Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's my 5 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 14 years ago. (My first post was very in media res.) And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 3437 blogs in 5 years and 646 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 1.77 posts per day this past year, down from 1.92 last year. Yeah, this year has been a bit slower for me in terms of writing than years past. I've remarked on various reasons why. Those reasons range from dispiriting things happening (including just being sick) to engaging in fewer activities than normal because of an injury to just not even caring. 😰 But hey, enough melancholy.

One thing I enjoy using these anniversaries to do is checkpoint what I've written about. For starters, here are the Top Five topics I've written about in 5 years on Dreamwidth:

Top Topics, Past 5 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	537
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	468
3	TV	279
4	Waterfalls	274
5	Weather	259

A few thoughts on this list:

• The tags "In Beauty I Walk" and "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" remain at the top of the list. That's appropriate as those are the foundational themes of my blog.


• I feel a little sad that TV has rocketed up to #3. Last year it came in at #6. I have mixed feelings about it because I'm thinking, Didn't I have anything better than TV to write about? But on the other hand, I did watch more TV this year than in the past. Not that that's even a lot. More on that later...


• Likewise, Weather seems like a lame thing to have on the leader board. I mean, people talking about the weather is kind of insipid. Blogging about it seems like the same. But the Weather tag got a lot of use this year because there were simply so many times that weather became a factor in something I wanted to do— sometimes as an opportunity, but most often an obstacle. And many times it was extreme weather I was writing about— which I call out is happening more frequently, and will continue to happen more frequently, because of human-caused climate change.


• I am satisfied that Coronavirus has fallen off the list. Last year it ranked #4, by this year it dropped all the way to #9 on the list of what I've written about over the past 5 years.

Now let's look at what I wrote about in the past 12 months:

Top Ten Topics, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	Planes Trains and Automobiles	123
2	Job	77
3	In Beauty I Walk	71
4 (tie)	No Rest for the Wicked	67
4 (tie)	TV	67
6	Taking it Easy	66
7	Dining Out	64
8	Better Call Saul	51
9	Waterfalls	50
10	Sales	47

A few remarks on Top Ten:

• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles climbed from 2nd place to 1st this year while In Beauty I Walk dropped from 1st to 3rd. I'm not sure what this swapping of places indicates.... Perhaps that I spent more time flying/driving than actually walking the past 12 months. 😂


• Job leapt up 8 places, from #10 to #2. That's not surprising as I had more than usual to say about my current job over the past 12 months— which included not just one but two troubling layoffs. Though I wasn't dismissed in either layoff, both prompted my thinking about when it'll be time for me to bow out.


• Better Call Saul roared onto the Top 10 list this year, coming from zero up to 51 posts. That helped propel TV up to the #4 spot. I actually don't watch much TV overall. Other than finishing Breaking Bad and watching all of Better Call Saul I watched barely any TV the past 12 months.

Here's the Second Ten list. I'll detail it out to show some where some topics that dropped off last year's Top Ten list landed as well as some topics that almost made it this year.

Second 10 Top Topics, Past Year

Rank	Tag	Uses
11	Being Sick Sucks	46
12	Weather	45
13	Around Home	41
14	Family	39
15	Pool Life	37
16	Road Trip!	36
17	WTF?	35
18	Italy	34
20 (tie)	Canada	32
20 (tie)	D'oh!	32

Some remarks on Topics #11-20:

• Being Sick Sucks climbed 4 spots this year, to #11. If it weren't for all the problems at my job it would've made the top 10. 🤮 And that's sad because who wants to see being sick on a Top Ten list? But the tag got a lot of uses the past 12 months. In that time I got Covid, my wife suffered a month-plus of a stomach virus that might have been a case of Norovirus the doctors refused to test for, and just recently my wife had foot surgery. It's been a shit year, health-wise.


• Weather actually dropped 8 slots this year, from #4 to #12. The sad thing is that's not because extreme weather and its harmful effects, driven largely by climate change, have lessened this year vs. last, but because with us Being Sick so often we've been less impacted by weather as we've sat inside. 😓 Notice also that Around Home made this year's list. Last year it didn't even place.


• Two country tags made this list. Canada I've visited before but not for a few years. This year we spent an enjoyable week in Canada. And this year we visited Italy for the first time! (I also visited Spain for the first time but so briefly that its tag only got 1 or 2 uses.)

