jimmy's savvy even at a young age. But the whole thing feels a little too perfect--not unlike the flashbacks in BoJack Horseman--when it comes to accounting for the current psychological state of Jimmy McGill. His father is a little too trusting, even for a rube; the grifter is a little too slick, especially with the corny advice he gives to Jimmy; and Jimmy himself takes the lesson to heart a little too quickly. I like what BCS was trying to do, but overall, it was a little too tidy and too blunt to work as well as it needed to.
In truth, the "Inflatable" montage that juxtaposes a loudly-dressed, obnoxious adult Jimmy and a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man who is just as flamboyant, is not particularly subtle in what it communicates either. By damn it all, the sequence is just too much fun for me to care. The De Palma-esque split screens that put Jimmy's fruit-smashing, turd-laying, bagpipe-playing antics side-by-side with a frantic, improvisational balloon creature dancing in the wind like a rainbow-colored dervish is a deliriously funny scene and speaks to how the younger McGill brother hopes to escape with his bonus intact by doubling down on his unique individuality.
And yet, when Clifford Main gives Jimmy what he wants and fires him for being a jackass instead of for cause, there's remorse on Jimmy's part. He isn't lying when he says it was a bad fit, and there's something very true and very unfortunate when Clifford asks Jimmy how they mistreated him or didn't do everything they could to put him in a good position. Cliff took a chance on Jimmy, and the fact that the arrangement was doomed from the beginning isn't his fault. Jimmy knows that, and it may not be enough to get him to sacrifice his bonus, but it's enough for him to offer to pay them back for the fancy new desk, to tell Clifford that he thinks he's still a good guy, and most importantly, to feel at least the slightest twinge of guilt about it.
Jimmy isn't the only one with regrets however. In another one of those little touches, Mike never has to say that he's disgusted to consider the fact that a sleazeball like Jimmy approves of how he handled the Tuco situation, or that he feels conflicted and even a bit concerned with what paying for his daughter-in-law's emotional blackmail will make him have to do. The fact that he finds the comparison to Jimmy unflattering, that he thinks Jimmy's approval is an insult rather than the compliment it's intended as, comes through in the way he doesn't want the pair to share an elevator, or accept Jimmy's legal services as a gift. By the same token, all it takes is a look from Mike to convey the moral calculus he's doing in his head as Stacey picks out her dreamhouse.
And all it takes is a look from Jimmy to know how he feels about Kim's proposal that the two of them share an office, but remain separate. The scene features a wonderful shot of Jimmy stuck in the frame between the two pieces of the business card that Kim tore in half. He wants the two of them to be together, to be a single unit, personally and professionally. Kim's alternative isn't a rejection, but it is, as Mike would say, a half-measure.
In the world of Breaking Bad, half-measures are often deadly, ways of both making things worse in exchange for a temporary reprieve and delaying the inevitable. On the generally less lethal Better Call Saul, the effects are not unlikely to be nearly so extreme, but the character of the results have the potential to be just the same.
There's something that brings Jimmy and Kim together, a zest for life, for self-determination, for truth to themselves that they share. But there's differences that keep them apart: Kim's professionalism, Jimmy's shadier side, and the part of each of them that says the only reason to do this is to do it their own way. It's a little difference--being separate attorneys in the same offices rather than partners, being separate people who spend time with one another rather than being "together"--but for Jimmy, even if he gives it the old college try, it's a world of difference.
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It's kind of crazy to find your inspiration in a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man, but that's Jimmy!
Season 3 starts just like the first two seasons boring as hell and slow.
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@edgaredgar That's the tone of the show, why would you keep watching or expect any different?
Probably the best episode of TV this year, if not one of the strongest I have ever seen.
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@lukebacich prolbably? NO! .... FOR SURE IT IS!
Watching Jimmy bring ruin to an elderly woman's social life for his own gain was flat out disgusting.
