The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Better Call Saul' Season 6, Episode 4 Recap

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Ben and Joanna start the pod by praising the writing and production work of the season so far and ponder whether the shadow of Nacho's death will loom over the rest of the show. They then discuss some of their favorite scenes, including the reintroductions of Wendy and Spooge, the sequence surrounding Howard's therapy session, and Kim's reaction to being tailed.(11:28) They then discuss the connections that 'Better Call Saul' and 'Breaking Bad' have to Shakespeare, particularly 'Julius Caesar,' and speculate which characters could make a return in next week's episode.(28:13) Email us at [e-mail]! Hosts: Ben Lindbergh and Joanna Robinson Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringers music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs for the 90s that define the decade. Rob is joined by a variety of guests to break it all down as they turn back the clock. Check out 60 songs that explain the 90s exclusively on Spotify. Hello and welcome back to the prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson, joining me here to talk about Better Call Saul. It's Ben Lindbergh. Hi, Ben. Hi, Joanna. Hey, let's try to keep this episode up to Pollo standards, please. Oh, I can't. No guarantee.

We're stretched thin. We're stretched thin here on the prestige podcast feed. There's a lot going on. I don't know if you heard, but there's a lot of television right now. So I think we've got a show every day this week, which is because there's a lot going on. As we happen, we'll be covering Atlanta and wedding time. And Sean's doing his conversations with Bill Hater about Barry on Sundays,

all that stuff. And then Van and I are going to be talking about the last, I don't know, was it six episodes of Ozark that just dropped over the weekend and a whole series of television ended while we're busy doing other things. Got to get everything in just before the Emmy eligibility deadline. Exactly. Just drop it all at once. We're in the Emmy window here.

So, yeah, so Van and I will be here to talk about Ozark. I think that's on Thursday. But here we are. Talk about Better CallSell. Season 4, Episode 4, Hit and Run. Yes. Directed by Ray Seahorn and her directorial debut on the show. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Round of a fly. and written by Anne Churgis. Anne wrote, The Guy for This, quite a ride and off branch, three other great Saul episodes. Yeah, a lot of connections to this one, because the guy for this, that's season five. That's the one where Jimmy really gets in deep with Lalo,

and he says, if there's going to be blowback, I don't want to be in the middle of it. And Nacho says, it's not about what you want. When you're in, you're in, and he is in. And he is getting some blowback in this episode, too. And quite a ride, by the way. That's the one where the episode starts in Saul's, future office as Francesca is shredding documents and Saul's calling Ed. So we get to see the future

office and now we get to see the origin story of the office. Any tidbits for offbrand? No, I got nothing. Just for the first two. And as we mentioned in a previous episode, there are two directors of photography working on the show this season. Basically, they're switching odd and even episodes. So this one is Paul Donicki, I believe is how you pronounce his last name. He's doing only even episodes, and he's the one who was, like, promoted from lead cameraman, essentially to DP this season. So he's sort of a newer DP. So the combination of, like, a slightly newer DP, even though obviously he's plenty

experienced and, you know, first time director in Ray and, like, this episode is masterfully done. Yeah, it looks like a better call saw episode. You couldn't tell that it's a couple of rookies taking over here. And that just sort of speaks to the larger surehanded structure of the whole operation that they're running here. I'm glad they just finally stopped phoning it in for the final season. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just got their act together just in time, really. One thing I want to mention before we get into the episode discussion itself is that there is a fake documentary series that they're producing called American Greed.

You can find it on the AMC YouTube channel, which is a fake Jimmy McGill documentary narrated by Stacey Keach. One of our listeners sent in an episode, I don't know how many episodes there are. I know that they do a lot of fun, like, extra material around this show. But those are sent it in saying that might be a good spot to sort of try to nail down the timeline of the house clearing out that we saw in the first episode. Have you watched any of that, Ben? No, not yet. Yeah. All right.

So we will report back having watched more probably next week. But I just got to it a little bit before we started recording. Fun, fun little extra tidbit there. Next week's episode is called Black and Blank. on the theme of X and Y and we will sort of get to the meaning of that title at the end of our discussion here this week. But I want to open Ben by asking you like something that, you know, listening to Chris and Andy talk about this episode on the watch. You know, last week obviously was a very cartel heavy episode with a little bit of Kim and Jimmy and then this week is

the opposite, a mirror of that little cartel, a lot of Kim and Jimmy. But my question to you is, do you feel like the shadow of Nacho's death, was it looming over this episode, or do you feel like they just put it in a drawer for now? How do you feel about that? Well, he's largely absent from this episode, at least explicitly. This is sort of an Eye of the Storm episode between Nacho's death and whatever the next tragedy turns out to be, probably. So it's more set up than payoff. There's some payoff. I guess in some series, people might call this filler, right? Which I feel like that term is often overapplied. It's like, character development equals filler in many minds, but there's not really much filler in Better Call Saul, because everything's there for a reason, even if it's one of the more leisurely-paced episodes. So this week was really more of a classic Saul episode, whereas last week was kind of the exception to the rule. So this felt like a vintage Saul episode at times kind of lighthearted, not necessarily a final season rush to the finish line type episode. And so Nacho isn't mentioned,

which I think reflects the fact that this series is so compartmentalized. Like, Kim never met Nacho, as we talked about last time, right? Jimmy doesn't know Nacho is dead at this point. So climactic, momentous things happen to some major characters on Sol, and other major characters don't even know about it. And the ones who do know, like Gus and Mike, either don't care or keep a tight lid on their emotions. So there aren't a lot of explicit callbacks,

although there was one, I think, and credit to Reddit on this one. The building that Jimmy and Wendy Park next to while they're waiting for the text from Kim, which I believe is the Empire Board Game Library, a combination cafe board game spot in Albuquerque. Haven't had the pleasure of visiting myself, but it has a wall mural that's covered in bluebells, right? So it's sort of a nod to the flower in the desert where Nacho is buried. But I think it's kind of appropriate that Nacho doesn't really pop up here. Like he's on our minds. There's a shadow hanging over this whole season at this point.

but it does sort of speak to how disconnected he was at times from other storylines on this series. I a little bit disagree in that I think that the Gus opener and then closer. Gus we know has always been meticulously careful and maybe he was this tense and this wound up just as soon as he knew Lala was still alive. Like maybe that's when this started. But it feels like the degree of tension around Gus and his meticulous routine of I come home and then I go to my secret fortress, which is actually in another home, that whole thing and his paranoia. All of that is a lot of related, but I think it's just ramped up by Nacho.

