Headscratchers / Better Call Saul

For Headscratchers related to the first 2 seasons, see here.

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Season 3

Shoplifter

• Why does "Gene" give away the location (photo booth) of the shoplifter with the corduroy shirt?
  • He sold out the kid because he's living with a false identity after going dark from his time with Walt. The last thing "Gene" needs is to get involved with police to protect some random shoplifter. Although at the end there, he can't contain himself and blurts out that the kid should get a lawyer, but still, better that than having to explain why he covered for a thief when they inevitably find out later.

"Garden/Lily Pond" scene

• Don't get me wrong, I understand the old lady's fear of "some dirty judge" messing with her property but what difference does it make if her request to request both "garden" and "lily pond" if it's included in her property?
  • Neither request was necessary. As Kim says, the garden itself was already included in the property and didn't need to be mentioned. It was meant as another demonstration that Jimmy attracts an eccentric clientele.

The "problematic chain of evidence"

• How does the tape of Jimmy's confession, in Howard's words, include a "problematic chain of evidence"?
  • The recording is admissible in court, at least as a fair and accurate representation of Chuck's testimony. By which I mean that the "evidence" being admitted is Chuck's statements about Jimmy's confession. But he can also testify that the recording accurately represents that conversation, so it can likely be admitted into evidence that way: as a representation of his testimony, not as a piece of evidence itself. To admit the recording as the evidence itself, substantively, is a totally different story. That's where Howard was going at: the tape needs to be properly authenticated, and Jimmy could easily duke it out over whether the tape recorder was tampered with, properly functioning, or hell, whether or not that was even Jimmy's voice on the tape.
  • If you're taped admitting something, the tape itself won't hold up because the person being taped can say they were coerced or it wasn't their voice or something.
  • Howard is looking at this out of self-interest. He sees that Chuck's disdain for Jimmy is far deeper than he ever thought and doesn't want to associate himself or HHM with Chuck's borderline lunacy and dirty tricks to destroy his own brother. Everyone in the show has talked about how brilliant and meticulous Chuck is, but I think in that moment Howard saw Chuck acting out of irrational emotion for the first time. You could tell from the way he phrased his response as well as his body language that Howard swallowed his real feelings and/or comment and let Chuck assume he was on his side. Instead of immediately siding with Chuck or making a comment about Jimmy he says, "I don't even know where to begin" — ie, there's a lot he'd like to say to Chuck against his treatment of Jimmy in addition to whatever it is Chuck wants to hear.
  • It also looks like Howard might be skeptical of Chuck's story. There's really no reason he or anyone else in-the-know wouldn't. They'd just assume Jimmy told Chuck whatever bullshit would talk him down from his insane state. What's easier to believe, that (particularly given the situation and source) or what actually happened, which for now sounds like some utterly nutty conspiracy theory for which there's no evidence?
  • Howard seems to believe Chuck crossed some line here. Remember in season 1, he shot Chuck this dirty look after he was made to look like he personally didn't want to hire Jimmy. Then there's his reaction after finding out Kim knew about the commercial and Chuck expected Howard to punish her ("What are you going to do about it?"). Howard isn't being deceived by Chuck. He knows full well he's being pushed around by his superior. But now it's becoming obvious to Howard that Chuck's disability is outweighing what was once legendary ability. As season 3 progresses, Howard has less patience putting up with Chuck and starts making moves of his own for the sake of protecting HHM, including ultimately cashing him out of the firm at the end. Which could be seen when Chuck played the recording for him: the otherwise very respectful Howard openly dismissed the idea of being able to use the recording for anything and seemed to be almost admonishing Chuck for going through with getting it at all.
  • Howard is trying to talk Chuck down because Chuck's plan is nutty and quite radioactive to HHM if it is exposed, and this does come to pass in Jimmy's hearing.

The Air Force Captain

• How big of a loss it would've been if Jimmy, as requested by that Air Force Captain, removed that commercial involving the fake war veteran "Fudge" Talbot?
  • It actually wouldn't have been a big loss, and for a moment, Jimmy even considers listening to the Captain's wishes. However, the Captain's words reminded him of being berated by Chuck, so Jimmy's pride kicked in, preventing him from admitting any wrongdoing.
  • They don't refund commercial time and he needs a new commercial, that's kind of costly for someone who spent most of his bonus in starting an office.

Mike the tracking bug detector

• Did Mike replace the bug from the car he took apart and put it in his other car? If so, why is that not suspicious to the guys tracking him, since they replaced the battery that ran out? Unless they bugged both anyway?
  • Mike got a second tracker from the shady vet, switched it out with the one that was already in the gas cap, and drained the battery of the first one. He knew that when they saw that the battery was dead, they'd send out someone to replace it. Since they weren't going to hover around the car for the time it would take to replace the battery out of fear of being noticed, they just swapped it out for a fresh tracker in a different gas cap. But the one they took had Mike's tracker in it, not theirs, so now Mike can follow them.
  • He put the tracker on his primary vehicle. I imagine those who came to swap it were just henchmen (Gus's presumably) who only knew that they were going to pick up a tracker, not what the vehicle was. They think "It's the tracker, must be the right car."
  • How did Mike deduce there was a tracker on his car? Because although he didn't tell anyone where he was going or what he was up to, Nacho somehow knew exactly where to stand to block Mike's line of fire from that hilltop, and someone found his car to set off the alarm and plant a note reading "DON'T". Nobody should have known Mike was there, but they did.
  • We also can safely assume the guys replacing the tracker aren't the same guys who put it on the clunker Mike acquired for the attempted sniper job. A careful crime lord like Gus Fring or Hector Salamanca would split up the duties so that no one else really knows what's going on.
  • Some viewers might be confused given that Mike's subplot is relatively light on dialogue compared to Jimmy's plot. Given that, here's what happens:
  1. Mike sees the note, looks around, and seeing no one within visible sight, realizes he's been bugged. He also probably realizes that Nacho might or might not be in cahoots with whoever has bugged him, given Nacho was blocking Mike's line of fire to keep him from getting a shot at Hector.
  2. So he hightails it until he gets to a safe stopping spot. Here, he does a preliminary search of the car to see if there are any visible trackers.
  3. Unable to find it, he goes to the salvage yard and spends a couple hours tearing the car apart (he can do this because he only acquired the car for the sniper hit) with no success.
  4. While waiting for the cab to pick him up, Mike notices that the place sells replacement fuel caps and realizes that's one place he didn't bother to check. So he grabs the gas cap from the car, takes it apart, and finds the tracker.
  5. Mike figures that whoever planted a tracker on this temporary car probably planted one on his Chrysler too. A suspicion that he confirms when he gets home.
  6. Mike writes down the model of this tracker, and puts the bugged gas cap back on his car.
  7. He goes to the courthouse parking lot booth as usual with the tracker, so that the guys who installed the tracker don't realize he's found it. Once there, he leaves it in the parking lot to make it seem like he's still at the booth, and drives off for his secret meeting with the vet.
  8. Caldera buys him the same tracker with monitoring kit.
  9. Mike tries out the new tracker/monitor at home and notices that the monitor has a warning that will go off when the battery hits a certain level, at which point whoever's watching him will have to send someone out to replace it.
  10. He retrieves the bugged gas cap from the car, switches the tracker inside it with his own, then puts the fuel cap with his own tracker back in the car.
  11. He then hotwires the battery to the radio and runs the radio for a couple hours to drain the battery, to send out the low battery warning. Once the battery is drained, he throws out the old tracker.
  12. Mike then sits by the window, munching on pistachios, waiting for the grunt to show up to do the switch. Some hours later, a henchman does arrive, switches out the tracker for a new one, and drives off. What the henchman doesn't know is that the tracker he's driving away with is Mike's live tracker, allowing him to track their location. Mike then grabs his gun and the monitor, throws the replaced tracker into a ditch (so that the stalker will think he's still at home), and drives off in hot pursuit of his live tracker.

Mike's gun

• What did Mike do with the rifle that he had in back of his station wagon after he tore apart the car in the salvage yard looking for the tracker? He took a cab home and we never saw the gun again. Did he leave the rifle at the salvage yard?
  • He took it home with him in the cab. Hunting in New Mexico is pretty common. It's very possible that he just told the cab driver that it was his hunting rifle and stashed it in the trunk of the cab.

Period vs. semicolon

• What was up with Kim's indecisiveness over whether to use a period or semicolon on that document?
  • It's possible that she is paranoid about making a mistake on her documents after getting Mesa Verde, who chose Kim over Chuck because of the "simple mistake" he made.
  • According to Rhea Seehorn, Kim is having doubts about even working with Mesa Verde because she knows she got them through less than legal methods. Look at how uneasy she is when Paige recounts Chuck's arrogance at the Banking Board hearing and says "Guys like [Chuck], when crunch time comes, it's always someone else's fault." Somehow, fiddling with the punctuation suggests she is having trouble reconciling her role in the crime. Score another point for the toxic McGill brothers who slowly take everyone down around them. Yay for the gift of family dysfunction that keeps on giving.
  • She's stressed as hell. She's a solo practitioner dealing with a major client that, very recently, fired a well-known and established firm over a relatively minor mistake, which is the sort of gossip that quickly spreads in banking and lawyer circles. On top of that, a punctuation mistake might not seem as serious as getting an address wrong, but the truth is, it is a very big deal. Language is a huge component of the law, and using incorrect punctuation can easily change the meaning of a sentence or statement, resulting in fucking over your client, either now, or in the future. There are countless cases of litigation and lawsuits that happened because of bad punctuation.

The half-rainbow

• While Kim is burning the midnight oil on the grammar in the document, Jimmy is painting over the rainbow in the lobby. Why is it left half-painted over?
  • It could be foreshadowing at least two things: the first being that the rainbow symbolizes that he's halfway through his official transition into Saul. The rainbow represents his remaining innocence, and he's already done enough to chip away at it, though there's still plenty left of it that he'll eventually remove completely. There's a certain point where the lighting makes his shadow appear where the other half of the rainbow used to be. The second maybe being Jimmy's relationship with Kim, and how he's diminishing it all with his own hands.
  • It represents how Jimmy is moving away from his elderly clients. Kim says his clients loved the rainbow. But in this episode, he walks out on multiple clients to deal with Chuck, he mixes up their names^note Just like he'll get involved with Walt due to mixing up Badger with a public masturbation crook, and he's a lot less interested in what they have to say (like the lady telling him about her family and the flowers). His thoughts are clearly elsewhere. It's probably part of his process of becoming a criminal lawyer. He's not really feeling it with elder law anymore, as much as he has a genuine soft spot for old people. Maybe it's because he's lost the last of Chuck's respect. Doing elder law was part of trying to play by the rules to please Chuck (and Kim), and that's not an option anymore, he's screwed it up too much. Chuck isn't going to be proud of him for it. Maybe Jimmy's thinking about doing something else already.

Jimmy and Gus

• How did Gus realize that Jimmy was sent in by Mike?
  • Jimmy was awkwardly following the drop guy the moment he walked in. Once Jimmy sat down to get a good view he just kept staring, it couldn't have been more obvious. Not only that, but while Jimmy is staring at the drop guy, Gus walks up behind Jimmy, sweeping the floor, and clearly sees him staring. At that point, it's game over. Gus probably knew way before that with how Jimmy stumbled around the restaurant. He knew not to go to the drop guy's table. When Gus passed by his table, the guy knew that it was a cue to get out of there. Jimmy wasn't exactly being discreet, and Mike knew that. Consider how in the next shot, when Jimmy drives away, Gus is outside sweeping in the parking lot. He suddenly stands up straight with this intimidating stance. He probably knew that Mike was there too. So Gus decides it's best to just cut to the chase, and just arrange an offsite meeting on the roadside with Mike.
  • Gus made a nonverbal signal to the bag man that the deal was to be aborted by sweeping around the floor space.
  • Plus, a guy as thorough as Gus would most likely already know who Jimmy is, since Jimmy has associated with both Mike and Nacho, and he's got Mike under surveillance.
  • Mike doesn't know Gus or suspect that Gus or anyone at the restaurant is the person he's hunting for. Mike believes Los Pollos Hermanos is a site for an exchange. The first shot we see of Gus is with Gus in the background, sweeping the restaurant floors, out of focus, over Jimmy's right shoulder as Jimmy sips the coffee he's ruined by hilariously (and subtly) loading it with sugar. Gus, still out of focus, glances at Jimmy. Gus is in the foreground in the following shot, still over Jimmy's right shoulder, in focus now, but his head is no longer visible. Jimmy is conspicuously staring at the bag with Gus now standing right behind Jimmy. Gus (we still haven't seen his face in focus) walks towards the bagman, Gus's body obscures the bagman from the shot, and it is at this moment Gus - totally on to Jimmy - is giving the bagman a signal to leave without making the exchange. The bagman immediately gets up and leaves - with the bag. We still have not gotten an in focus shot of Gus's face, which finally comes as Jimmy is rummaging through the garbage. We first hear Gus's voice: "Can I help you?" Jimmy, thinking fast, slips off his watch, pulls his head out of the trash, and FINALLY we see Gus standing there.
  • Plus he probably saw from afar Jimmy parked next to Mike's car.

Howard's Ferris Bueller moment

• Why would Howard go to such trouble of scaling several neighbors' fences in his $5k business suit to get to Chuck's backyard and convince Chuck of cutting the cost of private investigators whose fees average somewhere around $70 an hour? Considering that they clearly didn't expect Jimmy to barge in during the day and were expecting him to break in under the cover of darkness, I would think Howard would think it safe to just park a block over and walk on the sidewalks.
  • Most likely, Chuck requested that he avoid coming in through the front door. Howard obviously would not have gone through such lengths to cover his tracks if it weren't for Chuck pushing him to. Howard doesn't exactly look like he really likes having to sneak in this way.
  • There's probably a bit of Rule of Funny there as well.

Was Ernesto part of Chuck's plan against Jimmy?

• Honestly, I'm just confused.
  • He was. Look at the smirk on Chuck's face after Ernesto hears that two second clip of the tape. The whole plan was for Ernesto to "accidentally" hear that clip of Jimmy's confession. The tape recorder had conveniently been rewound to the point where Jimmy admits to the number swap.

Why was Ernesto fired?

• If Ernesto was part of Chuck's plan, wouldn't Chuck or Howard try to keep him on the HMM roster or maybe they feared his guilt would gradually eat him alive, leaving him a liability? Then again, if they do fire him, couldn't he be called as a witness to the stand, most likely to expose Chuck's devious plan?
  • Basically, he's of no more use to him. Chuck definitely realized that Ernesto lied and covered for Jimmy by giving him an alibi at the print store, meaning that his loyalty cannot be counted on. And Jimmy and Kim are smart enough to realize that Chuck tricked Ernesto into telling Jimmy about the tape. At that point, keeping Ernesto on at HHM would just mean keeping a potential spy around.
    • From Chuck's perspective, it's entirely justified, of course: Ernesto can't be trusted where Jimmy is concerned, and has not only lied to cover things up, but disobeyed Chuck's order not to tell anyone about what he heard (which was all part of the plan). If Ernesto hadn't done these things, would Chuck have been able to justify firing him? We, the viewers, are meant to sympathize with Ernesto, but in the context of the show he's clearly putting his sympathy for Jimmy above everything else, and it's a bit odd that he goes so far out of his way when he knows that Jimmy is lying about at least a few things. Maybe the real question is, "Why doesn't Ernesto react to the two glaring pieces of evidence he's encountered that show that Jimmy really is messing with the documents and with Chuck?"
  • Also, Ernesto could be called as a witness regardless of whether he was still an employee of HHM or not. And either way there's no way he can prove that Chuck deliberately played the tape for him. He could be called upon as a character witness, but that's about all Ernesto would be good for.
• Chuck was banking on him going to Jimmy to tell him about the tape, hence staging him hearing part of it. After the incident at the copy-shop, where he realized Ernesto was on Jimmy's side, he used him as needed and then got rid of him afterwards. Everyone's disposable to Chuck.

"I do not wish to see your gun. If I do not, I promise you will not see mine."

• Gus seems to imply that he personally is packing heat. Isn't that a bit out of character? Gus has never been shown to carry a gun, or even imply that he might be carrying one. Perhaps he was referring to Victor and Tyrus, who obviously would be armed. However, for Gus to even say something that would imply he himself is packing feels out of character.
  • Most likely Gus wasn't speaking about a literal gun. It's just his way of telling Mike that he means no harm while at the same time delivering a veiled threat.
  • In Season 6, Gus is shown to own a small revolver. So he could be speaking literally, although chances are he would never even think about using it unless he didn't have his bodyguards.
  • Gus is a drug kingpin who frequently meets with dangerous criminals, some of whom he would like to kill and some of whom would equally enjoy seeing him dead. He might not like to do so, might prefer having other men around to get their hands dirty for him, and may not call attention to it, but the odds that he is not in some way armed in almost every scene we see him in are so small as to be practically zero.

Mike's rifle

• I know it probably seems pretty minor compared to some of the other 'improbable feats' Mike regularly pulls off, but how was he able to get his rifle across a border checkpoint without it being detected? Considering that the cartel guys had to stash their guns at a dead drop spot before they hit the border, and pick up a new set once they're on the other side.
  • Not an expert on this, but it might be that Mike has a permit to carry a personal weapon through the border. Either that, or Gus has friends in Customs willing to look the other way.
  • Or they arranged for the gun to be delivered from the Mexican side.
  • They sell guns in Mexico, too.

How did Mike's plan work?

• So Mike shot the toe of the shoe hanging from the wire, causing powdered cocaine to fall on the roof of the truck. I expect it would blow off during the trip, but OK, drug-sniffing dogs have sensitive noses and there is probably enough residue for them to detect. But searching the truck would reveal one of two things: (1) there are drugs in the truck, or (2) there are no drugs in the truck. If (1), why bother with the whole plan in the first place, since the dogs would detect the drugs anyway? If (2), then how could they be arrested? Wouldn't the agents just assume the dog's response was a false positive and send them on their way?
  • For now at least, we can assume there were actual drugs in the truck. Off the truck that got stopped, the DEA found enough evidence to convince a judge there was enough probable cause to issue a warrant, and the drivers probably talked and gave up the ice cream parlor.
  • If the drugs are placed in sealed containers and very carefully loaded, it would be very difficult for the sniffer dogs to detect. However, if the inspectors are tipped off to the presence of drugs, that gives them probable cause to detain the drivers and perform an extra-thorough search of the truck and its entire cargo. Plus, Mike and Gus know that this is one of Hector's drug trucks. So it's going to be carrying either drugs and/or drug money (like the first truck that Mike hit). Hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in the tires is just as damning as bags of cocaine.

How did Gus know about the slain Good Samiritan?

• He pointed this out during his first encounter with Mike.
  • Because it's only natural that Gus would keep tabs on Hector's operation. It's also heavily implied that Nacho is working for Gus as a mole.

"A bullet to the head would be far too humane"

• Gus, who explains his reasons for stopping Mike from killing Hector, to the former that a "bullet to the head is far too humane?". What's the context?
  • Gus wants Hector to suffer. A bullet to the head is too quick and painless.
  • Gus wants to ruin Hector and kill all his relatives first before killing him. Which is less humane than shooting the offender in the head.

What's the difference between $ 321 and $323. 98

• Jimmy was originally gonna pay $321 to Chuck for the damages he caused in "Witness" but Chuck demands two extra dollars and ninety-eight cents for the tape cassette? Is Chuck just being a petty asshole as usual?
  • It's Chuck being petty.
  • In part, it is petty. But Chuck is also getting that cassette tape on the record so it can be used in the bar hearing. Jimmy's written statement doesn't mention it, so Chuck brings it up. Howard, Jimmy, and Kim negotiate that to "destroyed a piece of the victim's personal property." Then Jimmy's spoken apology also carefully omits the act of property destruction. So the payment is the very last chance Chuck has to get the detail that a cassette tape was destroyed into the record, which will allow him to bring in the narrative of Jimmy destroying a taped confession. And from there Chuck can get the bar to listen to the confession itself to establish Jimmy's forgery, ensuring a swift disbarment.

Hector Harassing Gus

• Hector and his goons going into Los Pollos Hermanos, intimidating the patrons into leaving, then holding the employees hostage until Gus arrives, seems kinda foolish. If someone called the cops, Hector and Gus would have both been pretty screwed. And honestly, it seems kinda unrealistic that nobody did. For example, what about the woman with the kid that Arturo obviously tried to stop from leaving? She's not dialing 911 when she gets to her car? I get that Hector's an intimidating looking dude with two other intimidating looking dudes, but nobody in that restaurant knows about any cartel ties. Someone, least of all one of the co-workers who were held hostage, would have called it in (unless we're to assume they were threatened "we will send people to your house if you do so"). On top of that, even if Hector is not implicated as a result of Mike's move against him (maybe the DEA hasn't connected anything from the ice cream shop to him), it's established in Breaking Bad that Hector has a big profile with the cops. He spent a long time in jail, Gomez knows he's a higher up (he calls him an OG), he is well known to be serious shit. If they don't know he's "Don Hector", they know he's something close to it. Making it even more stupid for Hector to make this big scene in a blatantly obvious intimidation move, and if the cops had shown up it would be bad news for both of them. He wants to use Gus' trucks, but if the cops come and find this known cartel associate clearly intimidating Gus, suddenly LPH is on the radar.
  • It definitely wasn't a smart move. Hector definitely was making a fool of himself. He was both angry and desperate because he's lost his main smuggling route and was embarrassed right in front of Don Eladio. So, Hector falls back on the only thing he knows how to do, which is threats and intimidation. And judging from Gus' reaction after Hector leaves, Hector behaved exactly how he predicted.
  • Hector is a bit of a bully and over-the-top reactions are pretty in character for him. He similarly went ballistic at Bolsa right before his stroke.
  • Hector is a Salamanca, and they are prone to reckless actions. The lady with the child is Mexican heritage and knew this was some sort of narco mafia thing and that's why she was leaving to begin with. She's doesn't want to get involved at all. Even if someone did call 911, what would they say? There's a ranting old man with a bunch of scary looking goons, which could easily come off as a Karen induced racist moment, and do these customers even know the goons are Hector's? The biggest wildcard is actually probably Lyle, but probably there have been weird situations before, though likely far smaller, and he's been conditioned by Gus to always wait until Gus addresses the situation.