It was the first time I've ever felt genuinely disgusted with him. All the other lies and schemes - even his bar scams as shitty as they were - didn't feel as repulsive to watch as seeing him manipulate those women like that.
Pride, anger and desperation have stripped him of his moral limits. If he ever had any they're gone now. He's not Jimmy anymore, he's Saul Goodman.loading replies
@nmiguelcosta Agreed, feel really bad for her. He could have just explained...
Boring, dry and slow. I loved Saul in Breaking Bad but clearly he is not the same in this show. I will tune out and binge next season. Sorry AMC, not your best work.
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@chinoxl3 It's not the Saul we all know well, it's not a case that his name is Jimmy McGill. The whole series is gonna tell us how and why Saul Goodman is born. It's not time yet for him to be Saul Goodman as we know him, but we're getting there. If you started watching this show without knowing these thngs, that's not AMC or anybody's fault. This show is far too good, but unfortunately not all people can see that :)
[7.4/10] Jimmy McGill’s role in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first scenes in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee -- the mundane tasks of his life in the interregnum of his suspension. And in his last scene in the episode, he does the same things, remarking on his fish’s voracious appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.
The catch is that between that first feeding and the second, he found out his brother is dead.
I don’t know what Jimmy is feeling between those two moments. Better Call Saul and writer/showrunner Peter Gould play it close to the vest. He cries no tears. Despite his usual loquaciousness and bombast, he is uncharacteristically taciturn and reserved. And while he sports more of a hangdog expression than usual throughout the episode, he is something of a blank slate in the wake of such foundation-rocking news.
“Smoke” leaves you to wonder what’s going on between its protagonists’ ears. That is, as I’m fond of saying, a feature not a bug. There’s not a lot of talking in Better Call Saul’s Season 4 premiere. Instead, there’s a lot of mulling, a lot of concerned and affected faces, of siblings who look like they’re in shock, of culprits swallowing their anxieties, of bald heads bobbing over cubicle walls and sporting the same half frown that speaks authority and disdain with one downturned crinkle of the lip.
This series takes the time to show its characters thinking, and to let the audience fill in the gaps, or wonder what’s going on rather than explicating in heavy-handed terms what’s going through each and everyone’s heads.
That’s particularly true for Jimmy here. There are signs that Chuck’s death got to him. He sees the electronics scattered in the backyard and knows the events that felled his brother were part of a relapse. He shares in the once celebratory but now palliative shots that he once offered Kim, but still can’t sleep. He seems almost in a place of catatonia, of processing the enormous shock of his brother’s grim departure, in a state that could indicate numbness or contemplation or being overwhelmed or any number of the complicated emotions that attend grief.
The episode plays similarly coy at what’s motivating Mike Ehrmantraut. He quits his job as a parking attendant, seems poised to spend more time with his granddaughter, and has all the time in the world to sit at home and watch baseball games in his newfound spare time. But when he gets that first check from Madrigal for being a “security consultant,” something clicks inside of Mike, and he can’t leave well enough alone.
What follows is another one of Better Call Saul’s superlative sequences, where Mike proves that all you need is a badge, a clipboard, and the air of innate authority to go anywhere and do pretty much anything. It’s a visual feast as Mike skulks through a cubicle farm, rumbles through a maze of industrial shelves, and observes and corrects a host of Madrigal employees like he owns the place. It’s a sequence where the show’s dry sense of humor comes out, with Mike overhearing a breakroom debate over who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali before providing his eye roll-fueled but definitive answer. Whoever wins, Mike isn’t content to sit idly by, but uses his misadventures to advise the nearest Madrigal outpost on what and where it’s going wrong.
“Smoke” leaves it characteristically hazy why Mike is doing all this. Maybe Mike is, true-to-form, scoping out this arrangement. Despite Lydia’s warning that his “salary” is a rounding error, it’s possible that Mike wants to make sure both that he’s seen doing some security consulting in case anyone starts asking questions, and also wants to make sure the people he’s getting into bed with on this are on the up-and-up. It might also be that sense of honor, that if he’s receiving a service and paycheck from these people, he wants to do the job he’s being paid for, and perhaps even show Lydia (and by extension, Gus Fring) what they’re getting.
