canyonwalker | Entries tagged with breaking bad

There's a lot of action in late season 5/early season 6 of Better Call Saul I've been skipping over. While Jimmy and Kim are doing their own things as lawyers and plotting together to embarrass Howard to force a quicker settlement to a class action case, there's been a turf war in the local drug cartel. Except it's not turf, per se, they're fighting for but power and influence. Lalo Salamanca and Gus Fring are trying to destroy each other, and their war keeps other regular characters like Mike and Nacho busy.

Nacho (Ignacio) Varga has been an interesting supporting character throughout the series. We meet him early in season 1, when Jimmy runs headlong into gang leader Tuco Salamanca. Nacho is smart and thoughtful, unlike many of the hot-headed Salamanca family members who run the gang. Nacho chafes at their leadership. Believing he'd be a better gang leader he plots to push them out. First he gets Tuco put in jail, then he causes Hector Salamanca to have a heart attack after secretly swapping his heart medication with a simple painkiller. Hector survives the heart attack but is mostly crippled and confined to a wheelchair, only able to communicate by tapping a bell with his finger. (This is the state in which we see Hector throughout the entirety of Breaking Bad. Now we know how he went from being a cartel capo to being a near-invalid in a nursing home!)

Nacho Vargo works his way into the good graces of cartel boss Don Eladio in Better Call Saul ep. 5.10 (2020)

Nacho Vargo works his way into the good graces of cartel boss Don Eladio in Better Call Saul ep. 5.10 (2020)

Despite all his plotting against various members of the cartel, Nacho rises through the ranks. By the end of season 5 he has a sit-down with cartel boss Don Eladio in Mexico. Eladio gives him his blessing to run things for the Salamanca branch of the cartel in the US.

It's hard to root for Nacho. He's a drug dealer and he's willing to murder people. But he's a thoughtful guy in a gang of psychopaths. And mostly he only murders people worse than him. So, yay? I do find myself rooting for him.

Alas, there's what I've dubbed the Star Wars Rogue One principle: a significant character in a prequel story who's not in the original pretty much has to die. I've remarked on this principle several times pondering how Kim Wexler, Jimmy's ride-or-die friend/girlfriend/wife would depart the story. It applies equally to Nacho Varga. He's nowhere in the Salamanca gang in Breaking Bad, so he's got to die in Better Call Saul.

The end for Nacho comes when Gus demands Nacho help kill Lalo. Gus has leverage over Nacho from having figured out he caused the stroke that paralyzed Hector. Nacho becomes Gus's mole in the Salamanca branch of the cartel because, if he doesn't, Gus will tell the Salamancas what Nacho did, and the Salamancas will kill him and his innocent father. Nacho doesn't have to shoot Lalo, though; he just has to use his position of trust with Lalo to unlock a door for a team of assassins to infiltrate the house where Lalo is staying.

Nacho does as asked, but the team of assassins fails. I swear, Lalo is the luckiest sumbitch alive. He bests a team of 5-6 assassins who have machine guns, body armor, and two-way radios. Nacho is on the run after the failed assassination. The whole Salamanca clan, plus their considerable network of allies, are looking for him.

Nacho begs Gus to get him out of Mexico, but Gus sets up Nacho to be captured. Gus can't be seen helping Nacho, as that would tip his involvement in trying to murder Lalo. But Nacho is shrewd enough to recognize Gus is hanging him out to dry— and also shrewd enough to realize that if the Salamancas capture him, they'll torture him and get the truth about Gus anyway. Nacho says as much to Gus and offers a deal: get me out of Mexico, and I'll say what you want me to say, then give me a clean death. Gus, impressed that someone matches his level of conniving, reluctantly agrees.

Nacho Varga threatens Juan Bolsa in Better Call Saul ep. 6.03

Nacho Varga threatens Juan Bolsa in Better Call Saul ep. 6.03

Things go a little bit sideways at the handover where Gus delivers a "captured" Nacho to cartel underboss Juan Bolsa and the Salamancas. Nacho has a script to follow, including staging an attack against Gus, at which point Gus's men will shoot him dead in apparent self defense. Nacho goes off script, breaks free of his restraints, and puts a gun to Juan Bolsa's head (pic above). Mike, monitoring the situation through a scope on a sniper rifle from 100+ meters away, whispers, "Do it!" But Nacho realizes that killing Bolsa would leave broad suspicion that he's working for Gus. So, after taking sole responsibility for plotting against Lalo, and declaring his responsibility for causing Hector's crippling stroke, he kills himself. He was going to die either way, but this way he protects his family from retribution.

As I described in my previous blog, for season 4 of Better Call Saul I'm organizing my blogs by story line rather than episode because there are multiple long-running subplots that stretch across multiple episodes. Earlier today I wrote about Gus, Mike, and the drug super-lab Gus is building. This blog I'll write about Gus's rivals, the Salamanca drug gang. Gus's story has some overlap with theirs, as you'll see.

At the start of season 4 family patriarch Hector Salamanca has been rushed off to the hospital after collapsing. Gang foot solider Nacho (Ignacio) Vargas had swapped out his heart medication, leading to him suffering a stroke during a stressful moment. Nacho starts to take over as de facto gang leader.

Gus owns a piece of him, though. Gus figures out from observing what happened the night of Hector's collapse and from one of his men getting copies of Hector's blood tests that Nacho swapped the meds. Gus and his men waylay Nacho and a colleague in 4.02, after the two think they've put one over on Gus's gang through their bold use of muscle. Nope! Gus apparently instructed his gang to give in easily to trick Nacho into false confidence while they laid a trap for him. Nacho's colleague is killed, and Gus plays the "I know what you did last summer" threat on Nacho to blackmail him into acting as an informer against his own gang.