Something we talked about last week is that when Nacho gave his farewell monologue a plague on both your houses, essentially we're going to talk about Shakespeare. But like when he did that, Gus seemed legitimately rattled in a way that we don't often see him rattled. So I felt like I could kind of feel that in the Gus stuff we got in this episode, even if it was minor, you know? There are a lot of little moments, not just with Gus, but with Kim, with Jimmy, where we just see the strain that they're maybe not completely cracking under, but bending under a little. So I do want to mention a few of those when we get to them a little later. But I love the opener of this episode because in classics, all fashion, you have no idea what you're watching. Right.

It's just going to tie into anything. And then, of course, it does come full circle. And I would love to know more about this happy couple living in Gus's property here. Like, what do you think the Zillow listing looks like for this place? Like, lovely neighborhood, perfect for long bike rides, great homeowners association. I was going to say. Got to mention the HOA. Yeah, yeah.

Attached mansion. Secret bunker. Yeah. I don't know. I'm living in a New York apartment with a seven-month-old at this point in space is at a premium. So you would go work for Gus? Yeah, I might be interested. Okay.

we've seen this house that Gus is in before 1213 Jefferson Street makes it appearance at Breaking Bad. So this isn't the first time that we've seen it. Something that I did think was interesting in these Gus's bookend moments is that, you know, Gus is so certain that Lalo's alive. We know that Lalo's alive. And Mike was like, maybe he's dead, though. Everyone thinks he's dead. Maybe he's dead. And I just thought it was interesting to see Mike be wrong about something like that.

Yeah. You know? I saw the look in Hector's eyes and he knows. But I love that just like, Lalo in his compound, Gus has his secret escape route, right? And credit to Ray Sehorne in her TV directorial debut for that long shot where she follows Gus to his second home and there's no cut, right, from when he leaves one house to get to the other, which sort of emphasizes that there's really no separation between the two Gusses. There's the public front and there's what's actually

going on there. But they're joined. They're joined by this little tunnel. They're joined by this shot with no cut. So I thought that was a nice touch. Your binary theory. Your two faces theory. Speaking of like the shadow of Nacho, I wanted to shout out this email we got from our listener and Nathan. You can always email us, Kim Waxler lives at gmail.com. But Nathan wrote it and he says, it's possible that one of the many ways will quote unquote never watch Breaking Bad the same way again is to deepen our perspective of character motivations. Maybe every time Gus sees Jesse Pinkman and Breaking Bad, he sees Nacho. Unpredictable. Jesse doesn't fear him as much as everyone else does. He's a problem dog. And I think we've been talking a lot about the way in which maybe Mike

see some of nacho in Jesse, but I don't think we really touched on maybe how Gus might see another nacho in Jesse. What do you, what do you think? Yeah, I'm really looking forward actually to rewatching Breaking Bad. And I'm not normally a rewatcher just because there's so much new stuff to watch always, which you can find out about on the prestige TV podcast. But I am actually looking forward to diving back into Breaking Bad because it's been a while and because I feel like it'll look different now. Obviously, the series itself is not changing. It's just going to be what we're bringing to it. So whether it's explicit tie-in, something that happens on the rest of this season that completely colors the way that we look at the series, or it's just the backstory we know. It's just what we intuit. I wonder what Saul is thinking about in this moment.

I wonder what Mike is thinking about this moment. I wonder if he's remembering that moment with Kim or with Jimmy, right? So I am looking forward to just seeing what I bring to it just as a viewer who's seen both series when I dive back in. So I think Nathan's right. I really love how we're going to be thinking about. I mean, like we're constantly thinking about what Breaking Bad can tell us about Saul, right? Like what we know about Saul in Breaking Bad and what that can tell us about the trajectory these characters are on. But I love the possibility of the vice versa. Speaking of which, it's time for a little musical break.

Okay. that song is windy by the association. And it's from one of my favorite musical montages in Breaking Bad, which is why I knew, of course, exactly who we were seeing at the motel to help with a hit and run. You made such a good prediction about who might help Jimmy and Kim. I was like, I was convinced as soon as I saw the two bicycles at the beginning of the episode, I was like, Ben was right. I thought I predicted something for once.

But instead, it's a, it's a Breaking Bad character, Wendy, the sex. worker, Jesse Pinkwin's Uriswell Paramar, and that song was used to introduce her in the series. I rewatched that montage actually this morning, and I just guess what? Breaking Bad was a good show. Did you know that? Yeah, I recall.

So yeah, so we get Wendy and we get character Spooch, who's one of Saul's or Jimmy's first customers here. Spooge looks great, by the way. One of the only Breaking Bad characters who actually looks younger on Better Call Saul, maybe. This was before he picked up his meth habit. Exactly.

That has something to do with it before he had his fatal run in with an ATM. Drugs, not even once, guys. Yeah, if you don't remember Spooge is a character who holds up skinny peat his knife at knife point and then takes some drug money later. Jesse goes to get the drug money back from him. And he's sort of, he's embroiled with Spooge, his paramour and their small child. And the lady in question crushes Spooge with an ATM. But it's a really, peekaboo is a really interesting episode in terms of

the development of Jesse Pinkman. It's a really, it's a really good rewatch. But what's true about both Wendy and Spooge? Sorry. I'm trying to say Spooch. Seriously. What's true about both of these characters is it's been 11 and 13 years respectively since we last saw them on Breaking Bad. Right. Did you make you feel the passage of time in your bones, Ben Lindberg? I feel older myself. I'm not saying I look as young as I did when I was watching Breaking Bad either. But this goes to that like plug and play aspect that we were talking about last week. Like if they're like, okay, we need someone to help with this grift, or we need, you know, a scuzz bag to be one of Saul's first clients.

Like, let's go to the board. Who do we have? Wendy and Spooge, why not? So I always say. It's really fun. And it's not only fun, but I think, again, they're really cleverly using this stuff, not just as a nostalgia play.