Or it may just be that Mike cannot sit still. We know from Breaking Bad that Mike stays active in his line of work, one way or another, for a long time to come. Even if we didn’t, he doesn't seem like the type of man who would be fulfilled by or satisfied with watching baseball and drinking beer all day for very long. Mike is good at what he does, and when you have a talent like he does, not to mention someone who seems to appreciate it, it’s hard to let it go to waste.
And Gus might be in need of Mike’s services very soon. The part of the episode involving him and Nacho is the most “Breaking Bad prequel” portion of these proceedings. It’s the straightforward conclusion to Nacho completing his plan to induce a reaction in his boss. It gives Gus the chance to artfully try to fill in the power vacuum that Hector’s incapacitation creates, lest war follow. And his henchman’s scoping of Nacho ditching the evidence suggest he’ll have an angle to play.
These scenes are fairly slight, doing more to clean up after Hector’s reaction in the previous episode and hint at what might be the offing than moving things along. They’re about teasing a war in the New Mexico drug scene, but more about Nacho’s state of mind. You feel his jangle nerves, his concerns about the storm that might be ahead, his worries that Gus or Juan Bolsa know what he did. The episode spend a great deal of time just letting the viewer watch Nacho grow anxious and stew.
The truth is that not much happens in “Smoke.” A hell of a lot happened in last season’s finale, without much, or in some cases any, time for denouement or for the show to catch its breath. So a good chunk of this premiere is purposefully light on incident, more about the fallout of those series-shifting events and the effect they’ve had on Nacho, Mike, and Jimmy than about the next big bang in the Better Call Saul timeline.
That timeline seems to be speeding up though. The Jimmy McGill we meet at the end of “Smoke” seems closer to the man we meet in Breaking Bad. For most of the episode, he is almost inscrutable, with it unclear whether he’s stunned or unaffected or somewhere in between in his flat affect throughout the proceedings.
But the episode contrasts him with Howard, who is clearly broken up about this, and it presents a strange flip. Howard seems like the family member, while Jimmy seems like the staid business partner. Howard reads back an admiring obituary, and Jimmy doesn't even want to listen to it. At the funeral, Jimmy is shaking hands with all of Chuck’s colleagues and contemporaries, while Howard is comforting Chuck’s almost widow.
And the clincher of all of this is how Howard waits for Jimmy after the funeral, so he can offer a confession. Howard blames himself for Chuck’s death, knowing that someone as deliberate as his former partner didn’t let the lantern erupt by accident. Howard is broken up over his belief that him forcing Chuck out of HHM set him down this path, and he is trying to bare his soul and clear his conscience by confiding in the brother whom he imagines would be most hurt by this.
But unbeknownst to Howard, that confession only confirms to Jimmy that he was the superseding cause of his brother’s demise, that Jimmy’s own tip off to the insurance company is what set this whole thing in motion. And yet, Jimmy doesn't care, or at least doesn't want to be seen to outwardly. In a move that prompts a brief but palpable moment of disbelief from Kim, Jimmy starts whistling and going through this day, the day his brother was laid to rest, like it’s any other day.
Who knows if this is Jimmy giving into the man he’ll eventually become, the one who won’t accept blame for anything and has a casual obliviousness to those who stand in his way. Who knows if this is the sort of thing that slowly but surely pushes Kim out of his life. Who knows if Chuck’s last words to him truly obliterated whatever sort of affection Jimmy might have had for his brother, or even convinced him to be the amoral slimeball that Chuck told him was his true nature which he should embrace.