Hector and the Coati

While Gus is working to weaken Hector's gang he surprisingly comes to Hector's aid in the hospital. ...Surprising, because why help an enemy recover? Except that Gus's reasons are diabolic. He explains his intent in 4.06 by telling a story from his youth at Hector's bedside. It's unclear how much Hector hears. When Gus was a child he nurtured a fruit tree to grow fruit he sold to support his family. He caught a coati, a wild animal related to raccoons, stealing his fruit. He trapped the animal and injured it, but it escaped. Rather than pursue the injured animal to kill it, Gus let it live longer— suffering the whole time with a broken leg.

Gus applies his coati vengeance to Hector by bringing in a stroke specialist from Johns Hopkins (a world-class teaching hospital, for those unfamiliar) to help Hector recover. The doctor works with Hector on therapy until Hector gains the ability to answer "yes" to questions by tapping a finger on his right hand. Other than turning his head a bit, that's all he can move, consciously. But it demonstrates he's aware of his surroundings and can think. The doctor is optimistic that with months more of specialized therapy Hector could talk and maybe even walk again. But that's when Gus sends the doctor back to her hospital, where a new program named in her honor has just been endowed. Gus's vengeance is to have trapped Hector with a reasonably alert mind in a paralyzed body. And we know from seeing Hector in this state in Breaking Bad that he's going to survive at least 5 more years with no improvement.

Nacho, the New Hector?

As we see Nacho growing into the role of gang leader there's a scene in ep. 4.08 that shows him behaving in ways he chafed at under Hector. When a drug dealer comes in short with his weekly pay-up, Nacho's new subordinate accepts the dealer's apology and tells him to bring the rest next week— an echo of something Nacho did in season 2. Nacho then calls the dealer over and injures him as punishment— which is what Hector forced Nacho to do in that earlier scene.

It's interesting Nacho is practicing the same behavior he chafed at under Hector because his motives for pushing aside the gang leaders— first his immediate boss, Tuco, then family don Hector— had seemed to be he thought the gang would run better, earn better, and avoid the authorities better, by using less violence as a first resort. That makes me wonder if Nacho's only motivation had been to fight his way to the top. That's odd, because Nacho doesn't present as someone focused on becoming top dog and willing to fight and kill to get there.

Lalo Takes Over

Nacho's upward mobility in the gang gets halted later in ep. 4.08 when yet-another Salamanca nephew, Lalo, arrives. I swear, Hector has no kids of his own that have ever appeared in the story (BCS or BB) but sure has an endless supply of nephews!

Lalo tells Nacho that he's "just here to help" but it's evident that he expects to take over, gradually. He's got the Salamanca name and goes way back with Hector. In ep. 4.09 he takes Nacho to visit Hector at the nursing home, where he regales Hector with stories about their long-past criminal history together. He gifts Hector the hotel-style bell, a trophy from one of their past crimes, that becomes a signature part of Hector's portrayal in Breaking Bad.

Lalo also has familiarity with the cartel bosses down in Mexico. In a meeting with Gus he gently proposes they rebel together. Gus responds, "I am satisfied with the current arrangement," and Lalo backs off, saying he was just joking.

Possibly true to his boast to Nacho that he's "just here to help" Lalo doesn't try to take responsibilities away from Nacho (yet) but instead starts trying to figure out Gus is up to. He stakes out Gus's chicken farm and writes down details about comings and goings. While spying through binoculars he sees a hubbub among Gus's security team. Unsure what's happening but sure it significant, he starts trailing Mike. This is where Mike is pursuing Werner after he fled the super-lab project.

Lalo gets some of the details of what Werner was doing before Mike catches up to Werner and shuts him down. While Nacho is more thoughtful and less violent than the other Salamanca nephews, or Hector, this level of initiative and sophistication is way beyond Nacho. And Hector. I expect season 5 will show the Salamanca gang, now led by Lalo, stepping up to counter Gus's machinations instead of letting Gus run circles around them.

I've written a number of times now about how Better Call Saul succeeds on the strength of its multiple character-driven plots. It's a show with not just an ensemble cast but an ensemble of interwoven stories. At first that seemed concerning. I worried that laconic cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) was upstaging Jimmy McGill's transformation from struggling small-time attorney to swaggering consigliere Saul Goodman. But the showrunners' continued strong writing has made the ensemble of subplots enjoyable.

Season 4 of the show sees a number of these subplots deepening and maturing. The show moves more away from a classic episodic structure. For that reason I've chosen not to write about Season 4 episode by episode— except for calling out the fantastic Sales lesson Jimmy demonstrates in 4.02— but instead discuss it plot by plot. This blog is about the plotline of drug lord Gus Fring (a very chilling Giancarlo Esposito) and Mike Ehrmantraut working together.

People who've watched Breaking Bad will recall the underground meth super-lab Fring introduced Walter White to. It was a major set-piece for a few season. In BCS season 4 we see the start of how it got built.

Gus and Mike interview lead construction engineers (ep. 4.05). The first, a Frenchman, is polished and sophisticated but possibly too optimistic. Then he makes a deal-killing mistake of bragging about another thing he built for a different criminal enterprise. Gus wants total secrecy and tells Mike to send him back overseas.

The next architect, Werner, has a more earthy demeanor but clearly an engineer's mindset and humility. He identifies specific aspects of the project that will be extremely difficult and shares his thinking on how to solve them. This impresses Gus, who judges character not by polish but by earnestness and skill. Plus, Werner will bring a trusted crew from Germany, who'll all go back to Germany when the project is complete. Gus hires him.