Finally, what happened to Coronavirus? Not only did it drop out of the Top Five Overall, but in the past 12 months I tagged it to a paltry 9 blogs, dropping it all the way down to a tie at 69th place for the year. I'd say "Good riddance!" except most of those 9 posts about Coronavirus were about me getting Covid-19 last December. 😳 So now hopefully it's good riddance!

Episode 6.12 of Better Call Saul is entitled Waterworks. It's the second-to-last episode in the series. The final four episodes of BCS are structured as a flash-forward to Saul's life after the events of Breaking Bad. It's an interesting end cap to BB as BCS was a prequel to BB. Now, with these final four episodes it's a both a prequel and a sequel.

While the idea of a wraparound prequel/sequel is interesting, BCS's execution is lacking. The first two of these four episodes were so off-putting that I simply got up and walked away at the start of the third. The opening credits of ep. 6.12 started rolling and I decided I didn't care anymore. (Cue the Seven Deadly Words: Why do I care about these characters?) It's only now, 4 months later, that I decided to see how it ends.

Episode 6.12 isn't the end. That would be 6.13. But 6.12 helps get us there. And it takes too damn long doing it.

In Waterworks we see Kim's new life. She divorced Jimmy/Saul after their con against Howard inadvertently got him killed by a drug lord. She announced her intent to divorce in ep. 6.09. Here we see that it was official. And Jimmy was a jerk about it, treating her like crap at the time.A character who previous was partly sympathetic, even while also flawed, turn into an all-out jerk is a key reason for uttering those Seven Deadly Words.)

At the end of the flash-back scene where Kim gets Jimmy to sign the divorce papers, she meets Jesse Pinkman, portrayed by a visibly aged Aaron Paul. I saw flashback because even though this scene is in the timeline of the main BCS series, it's a jump back from these jump-forward episodes... and because Aaron Paul is now, like 18 years older than he would've been playing an age-appropriate Jesse Pinkman.



The scene is so bad. Paul is so visibly too old to be playing a much younger Pinkman. He even sounds like an old man rather than the early-20-something Pinkman. It's like that parody scene from 30 Rock where cynical producers try to cast Steve Buscemi as a teenager. The writers here would've done better to leave clearly middle-age Aaron Paul out.

Anyway... I was saying the episode was too long. In Kim's new life approximately 5 years later she's living in a small town in Florida with a guy named Glen (unclear if they're married or just BF/GF). It's a completely banal existence. She works at a sprinkler company named Waterworks doing marketing. Her colleagues and friends are all dull people. They spend the day gossiping about trivial stuff and worrying about whether Miracle Whip™ tastes as good in a tuna fish salad as real mayonnaise.

I felt genuinely sad for Kim, previously a talented and driven lawyer, living such a stultifying life. I know I would go crazy in such a situation. And while the episode could've made this point in a few minutes, they stretch it out 3x as long as it needs to be. They took it from "Wow, I feel sad for Kim," to, "Now you're just torturing us."

Ep. 6.12 also picks up on a scene that was left as a cliffhanger at the end of 6.11. Saul is robbing a cancer-stricken rich person whom he and his buddies/patsies in Omaha have targeted in their identity theft scam. Not content just to steal the innocent man's identity and financial data, though, Saul starts robbing his house. WHY? As I've noted before, Saul doesn't need the money. He is just being evil now.

This robbery scene also goes on too long. Not only does it become painful for us viewer, but Saul gets trapped by complications from being in the victim's house too long. These complications ultimately lead to Saul's assumed identity as Gene Takavic unraveling. He is recognized as Saul Goodman, fugitive wanted on charges of drug dealing and felony murder, and flees ahead of the police.

First of all, no, I haven't resumed watching Better Call Saul. I paused the series 2 episodes from the end in May and haven't picked it back up since then. This blog is just me catching up on the last 2 episodes I did watch. The fact that I'm just getting to writing about those 10 weeks later is both a measure of how backlogged I've been and how badly this series lost my attention right at the end.

What happened? What happened is that the series shifted gears for its last 4 episodes. Across the first 5½ seasons we'd seen occasionally flash-forwards to Jimmy McGill's life post Saul Goodman. These were a narrative device similar to flashbacks but instead of filling in details or color about the past they were teasing us with the future. In this case, the future some 6 years later, after the Breaking Series, to which Better Call Saul is a prequel. So it's like the prequel changed to the post-postquel.