Kim's achievement at the hearing

• What was Kim's "bingo" after the hearing about? Or are we're not supposed to know the plan yet?
  • It was most likely referring to her goading Chuck into admitting the existence of the second tape. However, how exactly this fits into her and Jimmy's larger plan hasn't been revealed yet.
  • The tape ended up being part of a Batman Gambit by Kim and Jimmy—by getting Chuck to admit it exists, and objecting to it being entered as evidence, she ensured that it would be played, opening the door for Jimmy to establish its context and ultimately expose Chuck's "illness" as a delusion.

If Chuck get committed, who is the caretaker?

• The only reason the doctor doesn't have Chuck sent to mental institutions the last two times around, is because Jimmy refuses to, so if Jimmy gives the ok now, would it be admissible or due to the conflict of interest someone else has to make the decision, because according to the doctor Chuck is not in condition to refuse treatment.
  • Normally, as a direct family relation who also is the closest relative geographically, Jimmy would have the power of attorney to commit Chuck if he is found to be mentally incapacitated. However, given the current circumstances, it could be argued that Jimmy wouldn't have Chuck's best interests in mind. In that case, power of attorney would be appointed to someone else, or somebody personally designated by Chuck.

Don Eladio, Hector and Gus

• Why would Don Eladio have two distributors covering the same area? Working at odds with each other, no less?
  • Most likely because Don Eladio wanted to pit the two against each other to see who would be the bigger money earner.
  • Even in Breaking Bad, Tuco's crews was separate from Los Pollos Hermanos. It might be that Eladio lets Hector run his own crime ring across the border since his family is loyal, but earns less than Gus, who kicks back a lot of money but can't be trusted. If Hector decides to fuck with Gus because he is always a dick, well, that sucks but it happens.

Chuck hiding his condition from Rebecca

• How the hell was he able to do that for so long without her ever catching on?
  • Judging by their relationship in "Chicanery," it doesn't seem like they have interacted very much since their divorce. The dinner flashback in the beginning of the episode is implied to be the only time up to that point that Rebecca had seen Chuck since he came down with his illness. She left that interaction without a clue of Chuck's condition (albeit thinking he was being a pretty big jerk because Chuck disregarded Jimmy's suggestion that he just be 100% honest), and it doesn't seem like they'd even spoken since until she got summoned for the Bar hearing.
  • He still hasn't removed his old ring so it's probably not that long after their divorce and his condition.

About the leeway

• Jimmy and Kim would've had less leeway if Chuck didn't mention the true but speculated story about what happened and Jimmy covered his tracks. If Chuck didn't give the story but just keep it simple the judge probably wouldn't have let Jimmy goes n with the cellphone.
  • Because Jimmy and Kim knew that the tape couldn't sway the court by itself, especially if Jimmy testified and claimed he was only saying it to make Chuck feel better. The only way the tape could be useful is if Chuck testified to its authenticity, which would open the door for Jimmy to attack his credibility as a witness.

Why Chuck couldn't just tell Rebecca about his condition?

• Seriously, though?
  • Pride. Like it's not hard to figure out Chuck likes to hide things from his loved ones when that is what he has been doing the whole first season.
  • He explains himself explicitly in the show: He didn't want her to think less of him. And let's be real, Chuck wouldn't be the first person who withheld such details from their loved ones.
  • He might have expected her to decide to drop everything and try to help him. That's a key reason people hide things from loved ones because some loved ones do exactly that. His condition is especially ripe for that because it's challenging— whether it's real or not, Chuck needs intensive help, as Jimmy is providing.

Why a battery?

• I know that Chuck's condition is all in his head, but he explains it as being sensitive to electrical current. That's why the exit signs don't bother him, at least according to his reasoning - they don't pull much current and are further away from him. But an unconnected battery doesn't have any current, and yet the show seems to suggest that it does and that Chuck would (if his condition were real) react to its presence in his pocket. Granted, Jimmy asks if Chuck would feel if a watch battery were placed next to him, and Chuck says yes. While that may suggest that Chuck's understanding of electricity is flawed, we know he at least knows enough to cite the inverse square law about the exit signs, so it's not as if he hasn't done his research. But even aside from all of that, my main question is, why (from both an in-universe and out-of-universe perspective) use a battery at all, when they could have avoided this issue entirely and instead planted some other small device that actually does have a current? With it being just an unplugged battery, why wouldn't Chuck or anybody else at the hearing think, "But wait, that battery wasn't plugged into anything; Chuck would never have reacted to it anyway, so that doesn't prove anything about his condition..."
  • The exit signs does bother him though he mentions that he is enduring it, and Chuck actually said electromagnetism, not just current, since he insisted in the first season people ground themselves before entering he might be right in his claim that he can feel the battery.
  • Even if the battery is not connected to a circuit, episodes 1 & 6 of season 3 show that Chuck experiences discomfort when in close enough proximity to or touching a charged battery, provided he is aware of it. Thus the fact that he felt no discomfort in this case when he wasn't aware still proves that his so-called illness is nothing more than the nocebo effect.
  • Actually cell phone batteries do have circuitry. I can't say if they operate at some level when they're unplugged but they might. Though, I actually assumed the battery being inert later became Chuck's rationalization for his relapse, to explain to himself why the battery didn't bother him.

Will Huell be in any trouble?

• As Jimmy stated to the jury, Huell planted the charged battery onto Chuck without his knowledge for Jimmy's gambit. Will Huell face any charges regarding this?
  • I'm not sure what he could be charged with, given that it's subsequently proven that the battery is not harmful to Chuck in any way. Legal Eagle on YouTube actually made a video discussing this, and although he acknowledged it was a pretty unusual situation and he wasn't entirely sure, he seemed to believe that Huell/Jimmy wouldn't be charged with anything since Chuck isn't actually allergic to electricity.
  • IANAL, but it seems like there is a potential charge of assault. However, that would require proving that putting a battery in someone's pocket IS assault and that would require much more in-depth exploration of Chuck's condition in court, including why it didn't seem to harm Chuck at all. Chuck is clearly in no condition to face such a scenario.

Commercial Production Time

• I know Jimmy was desperate to sell his commercial slots, but could they really shoot their video, record voice overs (if they needed any), take the raw footage to someplace where it could be edited, edit the footage, make a hard copy of the final product, and deliver it to the studio, all in just 2.5 hours?
  • In most cases, probably not, but then again, Jimmy is able to pull off the seemingly impossible to a scary degree when his back is to the wall.
  • Half-assedly yes. It's like when he hires Francesca on the spot because he wants to get to work fast.
  • It is physically possible, and some real life local spots do seem slapped together. It would require no hiccups, but Jimmy has worked with this team before. Editing, effects, etc could be done on a laptop at the time this show is set.

"All he had to do was six months!"

• While I'm aware that Mike, at the behest of his Uncle Hector for an hefty sum, told the authorities that Tuco's gun was his gun, but Tuco only got six months for assaulting Mike? Isn't assault would carry like a year or two.
  • Yes, the maximum sentence for battery in New Mexico is six months. Had Mike not lied to the DA about the gun, the charge would've been upped to aggravated battery, which can result in up to three years.
• Also the extra charges; Stabbing an inmate and breaking a guard's jaw? The way I see it is those charges is gonna keep him in prison until Breaking Bad but what I'm asking is how those charges realistically fit the extra 5 years.
  • He probably won't stop stabbing and punching inmates for a while, also yes you can get six months for assault (look at Brock Turner). It's weird because it means Tuco has zero precedent of violence to be able to get that light of a sentence when the prosecution really wanted to pin him down but not impossible.
  • It could be that the assault was Tuco's first violent offense. Even though Tuco is a little crazy, he's not stupid, and he generally knows how to avoid police attention. Plus, at sentencing hearings, the prosecution cannot argue for a higher sentence based solely on things the defendant MIGHT have done, and that aren't even directly relevant to the case at hand. This is something any decently competent defense lawyer could do, and it's not like Hector is hurting for money to hire one.

Jimmy's money from Sandpiper

• How come Jimmy is still struggling that much for money? Didn't Howard gave him a relatively huge check for discovering the Sandpiper case? The bonus can be all swallowed up for dentist office but not that.
  • You'd be surprised how quickly you can burn through any sum of money, especially if you suddenly have no more source of income. Not only does Jimmy have to worry about the down payment to get the office, but he also has to keep up with monthly payments, handle rent and other bills, etc. Not to mention, we've also seen Jimmy splurge away his money on overly extravagant purchases, such as the cocobolo desk. Plus, most of Jimmy's payment would come as a percentage of the judgment if Sandpiper loses or settles the case. While the payoff is potentially big, the sheer size and scope of the Sandpiper case means he likely won't see that money for years.^note There's a reason most civil and criminal cases rarely make it all the way to trial, and of those that do go to trial, only a percentage of those go all the way to verdict: parties are risk-averse and most would rather take their small lumps right now than spend years of litigation with no chance of a bigger reward
  • Jimmy is owed about 20% of the damages from the suit, as is revealed in the season 5 finale.
  • The check Howard gave Jimmy was for $20,000. YMMV, but that doesn't seem "huge" in any sense. That's a fraction of the cost of one dentist X-ray machine. $20k should be enough to open a very budget office and cover maybe a few months rent. He gets nothing for Sandpiper other than that until it settles.

Stiffed pay

• That community service guy was a dick. Yeah, Jimmy shouldn't have been on his phone, but the dude really couldn't tell him to just get off it instead of screwing him over like he did?
  • The overseer just seemed completely apathetic to the situation and to Jimmy's plight. Most likely he has had to deal with this from other people for quite some time.
  • It's a commentary about doing things the right (legal) way. Jimmy had to do the community service, but he was going to work, and then collect extra trash to make up for it. But that's not what the rules are. He's being forced to do things someone else's way and that's hard for Jimmy.
  • People with petty power over others tend to abuse it the most. And the people who supervise community service have seen every petty "dodge work" routine and scam there is to see. They tend to get the milk of human kindness burned out of them after a few years. It's a common characteristic of low level management in many jobs.
  • It's called "community service", not "inconvenient distraction". You're there as punishment, not to work in some kind of outdoor office. Their supervisor does this for a living. He's probably used to people trying to sneak phone calls or try to do as minimal work as possible, and realizes the most effective way to deter this is to punish their wallet, which is the same logic behind why the fines for drunk driving are so steep. You can either tell someone to get off their phone 10 times or just dock them time at the end of the day the one time and hope they get the message.

Mike checking Nacho's gas cap

• It was pretty smart for Mike to check the gas cap on Nacho's van just to be sure that Gus wasn't having him spied on. But I keep thinking, if Gus or his men are tracking Nacho, would they really use the same method and put the trackers in the same place as they did with Mike's car? Especially after knowing Mike caught onto the same tracker right away?
  • It took Mike hours to find the tracker after he knew he was being tracked (if they didn't break his window and left a don't note on his car he'd have never have figured out too). The gas cap was the last place he checked and there is no reason Nacho knows about those bugs. We saw with Hank that the cops put their bugs under the car, not in the gas cap. That's not to say Gus wouldn't have contingency plans. Checking Nacho's gas cap may have actually just been Mike's way of emphasizing the need for Nacho to switch back the pill bottles after the deed, because Gus is also watching Hector and has reasons to get rid of him too.
  • Arguably, Gus probably already had Nacho's car bugged by that point. It certainly was by "Smoke," since Victor was following him and watched him dumping the placebo pills at the bridge. And when Mike met Gus at the end of "Talk", Gus knew all about Nacho having met with Mike (although you could argue that he had that information obtained from Nacho personally at gunpoint).

"This is on you"

• When Kim wrote that check out to Howard, was that because she genuinely wanted to repay Howard, or was it because she wanted an excuse to rip into Howard about his complicity in Chuck's scheme?
  • She seemed more irked, intending to give Howard a message of "I don't owe you anything, so stop barging in when I'm with my client."

Why didn't anyone expose Chuck's illness to him before?

• Since the events of "Chicanery", Chuck is finally coming to terms with the true nature of his condition. He's seeking help from the doctor and taking positive steps towards getting his life back to normal, like buying groceries from the supermarket, which regardless of your feelings towards Chuck, is a good thing. But it leaves me asking, why didn't anyone do something like this before Jimmy's whole gambit at the Bar hearing? It wouldn't have been at all difficult, and, as we've seen, it could have easily provided a catalyst to put Chuck on the road to recovery. Obviously Chuck kept a lot of people in the dark with regards to his illness, but surely Jimmy, at least, had numerous opportunities to get him to face facts? He lambasted the doctor's trick back in season 1, so he obviously had reservations about that kind of deception, but he must have known how potentially beneficial it could've been to 'wake him up' like that. And as stubborn as Chuck can be, I just don't see him ignoring undeniable proof, as evidenced by his actions since the Bar hearing. I suppose it's possible that Jimmy didn't want to mess with Chuck's fragile mental state, but it's just surprising that he never appeared to even consider exposing Chuck to himself until he was basically forced into doing so.
  • Chuck went catatonic for hours the last time Jimmy followed the doctor's orders, although it's likely he was just been faking that as part of his whole "taped confession" trap. Even the doctor admitted she wasn't sure what happened. Part of the issue is that no one was truly sure if Chuck's illness is 100% in his head even after that, since we see him falling into abnormal comas, which means either a really advanced case of nocebo, or he does have some weakness to it. And in both cases, Chuck looks like he'll die over it. On top of that, no one's really got the heart to break it to Chuck he was losing it, given how defensive he is about it and refused even the doctor's diagnosis of it, citing how AIDS wasn't diagnosed as a real disease until the 1980s. Plus, there are case of doctors denying mental and health issues because it doesn't fit their preconceived ideas.
  • No one in Chuck's life actually has both means and motive to expose his disease as psychosomatic, until after the events of "Chicanery". Of those who know the real situation:
    • Jimmy initially admired and trusted Chuck, and therefore believed his assertion that the disease was physical in nature. After Chuck was revealed to be both delusional and a cold-blooded manipulator, Jimmy began to use his delusion as an exploitable weakness. While exposing the delusion could have been helpful to Chuck, it didn't really serve Jimmy's interests until the Bar hearing.
    • Howard has a huge vested interest in Chuck remaining deemed as legally competent. If Chuck is deemed incapable of providing competent counsel to his clients, that doesn't bode well for Howard because he's hidden Chuck's illness from the HHM clients. It would leave him and all of the other HHM attorneys possibly open to disciplinary proceedings.
    • Ernesto probably knew or suspected Chuck's mental instability, but the whole issue is far above his pay grade.
    • Kim is Chuck's opponent in one way or another, for much of the series. Chuck would never believe that she had his best interests at heart, and he is a master of denial and would find a way to dismiss any proof she might bring to bear as being a trick of some sort.
    • Chuck's recovery since "Chicanery" also seems to be motivated by spite towards Jimmy. It's entirely possible that the trick wouldn't have worked in any other context, considering how vindictive Chuck is portrayed to be.
  • Who's to say nobody tried to expose it before? Maybe Jimmy went in his house one day with five switched on phones. Considering Chuck's intellect, it would be very easy for him to rationalize that away as "it's cumulative and I haven't been around much EM lately" or "the phones draw very little current when not on a call" etc.

Mike finds the body

• As usual, Mike's undertakings require a bit of clarification.) A. What was in that notebook, and how did Mike find the place? Surely Hector's goons would've buried it in some random place in the middle of nowhere and most certainly not make any notes about it? B. I presume the metal detector reacted to guy's ring, but if I'm correct, then how did Mike know he would have it (or anything metal) on him?
  • The metal detector thing was a lie, he asked Nacho last episode a favor and the favor turned out to be where they buried the guy. Nacho gave him the vague location and Mike wrote it down then combed the area with a stick.
    • The metal detector was indeed used. Most likely Nacho remembered the detail of the ring and relayed it to Mike.
  • His story when he called the tribal police was that he was using the metal detector to find arrowheads, which are made of stone, not metal. Obviously, the cops aren't really going to look too closely into this detail when conducting their investigation.

What could or can the State bar do if they found about Jimmy's side work with the "Saul Goodman Productions"?

• Just out of curiosity.
  • Nothing, they suspended him from practicing law, not having a job in publicity. Jimmy just disguised himself because he doesn't want to look like that asshole that sold air time when he returns to practice law. The flopsy he pulled maybe they could bar him for that if they have a hard on.

Do you guys have liability insurance?

• I'm guessing by Jimmy able to sell the remaining air time, the twin owners of the music store didn't have it but a few questions: A) Why don't they have it? B) Why wouldn't they want it? And C) Are store owners in general are required to have it?
  • A) Didn't feel like paying for it. B) Cheapskate or they don't think it'll cover something like misplaced drumstick anyway. C)From quick research it seems to only be mandatory for cars.
  • Only certain high risk businesses are legally required to carry liability insurance. It's also very likely they simply don't have the money to afford such insurance.

Kim's need for assistance

• I know Jimmy's on suspension. But couldn't Kim at least ask Jimmy to help out with the basic stuff like filing, proof reading, looking up precedents, etc? I think he's just not allowed to practice law, so as long as another lawyer is reviewing the work (which she probably wouldn't do but she'd sign off on it), isn't that allowed? It would take a ton of pressure off of her and her car accident would not have happened.
  • I get the feeling that Kim implicitly does not trust Jimmy with her files, especially given that she's a perfectionist and knows Jimmy's penchant for cutting corners and bypassing the law. There's a reason why she specifically did not want to officially partner with him, after all.
  • Plus Jimmy admitted he sucked at contract law when he was in the desert with Tuco, asking him to question him on any law aspect than that one.
    • He brushed up on contract law (as season 2 established when he got himself fired from Davis & Main).
    • And he sucked at it.
  • Technically, Jimmy could do anything so long as his name didn't appear on any documents and he didn't appear in court for anything. Anything that requires a signature would be signed by Kim as a certificate of "it's as good as if I did this work myself". The problem with that scenario is that with one slip-up on Jimmy's part, he'll have effectively pretended to be a lawyer/practiced law while his license is on suspension, and that will be viewed as the unauthorized practice of law. So it's best not to touch any legal documents to be safe.

Epic IBUPFROFEN fail

• While I'm aware that he will survive into the main series, but why didn't the ibuprofen kill Hector immediately?
  • It's not cyanide it's an anti-inflammatory. It's like going wow how come Hector isn't dead after eating a greasy burger this is super not recommended for people with heart condition. It's not even considered doping.
  • The Ibuprofen is not supposed to actually kill Hector. The intent is that since ibuprofen does not actually treat cardiac arrest, Hector will die since his heart attack will go untreated.

"Fuck Eladio. Fuck Bolsa, and fuck you!"

• Imagine if Don Eladio or Bolsa find out about those soundbites from Hector. What reprimand could the latter receive?
  • Nothing, Eladio might take a piss on Hector every now and then but he knows where the Salamanca's clan's loyalty lies. At worst he'll tell him to stop selling drugs in a market they already own the shares.

Rigged Bingo

• I get Jimmy's plan to sabotage Irene's friendship with the other elderly women but what was the purpose of rigging the bingo game for Irene to win?
  • "Everything comin' up Irene" gambit. The idea is to drive her friends to envy her and hate that she gets more by luck or settlement.

Was there any other way Jimmy could've got Irene to settle?

• I mean, did he really have to sabotage her friendships to do this?
  • Sure. He could have hired Huell to scare the old lady into taking a settlement, notice that it'S still not better. Jimmy found a way and it works.
  • It also seemed that Jimmy could have just talked with Irene and simply persuaded her. She cares for her friends and for Jimmy, and they have a good rapport. He could have taken the quite-plausible tack of, e.g., 'I know you want to hold out for more, but your friends aren't as well off and need the money badly right now' (or some variation thereof) and it could have worked. He could have continued working in Elder Law that way, too. Chalk it up to Jimmy's self-sabotaging and in-character Cut Lex Luthor a Check tendencies, perhaps.

Post-Settlement For Irene

• Even after she settles with Sandpiper, do you think she and the other elderly women will rekindle their friendship or not?
  • Episode 10 shows that they do not. It takes Jimmy having to admit his fraud to get them back together.