To keep the construction secret, all the work is done at night. But that's only the start of the degree to which the project is cloaked. The crew is all from overseas— and they're housed in a warehouse at the edge of town. Inside the warehouse are a few trailer homes plus various R&R facilities, including a bar! The men never see the outdoors, though. They're locked in this huge warehouse by day, and escorted in a closed van to the worksite after dark.

As much as Gus spares no expense— at Mike's recommendation— to make the workers' lives livable for this 8+ month long project, it does wear on them. At near 8 months they're only half done, and they know it. Tempers start to flare. And the chief engineer, Werner, wigs out from missing his wife. He engineers a clandestine escape from the secured quarters and tries to meet his wife at a resort for a weekend tryst.

In Gus's coldly calculating mind, the cardinal sin is to break trust. Werner had a small slip earlier, which Gus agreed to overlook. But Werner circumventing the security measures, sneaking out, and inadvertently slipping a bit of information to a rival gang spy in the process, is too much. In an emotional scene near the end of ep. 4.10 (the season finale), Mike shoots Werner on Gus's order.

In the next scene, Gus gives his chemistry protege, Gale Boetticher, a walkthrough of the half-completed underground space. Work has stopped as the crew have been sent home. Gale sees what the space it can become, though, and is impressed. But a quick glance at the story's calendar reveals it's going to be slow going from here. It's 2004 when work is stopped halfway through on the lab. We know from Breaking Bad it's only completed in 2009. That means Gus, who's a master at playing the long game, is going to be playing this particular long game for several more years before it bears fruit. And that, in turn, means Gus is likely to face a setback soon in this series. Likely it will come from new rival Lalo Salamanca, whom I'll address in another blog.

Wow, it's been two weeks since I've written about Better Call Saul. Well, I haven't watched it in at least that long, but I'd like to resume soon with season 4— so I'd better get caught on blogging about Season 3.

I've remarked many times that BCS is as much about its supporting characters as it is about Jimmy. I've already written about Jimmy's arc in season 3. Among other things, we see his first use of alter ego Saul Goodman, in ep. 3.06, though he hasn't yet connected it to shady lawyering. (In fact he creates "Saul" as a gimmick to separate a short-lived side gig from his lawyering.) So now I'd like to catch up on what happens with the main supporting characters. There are a lot of them, though, so I'll cover a few of them here and the rest in another blog.

Mike kind of fades into the background across the last several episodes of Season 3. That's kind of unfortunate as Mike is a really intriguing supporting character. The episodes where the writers have given basically an entire episode over to him have been among the show's best so far. But it's also a good thing because taking Mike out of the spotlight allows other storylines to move to the fore.

Mike's story has long been tied in with drug gang members Hector Salamanca and Nacho Vargas. Nacho's been working to take over the gang by pushing out the bosses. In season 2 he landed his boss, Tuco, in jail for several years. Now he's gunning for gang leader Hector.

Nacho plots to replace Hector's heart medication with a painkiller placebo. Hector pops these pills in emergencies when he feels heart palpitations. Sure enough, he has palpitations during a tense standoff with rival drug gang leader Gus Fring, and collapses when the fake pills don't help.

Seeing this backstory on Hector and Nacho is interesting because they're both characters in Breaking Bad— which, though it aired earlier, portrays events that happened a few years later. In BB Nacho is still not the gang leader. Tuco is out of jail. And Hector is still around— though he's incapacitated due to a stroke. The stroke Hector suffers in ep. 3.10 of BCS could be what leaves him confined to a wheelchair and unable to talk. There are still 3 more seasons of BCS, though, so it'll be interesting to see how the Hector/Tuco/Nacho story develops from here.

Finally, after 35 episodes of Better Call Saul, titular character Saul Goodman appears. In episode 3.06, the 36th episode of the series and just past the halfway point of the third season, Jimmy McGill uses the pseudonym Saul Goodman for the first time.

It's not what you'd think, though. Saul Goodman appears not as Jimmy's ambulance-chasing lawyer persona but as a TV producer who helps local small businesses create TV ads.

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Why did it take so long?

Jimmy creating his Saul Goodman persona 36 episodes into the story comes down to the showrunners needing to set a deliberate pace. I found the slow pace frustrating at first in the first few episodes but then realized it's necessary for good storytelling. The showrunners need to present their main character as a whole person. If they attempted a fan-service prequel, one where Saul-the-corrupt-lawyer is already Saul-the-corrupt-lawyer, they would have exhausted interesting storylines after just a few episodes. That's how The Book of Boba Fett fell apart after 4 episodes and became season 2.5 of The Mandalorian.

Why now, in the 36th episode?

Jimmy creates the alter-ego Saul Goodman in the 36th episode because he's hit bottom as a lawyer and needs to change. After a trial before the state bar in the previous episode, the verdict arrives: Jimmy isn't disbarred, but the board does suspend him from practicing law for one year.

As news of the suspension sets in Jimmy scrambles to shore up his finances. His income from specializing in elder law wasn't all that great to start with, and lawyers in private practice have a number of expenses. One is a series of TV ads he's paid for. They're not "Better call Saul!" though. He hadn't starting using that name yet. His latest slogan was "Gimme Jimmy!" He tries to get his money back for the unaired ads— it's thousands of dollars— but can't.

Jimmy gets the idea that if he can't get a refund he can run somebody else's ad in his slot. The TV station contract prohibits him from selling the ad time, though... so as a conniving lawyer he gets the idea of selling his services as a TV commercial creator and throwing in the ad time for free.

Why "Saul Goodman"?

Somewhere in Breaking Bad Jimmy quips that he changed his name to Saul Goodman because (slightly paraphrased) "It sounds Jewish, and clients trust a Jewish lawyer." That explanation always sat poorly with me because I'm related by marriage to a Goodman who's a lawyer— and he's not Jewish. And, moreover, I'm married into a Jewish family, and my Jewish relatives shake their heads at Jimmy's claim that "Goodman" sounds Jewish. Rosen, Katz, Siegel, Lieberman, Goldberg; those are a few common (Western European) Jewish surnames. Goodman is very Anglo.