In the life-after-Breaking-Bad timeline, Jimmy/Saul is on the lam. He's living under a new identity as Gene Takavic, who manages a Cinnabon store in Omaha. This situation is a nod to a seemingly throwaway line Jimmy/Saul makes in his last scene in Breaking Bad, where he tells Walter White, "With any luck by this time next year I'll be managing a Cinnabon in Omaha."

The brief flash-forwards sprinkled across the series show Jimmy living unhappily as Gene, the Cinnabon store manager. His job is a big letdown from his previously high flying career as a dirty lawyer, and he's constantly looking over his shoulder in fear that both people from his criminal past and law enforcement might figure out his true identity. He lives a quiet life going between home and work, doesn't socialize more than perfunctory greetings, and often drinks himself to sleep at night.

In episode 6.10 the show jumps full-time from Jimmy in 2004, right after Kim has left him, to Jimmy as Gene in 2010. Jimmy is panicking that someone from the past has recognized him. Jeff, a cab driver in Omaha who used to live in Albuquerque years earlier, recognizes him through his disguise. Jimmy then perpetrates a series of cons to ingratiate himself with Jeff and his family, starting with Jef's sweet but naive mom, Marion— played in a cameo by Carol Burnett that seems like an utter waste of the legendary comedienne's talent. Jimmy cons Jeff into committing a robbery he plans. The purpose isn't to profit from the loot but to get enough "dirt" on Jeff that he could go to jail for possibly decades if he rats out Jimmy. It's mutually assured destruction.

The thing is, Jimmy is not at all sympathetic in these cons. Younger Jimmy, "Slippin' Jimmy", was somewhat sympathetic when he was conning people because he was typically conning people who were jerks. He played on their greed and turned it against them. Here he's conning Jeff— and his innocent mother— just to protect himself.

Then the cons get worse.

Jimmy goes back to Jeff— after revealing that he conned him just to get "dirt" on him— with another crime proposal. They're going to drug wealthy men, copy their IDs and financial information, and sell it to an identity thief. Why is Jimmy doing this, though? It's not because he needs the money. The flash-forwards already established that Jimmy has a considerable stash of wealth in the form of diamonds. The only conclusion left is that Jimmy's doing it because he's evil.

The worst comes when Jimmy and his accomplices target a man whom they discover is a terminal cancer patient. The sedatives they use, in addition to the medications the man's already on, could be lethal. Jimmy's two accomplices tap out. But Jimmy is determined to see this particular con through, even if it directly kills someone. Evil.

And that's where I stopped watching, with only 2 episodes left in the series. Because why do I care about these characters anymore?

Yeah, I'll finish watching... at some point. But I'm just not that interested anymore.

I've kind of lost interest in finishing Better Call Saul. I havn't watched an episode in... checks calendar... five weeks. And I'm just two episodes from the end of the series!

BCS switches gears after episode 5.09. That was the one where Kim leaves Jimmy. Arguably that emotional loss is what tilts Jimmy into going all-in as Saul Goodman. With that the essential character arc of the series is complete. Jimmy has full transitioned from "Slippin' Jimmy" the small-time conman, to "Johnny Hustle", the hardworking young lawyer trying to carve out a career amid various people who won't give him a chance, to Saul Goodman, the no-ethics lawyer who'll break any law to make a buck, as long as he can get away with it.

The writers could have ended the series with ep. 5.09. Yeah, it would've been a ragged ending. We viewers would've wanted some kind of closure, some kind of coda that ties the story back in to Breaking Bad.

The writers give us more than just a wrap-up or coda, though. Like El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie told the tale of how Jesse Pinkman escaped to a new life post- the events of Breaking Bad, they want to tell us what happens to Jimmy post-Breaking Bad. The last 4 episodes of the series switch gears— and years; jumping the timeline from 2004 to 2010— to do so.

And that's where the series lost me. I watched the first two "Jimmy post-Breaking Bad" episodes. They aren't bad per se; they're just... tiring. Not fun. I paused the second to last episode after the opening credits because I realized I'd rather do something else than continue to watch. I paused it, got up from the TV, and walked away. That was five weeks ago now.

There's a saying in writing. Okay, maybe it's not much of a saying. I think one of my friends coined it 30-ish years ago. I call it "The 7 Deadly Words". Those words are Why do I care about these characters? I call them the seven deadly words because when audiences start saying them, it's the death knell for a series.

It's been a few weeks since I've written about Better Call Saul. I've been busy with travel and catching up on work and other stuff after returning home. I'm actually not done with the series yet. Almost! Just a few more episodes. But I do have a few episodes I've already watched but haven't written about yet.