We don’t know what’s going on in Jimmy’s head during “Smoke.” All we know is that it ends with a version of Jimmy McGill who seems closer to Saul Goodman than ever, who seems ready to brush off his own brother’s death because that’s just the way things are, who is calm and cool and unbothered by any of it. And we know that it begins with a Cinnabon Gene who is anything but, who is unnerved and frightened by something as simple as a mistyped social security number, or an Albuquerque air freshener.
We still know the beginning and what seems to be the end game for Jimmy McGill’s adult life, and we know the beginning and what seems to be the end of his mourning for his brother. But Better Call Saul honors the complexity of, and trusts its audience to figure out, what happens in between.
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@sikanderx6 I'm convinced that Mike Ehrmentraut is the closest thing we'll ever get to a truly realistic live action Batman.
[7.4/10] Jimmy McGill’s role in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first scenes in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee -- the mundane tasks of his life in the interregnum of his suspension. And in his last scene in the episode, he does the same things, remarking on his fish’s voracious appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.
The catch is that between that first feeding and the second, he found out his brother is dead.
I don’t know what Jimmy is feeling between those two moments. Better Call Saul and writer/showrunner Peter Gould play it close to the vest. He cries no tears. Despite his usual loquaciousness and bombast, he is uncharacteristically taciturn and reserved. And while he sports more of a hangdog expression than usual throughout the episode, he is something of a blank slate in the wake of such foundation-rocking news.
“Smoke” leaves you to wonder what’s going on between its protagonists’ ears. That is, as I’m fond of saying, a feature not a bug. There’s not a lot of talking in Better Call Saul’s Season 4 premiere. Instead, there’s a lot of mulling, a lot of concerned and affected faces, of siblings who look like they’re in shock, of culprits swallowing their anxieties, of bald heads bobbing over cubicle walls and sporting the same half frown that speaks authority and disdain with one downturned crinkle of the lip.
This series takes the time to show its characters thinking, and to let the audience fill in the gaps, or wonder what’s going on rather than explicating in heavy-handed terms what’s going through each and everyone’s heads.
That’s particularly true for Jimmy here. There are signs that Chuck’s death got to him. He sees the electronics scattered in the backyard and knows the events that felled his brother were part of a relapse. He shares in the once celebratory but now palliative shots that he once offered Kim, but still can’t sleep. He seems almost in a place of catatonia, of processing the enormous shock of his brother’s grim departure, in a state that could indicate numbness or contemplation or being overwhelmed or any number of the complicated emotions that attend grief.
The episode plays similarly coy at what’s motivating Mike Ehrmantraut. He quits his job as a parking attendant, seems poised to spend more time with his granddaughter, and has all the time in the world to sit at home and watch baseball games in his newfound spare time. But when he gets that first check from Madrigal for being a “security consultant,” something clicks inside of Mike, and he can’t leave well enough alone.
What follows is another one of Better Call Saul’s superlative sequences, where Mike proves that all you need is a badge, a clipboard, and the air of innate authority to go anywhere and do pretty much anything. It’s a visual feast as Mike skulks through a cubicle farm, rumbles through a maze of industrial shelves, and observes and corrects a host of Madrigal employees like he owns the place. It’s a sequence where the show’s dry sense of humor comes out, with Mike overhearing a breakroom debate over who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali before providing his eye roll-fueled but definitive answer. Whoever wins, Mike isn’t content to sit idly by, but uses his misadventures to advise the nearest Madrigal outpost on what and where it’s going wrong.
“Smoke” leaves it characteristically hazy why Mike is doing all this. Maybe Mike is, true-to-form, scoping out this arrangement. Despite Lydia’s warning that his “salary” is a rounding error, it’s possible that Mike wants to make sure both that he’s seen doing some security consulting in case anyone starts asking questions, and also wants to make sure the people he’s getting into bed with on this are on the up-and-up. It might also be that sense of honor, that if he’s receiving a service and paycheck from these people, he wants to do the job he’s being paid for, and perhaps even show Lydia (and by extension, Gus Fring) what they’re getting.
