That's how I saw it as well. He left the door cracked open just an inch, knowing full well that Kim would press him on it.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Better Call Saul - Season 5 - AMC
- Thread starter Cornballer
- Start date
Just finished season 4 and I don't think I can do the week to week for this show, its just so much more satisfying when binged. Fuck those last two episodes of season 4 fucked me up. Jimmy tried his hardest for the girl who pickpocketed in the past and then broke down in his car realizing his dream of washing away his past was truly dead. S'all good, man.
I guess we now know how Kim ends up distancing herself from Jimmy. It's agonising to see her go down this path.
Oh wow lol, I thought I recognised him. He was great.
Last edited:
mike is such a gary sue.
i also wasn't fan of his scene with gus. it was just mike asking silly questions so gus could fire off some cliches. jimmy and kim stuff is where it's at, the origin story of a meth basement is really starting to drag.
i also wasn't fan of his scene with gus. it was just mike asking silly questions so gus could fire off some cliches. jimmy and kim stuff is where it's at, the origin story of a meth basement is really starting to drag.
That was my thought too. Maybe the picture she looked at was some sort of old cowboy IP memorabilia in Kevin's house, and why she was looking at pictures on her computer when Schweikert came in.
it sucks seeing what Kim is doing. They're trying to have us root against her now. At first everyone was so nervous she was going to die or Jimmy was messing with her but it's really more on her than anything with the path she's on right now. I mean shit, even Jimmy was telling her just let it go but she persists and then she could have just taken a leave of absence from the case but makes a big stink in the hallway. It's getting brutal to watch knowing how badly this is probably going to end for her.
I'd prefer it if she had agency in her own downfall, as opposed to her being a helpless innocent caught in the crossfire of Saul and the cartels or whatever.
I really read it more as Jimmy manipulating her into seeing through her worst tendencies. "Encouraging her to be her worst self", I guess. She isn't faultless, but i wouldn't be surprised if Kim identifies this pretty soon and peaces out.
Jimmy wasn't telling her to let it go. He was hinting that there was one, final, crazy path forward that they'd be crazy to attempt. Kim loves crazy schemes with Jimmy. She decided to go for it, which is precisely what he wanted.
Yeah, Jimmy didn't seem to put much (any) effort in trying to steer Kim away from that choice. He seemed quite satisfied with her choice.
I'm having one of those moments where I'm being stupid and I've completely forgot key points in the story.
Can somebody kindly explain why exactly Kim wants the call centre to move to that other plot? How will that benefit her?
Thanks all, apologies for the dumbness!
Can somebody kindly explain why exactly Kim wants the call centre to move to that other plot? How will that benefit her?
Thanks all, apologies for the dumbness!
A Gary Sue who's spent the last few episodes screwing up and getting his ass kicked?
It doesn't necessarily benefit her in any tangible way, she just feels bad that the man living on that property that would have to be demolished saw her as some evil lawyer working to pretend to be her friend and force him out of his home. She tried basically everything (coming late at night with other homes he could get, etc), but he rejected it all and pushed her away. But she sees it as a personal failing that she can't help this guy out so she really wants to move it to the other location (which is basically just as fine) so he can live in his home yet.
At least that's my understanding of it, probably more layers to it than that but just a surface explanation..
It's a way for her to have her cake (i.e. not force Acker out of his home) and eat it too (deliver for her client). The other site is a perfectly viable opportunity, as has been pointed out.
That's the thing, this is already personal between Kim and Kevin, just by proxy. Both of them are in it to win it rather than to achieve some other goal.
She doesn't want Acker to lose his house because she's trying to be a good person.
Fuck. Please let's not play the "I can no longer root for X" game. I hate that game. I've always hated it, and Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul somehow produce especially bad variations of this game.
