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ernieball5150's Replies
Lol. It varies. Lately the workhorse is a cheap Yamaha superstrat.
Against Mike's conscience, he had taken Hector's "offer you can't refuse" to accept a bribe (and the lives of his granddaughter and daughter-in-law) in return for lying to the cops to save Tuco from jail on the gun charge.
Mike then robbed one of Hector's trucks, and left the driver bound at the side of the road, hoping the scene would get handled by the police and ultimately incriminate Hector.
As Nacho later explains to Mike, the driver was actually freed by a good samaritan. The driver called in Hector's people, who cleaned up the scene without any police attention, including Hector personally murdering the good samaritan. And Nacho knows Mike was behind it.
So Hector is still a free man, and at least one person realizes Mike is the guy who held up the truck. And Hector killed an innocent man as a result of Mike's actions. This together with the existing bad blood between Mike and Hector, and the continuing potential for Hector to mess with Mike's family, leads Mike to the conclusion that Hector has to be terminated.
I think it's intimated that Hector's murder of the samaritan was the final straw for Mike.
I've considered Nacho too. But the pill hustle he was doing that brought him into contact with Mike was behind Hector's back. Seems to me that if he were really a mole for Gus, he wouldn't risk his standing in Hector's organization by doing a side hustle. In that scenario, having his side hustle get exposed would get him in trouble with not just Hector (for doing unauthorized business), but Gus (for compromising his infiltration of Hector's inner circle).
From a conventional storytelling point of view, it's still a mystery who is behind the foiling of Mike's assassination of Hector, and the tracking. But in the real world, we've been told that Giancarlo Esposito will appear on the show this season, and from Breaking Bad, we know that Mike and Gus are bound to meet at *some* point, so there's a good chance the current events on BCS are designed to move us toward the inevitable intersection of Mike's and Gus's paths.
The people tracking Mike set off his horn and put a note on his windshield saying "Don't" when he was about to shoot Hector.
So whether it's Gustavo's people (who I assume it is), or not, it's *somebody* who didn't want Mike to shoot Hector. Since Hector is still alive and Mike has not made an agreement with anyone not to go after Hector again, whoever left the note has a continued stake in keeping tabs on Mike.
If the "tracker" people were loyal Hector, they wouldn't have let Mike live: he'd have either been shot in the back, or been ambushed back at a disabled station wagon. The logical conclusion is that the "tracking" is happening under Gus, who isn't loyal to Hector, but needs Hector to stay alive... for now.
In addition to Gus potentially having spies who could have first spotted Mike at Hector's Ice Cream shop, the vet or the gun dealer could be in cahoots with Gus, and alerted him of Mike's presence/interests.
It's simple.
Both cars are tagged.
The people tracking Mike know where he lives (if they hadn't initially, they *must* know now, since the Lincoln (with tracker) is sitting in front of his house all the time).
He just tried to kill Hector, so there's incentive to keep tabs on him.
In the process of keeping tabs on him, they detect that the tracker on his Lincoln sends a "low battery signal", then stops broadcasting.
The need to keep an eye on where Mike drives the Lincoln still exists, regardless of what happens/happened with the station wagon.
Ergo, they need to repair/replace the Lincoln's tracker in case Mike drives the Lincoln somewhere interesting.
They don't know that sneaky Mike had put a functioning tracker of his own into the gas cap they took from the Lincoln while Mike was watching.
Yeah, though if they're in the habit of using these trackers with any regularity, getting less than the expected service life out of a fresh battery should set off red flags regardless of whether it cuts out suddenly or not. And maybe those flags *have* been set off. Maybe they're leading Mike somewhere on purpose...
I agree with your interpretation of how Jimmy views the law. We'll have to see where it goes...
This topic reminds me of a Bill Hicks joke that plays up the cultural elitism angle.
Hicks talks about people in some backwoods part of the southern USA gathering for a UFO sighting, some bringing shotguns:
Hicks: "Why'd you bring a gun to a UFO sighting?"
Answer: "I don't want to get abducted."
Hicks: "Really? 'Cause if I lived here, I'd be on my knees praying for alien abduction every f---ing day."
I think Gene's shouted pro bono advice to the kid at the mall was a glimpse of young Jimmy's idealism sneaking to the surface again. Even though he eventually grew into a scumbag as Saul, I think we've seen from young Jimmy an authentic desire to "stand up for the little guy". Even if Jimmy's moral compass may be wonky at times, I think it's the lack of opportunity to exercise it that's really at the root of his unhappiness. His handling of the Kettlemans and Sandpiper in season one suggested that the desire to "do the right thing" was a major factor in his decisionmaking. Gene knows he has the capability to make a bigger difference in the world -- potentially for the better -- than what he's currently doing.
And his life as Gene has given him a lot of time to reflect on how he got to where he is now.
Kim is stressed out because honestly, she's in a little over her head with the amount of work required to handle Mesa Verde by herself. And her anxiety is compounded by the fact that she feels guilty because she knows Jimmy did something shady to help her get it. The business with the semicolon was a manifestation of both Kim's perfectionism and her insecurity about the Mesa Verde situation.
The people monitoring Mike put transmitters on both his cars.
Ironically enough, I'm not much of a fan of reddit. I agree that a site like this is a better potential replacement for IMDB's boards than reddit is. Didn't occur to me that the topic might be a "sore point" for folks who have been around here a while.
I'd offer to hug it out now, but that's just awkward. ;-)
I answered a question, so I must have an *agenda*? Nice sense of community you've got there.
My expectation is that this is just a step in maneuvering Saul into a different ending than managing the Cinnabon as Gene for the rest of his life. Now that we've been introduced to Jimmy, the writers have more motivation to perhaps give Saul a redemption story, which may or may not involve a reunion with Kim.
Getting tagged by the cops might not necessarily mean life behind bars for Saul. While Saul has been cavalier about people's lives, and has been an accessory to a lot of ugly things, there's no smoking gun with his fingerprints. And he might have enough valuable information to make some kind of deal.
If Anakin Skywalker can turn his life back around however late (sorry, spoilers), maybe Saul can too.
Almost. It's the equivalent of hearing a customer at a kid's lemonade stand ask "Where is everybody?", and telling them that everybody is at Starbuck's.
You may be right. My logic was based partly on the idea that in an RF transmitter application, if a device driven by an "AA" battery is going to have any kind of useful life on a single battery, it will either have to limit transmission power a lot (and therefore range) or only run intermittently. I took Mike's test with his own receiver (where the "low battery" indicator was seen) as merely a test to see what the receiver does when the signal drops from battery disconnect (which we also saw in that scene), but your explanation probably fits better.
There's way more activity over on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/betterCallSaul/
I watched the scene again, and after he dismisses Ernesto, Chuck puts the tape player back in the drawer and playfully flips his tongs, as a pleased look crosses his face. And if there were still any doubt, when Ernesto showed him the batteries wrapped in foil, Chuck was insistent that "I need them now". Yet after Ernesto replaces them, all he does is put the player away again. The supposed urgency to have the batteries replaced at that moment was bogus.
And Chuck had oh-so-casually walked back to the kitchen while Ernesto started replacing the batteries, so once the tape started playing (conveniently at a spot where Jimmy's voice was audible, specifically talking about changing the numbers no less), Chuck would have an excuse not to have pressed the stop button sooner.