Cas Stark

I guess I don't see it that way. The heist was against a train carrying a corporation's chemicals, if they succeed, they stole some stuff from a multi-national. This was an intricate plan to destroy an individual person's reputation and potentially career, a person who Jimmy, Kim and the audience knows intimately, knows he is a decent person, quite frankly a better person than either of the two protagonists, and knows [I thought] that he doesn't deserve to be treated this way. It's more parallel to Walt and Sky's tape blackmailing Hank, which also, indirectly, led to his death, as he wouldn't have been freelancing with Jesse except for that tape.

I think painting a lawyer as someone with a substance abuse problem who abuses sex workers is a lot more than 'humiliation'. The idea of hurting him but leaving him 'standing' or whatever their catch phrase was is more of their self delusion and self justification. I guess I am just personally a little shocked at how little sympathy he got, even to the point of the writer having an expectation that the audience is 'somewhat' rooting for their plan to succeed. ETA..did they forget that when they only professionally humiliated Chuck he killed himself?

Sure, I love Mike even though he's a stone cold killer and I wished many times in BB that he would just fucking kill Walt. But I still don't get rooting for Howard, an innocent person's life to be destroyed.

Yes they definitely did. They took pains to show that he was not a 'villain' or even a bad guy, which is a great thing about the show the way they create different layers to their characters. Such as how I rooted for Kim to come out unscathed and now I despise her and want her to pay for what she has done.

It seems odd that the writer said the audience was rooting for Kim and Jimmy's plan against Howard to succeed at least 'somewhat'? I don't get that. I wasn't rooting for it to succeeding. I was hoping they would call it off or at least, fail. My god, no wonder our society is falling apart if that is really in line with how the majority of viewers feel.

Yeah, you might be right. Walt kept the pandora's box of his rage locked until he was well into middle age and only unlocked because he had a death sentence. Kim unlocked her rage after a handful of dumb cons and turned her back on what would have been a lucrative, successful career as a lawyer, just because.

Or, they will both just blame Lalo and rationalize their own actions. The writers may feel that Kim can still be redeemed, but I hope not. I wanted her to take herself off the path she's been on the last 2 seasons, but I feel now she is a lost cause and does not deserve redemption. She got someone killed as a result of her own petty cruelty and arrogance. That last u-turn says it all as to who she really is.

Yes, sure Kim is primarily to blame, this was all her idea in the first place, because she is so broken that she wanted to ruin Howard's career because he put her in doc review and then had the temerity to think she needed to be 'saved' from Jimmy, and also made a handful of generous gestures to help her. To me, that means Kim, now that she has been as Ran said, 'unleashed' may be worse than Jimmy. In all of Jimmy's scams except the Chuck one, people being hurt is collateral damage, but not the purpose. Or, they're really both equally bad, because they both now have the blood of two people on their hands that they choose to ruin professionally and their targets ended up dead.

Almost everyone has 'some good' in him, even Hitler liked dogs. Finding Jimmy 'likeable' is different than rooting for him. Why is anyone rooting for a guy who wanted to have Badger shanked and send Jesse,or was it Mike? to 'Belize' and who engineered the professional downfall that led to his own brother's suicide and now has gotten another innocent person, who tried to help him in the past, killed? Yes Chuck was jealous of Jimmy, and why wouldn't he be jealous that the person he knew was a con artist, grifter, criminal scoundrel was so 'likeable'. Any normal person who knows the truth about the likeable rogue would be resentful to see that rogue use his likeability as a shield against his actions again and again. ETA. We saw, as a counter example, that both Jesse and Nacho had done terrible things, but this was because they got in over their heads, they were RELUCTANT to do these things and we saw that it took an emotional toll. That isn't Jimmy. The only scam we've seen Jimmy be reluctant about was this latest one with Howard. He enjoys scamming people and grifting and his grifts and crimes do not take an emotional toll on him.

Hmnm. I don't know. I feel like the show tells us again and again that character is destiny. Walt was always a bad guy. Hector was a bad guy and he imbued his terrible view of the world into his family. Jimmy is a grifter with a loose to non existant moral compass. And the chickens always come home to roost.

Yeah, you're probably right. She won't feel remorse. If either of the two of them were normal people they would have remembered the unintended consequence of the whole Chuck shenanagans and would never have started in on Howard in the first place. But, they forgot about Chuck and now, they'll forget about Howard.

But, according to Chuck, Jimmy was slippin Jimmy his whole life. Chuck spent all those years getting him out of jams, cleaning up after him and being disappointed in him, over and over again. We aren't just talking about stealing as a kid. Jimmy was an actual grifter. At some point, people like that--who do the same things again and again and disappoint their friends and families over and over again--you resign yourself that they can't change. I agree that Chuck should have pulled the plug on the relationship in an honest way and not under cut Jimmy through Howard the way he did. But, Chuck paid a high price for that. Let's not forget that it was Jimmy who pushed his mentally ill brother over the edge resulting in his suicide.

Is that really consistent with the Kim Wexler of the past 5 seasons? She has definitely broken bad in a huge way, but I never saw her as someone who wouldn't feel an injustice and Howard's end is not only a terrible unjustice but is her fault. That would mean that Howard was right about her, she's a sociopath. It's going to be interesting how they resolve all of this.

