BuckNaked2k

It's a slow burn, and it's exacerbated by the fact they take 2 years between seasons.

windom

I'm getting more and more tired of their artsy cinematography and scenes that just have long lingering shots where nothing is happening. They've also really overused the whole "here's a scene that doesn't appear to have any connection to the existing characters and storylines, but eventually it'll become clear what's being shown" scenes.

I know all that came from over Breaking Bad, but I can't remember it being quite so bad.

Gunde

^ I agree. This season I've felt "get on with it already" in every cold open. They used to be so good at this, but this year it's like it's done just because. They don't offer anything really interesting, revelatory or necessary. Simply mood pieces that IMO are unsuccessful.
It's the complete opposite of Game Of Thrones They rushed their final season, Better Call Saul seems to be stalling theirs.

jpcamb

Not the best episode but still a very good one. The boxing ring was stupid, I was honestly a bit surprised Saul didn't look more jacked in the scene considering what he did to get ready for 'Nobody.'

Coral

That's the inherent problem with the series - they can only do so much and go so far as we know most of these characters will survive and be around for BB. They can't get too wild with story lines.
So they have to move at a slower, more deliberate pace and concentrate on creating some small amounts of suspense, and watching characters move around in this world doing the things they do - which also allows a little deeper character development. Otherwise, the final season would be cut down to only around 7 or 8 episodes.

CPA-ESQ.

I'm I going to be the only one to say that this season is just going off the rails in the "unbelievable" realm? This seems like a generic streaming service show.

1) Let's start with Lalo going from limping around the Mexican desert, nursing his wounds, on the run from Gus... to just going back to the bat cave - healing up, getting on the bat computer and doing an analysis of a name that some clerk at money gram gave him, found out the husband died, booked a flight to Germany (of course with a new identity, clean passport, no Interpol flags, etc.), tracked down his wife at a bar in Germany!!, and just knew that they would hit it off (and she speaks perfect English), is not in mourning over her dead HUSBAND, and she would invite him back to her place because she has the irresistible hots for him. She INVITES him back the next day, so he could walk in, with no risk of alarms, someone else at the house, nosy neighbors, and look around the house with the owner being there and could freely ask questions about things he sees and get answers, but he says NO - I am flying out tomorrow, and instead decides he will just break in when the owner is out. Okk....???

2) He will break into the house looking for what?? The wife said that the lawyers and whom ever came in and took all the records... but ok.. he is Batman, and I'm sure he will find something that everyone else missed. So he goes upstairs, turns on his "detective mode" and notices a ruler in lucite and now has a clue in solving the case. Ohh.. and he does all this while under duress and is about to be caught in the act by someone else in the house... but it's ok he has acquired a hand gun in GERMANY and with a silencer to boot! He will just kill the homeowner and just hope that not one notices or calls the police.. Really???

3) So back to Jimmy - Howard is confronted, and he seems to give a very plausible reason to Cliff as to who is behind the set up and why the evidence seems sketchy. But now, based on the extremely convincing evidence a seasoned Lawyer like Cliff has seen, he is 100% firmly in the Howard is a junkie camp (oh boy.. anything to keep this sucky plot moving along).

4) Gus has emerged from his COBRA base, and using his MI6 training figures out where Lalo might bring him to when he is captured. Jason Bourne..uhh..I mean Gus then sets up a trap to turn out the lights, plant a gun, and then count the steps in the dark to the gun. Oh that Gus, this is so in character, and we really see how he is such a hands-on bad ass in Breaking Bad.

New Lurker

Well that's fair based on the way they decided to go with this season but there were plenty of options to do more. Could have jumped up and matched it to the BB timeline and showed non-BB things. Saul existed outside of the Jesse & Walt orbit too. Could have come up with other things he was dealing with when they weren't in the office. Could have jumped it up and gave us a full season in the Gene timeline. Stuff like that were options they could have considered. They aren't as handcuffed as you make it seem.

I don't get the Lalo story at this point. Cartel thinks he's dead. Hector knows he isn't. In 4 years Saul seems to think he's still alive, so Gus probably isn't killing him this season. Spending an awful lot of time on this story if they aren't giving us a resolution.

There's only 8 episodes left. Let's get moving.