Anyway, in this episode where Jimmy creates the character, he offers a different explanation for "Saul Goodman". As he explains to his girlfriend, Kim, who asks, he picked it because "Saul Goodman" sounds surfer-cool like, "It's all good, man!" 🤙

Across the first few episodes of Better Call Saul season 3, hit-man Mike Ehrmantraut continues to be a featured minor character. I've remarked many times that the series often feels lkke it should be Better Call Mike as his charcter arc gets so much screen time. But I say that in a fond way as Mike, played with acerbic wit by actor Jonathan Banks, is fun to watch.

Recall season 2 ended with a pair of cliffhangers, one for main character Jimmy (pre-changing his name to Saul) and one for Mike. That's one of those points at which viewers might wonder if this Mike should get title billing. In ones cliffhanger, Mike is interrupted from his attempt to kill drug gang boss Hector Salamanca by some unseen person who's tailed him into the desert and rigged his car's horn.

Spy vs. Spy

Season 3 for Mike begins with him trying to track down who's tracking him. He assumes, correctly, that his unseen adversary has placed a tracking device in his car. He literally tears the car apart looking for it, but it eludes all the places that he— as a former career police officer— knows to look for contraband in a car. Just as he's about to give up and leave his torn-up beater at the junkyard, inspiration strikes he finds it, a tiny tracker placed in his gas cap. Being a resourceful person he uses his contacts to buy an identical device and study how it works. Then he puts his tracker in his car's gas cap, runs down the battery on the mystery device to alert its owner, and waits to watch who comes to swap out the tracker on his car for one with a fresh battery.

Sure enough, a person comes by Mike's house late that night to swap the trackers. But the dead tracker is actually hidden nearby and the one in Mike's gas cap is his— meaning the mysterious adversary has just driven off with Mike's tracker, which Mike can follow. Mike, who stayed up all night watching the street from his darkened house, starts to follow.

Mike tails the man with his tracker to an empty industrial site. The man hands off the tracker to another person, who appears to be his boss. Mike tracks the boss as he drives around Albuquerque from the wee hours of the morning through sunrise, picking up packages stashed in out-of-the-way locations. Mike's mysterious adversary is a bag man for a drug gang.

Another Great Minor Character (Re)Appears

The bag man's final stop is a location that's familiar to all us fans of Breaking Bad. It's a Pollos Hermanos restaurant. The bag man leaves his bag— full of money plus Mike's tracker— at one of the restaurants owned by Gus Fring (portrayed by actor Giancarlo Esposito).

Restaurateur and drug kingpin Gus Fring in Better Call Saul (2015-2022)

Restaurateur and drug kingpin Gus Fring in Better Call Saul (2015-2022)

It's worth noting that Mike doesn't yet know who Gus Fring is— or that he's a drug lord. For all Mike knows the restaurant is simply a place where the bag man makes a handoff. Though his radio tracker shows him the bag isn't moving, so Mike reasonably knows that someone in the restaurant is high up in hierarchy of this mysterious drug gang.

Now that I'm feeling the flow of Better Call Saul I'd like to go back and write about some of the easter eggs in the opening episode. Here are three:

The pilot starts with a flash-forward to sometime after the finale of Breaking Bad. Saul has a new look with a bushy mustache and is working as a manager at a Cinnabon restaurant in a mall. This is an homage to a throwaway comment Saul made near the end of Breaking Bad, when he and Walter White were both paying "the disappearer" to manufacture new identities for them. "By this time next year I'll be lucky if I'm managing a Cinnabon in Omaha," Saul laments to Walter. At the Cinnabon Saul is scared by an intense-looking customer who he fears might be a person hunting him for his former identity. That night he goes home to his nondescript apartment and watches old videotapes of his "Better Call Saul" TV ads.

The next scene is in the present day, where Saul Goodman is still Jimmy McGill, struggling young lawyer. He's working public defender cases to get by because that's all the work he can get. After one case where his clients are convicted he walks out to the parking lot. We see him approach a Cadillac similar to what he drove in Breaking Bad... except his key unlocks the car next to it, a beat-up shitty old economy car, a Suzuki Esteem.

As Jimmy drives out of the parking lot we see the first of many run-on gag scenes with Mike Ehrmantraut as the parking lot attendant. As I noted before, viewers unfamiliar with Breaking Bad wouldn't know that in the future Mike is a fixer and hit-man working for a powerful drug lord. There are several scenes of Jimmy trying to coax Mike to accept a parking stub with an insufficient number of validation stickers. It's funny as a running gag... but it's also intriguing because it has most of us in the audience wondering, "Okay, when does Mike go from parking lot attendant to gangster?" (BTW, the answer to when is Mike's back-story is episode 1.06. And Mike's move into thug life is in 1.09.)

I quipped in my previous blog that Better Call Saul improves from its ploddingly slow series start not by making Saul's story more interesting but by telling a fascinating story about a supporting character, Mike.

If you come to Better Call Saul without ever having watched Breaking Bad you wouldn't recognize the significance of the character Mike Ehrmantraut. For the first 4½ episodes he's a bit player who's part of a running gag. Mike is a taciturn parking lot attendant. He's the ticket-taker at the City Hall parking garage. Saul— who hasn't even changed his name yet and is still struggling young lawyer Jimmy McGill— never has the right number of validation stickers on his parking stub. He's always one short. And he always tries his swashbuckling best to sweet-talk Mike into letting him skate. But Mike stonily refuses every time.

