Breaking Bad In More Ways Than One

in the latest episode Better call Saul, We jump between two timelines.

Spoilers follow.

The first is a black and white “now” timeline, where Jimmy is now living a quiet life in his local Cinnabon, Nebraska, disguised as Gene Tarkowicz. He kept a low profile, played it safe, and managed to evade the law.

Second timeline aligns with Season 2, Episode 8 breaking Bad. The title of that episode is Better call Saul, And introduced Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) for the first time on the show.

Not without reason, this episode Better call Saul is titled “Breaking Bad” and in some ways its mirror breaking Bad other side.Unsurprisingly, this is also the first time Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) have appeared in Better to call Saul.

13 years after that episode aired, the two actors reprise their roles (and change), which really shows. Of the three, only Odenkirk looked about his age.I attribute this to the actor losing a lot of weight and looking younger than him breaking Bad character of most people Better call Saul, So much so that they had to make him look older and fatter in these clips.

Cranston in his Better call Saul A cameo that perfectly captures the irritable, impatient and absent-minded Walter of Season 2. How well he pulls off those scenes is a remarkable feat given how radically his character shifted between that episode and his later Heisenberg – a far more ruthless, villainous character.

Paul also did a great job, but his voice was clearly much older, and his voice has deepened significantly between then and now.I’m looking at him too west world and breaking Bad At the moment, so more obvious.

The episode begins with Walt and Jesse kidnapping Saul, who realizes who they are and tells them to put a dollar in his pocket so they have attorney/client privilege.But then they spent some time talking in the RV and gave us a scene we never got back to breaking Bad. See this scene right now Better call Saul’s Running really underscores how much more experience and knowledge Saul has than any of these clowns. He has been trapped by the cartel for a long time, and at this point is a seasoned liar himself.

We also see Jesse asking about Lalo because that’s what Saul whimpered about when he was first arrested (the name we hear breaking Bad But it didn’t get a face until Tony Dalton joined the show as Lalo Salamanca in Season 4, Episode 8. You have to admire the show’s creators’ restraint in waiting so long to introduce characters they must have planned to introduce from the start.

But that’s all.not a ton breaking Bad Or the Walter/Jessie stuff in this episode, despite its title “Breaking Bad.” That’s because the title doesn’t refer to Walter and Jesse at all.

Gene is the winner

Things aren’t going well for Gene in the “now” timeline. He lost his hair. He works a dead end job. His life was lonely and depressing. He almost ran away when he was “made” by taxi driver Jeff, but the challenge clearly awakened something inside him. will to overcome. . . something. anything.

Last week’s episode “Nippy” didn’t fit I listed many reasons in the commentsbut it does establish Gene’s trajectory, which Breaking Bad follows along its natural trajectory, and gets more interesting in the process.

When Gene completes the mall robbery, he has a moment with security trying to stop him, and Jeff (Pat Healy) is briefly knocked down after slipping on the department store floor.

The stories he tells are unexpectedly true. He started pretending to cry and complaining about his lonely life. His parents are all dead. . . his brother is dead. And no one loves him. He has no friends. If he died, no one would come to his funeral. It’s a total ruse, but you can see him realizing as he leaves his words that he’s saying a painful truth.

A more painful truth followed. He calls his former assistant Francesca (Tina Parker), who is delighted to hear from him. She revealed that all his shell companies had disappeared, including one he set up in her name. Basically, all the wealth he’d accumulated — except what he carried with him — evaporated. But she also tells him that Kim (Ria Seahorn) called her to inquire about him after everything failed.

This realization—his financial failure and the love of life he showed for his welfare—lit another fire in Saul’s heart. He called Florida and tried to talk to Kim at her place of work — Palm Coast Sprinkler — but we couldn’t hear what he was saying on the phone in the payphone. Whatever made him so angry and distraught that he broke the glass and went berserk.

Breaking glass is important. This is the moment when Gene is broken. We spent more than five seasons learning how Jimmy became Saul 1.0, and eventually became Saul 2.0 when Kim left – the Saul we know breaking Bad. But throughout, we only see Gene as a mild-mannered middle-aged man, tired of loneliness and boredom.

Jeff’s appearance in season 5 and last week’s heist, now this new information about money and gold has changed all that. Gene abandons fear and restraint and returns to Jeff’s home, where the taxi driver lives with his mother, Marion (Carol Burnett). Given that Gene was so determined that he and Jeff were doomed last week, the taxi driver turned liar, surprised and excited, was back in Saul’s business.

But Gene changed. Before, he was cunning and patient, able to lure Marion with ease with gin and good conversation.

Now, despite showing her funny pussy videos to distract her, Gene seems to underestimate the woman – something he used to do with older women who were both weak and weak to our heroes is a blind spot.