Pros And Cons of Chuck Suing HMM

• If they're any.
  • For who? Like for Chuck he has all the leverage while Howard has none of it.
  • Chuck will harm his own reputation as much as HHM's will be harmed.
  • He doesn't have a reputation anyway if he is forced to retire. Once he does that he has enough money he can practice law for fun anyway.
    • No client will want to hire a lawyer who sues his own employer, nor will any law firm want to associate with him. It's basically career suicide for a lawyer. Kim had said as much in season 2 when Jimmy suggested she take legal action against Howard to get out of doc review.
  • Sue his own employer because they try to kick him out? Yes, especially since Chuck is a well known lawyer from New-Mexico and if he did recovered from his mental illness he can work it out. And someone like the Kettlemans or other fraudster probably don't care about lawyer's gossip. And reputation aside he gets shit done.
    • You're assuming that Chuck would be happy working with clients like those, which he wouldn't due to his obsession over "justice" and the "sanctity of the court" and other "spirit of the law" stuff. And as the season finale shows, Howard and HHM's fears of Chuck's illness going out of control were very well founded. Let's also not forget that Chuck was already a massive liability to HHM from day one due to his EHS coming to light as a result of the Bar hearing, and this prompting the insurance company to double their premiums for HHM, which is more than enough justification to fire him for cause. Clearly, his EHS and vendetta against Jimmy make him unable to provide competent legal counsel.
  • Firing someone because you don't want to pay insurance for his mental illness is not a probable cause. And Chuck's company share is his to collect if he wants to. Plus Chuck had those clients, the Kettlemans were consulting HHM. Had thing went his way, the worst case is HHM goes under and he starts his new firm with a bunch of experienced workforce available (most of the people in HHM applaud when Chuck enters the room, so they don't have that bad of an opinion of him compared to Howard).
    • "Fired for cause" is very broadly defined, and depends largely on what your employment contract says and what state your business is chartered in. However, generally gross misconduct or negligence that directly harms the bottom line is enough justification. And Chuck never personally took the Kettlemans, as he was still absent from the law firm at the time. And although Chuck did practice criminal law early in his career (according to his obituary), his field of expertise by the time of seasons 1-3 is primarily in white collar stuff like contract law and banking regulation. The type of clients looking for counsel that specialize in that field will not hire Chuck, a mentally ill man who dragged his own firm through the mud, to be their attorney. In fact, no professional firm or attorney would ever refer anyone but their worst enemies to Chuck. Not only would this professional baggage lead to questions over whether or not Chuck can provide clients with adequate, competent and unbiased legal counsel and advice, it would also preclude him from getting the cushy academic offer from UNM as well.
    • Plus, the reason why the staff at HHM give Chuck a standing ovation as he's leaving is because Chuck's threats of a lawsuit were never made openly public. They were only known to the senior partners of HHM. And because Howard called Chuck's bluff and paid him off out of his own pocket, the rest of HHM will never know. If the lower associates and staffers had known just how close Chuck had come to putting them all out of a job because of his pettiness, applause would be the last thing on their minds. Rather, his departure would've been greeted with lots of harsh stares and people muttering about him behind their backs. They also would've been quick to pressure Howard to drop the McGill name from HHM's branding following Chuck's death, and they wouldn't have ever put a shrine to Chuck in the lobby because they would all be like "Good riddance" to the man who was willing to risk all of their jobs if he didn't get his way. As it were, they'll never know the truth outside of the downsizing that HHM had to go through as a result of losing clients and having to pay out Chuck's estate.
  • Regardless of the amount of increase in malpractice insurance cost, HHM could have handled it. But that is just theoretical. The Bar hearing probably terrified Howard because if all it took was Chuck being proven wrong over one small curveball like that to get him to flip out, combined with his belligerent attitude towards the insurance reps and threatening a lawsuit against them (and then the same towards Howard when Howard mildly suggested that he retire), he could singlehandedly sink the Sandpiper case in a courtroom. Sandpiper wasn't just a small case, this was a class action case big enough that the legal counsel for both sides (Schweikart & Cokely for Sandpiper, HHM and Davis & Main for the plaintiffs) were probably riding their futures on it. While Howard was probably aware that this was just a personal thing between Jimmy and Chuck and maybe Chuck wouldn't act irrationally elsewhere, it wasn't worth the risk, especially considering all the technological accommodations that would have to be made for Chuck in the courtroom if he started to relapse (as his death would ultimately prove). Accommodations that the judges, and the opposing counsel of Schweikart & Cokely might not be so inclined to give to Chuck as Jimmy and Kim were (Jimmy and Kim only let the accommodations go through at Jimmy's disciplinary hearing because they needed to attack Chuck's credibility).
    • In fact, what's to say that Howard didn't also inform the insurance company about Chuck's condition, independent of Jimmy? Once the Sandpiper case drew closer to the courtroom, Chuck would've probably cracked under the pressure and need to take a sabbatical since the courts wouldn't be able to accomodate his needs. Chuck had already done most of the legwork in building the case and now it was really out of his hands. After seeing Chuck behave like that during the Bar hearing, Howard would have a hell of a lot to gain from forcibly retiring Chuck.
    • The one thing against Howard tipping off the insurance company is that everything else we've seen of Howard is that he's someone of very weak character (even Jimmy sees this, calling him "a shitty lawyer but a good salesman" in season 4). He let his dad convince him to give up his early dream of being a solo practitioner, then, after he joined the firm, he allowed Chuck to lead him around by a metaphorical ring in his nose. The one time Howard stood up to Chuck, it ended in tragedy and guilt.
    • Theoretically, Howard did have an alternative option. He could've always reported Chuck to the Bar Association himself and started disciplinary proceedings on Chuck. Because really, Howard and all of the other senior partners are obligated to inform the Bar Association about an attorney who is clearly not fit to practice law. Whether this would've culminated in a suspension of Chuck's law license or outright disbarment, or him still burning down his own house like in the show, we don't know. Probably wouldn't benefit Howard either, seeing as it would come up how Howard and his various associates had been concealing Chuck's illness for years from their clients, which would leave Howard open to disciplinary proceedings and potential disbarment himself.
  • The only pro of Chuck's actions would've been Chuck successfully blackmailing his way back into the senior partnership. He knew Howard couldn't pay out an $8 million settlement from HHM's revenue without bankrupting the firm. He simply wanted to force Howard to rescind his demand of Chuck's retirement, at which point he'd bring Howard back under his thumb, as he'd been for nearly 18 years. He just didn't anticipate Howard would call his bluff and dip into his personal funds, as well as take on a few loans, to cash Chuck out. Never in Chuck's wildest dreams was this more than a temporary bluff for him, but for Howard, the decision was final. Howard has basically been Chuck's lackey for 18 years, so there was definitely precedent in Chuck's expectation that Howard would simply bow to his will. Plus, Chuck has a habit of projecting his own narcissistic tendencies onto everyone else; in other words, he didn't expect Howard to put himself at risk, because in his position, Chuck wouldn't.

Will or Should Howard be suspicious about Irene's 'sudden change of heart'?

• I mean, after his confrontation with Jimmy in "Fall", where he made it clear to the latter that HHM were gonna wait it out with the settlement until they get a better sum of cash. All of a sudden, he finds out that Irene wants to settle immediately.
  • At this point, Howard was kinda swamped. The last thing on his mind would be, "oh this case is closed uh?" when he's also currently dealing with Chuck's threats of legal action.
  • I think he is aware of it, and wanted the money to come sooner rather than later (the whole Chuck situation considered). He just couldn't see a way to go back on his original idea without coming across as dishonest, and potentially mess up the whole deal.

Is season 3 still 2003 or nearing 2004?

• Just to be sure.
  • "Lantern" puts it in 2003. When in 2003 is up for debate.
  • The sign outside of the courtroom in "Chicanery" lists the date as being February 2003, so by "Lantern" it's probably not much later than March or April.
  • We know it's still 2002-2004 since Lydia has an iMac G4 for her office computer.

“Shame On You”

• #1) After it’s revealed that Jimmy engineered the “hot mic” incident to help Irene win back her friends at the cost of losing the trust of Sandpiper residents, let’s say that the state bar was to catch wind of that? Then his disbarment could be a reality or no?
  • Jimmy could potentially be brought up in civil court for his fraud, but the issue there is that Irene and her friends never suffered any monetary damage as result of Jimmy's actions, and a ruling in a civil court does not count as felony. Criminal fraud requires very specific conditions which would be very difficult to prove against Jimmy in this case, since the only evidence they have is the oral confession which he can easily discredit in court.
  • Maybe if they really want him disbarred they could go for it, I mean it does show his ethics is not suited for a lawyer but I don't think anyone wants Jimmy disbarred that bad aside Chuck, Kim made a good job to have Jimmy looked sympathetic and the suspension is because they can't ignore Jimmy's outburst after the police got involved.
• #2) why would Jimmy need the help of Erin Brill? And/or Why would Erin Brill agree to be a part of his scheme?
  • Jimmy's clients know Erin since she is acting in his place as Davis & Main's representative. Plus, Erin has an interest in keeping the settlement process going in accordance to her bosses' wishes, and Jimmy's confession means Irene will go back on her decision to settle prematurely.

I Know It Was You, Nacho

• Seeing by the facial expressions, Gus knows Nacho switched the pills, and knowing his intentions to keep Hector alive, what might he do with Nacho?
  • It mostly is dependent on whether or not Nacho secretly was a mole for Gus. Remember that Nacho had blocked Mike's line of sight when he tried to snipe Hector, and Gus had by that point been tracking Mike. Whether he'll kill Nacho or do something else to him is unclear.
  • It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, keeping Nacho close would be the smart thing to do. But since Nacho did the pill swap with the intent that Hector die, Gus is also pretty pissed.
    • Ultimately, Gus decides to blackmail Nacho into working for him, by killing Arturo and threatening him.
  • Gus had reason to be suspicious of Nacho. When Hector collapsed, he dropped his pills and they spilled out of the bottle. When Nacho handed the bottle to the paramedics (the bottle with the real medication), it was full.

Did Nacho switch the pills before the paramedics arrived?

• Because he gave Hector’s pill bottle to them when they arrived.
  • He probably just gave them the real bottle and picked up any fake pills from the crime scene.
    • Watch the scene again, during the close up of the bottle as Nacho hands it the paramedic, you can see that there are capsules in the bottle, you can even hear them rattling.
  • While Nacho was picking up the capsules, you can see him reaching into what appears to be either his jacket or pants pocket, all while taking a quick glance to make sure no one is looking. It seems likely he would've kept the original pills on him to make the switch when he needed to. He certainly would not want the hospital staff telling anyone that the pills in a bottle labeled nitroglycerin were filled with ibuprofen, which they probably would be obligated to report to the police.
  • The first episode of season 4 shows he didn't. Nacho sees a partially damaged sewer grate and tries to toss the evidence while Gus is distracted by a phone call.
  • He did switch them back. He refilled Hector's prescription container with the original correct pills (which Nacho was still carrying the whole time for this exact reason), while he took the poisoned ones he made off the ground and filled up his own pill container (the rectangular-shaped one with multiple storage sections). This is what he was trying to dispose of, but what he handed to the paramedics was exactly what everyone expected.

Will Howard change the firm from "Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill" to "Hamlin & Hamlin"?

• Now that Chuck's shares were bought out by Howard, with his own personal funds.
  • Considering Howard mentioned Chuck becoming partner emeritus and the fact that the firm is still called HHM despite the fact that Howard's father doesn't work there anymore, I think it's safe to say the name isn't changing.
    • Depends on if Howard decides he wants to drop Chuck's name to avoid association with Chuck's reputation, and promote another associate to take over the 'M' in their tri-rectangle logo.
  • Would be rather bad for their reputation to unperson someone who just comitted suicide after you "retired" him.
  • No. We see in the Season 4 finale that the firm is still proudly going by the name of "Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill" a full year after Chuck's death. The truth about Chuck's death is known only by Howard, Kim, and Jimmy. As far as everyone else is concerned, Chuck retired voluntarily from the law firm, and died in an accidental house fire a few days later (though HHM clients paying close attention might have read between the lines). Howard's guilt following Chuck's death swayed any animosity he still felt towards Chuck, so he wouldn't be motivated to rub his name out of the company. He probably thought "Maybe I should've tried to just reason him out of the lawsuit and pitched the idea of partner emeritus to him in a different way".
    • Why should they? That is their corporate name, and plenty of corporations still trade under the names of founders long after they have died or have bought the families out. Just because the original partners decided to have the business named after them, or were willing to change it, to allow a second Hamlin does not mean that Howard has to alter the company name. Besides, it has brand recognition, the same way firms that employ people like Ken Starr do.

What if Jimmy never made his visit to the insurance underwriter?

• Would Chuck be alive and picking up his career at HHM, working on his recovery, with time healing all wounds?
  • Unlikely. It seems that Jimmy's visit likely just informed the insurance company about something they'd have inevitably found out on their own, just much later. The insurance company would eventually find out about Chuck's breakdown on the stand. Furthermore, Howard's patience with Chuck was already growing thin. Chuck still has a personal vendetta against Jimmy, which as Howard pointed out repeatedly would inevitably jeopardize the firm, prompting Howard to ask him to retire. Remember that Chuck was so offended by that suggestion that his reaction was to sue HHM. So I'd say that his demise is inevitable. Chuck is a power hungry sociopath who wants to control everything around him, and in the process he ends up alienating everyone close to him. His wife left him. He betrayed his brother multiple times. He used Ernesto as a pawn, as well as betrayed the firm he helped build over personal interest (remember, the private investigators who were at the house to catch Jimmy were being paid for with HHM funds).

Can Ernesto sue HMM or get some sort of a severance package

• Seeing how he got fired.
  • He lied to his boss twice, even if his boss knew he was going to break his promise the second time it doesn't mean he is allowed to report to his friend what he was told not to. And Chuck can simply point the busted door to show why Ernesto shouldn't have said it and use it to prove he lied the first time when Jimmy bribed the clerk, why would Ernesto even believe he gets to sue them for being fired for borderline complicity in a crime?
  • There's a good chance HHM gave Ernesto a severance anyway. Companies quite often give fired employees a few months severance on condition they sign an agreement that says (in effect) they won't sue.

Why wasn't Ernesto called as a witness?

• Surely Jimmy and Kim would've found Ernesto to be useful as a witness, seeing as he was a pawn in Chuck's scheme, right? I mean, he could testify to how Chuck "accidentally" played that bit of the tape knowing that Ernesto would inform Jimmy about it.

Don Eladio, Where's my respect?

• Let's say if Hector's "Salamanca money, Salamanca blood!" grievances were to be believed, why wouldn't Don Eladio show him the proper respect he allegedly deserves.
  • Eladio is a dick. Every male Salamanca works for his business with ruthless efficiency and Undying Loyalty (Joaquin died trying to avenge Eladio) but you think he cares? All he sees are old school Latino gangsters, who can't do the more lucrative and refined work so he just give them a small drug ring (even though Gus already covers the same market) so they have some use when gang wars aren't happening.

Chuckgate?

• From a realistic standpoint, what damage, in regards to the future of HMM, can be done by Chuck's suicide?
  • It's complicated. Chuck was a partner at the firm, which means he owns a portion of the firm. The partnership voted to buy him out and provided him a partial payment on his share (either from other partners' funds or someone else becoming an equity partner), Chuck threatened them with litigation. This can be complex and is probably covered in an exit clause in their agreement. If the buyout is happening, his Estate would get the remaining buyout funds/share of the partnership; it would be their call if they wanted to continue the litigation or not, given a buyout would happen either way, it probably won't. Typically a partnership would have a life insurance policy that would cover the partnership in case of death, in all likelihood they would still have one, its status would be a major factor in determining how the firm would hold up. The bigger issue for the firm would be dealing with the sudden volume of work, loss of clients, etc., things that were happening anyway.
  • The damage was already done, in terms of Howard having to schmooze all of their clients to assure them everything is fine. Since Chuck was officially no longer a part of the firm when he died, there isn't really any further impact to HHM, and the physical circumstances of his death will probably make it appear to have been an accident. The main fallout in Season 4 will likely be the emotional toll that Chuck's death takes on Jimmy and Kim.
  • Well yes the guy you just fired after he tried suing you died in a fire kind of damage your reputation, like people don't know much of Chuck's flaws aside he had a mental illness. It's ridiculous to think someone kills himself just after he was bought out won't hurt your reputation for a while.
  • They had to downsize as shown in "Pinata", laying off a not-insignificant number of staff. It seems like HHM then struggled for a whole year as Howard says in his video message during the dedication of the library to Chuck in "Winner".

Security cameras?!

• 1) Does the twin owners of the music store have them? And If they did, do you think they would've been savvy enough to check footage of Jimmy planting the drumstick on the floor? 2) If they don't, is it because like the "liability insurance, security cameras are expensive?
  • Well first the camera has to aim at the drumstick which doesn't seem like where your camera focuses and second even if they did do you think saying hold up before I call an ambulance I want to check the footage is gonna look good to the clientele?
  • Same guy who asked this question: Maybe not like they checked it before they call the ambulance but after they call the ambulance? Still bad?
  • Well even if they try getting the police involved, unless they know Jimmy is on suspension, they have more to lose than him. Stiffing someone's payment like that is in poor taste and unless they have a perfect shot in to show that Jimmy set up the fall (Jimmy has his own people filming him and it looked like he slipped for real) trying to argue that just to not pay Jimmy what he is owed is gonna look terrible if it reaches local news.

A Non-Issue?

• Before Chuck interrupted him with his rage rant that practically saved Jimmy from disbarment, Mr. Alley said that Jimmy going after Chuck's condition was a 'non-issue'? To the case as a whole?
  • Yes, it doesn't stop that Jimmy broke in and destroyed his brother's property, in fact it would probably have appeared worse for Jimmy to treat the person under his care like that. Like, you can't break the nose of an unruly child. However Chuck's outburst proved it was out of malice and his condition is indeed a non-issue. What the Bar panel concluded was that Chuck schemed to trick his brother not because he is insane but because he hates Jimmy.

If he was schizophrenic...

• Robert Alley, the state's rep, made a comparison of Chuck's condition to schizoprhenia, saying the above-mentioned quote while adding, "it wouldn't take away from the fact that the defendant..." before Chuck interrupted him before going into his rant about Jimmy. Had Chuck not did that, was the prosecutor was about to finish his sentence that the defendant (Jimmy) was still in the wrong?
  • Well he would have gotten his objection accepted since it's the same he said before, they are destroying the witness credibility by exploiting a condition that is not what is being on trial. Even if Chuck is schizophrenic it wouldn't take away that the defendant is the victim of forgery and that Jimmy broke in to destroy the tape. But then Chuck starts raving that he did set up his brother out of personal grudge and contradicts himself when he said he loved his brother.

Why Jimmy never told Rebecca about all the horrible things Chuck did to him?

• After Chuck's meltdown in the courtroom which results in Jimmy escaping disbarrment, Rebecca confronts Jimmy and calls out him for driving Chuck to that point, even though he had legitimate reasons to do so and when you think about it, he could've told all the horrible things Chuck has done to him to Rebecca but he doesn't. Is it because he never thought about it or because he did thought about it but Rebecca would've used the "That doesn't justify your actions" card, so he thought "screw it".
  • Look at the big picture. Chuck just didn't want Jimmy to be a lawyer in his firm and was just too cowardly to tell him to his face, instead hiding behind Howard. Does it really deserve forging legal documents so his brother loses a high profile client, shames him in front of a jury and invites Rebecca to it just to rub salt on the wounds? In the first part of Season 2, Chuck says he disapproves of his brother being a lawyer but he passed the bar fair and square so nothing he can do. It's only when Jimmy sabotaged his work that he goes overboard with having his brother disbarred (and he kind of have a good reason for that since Jimmy just committed a felony). Like being dishonest to your brother is bad, but breaking the law and humiliating him publicly as retribution is disproportionate.
  • Jimmy could simply have been exhausted after all that happened that day and didn't want to get into it. And we don't know much about Rebecca, but it sure looks like she's itching to get into a fight.
  • Saying this with hindsight, but Jimmy can only barely admit out loud the damage his brother did to him in the finale. At that point he can only try to ignore his feelings and take it all out on Howard.
  • Also, look at Jimmy's face when Chuck has his rant. Even though his scheme to utterly discredit Chuck has come to fruition, he's clearly hating every second of what's happening. Jimmy has a lot of complicated feelings towards his brother, and for any big talk he makes clearly hates hurting him. When push comes to shove, he doesn't actually want to hurt Chuck, but he does because he feels that he has no other option than to do so. Destroying the last vestiges of Chuck completely in the eyes of his ex-wife by revealing just how petty and vindictive he can be would just be pouring salt into an open wound, so Jimmy demurs.

You know, Chuck, you break the law every day

• For as much of a stickler for the law that Chuck was, he sure did love to violate federal law by having people use his mail box for non-federal USPS purposes. And apart from the hypocrisy of Chuck, Mr. "supposed stickler for rules' illegal use of the mailbox" always struck me as illogical. Why not have Jimmy place a box on a pole specifically for cell phones along the walkway somewhere between the street and the house? Apart from being a federal crime to use a mailbox for this purpose, the logistics would be problematic. Strangers, or at least the mail carrier, would have access to cell phones, car keys, or wristwatches left there.
  • To my recollection, the one who typically used the mailbox for storing electronic items was Jimmy. Maybe Chuck just told Jimmy "don't bring electronics into my house", and Jimmy decided to utilize the mailbox for it. Chuck wouldn't even necessarily know that the mailbox was being used since he doesn't ever leave his house. The one time I can recall someone who wasn't Jimmy doing it was when Rich came by to discuss the Sandpiper case, but that would have been Jimmy advising him to do so, not Chuck.

Jimmy's drumstick accident

• This is about Jimmy's drumstick scam in "Slip" that he learned from those skateboarding brothers. Why does Jimmy place the drumstick onto the ground right after he tells the guy to re-start filming him with the camera and not before it? Wouldn't the recording just expose Jimmy having deliberately set up the scam on purpose?
  • Considering Jimmy already knows the camera is there, he most likely placed it somewhere just out of frame.

Chuck's buyout

• Did Chuck cash the check Howard gave him before killing himself or not?
  • No. Chuck never wanted the buyout. He was even shocked to see that Howard was willing to call his bluff and pay out of his own pocket. Chuck never thought Howard would be willing to go that way.

Out of character moment for Mike

• So Mike switched out the tracking device to follow whoever was tailing him, all the way to Los Pollos Hermanos. So why, instead of hiring a real professional to go into the joint and spy on the dead drop, did he hire Jimmy, who’s a complete amateur and got made instantly by Gus, and thus so did Mike? This was arguably one flaw in Mike’s game.
  • Mike is still fairly new to Albuquerque, so in terms of reliable sources, he's only got Jimmy, Nacho, Dr. Caldera and Lawson. Jimmy isn't completely incompetent, and Mike knows he can be a bit theatrical, and convincing. The stakes were really high and he must have weighed all "pro's and con's" in terms of hiring a totally unknown outsider he didn't trust. Besides, there's also the time factor: he had to do it asap to clear up a potentially deadly dangerous situation with Hector. So, though Jimmy wouldn't be my first choice, to say the least, he was really the best option Mike had available at the time. And Nacho was completely out because, from Mike's perspective, whoever this other party is that's following Mike also knows Hector Salamanca and thus also might know Nacho, so would instantly have gotten Nacho made.
    • Mike probably chose Jimmy because unlike the other people listed above, Jimmy was still new to "The Game" and had a less likely chance of being recognized by Gus or the bagman. Hiring someone like Huell or Ira who have been running around the Albuquerque crime scene for a while now had a bigger chance of Mike's mark knowing who they are.
  • It’s also possible that Mike just wanted the cat and mouse game to be over, consistent with his ensuing conversation with Gus, and therefore wanted to be found, yet resented being caught up in the game in the first place.