Hit-man Mike Ehrmantraut is a parking lot ticket-taker at the start of Better Call Saul

Hit-man Mike Ehrmantraut is a parking lot ticket-taker at the start of Better Call Saul

Finally in episode 5 Jimmy can actually afford the parking and tries to make amends with Mike for his history of shenanigans. He even hands Mike one of his new business cards. Yes, business cards! Jimmy's finally getting a bit of traction in elder law, writing wills and such for elderly clients. His card bears the slogan in colorful print, "Need a will? Call McGill!"

And with that we go into Mike's back story— and why he needs to call a lawyer— and how and why, in Breaking Bad, he's not a parking lot ticket-taker but a bag-man, a fixer, and a hit-man for a powerful drug lord.

Mike gets a knock on his door at home in Albuquerque. Outside on the steps and front walk are four police officers. Two are in plain clothes, two are in uniform. "You're a long way from home," Mike says to the one at his door, apparently recognizing him. "Yeah, so are you," the plain-clothes detective responds.

( Spoiler: The Setup )

The episode features an extended flashback scene to Philadelphia some weeks or months earlier.

( Spoiler: A Dark Night in Philadelphia )

Recently I watched episodes 4-5-6 in the first season of Better Call Saul. On the one hand, watching 3 "hours" at a time feels a bit like bingeing. On the other hand, these "hour" long shows are actually 42 minutes— the standard run length for a program that fits in a 60-minute slot with ads. Watching them largely without ads means I can watch 3 episodes in the time it used to take to finish 2. And watching TV for just two hours isn't bingeing. 😅

Anyway, bingeing-or-not-bingeing is not the main thing I wanted to write about here. It's my disappointment that the slow pace of the show across the first 3 episodes continues in the next 3 episodes. Yeah, we've seen some seeds of the to-be Saul get planted, like how Jimmy McGill first met members of the Salamanca drug gang— spoiler alert: he tried to con the gang leader's grandma with a staged traffic accident, and thing went sideways, badly— but it's just moving so slowly.

Episode 6, titled "Five-O" does get really interesting— but it does it by telling the backstory of supporting character Mike Ehrmantraut. It's like my frustration with the crappy writing of the Star Wars spinoff The Book of Boba Fett. The writers couldn't sustain a character-driven narrative around Fett, and they rescued the show by adding in The Mandalorian hero Din Djarin— or, as I dubbed the series at that point, Boba Fett Writes a Book About a More Interesting Character. Here it's Better Call Saul turning into Better Call a More Interesting Character: Mike.

Keep reading: Mike's fascinating back-story in Better Call Saul 1.06.

I've taken the plunge into watching Better Call Saul on Netflix. It's a prequel spinoff from the highly acclaimed Breaking Bad series, which I thoroughly enjoyed watching over the past few months. (Note I'm watching these shows belatedly. Breaking Bad aired between 2008-2013, Better Call Saul ran from 2015-2022.) After watching the first 3 episodes I'm... disappointed.

Better Call Saul: Season 1 (image courtesy of Amazon)

Better Call Saul: Season 1 (image courtesy of Amazon)

Nothing's wrong with the show. The characters are believable, it's well acted, well written, and the production values are high. So many new shows I see on streaming services fail one or more of these points. So to say "Nothing's wrong" with it puts it ahead of the curve. But at the same time, yes, I'm absolutely damning it with faint praise. To be worth watching a show needs rate better than merely "not stupid" or "not fatally flawed". It needs to actually be interesting. And so far this show is not interesting.

Why is it not interesting? It's not interesting because it's too slow. Three episodes in, it feels like nothing has happened.

What am I expecting? Well, similar to how Breaking Bad was conceptualized as Walter White's transition from Mr. Chips to Scarface I've been expecting Better Call Saul to answer the question that struck me at Saul's first appeared in Breaking Bad S2E8: How did this ambulance-chasing lawyer become a drug-gang consigliere?

Directionally, I'm confident that's where it's going. But it's taking way too long to get there. In the first three episodes Saul (played by Bob Odenkirk) isn't even Saul. He's still using his given name of James McGill. He's a down-on-his-luck young lawyer. His office is in the back of a nail salon, and his only work is taking on Public Defender cases to scrape by. A lot of time is spent on McGill's supporting his mentally ill older brother, pursuing an ambiguous relationship with a lawyer at a big-dollar firm who might be an ex-girlfriend, and his personal rivalry with the managing partner at that big-dollar firm. Oh, and the running gag twice each episode of him fighting with the parking lot attendant each time he's at City Hall and doesn't have the right number of validation stickers on his parking stub.

Compare this to Breaking Bad where, all in the opening episode, Walter White went from mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher to cooking his first batch of methamphetamine and killing at least one rival drug dealer to protect himself. Clearly that show didn't dwell very long on introducing the character and the context. While that's the point of Act I of Shakespeare's 5-act structure, Breaking Bad wisely understood setup can't be 20% of the series.

So, what keeps me watching? Primarily, one, it's my optimism from so many fans of Breaking Bad who recommended this show that it's going to get better soon. Two, it's that at least it doesn't suck right now. And three, it's that running gag with the parking validation. The parking lot attendant McGill constantly butts heads with is Mike Ehrmantraut (played by Jonathan Banks). In Breaking Bad he's a hit man and drug gang lieutenant. Thus as much as I'm watching to enjoy the character arc of ambulance-chasing, sad-sack lawyer James McGill becoming drug-gang consigliere Saul Goodman, I'm eager to see how the guy who'll become a drug-gang lieutenant and hit man is hiding out as a quiet parking lot attendant.