Eh, Jimmy keeps showing us that Chuck was right about him. He has had several chances to 'play it straight' and he doesn't and cannot, he always defaults to corner cutting and scamming. Chuck was a jerk to Jimmy and was jealous of his way with people and his mother's affection for him. None of that changes who Jimmy has been since Better Call Saul premiered. It is unfair to blame Jimmy's actions on Chuck, especially since Chuck has been dead for several seasons and Jimmy continues to be the same person, a bad person. Sure, he has some generous, positive impulses and sometimes a conscience. But, he's a bad person who does bad things and refuses to take responsibility for them. Just. Like. Chuck. Said.

I never really understood the hate for Chuck in the first place, let alone Howard. Chuck was 100% right about Jimmy.

Yes, but we have a ways to go for that to resonate. You would think that having literal blood on his hands, since there is still a lot of Jimmy in Saul, that it would affect him in a significant way and not in him simply saying fuck it, I'm a cartel lawyer now. So, I don't know. Yes the writers are fantastic and they pay attention to character and motivations, so I guess we'll see what happens in the final eps. And let me admit, I think Kim deserves something very, very bad to happen to her now, but I suspect I'm a distinct minority there and I don't think the writers will give her a bad/sad ending. BB [and The Sopranos] showed that most of the audience, once they identify with the character, will continue to root for him/her no matter how awful their actions.

Also, maybe it's just me, but BB Saul seems pretty flippant considering what happened to Howard. I could see that he would compartmentalize the Chuck issues since that went back to childhood and was years in the making, but what happened to Howard, a totally innocent person who has never done anything meaningful to harm either Jimmy or Kim, and in fact, went out of his way to help them mulitple times, that should leave some kind of mark on Saul that did not exist in BB. So, I don't know, I'm not feeling it.

Maybe for a regular guy whose car stalled in the desert, but when you add in the Fring feud, and that Saul was picking up several million in money to bust out a cartel kingpin from jail....vandals becomes less likely than something cartel related. I thought at the time a real drug lord would probably have tortured Jimmy to get the truth and then killed him, but I went with the 'Lalo is more intelligent and only uses violence when it is necessary' idea, but they're pushing it now.

Realistically, isn't the most likely thing that would happen now is that Lalo would interrogate, possibly torture Jimmy and Kim and then kill them. We know that won't happen, but making a different outcome more plausible is going to be a heavy lift for the writers. It was already barley plausible that Lalo took Kim's bait on 'vandals' doing it and has just left the two of them alone to work on their stupid legal chicanery.

Unleash is the perfect word. For a long time I did blame Jimmy for corrupting Kim, and it was fantastic how the show proved to me that this was the wrong reading of their characters. Jimmy touched something in Kim that she had locked the door on, and now, here we are, where they reversed roles and she is the instigator and Jimmy the reluctant follower. The only endings I can now imagine for Kim that will seem realistic is she dies [I doubt it] or as someone already theorized, she goes to buy a vacuum cleaner and never resurfaces until maybe the very end at the Cinnebon.

It's wasn't really about the money. Kim wanted to fuck over Howard, and getting the settlement money [so she could continue to play judge/jury/executioner/savior with her poor clients] was the excuse.

Truth. Although you have to wonder how such a hair style made it into the movie in the first place. It's so bad it is actually distracting. I find myself watching scenes and just wondering, WTF was CC thinking and why did no one put a stop to those bangs. I think Scream 3 holds up pretty well, the original trilogy holds up well overall.

I did hate season 3. That means my expectations for season 4 are much, much lower, so it is possible, though not probable, I could be pleasantly surprised.

I had free HBO for a week, the results: Gilded Age. Meh, I found none of the characters very likeable and the plot was easy to predict from the first 30 minutes. I made it 3 eps. Death on the Nile. I really liked it, other than the incredibly stupid, wink, wink, hey look there is Gail Gadot, whose going to play Cleopatra in a new movie, dressing up like Cleopatra in this movie, harde har har, look how meta we are. Suicide Squad 2. Hated it, and I am one of the few people who thought the first one was entertaining if stupid. The giant land shark? WTF? Did not finish it. Many Saints of Newark: Meh. More evidence proving that Better Call Saul is an outlier in a prequel that is truly great and can stand on its own. The Last Duel. I tried to like this, I really, really did, but it was not cast very well, Matt Damon I'm looking at you, dull, and fairly pointless. I also don't like Adam Driver in anything, so I didn't like him in this, but I recognize that is my personal feelingthere. Jodi Comer was great as always. But, we already know that life was hard for women in the 14th century, there was nothing much more going on here storywise. Very disappointing and I can now see why this film did so poorly at the box office, not because no one will go see a good non Marvel 'adult' movie, but because this particular movie was not that good or interesting. Halloween Kills. Atrocious. That is all. Batman. Meh. I didn't hate it, or really like it, meandering, didn't seem to have much of a dramatic arc, and its batman, the villains need to be a little more amped up. Nightmare Alley. Good not great. The original with Tyrone Power was better I think, for not being quite so grimdark. I would have liked a more charismatic lead than Bradley Cooper.

Michael Mando is definitely charismatic, and I hope he gets some good gigs after BCS. Aaron Paul has a different thing going on, he is classically handsome and his charisma is more boyish. When you add in that all of Jesse's violent actions were done as a result of Walt's manipulation, he becomes much more sympathetic, which is why I think so many people rooted for him to survive. I expect Kim will get a better ending than her character deserves because she is a huge favorite of the showrunners, just like Pinkman was.