I've invoked what I call The Star Wars: Rogue One Rule several times in writing about Better Call Saul. A major character introduced in the prequel who doesn't appear in the original is doomed. Else, how do writers explain why that character wasn't in the original, without creating massive story discontinuity? While I've invoked that rule several times musing about one of BCS's protagonists, Jimmy's BFF and later girlfriend then spouse Kim Wexler, it also applies to the villains. And in episode 6.08 we see why Lalo Salamanca, head of the Salamanca branch of the drug cartel and Gus Fring's chief rival for two seasons, isn't part of the story in Breaking Bad.

( Spoilers! (click to open) )

In episode 6.07 of Better Call Saul we see the conclusion of Howard Hamlin's story. ...Well, kind of.

Kim and Jimmy have been running a con to discredit Howard to speed up settlement of a case. It's an elaborate con, more elaborate than anything Jimmy seems to have done in the past. And that's because Kim has sunk her teeth into it and assisted with the planning. The two even have created an elaborate "storyboard" of the plot, hidden on the back side of a large framed picture in Kim's living room. Ep. 6.07 is when "D-Day", as they call it, arrives.

The final stroke of the plot is discrediting Howard in front of all of his legal peers who are negotiating a settlement on the Sandpiper case— the class action suit about a chain of nursing homes overcharging elderly residents. Jimmy and Kim have phonied up a set of photographs that supposedly show the mediator assigned to the case, a respected retired judge, accepting a clandestine payoff from Jimmy. The staged photos are given to Howard by a private investigator he's hired to investigate Jimmy.



Unbeknown to Howard, the PI is part of the con. Not only did Howard see staged photos of an actor dressed as the judge taking the payoff, the PI furtively swapped the photos after showing them to Howard. Thus when Howard makes a big scene of challenging the judge during the mediation, announcing he's got photographic evidence to prove he's in an illicit bribery scheme with Jimmy, the photos he triumphantly shows everyone depict a man in exercise clothes who sorta looks like the judge taking a frisbee from Jimmy.

To make this con even more embarrassing to Howard, Jimmy dabbed a contact drug on the original photos that contains something akin to a heavy dose of caffeine. Howard is sweating, agitated, and has dilated pupils as he frantically waves the supposed evidence around. This builds on the innuendo campaign Jimmy has been running for weeks that Howard is using cocaine. The other lawyers in the room, who've all heard the innuendo up to this point but were willing to dismiss it as smear campaign by Jimmy, believe it.

Howard's credibility is destroyed. His most senior co-counsel, Cliff Main of the highly respected firm Davis & Main, is sympathetic— he's revealed to Howard that his son struggled with drug addiction, so he understands a bit of the difficulty— but walks him out of the room and tells him he's done. Cliff also apologizes to the retired judge. The opposing lead counsel, Rich Schweikart of Schweikart & Cokeley, rescinds his latest settlement offer and drops back to a previous offer that's lower by a few million dollars. Furthermore, he says he'll reduce his offer by another $1 million each day they wait. Cliff quietly accepts it on Howard's behalf as Howard is still panting and sputtering in his office, ranting about how it's all Jimmy's chicanery. Nobody believes him.

In ep. 6.02 of Better Call Saul we see the Kettlemans, Craig and Betsy, again. They were part of a subplot in season 1 of the series. Craig was the (fictitious) treasurer of Bernalillo County, NM, who embezzled $1.6 million from his own office. Betsy is his domineering and, frankly, delusional wife who kept denying they had the money even as she literally held a duffel bag with $1.6 million cash in her hands, and thought they could somehow avoid jail time without returning the money.

Kim was their lawyer for a while and arranged a plea deal for Craig: 16 months in prison if he returned the money. He faced a sentence of up to 30 years if he went to trial, and there was plenty of evidence to convict him, as he wasn't particularly good at hiding his tracks. He wrote, and cashed, numerous checks to himself! Betsy torpedoed the deal because she wanted to keep the money. Jimmy did a bad thing for noble purposes. He stole their stolen money to give it back to the county, forcing them to accept the deal.

The Kettlemans come back into the story in ep. 6.02 through Kim and Jimmy's con to destroy Howard Hamlin.