Or it may just be that Mike cannot sit still. We know from Breaking Bad that Mike stays active in his line of work, one way or another, for a long time to come. Even if we didn’t, he doesn't seem like the type of man who would be fulfilled by or satisfied with watching baseball and drinking beer all day for very long. Mike is good at what he does, and when you have a talent like he does, not to mention someone who seems to appreciate it, it’s hard to let it go to waste.
And Gus might be in need of Mike’s services very soon. The part of the episode involving him and Nacho is the most “Breaking Bad prequel” portion of these proceedings. It’s the straightforward conclusion to Nacho completing his plan to induce a reaction in his boss. It gives Gus the chance to artfully try to fill in the power vacuum that Hector’s incapacitation creates, lest war follow. And his henchman’s scoping of Nacho ditching the evidence suggest he’ll have an angle to play.
These scenes are fairly slight, doing more to clean up after Hector’s reaction in the previous episode and hint at what might be the offing than moving things along. They’re about teasing a war in the New Mexico drug scene, but more about Nacho’s state of mind. You feel his jangle nerves, his concerns about the storm that might be ahead, his worries that Gus or Juan Bolsa know what he did. The episode spend a great deal of time just letting the viewer watch Nacho grow anxious and stew.
The truth is that not much happens in “Smoke.” A hell of a lot happened in last season’s finale, without much, or in some cases any, time for denouement or for the show to catch its breath. So a good chunk of this premiere is purposefully light on incident, more about the fallout of those series-shifting events and the effect they’ve had on Nacho, Mike, and Jimmy than about the next big bang in the Better Call Saul timeline.
That timeline seems to be speeding up though. The Jimmy McGill we meet at the end of “Smoke” seems closer to the man we meet in Breaking Bad. For most of the episode, he is almost inscrutable, with it unclear whether he’s stunned or unaffected or somewhere in between in his flat affect throughout the proceedings.
But the episode contrasts him with Howard, who is clearly broken up about this, and it presents a strange flip. Howard seems like the family member, while Jimmy seems like the staid business partner. Howard reads back an admiring obituary, and Jimmy doesn't even want to listen to it. At the funeral, Jimmy is shaking hands with all of Chuck’s colleagues and contemporaries, while Howard is comforting Chuck’s almost widow.
And the clincher of all of this is how Howard waits for Jimmy after the funeral, so he can offer a confession. Howard blames himself for Chuck’s death, knowing that someone as deliberate as his former partner didn’t let the lantern erupt by accident. Howard is broken up over his belief that him forcing Chuck out of HHM set him down this path, and he is trying to bare his soul and clear his conscience by confiding in the brother whom he imagines would be most hurt by this.
But unbeknownst to Howard, that confession only confirms to Jimmy that he was the superseding cause of his brother’s demise, that Jimmy’s own tip off to the insurance company is what set this whole thing in motion. And yet, Jimmy doesn't care, or at least doesn't want to be seen to outwardly. In a move that prompts a brief but palpable moment of disbelief from Kim, Jimmy starts whistling and going through this day, the day his brother was laid to rest, like it’s any other day.
Who knows if this is Jimmy giving into the man he’ll eventually become, the one who won’t accept blame for anything and has a casual obliviousness to those who stand in his way. Who knows if this is the sort of thing that slowly but surely pushes Kim out of his life. Who knows if Chuck’s last words to him truly obliterated whatever sort of affection Jimmy might have had for his brother, or even convinced him to be the amoral slimeball that Chuck told him was his true nature which he should embrace.
We don’t know what’s going on in Jimmy’s head during “Smoke.” All we know is that it ends with a version of Jimmy McGill who seems closer to Saul Goodman than ever, who seems ready to brush off his own brother’s death because that’s just the way things are, who is calm and cool and unbothered by any of it. And we know that it begins with a Cinnabon Gene who is anything but, who is unnerved and frightened by something as simple as a mistyped social security number, or an Albuquerque air freshener.