The problem with it is that it turns what is a thoughtful character study full of nuance and subtlety and realistic psychology into a fucking sports match where you entrench yourself into cheering for one side to win rather than enjoying the richness of the narrative. Whether Jimmy was justified against Chuck or vice versa never mattered except for maybe some philosophical discussion on morality, what mattered is us learning and empathizing with what both characters thought and felt about each other and it drove me crazy how many fans wanted to reduce the beautiful tragedy of the Brothers McGill into "FUCK CHUCK"
PLEASE lets not do that with Kim. Kim's doing what she is doing because she's torn between having worked to be a professional, respectable lawyer for so much of her life, her idealized dream of being an Atticus Finch-like hero figure, her love for Jimmy and the thrill she gets from clever schemes. In every single one of those things, we can empathize. We can empathize with wanting to live in the confines of the real world as a respectable professional, we can empathize with aspirations of being a hero-like force for good, we can empathize with her love for Jimmy because all of us (or most of us) too have some love for Jimmy, and we can empathize with the thrill of getting away with a smart plan.
So we can empathize with Kim on all levels, even if we may differ on how we would go about it on a personal level for any reason, including ethical. I can do all that while personally acknowledging that what I think Kim is doing is wrong - Mesa Verde is a corporation, but they're not breaking any rules or being scummy here in any sense and they've gone the extra mile to try and accommodate Acker. If what they're doing is evil, it's only evil in the general sense that all capitalism is evil, but I'd say this is one of the lesser examples of it. So, Kim screwing up Mesa Verde, it's not something I necessarily agree with morally. But I still empathize. And I empathize with Kevin Wachtell who is just trying to run his business and has no bad intentions towards anyone. He's a decent sort as far as I can tell, and it's a shame he's being backstabbed like this.
But I'm not rooting for Kim to fail. Nor am I rooting for her to succeed. My job as a viewer isn't to root for anyone or be a moral judge. It's to enjoy the unfolding chaos, the tensions between the interested parties, and the conflicting motivations that drive them. That's what makes storytelling great, not me judging the characters, as if my approval of what they do or don't do matters.
But if this just turns into "I can't root for kim anymore", I'm....just gonna be disappointed. BB and BCS has always delivered on better things than just visceral enjoyment of seeing your judgements executed.
The problem with it is that it turns what is a thoughtful character study full of nuance and subtlety and realistic psychology into a fucking sports match where you entrench yourself into cheering for one side to win rather than enjoying the richness of the narrative. Whether Jimmy was justified against Chuck or vice versa never mattered except for maybe some philosophical discussion on morality, what mattered is us learning and empathizing with what both characters thought and felt about each other and it drove me crazy how many fans wanted to reduce the beautiful tragedy of the Brothers McGill into "FUCK CHUCK"
PLEASE lets not do that with Kim. Kim's doing what she is doing because she's torn between having worked to be a professional, respectable lawyer for so much of her life, her idealized dream of being an Atticus Finch-like hero figure, her love for Jimmy and the thrill she gets from clever schemes. In every single one of those things, we can empathize. We can empathize with wanting to live in the confines of the real world as a respectable professional, we can empathize with aspirations of being a hero-like force for good, we can empathize with her love for Jimmy because all of us (or most of us) too have some love for Jimmy, and we can empathize with the thrill of getting away with a smart plan.
So we can empathize with Kim on all levels, even if we may differ on how we would go about it on a personal level for any reason, including ethical. I can do all that while personally acknowledging that what I think Kim is doing is wrong - Mesa Verde is a corporation, but they're not breaking any rules or being scummy here in any sense and they've gone the extra mile to try and accommodate Acker. If what they're doing is evil, it's only evil in the general sense that all capitalism is evil, but I'd say this is one of the lesser examples of it. So, Kim screwing up Mesa Verde, it's not something I necessarily agree with morally. But I still empathize. And I empathize with Kevin Wachtell who is just trying to run his business and has no bad intentions towards anyone. He's a decent sort as far as I can tell, and it's a shame he's being backstabbed like this.
But I'm not rooting for Kim to fail. Nor am I rooting for her to succeed. My job as a viewer isn't to root for anyone or be a moral judge. It's to enjoy the unfolding chaos, the tensions between the interested parties, and the conflicting motivations that drive them. That's what makes storytelling great, not me judging the characters, as if my approval of what they do or don't do matters.
But if this just turns into "I can't root for kim anymore", I'm....just gonna be disappointed. BB and BCS has always delivered on better things than just visceral enjoyment of seeing your judgements executed.
Last edited:
Kim is going to push beyond what even Saul is comfortable with. He is eager to please her and enable her but right now I think he's very surprised by how he isn't able to keep up with what she's thinking.