When Jeff arrives, Gene traps Marion and heads to the Indie Garage to bring Jeff back into the circle to plot their new scam. Marion seemed surprised and disturbed by this. Gene seems to have lost contact.

This scam is a clever enough scam. Gene, Jeff and Buddy (Max Bickelhaup) each have their own roles. Gene meets rich, single men in a fancy bar and basically plays dumb to make them look good. He used a bladder and hose device hidden in his shirt to suck alcohol from the drinks and get them drunk. They had a good time and he took them to a taxi waiting outside.

Of course Jeff is a taxi driver. When he drove away, he gave the fare/marked a bottle of water. The water is laced with drugs, and combined with alcohol, it’s sure to bring the poor suckers down. He helped them get into the home and put a piece of tape on the crash board so it wouldn’t lock or lock when the door was closed. Buddy and Jeff communicate the arrival time with codes via the cab radio.

When Jeff left, Buddy came to the house with his very well-behaved dog. Instead of stealing the place, he found as much personal information as he could: ID cards, credit cards, bank account numbers, passwords. Whatever he could find, he took it out, photographed it, and carefully replaced it. This allows them to rip these guys off without them knowing (until it’s too late).

It’s a clever scam, and like most scams, it eventually gets out of hand. The last Mark we see in this episode turns out to be a very nice guy, unlike many of the other unsympathetic rich people who came before him. It turns out that he has cancer. You can see Jimmy’s moral compass shining through life — but only for a moment. He removed any moral restraint he had and loaded the man into Jeff’s car.

Then he went home and waited. When the phone rang, he was visibly angry and told the person on the other end that he would be there soon. He arrives at Marion’s house and heads to the garage with Jeff and Buddy, whose very well behaved dog gets nervous and starts barking.

The puppy could be Gene’s downfall. Upstairs, Marion is also watching funny cat videos on YouTube when she hears barking from the window in the scene below. What she saw clearly disturbed her. The mild-mannered, dog-loving Gene yells at Buddy to shut up his dog, who is forced to take the dog to his car. It was a side Gene Marion had never seen – and until now, Gene had been carefully hidden from view.

What will Marion do? I’m sure we’ll find out in next week’s episode. However, there are too many questions about the last two episodes.

Anyway, in the garage, Buddy tells Gene that he can’t take the latest hit. Buddy said the guy had cancer. He can’t steal from a man with cancer. His father has cancer. this is not right.

Gene drops all the pretense of a moral compass and tells Buddy that everything will be fine. He needs to go back and get work done. Before he knew he was being robbed, the mark was dead. Also, it doesn’t matter if someone is sick or kind or whatever. A marker is a marker.

Buddy refused. He reached out to Jeff for support, but Jeff “sees both sides” of the argument. So Gene fires Buddy, tells him to leave and shut up, if he knows what’s good for him. Then he told Jeff that they were going to finish what they started.

While we all thought the episode was titled “Breaking Bad” because it would feature Walt and Jesse cameos, apparently it’s actually about Gene finally turning bad. again. Of course, Jimmy is always bad. He has been stealing from his father’s store since he was a boy. Slip on Jimmy, no matter how well-meaning he is in other areas of his life, is always the reason his brother Chuck (Michael McKean) doesn’t trust him.

The Saul Goodman he became was Chuck’s fears manifesting. But even so, Saul was just a shabby lawyer, making money off other people’s crimes. Whatever Gene became – let’s call him Victor, the name he used in the bar – seemed worse. Perhaps this more ruthless version of Saul is what Chuck sees deep in Jimmy’s soul.

Regardless, this was a turning point not only for Gene, but for Saul and Jimmy as well. Gone is the kindness Jimmy showed to his brother, Kim and many others along the way. In its place is a man who has lost everything, angry and bitter about it, almost desperate to find some new purpose in life – no matter how dangerous.

It was almost a death wish that he asked Jeff to take him to the sleeping man’s house. He told Jeff to be back to pick him up in 20 minutes, then he walked to the back door and found it locked.

In the same episode, Jimmy breaks some glass a second time.

I won’t spoil what we’ll see in the post-episode preview, but things certainly aren’t looking good for Gene Takovic.

I enjoyed this episode even more than last week, thanks to the funny cameo from Walt/Jesse and the more shocking nature of Gene’s new con. Will he be caught breaking into the house? Will he find out that Mark is dead, or will there be a physical conflict with him and that person will die? Will Marion find Saul Goodman with her new laptop and hand him over to the police?

We’ll find out at least some of the answers to these questions when episode 12 of “The Water Works” airs tomorrow. “Once detected, the risk increases,” the description reads. breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan wrote and directed the episode.

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