Last night I watched El Camino, the movie that's a postscript to the Breaking Bad TV series. I'm not sure what I expected of it but it... wasn't what I expected. I mean, I knew it's a follow-on to the TV series. I knew it focused on Jesse Pinkman's character as he tries to recover from the terrible things that happened to him in the last two episodes the series. I guess I expected it'd cover a longer span of time than basically two days. In that sense the movie was like two bonus episodes of Breaking Bad.

The movie gets its name from the model of a vehicle Todd Alquist owned that Jesse stole in the penultimate scene of Breaking Bad. The El Camino was produced by Chevy from the 1960s through the mid 1980s and is recognizable to anyone who lived in the US in that era because it was unique as a successful hybrid pickup truck/car.

Jesse parts with the movie's namesake car within the first few scenes. He drives it to Badger and Skinny Pete's house late at night. They take him in and hide the car. The next morning Jesse calls Old Joe, the guy who owns a junkyard and enjoys giving the middle finger to police, to dispose of it. But Old Joe first checks the car with a radio transponder and finds that its LoJack system has just been activated. He nopes out there quickly, warning the men that the cops are probably only minutes away. Skinny Pete quickly forms a plan to swap cars. Jesse narrowly escapes the cops arriving en masse.

I knew that Badger and Skinny Pete would be in the movie; the trailer that ran right after Breaking Bad showed them. I find them oddly lovable minor characters. They share a scene at the house trash-talking each other's video game driving skills that's downright hilarious. But just like the namesake El Camino disappears from the movie after the initial scenes at their house, so do Badger and Skinny Pete. The rest of the movie is Jesse trying to get out of Albuquerque, getting money and settling an old score on the way. In that sense it's kind of like what the final episode of Breaking Bad was for Walt, except instead of returning to Albuquerque, Jesse's trying to leave.

The movie includes a number of flashbacks to when Jesse was held captive by the Alquist gang. These show Todd Alquist, who was Jesse's primary jailer and the guy who was learning to manufacture meth from him, as a real monster. Forget his occasional I'm-a-polite-young-man-who's-socially-inept act; even though he is socially inept, that politeness is a sociopath's trick to disarm people.

In one of the flashbacks Todd shows Jesse he killed his housekeeper because she found his hidden money. She didn't steal the money; she merely saw it. He was nonchalant about killing her. He even left her dead body on his kitchen floor for days.

The flashbacks show that Todd broke Jesse's spirit, getting him into a Stockholm Syndrome type situation. Jesse had an opportunity to kill Todd— Jesse had a gun in his hand, and there were no witnesses within miles— but Todd sweet-talked him into surrendering with the promise of getting pizza and a beer together before returning him to his underground cage. Of course, by the final episode of Breaking Bad, Jesse was was ready to kill grievously injured Todd with his bare hands.

Jesse goes through some more stuff before getting out of Albuquerque. He needs money to pay Ed Galbraith, "the disappearer", so he goes hunting for Todd's hidden stash. He finds the money but gets crossed up with thieves who are also after Todd's stash. The thieves trigger another flashback. Jesse realizes he has a personal score to settle with them. Jesse says goodbye to his parents in a melancholy scene that shows they no longer care about him as a son, only as a dangerous fugitive who's best in police custody asap. And likewise he uses them only as a means to help his escape, misdirecting them as he knows they'll immediately tell police whatever he tells them.

In the end Jesse gets the money he needs to pay off Ed. Ed smuggles him off to Alaska. It's a place where, in a flashback at the start of the movie, Mike Ehrmantraut suggested Jesse go to start a new life. Ed echos Mike's words when he drops Jesse off in Alaska in the final scene, telling him he has an opportunity few people get to start fresh and become whatever new person he'd like to become.

In the series finale of Breaking Bad, Walter White dies. I say that without revealing spoilers because we all knew from the first episode that's how the story would end. The character has lung cancer, and even the two years he's made it in this episode is a lot longer than he was originally expected to survive. Plus, he's involved in a dangerous criminal enterprise, as a drug kingpin— and now a most-wanted fugitive from justice. You know that if the bad guys don't get him first, the good guys will. Or the cancer will.

One thing I wondered was whether Walt would go out with a bang or a whimper. It's a trope of crime gang stories that when the kingpin is the protagonist, he goes down in a blaze of glory. But the shift in tone late in the series to empire shattered suggested Walt may go out not with a bang but a whimper. Ultimately the finale is a bit of both.

There's plenty of action in episode 5.16 as Walt acts to tie up loose ends before he dies. We've already seen from flash-forwards in earlier episodes that he returns to Albuquerque and buys a machine gun from an illegal arms dealer. Then he visits his old house, now empty and vandalized, to remove the vial of ricin poison he'd hidden inside. Now that the timeline has caught up we see that using these weapons isn't the first thing Walt does in Albuquerque.

( Episode spoilers (click/tap to open) )

I recently finished watching the series Breaking Bad, the final two episodes, after taking a break from watching for a few weeks. Why a break? For one, the holidays were coming up, with travel and stuff. And two, the events of the previous two episodes, 5.13-5.14, marked a shift in tone of the series. We saw the climax where Walt's empire crumbles around him and everyone he cares about turn to hate him. That's the climax in the Shakespearean tragedy sense. What comes next in Shakespearean structure is Act V, the moral, where the story counts the wages of sin. And for all the sinning Walter White has done... well, the count is going to be grim. I took a break before watching.

Indeed, in episode 5.15 the tone of the story switches from action and violence to grief, loss, and impotence, and toothless rage.

( Episode 5.15 Spoilers (click to open) )

It's been a few months since I've tallied statistics about blogging, plus now it's the end of the year— time for retrospective.