There's a phrase that they used in the insider podcast, pre-Easter eggs. They used it in reference to that opening teaser of this season when they're clearing out Saul's mansion, right? And we see a bunch of things and we saw we slowly as the season rolls on, these little items that we saw in the house will take on meaning. Like in this episode, it's the Owl Beanie Baby that Saul tried to use to get in the good graces of courthouse employee. I guess he just held on to that for some reason. It wound up in his house or the painting in Kim's apartment in last week's episode. So I think these like little items that we

saw basically what they said is that they filmed that sequence, the clearing of the house later. So they were able to just go through the season and pluck little items to put into the house. So they showed us a bunch of things in the season opener that will later make sense for us in the season. And I think they're doing a similar thing with how they're using these characters both from earlier seasons of Saul and the early days of Breaking Bad to sort of weave this tapestry that feels tightly knit and coherent. What do you think? Yeah, and we're getting one of these prester eggs that's getting revealed in each episode or at least each non-nacho episode. And so you have to wonder, is this just a bunch of junk he had lying around? I mean,

if you dig in one of my drawers, right, it might not be items of special significance to me. It might just be some stuff I never got rid of. Or is he holding on to these things because they actually mean something to him. They are haunting him in some way. But it's not just stuff coming back from there or coming back from Breaking Bad. It's often coming back from the beginning of Saul, which we saw in this episode with Jimmy's Howard cosplay, which is both convincing and disturbing. We've seen him donned the pinstripe suit before. And now he's back to that. So it's kind of, you know, he's up to his old tricks, the ballet trick, the Howard cosplay trick, all of the old standvice in his repertoire he is bringing back here. And I like that Howard got that moment.

I'd like to have sat in on more of Howard's therapy session here because we found out that he has his own life and we know nothing about it, right? I mean, he starts this session by talking about how things are going for him at HHM, and that's the only thing we've really seen of him in this series. But there's more to him. He lifts the veil a little bit before we go away to see how the scam is progressing. But it's a reminder that he is a human being. He's got some troubles at home. he's not just the pawn in our protagonist plans here. So I appreciate that.

I don't know whether we'll see more, whether we'll find out more about Howard's troubled relationship or not here, but at least we got a brief window into that world. Speaking of windows, I thought it was a really, I think one of the smartest shots of the episode is the shot inside Howard's therapy session, out the window you see Jimmy and the Howard cosplay doing his like schick. And it's funny, like the whole thing is funny, obviously. him trying to like wrench the sign out of the ground. All of that like, you know, you're anxious for him.

All that frantic comedy is really good. But the same time, it's like you're listening to Howard talk about how he's a real person with a real life. Meanwhile, here's this like little goblin outside, like seeking to destroy it. And that juxtaposition, I think, was really smart to be. Because Howard could have been in any appointment, any something. But the fact that they made it a therapy appointment and the fact that they used that moment to draw us inside Howard's life in a way we've never been before, however briefly, I think is really intentional and smart, right?

And the fact that Jimmy slash Saul and Kim are mad about someone moving the cone, which, again, I'm not a driver. I don't have a car. I don't have to deal with reserving parking spots. But Kim says narcissists move cones, right? I mean, I would think that narcissists would be the ones to put the cones down in the first place, right? Yeah. That you think you own this parking spot.

And beyond that, they're offended that someone moved the cone. while they're in the middle of stealing someone's car and framing him and tearing down his career, right? And while they're upset about the cones, it's great. Yeah, the return to the Howard suit, which is from season one episode four, Hero. And Jimmy's depressing journey through the courthouse in this episode really does reward that season one rewatch that you and I did, even like the premiere, season one episode one. Well done. Yeah.

Pat ourselves on the back for our preparation. But again, that's the way that the show is really intelligent. making everything feel really intentional, right? Like that it's, look, this is the same story we've been telling this whole time. We're going to mirror a lot of shows do that actually in their final season. They'll find ways to mirror season one. But Saul does it better than most people do it. So she doesn't even have a name.

This character played by Nadine Marissa is the contract counsel admin. She doesn't even have a character name. She looms larger from it. Like I thought she was more present in the series, but we haven't seen her since season two. For some reason, I thought she was a figure that we see a lot of. And then of course, like Bill Oakley is a character that we've seen eternally, but for him to be one passing judgment on Jimmy in a way we're going to talk about in a second. Like, I think that that's really brilliant use of small characters and small beats, small patterns to show the trajectory of a character that has been changing so incrementally. I was going back through reading some old stuff to just catch up on coverage of the season.

And there's been so many articles written by so many smart people who write about TV. about like, finally we're seeing Saul emerge. And I'm like, it's not a one-time heel turn. It's just slowly chipping away at someone until they wind up where they wind up. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And this episode, I think it marks an important point in that turn in a few ways. But that scene in the courthouse is kind of heartbreaking.

I mean, not that Jimmy has ever been really a respected figure around there. I mean, Bill, the deputy DA, he says, I liked you better when you. were just a regular bottom feeder. So it's not like anyone was putting Jimmy on a pedestal at any point, but they tolerated him. They may have had some affection for him. They at least accepted his Beanie Baby bribes, right? And now he's sitting alone at the lunch table, and his only company is the crooks who are

calling him. And it's sad, right? Because he's always someone who has wanted to be liked and to be respected, and he never got that from his brother, which is sort of what. made him break bad or break Saul in the first place. And so now it's coming home to Roost, right? And now he is Saul walking through the courthouse, not Jimmy. It feels like it happens so slowly yet so quickly at the same time. I was rewatching Lantern, which is the episode where Chuck dies. I was rewatching it. I was rewatching it. And I told you, I was rewatching all the Nacho dad scenes.

But in that episode, and I'm glad I just happened to rewatch it, and you'll remember this because I think you did a full rewatch, is that. That's the episode where to try to move things along in the Sandpiper case, Jimmy has to set himself up to be the bad guy. So he sets it up where these like senior citizens who he has been, yes, manipulating, but also enjoys being really popular with. He sets it something up where he is overheard on a mic so that they hear him exaggerating his villainy so that they will turn on him because he needs them to turn on him

to rally around this other person to make the case go forward. But the point is he needs to set himself up as the bad guy. And he hates doing it because he actually loved being loved by these senior citizens. And we see Jimmy pull all these grifts. He's definitely a grifter. But also, like, when he's in a grift where he's just charming people and they love him, that is like, that's his happiest place of existence, you know? Yeah.

And in this episode, on the outside, he's basically solomile. On the inside, he might not quite be there yet, but we're seeing everyone turn their backs on him and everyone from his Jimmy life, even Mrs. New Yen from the nail salon. She's kicked him out because of his clientele. He's now fulfilled what Betsy Kettleman said in season one about him being the kind of lawyer guilty people would hire and only a certain class of criminals, not even white-collar criminals like the Kettlemen's. Not that they ever acknowledge that they're criminals. But now he has this new class of criminal who wants his services because, you know, he has the reputation for being the guy who got Lalo off. And when Spooge asks him if he's Salamanca's guy, he says, yeah, that's me. So he is fully embracing his Amigo del Cartel brand here.