Jimmy visits their new place of business— they run a small-time tax preparation service out of a trailer on the outskirts of town—and tells them they could get Craig's conviction overturned by suing Howard Hamlin, their lawyer of record, for ineffective counsel as he was using cocaine at the time. (The notion that Howard is a coke addict is the core of their con to destroy his reputation.)

Curiously, while Craig is pleasant toward Jimmy, even congratulating him on his recent marriage, Betsy is nothing but bitter. She blames Jimmy for Craig's conviction. Never mind that Craig actually stole the money and almost certainly did so at her behest. Never mind that she fought against effect lawyering that would have gotten Craig a much lighter prison sentence than he deserved. To her it's everyone's fault but their own. "Our kids have to go to public school now because of you," she hisses at Jimmy. And that's where I found myself rooting for Jimmy in this stage of the con.

You see, the con's a con, and the Kettlemans are patsies. Jimmy asks them to sign him up as their attorney but doesn't actually want them to hire him. He wants them to hire anyone but him. He wants them to go shopping for lawyers all around Albuquerque, saying, "We think our former lawyer, Howard Hamlin, was on cocaine when he represented us."

Interestingly while Betsy is completely delusional about responsibility for the money her husband stole and she tried to conceal, she figures out Jimmy's con. She doesn't figure it out right away, though. She marches in to various lawyers' offices— we see her being a delusional jerk with Cliff Main, head of white-shoe law firm Davis & Main— and makes her allegations against Howard. Only after being laughed out of several offices in a row does she realize she's been played for a chump.

Jimmy using the Kettlemans to spread false innuendo had the potential backfire. Betsy, once realizing she's been played, could go back to all the lawyers she visited and say Jimmy put her up to it. Howard could sue Jimmy for slander. But Jimmy— and Kim, who's really the architect of this con— thought of that. They were prepared to shut down the Kettlemans' shot at revenge.

Jimmy goes to visit the Kettlemans' office again. Betsy confronts him with having figured out his con and threatens to turn him in. Jimmy offers a small wad of cash to buy her silence. Betsy is righteously indignant at the bribery attempt and refuses the cash. Then Kim drops the boom.

Kim figured out, perhaps as a lucky guess by knowing Betsy Kettleman is a narcissist crook, that their little tax prep business is a sham. She calls a contact at the IRS, in front of Betsy and Craig, and threatens to turn them in for defrauding customers with fake tax returns. Kim alleges that they file real paperwork with the IRS while giving fake paperwork to the taxpayer, pocketing the difference in the returns. Kim's lucky guess seems to have hit a bullseye, as Betsy hangs up her phone call and agrees to keep mum about the con.

And just to be nice, Jimmy gives them the bribe anyway. Maybe he feels bad for Craig, having a life sentence with Betsy.

In episode 5.09 of Better Call Saul a pair of scenes shows that Kim is a better tough-guy lawyer than Jimmy. One of them is a confrontation with a powerful drug cartel member who, after Jimmy's I'm-so-sorry straight man routine probably would have killed both Jimmy and Kim if Kim hadn't stepped up and confronted him with a shrewd insight.

But Kim's first high stakes showdown is one without guns and killers. Kim and her boss, Rich Schweikart, meet with Kevin, owner/CEO of the bank they represent, to discuss next steps after Jimmy's latest con— which Kim was secretly in on, until she wasn't— forced the bank to pay a large settlement to a small-time landowner. Kim gives Kevin a professional apology. Rich nods in the background. Interestingly Rich doesn't blame her... even though he confronted her with suspicions a few episodes earlier that she was in cahoots with Jimmy to tank the bank's deal. As the two are walking out of Kevin's office, Rich dispassionately says, "I think our chances are 50/50"— of being fired.

Kim wheels around and strides back into Kevin's office. She repeats (paraphrasing) that the final negotiation wasn't her finest hour, then adds this time that Kevin shares responsibility for the outcome because he ignored her professional advice several times. She counts off three key actions he took contrary to her advice. "I hope, whoever your next lawyer is, you listen to them better," she concludes.

"Okay," Kevin says, after a momentary pause. "See you on Thursday"— meaning it's business as usual.

This reminds me of something an advisor in school told me about dealing with strong-willed people. When you messed something up, you don't go with your hat in your hands. Powerful people (and those who aspire to power) see it as a sign of weakness and will crush the weak.

My college advisor meant "crush" figuratively, of course. But Kim's next high-stakes confrontation in ep. 5.09 comes with someone who might crush her and Jimmy, literally. Lalo Salamanca.

