Sunk Costs
Written by Gennifer Huchinson
Directed by John Shiban
Air date: April 24th, 2017
"Victim is... your brother Charles? Seriously?"
Gus: Who is [Hector] to you?
Mike: We had a disagreement. He threatened my family, I'm not gonna let that go.
Gus: But you had let it go. You'd taken his money. Your family was no longer in danger, and yet, still, you robbed his truck. Shouldn't that have settled the matter? Most men would've walked away.
Mike: We had a disagreement. He threatened my family, I'm not gonna let that go.
Gus: But you had let it go. You'd taken his money. Your family was no longer in danger, and yet, still, you robbed his truck. Shouldn't that have settled the matter? Most men would've walked away.
Picking up where the previous episode left off, Mike is confronted by Gus in the desert. Gus explains that he does not want Hector to die "at this time," but encourages Mike to rob another one of Hector's trucks. Mike, realizing that Gus is Hector's competitor, forms an alliance with Gus and embarks on a scheme of his own.
Meanwhile, Jimmy is arrested for the break-in, but not before delivering a blistering speech to Chuck. Kim gets wind of the arrest from Ernesto and shows up at Jimmy's arraignment, only for Jimmy to refuse her offer to represent him as his counsel. Jimmy explains to Kim that he does not want to have her clean up the mess he caused with Chuck.
Obtaining a sample of cocaine from Gus's physician in Mexico, Mike engineers a gambit in which he manages to plant the cocaine on one of Hector's trucks as it travels to the U.S.-Mexico border. The cocaine is subsequently detected by a sniffing dog and the drivers are arrested, meaning that the authorities will crack down on Hector and allow Gus to corner the drug market.
Chuck, seemingly reconsidering his choices, has the prosecutor make an offer to Jimmy: avoid jail time in exchange for confessing to his crimes and submitting them to the state bar association, which will almost certainly disbar him. When Kim tells Jimmy that she will stand by him, he decides to reject the deal.
Tropes in this episode
- Armor-Piercing Response: After Chuck spends an extended time telling Jimmy how his scheme to get Jimmy arrested is for the best and everyone will come out of it better, Jimmy has a sad, matter of fact response that clearly gets to Chuck.Here’s what’s gonna happen: one day you’re gonna get sick, again. One of your employees is gonna find you curled up under that space blanket and take you to the hospital, hook you up to those machines that beep and whir and hurt. And this time it’ll be too much, and you will… die there. Alone.
- Bait-and-Switch: Mike acquires a bag of narcotics from Dr. Goodman and puts them in the same bag as his rifle. He packs the narcotics into a sneaker and suspends it from an overhead cable. Are the sneakers some sort of signal to the delivery van for a drug drop, and Mike is going to kill both of the people in the van? No. He fires some shots to desensitize those people to the gunfire (they ignore it after about the fourth shot), then shoots the sneaker with the drugs in as they drive off to sprinkle the drugs onto the roof and the rear bumper, which leads them to get flagged by the sniffer dogs at the border crossing.
- Batman Gambit: Chuck – in line with his 'Slippin Jimmy as a Lawyer is a Chimp with a Machine Gun' attitude – does not want Jimmy in jail for the crimes committed in Witness; instead, he wants Jimmy to take a conditional discharge, one condition of which is that the plea goes to the Bar Association, who will almost certainly disbar Jimmy for it (especially if Chuck can peddle as much influence with them as Jimmy implies). He never wanted Jimmy in jail, he just wanted to take away his law credentials.
- Although it seems from the way Chuck talks to him that he did initially want Jimmy to go to jail as well as being disbarred. However, when Jimmy lays into him that nobody will be around to take care of him if his EHS symptoms flare up, he changes tactics to have Jimmy's crimes forgiven in exchange for his disbarment.
- The Bus Came Back: The previous episode made a big leap in introducing old Breaking Bad faces by bringing in Gus, Victor, and Francesca. Here, more members of Gus's organization make appearances, in this case, Tyrus Kitt and Dr. Barry Goodman.
- Black Boss Lady: Kyra Hay, the prosecutor from Belen handling Jimmy's case.
- Cain and Abel: A subdued but significant version. For the first time, one of the brothers seemingly hopes the other will die.
- Call-Forward:
- When in Dr. Goodman's clinic picking up the cocaine, Mike uses the "Mr. Clark" alias he will use in Breaking Bad when posing as a postal inspector on the phone with the APD when searching for Gus's laptop.
