FifiBetter Call Saul : Season 2 Episode 8
Tropes Amoral Attorney: Chuck has now proven to be just as capable as Jimmy or Kim are of doing this on someone else.
Berserk Button: Chuck and Jimmy have a difficult relationship but they are still brothers so Jimmy has refrained from seeking revenge against Chuck. However, when Chuck goes after Kim, the gloves are off and Jimmy uses his access to Chuck's house to sabotage HHM.
Best Served Cold: The Salamancas threatened Mike's family and he is not going to let that go. He takes his time observing Hector's operations, picks out a vulnerable point and then carefully prepares to strike back.
Call-Forward: Jimmy and Kim eat at the Dog House, an establishment where Jesse Pinkman will vist to deal drugs, buy a gun and hand out money to a homeless man.
Chekhov's Skill: Jimmy's years of working in the mail room at HHM come in very handy in this episode, as it gives him all the knowledge he needs to produce convincingly altered copies of Chuck's paperwork for Mesa Verde.
Complexity Addiction: Jimmy wants a patriotic shot for his commercial, so he dresses an elderly sex offender up as a World War II vet and uses him to smuggle a film crew onto a military base to film him in front of an old B-29 bomber. His crew points out that it would have been much easier to just film him in front of an American flag.
Dirty Old Man: The "old veteran" that Jimmy found for his veteran's shoot was someone he defended for public masturbation.
Five-Second Foreshadowing: "That's the story, right, guys?"
Forged Letter: Jimmy steals some HHM legal documents on Mesa Verde from Chuck's house, makes multiple copies of it and then carefully cuts out two numbers so he can paste them onto a different copy in reverse order. He then makes another copy of the altered documents to hide what he did and slips it back into Chuck's files. It looks like a simple typo but it changed the lot number for the expansion making everything void if Chuck follows it.
Futureshadowing: The use of an ice cream truck to smuggle drugs into the country seems to foreshadow Gus Fring's usage of refrigerator trucks for distribution.
Likewise, the ice cream man's gun buried hiding place in the desert, concealed with a rock seems to foreshadow Walt's hiding place for his barrels of cash.
Hidden Depths: "Fudge" is a quarter-senile public masturbator, but he also demonstrates an impressive knowledge of military history, correctly pointing out to Jimmy that the B-29 was deployed exclusively in the Pacific theater of the war and therefore never used against the Nazis.
Improvised Weapon: Mike improvises a spike strip using a perforated garden hose.
Ironic Echo: In "Pimento," Chuck double-crossed Jimmy by making a call to Howard while Jimmy was asleep. Here, Jimmy returns the favor by sneaking out to a copy business to tamper with some Mesa Verde documents while Chuck is out cold from what he felt as a near-death experience.
Jerkass Has a Point: Chuck goes out of his way to make sure Mesa Verde stays with HHM, which is a very reasonable thing for a partner in a law firm to do. And the arguments he makes are equally reasonable: putting a solo practitioner in charge of an interstate banking expansion is taking a real risk, particularly when she isn't even a regulatory specialist, and they currently have a whole firm available to them. Still a dick move given it's a clear jab at Jimmy through Kim.
Locked Out of the Loop: A subtle example. Howard needs Chuck to help him retain Mesa Verde, so he decides not to correct Chuck's assumption that Kim and Jimmy are partners at law when they're actually running separate practices while sharing expenses.
Obfuscating Disability: The seemingly senile and wheelchair-bound "Major" Fudge Talbot is actually able-bodied, and coherent of speaking English. Jimmy and his camera crew merely needed him so they could get around the fact that they didn't obtain shooting permits.
The Oner: Used in the opening sequence as Hector's drug mule gets his ice cream truck inspected at the United States-Mexico border crossing.
Tempting Fate: During Chuck's meeting with Mesa Verde, he says that staying with HHM means that even the smallest of details won't be overlooked. That night, Jimmy does exactly that to tamper with the documentation for a new branch.
Title Drop: Fifi, the name of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress seen in the episode.
Sinister Surveillance: Mike as he surveils Hector's operation looking for a weakness.
Wham Episode: Chuck torpedoes Kim's attempt to take her recently landed big client with her when she leaves for a private practice, just because she'll be working alongside Jimmy. This marks the first time his efforts to put a stopper in Jimmy's law career have had serious collateral damage, which he doesn't seem to care about at all, and it's made worse by the physical hell he puts himself through just to do it. Jimmy responds by slipping Kevin and Paige's paperwork out while Chuck is suffering the severe effects of taking that meeting without any of his usual precautions, and spending hours at a copy center meticulously altering a single address throughout all the papers. While intended just to make Chuck look bad, it signifies the gigantic escalation in Chuck and Jimmy's rivalry to follow and will result in HHM's reputation being permanently damaged.