I posted 70 journal entries in December. At an average of nearly 2.3 posts/day that's well over my stretch goal of 2/day. It was one of my bloggiest months since January 2024. Blogging about the trip my wife and I took to Panama— which I haven't even finished catching up on yet—was a big part of that blogginess but not all of it. Even earlier in the month I was averaging 2 posts/day, mostly through writing about Breaking Bad as I was watching it via our new Netflix subscription. That's also not done... but at least I'm not backlogged on it. I've got two more episodes to watch.

For the year in full I write 707 journal entries. That averages out to a bit over 1.9/day... just short of my stretch goal. It's down from my 2023 tally of 760 (2.08/day) and even 2022's total of 765. I was off my pace at various times this year as I struggled for motivation in writing. Nearly nobody I know writes journals anymore. They've all moved to Discord (mostly) and Facebook (some). Those tools certainly have their place, but that place involves short messages, 1-2 sentences at a time. I still prefer to think— and express myself— in longer form.

I'm treating season 5 episodes 13-14 of Breaking Bad as one long episode. The break between the two episodes as aired is in the middle of a big gunfight. What a frustrating spot to have to wait another week to see what happens! I'm so glad I'm streaming it after the series is finished so I can just keep watching. That said, ep. 5.14 is widely considered by critics the best episode in the series. Many call it the best hour of TV aired that year. Some say it's the finest TV episode of the 21st century.

Anyway, this pair of episodes together are where the story goes totally Shakespearean Act V. As in, tragedy. People die. Good people die. And Walt sees everything he's built, the empire he failed to build earlier in his life, crumble and fall.

In S5E13, Walt and Jesse are both trying to flush each other out to hurt the other. Jesse threatens to destroy Walt's trove of cash, now hidden. And Walt has now decided it's time to kill Jesse. He hires the Aryan Brotherhood gang to do it. What Walt doesn't know, though, is that Jesse is currently hard to find because he's working with the DEA. ...Or not with the DEA, per se, but with two agents, Hank and his long-time partner, Gomey, who are pursuing Walt "off the books" for now.

At the climax of 5.13,( Eps 5.13-5.14 Spoilers (click to open) )

Fallen Empire

The last scene of the episode shows Walt going into hiding. He's hired the local guy who specializes in creating new identifies. He leaves town, presumably for New Hampshire.... Flash-forwards earlier in the season show Walt using an assumed name and saying he's from New Hampshire.

Walt's life, his empire, is a shambles. He's watched friends and relatives be killed or dragged off by thugs. He's alienated from his family. Everything he did for his family, they likely won't benefit from now. In fact they'll probably spend the rest of their lives picking up the pieces of the wreckage he's created.

Now that I've vented my frustration about the slow pace of several of the episodes in Breaking Bad season 5 I'll write about what's actually happened. This is a summary across eps. 9-12, the first half of season 5 "B".

Hank is onto Walt. Hank's "OMFG" moment came at the end of S5E8 when he discovered a book of poetry in Walt's house with a note from (murdered drug maker) Gale Boetticher in it. Hank subsequently spent a week or more reviewing DEA case files in his garage to be sure and to see if he could build a case against Walt. Why do it in his garage and not the DEA office? Two things: One, even at the end of his week or two he has no hard evidence, and his superiors have already signaled, strongly, they consider this case closed and object to him dedicating expending agency resources on it. Two, as he explains to Marie, his career would be over 15 minutes after he tells his superiors. A drug kingpin is a relative of a DEA office leader? Not a good look.

( Plot outline, keep reading... )

It's been a while since I've blogged about Breaking Bad. ...Well, not a long time. My last journal entry about it posting yesterday! But since writing "How Much is Enough?" regarding episode S5E8 I've now watched four more episodes before wanting to write again.

Why go four episodes before writing? Frankly it's because the episodes are slow. It's lots of relationship drama, lots of stuff that in a book would be interior monologue, lots of people calling each other and leaving tense voicemails because nobody wants to actually talk.

I tell you, if I were watching this series live and having to wait a week for each new episode I would probably scream. These four recent episodes have not been worth waiting a week apiece. Fortunately I haven't had to play the previous-century TV waiting game because I'm catching up on these episodes via streaming. They're all right there on demand. If one episode sucks but I'm still in the groove and want to see some action, I can click "next"— or, actually, just let the system do it because it's the default— and see if the next episode has any cool action like, I dunno, someone actually answering their phone.

Breaking Bad S5E8 is an episode where Walt hits his stride. His stride as a drug lord, that is. After the deal he negotiated with a rival gang lord from Phoenix (previous episode) he's free from the having to find or manage a distribution operation and can focus on what he does best: the chemistry. He just has to rub out 9 witnesses in prison first... which he does with the help of the Aryan Brotherhood, whom he pays an untold amount of money to kill 9 men in 3 different prisons all within a window of 2 or 3 minutes (to prevent news of one killing leading to the protective countermeasures on the others).

Once all those murders— and, of course, disposing of Mike's body— are behind him, Walt falls into a routine. Working with new guy Todd now as his assistant instead of Jesse, Walt cranks out batch after batch of blue meth. We viewers see a montage.... Walt and Todd mix chemicals, sort finished product into bins and bags, drop the bags into barrels of some other chemical for smuggling. Later Walt gets a should bag of money from Lydia or someone else and brings stacks of cash hidden inside cases of soda cans to Skyler for safe keeping and laundering. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The screenplay clearly shows that time is passing, though it doesn't indicate exactly how long this goes on. Given the time involved in cooking one batch— and several batches are shown— I guessed it's at least a few weeks. Commentary from the showrunner indicates a few months pass.

During one of Walt's deliveries of cash to Skyler, she says, "Come with me, I want to show you something." She takes him to a storage cube where she's keeping all the money he's brought in. The stockpile of cash is HUGE.