- When Mike asks Gus what Hector is to him, Gus says "He's an associate .. of an associate", almost echoing how Jimmy (as Saul) will describe Gus to Walt and Jesse prior to them entering business together: "I know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy."
- Deadpan Snarker: Gus shows signs of this sort of banter in his interaction with Mike. "I am not completely unsympathetic towards your.... sense of justice".
- Did Not Think This Through: As the look on Chuck's face makes clear, he did not realize that sending Jimmy to jail after firing Ernesto would deprive him of his last caregiver.
- Doublespeak: There's a bit of this going on when Mike is at Dr. Goodman's clinic. When the doctor asks his assistant who the gringo (Mike) is, she just says "the revenge". To the unsuspecting patients, they'll take that to mean Mike is there being checked up for Montezuma's Revenge, a gastrointestinal affliction (diarrhea) that affects people who are not acclimated to Mexican water and VERY common for American tourists in Mexico, while to Mike and Dr. Goodman, they take it to mean "Gus' revenge".
- Dirty Coward: Chuck backs out of his plan to have Jimmy jailed because not doing so will deprive Chuck of a potential caregiver.
- Dying Alone: Jimmy describes this in painful detail, as Chuck he has alienated his last family.
- Enemy Mine: Mike and Gus form an alliance against Hector — Mike for his family being threatened, Gus because Hector is a competitor in the drug trade and, as we know, killed Gus's partner, Max Arciniega.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Mike plants drugs on one of Hector's trucks by sprinkling it over the exterior, knowing that they are on their way to the border. In an interesting variant, the frame-up was only useful because they were guilty. There's not enough planted drugs to implicate them, just enough to alert the dogs, which trigger an intense search, which discovers the actual contraband they're smuggling.
- Firing in the Air a Lot: Mike fires several 'warning' shots to desensitize the drug couriers by firing upwards, leading them to think that there's just some hunters nearby. A falling bullet can do quite some damage, especially fired at sniper rifle velocity - as Mike would know, but they are in the desert, miles from any civilization, so he doesn't have to worry about any humans getting hit.
- Flash Forward: The shoes that Mike tosses over the wire are still there several years later, faded and weatherbeaten. The vibrations of a passing truck finally breaks the frayed laces and they fall to the ground. Not coincidently, it's a Los Pollos Hermanos truck possibly in the Breaking Bad part of the timeline, when Gus now has firmly taken over Hector's role as the main distributor for cross-border drug movements.
- Holier Than Thou: Chuck really comes across this way when he gives Jimmy his sanctimonious speech outside the house.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Mike shoots a hole through one of the sneakers dangling in the wind from a powerline, and at a considerable distance.
- Invincible Villain: Chuck is the equivalent of this in the legal world of New Mexico. Kim tries to reassure Jimmy that the bar will listen to his extenuating circumstances. Jimmy replies that Chuck's stature and respect in the bar is such that at least half the members of the panel will owe their careers to Chuck. And even with those that don't, all the members of the panel will be waiting to disbar Jimmy at the snap of Chuck's fingers. Chuck has Jimmy "boxed in". But Jimmy and Kim resolve to fight the good fight at the disbarment hearing, the lawyer's equivalent of Defiant to the End.
- Jerkass Has a Point: We know Chuck is ultimately right that Jimmy will eventually take things too far and end up ruining his life when it becomes too late. But we know a lot of that is on account of Chuck turning it into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
- Lipstick-and-Load Montage: Kim gets treated to one of her own, waking up from sleeping in her office, going to the gym across the street, showering, and then getting dressed, a montage that is cut off when she finds Ernesto in the parking lot to inform her that Chuck had fired him. It also has elements of a Hard-Work Montage in that it shows just how little free time or even sleep she is getting as a result of investing so much of herself in her legal career.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Barry Goodman runs his free clinic south of the border, and is a medic for Gus. Here, it's revealed he also is a mule of sorts, loaning Mike some cocaine on Gus's orders for Mike to ensnare Hector's drug runners.
- Morton's Fork: Jimmy says that Chuck has him "boxed in". Jimmy will be disbarred if he confesses per the pre-prosecution diversion deal, and if he takes it to trial and loses, he'll face the bar anyways, but also face jail time.
- Pet the Dog: Oakley tries to make Jimmy feel better and gets his court date moved up so he doesn't have to spend any longer in jail than is strictly necessary.