And we even saw Francesca show up in the next time on at the end of the episode. So she's about to be in place. So all of the pieces are here now. And I don't know if he is fully saw at heart. Something else has to happen to make him snap, I think. But he has the office. He's about to have Francesco back. He has the clientele.

Like, it's all happening. Yeah, he's got the suits, of course. So he needs the car. He needs some remodeling. He needs the gold toilet instead of the white toilet that's in the middle of his empty office. So he's got to upgrade his toilets. But other than that, he's almost there.

As I promise we're going to talk about Shakespeare in a minute. it, but like digging into Shakespeare in the Gilligan verse, I found this great article that Emily St. James over at Vox wrote for the 10th anniversary, Breaking Bad, about Shakespeare and the five-act structure and how that relates to how the story of Breaking Bad was told over five seasons, how that story was told. Really good read that I recommend. I talk about it a little bit throughout this episode, but that idea of the five-act structure, I was sort of looking at how that mapped over to Breaking Bad and thinking how could we map it over to Better Call Saul? And the point being, is like something will happen right in the middle, not towards the end, but right in the middle

that is the turning point, the like past the point of no return sort of spot. And I think that has to be Chuck Suicide, which is the end of season three, right in the middle of the story that we're telling here. I mean, unsurprising, it's not like they pretended like that wasn't a huge moment, but I don't know that we've really grocked what exactly that snuffed out in Jimmy or how exactly that bound Kim and Jimmy together is something I was thinking about it. I was thinking about that tequila bottle, which is something that they got in season two, but they didn't drink until Chuck died at the end of season three is when they opened the bottle. And that's a moment I feel like Kim knowing that Chuck is gone and that's a wound that's never

going to heal in Jimmy is something that I think just bound her to him forever. I don't know. What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, that closed the book on the possibility that Jimmy could. could ever earn Chuck's respect and avoid becoming Saul. So it was an important turning point in that respect. And also, I think, in the sense that he then buried the emotion that came out of that and any guilt that he felt. And that was an important moment for Howard, too. He might be in that

therapy session in part because of the part that he thinks he played in Chuck's death. So it was definitely a turning point for multiple characters and something that I think brought Jimmy and Kim closer together. It was kind of a point of no return, right? I mean, I mean, it may have been apparent to all of us that Chuck had made up his mind probably in childhood about his brother. But Jimmy was still holding out some hope that he might one day be something better in Chuck's eyes. And it turned out that that wasn't possible. And Chuck snuffed out that possibility when he snuffed out his life. And it's all just free fall fall out from there.

You know what I mean? Like Chuck dies and then we're just like in a downhill run to where we find Saul at the beginning of Breaking Bad. There's this other phrase that Emily used in that piece to describe the genius of what, like, Gilligan and Gould do, this idea of something being unexpected, yet also completely inevitable. And this is what she uses to refer to that thing that you and I have talked about a couple times, the way that Gilligan and Gould, et cetera, will write their characters into corners just for the joy of writing them back out again. That kind of TV writing can be the worst kind of TV writing in more inept hands, right? Like I think of, and forgive me for invoking this show when we're talking about Better Call Salle.

But I think about Glee and one of the things that drove me crazy about Glee. I often think about Gle. One of the things that drew me out of my mind about that show is that there was just huge character inconsistencies. There's no character consistency episode to episode. There are a million other bad TV shows I could have pulled up as an example, but this drew me absolutely out of my mind in watching Glee. The characters just did whatever they needed to do. do that week to serve the plot and who they were inherently didn't matter. And I think the reason that Gilligan and Gould,

etc., can get away with what they do is not just that like in this really clever seeding back in season one elements into here, but also whatever is happening is rooted in this character of Jimmy McGill. Whatever he does or doesn't do, whatever decision he makes, the same with Kim. So it's all psychologically rooted to stuff like Jimmy's compulsive need to be. he liked. And so when he walks from the courthouse and nobody likes him anymore, he's like,

well, fine, I'll go where I'm liked and where I'm liked is by these criminals. You know, and then we see him working the line outside the nail salon and just having a ball. He's like, oh, I love your leathers. You two together. Okay. You know, like that's where he's, he just wants to be wanted and needed and loved and liked, which we all do. But Jimmy has a real hole in him that needs to be filled. You know what I mean? And Kim says, sorry you had a hot day. And he's like, no, I had a great day, which is very similar to when we saw a recent scene with them eating Jimmy and Kim. And he says to her, it was a hard day. And she says, no, it was great.

It was the best day of my career. So I think they both have something going on inside that maybe is a little different. Maybe they don't even fully understand each other and what the other wants, what constitutes a good day for Kim or for Jimmy is something that maybe they don't even recognize in each other. even if it's sort of similar for both of them. That's so interesting. All right, now we're going to get to the point of why I went down the Shakespeare rabbit hole in the first place, which is Mike and Kim's first scene together. Big moment for the show.

We've been talking about Chris and Andy. I've been talking about anyone who studies the show has been talking about the binary between the Mike show and the Jimmy show. And this, at last meeting of these two characters feels like a real bridge in a way that we haven't seen, you know, the personal. side of Jimmy's life, even beyond her Lalo encounters last season is like meeting a really important key figure on this other side of his life. And that feels like it feels like it's finally one show in a way with this moment. Yeah. And I love how it was introduced in credit to Seahorn again. But when you

first see Mike just out of focus in the corner of the frame sitting at the counter behind Kim, and then in the next shot, you just see a part of his shoulder before the camera pans to the right. So it's like he's been lurking at the corner of the frame of Kim's life all along, right? Not just because his guys are literally tailing her these days, but also because through his relationship with Jimmy and their entanglement, he's been having an impact on her, whether she knows it or not, whether she knows him. I mean, she knows him from being a parking lot attendant. That's all she knows. And they've come a long way, both of them, since their H.HM parking lot attendant days. And I wonder whether Mike ever wishes he were still checking parking validation.

It's just like, shooting Werner in the desert, or he's ready to snipe nacho or anyone near Nacho, is he thinking, I wish I were still sitting in my comfy little parking lot attendance box. I could be playing hungry, hungry hippos right now with my granddaughter. Yeah, it's interesting because, again, that's another season one connective tissue moment, right? Like, you're the parking lot attendant. I was, right? I used to be.