Lalo confronts Jimmy in Kim's apartment. Both Jimmy and Kim are there. Lalo was fleeing to Mexico, but at the border he thought about Jimmy's story about carrying $7 million across the desert and smelled a rat. He forces Jimmy to retell the story over and over, looking to catch Jimmy in an inconsistency that would reveal it's fabricated. He also confronts Jimmy with observations like, "I saw your car in a ditch; you didn't tell me you pushed it in a ditch," and, "I saw your car with several bullet holes. There are no bullet holes in your story."

Kim astutely realizes that Lalo is going to win if he keeps going on like this. He'll pressure the truth out of Jimmy, then probably kill both of them— Jimmy for working with rivals and lying about it, and Kim for being a witness. Kim stands up to Lalo and confronts him with a painful truth: Lalo asked Jimmy to fetch the $7 million because he couldn't trust anybody else in his gang.

Lalo, gobsmacked, starts to say something once or twice and stops. He puts his gun away and leaves.

Kim's the one who should be the gangster lawyer. Jimmy's a con artist who's in over his head. Kim's the one who knows how to face down powerful people— whether they're bank CEOs or gang leaders.

Better Call Saul ep. 5.08, "Bagman", is an eventful episode. Jimmy gets in deeper with the drug cartel when he agrees to help smuggle $7 million cash into the country for bail for his client, Lalo Salamanca— bail money that Lalo plans to forfeit almost immediately by fleeing to Mexico. Jimmy drives out into the desert near the border to take the handoff, two heavily loaded duffel bags of cash, from Lalo's cousins, the Murder Twins.

As Jimmy is still in the process of becoming ethics-free lawyer Saul Goodman he initially turns down the request. He knows it's dangerous. But then, thinking about how Lalo teased him that the initials JMM on his monogrammed briefcase ought to stand for Just Make Money (he told Lalo they mean "Justice Matters Most" instead of being the the initials of his real name, James Morgan McGill) he asks for $100,000. Lalo agrees.



Jimmy was right to be concerned about the safety of smuggling $7 million cash. One of the cartel members at the stash house is seen making an ominous phone call when the Murder Twins leave with the money. Minutes after the handoff, a well armed gang ambushes Jimmy in the desert.

Even if this gang were just one or two men with pistols, Jimmy's goose would be cooked. He's not a soldier and he doesn't have a vehicle he can use to escape across the desert. He's still driving his beater econobox Suzuki Esteem. And he's not even dressed for the desert; he's wearing a natty jacket and tie and a pair of soft loafers.

It's interesting who's behind this ambush. At first it seems like the gang in Mexico may have a mole working for a rival gang. But it turns out the mole works for Juan Bolsa, the cartel underboss. Bolsa likes playing off the different factions against each other and evidently doesn't approve of burning $7 million cash to get the aggressive Lalo out of prison. And Jimmy is nobody to them. The hit squad boss motions to one of his men to kill Jimmy once he's secured the bags of cash.

Fortunately for Jimmy, Mike is shadowing him at Gus's behest. Gus, always the most astute player in the game, anticipated that there would be trouble moving that amount of money around. Mike, from a safe distance, sees the ambush happening and starts picking off the bad guys with a sniper rifle.



It's a good news/bad news situation. Good news: Jimmy survives the ambush and isn't even injured, just in shock. Bad news: All the vehicles are damaged in gunfight. The only one driveable is Jimmy's Suzuki, and even that vehicle craps out within a few miles because of damage. Jimmy and Mike are stuck walking 25-30 miles across the desert to the nearest paved road.

By the way, those two duffel bags of loot Jimmy's carrying are heavy. People who apparently are more familiar than I am with carrying $7 million in $100 bills say that each bag would weigh 75 pounds. The screenplay doesn't make them out to be quite that heavy. I mean, a man of Jimmy's size and in no particularly great physical shape would be staggered trying to carry that much weight, especially with only two relatively thin shoulder straps to distribute the load.

Meanwhile, Kim is aware of what Jimmy is doing. It was part of their agreement to get married: Jimmy would not keep secrets from Kim. Kim urged Jimmy to turn down this job, but by that point he'd already made his deal for $100k.

When Jimmy doesn't come home that night— because he's struggling on foot across the desert— Kim visits Lalo in prison the next morning to press for information.