Jimmy is going to end up being the one that feels furious and conned by her by the end of it all. That is the explanation for his sexism in Breaking Bad. Jimmy will feel like he was the one in the right even if it's a 50/50 split of blame. Kim might offload all the responsibility but the only chance we have of seeing a reconciliation between her/Gene in Season 6 is if she has something she has to apologize for as well.
Jimmy is going to end up being the one that feels furious and conned by her by the end of it all. That is the explanation for his sexism in Breaking Bad. Jimmy will feel like he was the one in the right even if it's a 50/50 split of blame. Kim might offload all the responsibility but the only chance we have of seeing a reconciliation between her/Gene in Season 6 is if she has something she has to apologize for as well.
I think there's a pretty big misunderstanding of Kim's character that I've noticed since season 4. It's not that Jimmy is pushing her to be a worse person, it's that this is part of who Kim is. She likes the idea of helping the little guy and she feels like it should fulfill her, but the moments where Kim is the most satisfied and happy are when she's pulling some grift shit. Hell, it's the reason she fell for Jimmy in the first place. What I find so interesting is that she doesn't want to be. She wants to be this hero that fights for the little guy, but she isn't that. She's an incredibly complex character and probably one of the more interesting characters on TV at the moment
I see what you mean, but there's one thing I was wondering - have we ever seen anything to suggest she was into this before Jimmy? I think part of what makes people blame Jimmy is that Kim seemed to legitimately be a good person up until he got her into this stuff (at the restaurant, if I remember correctly).
I don't like generalizing Kim enjoying grifts as something that makes her a bad person either. Like, generally, grifts have a bad reputation for a good reason, because they prey on good will and when you do that to people who are not harming anyone and they are legitimately hurt by the grift, that's when it becomes unconscionable. So what grifts has Kim participated in?
She and Jimmy scammed Ken Wins into buying them a super expensive dinner under promise he'd be their hedge fund manager. Okay, not good, especially since Ken didn't seem like he was a bad person, just kind of obnoxious.
She helps Jimmy get the better of Chuck in the hearing, which she feels raw about, but given the manipulations Chuck has pulled, I'd say manipulation on their part is fair game. It's not pretty, but I wouldn't say there is a moral issue at stake here.
The big one is the Couchetta scam with Huell, which she is doing both as a favor to Jimmy and because the ADA was treating Huell's case with more harshness than is warranted. In the end, what justice did Huell escape, that he hit a cop with some groceries? Who cares. I'm 100% fine with this con.
Then she scammed that lady with the building blueprints. I don't care about the blueprints being switched out themselves, but this is bad in smaller ways, like the fact that the lady that helped her could have gotten in trouble due to the switcheroo they pulled. This is where it's getting into the nastier aspects of the con in that your preying on the goodwill of well meaning people for no greater purpose than to get a paycheck you don't actually need. Mesa Verde could have just paid the bills to change those plans.
Then she helps with Jimmy's long-con to get back to being a lawyer by making him seem sympathetic. Which....like....I guess isn't good in that it's a bunch of horseshit to make Jimmy look better, but in this case, no one is really being hurt. Unless you count I guess the damage Jimmy is going to do as Saul, but that's another story, because right now Kim still thinks of Jimmy as the good guy who was doing elder law before that fell apart. So, in essence, this is her just helping out a friend and I don't think it's all that immoral.
And this thing with Mesa Verde is her worst one yet because unlike the others, I see it as soothing her ego more than anything. Everett Acker called her out on her insecurities and moral lapses, so she is trying to compensate by giving him what he want and disrupting the plans and wasting time of not just her employer but his hundreds of workers. Like I said before, Mesa Verde isn't doing anything shady here. They just want the goddamn land that they paid for and were as far as possible to the tenants living there. It's not some greater calling, they just want a call center to expand their business, but it's not wrong and it's not like Acker made any kind of appeal of how important his home was to him. He just fucking hates that he has to go and made no bones about that. And since no one, including Kim, gives a fuck about Mr. Acker's right to be there, the only reason any of this is happening is because he managed to touch Kim's raw nerve and now she's making everyone's lives difficult over this overcompensation idea of "doing right". So I'd say this is Kim's worst con because of how petty it is. None of what's happening needs to happen on any moral ground. The big corperation wants a call center, acker wants to stick it to a big corperation, Kim doesn't want to admit that she is, to some extent, a corporate drone, and Jimmy just wants to do Kim a favor.