"How much is it?" Walt asks, before we even see the pile of money.

"I don't know," Skyler says in clenched anger.

"How much is enough?" she asks. "How big does this pile need to be before I get my life back?"

Then the camera pivots around to show this:

Skyler shows Walt the cash he's earned in Breaking Bad S5E8 (2012)

Skyler shows Walt the cash he's earned in Breaking Bad S5E8 (2012)

How much money is that? The crew that staged the scene estimates it's around $80 million— or would be, if it were real money.

Finally Walt has built the empire he wanted. But already we can see he'll never enjoy it. He's still facing cancer. And even his family will not be able to enjoy it. Skyler points out in this scene, "It's more than we could spend in 10 lifetimes. I'd need [to own] 100 carwashes to launder it."

Here the moral dishonesty of Walt's motivation is exposed. He didn't do this for his family, as he so often insisted. He did it for himself, and only to prove he could. To feel the power of having built an empire. An empire that will crumble to dirt before his family enjoys even a fraction of it.

The size of the cash pile shocks even Walt. He quits the business. The screenplay then shows another montage with the kids moving back into the house and Walt and Skyler getting back to some sense of normalcy— on the surface, at least. But then empire starts to crumble.

( The empire starts to crumble! (Spoilers) )

After a lot of talky scenes in the previous episode, where Walt explains at (almost painful) length why he won't take a $5 million exit strategy, Season 5 episode 7 of Breaking Bad returns the standard of action, tension, drama, and tragedy from two episodes earlier, the one about robbing a freight train. In this episode Walt strikes a deal to move further up the food chain as a criminal gangster and Mike makes his exit, all while the DEA tightens its net around the bunch of them.

Walt Commands Respect

The episode's title, "Say My Name", comes from a tense scene in the desert where Walt bargains with a rival drug gangster from Arizona. The rival, Declan, doesn't know Walt and treats him dismissively. Walt, who's feeling his oats, fires back— verbally—with a taunt that Declan's gang can't make meth anywhere near as good as his "99.1% pure" product and a boast about taking out Gus Fring.

"Say my name," Walt hisses, after Declan again claimed not to know him.

"You're Heisenberg,"

"You're damn right."

Yeah, that retort sounded a lot like a line from Shaft.

The Cops Tighten the Net

While Walt is proving to himself that he can build an empire, the cops are tightening their net around it. Hank's team has been gunning for Mike, as they strongly suspect he's the street boss in the gang. They get a warrant to search Mike's house but find nothing. Mike knew they're were coming via the bugs Walt planted in Hank's DEA office and threw away or hid all his contraband elsewhere. Mike has a $5 million payout from the baller deal Walt negotiated, and he's ready to get out of the business and disappear anyway.

The DEA team is frustrated that Mike's place is clean. They know he's connected, though. Hank notices in the paperwork that all 9 of Mike's known criminal associates have the same lawyer. He directs his team to follow that lawyer. They track him to a local bank and apprehend him with a gym bag full of over $100,000 cash he's placing into safe deposit boxes.

The cops move to arrest Mike after this. Walt hears via the bugs that they're coming for him and calls him, frantically. Mike almost doesn't answer Walt's call, but it's good he does. He looks up in time to see cops starting to encircle the park where he's relaxing while his granddaughter plays on the swings. Mike's wily, but it's not clear if he's going to make it out.

Mike's Exit

( Read more... )

Throughout the series of Breaking Bad, Walt has told himself (and his wife) he's doing all the evil things he's doing as a rising drug lord for his family. His family would be bankrupted by his medical bills for cancer treatment. The drug money takes care of that. His family would be unable to afford basic living expenses once he dies. The drug money takes care of that. After his death his wife would have to go back to work, with an infant daughter and a special-needs son, just to come close to making ends meet. The drug money takes care of that. There'd be no money to send the kids to college. The drug money takes care of that. Walt even calculated how much money he needed, early in the series. He came up with a figure of $727,000. He just needed to get that much money, for his family, and then he'd be done.

Walt's financial target proved to be a moving goal. Partly that was because earning money illegally entailed challenges he didn't anticipate. There were costs for equipment. Costs for shady lawyers and payoffs. Costs for things breaking or being stolen. Costs for laundering money. That was a big one. He couldn't just leave his family a surprise bank account with three-quarters of a million dollars after a subsistence job teaching high school. He and Skyler— who, by that point was helping him launder money— boughtg a car wash business for $800,000 to launder excess profits through it.

Along the way Walt also raised his sight higher. That's laid bare in this episode, entitled "Payout", where Walt, Mike, and Jesse have the option to take $5 million, each, to be done with the drug trade. The money would come from selling the chemicals they robbed from a freight train to a rival drug lord in another state. They take the money and be out of the drug trade.

Mike wanted out. It was his idea to set up this deal. He was ready to retire, as the feds were tightening the noose around him and his former associates.

Jesse wanted out, too. In his evolution as the conscience of the Odd Throuple, he was so troubled by a gang member murdering an innocent boy during the train robbery that he wanted out.

But not Walt. Walt turned down the $5 million exit strategy. It wasn't good enough for him.

Indeed Walt had moved his own goal posts, significantly. He explains in a scene with Jesse that he's now no longer thinking about "doing it for his family" but doing it, basically, to settle a score with the universe.

Back in grad school, Walt explains, he founded a small scientific company with two fellow grad. When they had a falling out— something involving differences between him and his fiancée, who married the other business partner after she and Walt broke up—Walt sold his 33% stake in the company for $5,000. "That company is now worth over $2 billion, billion with a B," he laments to Jesse. "And I sold my share for a few months rent." Now he's not out just to get enough money to provide for his family after he's gone; he's out to build an empire to rival the one he lost.