Kim panicking about Jimmy's situation is understandable, but her going to Lalo to demand information seems slightly against character. She's a shrewd lawyer, and though she's go not particular experience with organized crime, she's got to know that this stunt puts her "in the game". She's now shown the cartel that she's knowledgeable of at least some of their operations. And so far they have no reason to trust her— or to even want to trust her.

Is this Kim's doom? I wondered. As I've remarked a few times in relation to what I call the Star Wars Rogue One principle, we know Kim's got to be meet her end in this prequel because she's not in the original series. Over the various seasons of Better Call Saul I've wondered if she'd just leave Jimmy because he's a jerk, or because he commits too much fraud that jeopardizes her burgeoning career as a lawyer. More recently it has seemed like she might go into self-destruct mode and destroy her own career, because she gets too much of a charge out of running scams with Jimmy. But now she's in physical danger— in addition to career-ending reputational danger.

Yesterday I wrote about the business plan Jimmy McGill uses as Saul Goodman in season 5 of Better Call Saul. He makes defending petty criminal cases more profitable by churning through them quickly. Some might say, "Oh, that's quality, not quantity." I purposefully did not use that phrase because it's not clear that Jimmy is depriving his clients of quality representation.

The main way that Jimmy pushes through a higher volume of cases is by aggressively seeking plea bargains. But that's actually normal. Despite how the legal system is depicted in police- and courtroom procedurals on TV like Law & Order, most criminal cases are settled by plea bargain arrangements.

How many is most?  In a quick web search about how criminal cases are settled, I found a study from the Department of Justice saying that "over 90%" of criminal cases are resolved via plea bargain. Cornell University law school says 95%. The American Bar Association says 95% of state criminal cases and 98% of federal cases.

Thus, if wheeling-dealing Saul gets plea bargains for 19 out of every 20 defendants— 95%— and only goes to trial with one case in 20, he's he's doing exactly what the legal profession as a whole does.

And plea bargains do benefit defendants. The defendant is offered the opportunity to plead guilty to lesser charges, with lesser punishment, than they might otherwise be convicted of at trial. This is especially important in Jimmy's/Saul's cases, because he's defending people whom he knows did the crime. And they're generally not smart criminals, as they crimed in ways that left evidence and witnesses to help convict them.

So why does the system want to plea-bargain down these offenders? That's because it benefits the system, too. The prosecutors save time not going through a full trial. It's a win for them because they get a conviction against a small-time offender with less effort, freeing them up to spend more time on cases against people who committed bigger crimes. The courts avoid being clogged up with minor cases, too, keeping space open in their limited dockets for defendants (and plaintiffs!) who wish to go to trial. And ultimately the people, particularly we as taxpayers, benefit because it's our money being spent to otherwise tie up a courtroom and all its legal staff for days or weeks at a time prosecuting potentially minor offenses.

If there's a way in which Saul is depriving his clients of quality representation it's that he's pulling risky stunts— and sometimes illegal actions— to defend them. These could blow up and possibly harm the client's interests if they were discovered. Though so far they haven't. Saul keeps getting away with it!

What are some of Saul's tricks, BTW? Well, in one of the early-season scenes he hires his university student film crew to pose as TV news interviewers. They ambush one prosecutor with a fake "gotcha!" story about an innocent person being prosecuted. Among other things, the stunt seems to intimidate the prosecutor. He may be on his back foot whenever Saul is the opposing counsel in a case.

Another prosecutor, who made clear she is not intimidated by stunts— the one Jimmy orchestrated a hilarious letter-writing campaign against— tries to slow-walk Saul's negotiations to blow up his business plan of closing cases quickly. He plots a scam with an elevator repairman to cause the courthouse's elevator to get stuck for 20 minutes while he's in it with her. Out of boredom and frustration at time being lost— because the prosecutors are juggling dozens of cases, too— she agrees to negotiate.

It's worth noting that this prosecutor isn't being 100% ethical. By slow-walking Saul's cases because she dislikes Saul she is hurting not just Saul but all the defendants he represents— people who are a) presumed innocent until proven guilty and b) have the Constitutional right to a speedy trial.

These types of dirty tricks don't rise to the level of crimes. Not crimes worth prosecuting, anyway. But in ep. 5.03 Saul does commit a crime in representing a defendant that could get him thrown in jail. Under duress from a drug gang he ran afoul of early in the first season he accepts payment from a gang leader to instruct a low-level dealer in jail to give a false story to police investigators. Though from the client's perspective, "S'all good, man!" because he avoids prosecution with likely a multi-year sentence upon conviction.