No matter what she says during that call, it inspires Jimmy to start making money. and the three start a new scam. Jimmy approaches a man at a bar and gets him drunk. Jeff takes them home in a taxi and offers them a bottle of barbiturate-spiked water. Buddy then enters the house and takes pictures of identification, tax records, credit card bills, etc., and this information is sold to some sort of broker. This is his 3 person identity theft offense and you get a $20 stack. This is a lot better than the Cinnabon money Gene made, but it’s just a fraction of the money the plaintiff’s attorney has pocketed and offshored as Saul.
It’s not clear exactly why Jimmy-Gene feels the need to raise money soon. He doesn’t seem to need the services of Ed Galbraith, aka The Disappearance, whom Gene called last season when he was first approached by Jeff. (At least he doesn’t need those services now. If Buddy starts talking to the police or anyone else, firing Buddy over the morality of robbing a man with cancer will prove his doom. There is likely to be.)
The episode ends with Saul walking in one door and Gene in another. Saul is visiting Walt, whom we’ve already seen in “Breaking Bad.” Jimmy is in Mark’s house with cancer. A confab with Walt ultimately ends in disaster. We’ll see how it goes with Gene in Omaha, but I’m pretty sure Jeff is saying the barbiturates have definitely gone down.
odds and ends
-
Conversations with Francesca reveal the fate of key figures in Breaking Bad. Skylar White signed a contract with the federal government. Huell Babineaux lives in New Orleans, but fans will recall that he lives free, mainly because he was illegally detained by Hank Schrader.
-
Saul is clearly a fan of the 1931 film Frankenstein by James Whale. He calls his RV “James Whale’s Journey Roadshow,” which is a reference to the movie Lab. He calls Jesse “Igor”, who was Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. And when he recommended Mike the Swingmaster, what other device could have been more useless? say it helps.
-
We have to assume that Saul buried the money he used to pay Francesca for the spy phone. He sounds relieved that it hasn’t been eaten by rats, suggesting it’s been there for a while. And who else could have put it there?
“Better Call Saul” has always had a split personality. Conversely, a drug and criminal conspiracy is bequeathed by “Breaking Bad” and tells the story of Jimmy’s relationship with his brother and Kim. The drug plot is mostly physical and the relationship plot is mostly internal. His previous two episodes pretty much abandoned the cartel element of the story, presumably because he was buried with Lalo.
“Breaking Bad” continued to grow as the show progressed, but eventually included stories of Mexican gangsters, neo-Nazis, German conglomerates, federal agents, prosecutors, and purported to make national news. but “Better Call Saul” is smaller. We ditched the old storyline to create a new storyline of moderate scale.Our protagonist is back at the bar where he started.