New Lurker

Well this one doesn't take a Batman. The internet existed in 2004 or 2005. He saw the video footage of Verner at the travel lodge. He knows what the guy looks like. It's not Batman level detective skills needed to Google obituaries under the name Verner Zeigler and find a picture of the man he saw in the travel lodge video.

He's also a high ranking member of The Cartel. He definitely has multiple clean passports and identities. How else do known criminals travel? One of them was DeGuzman. Which was the identity charged with the travel clerk's murder.

Its also been a few weeks since this all went down. If he twisted his knee and had some scrapes from the attack, how long do you expect he should be showing wear and tear from that? He didn't need any magic healing potions. Time heals all that minor shit. And we are at least two weeks post attack on Lalo's home.

I chalk up his seduction plan as Plan A. Had that not worked he could have just left and followed her home and watched for alarms and stuff. His plan didn't hinge on her being turned on by him. His plan hinged on confirming she was the right person. They happened to hit off so he never had to segue into Plan B.

Nitpicky. He's a high level criminal. With all kinds of connections. You don't think he can find someone in Germany selling illegal weapons? And again, a high level criminal that has all kinds of experience breaking into people's houses and shit. Like you & me, this would be ludicrous to pull off. But a dude that's been doing this his whole life? I totally buy he was be calm under pressure and be able to do what was depicted.

Also why would he care if a neighbor heard or called the cops? He'd be long gone before they show up. He's not gonna stick around and do a photo shoot with the dead body.

This one I'm with you on. Cliff should 100% be thinking it's a Jimmy plan. You would think at the golf course they would have bumped into either Kevin or at least someone who witnessed the Jimmy outburst. That places him where the drugs were found. Then client's of Kim's that were also involved with Jimmy make a claim about Howard are connected to them. Then Kim is at the scene of the hooker scheme. This is an easy one to connect dots on and he shouldn't be buying in so easily.

This is totally inline with the character they have presented. The guy who takes out the entire Cartel himself with one poisoned bottle of Tequila. The same guy who has this history of crazy violence in Chile everyone references and is afraid of. This is totally inline with Gus' character and I don't see any reason to question his thought process here. He's highly intelligent and ultra violent.


Finally tally: 3/4 things you complained about seem completely plausible to me... think you're over reacting a bit.

CPA-ESQ.

Good points, but the Cartel thinks he is Dead - he had no access to any of his connections. If he surfaced they would know he was alive - he even went so far as to kill the couple at the farm house so no one would know they saw him. So I have to believe that he has no network to call to get him another identity, cash, cards, papers to travel, access to airlines, Visas (yeah you need that to travel out of Mexico), someone to place a call to an arms dealer of the Cartel to get him a gun in Germany.

His only way to travel back into the US was via illegal smugglers (until he changed his mind) - If he had access to passports, cash, visas, travelers checks, credit cards, and his whole Cartel network he could have just taken a plane or booked a trip to NYC.

The Cartel just doesn't have a shoe box of passports, and Visas that you can just reach in and take one as needed. That is why local associates, dealers, and assets in the US and other countries are so valuable... if they could do it all themselves they would, but they can't.

I don't understand how one graduates from the "Harvard of Crime School" and becomes a high-level criminal bestowed with all the knowledge of criminals - breaking and entering, bank fraud, international espionage, passport fraud, untraceable murder, drug smuggling, hot wiring cars, bypassing alarms, evading cameras. They guy is a simple Cartel Enforcer who operates and is successful by intimidation where he can operate in a land run by corrupt politicians, and police. This guy is more of a cleaver than a scalpel.

Its 2004 / 2005 Yahoo was tied with Google as the top search engine (~30ish %) here in the US. The internet was not that powerful back then and slow as shit. What dial up was Lalo using in Mexico to do a search in a foreign country without the assistance of Google Translate? What local newspaper in Germany was digitizing their obituaries and what German specific search engine in Europe was scraping this data?

devilshalo

Well.. this makes more sense now

John Galt

I think part of their plan is to have this trace back to them. For what, I don't know...but they're too careless for their level of experience pulling cons. Plus Kim's comments about "you know what comes next".

johnnysd

On #3 the whole point is for Howard to figure it out and "get ahead" of what Jimmy and Kim are doing to defame him, so that the REAL event (with the retired Judge) will clearly not seem to be from Jimmy. Cliff with this second huge thing (whatever it is) will go back to believing both, and Howard since he was "on" to Jimmy will have no way to connect Jimmy to this new piece of information. Everything that has been done is an attempt to make sure that Howard does not know the really incriminating con that is coming next is from Jimmy and Kim. Since Howard cannot implicate Jimmy, Cliff will lose all confidence in his competency and force the Sandpiper case to close.