What if Chuck never had Jimmy arrested, and thus never subject to disciplinary proceedings?

• Say that Chuck was talked out of having Jimmy arrested and he ceded defeat there and then. What would have happened?
  • Not much would have been different in the greater scheme of things. Recall in "Chicanery" that the electromagnetic hypersensitivity began around the time when Jimmy passed the Bar. Which coincidentally also happened around the time of Chuck's divorce. Jimmy becoming a lawyer bucked any sense of "cosmic justice" Chuck had in mind for the guy who could get away with anything. The most likely scenario if Chuck didn't have Jimmy arrested, is that they would have gone their separate ways and never spoken to/of each other again. When Jimmy confronted Chuck about the tape, he said, "for this you destroyed our family?" So it's fair to say that Jimmy was so betrayed, he would no longer have any brotherly connection to Chuck regardless of if he had Jimmy arrested. Maybe months down the line they would have reconnected, since Jimmy did reach out to Chuck in the season 3 finale, despite everything that had happened between them. Now, if the whole Bar hearing didn't go down, Jimmy would have continued his elder law practice until the Sandpiper case cashed out. He'd use that money to get a bigger, nicer office for Wexler-McGill. Kim would have had to hire multiple paralegals anyways to help with Mesa Verde (with her car accident never happening), and probably would never have gone to Schweikart with it. With time, maybe things would have been better for everyone.
  • It's hard to tell how things would differ for Chuck. 'Cause it's impossible to confidently predict what fully goes on in the mind of someone as mentally ill and obviously depressed as Chuck. Meaning one of two things happens to him:
    • Scenario 1: He spirals slowly and eventually commits suicide. The severity of his EHS seems to be directly related to the quality of his relationships with the people/things he loves (Rebecca, Jimmy, Howard, and the Law). Since Jimmy would still be out of his life, his EHS would get worse and he might continue to sabotage his relationships until he kills himself. Because the Bar hearing wouldn't destroy his three remaining relationships in one fell swoop, this process wouldn't be as accelerated, but would have the same conclusion. Maybe Jimmy would have still told the insurance company out of spite about Chuck's illness and gotten them to hike the malpractice premiums on Chuck anyways.
    • Scenario 2: Howard (and maybe Rebecca) become Chuck's primary caretakers, filling the void left by Jimmy. Since Chuck doesn't hate Howard and Rebecca like he does Jimmy, they would be better equipped to stop enabling Chuck and encourage him to seek treatment. Eventually, with their support, he may be able to make a full recovery.

What if Jimmy had used Mike to recover the tape?

• Chuck's plan hinged on Jimmy breaking in to recover the tape. What if Jimmy hadn't been impulsive, and had instead acted reasonably and hired Mike to steal the tape (as quid pro quo for helping Mike with the espionage at Los Pollos Hermanos)? Because Chuck seemed to hinge on the idea that Jimmy would come personally, and he and his private investigator didn't seem to anticipate the possibility of Jimmy using an accomplice.
  • Jimmy being impulsive is his Fatal Flaw, which Chuck knows all too well. It was certainly a gamble to bet Jimmy would barge in, but it was a very safe gamble.

Asking Jimmy for help with Chuck

• Why would Rebecca go to Jimmy for help getting into Chuck's house? The last person Chuck would want to see is Jimmy. He rightfully points out he already kicked his door in for the year. Even if Jimmy wasn't of the opinion that Chuck was for all intents and purposes dead to him, Chuck wouldn't have let him in. He barely lets Howard in. Rebecca herself was probably not high on his list of people he wanted to see, either.
  • She doesn't exactly have a wealth of other options, to be totally fair. Jimmy and Chuck might be feuding, but Jimmy's still his brother and has been his primary caretaker for a good portion of time; he's the best of a not great batch of options.

Chuck's house

• The show does a great job of writing in how Chuck compensated for not having electricity (lanterns, camping stove, etc), but how does he deal with the summer heat with no AC or fans? I guess there was no good alternative, and filming a sweaty Chuck wasn't appealing, but that place had to be a sweatbox.
  • When Jimmy brings Chuck home from the hospital after the copy shop incident, he asks Chuck if he wants to go to bed, and Chuck replies that he'll just sleep on the couch because the ground floor of his house is cooler. Other than that, there is no mention of the summer heat. It's worth noting that Chuck's house is surrounded by large shade trees, and Albuquerque's elevation is quite high at 5,312 feet, so these two factors may keep the heat from becoming oppressive.

The Cartel Civil War that should be

• So, the flashbacks we see in Breaking Bad and this show paint a very clear picture of how Hector's status within The Cartel has diminished. In the distant flashbacks, he's practically on equal footing with Eladio. In the present, it's clear he's now held in much lower regard and is beneath not only Eladio, but Bolsa, and maybe even Gus. By the end of Season 3, Eladio basically treats Hector like an underling and feels comfortable upsetting him if it means his operation will be a little more efficient. So, why doesn't Hector do something about it? He's clearly unhappy that The Cartel is working with Gus at all, something that has been going on for quite some time, and his position is only getting worse. But the Salamancas are clearly the muscle for The Cartel, so why doesn't Hector do something about it? The Cousins and Lalo would 100% back Hector over Eladio if Hector decided to make a move, and Tuco probably would as well. I'm not even sure why Eladio is the boss of The Cartel, but now that Hector is clearly getting pushed aside, why doesn't he at least go down swinging given the impressive set of enforcers who he'd have to work with?
  • What would Hector be winning? We don't get much background on the early days of The Cartel, but the Salamancas don't produce or procure their product themselves. A war wouldn't do them any good because while they could win, they wouldn't have a connection for product.
  • Also, the Salamancas are muscle, but they're basically just muscle. Except for maybe Lalo they tend to have very little in the way of strategic or organisational acumen, they tend to be impulsive and unstable but in a way that is nevertheless quite easy to predict and account for, and overall tend to be best employed as blunt weapons who'll obey fairly simple orders that don't require a lot of nuance or guile. You can often win a war with muscle, but very rarely can you win a war with only muscle.

How can Howard force Chuck's retirement?

• Howard suggests that Chuck become partner emeritus, as his instability and condition is making him a liability to HHM. Chuck turns him down, and Howard basically says he intends to force the issue. So that implies Howard has power over Chuck working at HHM, even though they're both senior partners. Also, in the series finale, once Howard gives Chuck his share, it's implied that Chuck has no ability to simply refuse to retire. Given that Chuck didn't want the money and wanted to remain at HHM, what's stopping him from just giving the check back and saying he doesn't want to retire? What gives Howard the power to force a name partner (who also seems to have been the driving force behind the firm being built up into what it was) to retire regardless of what that name partner actually wants?
  • It seems like the firm has some contractual agreement that the partners can force out a partner if the rest agree, albeit having to pay out that partner's share of the firm. I have no idea if that really happens but it seems to make sense for situations of a partner becoming toxic for whatever reason.

Why didn't Jimmy contract the Music Store owners to buying all the ads or sue them?

• They already agreed to have a free ad then the rest. If they were contracted, they couldn't back out easily and Jimmy would safely have the money. If it was verbally contracted, then the three college kids could be witnesses to support a lawsuit.
  • The goal was to make an ad quickly so it could be shown on TV the very next day. Jimmy was already in dire straits and simply didn't have the time to draw up a formal contract. Even if he did try to enforce it as an oral contract, the amount of time and resources involved for a relatively small amount of money simply wouldn't have been worth it.

Season 4

What if Chuck survived the fire?

• What would've happened if Chuck had somehow survived the fire? Like, if someone had noticed the blaze and managed to get him out of the house in time?
  • There's only one way this would've ended for Chuck, and it's that those with power of attorney over his affairs, whether that be Jimmy and/or Howard, would have no choice but to have him committed to a psychiatric ward. There's a short fanfic out there illustrating just how this might've gone. From a writing standpoint, that would've been the end of the road for Chuck. There's no way he's going to get his law license back, not to mention that every lawyer in the tight-knit legal community of New Mexico is going to know what really happened (while Howard would have to face countless malpractice suits from HHM clients, to the point he would've probably had to take Chuck's name off the firm and rename it Howard Hamlin & Partners or something to minimize modifications to the logo). He'd probably find a way to kill himself in the psych ward.

Why throw the pills away at the bridge?

• OK, I get why he couldn't toss the pills in the sewer grate, but why would Nacho throw the pills away by parking in the middle of a bridge, even while knowing that Gus could be trailing him? Why not just stop at a gas station and throw it in a garbage bin?
  • He probably decided just to get it over with. Nacho looked super stressed out about it every second of the scene, especially since Gus disrupted his first attempt to dispose of them.
    • Nacho's attempt on Hector had failed. Nacho was internally panicking, and people who are panicking tend to make hasty, bad decisions.
  • The bin of a gas station isn't any safer than the bottom of the river, at least it'll be harder to find if it is indeed the pills he threw instead of a piece of garbage. Gus only knows by gut feeling that Nacho did it. If Victor brings the pills he found in the trash it's even easier.
    • Gus knows Nacho was up to something because when Hector collapsed, he spilled all the fake pills on the ground. Nacho picks up the empty pill bottle first, then starts picking up the pills off the ground and putting them in his pocket. Then he sees Nacho hand the paramedics a filled bottle with the real pills. Gus simply noticed something was off with Nacho's behavior, probably something as simple as him not hearing Nacho dropping the pills straight into the bottle when he was picking them all up. It was through getting copies of Hector's hospital records that he was able to put together the rest.

Bugging Nacho's car

• When did Gus have Nacho's car bugged? Was it as soon as he had suspicions of Nacho having something to do with Hector, or much earlier? More importantly, how did he know Nacho had been meeting with Mike?
  • It seems like Nacho's stop at the bridge to get rid of the fake pills took place immediately after the meeting with Bolsa, so the latest that Victor could have installed the tracker was while Nacho was with Gus, Bolsa and Arturo. As for installing the bug, Gus seems like he plans to bug anyone who may be of use/a liability down the road, and he is just waiting for it to become necessary before he does it, to minimize costs.
  • It had to be some time in episode 8 or 9. When Mike met with Nacho to warn him about the risks of taking out Hector by tampering with his medication, he makes a big show of inspecting Nacho's gas cap just to be sure Gus didn't have a tracker installed there. And it's very likely Gus still had someone surveilling Mike and/or Nacho, seeing as at the end of "Talk," Gus confronts Mike about not telling him that Nacho was plotting a move against Hector, in a tone that suggests he knew about Nacho meeting Mike and Daniel Wormald.
  • It might've been earlier. Gus had Mike placed under surveillance some time before Mike's failed attempt to snipe Hector. It may have been as early as "Bali H'ai", once Mike had pissed off Hector. After Mike robbed the truck, Nacho called him and they met in "Nailed". So Gus's men saw them together. That's why Gus knows that Mike went to kill Hector because of the dead samaritan. Knowing that, Nacho's weird reaction to Hector almost collapsing in S 3 E 9 and him going straight for the pills when Hector collapsed in S 3 E 10 would've raised red flags with Gus. Once he's figured out that Nacho swapped the pills, he makes an educated guess that Mike knew about the plan, or got that information out of Nacho at gunpoint.

How much of Jimmy's grief is real vs. fake?

• Obviously, to some degree, Jimmy was faking his grief. But was any of his grief genuine?
  • The best argument is that Jimmy just hasn't fully processed it yet. Everyone reacts differently to learning of the death of a loved one. Some people carry on as normal, or are even cheerier than usual, others just become inconsolable.
  • While Jimmy’s “your cross to bear” response to Howard’s confession does show some traces of Saul, one must also remember that Howard showed up unexpectedly, uninvited, and basically intruded on a delicate moment. Jimmy hasn’t had time to process the funeral, much less Chuck’s death. He didn’t say a word to Kim on the ride home. Then Howard, who almost always sided with Chuck against Jimmy, shares a tearful confession that he may have driven Chuck to suicide. The LAST thing that anyone in a state of grief would be is "rational". Hell, a lot of people are impossible before their first cup of coffee. Imagine that someone you don’t like shows up at a vulnerable moment with disturbing news that only compounds your already mixed bag of emotions? Would you feel bad for them? Or would you be outraged? Would you think that was thoughtful of them to tell you? Or selfish of them to divulge? Most people would probably react to Howard's intrusion the same way Jimmy did.
  • Jimmy felt immensely guilty before Howard revealed the insurance stuff, because he thought he might have been the one responsible for Chuck's suicide. And once he realized that he wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back (even though he was indirectly contributory toward Chuck's suicide), he felt relieved enough to go back to normal. Now if Jimmy still truly cared for Chuck, he would have at least thought "oh, that whole insurance ordeal was because I made his rates go up." But since any love between them was eroded by the Bar hearing, Jimmy's thought process is that, so long as he wasn't the very last person to hurt Chuck, he exonerates himself of all guilt.

Did Jimmy indirectly kill Chuck or not?

• Sure, the insurance visit and them jacking up Chuck's malpractice premiums was a big factor, but does that truly mean Jimmy indirectly killed Chuck or not? On a related note, did Jimmy know about the insurance issue prior to Howard mentioning it? Sure he knew that he leaked the info but he wouldn't know the eventual result because there were so many intermediate steps between Jimmy's visit to the insurance company and Chuck's suicide. It does seem that Jimmy's sense of guilt probably came from the visit just before Chuck goes all tweaker on his house. Howard confessing that he pushed Chuck out of HHM lifted that weight.
  • When Howard confesses the insurance matter to Jimmy and Kim, it seems that Jimmy realized what he did with the insurance wasn't what caused Chuck to go off the deep end. All Jimmy did was cost HHM more money, it was Howard who drove Chuck to full on depression. But Chuck's death is really just the result of a bunch of independent decisions that were made by a bunch of completely independent characters. Jimmy may have been responsible for the insurance stuff, but Chuck was responsible for his own life, and Howard was responsible for his reaction to the insurance scenario.
  • Even without Jimmy's visit to the underwriters, the insurance company would've eventually found out about Chuck's condition. Anyone who held a grudge against Chuck could've alerted the insurance company. In fact, they would have found out about it at renewal time if they saw Chuck had brought a case against his brother. In a way, Howard is truly guilty if you go all the way back to the beginning where Jimmy wanted Howard to just buy out Chuck's share, but instead it was cheaper for Howard to ignore Chuck's illness. At least, that's certainly an alternate interpretation of Jimmy's thought process here.
    • There's a bit of irony in that while Jimmy may have been trash beforehand, if the shoe was on the other foot and Chuck had some dynamite on Jimmy then of course he'd have tipped someone off "in the interests of integrity". The joke is that the one thing that helped to send Chuck over the edge was something Jimmy did legally.
  • Chuck killed himself, like it's not just the insurance, it's the delusions about electromagnetic field, his resentment of Jimmy, and maybe even his mother's death and his divorce from Rebecca. Howard didn't even need the insurance; he wanted Chuck out since Mesa Verde and would have found something else.

Using Barry as the patsy

• So did Mike go to that warehouse, follow Barry home, find his security badge in the car, and drain the battery the day before his surprise "security inspection"?
  • Yes. He needed a way in, and he rolled it into the larger test of Madrigal's systems as well.

Mike's audit

• Was it a wise idea for Mike to show his face at the plant? What crime boss allows underlings to disregard their orders without severe consequences?
  • It was a smart idea. Now Mike has a cover story if Madrigal ever is investigated for money laundering. He also can practically dictate how the security is run now, allowing him to craft his own "backdoors" only he knows how to use without people noticing, which he tells Lydia he's going to do, which may or may not lead to Madrigal being a part of the meth logistics (remember how Lydia offers her illicit logistics network in Breaking Bad).
    • From Mike's perspective, it is. He's covering his ass from both the law (not everybody at Madrigal is involved in crime, or knows about their criminal activities) and the IRS (he's created a trail of work which can be verified by lots of people). He's also in bed with these people. Lydia should thank him for doing a good job and take steps to fix their issues.
  • What is the crime boss gonna do? Send Mike to punish himself? It's not like Gus gives a shit what Mike does as long as it is not killing a Salamanca.

Gus sticking around for the ambulance

• Why would Gus remain present when the ambulance came to pick up Hector? It seems pretty suspicious. They're having a shady meeting in a secluded meeting at dark with a known OG cartel gang-banger, and the inconspicuous owner and proprietor of Los Pollos Hermanos is just there? Obviously the paramedics are just doing their job, and they only need details about the patient, not those who were there with him. Still, it is uncharacteristically careless for Gus to allow himself to be seen having a meeting with such unscrupulous individuals.
  • If the police are aware of Gus's presence, he could explain it away as being that he was under duress by these bad men from Michoacan who wanted protection money like they used to get from him. His Pollos staff would vouch for this story given Hector's previous attempt to extort Gus by taking his restaurant hostage.
  • For Gus's purposes, he needed to stick around to know what would become of Hector, since he has a personal stake in deciding Hector's fate himself. And so, he would've quickly come up with an alibi in case he was questioned on why he was there. Los Pollos Hermanos is later shown to have their warehouse in this area, so it probably wouldn't be too hard for the proprietor of said warehouse to justify his presence.
  • Remember that Hector has a couple of "legitimate" businesses as well, namely his ice-cream parlor and the El Michoacáno. It probably wouldn't have been too hard for Gus to come up with a story about how two local food business owners had decided to meet up to discuss something, when Hector was unfortunate enough to suffer a heart attack.
  • Legitimate or not Hector is still known as an O.G by most of the police, and his hostage situation last season can crumble it. Gus probably was careless, but he is always careless when something screws his revenge plan. This is what will do him in at the end of his life.
    • We shouldn't forget that Gus does have the DEA looking the other way. He may not have agents on his payroll, but he made donations to charities set up by the DEA and he was close friends with George Merkert, Hank's boss at the DEA. Presenting himself as seemingly being a businessman who supports Albuquerque charities for good causes makes it easy to dissuade anyone from investigating him unless they develop probable cause (like eventually happens with Hank when looking into Gale's death).

At the funeral, no one cried harder than Rebecca

• While we saw several people like Schweikart and Cliff giving Jimmy their personal condolences, no one does so with Rebecca, though Howard is standing by her side and comforting her. I'm curious why no one was stopping by to her. Did it mean that she and Chuck were not a very social couple even when they were married (that they were separated was something Howard put in the obituary), not often seen together or that they didn’t have a lot of friends together?
  • It makes sense if one believes that Chuck and Rebecca's divorce was not an amicable split, as Jimmy hinted a few times in season 3.
  • It's interesting that everyone wants to assume those people specifically only went up to Jimmy, when he's sitting in front row several pews in front of Rebecca. They could've very clearly gone up to her first, and then up to Jimmy afterwards, but the camera is only interested in showing us Jimmy. Then again, Rebecca also doesn't live in Albuquerque anymore, so understandably, some of the guests there who only knew Chuck from business relations, like Rick Schweikart, might not know her or have enough of a connection with her and her late husband.
  • There's also a bit of underlying misogyny here, in that grieving wives/mothers tend to get ignored by the men. You see something similar to this in Stranger Things at the "funeral" for Will Byers: everyone offers their condolences to Lonnie, Will's absentee abusive father, but none of them even give a shit about Joyce, Will's mother and the active parent in Will's life. Though ironically in the BCS case, the person everyone gives condolences to, Jimmy, was the more active person in Chuck's life compared to Rebecca.
    • Do they? This seems like an assertion that needs some stronger supporting evidence — since grief arguably tends to cause people's protective instincts to kick in around women. Especially considering that in the Stranger Things example Joyce spends most of the episode practically catatonic; It's not that she's being ignored, it's that she's in a mental state where she's barely responding to what's going on whereas Lonnie, for all his faults, is in a state of mind where he's able to acknowledge and respond to people around him.
  • We don't see the whole funeral or wake, to be totally fair, and what we do see of it is going to revolve around and focus on Jimmy's perspective since he's the protagonist. For all we know, people were giving Rebecca their condolences, the show just didn't really focus on it because she's just a bit-part player at best. The very fact that "Howard is standing by her side and comforting her" clearly indicates that she is not being ignored.

Jimmy's interview with Neff Copiers

• So Jimmy goes for the interview, obviously well prepared. Then, instead of the normal waiting time to get an answer, he goes with the full court press to convince them. When they say yes, he gets mad and turns them down. So, why did he do that? Does he really have no interest in the job, but his self esteem can't take being told no; so he has to "win" the interview, but then turn it down? Is he just doing it to prove to Kim that he can get offers? Did he change his mind once they made the offer, or did he go in knowing he would turn it down?
  • My guess is that he's self-sabotaging. He's at a crossroads in his life, but doesn't yet know how to continue, so he is unconsciously keeping himself from moving forward.
  • I think he was secretly testing them. He might have gone into the job convinced that it was probably going to be a dead job given his lack of sales experience, and then upon realizing that he scored better with them than he thought he would, he decided to pull a Charlie hustle and see just how reliable they actually are as employers. Some other tropers on this site have brought up Jimmy's late father and how Jimmy might've been reminded of his navieity in this scene, all too willing to assume anyone they don't do business with isn't a shady character by any means. Add that to the fact that Jimmy is still processing Chuck's death and his own future, his emotions are swirling all over the place and he's acting purely on a "fuck-it-all" impulse right now.
    • Jimmy was falling back on his nature as a con man. He talked them into making a bad decision by hiring him (though he did a great sales pitch), but the fact is, he doesn't want a legitimate job. Even the thrill of talking people into upgrading their copiers (which they may not want or need) is too vanilla for him. The entire interview was him feeding his need to con people in a completely legal manner. But he needs a chaser; he has to tell somebody how he did it. He picked his marks, because he is out of other options. Kim would be his usual confidant, but he's pretending to seek legitimate work, so she's unavailable.