That's not who I am anymore. Past the point of no return. One of our listeners Ron wrote in asking, like, what we make of how, if we're to understand how Kim's characters progressed, what do we make of how she reacts to the stressful news of who's following her and that Lala's alive and so like that compared to what we've seen Kim, how we've seen Kim react earlier. He mentioned her with like the papers on the side of the road, like various moments of Kim encountering stress and strain.

Something that Chris said that I thought was so smart on the watch was this idea that like when you watch an episode directed by an actor on a show, you get maybe a better chance of understanding how they understand their character. So since she's the director, this is maybe the best insight we've had to Kim Wexler ever in the show. So how did you read her reaction to this news here? Yeah, late season Kim, current Kim, she always keeps it together, right? When she's in the room, when the conversation is happening, it's like in the last. last episode when the deal for Jimmy was presented to her and she hears the name Lalo and you can kind of see something flicker across her face, but then it's immediately composed again. She has her lawyer face back on and it's sort of the same here, right? I mean, she keeps her composure when this guy at the counter accosts her and tells her Lollow's alive and that they've been tailing her. And then after Mike leaves, then she starts shaking, right? And she's almost in shock and we see some of that stress come out.

and we're getting these glimpses of emotion from almost every character. This is what we alluded to earlier in the episode. And we see it with Kim here when she's shaking in that scene later in the episode at the end, when she's sitting with her head down in the car at the end of the episode before Jimmy knocks on the window. And then she's sort of startled. And something my wife noticed, the foot tapping she does when she's sitting with Cliff waiting for Jimmy to drive up, that's an echo of the first shot of season five episode seven when Kim and Jimmy are about to get married and they're talking about how now they're going to be honest with each other at all times. The first thing you see in that scene is Kim's foot tapping.

Her face is composed, but that's just the little tell. It's her tell. Something is coming out here, right? And we're seeing that with everyone. We saw it with Jimmy letting Lalo's name slip out to the prosecutors. We saw it with Gus, breaking the glass. and then in this episode being nervous about a plumber who's driving him, right? So he's seeing Lalo everywhere too.

And of course we know he's wearing a bulletproof vest and an ankle gun. So even if characters aren't necessarily saying or vocalizing their nerves, I mean, Kim does say to Jimmy, do you ever feel like you're being followed? But it's pretty restrained. And yet these little things come out, these little mannerisms, one word here or there, a foot tap, whatever it is, a breaking glass, we can kind of sense the strain that everyone's under as we head to the end stages here. And everyone in the audience is under that strain too.

I mean, we're probably all tapping our foot or doing something similar in our own homes. That's really smart. I love that rundown. I would add when Jimmy and Wendy are waiting to, you know, play their scene out and Kim's texting him. And it feels like he's having a moment there where he's like, is this a bridge too far? Like, should I do this? which is consistent with what we've seen with Jimmy of like Kim's maybe the one plowing ahead and he's the one feeling uncertain. But in this episode we see her also feeling uncertain.

I want to ask you about the ponytail shot. Like we were just talking about this the other day about you. Okay, so what have you heard from the creative team behind the show about like what Kim's ponytail, her perfectly curled ponytail means? I'm pretty sure I read a quote that that was a conscious choice that the tightness of the ponytail. or how orderly or disheveled it was would reflect Kim's mental state. So if it's very tightly pulled back, that reflects just her kind of keeping her composure at all times and keeping up appearances and being very tightly under controlled. Whereas occasionally, you'll see she lets her hair down maybe when things are getting out of hand a little bit or whether she's indulging her vice, right, and getting in on some grift. So maybe we're seeing something along those lines here as well.

Well, what's interesting is, so like the ponytail is tight in the sequence with Cliff. But what we're seeing is as she's adjusting her hair, the camera's on the ponytail as it's bouncing around as she's sort of shifting her chair around to make sure that they are angled properly where they need to be to see the car. But it also, I think, again, speaks to that like nerviness, the foot tapping, the checking the phone, all that stuff. But I love like as an artistic choice, I love the ponytail shot in that episode, in that sequence. I thought it was so good. All right. So the thing that Mike says to Kim,

he says, which no matter, before I understood it to be a Shakespeare illusion, I still thought it was a monumental line when he tells her she's made of sterner stuff than her husband. Shout out, as you did earlier, to Reddit for finding the Shakespeare. And this is from Julius Caesar, best part of the play, actually, which is Mark Anthony's speech after Caesar has died. and Brutus and the assassins have sort of convinced the crowd that Caesar deserved to be assassinated. And Mark Antony, his friend, gets up and gets on the mic and gives a speech that rouse the crowd back up.

But he says this. He says he was my friend faithful and just to me. But Brutus says he was like, so Mark Ante's whole purpose here is to convince the crowd that Caesar was not an ambitious, a brutal loser, loser, brutal ruler. but a kind, gentle guy. And he says he was my friend faithful and just to me, but Brutus says he was ambitious,

and Brutus is an honorable man. He had brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffersville. Did this and Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

and Brutus is an honorable man. And so on the one hand, when we say now ambition should be made of sterner stuff, I think in our capitalist society, we would say that that would be a compliment you pay someone, right? Like you have ambition. You should be made of sterner stuff, all the sort of thing. Anthony is using it here as an insult, like claiming that that Brutus is made of ambition and sterner stuff. And oh, poor gentle Caesar, he didn't deserve to be stabbed. He's not, you know, Ante is lying. He's using propaganda here.

But I think that this idea, when Mike is saying it, he's meeting it as a compliment. but in this world that we're watching here, this idea that Kim is made of sterner stuff is not ultimately a good thing. Or I'm reading way too much into this. What do you think? Yeah, I think there are multiple interpretations. I mean, just on the surface level, it is literally true,

I think, that she just has more nerve than Jimmy probably. I mean, we've seen that. She displays that in this episode where she thinks she's being tailed and her response is just to walk up and say, hey, why are you telling me? Take their plates? Yeah. What a badass.

Yeah. And of course, Mike was listening in when Lalo paid his visit to Jimmy and Kim, right? So he knows that Kim was really the one who protected Jimmy in that spot and kind of cowed Lalo in that situation. So it's true. But putting my English major hat on here for a second. Yes, join me. Just kidding. My English major head is always on.