We still know the beginning and what seems to be the end game for Jimmy McGill’s adult life, and we know the beginning and what seems to be the end of his mourning for his brother. But Better Call Saul honors the complexity of, and trusts its audience to figure out, what happens in between.
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@andrewbloom Mike strolling around with the stolen lanyard around his neck = super alpha move
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
-33-"Can I make the call now?"
Holy shit! This show went dark.
What a way to start this episode.
Always appreaciate those Scenes in which we actall see how they do their stuff, in this case forge a gunfight.
So beatifull made…
Nacho is in a lot of Trouble and who is the source of it?"No more than a week."
Gustavo Fring, again. He creates chaos so he can climb the ladder to the top.
Genius. Who is his tool? The Cousins. Again.
Or should I say for the first time?
His talk with Juan Bolsa is another example how good Gus is.
Always just a little push in the right direction.
He can built an empire. He is made for that.
The Little smile of Gus...
Again: He is not the Gus we know from "Breaking Bad" yet.
He wouldn't have smiled there, not one bit.As he walked into the School, I got goosebumps, then I saw "Chemistry" and I thought:
Is he in Walts School? But it was even better!
As soon as I heard someone sing...
Gale is back! (Run Gale! Run!)
His love to chemistry is one of a kind.
I have to say, I believe him when he says he can make better than 67%!And now to Jimmy.
Eight minutes? More like Eighty minutes^^
Clever way to get this guy out of his office.
But who did he got for the Job?
Ira from Vamonos Pest! Nice cameo.For the letter from Chuck I only have one Thing to say:
The fact that Kim has Tears in her eyes and is so moved by his words and Jimmy had no emotions whatsoever, says it all.
Or does it?
The last conversation with Chuck was so cruel and These words sound off.
Did Chuck wrote the letter only to relieve his soul?
Guess Jimmy made up his mind. The rest is open to Interpretation.loading replies
@mrblonde I got the feeling that the letter had been written a while earlier, before Chuck and Jimmy's more recent relationship. It also seems to me that Kim is feeling tremendously guilty and it's going to reach a breaking point.
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
-33-"Can I make the call now?"
Holy shit! This show went dark.
What a way to start this episode.
Always appreaciate those Scenes in which we actall see how they do their stuff, in this case forge a gunfight.
So beatifull made…
Nacho is in a lot of Trouble and who is the source of it?"No more than a week."
Gustavo Fring, again. He creates chaos so he can climb the ladder to the top.
Genius. Who is his tool? The Cousins. Again.
Or should I say for the first time?
His talk with Juan Bolsa is another example how good Gus is.
Always just a little push in the right direction.
He can built an empire. He is made for that.
The Little smile of Gus...
Again: He is not the Gus we know from "Breaking Bad" yet.
He wouldn't have smiled there, not one bit.As he walked into the School, I got goosebumps, then I saw "Chemistry" and I thought:
Is he in Walts School? But it was even better!
As soon as I heard someone sing...
Gale is back! (Run Gale! Run!)
His love to chemistry is one of a kind.
I have to say, I believe him when he says he can make better than 67%!And now to Jimmy.
Eight minutes? More like Eighty minutes^^
Clever way to get this guy out of his office.
But who did he got for the Job?
Ira from Vamonos Pest! Nice cameo.For the letter from Chuck I only have one Thing to say:
The fact that Kim has Tears in her eyes and is so moved by his words and Jimmy had no emotions whatsoever, says it all.
Or does it?
The last conversation with Chuck was so cruel and These words sound off.
Did Chuck wrote the letter only to relieve his soul?
Guess Jimmy made up his mind. The rest is open to Interpretation.loading replies
@mrblonde you're a poet
[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.
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@andrewbloom "(Auf) Wiedersehen" in German also means "Goodbye". Which may simply refer to Werner leaving.