What was on the documents?

• What was on the documents that Tyrus brought to Gus? The camera deliberately was keeping it out of focus for some reason.
  • It's implied to be the results of the toxicology scan on Hector. This is seen in the way Gus's facial expression changes, and he directs Tyrus to call Victor and arrange a meeting. The results presumably tell him that there were no traces of the nitroglycerin pills in Hector at the time of his stroke, even though Gus saw Hector using pills. Which, combined with the report Victor gave him about Nacho's stop at the bridge, was enough for him to conclude that Nacho had tampered with Hector's medication.
  • Nitroglycerin has a half-life of just a few minutes, and there's no reason for the hospital to have tested it in the first place. Even if Gus had somehow gotten a sample of Hector's blood without anybody noticing, by the time they would have had the opportunity, it almost certainly would have been undectectable anyway.
    • Gus could easily have gotten a sample in secret, since he had his physician and Victor break into Hector's room in the middle of the night and make copies of his charts.
  • Even if Gus found nothing, he would still have copies of the reports just to see how Nacho did it. If Hector was off his meds and given something to raise his blood pressure it might come up or might not, but in any case he wants all the info. With the amount of influence he's got on the hospital staff thanks to Dr. Bruckner being in his pocket, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that Bruckner could be paid to supply Gus with copies of the needed charts.

Kim and Howard

• I can understand that Kim isn't the most friendly towards HHM for what they've treated her and Jimmy, but I wasn't expecting that much hostility towards Howard.
  • Kim refuses to believe that Chuck killed himself, because she can't bear the thought of being partially responsible for it. She already felt overwhelmed by guilt for having torn Chuck down at the Bar hearing, but just imagine how much worse she would feel if she actually felt responsible for his death. So she's probably in denial. Thus, Howard telling Jimmy that he believes Chuck killed himself really set Kim off. She feels protective of Jimmy because she loves him, but at the same time she knows they're all partly responsible for Chuck's downfall.
  • Also, Howard stuck Kim in the cornfield for losing the (batshit) Kettlemans, put her in doc review because of the Jimmy/Davis&Main thing, and continued to treat her as subservient after she left HHM. Perhaps the worst was when he insinuated Jimmy was making her choices for her. Howard really was asking for it, though he didn't remotely deserve how nuclear Jimmy and Kim went.

Gus "I don't believe fear to be an effective motivator" Fring

• Why does Gus handle Nacho so differently from Mike? Both are people he caught trying to hurt Hector, yet seemingly with Mike he is following the principle he shared with Walt in Breaking Bad of fear not being an effective motivator, whereas with Nacho he chooses to apply a decent dose of fear. Is there some particular reason or endgame to this?
  • When Gus said the line to Walt, it was a very specific circumstance; Walt is a potential partner and he didn't feel like scaring him into cooperating was going to actually help as well as appealing to his wellbeing would have. Like Mike, he had a use for Walter and needed a good relationship with him to get what he wanted. Plus he likely knows Mike has confronted Hector to the point where he openly attempted to provoke a violent encounter, so he knows already it won't work. It's a different ball game with Nacho, who's a mid-level guy within Hector's crew. He already had little use for Nacho to begin with, and now that lower ranked guy "stepped out of line" and nearly cost Gus something he'd wanted for years. Plus, remember that in the episode before, after Arturo and Nacho were dismissed, Gus told Bolsa that Hector's absence will likely cause other operations to invade Salamanca (and by extension Gus's) territory, something Nacho as a gang member should have known before acting. Put it another way, Mike is a valuable asset who didn't know the extent of what he was doing, whereas Nacho was an underling who should have, and stepped out of line doing anyway. The "initial fear" line doesn't work because Gus is not motivating Nacho to be an ally the way he wants Mike to be, Nacho has already made an error and now fear is going to be an effective motivator.
    • Gus had Mike screwing with the distribution, that affects Cartel activity and invite DEA too. He even staged a drug war in the third episode he doesn't care about ramification as much as he just wants the Cartel to fall his way and everyone else is doing it wrong.
    • In addition, let's not forget that Mike wasn't working under Hector when he robbed his truck, nor would he have realized the ramifications for Gus upon doing so. On the other hand, Nacho, being the guy working under Hector, should have. The fact that Mike was an outside party is a big deal because it's far easier to at least have a conversation with an outsider, at least to understand their reasoning. In addition, Gus was much easier on Mike because Mike had helped hurt Hector's business when he stole money, and he saw someone was skilled and valuable. Nacho on the other hand, already nearly murdered Hector so Gus is angry about this, and furthermore is not someone that Gus should trust to stay loyal.
    • Gus also likes to be in complete control on matters concerning Hector. He wasn't really so mad about the intent to kill Hector that Mike also displayed, but rather what really made him mad is that he couldn't control the situation as he pleases when he didn't see Nacho coming. Because Nacho managed to carry out his attempt under Gus's nose, Gus has to show him who's the boss. While Breaking Bad suggested that Gus is more rational than a raging egomaniac like Walter White, everything we see with Gus in Better Call Saul here shows that Gus is not just some cold calculating robot but acts impulsively to assert dominance.
  • The key word there is "effective". It's not that Gus is above using it, he just pursues other options provided they're available. With Walt, Walt was someone he could make a killing off of while Mike was someone who showed that he was loyal and even competent (similar to Tyrus and Victor, Gale's apartment notwithstanding) enough to help Gus' plans moving forward. Nacho meanwhile encouraged a gang war with his attempt on Hector's life which would've endangered the Cartel (and Gus) in their state-side operations. Couple that with the thought that if Hector died, then Nacho would've "cheated" Gus out of what he felt Hector deserved.
    • And the need for control is more apparent considering Nacho's past actions. He wanted to murder Tuco because he was worried about side dealings being found out. He induced Hector's stroke because Hector wanted to use his father's upholstery shop as a smuggling route. We have no idea whether Gus is aware about the circumstances behind Tuco being arrested (knowing Gus, he probably did, given that's the earliest Mike could have appeared on his radar), but the fact that Nacho tried to murder his boss, regardless of reasons, shows that if he is capable of doing that to the Salamancas, then he might try something similar to other bosses. He cannot expect any sort of loyalty from him.
  • Because unlike Mike, Nacho blindsided Gus. When Mike was about to shoot Hector, Gus had him bugged and all. Nacho had already tampered Hector's medication before Gus even knew who he was.
  • You have to view Gus's "I don't consider fear to be an effective motivator" line in the context it was said in. Gus doesn’t use fear for respective business partners. Notice that he didn’t intimidate Werner into working for him. He acts courteous to Werner because he wants a healthy relationship. The same goes with his initial efforts to recruit Walt. It’s only with people who cause problems that he resorts to fear tactics or intimidation, and Nacho is that kind of person.
    • In fact, everything Gus says must be taken with a grain of salt. He can even break his promises or words given if he thinks that's helping his business. For example, in Breaking Bad, he told Walt "Never trust an addict" in relation to Jesse, however, later, indeed, pressed by the circumstances, he broke his words and had to trust him (and ultimately was won over by Jesse by the way Jesse stood up to the cartel's condescending chemists as well as protected him during the shootout at the compound). Of course, each time it's more or less a lottery.
    • There's a distinction between motivating someone as opposed to using power to bend them to your will. The distinction is subtle because they do overlap in some cases, but if you look at other cases you can see the difference. When Gus recruits Werner, and when he first considers having Walt cook for him, there's no fear involved, there's completely friendly professionalism. These are the kind of terms you need if you want to motivate someone to do their best work for you. The same way Gus treats his restaurant employees after the Hector incident.
      But when Gus kills Arturo in front of Nacho, and Victor in front of Walt, the relationship is completely different. In both cases, it's fear. In Nacho's case, it's recruitment by intimidation with the threat of being sold out to the Salamancas if he doesn't become a double agent for Gus. In Walt's case, it's a message if "I will kill you the next chance I get, but for now I need to keep you alive". In Walt's case, both people know that the relationship is doomed and it is just a matter of time before one kills the other. In Nacho's case, Gus would like to kill him, but he also figured that Nacho would be more useful as a double agent, giving him an opportunity to undermine the weakened Salamanca crew in a way that can't be traced back to him.
      Gus' belief in this distinction comes from, of course, Max's death (essentially the origin story for his character). Eladio tried to use fear to control Gus' behavior. That tactic only served to motivate Gus to wipe them all out. That's how Gus responds to other people attempting to use fear on him, so he doesn't think very much of the tactic. He always tries to be friendly/professional to everyone first. Threatening the life of Nacho's father in season 5 probably wouldn't be something Gus would normally do, but considering Nacho put Hector in the hospital (and all the overhead Gus had to spend on Hector's medical care), the fact that Lalo is a more challenging Salamanca than the rest of his family, he has reasons to resort to extreme measures to ensure Nacho's cooperation. Mike eventually even calls Gus out on this late in the season.

Why was Kim in court?

• What was Kim's motive to sit in the courtroom? Was it to renew her love for the law as Judge Munsinger indicated? That seems a little too obvious, and does not necessarily explain why she stayed after he suggested she leave because what she was looking for was not there. Does Kim not agree with the judge on likelihood of rekindling her passion? Or is there a more subtle motive, perhaps related to Kim's request that the paralegal drop her off at the court when she had no business there?
  • She wants to do public defender work, because while she may be making a big paycheck helping Kevin and Paige with the work at Mesa Verde, it's mostly about banking law and whatnot, which isn't exactly glamorous and mostly happens out of sight. And one must recall the conversation she had with Jimmy in "Lantern" when they were trying to decide on a movie to watch while she recovered from her car accident. She said she always idolized Atticus Finch and wanted to be more like him once she graduated law school. Sure, helping a mid-size local bank become a mid-size regional bank is a big thing, but it's not the same thing. But Kim is using law to seek justice for what feels unjust to her in light of Chuck's death and Jimmy's odd behavior.

Mesa Verde's terms of work with Kim

• Look Paige, I understand you want Kim to prioritize her time on Mesa Verde's work, but if you're legitimately asking her to be your lawyer and do literally no other work, shouldn't she be working for you as an employee in your own office as in-house counsel, as opposed to being outside legal counsel? If they got HHM to do this, would they have expected HHM to not work on anything else either? Not to mention, if you're trying to become this regional entity with branches all over the Southwestern United States, how exactly do you expect ONE person to do all of that work for you under those circumstances?
  • Yes, Kim is on retainer and got the job solely because she promised she'll give all her attention on Mesa Verde. Given the steady income they give her for a job, she won't lose any time soon. Though you'd think Kim would hire help or do like HHM did with Davis & Main on the Sandpiper case, and ask another firm for assistance if she is that overworked. No one but Kim is to blame on her still being a one person and assistant show. Even if his motives for trying to retain them were not 100% honest, Chuck had a point that HHM was more than capable of handling the sort of demanding work that Mesa Verde needed to have done.
  • Kim fought tooth-and-nail to convince Mesa Verde to stay with her as their client, and they initially went with HHM because they were concerned one person couldn't do all the work they needed. When she quit HHM, she had initially started her business solely as outside counsel for them. So it had been Kim's responsibility to prove them wrong, and if she's blowing off Paige's calls to focus on pro bono cases, that just comes off as a betrayal of their trust and makes her a liability. And she does eventually realize she's overtaxed; that's why she finally decides to take Rick Schweikart's offer to work at Schweikart & Cokely, that way she doesn't have to deal with the Mesa Verde work full-time. She can now delegate that to associate attorneys, allowing her to use the better amount of her time working with her public defender clients.
  • It's quite simple, really: Kim's supposed to prioritize Mesa Verde because Mesa Verde keeps the lights on. We see this later in season 5, when she's forced to abandon her pro bono clients at Schweikart's request to go assist Paige in Tucumcari with the Everett Acker eviction dispute.

The reinstatement panel rejecting Jimmy

• Does anyone have experience with lawyery stuff to confirm that simply seeming a little insincere is enough to get rejected like that? I mean, having the suspicion that someone is insincere is basically just a "feeling", it's not based on facts like statements or physical evidence. It doesn't seem like a strong argument. But even if Jimmy said something like "I like the thrill of winning court cases" or "I like making big bucks", would that be so wrong? As long as a lawyer plays by the rules (for as far as they know), why does the underlying motivation even matter? And why fish for a response about how Jimmy felt about his recently deceased brother? People all handle grief differently and then to use it against him is just wrong.
  • There's an irony going on in that Jimmy was sincere when he answered the question, "what does the law mean to you?" Pretty much everything he said was honest. It was what he didn't say that bothered the committee. Chuck clearly had a huge influence on Jimmy becoming a lawyer, and he avoided mentioning his name at every opportunity:
    • Jimmy said that becoming a lawyer was the last thing he thought he would do growing up, but didn't mention how his own brother was a lawyer since he was in grade school? Even saying "that was more of Chuck's thing" would have pleased the committee.
    • He mentioned that he "happened to get a job with some attorneys," but didn't mention that Chuck was the one who hired him and moved him to Albuquerque in the first place? Chuck introduced him to the world of law, so he deserves credit for Jimmy becoming a lawyer.
    • Jimmy said, "something inside me made try" to become a lawyer. Was that "something" the respect and admiration Chuck earned by being an attorney? Jimmy was a low-life conman before Chuck hired him. It seems a little ridiculous that he avoided giving any clear reason for why he went to law school when, from an outsider's perspective, it's painfully obvious he was following in his brother's footsteps.
    • And there was his terrible "go Land Crabs!" answer. The woman was just trying to get Jimmy to say a few words about Chuck, and he missed the easy layup.
  • So in other words, Jimmy's feelings about Chuck were crucial to the reinstatement hearing. Chuck was the victim of the crime Jimmy committed that got him suspended in the first place. Jimmy exposed Chuck's mental illness in court, destroying his reputation.
  • It was more than him coming off as insincere, that was just the hurried response the chairman gave when Jimmy confronted him in the stairway. They were trying to measure whether he truly felt remorse for the break-in incident and would never attempt such an action again in the future. His overt dismissing of Chuck and obvious rehearsed, flippant attitude to answering the questions dissuaded the panel's confidence that he had truly grown from his suspension.
  • Not to mention there's a bit of classism going on. Had Jimmy gone to a prestigious law school and not a place like University of American Samoa, their opinions of him going into the hearing would've been much different.
  • It's not that Jimmy displayed an "incorrect" reaction to Chuck's death. He didn't mention it at all. A formative relationship that was materially relevant to the incident that got his license suspended.
    Now, is it reasonable to expect someone to want to talk about their recently-deceased brother when you don't even directly raise the question? No, and Jimmy would've been wise to lean on that argument in his appeal. Nevertheless, that's the reason they call him insincere. When he tells Kim he doesn't feel anything about Chuck's death, he's lying to himself and her because he's still in denial. Also, as much as the show likes to big up Jimmy's charisma, some people have a nose for an obvious schmoozer and don't like it, which could be part of why he lost — as much as he says he was sincere, he was putting on an act for most of it. Which makes it ironic when he has to be even more insincere to sway them into reinstating his license.
  • Look at all the times Jimmy has been betrayed and shafted by Chuck, both in secret and openly...and he still kept trying to reconcile and make sure his brother is okay. The final straw for Jimmy was when Chuck conned him into that break-in to get him arrested and then disbarred. Let's not forget that the reason Jimmy altered the Mesa Verde documents was to get them to go back to Kim, not for his own gain. It's pretty difficult to mourn someone who actively hated you and tried their damnedest to ruin your life. Jimmy's reaction is utterly reasonable. What's crazy is how other people keep telling him that he should mourn Chuck, even the Bar Committee. Nobody sees through Chuck because he was always playing a role. It's likely that what really angers Jimmy after Chuck's death is that everyone keeps nagging him to feel bad and to praise someone who was actually a villain and a snake.
    • The people on the Bar Committee seem like the kind who believe you must always reconcile with family, no matter what they've done, or at least feel horrible about it if you don't. But that's just pie in the sky. Jonathan Banks once said at a panel discussion, after everyone was saying how Jimmy should forgive Chuck for keeping him out of HHM, that he (Banks) disagreed: "Sometimes, trusting a person like that is the most dangerous thing you can do." Jimmy finally learned that and wasn't about to mourn for a guy who hated and tried to ruin him.
    • In fact, that would explain why Kim doesn't understand why Jimmy has buried his feelings for Chuck: she wasn't there when Chuck delivered this toxic last line to his brother. She doesn't know what Jimmy and the audience know.
  • The root to Jimmy's insincerity is in the fact that every time he did let himself feel vulnerable and tried to reconcile with Chuck, it backfired on him. Hell, Chuck literally manipulated Jimmy into committing a B&E, using that desire for reconciliation, just so he'd have a pretext for taking Jimmy's law license away. When Jimmy tried to start a conversation about admitting his mistakes to Chuck, what did Chuck do? Chuck said that Jimmy never meant anything to him. So now that the bastard's dead, Jimmy's supposed to feel bad? Nah. The reigning emotion in Jimmy's head is "fuck him".
  • When Chuck was alive, he did nothing but hurt and discourage Jimmy. He made it clear to Jimmy that he didn't respect him, and he succeeded in convincing Jimmy that he never cared about him. His last words to Jimmy were "you never mattered all that much to me." When Chuck died, he left Jimmy nothing beyond a soul-crushing final memory, $5,000 to satisfy some legal requirements, and an unfeeling, disingenuous letter in which Chuck says things that sound kind enough, but never actually says he cares for Jimmy in any way.
    How deep should Jimmy's sadness be about his toxic brother's death, especially a year later (when the reinstatement hearing takes place)? Jimmy wants to detach himself from his brother and all the pain he's caused him and forge his own path. He never wants to face the memory of Chuck again. However, at his first bar reinstatement interview, he gets declined because the other attorneys wanted to hear Jimmy mention what an inspiration Chuck was to him...and he doesn't mention Chuck at all. Again, Chuck stood in his way. Even in death, Jimmy can't seem to escape Chuck's influence. So, at the second bar reinstatement hearing, he gives them what they want him to show. He pretends to have all the natural, expected feelings about his brother. He acknowledges Chuck one last time only so that he'll finally be able to leave him behind—for real this time.

Why would people buy phones from "Saul Goodman?"

• Jimmy is selling burner phones to pimps and drug dealers so they can manage their criminal enterprises without "the man" knowing about it. The first group he tries to sell to dismiss him as a "narc," but once he dons a brand-new track suit, he gets dozens of customers. Why would all of these criminals trust a 30-something white guy in an off-the-rack outfit who suddenly appears on the scene and wants to sell them phones? Wouldn't buying burners from random retail shops with cash be safer? Cops can't anticipate exactly when and where you'll purchase a burner, so they'd have no idea what your number is. Jimmy's business model, on the other hand, would be a perfect way for the cops to plant a wire-tapped phone on a gang (especially seeing as The Wire saw Lester Freamon do exactly that). Why don't more of them suspect him of being a narc?
  • A little charisma goes a long way. If there's anything Jimmy is good at, it's convincing other people to trust him (even if they shouldn't).
  • He's selling to reckless, small-time criminals who don't think too far ahead (like the guys who go on a crime spree early in season 5 after getting Saul's 50% off coupon for legal counsel). Some of them at the late-night hotdog stand might be in the middle of some illicit activity and need to make a call immediately after buying the phone.

Chuck's biggest case

• What was Chuck's signature case? He would have to have achieved a huge class action suit to support HHM. Such as Sandpiper, Mesa Verde ... what was Chuck's expertise? I would say something keyed into "The law is sacred".
  • Before his death, Howard had a discussion with Chuck about Chuck writing the definitive piece on the Commerce Clause. And his legal peers remember him as poised for the Supreme Court. So, his encyclopedic command of the law, the higher calling and institution of law, and above all, his reputation as the pillar of these traditions older than the US itself, that was his legacy. The cases themselves likely required him for those reasons, or were perverted hypocritically, as we've also seen.
  • That said, Chuck was someone who wouldn't have thought about his signature cases. He was extremely proud (justifiably) in being someone who got to work and grinded every day on every case he was a part of. Every case mattered to him, big and small. It's telling that they kept punishing Kim for cases that she appeared to falter on even if they weren't that important in the long run. Every single case, and every detail, mattered to Chuck, therefore every single case had to matter to everyone at HHM. It's interesting to think about this in terms of Jimmy, too. Chuck probably always thought of Jimmy as his opposite, because he never believed Jimmy would apply detail-oriented perfectionism to his work, just to his grift. Jimmy tried his best, though, putting his all into his mailroom work and to his public defender clients. In the end, though, Jimmy seems to have placed his detail-oriented ethic into Saul Goodman, synthesising the Law with the Grift.