But if we look at the Friends Romans Countryman speech here, I guess, you know, Right. Brutus is saying it's good that Caesar is dead because Caesar was so ambitious. Antony is saying Caesar couldn't have been so ambitious and so heartless because if he was so moved by the plight of the poor, then that was genuine, although maybe that was emotion was an act. So I guess there are a couple possible interpretations. One is that Mike is Antony. Kim is Brutus, who has the sterner stuff and Saul slash Jimmy is Caesar. Yeah. So maybe Kim is going to betray Saul the way that. Brutus did Caesar. I guess that would go toward the long con theory that people are still holding on to. Or maybe it means that Kim is Caesar and she's going to get betrayed because she is unquestionably ambitious, but she's also concerned for the poor, right? Like she has that. That's why

she's trying to disrupt public defending. So maybe this means she has to pick a lane or she's going to end up getting stabbed, whether figuratively or literally, because we see that conflict in this episode where she's talking to Cliff, right? And the whole point of this conversation is to set up the scam to set up Howard. But then almost without meaning to, maybe, she persuades Cliff that her idea for her helping out people is actually viable and he's into it. And so it's like, well, which one do you want here? Which one are you actually trying to do? And when she's recapping conversation for Jimmy later, she says, oh, God, it was beautiful, right? And she's talking about the fact that they conned Cliff here, that it worked. She's not saying it's beautiful that she convinced Cliff to go along

with her plan to help underprivileged people of Albuquerque. She's saying it was beautiful that she convinced Cliff that it was Howard in the car. And yet she's still trying to have it both ways, right? I mean, she's still trying to scam Howard on one end and then also help people on the other end, like sometimes in the same conversation, in the same diner on the same day. And it just seems like it's hard to have it both ways. And even if, in theory, scamming Howard is a way to get a sandpiper settlement so that they can have the money to help people, we know it's not about that. And even they know on some level that it's not about that. It's about gold toilets, I think we find, yeah. Right.

Right. So is she going to end up like Caesar if she doesn't either embrace the ruthless, heartless ambition or be legitimately concerned for people and give up the ambition? I love this idea that a lot of ink has been spilled about the fact that like Macbeth is a good comp for Breaking Bad, a character full of ambition who gets just sort of inevitably pulled into tragedy because of his own taste for power. I never thought of it before this moment, but Caesar is such an interesting. comparison for Saul because there is so much that hinges on oration and convincing and conning and all this sort of stuff that is the heart of Saul in a way that that Breaking Bad never was speechifying. So I just I'll be thinking about it. And I'm sure that they're not sitting there with like a one to one character to character comp in their writer's room. But I you know, it's not it's not an accident that this line is here. I also always have my English major hat on and

I'm so happy to be doing this with you because Sean Fennesse just rolls his eyes whenever I was like, let's talk about the Shakespeare of it all. So thanks for joining me. There's a lot of illusions here. They're juggling days of wine and roses in the writer's room. They're juggling Shakespeare. We're giving our listeners a lot of homework here. But I love that Saul, like, this is not obviously as pulse pounding an episode as the last one. But it really is a payoff of sorts. It is a kind of climax just to see Kim and Mike sit quietly in this rest of. for a minute. How many series are there where it's like, oh, they finally met? That is like a big thing that you're wondering if that will ever happen in the last episode. It's not, will they kill each other or will they run away with each other? It's just, will their paths ever cross? Will they ever have a conversation? And then they do. And it feels really consequential and weighty for these characters just to encounter each other and just to have a conversation that's

built on sort of a mutual respect. So I appreciate that about this series. The last time I that way was Thrones because like because specifically Thrones was such like a far flung story, right? So you have characters in different continents and you're like, will these two characters ever share screen time? And even though Kim and Mike were tooling around Albuquerque a much smaller strip patch of land, it still does feel so as hugely significant as someone like sailing over from Sos to like, you know, be someone. This is Albuquerque. Yeah. And there's not even that big a cast, right? It's not even that big an ensemble in the series compared to Thrones. And yet they have managed to keep them apart to this point.

We got a couple of listener emails before we get to sort of our wrap up here, which is a listener, Shrutti Rodin, is there any, like, basically she's asking, is there anything to be gleaned for the fact that, like, Kim has seemed to set up shop in the El Camino. And El Camino is the name of, like, Jesse Pinkman's sort of happily ever after movie, spoilers for El Camino, happily ever after a movie, that he gets,

like, is this an indication that Kim Waxler's going to make it? Because she's in the El Camino restaurant. I mean, I love a stress. Is Kim Wixler lives. We're aspirational people around here. I'd love to, it would be pretty to think so. So sure, let's go with that. Shoot these email was titled Kim Wixler Thrives.

I love that. Not just lives, but thrives. I listener Max run in with the theory that Kim kills Lalo, this like sterner stuff, thing. Again, this is a show that is so about incremental moments that it feels, it feels like we don't have enough runway for me to get Kim to murder, though, like, murder can happen if your backs against the wall in like any sort of circumstance, I'm sure. And there certainly could be a storyline where... It takes one episode of Breaking Bad, right? Right. Yeah. So if Kim does

kill Lalo, let's say, and then does she need to be disappeared so that the Salamuncas do not exact revenge on her? Assuming they realize he's alive at some point before he dies. Yes. Right. Well, Hector knows he's alive, right? But like, yeah, so is that why Kim? He can't tell anyone because as we've covered. They will not get him a speaking spell. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's an idea.

I also saw a theory that like Kim's going to go work for Lalo. Like what's interesting about Kim at this point is that any of those things feel possible. Any of like Kim breaking back good because she's nervous or Kim breaking all the way bad, both feel equally possible to me and this rich character that they've created here and again, it'll be that like

sort of surprising but inevitable feeling of like it's not going to feel out of character, whatever it is, you know? Yeah, the conversation about whether they're wicked, she says,

do you think we're wicked? What? No, it's just the turn of phrase, he responds. And I think both of those outcomes are in play, at least for her, potentially at this point.

Was I the only one who thought she was being followed by Noho Hank for a second? A hundred percent. I was like, Barry's back. Maybe.

I thought we were getting a crossover episode here. I got really excited. I 100% was like, is it no-ho Hank in the car? One last thing before sort of my roundup that I've decided we're going to do this week and maybe every week is the Office of Origin story. You know, I get a little irritated. Well, this is when you and I are going to have another one of our solo of Star Wars stories conversations. But like when we get something that's so blatant is like this is how Han Solo got his blast or whatever, you know, is like I get a little. little tired of those kind of prequel moments. How did this feel for you? This is how Saul finds his

office. I felt a little bit that way about when we saw how he discovered the Statue of Liberty flappy person. I didn't necessarily need to know where that came from. But in this case, I mean, we had to see or it seemed likely that we would see where he got the office. We know Kim proposed the idea, the concept for the office. And I kind of liked the way it was introduced because he says it's temporary till I find something better, which seems like such a sad line because we know he doesn't find anything better, right? Like, this is as good as it gets for Saul. But that actually gave me hope because maybe Saul is temporary, right? Maybe Saul is just a way station on Jimmy's life.