I did not actually find #1 and #2 all that far fetched other than Lalo being a pickup artist. Almost all educated people in Germany can speak English at least to the level she did. It might have made more sense for Lalo to find her in a beer garden rather than a bar but both do exist.

Everything associated with #4 is completely ludicrous and unlike the Gus we know.

This episode was sort of even more boring than the last few. They could have easily covered everything in this season in like 2 episodes. I actually do not mind the weird cold opens.

New Lurker

They kind of do actually. Like I'm quite certain all high level cartel people have multiple different identities and the paper work to go along with them. Hence him not having to panic when he got picked up for the travel lodge murder. He had all the necessary DeGuzman stuff.

The cartel thinking he's dead isn't that big of a hindrance if some of his papers and identities were stored at that farm house where he kept his look alike. Probably just slipped your mind which is which but visas are only needed for work. As in if a resident of Mexico gets hired in the US, the US company would be required to get him a work visa. Has nothing to do with anyone's travel, so that wouldn't come in to play here.

As far as what other people have said about Jimmy & Kim's plan being to purposely get get caught... I had not considered that at all. And now it seems so obvious. Of coarse the plan is transparent... if they want to get caught. Good catch because that didn't cross my mind.

JZ1276

I think there's more to the boxing then we are led to believe and it's part of Howard's plan for revenge. I also don't think Howard's "referee" was there just to be a referee.
Now, Lalo is in Germany getting "proof" that Gus was behind his attempted hit right? In what way does the super lab prove that Gus attempted to take out Lalo?

Josh-da-man

It's obvious that the guy Lalo killed to fake his death was a contingency plan he had set up in case he needed to bug out. Found a guy who looked similar to him, generously paid for him to have dental work done, switched the dental records, and he's got a fast way to make everyone think he's dead.

It's probably safe to assume that he has any number of fake identities at his disposal, and ways to get firearms into places like Germany. He's going to have networks to either smuggle a gun into the country, or find one within its borders.

Josh-da-man

Speaking of things that don't hold up, I thought that Saul's plan to frame Howard relied on a lot of stars to align.

It's one thing to sneak into the club and plant the baggie of fake cocaine into Howard's locker. But he had no way of knowing that Cliff would be standing there when Howard opened the door, or even see it fall out if he was standing there. He could have had his back to Cliff. I'm also not sure how Saul knew Cliff and Howard had lockers next to each other since he had to look up Howard's locker number.

And when he got IDed by Kevin and he was forced to make a scene, that whole plan to plant cocaine would have been compromised right there. That's something the whole club would be talking about for weeks, and Howard and Cliff would be able to put together how that baggie got in his locker.

And, at this point, it seems like Gus' plan to take out Lalo with the hidden gun is going to rely on a lot of things coming together at the right time.

Xander

Eh, Cliff buying the "Howard is a junkie" thing doesn't bother me since they've mentioned several times that his son was a junkie (and maybe died?), so he's overly sensitive to the whole thing. If he feels he didn't do enough/didn't see the signs early enough for his son, it makes sense to me that he would over-react/try to react earlier with Howard.

whotony

Wouldn’t a voluntary drug test solve the issue of being accused of a drug addict?

johnnysd

Like I said before the drug thing is NOT the con it is the setup and diversion.

Decker

My take is Lalo can’t take out Gus while he’s a top earner for the Cartel. But he’s been suspicious since he was told that big property was to construct a “chicken cooler”. I think he’s trying to get proof that Gus was building a Super Lab to make his own meth and cut the Cartel out. If he gets that, he could kill Gus with the Cartel’s blessing.

Josh-da-man

That's my take as well. He's in Germany trying to find out what Gus was building. He's been obsessed with it ever since he caught wind of it.

Decker