Killing Werner

• Why didn't Mike offer Werner an out to let him escape with his life? He could have easily arranged for Werner to leave without any trace. All he had to do was tell Gus that he'd taken care of Werner as he said on the phone. Was killing Werner really necessary?
  • Mike's loyal to Werner, but his loyalty to Gus is stronger since Gus is the one who pays his salary. And while Mike is a resourceful man with connections, he doesn't know many that don't also know Gus or the Salamancas. He wouldn't have any way of planning a way for Werner to get out, and if he let Werner figure out a way back on his own, Werner certainly would've been caught by Gus's or the Salamanca's people, and there's no doubt that those parties would've probably done worse things to Werner. Mike executing him with a swift bullet to the back of the head was a merciful ending in that regard.
  • How can you trust someone who behaved so unprofessionally? Mike is motivated by the desire to provide a financial future for his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, and he is also someone who insists on maintaining a very professional work environment. He'd already observed how loose Werner's lips were after a few drinks and how much he liked to talk about his work. Mike gave Werner a very firm warning that he better not make another slip-up like that, as that was the only second chance he was getting. But what does Werner do? He escapes, and when Mike catches up to him, he inadvertendly is leaking information about Gus's secret lab to Lalo. Meaning that the lab is now compromised, and Gus's plans have to be altered.
  • Werner's fate is like Lennie's at the end of Of Mice and Men. Gus (Curley) was about to send two of his own men out there to kill Werner (Lennie) and possibly Mike (George) too, because Mike most likely would have been seen as compromised if he either refused to kill Werner or worse, tried to help him. Gus liked and trusted Mike, and was impressed at Mike's creativeness in the truck heist as well as disrupting Hector's drug smuggling operations; but Gus is also very careful, and he has no problem with killing someone that he likes if there's a possibility that they may have become a liability. Could Mike have really arranged Werner to leave without a trace that easily? No. Because Gus is too careful. If Mike had valued Werner's life more than his own, could he really have realistically done that much? Most likely not, and Mike is pragmatic enough he wouldn't see a very slim chance they both live as the better choice. It all went down fast and Gus's men were coming to make sure the job got done. Mike murdered Werner, but tried to cause the least amount of harm possible in doing something wrong, and with no benefit to himself ensured that Marguerite wouldn't be killed alongside her husband.
  • It's also a poetic thing for Mike. The reason Mike did what he did to Werner is a repeat of why those dirty cops murdered his son. Even after Matty agreed to go along with Hoffman and Fenske, they couldn’t trust him anymore, so they killed him to keep him quiet. You can hear Mike's voice quiver as he tells Werner he has to call his wife, so you know he's probably thinking of Matty in this moment as he prepares to do the deed.
  • To a degree, Werner died because of Mike. Mike was soft, only just wetting his feet in Gus's operation. He let things slip and was not strict with them at all. Because of this, Werner thought his temporary escape would have not been a problem. He said it himself. He thought Mike would just be angry. He just didn't know the scope to which Mike's loyalties with Gus were.

Eduardo's stunt in the parking lot

• He rams his car into the car in front of him, wrecks both the other car and the bar, and... then what? How does he get away with it and continues his pursuit without the police getting on his tail? Surely, the other guy would've instantly called the police and gave them the car description, if not the plate.
  • It all happened so fast that the unfortunate driver who got caught between Mike and Lalo probably was still in shock and wouldn't remember a plate or vehicle description when the police arrived to take a report on the hit-and-run. Most likely, the police may even dismiss it as a road rage incident where Lalo was just impatient because of the intermediate driver getting stuck.
  • It's established in "Wexler v. Goodman" that the police see two seemingly unrelated crimes: someone burned down a Travel Wire office after killing the clerk on duty, while a gray 1970 Monte Carlo was in a hit and run at a parking lot a couple miles away. Mike gets the Travel Wire witness, Lili Simmons (the woman who got turned away by Lalo while he was combing the security footage), to add to her statement that there was a grey 1970 Monte Carlo in the parking lot, and he sends Detective Roberts a forged inter-office memo, ostensibly from the division that investigated the hit and run, letting him know it might be connected. After this, the dispatchers put out an all-points bulletin to look out for Lalo's car. Once Mike has Lalo's location zeroed in courtesy of Nacho, he uses a CB radio to call in the location to the police and let them apprehend Lalo.

Visas for Werner's crew

• Okay, so Werner being in the United States is one thing. But how did Gus get Werner's crew into the country legally? I would guess that Lydia procured them and that on paper they are contractors for Madrigal Electromotive, but still for that length of time, that would look suspicious.
  • Werner's probably the only one on the crew who's even in the United States legally. He flew into Denver much like the French architect who was rejected before him. Considering the rest of the crew have no legal residence and don’t leave the compound except to work underground, it's not too hard to imagine that they do not have work visas and aren’t there legally. Gus doesn’t want a paper trail for a mystery construction project. They went to extreme lengths to cover it up. So the most likely guess is that Gus had them flown from Germany to Argentina or one of those South American countries that have large German exclaves, to avoid raising red flags on the EU side of things, then a Madrigal charter plane to Juarez, then halfway to Agua Prieta in one van, then smuggle them across the border the rest of the way to the lab. End result, there's zero paperwork with any American customs officials showing the contractors' names, so they can't be tracked down and questioned.
  • Arguably, the German crew were all there legally, and were never hooded at all during any part of their trip to their living quarters. Otherwise there would've been problems with taking them to the strip club (and there still were when Kai tried to grope that one dancer, a problem that Mike had to bribe the doorman and the dancer into silence to keep the police from being involved).
  • The way they're sent home at the start of season 5 says they definitely were in the country legally. They're all told to drive in separate cars to different big cities for differing itineraries to get back to Europe, something they wouldn't be able to do if they were in the United States illegally since there'd be troubles for them if they got pulled over for any reason. So they were probably in America on work visas sponsored by Madrigal.
  • They could be in on tourist or business visas which are 90 days per entry. They would have to do a "visa run" every 90 days (leave the US to Canada or Mexico or whatever, then walk right back in). This is done by backpackers all the time in some countries. Mike would probably do it just like their return trips, have a few go to different border points to avoid suspicion.

Kim's influence on Jimmy

• If Jimmy were to have lived alone and not have an enabler like Kim to do cons with, would he have not become Saul Goodman or not? The writers said once that Kim and Jimmy did things together that neither would have ever done on their own.
  • Kim's presence is a double-edged sword in Jimmy's life. The way the "Pinata" flashback goes, it kinda feels like if it weren't for Kim, Jimmy would have been stuck in the HHM mail room until he got bored and went all the way back to Slippin' Jimmy, fulfilling Chuck's prophecy. It was Kim's admiration for Chuck that helped push Jimmy to pursue his law degree, and he wouldn't have gone that route without her. In that sense, she both helped him onto a better path but enabled his more "questionable" traits. Saul Goodman the lawyer wouldn't exist without Kim Wexler.

Coushatta scam

• Surely both the DA and judge would have recognized the use of repeat stationery by the writers of the support letters, wouldn't they? Yes, Kim (and probably Jimmy and others) purchased many different kinds and styles of stationery to use to produce the letters, but I certainly think I would have noticed lots of repetition. And that DA would have had her staff analyzing and examining those documents. They would have noticed. You would think it would be easy for the DA to order a DNA analysis if she had any suspicions whatsoever (and she certainly seems to) that the "Save Huell" campaign was rigged. Also, wouldn’t the DA have thought to check the domain of the fake church website to determine when it was created and who owned it?
  • Devil's advocate: you attend church regularly and a nice man from your congregation is unfairly charged with a crime. Is it outside the realm of possibility that your pastor gathers you and your fellow parishioners together for a letter writing campaign? Maybe an afternoon of prayer, barbecue and writing letters to save Huell? Maybe the pastor gives everyone key points to include in their letters. Maybe he even went out and bought enough stationary for everyone to use. Now, obviously none of that happened. ADA Ericson wasn't concerned about the content of the letters so much as the possibility that the entire fictitious congregation would bus themselves to Albuquerque for the trial. And the whole beauty of the scheme is that the amount of work Kim and Jimmy put into it is so out of proportion with the actual case itself that no one, not even the DA, could fathom anyone trying it, so why even bother looking into the domain?
  • The whole point in the DA dropping the case was because she didn’t think it was worth all the complaints and hassle. She’d rather move on and pretend it never happened. Even the judge wanted it to “go away”.
  • The courts in Albuquerque are ridiculously behind, understaffed and generally fucked up. It would be unreasonable for the ADA to devote too many man hours to a low rung case.
    • Imagine the depth they'd have to go to. They'd dust the envelopes for prints and find that the vast majority are from different people and many are from the same person, primarily handling the envelopes. That's exactly what you'd expect to see: a pastor or chief organizer handling many peoples' letters and envelopes and mailing them. If they started "checking" the prints, they'd get random blanks from all the bus people. It'd be white noise. They'd burn through resources trying to find whose prints are whose (Person 1, Person 2, Person 3, etc., etc.) and then might check a few... even if they did that, they'd come up with a chance (not a certainty) that Jimmy's prints would pop up—but Person 4's prints might too and that'd noisy up the investigation as some random bus person who did time for bad checks is in this "congregation". And if they did find Jimmy's prints and match them, it'd be after weeks of seemingly fruitless busywork.
      Then? It'd still be a leap to assume it's all a fraud. Easier explanations exist like Jimmy working with the church to do this. Doesn't make the complaints "go away". Even if you now think they're partly in bad faith because someone in ABQ went off and organized this over there with the congregation (super more plausible), it's still every inch of a headache.
      And yeah...what law enforcement agency or prosecutor's office is going to waste those billable man hours sorting through the mess? For what?
      It underscores the brilliance of Jimmy's cons: they're simple. Simple gets the job done. A busy DA, a busy cop, a busy court, a busy clerk... everyone wants to get on with their day. Give them a firm-feeling reason to move on? They do.

Why pick on Huell?

• It's established by Kim that Ericsen has prosecuted several people in the past for assaulting a plainclothesman and had consistently pursued sentences significantly less than the sentence she is pursuing with Huell, despite those prior assaults being considerably more violent in nature than Huell's. Ericsen claims it's because he has a prior conviction for pickpocketing, but is that really enough to actually justify thirty months in jail? Would that fly in real life, or was the show implying there was something else going on with the charge, relating maybe to race, or the association with a disgraced suspended lawyer?

Drop phone business

• How come Jimmy doesn't get in trouble for his drop phone business, since he's supposed to only be associating with law-abiding citizens? Huell is known as a pickpocket and was clearly associating with him when he's arrested. Why didn't this get him in hot water with the bar?
  • Did anybody raise it as a complaint with the bar? Unless someone directly tells them, and tells them at the formal hearing as an official objection then the bar never knows nor considers it. Also Huell is an employee, that is all. As far as Jimmy's drop phone business, as long as he has the right sales permit then it is a legal business. He's not under any requirement to vet his customers. The rules on not associating with criminals covers spending large amounts of social time with them, not business arrangements (although those types of gatherings often blend together).

Chuck's career path

• How did Chuck end up in New Mexico after being such an exceptional law student? Why didn’t he join a large white-shoe New York, Chicago or Washington DC law firm? Was it because he met Rebecca, was she from New Mexico? If so, was he so angry about his choices so after Rebecca left him, that it contributed to his condition, on top of the fact of the divorce? Whatever the case, it never made sense that he goes from Georgetown Law school and clerking for judges to join a solo practitioner in Albuquerque. We understand that Jimmy went there because of Chuck getting him out of jail, but have no context for how Chuck ended up there.
  • In his obituary, it's noted that Chuck clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit before he went to work with George Hamlin. Lots of people enjoy the beauty of the West, Colorado and New Mexico specifically. Chuck certainly had the CV to be successful just about anywhere he chose to set up practice and he had a pretty incredible career before his illness. Plus he stands out more. In New York, Boston or Washington DC, Chuck would be just another one of several thousand Ivy League and Georgetown grads who clerked in the US Circuit Courts and didn't stand out at all. In Albuquerque, he was a big fish in a little pond (which allowed him to set up a practice right away).

Why does Hector wind up in Casa Tranquila?

• Hector seems to be a Mexican national, and he has living relatives well into the Breaking Bad part of the timeline. How does he end up stuck alone in a nursing home in New Mexico? Why doesn't one of the other Salamancas take him back to Mexico to be cared for on one of their compounds? If Gus is somehow keeping Hector there, why isn't this a point of contention for Lalo or the Cartel?
  • Later episodes partially resolve this; Lalo is long dead by the time of the events of Breaking Bad, and once Walter / Gus finish off the rest of the Salamancas and the Juarez Cartel is destroyed there appear to be no more members of the family willing or interested in taking him in. He is kind of a horrible person even by the standards of a cartel enforcer, after all.
  • Hector might be an American citizen. I don't believe there's anything explicit regarding that. And maybe Casa Tranquila is the best for his particular condition. Also, lots of people don't want to take care of senior citizens, the reason nursing homes exist. The weirder thing to me is that Tuco of all people was apparently taking care of Hector.

Season 5

Is he Jimmy or is he Saul?

• Does Jimmy regard Saul like a separate persona, or are they supposed to be one and the same?
  • By and large, the legal community are treating Saul as Jimmy's business name. There's not really much difference between Jimmy's interactions with DDA Oakley and ADA Ericsen in earlier seasons and his interactions with them here as Saul, other than that Saul is using way more dubious tactics when negotiating deals for his clients. As for Saul himself, Jimmy certainly looks at Saul like he were a separate entity, and you see this in his interactions with Kim at home.
  • This is not a split personality, Jimmy did plenty of evil cons and tricks before calling himself Saul Goodman. Just like Jimmy McGill has his demons, Saul Goodman has flashes of decency. He just uses Saul's name more because he wants to cut ties with his brother after Chuck, no matter how much he wants to say it's for brand recognition. Not even him is gonna say he is different, just that he stopped doing "the right thing" like he promised himself since Season one.

Nacho's pointless vandalism?

• What was the point of Nacho trashing the Los Pollos Hermanos store if Gus was just going to blow it up anyway?
  • Probably so that as far as the police are concerned, the explosion looks more like a side effect of vandals rather than a mob hit. Some drunken teens broke in, tore the place up, tried to cook a chicken but ended up setting everything on fire instead. Gus is stage-managing his own hit, and he probably wants to make sure that it attracts as little police attention as possible; and also lets the insurance payout be rubber stamped too.
    • Alternately, Gus might be trying to lead the police to believe it was animal rights activists since this was around the time of several movements denouncing the treatment of the livestock in the facilities that supplied products for fast food restaurants.
  • Lalo would likely appreciate that Nacho went the extra mile if he decides to look over it.

Mike and Gus ensuring Lalo's bail

• Why did Mike (and by extension, Gus) get Jimmy to approve bail for Lalo? He was already in jail and mostly out of their way.
  • Lalo was still conducting his campaign against Gus (burning down a Pollos) while in jail. Gus wanted Lalo out of country so he could assassinate him.

Bond money origin

• Can you really show up with a $7 million cash bail, and not have to adequately explain its origins (I mean Lalo here, not Jimmy)? I mean, the police or the IRS cannot demand to know where it came from? After all, this isn't ransom you pay to terrorists, who don't give two shits where you got it - it is the law making a concesion to let you out pending the trial. Or is it the point that this is tacitly the ransom, and the law understands perfectly well that they'll never see "Jorge de Guzman" again, but are willing to walk when money talks?
  • Yes. If a judge says to bring that amount, and you bring that amount then they cannot interfere at that point. Otherwise it just becomes a tool for enforcing self incrimination while denying liberty. The cops have to have some form of proof that it comes from unlawful gains before they can block it, they cannot block it because they want to later prove it came from unlawful origins. The cops can investigate it after the fact, but they cannot block it in order to investigate it. And if "Jorge de Guzman" vanishes, then the state gets his seven million. That is supposed to be the deterrent for skipping bail, and the reason it was set so high, what is more he can then be arrested for skipping bail and also subsequently held without it if he comes within the court's jurisdiction again.
  • But doesn't this system actually favor hardened mobsters like Lalo? Who would a) most likely be able to cough out this kind of cash and b) unlike honest people, have no problems with skipping town, escaping to another country and laying low. Not that I'm having any illusions, just surprised if it is really that simple to abuse. In many criminal shows starting with Breaking Bad they reiterate the importance of money-laundering precisely because any whatsoever lavish (but still mundane) purchase might attract the attention of the IRS, and without a solid(-looking) money origin you're screwed. And yet something that can be used to escape justice for murder isn't questioned at all?
    • This is what activists who advocate for cash bail reform have been saying.
  • It's really not that simple. Had Mike not set up Lalo and therefore contaminated the investigation, and Lalo not found a lawyer that could hire a fake family to pretend he had bonds in New Mexico, Lalo wouldn't even have bail. Then he has to cough up $7 million and disappear. What is simple is the prosecution telling the jury how suspiciously easy you were able to pay your bail to sway them, or delaying your release because they want to see if all the money is clean and asking an audit check to your family. Jimmy even cautions Lalo after he's released that his actions have "really sent up a huge flare" and his "Jorge de Guzman" identity probably won't hold up under scrutiny. And indeed Jimmy's proven right, as the police and DA's office are shown at the start of season 6 to have investigated the matter and quickly uncovered that Lalo's given "address" is a Dairy Queen in Alta Monte and "there isn't a single Elizabeth McKinnon under the age of 73 living in New Mexico." ADA Khalil even asks Jimmy, "Who comes up with seven million bucks in cash?" because Lalo did something that can't normally be done, no matter how rich or connected a criminal is. Then from there, it doesn't take much effort for them to figure out who he really is. As for Breaking Bad pushing being careful with money, that's really only Saul trying to get bigger cuts and Skyler exerting over-cautiousness. Everyone else, like the Salamancas, Gus and the Aryans, have little thoughts aside from not being obvious.

Why would Bolsa do it?

• Why would he order a hit on Jimmy? Gus says Bolsa was trying to protect their common business, but how would preventing Lalo's release have achieved that? He's already proven to be capable of directing hits against Gus from behind the bars.
  • Inside, Lalo can burn a restaurant to piss off Gus. Outside, he can cost the Cartel millions by selling the safe drops to the Feds to make Gus and Bolsa look bad. So not only he limits what Lalo can do but he gets back a bunch of the money.

When did Mike decide killing was acceptable?

• After killing Werner, Mike starts to lose it. He’s drinking himself to death, starting fights with thugs, disconnecting with his family and wallowing in guilt. It’s obvious that it took an extreme emotional toll on him, especially since up until this point he’s gone out of his way to avoid getting his hands dirty, bar the corrupt cops who killed his son. After an intervention from Gus, Mike doesn't hesitate to kill the men that try to rob Jimmy. This is seemingly a huge step down the dark path... but it doesn’t feel forced. For some reason, it truly feels like he managed to quickly accept that this was his lot in life. This is seen when he tells Stacey that he’s “playing the cards I was dealt”. So, when did he come to this conclusion. Was it as soon as he started working for Gus again, after "Dedicado A Max"? Was it after Nacho asked for his help with Lalo?
  • Mike arrived at this conclusion after his talk with Gus by Max's memorial fountain. It's also important to note that what he deems an acceptable target for killing is based on whether someone is in the game or not. The good samaritan who found the truck: not in the game. The guys who ambushed Jimmy in the desert: in the game. They were armed, Jimmy was not, you could rationalize it as defense of a third party. But Werner is a complicated case because he's in a very murky gray zone. On the one hand, Gus kept him in the dark enough that he could be considered not in the game (he would have no idea what Gus was building the secret basement for). But the paychecks for his work say the opposite. And that's part of how Mike has to make the tough decision. But unfortunately he'd grown to like Werner, so it feels shitty. That probably just means he'll never make friends with anyone again except maybe Gus. Speaking of Gus it seems like he's the one who manages to convince Mike to accept his lot. They both understand revenge, he says, and the episode ends, but the conversation likely continued offscreen.
  • Mike felt Werner's death was his fault because it was Mike's job to manage him. Mike screwed up, by bonding a bit with Werner, yet not really understanding his emotional issues and not anticipating him doing something crazy. Seems like Mike could have found a way to bring his wife in for a few days. But no matter what, Mike botched the situation, causing him to have to execute Werner.

Why not just pick up the money in a car that works?

• Jimmy is going to get $100,000 to pick up Lalo's bail money, but he has to drive far into the desert into an unknown situation to get it. Instead of using that money to rent or just buy any car that will do the job, he uses his unreliable beater that barely starts. He assures Kim that nobody would suspect him in his old rustbucket Suzuki Esteem, and that if there were any danger he would split. Just get a modest newer car that runs properly and you have the benefit of being unsuspecting AND you can actually drive home. I know Jimmy has a psychological attachment to the car as being a trademark of "Slippin' Jimmy" but you'd think someone as unsentimental and carefree as Jimmy would just get a new car.
  • Jimmy is nowhere near as unsentimental as he acts. Notice that he takes the time to grab the "World's 2nd Greatest Lawyer" cup out of the Esteem before its ignoble death. Also remember how he hated the company car that came with his job at Davis & Main because, among other things, it didn't have a wide enough holder for that cup. While he'll joke about the Esteem's dingy and unassuming appearance, he's never actually acknowledged at any point that the car often fails to work, and will turn the engine over as many times as he needs to to fire it up, often seeming outright dismayed when it refuses to cooperate. So no, he's not so calloused that he's open to ditching it. That said...Mike still has his old Cadillac, and is often shown using burner cars for jobs to avoid identification. Jimmy could've just done that, and left the Esteem at home.
  • Wasn't the implication that Jimmy's car broke down because it had been shot? On a normal day it would have made it fine.
  • The camera calls attention to the bullet holes in the car's hood, and Mike's line when the car breaks down is "The alternator's shot. Literally." That seems like solid confirmation it was bullet damage that caused the breakdown.

Why does Gus leave the money in the dead drops?

After learning Lalo's plan from Nacho, Nacho convinces Gus to leave the money in the dead drops because otherwise Lalo will know someone talked. But Gus and everybody else would know Krazy-8 had been busted and since he had the knowledge of the drops, wouldn't Gus change the drops automatically? To me, to the Feds, it would seem suspicious that the drops were left as is.

• Krazy-8 doesn't know about the dead drops. Lalo asks Jimmy to tell him the dead drops as leverage, and Gus has to keep the drops as is to avoid tipping his hand to Lalo that there's a double agent.
• Sometimes you gotta lose the battle to win the war. Changing the dead drops would clue Lalo in that someone snitched, and that could lead back to Nacho being a double agent. Nacho couldn't even be suspected of being a double agent. Everything that happens to Nacho and Gus is all about the long game - getting Lalo to trust Nacho. Recall why Nacho was shot or why Gus supervised the destruction of his own restaurant in Los Lunas - Nacho had to appear squeaky clean to the cartel. It was an expensive gamble, but it paid off.

