Season 6, Episode 11, “Breaking Bad”

He left this funky Saul Goodman shirt and tie on the department store shelf, but make no mistake: Last week’s hug with Jeff and the mall security team brought Gene Takovic back to the world of Saul Goodman. And a mysterious and controversial phone call in “Breaking Bad” sent him doubling down and going all-out Saul.

We don’t yet know where this sudden but committed embrace of life that sent him into hiding will end, but people from his former life as Albuquerque’s most infamous lawyer are still reeling from their associations with him. For Bill Oakley, the embattled assistant district attorney who envied Jimmy’s cushy opportunity at Davis & Main as he ate lunch at the courthouse vending machine every day, Jimmy/Saul’s shenanigans in helping free Lalo Salamanca turned out to be so disappointing that Bill turned to the defense attorney. Himself: He walked into a private practice, advertising his services on a bus stop bench. Is he now serving the customers Saul left behind?

For Francesca, Saul’s loyal but also overwhelmed and stressed assistant, her career prospects are potentially less lucrative. Her life with Saul has certainly never been glamorous, but now she’s a landlord, spending her days plunging a sink clogged with weed stalks and seeds into the apartment of a pair of surly tenants whose house stinks. like “a skunk’s asshole”.

She is also being followed, her mail opened and her phone tapped, as law enforcement authorities continue to search for Saul. Still, she agrees to drive out of town (to the old Big Chief gas station where Jesse paid for the RV’s full tank of meth in season three of breaking Bad) for a paid phone call with Gene. He wants the hot gossip about events at home, and Francesca wants the hidden cash stash he promised her to show up. She tells him that the rest of his funds (the nail salons, the vending machines, the laser-tag center, the offshore account) are all gone, but he’s mostly interested in a call she got after the announcement of her connection with Walter White: Kim, who phoned to see her. Kim also asked about Saul, Francesca shares. She wanted to know if he was alive.

Gene, who had been driving outside of Omaha to call Francesca, is back on the road to Omaha when he stops to make another call. Kim, apparently, is in Titusville, Florida, working at a company called Palm Coast Sprinklers. Gene calls her and asks her and although the sound of passing trucks on the freeway drowns out his conversation, it’s an angry conversation you can tell by the gesticulation he makes. When he hangs up, he hangs up the handset several times. When he leaves, he kicks the glass of the phone booth so hard that it shatters.

What could have happened on that call that would make him so angry? If Kim simply hadn’t been in the business or no longer worked there, he might have been disappointed, or annoyed, but not violently angry. What was passed on to Gene that would elicit this reaction? Did we tell him that Kim refused to talk to him? Has she spoken to him and does she share her feelings about his breaking Bad-actions of the time? Did she share any news about her new life that ticked her off?

Everything that happened during that conversation sparked a comeback in Omaha that was followed by Gene visiting Marion and Jeff’s house and falling back into Saul Goodman’s ways.

The surprise of this reunion of Gene and Saul is the enthusiasm then the carelessness with which Gene approaches his new adventure with Jeff and Buddy. It’s a typically complex and clever piece of the McGill/Goodman mind that boils down to identity theft which is then sold for money. The trio get away with it easily and have amassed a good amount of money when they hit a snag: one of their targets is seriously ill and when Buddy finds out the guy has pancreatic cancer, just like his dad. suffered, he refuses to continue. swipe his identity papers. Gene had discovered earlier that the man had cancer during the recognition phase of the jerk at the bar where they were drinking and seemed very concerned about him. He even asked him if he should mix alcohol with the pills he was taking for cancer.

But when Buddy tells Gene and Jeff that he won’t continue their attack on the cancer patient, that they should move on to the next guy, Gene backfires. He berates Buddy, insisting that he return to the man and resume photographing all the personal documents which will earn them another payday. When Buddy still refuses to do so, Gene calls him an amateur and fires him from his job, with a parting warning that he should keep his mouth shut about their plot.

Then Gene’s anger and recklessness turn to despair. He asks Jeff to drive him to the home of the cancer patient, who he says will still be unconscious three hours after Jeff slipped him some medicine in a water bottle. Without any proof that this is the case, Gene is nonetheless dropped off at the man’s home and breaks in, with no real idea what will happen when he enters.

The break-in scene is preceded by a flashback of Saul approaching JP Wynne High School. in “You better call Saul,” the season-two episodes of breaking Bad who introduced Bob Odenkirk character. Saul will surprise Walter White in his chemistry Classroom. It’s still early in Walt and Jesse’s meth company and Saul thinks he can help them grow it and keep a significant reduction in profits for itself.

And mea scene that precedes that, there is another flashback, a new one breaking Bad-st meeting with Mike in Saul’s office. Mike reports to Saul that he spotted Walt and Jesse, telling him they are amateurs, “little potatoes” that “He Who Will Not Be Named” (Gus, of course) has no interest in. . Mike, in no uncertain terms, advises Saul that Walt and Jesse are not suitable business partners. Saul obviously ignores that advice, and we now know that the connection of all those characters and everything they brought together, all the lives he changed and the many that he ended, was facilitated by Saul Goodman. Of all the breaking Bad encores and guest appearances that were strewn all over You better call Saul, writer-director Thomas Schnauz kept the best and the most crucial a for Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, whose long-awaited appearance like Walt and Jesse were more than worth the wait.

Now, with only two episodes left in the series, we turn to Gene’s desperate entry into this cancer patient’s home. in a decision that seems to be as crucial for his post-Walt and Jesse- life as his initial appearance was to theirs.

Spurious observations

• Francesca’s call with Gene also provides a crucial update on Skyler White: She made a deal with the authorities, so apparently Walt’s lottery ticket, the one he promised would lead to the location of Hank and Gomey’s bodies, worked.
• Kudos to Tina Parker, for her streak riding on Francesca’s outstanding performance, which definitely ended up on the wrong side of Saul’s relationships. I hope there was a nice amount of money in that package she pulled out of the water pipe.
• There’s noWe don’t find out the content of Gene’s call at Kim’s workplace in Florida, do we? Could this even mean another Rhea Seehorn appearance before the series ends?
• Super smart cast: Alfred Hawthorne, the obnoxious first brand in Gene’s identity theft bar scam, was brilliantly portrayed by Devin Ratray, who played Kevin McAllister’s obnoxious older brother Buzz in Alone at home.
• Two more good callbacks from Gene: he skips Saul’s modes, but he does to drink (or not to drink, because it is part of the scam) Moscow mules with one of the identity theft marks and also gets a chi machine, that foot massager that Saul used in his breaking Bad days. Was it simply because it was a safe way to privately embrace his Saul past? or was the machine a physical necessity to cope with the stress of returning to an active life of crime?