And maybe Jimmy can find something better in his post-breaking bad life as Gene Tachovic or as himself again before the end of the season. So that's the way I hopefully interpreted it. We know he's going to... There's always a synobon to consider. Yeah, right. We know he's going to get the golden toilet, so maybe things will look up in other ways. But yeah, I didn't mind seeing how it all came together.

It obviously looks a lot different from the last time we saw it or the next time we saw it. But I appreciated, you know, it's conveniently located close to the courthouse. So it might smell bad, but it's all about location. It's exactly what Kim asked. for. So, all right, this is, this is something I'm calling theory corner roundup. It's not all theory base, but it's sort of like forward-looking stuff, right? So one thing that that Reddit, rightly so, has lashed on to is this idea of Clifford Main's drug addict son. My favorite theory for two

minutes before it was disproven was that Clifford Main's drug addicted son might be Skinny Pete, who plays the piano beautifully and we don't know his last name or his parents, etc. But the actor who plays Skinny Pete has tweeted out, please stop asking me. I tried. He's like, it's really, it broke my heart. He's like, this is the photo I sent them to prove that I could look like healthy and younger. And they didn't bite.

Not a necessity. Not a requirement to be on the show. But yeah, it doesn't work, right? Because there are some biographical details we get for Skinny Pete that would seem to contradict the Clifford main dad theory. What do we know about Skinny Pete? I think Skiddy Pete, credit to the Breaking Bad wiki here, said his dad was a contractor at some point. That's right.

That's right. And I think he also says his name is actually Pete or Peter. And Cliff says his son's name is Gregory here. So I don't think it works. I love the idea of like Gregory Peter Main. Anyway, do you think other than the fact that obviously this positions Cliff to be in a place to be extra sensitive to any of Howard's activities, unforgiving, perhaps, of Howard's fabricated drug addiction. Do you think there's going to be any kind of payoff to Cliss's son here?

Probably not. Yeah. I would guess probably not. Yeah, it kind of raises your antenna a little bit that he mentioned that, but it could just be a justification for why this scam works so well on him, right? Okay, as you mentioned, we see Francesca in the preview for next week. There seems to be, like, let's just do like a quick Francesca check in. And the last time we saw her, so she was a receptionist for Kim and Jimmy in their office that they briefly shared together, right?

And she loved Kim and tolerated Jimmy. When we meet her at the beginning of Breaking Bad, like when Saul is leaving his office, he's like talking about her booty and like it's like pretty skeevy actually. And in general, Francesca seems like down for all the criminal activity that's happening around her. So, like, I don't need to spend a ton of time wondering how Francesca got where she got. But, like, those are two dots that are in need of some major connection for me. Yeah. What are you thinking about that? Yeah.

And it could just be working with Saul for a while, right? Again, there are a few years between where we are and where Breaking Bad begins. So if you're Saul's assistant for a few years, I imagine that that could rub off on you in some unpleasant ways. Literally. Anyway, yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah, so Francesca, the assistant in Saul's office and Breaking bad is going to come back to do something next week.

What about Mike at this point, given that he thinks Kim is made of Sterner stuff, what could possibly put Mike as someone who's doing work for Saul sometimes? Man, that is a question. I would love to know the answer to that question. There's a lot of time here that can transpire. A lot of things could happen. I assume we will get some sort of answer to this by the end of this season, I would think.

So whether it's maybe Jimmy slash Saul earning Mike's respect on some level because of how he handles Kim, maybe he protects Kim in some way. Maybe just Mike wants to get out of the game or extricate himself somewhat while still being able to provide for his family, right? I mean, at some point, maybe he wants to stop executing his friends. So maybe he feels like working for Saul as an investigator is a little low-stakes work on the side. But you wouldn't think at this point that he would be inclined to do that. I mean, there is like a fondness of sorts between them. They go back a ways at this point. And Saul has helped him out in the past, right?

When Mike was under investigation for murder by those cops from Philly, and Saul helps him get out of that and get the notebook. So there's a relationship here. So I imagine that we will get some answers to this right now. It doesn't seem like Mike is going to say, yeah, I want to work for Saul. Like he's in pretty deep with Gus at this stage. So I don't know. This is one of the enduring questions here.

This is one of my big questions about the rest of the season. Another dot needing connection. All right. This is not skepticism. We've already said, I completely trust these writers. They're going to connect these dots. I'm just curious about it. Okay.

Where's Lalo? We haven't seen him since I miss Tony Dalton so much. We haven't seen him since episode one. Where in the world is? Lalo Salamanca. Yeah, exactly right. I'm going to tell you about my Rockefeller story off air.

So there's this illuminating quote that Peter Gould gave to Entertainment Weekly about the proof that Lalo might be looking for. And this ties into, we see the Super Lab, Gus's Super Lab again in the preview for next week. Peter Gold said,

if fans watched the beginning of last season, carefully Lalo was making a bunch of phone calls and trying to understand what it is, Werner or Ziegler, was building for Gustavo Fring. And that would definitely be a vulnerability for the fring organization. He needs some kind of, Lalo needs some kind of proof that Gus is plotting against the

cartel. Otherwise, killing him while he's making big bucks for, big bucks for Donaladeo is going to be a problem for the Salamanca family. So why is Lala going down south to find out what was going on with the construction site is a question. There's this other thing where there's this character Kai for folks who don't remember what happened on a TV show that aired like two years ago, right? There's this character, Kai, who was working on building the super lab, working for Werner,

and it helps betray Werner to Mike, right? And then when Mike is sending all the lab guys away to drive off to Poins Unknown and then fly back from whence they came, Kai's like, it had to be done. Werner was soft. And we know that Mike was really distressed to have to kill Werner. So Mike punches him to the ground. And I guess in the commentary for that episode, the writer said, Mike made a mistake here and it will come back to haunt him.

And so Kai might be a character who would have reason to be angry. It might be vulnerable to give up information, perhaps. He seems like such a minor character to hinge something like this on. But I don't know. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about Kai? A lot of events this season have hinged on minor characters. So I wouldn't put it past them. Yeah, it is curious.