Why doesn't Nacho consider federal witness protection?

• He is American and considering his line of work should certainly be aware of witness relocation. He's in the game but only sort of living the high life because he's gotten hopelessly over his head. He would get out if he could. His only familial connection seems to be his father, and while his father is utterly disgusted by his line of work, if Nacho turned state and explained they had to run to save them both, surely he would do so. Even if Nacho didn't want to give up some small players like Mike and Crazy Eight, surely the Feds wouldn't care if he handed them Fring and what he knows of the Salamancas.

Ed Galbraith in black-and-white

• Gene Takovic is shown seeing everything in black-and-white around him, due to the people in Omaha having unhappy lives, much like him. But if that's the case, why is Ed Galbraith shown in Deliberately Monochrome in the few shots he's in. Not only is he all the way back in Albuquerque away from the depressing parts of Nebraska, but he's also shown to have a relatively stable life with little to be upset about. So why's he symbolically depressed as well?
  • The black and white style isn’t just to show how far removed Gene is from his old life, but how everything in the BB/BCS universe has symbolically changed as well, even if some things are still technically the same, due to the passage of time. Also, Ed may not be as miserable as Gene, but he doesn't seem to be quite happy either.
  • It's just continuity. The black and white is symbolic of Gene's depression because he's the protagonist of the series and the main viewpoint character of these sections, so the show is shot to reflect his dominant viewpoint on things. But that doesn't mean that literally everyone everywhere in the world is depressed at that particular time as well. The black and white is also meant to establish when events are happening in the "Gene" part of the timeline, as opposed to the "Jimmy" / "Saul" parts of the timeline. We're not supposed to assume Ed is down in the dumps as well, it's just to make sure that the viewer isn't getting confused by the phone call apparently jumping backwards and forwards through time from Gene's time (black-and-white) to the Jimmy / Saul era (colour) by making it clear that Ed is occupying the same temporal part of the narrative as Gene when the phone call is made.

Season 6

Nacho's escape from the hotel

• He gets a tyre shot and then slams into a large car. And yet he apparently escapes, and the mobsters don't even give chase?
  • They do chase him. They're only a minute or two behind him when he ditches the car and hides in the tanker.

Nacho's loyalty

• Why exactly does Nacho stop short of implicating Gus in organizing the hit on Lalo? He's already found out that Gus doesn't really have his back and regarded him as a liability—lying about someone coming to rescue him, hiring someone to spy on him. Even if it starts a vicious intra-cartel war between Gus and the Salamancas, he's dead anyway...so what does he care?
  • Nacho made a deal with Gus, where Nacho would implicate another gang in the hit on Lalo, and in return Gus would leave his father alone (and Mike would enforce Gus's part of the deal if need be). If Nacho goes back on his part of the deal and sells out Gus, then Gus is likely to go back on his part to go after Nacho's father. Whether Mike would still be willing to protect Manuel Varga in this situation is unknown, I would assume he would, but it's somewhat unlikely that one man would be able to do much to protect a civilian from someone like Gus, especially with Gus knowing Mike so well. Either way, Nacho is willing to die to protect his father, so doing something like backstabbing Gus with his final words (when he's already given himself up) would put what he's fighting to protect at risk for no real gain to himself.
  • In addition, the enemy of Nacho's enemy is his friend. Nacho hates the Salamancas way more than he hates Gus, and he wants Gus to carry on trying to destroy the Cartel, so it's in his interests to help Gus mend his relations with them.

Speaking in English in Nacho's final moment

• Given that the major characters involved in that scene were in the Mexican Cartel, wouldn't it have made more sense that they spoke in Spanish towards each other, both from a in-universe and creative standpoint? It doesn't seem like they would need to speak in English in order for a non-Spanish speaking character to understand what was happening (I don't think that Gus' henchmen are important enough for the other characters to speak in English for their benefit). I would imagine that having the dialogue in Spanish would have made the scene a lot more heavy and impactful.
  • I mean the actors don't really speak Spanish that well to begin with but Nacho grew up in the United States, English might be his preferred language and only talk Spanish for his dad.
  • Well in-universe, Nacho is American, isn't he? He's clearly bilingual but English might be his primary/preferred language. Creatively, it makes perfect sense. Under the circumstances, with Nacho telling pretty much everybody there where to stick it, he's not going to defer to them by speaking in Spanish.
  • Possibly an example of Translation Convention, the production crew may have not wanted non-Spanish speakers to be forced to read captions in this scene.

Taking the sack man with him

• I've been trying to come up with a good reason why Nacho wouldn't have taken the opportunity to kill Juan Bolsa before committing suicide, having every opportunity and reason, and all I can come up with is 'Bolsa has to live because he's still alive in Breaking Bad'. It seems like the thought crossed his mind, given he didn't immediately shoot himself after taking Bolsa's gun, instead taking Bolsa hostage, but why wouldn't he do it? Bolsa represents The Cartel, who Nacho had spent the last minute or so declaring his hatred and disdain for, and it's not like he can make The Cartel hate him any more than they already do after what he had just admitted to. The only thing I can think of is that Gus doesn't want Nacho to kill Bolsa, because Bolsa is a middleman between Gus and Eladio and Gus probably wants Bolsa to die by his machinations as part of his revenge plot, but how would Nacho know that?
  • He realised he only had a few moments to act while the gangsters were in shock. If he shoots Bolsa, will he able to shoot himself next or will the Cousins shoot him? And if they do, who's to say it will be fatal? If they just wound him, he's in for the Fate Worse than Death. So he took the safe option.
  • Nacho is not a killer for no reason, Bolsa did jack shit to warrant killing him and risk getting tackled by the rest before shooting himself, so he gets tortured.
  • It's possible that Nacho knew Mike was going to shoot him after he shot Bolsa, and not wanting him to live with that, chose to go out on his own terms and not burden Mike.

Is Manuel Varga safe?

• So, Nacho makes a deal with Gus to leave his father alone, and in exchange he'll spin up a web of lies to pin responsibility for the hit on Lalo on another gang, and then die before the Salamancas get their hands on him. Makes sense. But...then he goes a little off-script to declare his hatred and disgust for the Salamancas, admits he was behind Hector's stroke, gloats and disrespects the Salamanca family, and then kills himself so they can't even get their money's worth on him. Now, let's recall, this is the same family that tortured a man and his wife, then burned their place of business down, just because of a little disrespect. Also, Hector knows how important Papa Varga was to Nacho. So the Salamancas aren't going to just take it out on Nacho's father now? Seems to me he's getting a visit from some very dangerous people either way.
  • Perhaps Mike, out of obligation to Ignacio, would visit Manuel and finally convince him to move away. Also, with all the heat raised by Lalo, Don Eladio might step in and prohibit any further retaliations so as not to hurt their business any further. Plus, Hector is unable to speak, thus he may be the only who actually KNOWS about Manuel, but cannot tell the Cartel about it
    • In "Fun and Games", Mike does visit Manuel and give him some peace of mind. Manuel just quickly tells him off.

Howard's got receipts

• How is the stolen-car/Jimmy-as-Howard/throwing-Wendy-out-in-front-of-Cliff con expected to possibly hold up? Howard was in a meeting with his therapist during the incident with Wendy in front of Cliff, and that fact is very easy to verify. The therapist will definitely have record of the appointment, and at least a couple people will be able to confirm he was there (the therapist and receptionist) during that time. Also, Cliff was only at that outdoor cafe because he was meeting with Kim, so he almost definitely has some sort of date and time for that meeting written down somewhere in his daily planner or calendar, so he either knows exactly what time it is when he's meeting with Kim or can easily look it up. So there's absolutely no way that particular deception is going to hold up, it'll take about fifteen minutes to expose as being impossible. The basic structure to many of Jimmy's cons are that he makes up a bunch of lies, and then makes it so inconvenient and difficult for the people they're conning to refute the lies it's easier to just give Jimmy what he wants (the Coushatta/Huell scam, the Mesa Verde commercials). But this deception should be trivial to clear up when Cliff confronts Howard over it.
  • Hold up to whom? the scam is just to make Cliff feel a bit skeeved out by Howard. It is part of a rich tapestry of innuendo and insinuation, with no single incident being truly important but which in aggregate makes Cliff no longer feel like he can trust Howard. It damages Howard's reputation in his mind.
    • But this scam is something that Howard can easily disprove if Cliff confronts him about it in an even remotely reasonable manner. There's nothing Howard can do about the packet of fake cocaine falling out of his locker, that definitely happened and there's no way to prove anyone else planted it. He also can't do anything about the rumor that the Kettleman family spread around that he's a cocaine user unless the Kettlemans come forward and admit they were put up to it. But imagine if Cliff goes to Howard to confront him about all this, claims that he saw Howard throw a prostitute out of his car, and is even a little bit willing to hear Howard out on his defense. Howard can prove that he was accounted for elsewhere at the time of the incident, which also calls the other implications against Howard into question since clearly someone is messing around (it WAS Howard's car after all). So it might even undo the seeds that Jimmy and Kim had planted in Cliff's head. And unlike the Coushatta scam, where the targets of the scam don't care enough to do the work that it would take to expose the lies (I doubt that the church website would have held up to scrutiny if Ericsen had cared enough to do more than make a few phone calls), Howard is REALLY going to care about disproving the notion that he's a cocaine addict who utilizes prostitutes since his career will be at risk.
    • Cliff does confront Howard, but he's unwilling to listen, and believes Howard's attempts to say otherwise are just more evidence of his covering up a drug problem. Cliff's difficulty with his own son's drug problems have led him to believe the pattern of problematic behavior rather than any of Howard's attempts at defense.
  • "I was seeing my shrink at the time" isn't really the best defense against allegations that you maniacally threw a hooker out of your Jaguar, and Howard may not have wanted to even admit to seeing a shrink. Actually attempting to prove it would have gotten ridiculous fast. "When exactly did you see the car?"

How did Lalo find Margarette?

• Unless I'm mistaken, his only lead is the name "Werner Ziegler". He's officially dead, so he cannot even use Cartel's resources to look for his address or relatives. So how did he manage to find Werner's wife? Surely, they're not saying he just got lucky? That of all the gin joints in all the towns in Germany, they walked into the same one, right? Right?
  • Werner was blabbing all over that bar that he was in, and as Mike said, pretty memorable in doing it. Margarette was also due to be checked into the spa that Werner ran away to, and attendent travel records to get to it. It is not a lot to work with, but Lalo is smart, motivated, and can be very charming when he puts his mind to it. He probably has secret funds and resources separate from the Cartel ones.
  • His lead is a Werner Ziegler who died that month. All he had to do is read the obituaries. Lalo is smart and resourceful. And this is 2004. Google already exists, and phone books still do. It's not that hard to find someone who doesn't own a Hoover Max Extract Pressure Pro 60.

Howard's PI

• Howard more-or-less correctly surmised that Jimmy and Kim gave his secretary a new phone number for the PI he had following Jimmy, allowing them to plant their own double-agent instead, similar to how they covertly replaced Chuck's locksmith with Mike back in "Sabrosito." But how would they have gotten the name of the original PI firm in the first place? They would have needed the name of it to successfully convince Julie that they were legit, and I can't imagine most PIs are eager to give out information about who their clients are to just anyone. The only plausible explanation is that they have yet another mole within HHM, but this is never touched on.
  • It's possible that Kim knew who their PI agency was as she used to work for HHM.

How exactly could have Howard exposed Jimmy and Kim if Lalo hadn't happened?

• During their final meeting, Howard chewed both of them out and promised that he would have shown the world who they really are. How could have he done that? Jimmy and Kim surely cleaned up after themselves regarding them defaming Howard.
  • Jimmy's schemes weren't covered up as well as they could've. Howard already managed to figure out some things, like the PI switcheroo, almost immediately, so it's reasonable to assume that he could figure out the other ploys. The schemes only worked because they were intended to muddy the waters enough that Howard would freak out and cause some damage himself. If brought into court, Howard could've shown that they were up to shady business even if he couldn't clear his own name completely.
  • Who is to say he could? This comes from a very drunk and furious Howard rant. He might have thought differently when sober.
  • He's saying that he's going to devote himself to exposing who they are, not what they've done. Maybe he can eventually prove his innocence regarding how they set him up or maybe he can't, who can say. But what he's saying is that he will devote himself to making sure everyone eventually knows what spiteful, untrustworthy, manipulative and borderline-sociopathically cruel con artists they can be.

How was Howard not aware of Lalo?

• Jimmy defended Lalo and approved bail for him back in Season 5, albeit with help. Surely Howard would have heard of him (or even Jorge Guzman) later on, not being unaware of him when it was too late?
  • Howard had likely gotten wind of the Lalo affair like everyone else at the courthouse, but since he wasn't intimately involved with criminal cases, he likely didn't think about it too deeply and just wrote it off as Jimmy pulling his usual antics. It's also unlikely that he had seen a picture of Lalo like the ADA and the detective had.
  • Also, he was drunk, and it was dark in the room. And he was also focusing his energy on chewing out Kim and Jimmy.
  • Also, it's possible that he is at least somewhat aware of Lalo, he just didn't immediately make the connection. Remember, his literal last words are him somewhat nervously realizing that he's found himself in a more dangerous situation than he initially thought it was...

Lalo's Dr. Evil Routine

• This might be a pointless thing to go into, but seriously, what in the hell got into Lalo in the lab chamber? He literally let Gus monologue him to death, and while I understand that villains turning into morons when disposing of their enemies is very common, Lalo has spent his entire time on the show being the villain who is way too smart for that kind of thing, so it's hard for me to let it slide. The Cousins? Sure, we see multiple times that they're not particularly bright and seem to lack any sense of self-preservation. Tuco? Yeah, he's an erratic psycho who's probably perpetually high. But Lalo has been shown throughout the series as the guy who is basically a combination of the best qualities of everyone in The Cartel (the loyalty of The Cousins, the indiscriminate willingness to commit violence of Tuco, the menace of Hector, the charisma of Eladio, and most importantly, the brain and instincts of Gus). There was zero reason to not put Gus down the moment he opened the lab, particularly when he's not 100% sure when Mike and his crew are going to show up. Any other Salamanca doing that, fine, and again, maybe it's pointless to critique it, but it seems like it goes against everything that character is supposed to be.
  • He's about to kill the Cartel's top earner. Gus isn't some random schmuck. He's bringing in literal millions. You do not fuck with someone bringing in the big bucks. If Lalo is going to kill him, he'd better have a damn good reason with bulletproof evidence. He had better show that his accusations against Gus were accurate on all fronts lest he bring Eladio's wrath not just on him, but the entire Salamanca clan.
    • Granted, but seeing how Gus calls Don Eladio every swear word under the sun in the first ten seconds of his speech, you'd think that it would've been more than enough, and killing him mid-sentence would've prevented him from doing anything.
    • That just proves that Gus hates Eladio. Which Eladio already knows.
    • Lalo still should have killed Gus once Gus showed him the where the lab is then fled. He could make an anonymous tip to the cops about gunshots being heard at the laundry to make it impossible for Mike to clean the scene. When a man of Gus's stature is murdered (or just disappears) it would be front page news, plenty of evidence to show Eladio. (If somehow the meth lab wasn't discovered, Lalo could easily tell the Feds about it anonymously.
    • Lalo wants to avoid any possible ambiguity about what Gus has been up to. Revealing the existence of the lab just proves that someone built the lab, not that the someone who built it was necessarily Gus. Anonymous tips and Gus just suddenly disappearing off the face of the planet or winding up dead lead to the possibility that he was somehow set up, which is not impossible considering that there is obvious bad blood between Gus and the Salamancas. It could be possible for someone who wanted to to argue that it was actually the Salamancas who have been planning to start up their own production, and that they murdered Gus and tried to set him up when he found out. Lalo wants there to be no doubt whatsoever about what Gus has been up to when he explains himself to the cartel, and ultimately the only way for him to get that is to get footage of Gus actually standing in the lab outright admitting that yep, I did all this, and I'd do it all again, and I hate all of you, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the day when you all die horribly and I get to take over everything after pissing on your graves. It's a gamble Lalo has to take, and unfortunately it backfires on him.
  • Let's be totally fair to Lalo here; he's standing with both a gun and a camcorder on Gus inside the secret lab Gus has been building, with ample proof that Gus has been plotting to betray the cartel, with none of Gus's men there to intervene. Gus is totally unarmed and in Lalo's power, and (while Lalo doesn't know this) the only gun in the vicinity that Gus has access to is at least ten feet or so away from the two, and Gus getting it requires him to knock out the lights and run over to it in the dark before Lalo can plug him. By any reasonable metric Lalo clearly has the upper hand in the situation, so if Gus wants to dig his own grave further, why not give him a minute and let him? It's overconfidence, but it's far from unjustified given the circumstances. Frankly, the fact that Gus was able to nevertheless get the drop on Lalo was a minor miracle given the position he was in.
    • Lalo knew that Gus's men were rushing in. He said they had 30 minutes before the cavalry arrives, which is significant, but it's not like he could be sure, and if they appear before he gets out, he's trapped. You'd think that in such situation he'd opted for a more expedite approach, something in the area of "Either confess right now and get a bullet to the head, or I will turn you into a block of Swiss cheese, starting with kneecaps up."

"Lalo didn't send you? No Lalo?"

• While Jimmy and Kim are not explicitly told that Lalo is dead, Mike still puts a good bit of emphasis on the fact that he "is not coming back." While they're both under mental duress at the time and likely cannot think 100% clearly, Kim and Jimmy are both very intelligent people who are both reasonably familiar with Mike by this point, Jimmy more so than Kim. Jimmy at least should have been able to read between the lines, if not at that moment than at a later time, and put together exactly why Lalo "is not coming back." It doesn't make a lot of sense for him to immediately jump to the conclusion in Breaking Bad that Lalo is behind Walt and Jesse's kidnapping of him.
  • Unfortunately, Jimmy's most recent experience before this regarding Lalo was Mike telling him Lalo was dead for sure, and then Lalo turning up alive and well and murdering Howard directly in front of him and Kim. Not only is that traumatic, it's also going to make Jimmy feel serious doubts when Mike tells him the same thing, but with less direct wording, only a few days later. Jimmy's also never going to see a body or get any more details or confirmation on this. In other words, Jimmy is both terrified of Lalo and has reason for just that sliver of doubt that Lalo is really dead this time, when he sure wasn't dead last time. So when Jimmy/Saul ends up in a terrifying situation in the future, where would his thoughts go first?
  • I think the writer (Gordon Smith) confirmed that the traumatic experience broke Jimmy's brain a little, and there's always going to be a part of him that's trapped in the memory of being tied up and helpless and waiting for Lalo to come kill him and Kim. So fair enough that when Walt and Jesse kidnapped him and he found himself facing a shallow grave in the desert (already a traumatic place for him), he thought his time was up.
  • Jimmy being intelligent and knowing Mike for a while is exactly why he can't trust Lalo to be dead. Mike never tells him anything except on a very limited need-to-know basis, and even then, Mike's only really reached out to hire Jimmy because he's needed him for somewhat minor matters. The audience knows Lalo is dead because they saw Gus shoot him; Jimmy only has the words of someone that made him come up with squat cobbler and drink his own urine.

No footprints on the beach

• How did whoever parked Howard's car on the beach managed to park Howard's car on sand and place both of his shoes on the beach without leaving any footprints?
  • There are footprints. The camera follows the trail of footprints from the water to the car. If you mean why there are no footprints from the return trip of whoever set this up, what he most likely did was walk along the beach in the water (where the waves would quickly wash away any footprints made), then walked off the beach a distance far enough away that no one would suspect the prints were made by the same person.
  • Or, to be even safer, they might've swam to a boat waiting for them offshore.

Why even use Ed The Disappearer?

• We find out in Breaking Bad (the episode) that Jimmy had no intention of spending the rest of his life working at a Cinnabon in Omaha, and was just waiting for the heat to die down so he could go collect his hidden money and do...something else. We don't know what that something else might be, but it's obviously not resuming his lawyer career or doing anything else that would put him back into the public eye. Really, he won't ever be able to do much of anything in America, unless he's content living the lumberjack life like Jesse (not likely). So I can only assume he plans to flee the country, find someplace where he can't be extradited, and either live like a king for a couple decades or get involved in crime wherever he ends up to satisfy his itch. So why not just skip the Omaha part, get as much money as you can together, and make for the nearest country that won't ship you back as soon as they realize who you are? What does the Omaha part accomplish except giving the feds a chance to seize all your hidden money and prevent you from being able to fund your new life in a new country?
  • Jimmy is impulsive and doesn't really think through his actions or whatever the resulting consequences are. We've seen this time and time again - running that Davis and Main commercial without the partners approval, forging the Mesa Verde documents, breaking into Chuck's house to destroy the tape despite Kim's informing Jimmy the tape was useless, strong-arming Kevin with the fake tv ads despite Kim's pleas not to, the list goes on. He may be savvy in scams and cons, but his impulsive nature always comes back to bite him in the ass.
  • After Walter White's call to Skylar, the feds were on Walt and any of his associates. As deep as Saul was in Walt's empire, it was prison or the new identity. No time to hang around and do any shady money stuff.
  • Because he needed to disappear first, come back later. Like if he skips Omaha he is guaranteed to get caught given all his shell companies were taken. He lasted a couple of days when on his own and on the run skipping the country with no outside contact and help just means he'll figure out how the U.S is good at repatriating convicts.

Was Saul's story really that good?