FifiBetter Call Saul : Season 2 Episode 8
As expected, the Better Call Saul series finale is filled with Breaking Bad callbacks, references, and Easter eggs. Even to those who didn't really follow Breaking Bad, the spinoff Better Call Saul has proved to be entertaining on its own. That said, every episode in the spinoff - especially the Better Call Saul ending - is doubly rewarding for sharp-eyed viewers of both crime dramas.
The Better Call Saul series finale closes the very last chapter in the story of Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler - with references not only to the spinoff's previous episodes, but also to the most crucial moments in Breaking Bad. It can be difficult to get a handle on all the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul Easter eggs in the last episode, even for audiences who have closely followed both shows. Here's every callback, Easter egg, and reference that audiences might have missed in Better Call Saul season 6, episode 13 "Saul Gone."
The series finale opens with a flashback to Better Call Saul season 5, episode 8 "Bagman", with several Easter eggs showing up within the first minute. This includes Jimmy McGill's 1998 Suzuki Esteem which Mike and Jimmy pushed into a ditch in the desert, and Mike's space blanket which reminded Jimmy of Chuck. There's also the hundred-dollar bill stuck in a cactus, a reminder of the hole that resulted from Jimmy dragging the heavy bags of money, and a metaphor for Saul's ill-fated stint as Lalo Salamanca's bagman. In fact, the flashback also refreshes the viewer's memory about how Jimmy had to drink his own pee to survive - the price of Lalo's $100,000 fee for transporting his bail money.
Though Jimmy has done it before, this is the first time Gene dives into a dumpster. Jimmy first entered a dumpster in Better Call Saul season 1, when he was looking for shredded evidence for the Sandpiper case. This is also a reference to the Better Call Saul season 6 premiere episode "Wine and Roses," which notably didn't feature Gene at all. In the cold open for "Wine and Roses," police were seizing Saul Goodman's properties, with one cop disposing of a life-sized cardboard cutout of Saul into the dumpster - foreshadowing Gene's trashy fate.
In the dumpster, Gene pulls out a calling card that reads "Best Quality Vacuum Repair," which is a reference to Ed Galbraith, "The Disappearer." Written behind the card is the phrase "Hoover Max Extract Pressure-Pro Model 60," which is Ed's code for a specific package in his services. This is the same card Jimmy uses to contact the Disappearer in Better Call Saul season 4's flash forward to Breaking Bad's "Ozymandias" episode. Apart from Saul, Ed has also rendered his services for both Walter White and Jessie Pinkman. In Better Call Saul season 6, Saul Goodman's veterinarian Dr. Caldera was revealed to be the source of Ed's calling card, which was just one of the many contacts inside Caldera's encrypted black book of criminals. That book, which Jimmy used to become Albuquerque's next top criminal liaison following Caldera's exit from the underworld, ended up in police custody - as seen in the season 6 premiere.
Alone in his jail cell, the first thing Gene does is panic and hit the door in frustration - until he sees a phrase scrawled on the wall that reads "MY LAWYR WILL REAM UR A**," which causes Gene to start laughing, followed by Saul finally calling Bill Oakley. Gene hitting the wall is a reference to Jimmy kicking the trashcan at the basement of the HHM office, and when Gene kicked and shattered the phone booth glass after he called Kim - only this time, Gene finally hurts himself. The phrase scrawled on the wall reminded Gene of the time he got stuck inside the dumpster room at the mall, where he scratched "SG WAS HERE" on the wall there. This is essentially what turns Gene the manager back into the lawyer Saul Goodman. Saul's laugh is also reminiscent of Walter White's unsettling breakdown in Breaking Bad's intense "Crawl Space" episode.
The ice cream flavor that Saul wanted to get delivered to his prison cell on a weekly basis appeared throughout Better Call Saul season 5. It debuted in season 5's first episode "Magic Man," with Saul scooping mint chocolate chip ice cream into a bowl as Kim listens to Saul's next big plans. The same flavor appears again in the next episode, "50% Off," in which Saul enjoys a cone of mint choco chip until he gets picked up by Nacho, who insisted that he drop the cone instead of making a mess in Nacho's car. In the following episode, "The Guy For This," Jimmy sees the ice cream still on the sidewalk, covered with ants. In the last episode of Better Call Saul season 5, Jimmy gets Kim to scoop the mint chip into her bowl instead of his. What's the real meaning of Better Call Saul's ice cream? In the show, mint chocolate chip ice cream represents "the game." Saul uses the ice cream to make his plea more ridiculous and eventually to get Kim to show up at his trial. After Jimmy's plea bargain deals and final testimony, ice cream is never mentioned again, implying that Jimmy is sincere about getting out of the game for good. 041b061a72