Like, I guess Lalo could have headed south initially, and then somehow he gets wind of what happened to Nacho, and he turns around and comes right back. Like, maybe that is just putting us off the trail a little bit. Right. Because he's put everyone in the series off his trail, which I like. I like that we're just as in the dark about Lalo's whereabouts and motivations as everyone in the series. You know, I think it would sap some of the suspense. If we knew, if we were getting Lalo scenes, you know, we could see him plotting or creeping across the border or whatever it is. Like, we don't know. He could turn up next week. He could turn up three

episodes down the line. He could be sitting in someone's apartment when they come home. We have no idea. It's like the Jaws theme is playing. Like I'm seeing Lalo everywhere. I was rewatching some of those episodes when Lalo was poking around the construction site, the alleged like chicken chiller that Gus is building here. And something that he says to Bolsa in one of those episodes is Boulso's like, the thing you have to understand with the Gustavo Fring is that it's not personal, it's business, it's business no matter what. And Lalo said even what happened in Santiago. And it's been addressed in Breaking Bad that we don't know about Gus's life in Chile before he came up north. There are some indications that it might be connected to Pinochet, which would be like an interesting left turn for the show to take.

but like could Lalo be headed down to Chile to find some intel on, I mean, I don't know how that would be, I mean, Peter Gould told us what it was about and I'm like, but what if it's about Pinochet? But, you know, he's driving in the right direction. He's going south, you know. But it's like Aladio says to Gus after killing Max, the only reason you're still alive is because I know who you are. And we still don't know who he is. Not really. Like there's so much we don't know about Gus. even the nature of his relationship with Max, which is sort of implied, suggested that maybe it was a romantic relationship, but that hasn't been confirmed. I don't think it's going to be confirmed because Gus is such a cipher. And he's gone to such lengths to wipe away his history and even part of his present to the point that he has set up a fake family in his second home next door. Who among us has not done that and we'll point another in our life, Ben Lindberg? Yeah, right. I mean, what if I could if I had the space? But I think that is kind of emblematic.

I mean, he has really just wiped away his origin story. He doesn't want anyone to know. Evidently, the Salamanca's or some of the Salamanca's do know. And maybe that is why they work with him or why they're afraid of him. Was he some sort of enforcer? Is he a torturer? Who knows what he is, right? I mean, he's capable of anything.

So I kind of like that there's a mysterious element to who he is and where he came from. And I don't even necessarily want to know the answer to that, right? I'm fine with that just being left unexplained. Leave it to our imagination because it's more threatening that way. I love it. All right. Next week's episode is called Black and Blue, as we already mentioned. Season 2 episode 7 of Breaking Bad is called Negro I Asul, which of course is black and blue in Spanish.

That title is based on a song written about Heisenberg that Heismurg wears black and cooks blue meth. And it's the episode before we meet Sal Goodman in Breaking Bad. Okay, couple questions. Number one, could this be an introduction to Walt feels unlikely, but what do you make of this title and how it relates to the Breaking Bad title? Yeah, I mean, I think one point that maybe Chris may have made on the watch is that we don't really know how quickly they're going to wrap up this timeline on this series, right? For all we know, they could wrap up the present part of Saul and then jump forward to the Gene Toccovic part for a substantial part of the season. I mean, maybe they wrap up this timeline in the first half of this season. Then we jump forward for the second half that's very much in play, in which case a lot is going to be happening soon. So the fact that this is maybe an illusion, a callback to the episode right before we meet Saul, does that mean that we're going to meet the fully realized Saul in this upcoming episode?

Or is it too soon for that still? It's hard to say. Yeah, I'm excited to find out. Or maybe, and again, I'm over. But like, again, they don't, they don't do these episode titles lightly. So, you know. Character Return Wish Corner. Reddit seems to think it knows who's going to show up next week. And I'm really excited about it.

He's actually high on my list of Character Wish Return. So we'll talk about that. But do you have any characters you're hoping to see soon? I do. The actual answer will probably be someone I haven't thought of since 2010. But possibilities, I guess, shout out to the rewatchables. And their question about, would this season be better with Danny Trejo? Maybe Tortuga comes back because I believe his original appearance, his lone appearance in Breaking Bad, was in Negro Yassu.

It's true. So maybe he'll turn up in black and blue. I think maybe Jesse's partner, Emilio, who had a very brief but memorable arc on Breaking Bad. And he's kind of important because Jesse recommends Saul to Walt because Emilio had used him to get out of trouble. So maybe we see how Saul got Emilio out of trouble at some point this season. And then I guess I would say likely maybe is Patrick, right, Bill Burr's character? Because we've seen plenty of Huel in this series, but no Patrick, who is the other half of Saul's A team. And apparently he was supposed to appear in season five at some point, but he had a scheduling conflict.

So he seems like a safe bet to pop up at some point if he's not too busy being Miggs-Mayfeld or whatever else he's up to these days. So I would be sort of surprised if we don't see Patrick at some point. Shown up on reservation dogs? Bill Burr's busy, man. The person that Reddit seems to have identified in the refunction of a cabinet, classic Reddit moment, honestly, is good old Gail Betaker, chemist for Gustavo Fring. So if we're back in the super lab next week for some reason, it might be we get some gale. Gail is one of my favorite Breaking Bad characters, so I would love.

And Gail's been in Saul, right? He showed up with the wags. Yeah, yeah. But briefly. But like to spend more time with him and like he could be like a substantial part of the end game here. Because the question I had like after Nacho dies is how interesting is the cartel story to me with as we said the power structure is going to be the same as it was before. But the thing is that Kim is now drawn into and Kim is our, Kim is our other variable. And now she, now Mike's following her or now like Fring is aware of her or Lala is aware of her, like all that sort of stuff.

But yeah. Well, there's proving and there's knowing. That fine applies here. I just wanted to say it at some point. I was to say it again. All right. All right. So Gail, I look forward to learning more about it's coffee, right, that Gail has learned how to expertly make.

So get your pourovers ready. Gail might be coming back again next week. And until we can. find out what is black and what is blue. Ben, where can folks find you? On Twitter at Ben Lindbergh writing at the ringer. I'll be reviewing the new Star Trek series later this week. It's so good.

It is good. I know you'll be podcasting about Star Trek this week elsewhere as well. So maybe we can talk about Star Trek at some point. Try by contents and Star Trek. Let's all just try to stay up to Pollo standards in our own life. However we want to manifest that. It's hard to do. It's lofty standards.

but I try to hold myself to them. All right, you'll be hearing me talk about Moon Night and Dr. Strange and all kinds of stuff around the ring ofverse. Please you email us. Kim Wexler lives and or thrives at gmail.com. We appreciate your emails. This episode was produced by the great Christopher Sutton, and we'll see you next week. Control the market.