• In the finale, Saul's claim of being threatened/coerced into working for Walt is treated as very credible, or at least capable of causing enough of a headache for the Feds that they would rather negotiate a plea bargain. But wouldn't it be fairly simple for them to argue that had Saul really been that afraid, he should have turned himself in and offered to testify against Walt in exchange for being placed in witness protection?
  • Walt assassinated ten incarcerated men in a two minute window. This occurred well into Saul's relationship with Walt, but Saul could easily claim Walt was like this from the beginning. After all, the very night of the day Saul met Walt, Walt and Jesse abducted him, drove him to the desert and threatened to shoot him if he didn't comply with their demands.
  • The point is not that the feds can't feasibly argue against Saul's version of events; the point is that Saul can be very, very good at manipulating people. Saul points it out himself; all he needs is to convince one person on the jury that his version of events is the true one, and he's essentially gotten himself acquitted.

Wex(ler)-atious Civil Suit?

• Oakley and Saul seem to grimly agree Kim would face a major civil judgment from revealing the Howard Hamlin affidavit to Cheryl...would she? Howard's death by being shot by a third party was a pretty remote possibility to bring civil liability for wrongful death into play. Saul had a duty of care toward Sandpiper clients who were arguably shortchanged in the settlement, but did Kim? Infliction of nervous shock to Cheryl? Minor property damage?
  • I'm not sure about Howard's death, but Kim is absolutely responsible for character assassination. She got a significant portion of the Albuquerque law community to think Howard was an incompetent cocaine user. Me and a friend were discussing the last episode recently, and we came to the conclusion that Jimmy throwing himself on the sword at the end will end up saving Kim from the lawsuit, but based off what Kim actually did she can face a suit.
    • Anyone can face a lawsuit for any reason, the question is more what would be theoretically effective enough to worry Saul and Oakley (I've clarified the wording)...with regard to "character assassination" it'd be pretty hard for Howard's estate to quantify damages if a defamation action could even begin.
  • It's a weird situation because Kim is clearly putting her own neck on the chopping block. Yet she also lives in Florida (notoriously judgment proof— one of the reasons OJ Simpson moved there). The life Kim is living is meager lower middle class at best, so there's little damage Cheryl Hamlin can do, justified though her anger may be.
  • I got the impression that Cheryl's goal isn't so much to get money (she seems to be living in the same house her husband lived in, got the Sandpiper money, and probably had a lucrative career of her own) so much as to vindicate Howard's reputation. So by shopping around all the prestigious law firms around town and telling them her story, she's probably hoping word gets out and the narrative that "Howard was framed" can overwrite the false narrative that "Howard was a junkie". Since lawyers in the show are shown to be gossipy, the story that the now infamous Saul Goodman and his wife launched an extended campaign against poor Howard as part of some revenge scheme (maybe playing up the Chuck factor too since Chuck's also apparently famous) has a decent chance of making rounds.

Jimmy's guilt over Chuck's malpractice insurance

• Why does Jimmy still feel so much guilt over Chuck's insurance premiums? I could understand him feeling that way about it during Season 4 in the immediate aftermath of Chuck's death, but this is many years later and he should be able to have at least some objectivity. First, the insurance company would have found out about the bar hearing incident anyway, so Jimmy putting it on their radar when he did changes very little. Second, Chuck should have his malpractice premiums raised! He's got a severe mental illness, went on an unhinged rant that made him sound like a crazy person in the middle of a courtroom because of a curveball, and he took sensitive work documents home and failed to secure them! Why is Jimmy making that the big Chuck-related confession as he clears his conscience? How about "I tampered with legal documents my brother was working on and then tried to gaslight him into believing he had made a career-damaging mistake". You know, something he actually did that was wrong and actually had a negative effect on Chuck.
  • I think it was Gordon Smith who said Jimmy had pieces missing since Chuck’s death, and while Mesa Verde was doing it for Kim, this was him wanting to spread the misery. Also, maybe a bit more selfishly, he’s had “you never meant that much to me” as a weight around his neck for years, and Bob was saying Saul had recreated the bad parts of his Chuck relationship with Walt, so maybe he thinks if he hadn’t raised the premiums none of this would have happened.
  • To add, knowing Jimmy's personality, I think him ratting out his brother to a third party out of casual spite would weigh more heavily on his conscience than getting what he thought was justified revenge.
  • It's not the insurance premiums reveal in and of itself that he regrets; it's the fact that his doing so was pretty much the last straw that led Chuck to kill himself. Jimmy is basically using this as a stand-in for "I'm sorry that my pettiness and my grudge directly contributed to my brother's suicide, because despite everything I loved him and deeply regret that we ended up having such a terrible relationship and I never got to mend bridges with him."

Did Jimmy fall on the sword for Kim?

• Me and my friend were discussing the finale right after it aired, and we had an initial conflict of interpretation on why Jimmy did what he did in the courtroom. My initial take was that Jimmy got the sweetheart plea deal, then ruined it, because he wanted to get caught and punished for his actions, but also wanted to prove that he was still good enough to (basically) get away with it if he wanted to, like his job interview at Neff Copiers. However, my friend believed that Jimmy's actions were intended to take the fall for what happened to Howard, under oath, in a federal court, so that Kim can't. The way he described it was basically that, once Jimmy confesses concerning Howard, even if Kim attempts to contradict his confession, the government would likely not want to 'undo' the conviction on Jimmy, and just be happy leaving things as they are. He compared it to the character Wee-Bey from The Wire confessing to several murders other members of his crew committed when he knew he was facing a life sentence regardless. Is this how it works?
  • My interpretation was that, as someone who represented a lot of defence clients prior to becoming Saul, Jimmy knew the plea deal was dead on arrival (Oakley's note seemed to be overly optimistic), that he was going to jail for at the very least 25 years, and he took the opportunity to just come clean and get it all over with in front of Kim (who was present because of Ruleof Drama). Kim's very detailed affidavit would probably be seen to have far more evidentiary value than Jimmy's word at this point, and if she was going to be charged with anything (obstruction, tampering etc.) it would happen no matter what Jimmy testified to.

Water tank

• In the flashback scene in "Saul's gone", while traversing the desert Saul and Mike come upon a huge open tank of clean water in the middle of nowhere. Why would it be there? What was its purpose?
  • It's a water tank, it stores water, maybe rainwater given the open hatch. People in the desert like having water so they make those here and there.
  • That's exactly what's incongruous about it - it's open. Not only would any water, especially rainwater, have long evaporated, but lack of a hatch invites wind-blown dust, rubbish etc. If it was put there for the sake of travelers, you'd think it would've been covered, probably buried underground or at least placed in some shack.
  • I think it's for horses and possibly livestock. There's a pipe with a valve visible on top. It's probably fed from a well powered by that windmill.

Why did the prisoners chant "Better!" "Call!" "Saul!"?

• In the final episode, as Jimmy McGill was being transported on the prison bus he gets recognized and the prisoners are chanting "Better! Call! Saul!". Was this out of mocking jest on the prisoners side or was it to laugh that Saul was finally alongside with them?
  • They like him. And Gould said that was there so audience would know Jimmy was liked and protected (even though nobody but Kim calls him by the name he wants), and that no hellish prison cliché was going to happen to him.
  • Saul Goodman is one of the most well-known criminal defense attorneys ever. He dedicated his whole career to helping criminals, just like the ones that were in that bus, get the best legal defense possible, even going as far as breaking the law to help them avoid punishment. To them, Saul Goodman is a hero. And Jimmy might not be terribly proud of his actions as Saul Goodman at this point, but it's nice to be liked by pretty much all your fellow inmates for a (basically) life sentence.

Why Montrose of all places?

• So I get whatever prison Jimmy went to is kind of window dressing to the big picture (he's atoning, he's at peace, he's got Kim) and he couldn't go to an easy luxury one, but the real prison it's based on is one of the worst, twenty three hours in solitary confinement and would completely break him. I also know Gould put in the prisoners cheering him so we don't imagine bad shit he doesn't deserve, but I'm just wondering why not base it on somewhere that isn't severely abusive in reality.
  • I think it's both to show the dramatic irony of him specifically namedropping Montrose as a place he didn't want to go compared to the cushy prison he wanted, and to show the severity of the crimes he committed and that the untouchability of Saul Goodman is gone. He has no idea he is going to be well liked or a celebrity in prison when he is transported there, and those who sentenced him certainly did not expect that either. By all means himself and the government are expecting his spirit to be broken there, and perhaps over the next decades it will be but it's not going to be as bad as either party was anticipating/potentially hoping. The prisoners recognizing him and giving him respect therefore shows another layer of irony to it: even being sent to a hellhole prison, Jimmy's gonna get the best of a bad situation. His reputation as "Saul" he tried to abandon will protect him when he was ready to accept his unpleasant fate; he made his own fate in several layers. Ironically his presence may have a more pacifying effect on the prisoners than anyone anticipated.
  • Because Jimmy is part of an organisation that hit ten inmates within a two minutes window. Like on paper Jimmy is up there with supermax security inmates just for his involvement with Heisenberg, if they dig furhter they can even bring up his defense of the Cartel to show he could either be a target or an asset inside jail for other gangs.
    • That makes sense, plus there's an AMC title card that had him move to the ABQ jail for I assume good behaviour and the reassurance that he's not in or a huge danger.
  • IIRC the writers themselves admitted they fudged it a bit, and that a real supermax prison of the sort that Jimmy would find himself in would be a lot less pleasant, but it's really just to show that even though his freedom and life is effectively over, there's still a note of grace to Jimmy's life in recognition of his willingness to finally take responsibility for everything he did. It's at least partly an artistic statement rather than a strictly realistic depiction of prison life; the writers are basically saying that it's never too late to find some redemption for your sins.

Howard's fate as a bargaining chip

• Even if Kim hadn't already told the police everything, how valuable would revealing Howard's murder be? Even if it is just trying to get ice cream? The man who killed him is dead, the people who covered it up are dead. It wasn't treated as a murder case, there is nobody to hand over, at most it just seems like it could give his widow some closure. Even then she already blames Saul/Jimmy and Kim for it.
  • Probably not that valuable; he was, after all, merely throwing it out there to try and get some free ice-cream out of it. He's just raising it as a last little point to see if he can get a tiny little cherry on top of his already pretty sweet deal out of it. Had it not led to the revelation about Kim, and the authorities weren't interested, he'd have likely shrugged it off.

Merging of BCS and BB timelines in respect to Gus and Hector

• When watching BB, it was my impression that Hector (and, by extension, the Twins) didn't really care about Gus one way or another. Yes, we learn about the bad blood between them, but clearly, the Salamancas didn't think much of it, so it seemed plausible that their relations were a bit tense but civil, as much as it's possible among criminals. However, BCS ends with Hector adamantly convinced that Gus had murdered Lalo. In their final scenes together he's visibly seething with hatred, cannot stand the sight of Gus and is "vocally" plying for his blood. It is already pretty hard to buy that they would refuse to take their revenge, regardless of Don Eladio's objections, but it strains all belief that either of the Salamancas would sit at one table with him or believe a single word coming out of his mouth, or that Gus, knowing what the Twins are like, would be reckless enough to meet them one-on-one in the middle of the desert like he did, plans or no plans. I guess Don Eladio could've told them something like: "If ANYTHING happens to Fring while you're there, I'm holding you personally responsible", but would that really fly?
  • Eladio is the main boss; what he says, goes, and he will not hesitate to put a bounty on anyone who double-crosses him, like he did with Nacho. Even if the twins did believe Hector; without concrete evidence that Gus killed Lalo, they’re shit out of luck. Plus, there was a four year gap between the end of Better Call Saul (the prequel side) and the beginning of Breaking Bad. Perhaps, in that amount of time, tensions did ease a bit.

Why bring in Marie?

• Saul had nothing to do with what happened to Hank. Who would even call her saying that her brother-in-law’s lawyer was even caught? That’s really no way of justice for her husband. She never even met him.
  • Saul wasn't directly involved with Hank's death, but he was intimately involved with her brother-in-law's meth production/distribution cartel, the unravelling of which did directly lead to Hank's death. Saul is probably the closest Marie will ever get to someone facing justice for what happened to Hank, so it's hardly surprising that she would either take an interest in what happens to him or that someone in the DEA would keep her in the loop if high-ranking members of Walter White's criminal enterprise were located and arrested.
    • Exactly, and a major arrest in the Walter White saga would have received massive media coverage. Plus, Marie herself doesn't automatically know Jimmy wasn't directly tied to Hank's death.

Would Kim really be allowed to practice again and not be disbarred over Howard and Lalo?

• In the finale, Kim said something to the effect that bar membership is permanent so her voluntarily stepping down didn't matter and that she still could be a lawyer in New Mexico. But wouldn't her elaborate hoax/fraud against Howard (which she explicitly came clean on) be enough to disbar her? And it seems likely upon doing that that her actions around that time would be closely scrutinized and it would be discovered that she checked in at the jail as an attorney for one "Jorge de Guzman"... Lalo Salamanca. It's hard to believe the bar wouldn't want to talk to her about that.
  • There isn’t enough evidence to prove she committed a felony that’d be grounds for disbarment, especially after Jimmy confessed to everything, and, at worst, would be suspended for a certain amount of time.
  • Kim stepped down from the bar, as I'm no lawyer and I'm not quite sure how it works I take it to mean she canceled her bar membership and it is effectively no longer valid. However her bar card doesn't have an expiration date on it, so what I believe occurred is that she used it to pretend to be Jimmy's lawyer and conned the jail into letting her in. More than likely a crime, but if she never intends to visit Jimmy again and goes back to Florida, it's unlikely she'll face any issues from this incident.

Unsorted

Does Jimmy/or Saul (currently "Gene") know Walter is dead?

• I know his current hiding takes place in Nebraska after the event of Breaking Bad but wouldn't he had known by then because of newspapers or CNN. After all, Walter (AKA Heisenberg) was being monitored by the DEA, a top USA federal agency.
  • Not clear if "Felina" happened yet. Walt might still be in the shack while Saul is adjusting to his real life.
  • ^ That. It is never make clear when either of the Omaha flashforwards take place. In the season 1 flashforward, "Gene" does watch TV, flipping through an infomercial and the evening weather forecast before putting on his old Saul commercials. As someone noted on the Breaking Bad headscratchers page, "Granite State" took place over a time period equivalent to the entirety of that show's seasons 1-4. There were a couple of time skips. Therefore, making it possible that the flashforwards are taking place while Walt was still in New Hampshire.
  • On top of that, just because Walt dies doesn't mean the investigation into his criminal activity ends at that point. It's on official record that Saul Goodman was acting as Walter White's lawyer during the entire stretch of Heisenberg's empire (hence why Hank was said to have sent several agents spying on Saul after he realized the truth). "Gene" actually has good reason to believe that even with Walter White dead, if Saul Goodman were to resurface he might still be found and arrested.
    • Gene's had time to learn how to make cinnamon rolls, yes. However, his fear level is very high. He was terrified by the Isotopes trinket in the cab. Jimmy advertised "Saul Goodman" on TV, bus stops, billboards, and probably on matchbooks and bingo cards. If it has been a short time, half that stuff would still be around, and probably is now being auctioned on eBay as collectibles (and Jimmy might not have been able to cancel the TV ads like he did in Better Call Saul season 3 when he was just starting out).
  • By November 12 2010, Jimmy does know Walt is dead (the date is mentioned in Quite a Ride and shown in Breaking Bad, the episode not the show). In his phone call to Francesca on that day, he comments that the “maestro buying the farm” (Walt dying) and surmises he’s now the main suspect after Francesca fills him in on Jesse, Skyler, and Huell.

How does no one in Omaha recognize Gene's face?

• With how big the Heisenberg story seems to be, it's hard to believe that no one except an expat from ABQ who happens to drive him to the mall would recognize his face considering it's likely plastered all over national/international news sources.
  • It's really hard for people to recall faces, especially faces that were only shown several months back on some high-profile case in another city that may have bounced across the news in your town (and ultimately is small potatoes compared to your town's local problems). And not everyone gets injected with a daily dose of news that they magically shelve in their brains. Celebrities in real life are often able to move about in plain sight without being mobbed because for the most part, people don't recognize them unless they're wearing a ton of makeup, wearing nice clothes, and well-lit. That same logic goes here: Gene is also just a quiet Cinnabon manager, and nothing about his demeanor or behavior would make someone think he's Heisenberg's disgraced criminal lawyer from Albuquerque hiding under an assumed name. Anyone who thought there was a similarity between the two would chalk it up to coincidence.
  • Think about it this way. You know who El Chapo is. But would you really recognize him if he shaved his mustache, donned a hat, and served you a cinnamon roll at Cinnabon? No. You know the name and what he did, but you wouldn't know what he looks like even with his face plastered all over the news. Even less so would you even know the guy who laundered El Chapo's money, even with his face on all the billboards.
  • Even if the Heisenberg story was big, most people aren't going to read too much into it or recognize the faces of the minor figures involved. If you live in a major filming center like Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago or Atlanta, you see celebrities around town all the time. You will get the feeling that someone looks familiar and that you've seen them before, but it takes a while to place the face to a show/movie and then to remember the actor's name (if you knew it at all). In Saul's case, his face probably didn't get much attention in the Heisenberg story, so it's doubtful that a regular person even with interest in the case would be able to recall it in enough time to recognize him in person in the moment. Someone from Albuquerque like Jeff the cabbie might recognize him or have a stronger feeling that they remember him because his face was all over the place for a decent amount of time before Heisenberg (i.e. commercials, billboards, etc). It's the difference between spotting an actor in a TV show you watch versus someone who had a minor role in a movie you watched a few months ago.
  • That, and well, "Gene Takovic" looks pretty distinct from Saul Goodman, with his tinted yellow glasses, thick mustache, and noticeably receding hairline, not to mention posture and general demeanor. Clark Kenting isn't quite as unrealistic as people make it out to be. Not that it didn't stop Jeff the cabbie from making him.

Why Cinnabon?

• I get that it's a callback to Saul's joke in BB, but managing a fast food joint in a mall? It's hard to see that either he or the extractor would think that would be a good idea. WAY too much foot traffic with thousands of chances a day of someone saying "that looks like that guy!"
  • He's hiding in plain sight. If you're going to go into hiding, you need to appear as normal as possible.
    • A much better option would've been to not appear at all. It's really weird that together Ed and Saul couldn't have thought of some job with minimal customer interaction, preferably remote.
    • Exactly. Hiding in plain sight can work when you are a Gustavo Fring or a Walter White. It would seem absurd that a very successful restaurant proprietor or a high school teacher— both with strong ties to the DEA— could possibly be drug kingpins. But when they are looking for YOU specifically, it doesn't work, which is why Ed went to the extreme of hiding Walter in an isolated and unconnected mountain cabin.
  • Ultimately, this one's Rule of Drama. The point of the Gene scenes is to show the contrast between the life Jimmy wants throughout the series, the life he has as Saul in the mother series, and how that all comes crumbling down by the time he winds up as Gene. The life Jimmy wants is one of success, public fame and fortune; the life Saul has is extroverted, glamorous (in a kind of seedy and superficial way) and makes full use of his charisma; ergo, for maximum irony and drama points, his life of Gene is as an anonymous minimum-wage service-industry schlub, forgotten and ignored, the kind of existence he has spent his life disdaining and trying to avoid. It's Saul trapped in his Ironic Hell; leaving aside the fact that they already did the "man trapped alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for years" thing with Walter, Saul would probably be, if not exactly happy, then at least happier in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, because then he could at least be the version of himself that he wants to be. As Gene, however, not only is he on the run, but he's trapped in an identity that he detests yet can't break out of (just as being forced to live all on his own with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company and no one to show off to, dominate or convince himself he's protecting is Walter's hell). Is it 100% realistic with regards to actual protocol for evading law enforcement? Perhaps not. But this is a universe where 100% realism has always been willingly sacrificed for the sake of a bigger artistic point, and in this case, the point is: "What's the one life this character would utterly hate to be forced to live? Let's force him to live it and see what happens." You just have to go with it on this one.
  • In addition to the above, the plan was almost certainly not to be Gene forever. Presumably the Gene identity was set up on a "get me the hell out of here as quickly as possible" basis when he could feel the heat at his neck and he needed to be someone else somewhere else yesterday. Given that he has his stash of diamonds and Ed's number and whatnot, Saul is presumably thinking that he can keep a low profile and live as Gene for a few months, maybe a year or so, just until the heat dies down, and then with a combination of the resources he manages to take with him and his various dummy accounts and shell corporations and such, he can then call upon Ed again to set him up in a different, better identity far far away where he can live the rest of his life. Saul just underestimates how long the heat is going to be on him, how effectively the government is going to smash through his financial safety-net, how soul-draining he's going to find being Gene and just has the bad luck to randomly bump into someone else from Albuquerque who does recognise him.
  • Also, in total fairness, Omaha is literally almost 1000 miles away from Albuquerque, and he's working in what appears to be a fairly low-key suburban mall. The chances of someone going through suburban Omaha who happens to stop off at that particular Cinnabon who is also be familiar with local Albuquerque celebrities and is able to recognise him as one through his disguise at a glance must be fairly negligible. Worth noting, the one person who does manage to recognise him doesn't see him at the Cinnabon, it's after he has a random medical crisis and has to go to a hospital.

Where are the missing Salamanca relatives?

• The Salamancas seem to have a highly advanced case of Nephewism, a strange family structure with one grandmother, one uncle, and lots and lots of "cousins," only two of whom are confirmed as siblings. Additionally, none of them seem to have romantic partners. Where are all the fathers and mothers in the family? Are there no women in the family besides Tuco's abuela? How many brothers and sisters does Hector Santiago have to have so many nephews?
  • It's possible "cousin" is being used in a colloquial sense and the actual family relations they have to each other are different. As for the lack of women, we only really see the Salamancas when they're at "work" and organised crime tends to be an ultra-macho environment so they must exist we just don't see them as they're not involved in the family's criminal doings.
  • Given how Hector said they built their cartel on “Salamanca blood”, it’s possible that the missing members may have been killed earlier.
    • This. There's been extreme violence in this world, to put it mildly, and family has certainly been fair game. This feud is likely far deeper than we have seen.

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