- Revision: Breaking Bad implied that Tyrus Kitt only was brought in to Gus's operation after Victor was killed. Here, we see Victor and Tyrus work together for Gus as co-muscle. As opposed to the implication that Tyrus was in brought on Mike's recommendation. Though it certainly explains Tyrus's colder attitude towards Walt and Jesse, if he's mad at them for getting his partner killed.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Ernesto. After previously being told by Chuck to not reveal what he heard on Chuck's tape, he told Kim about it, who then told Jimmy, who then confronted Chuck. Even though this was all part of Chuck's plan to entrap Jimmy and Ernesto did exactly what Chuck wanted, Ernesto was still fired for violating Chuck's orders.
- Shout-Out:
- Kim's Lipstick-and-Load Montage takes a lot of cues in its cinematography from Edgar Wright films (incidentally, Nick Frost, a major collaborator with Edgar Wright, had just made his debut on fellow AMC show Into the Badlands at the same time that season 3 came out).
- When Gus asks Mike why he tried to snipe Hector, Mike explains that he did so because Hector hit someone who wasn't "in the game". For a moment, Mike sounds very similar to Omar Little, who had a similar code of not tolerating crooks who targeted innocent civilians.
- Chuck’s pre-trial interview with Kyra Hay sees him repeat the “He has a good heart, but…” line that he used when talking with Kim about Jimmy in "Rebecca"note , which in turn was likely inspired by a linenote from Michael Corleone to Tom Hagan about Fredo in The Godfather Part II. Incidentally, like the original scene, the discussion at hand involves brothers and betrayal, this dialogue is spoken to attorneys, and Chuck's face is half lit/half in shadow.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Chuck approaches Jimmy with another one of his sanctimonious speeches, Jimmy shuts him down by reminding him that without Jimmy or anybody else around, Chuck will get sick again and most likely die alone. It's enough to seemingly turn Chuck off on the idea of sending Jimmy to jail.Jimmy: [calmly] Here's what gonna happen. One day you're gonna get sick - again. One of your employees is gonna find you curled up in that space blanket, take you to the hospital, hook you up to those machines that beep and whir and...hurt. And this time it will be too much. And you will die there, alone.
- Smug Snake: Chuck "I find victory laps very comforting" McGill steps out of the house with no reaction at all to the electromagnetic radiation outside to walk to where Jimmy is sitting and give him the above sanctimonious lecture. He doesn't even flinch or realize where he is when Jimmy refers to the EM sensitivity.
- Stupid Evil: Jimmy, accurately, argues that Chuck's vendetta against him is this as he will deprive himself as well as Jimmy of a career and eventually die of electromagnetic seizures.
- Title Drop: By Kim: 'Let's just call it the fallacy of Sunk Costs', referring to the fact she is already involved and doesn't want to 'lose her investment' so may as well help Jimmy against Chuck.
- Tranquil Fury: It is a recurring aesop of the Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul universe that going on any sort of Roaring Rampage of Revenge always blows up in your face (and sometimes quite literally, in Gus's case), whereas taking your anger out on someone in a measured fashion works far better. Here we see Mike plant coke on the cartel smugglers' truck (getting them busted by the Border Patrol) and Jimmy calmly relate to Chuck (see the above quote) just how Chuck's life is likely to go (and end) after this.
- Ungrateful Bastard: Gus implies that Mike is this regarding hurting Hector after Hector paid him off therefore no longer thinking about harming Mike's family. Mike smoothly defends himself by asserting that Hector's attempted murder was justified after he killed someone who wasn't in the game.
- Workaholic: Kim is so busy with Mesa Verde that she slept in her office, woke up at 5:30 am, only had a cup of coffee for breakfast, took a shower at a nearby gym, and would've immediately gone back to work if Ernesto wasn't there.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Jimmy thinks that he can talk a local prosecutor into a plea deal that will avoid Jimmy confessing to a felony (a disbarment offense). However, the District Attorney realizes that all his prosecutors know Jimmy so to avoid any conflict of interest, they bring in Kyra Hay, a prosecutor from Belen, where Jimmy isn't known, to handle the case.
- Xanatos Speed Chess: Albeit petty and one-sided but Chuck shows signs of improvisation when being pointed out that jailing Jimmy will only deprive him of a career — so he resorts to simply having him disbarred!
- You Are Not Alone: Kim, to Jimmy, when he describes having to face prosecution (or a deal) and the Bar Association – full of people who will side with Chuck – on his own.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: The judge is not impressed when she hears who the victim of Jimmy's rampage the previous day is. She and the rest of the Albuquerque justice system are undoubtedly familiar with the McGill brothers and their petty Sibling Rivalry.Judge: Your brother Charles? Really?
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Chuck has now fired Ernesto, seeing no need for him anymore.