So one immoral grift to someone really unpleasant, one unpleasant but fair grift to Chuck, one genuinely good grift because Huell's case was bullshit, one mean one to an innocent lady, one mostly good one to Jimmy, her friend and lover, that doesn't realistically harm anyone, and now one petty one over her bruised ego.
I don't think there's any steady progression of Kim becoming a worse person as she grifts more and more. Morally, the grifts are all over the place. It's just this one in particular that's bad, but not like Jimmy defending murderers and drug dealers in BB bad, it's just all really petty for how much time, effort and money is being wasted over this stupid shit.
She and Jimmy scammed Ken Wins into buying them a super expensive dinner under promise he'd be their hedge fund manager. Okay, not good, especially since Ken didn't seem like he was a bad person, just kind of obnoxious.
She helps Jimmy get the better of Chuck in the hearing, which she feels raw about, but given the manipulations Chuck has pulled, I'd say manipulation on their part is fair game. It's not pretty, but I wouldn't say there is a moral issue at stake here.
The big one is the Couchetta scam with Huell, which she is doing both as a favor to Jimmy and because the ADA was treating Huell's case with more harshness than is warranted. In the end, what justice did Huell escape, that he hit a cop with some groceries? Who cares. I'm 100% fine with this con.
Then she scammed that lady with the building blueprints. I don't care about the blueprints being switched out themselves, but this is bad in smaller ways, like the fact that the lady that helped her could have gotten in trouble due to the switcheroo they pulled. This is where it's getting into the nastier aspects of the con in that your preying on the goodwill of well meaning people for no greater purpose than to get a paycheck you don't actually need. Mesa Verde could have just paid the bills to change those plans.
Then she helps with Jimmy's long-con to get back to being a lawyer by making him seem sympathetic. Which....like....I guess isn't good in that it's a bunch of horseshit to make Jimmy look better, but in this case, no one is really being hurt. Unless you count I guess the damage Jimmy is going to do as Saul, but that's another story, because right now Kim still thinks of Jimmy as the good guy who was doing elder law before that fell apart. So, in essence, this is her just helping out a friend and I don't think it's all that immoral.
And this thing with Mesa Verde is her worst one yet because unlike the others, I see it as soothing her ego more than anything. Everett Acker called her out on her insecurities and moral lapses, so she is trying to compensate by giving him what he want and disrupting the plans and wasting time of not just her employer but his hundreds of workers. Like I said before, Mesa Verde isn't doing anything shady here. They just want the goddamn land that they paid for and were as far as possible to the tenants living there. It's not some greater calling, they just want a call center to expand their business, but it's not wrong and it's not like Acker made any kind of appeal of how important his home was to him. He just fucking hates that he has to go and made no bones about that. And since no one, including Kim, gives a fuck about Mr. Acker's right to be there, the only reason any of this is happening is because he managed to touch Kim's raw nerve and now she's making everyone's lives difficult over this overcompensation idea of "doing right". So I'd say this is Kim's worst con because of how petty it is. None of what's happening needs to happen on any moral ground. The big corperation wants a call center, acker wants to stick it to a big corperation, Kim doesn't want to admit that she is, to some extent, a corporate drone, and Jimmy just wants to do Kim a favor.
So one immoral grift to someone really unpleasant, one unpleasant but fair grift to Chuck, one genuinely good grift because Huell's case was bullshit, one mean one to an innocent lady, one mostly good one to Jimmy, her friend and lover, that doesn't realistically harm anyone, and now one petty one over her bruised ego.
I don't think there's any steady progression of Kim becoming a worse person as she grifts more and more. Morally, the grifts are all over the place. It's just this one in particular that's bad, but not like Jimmy defending murderers and drug dealers in BB bad, it's just all really petty for how much time, effort and money is being wasted over this stupid shit.
Last edited:
This is fair and if I don't remember if I said she was a bad person, but if I did that's poor choice of words on my part. Kim is a very, very grey. She has a line, but the more she scams the more it blurs. I know you say there's not a steady progression, but there actually looks like there is when you draw it out like that. Before this season Kim was scamming when she personally cared about them or if it was relatively harmless like with the rich dude. Mesa Verde is kind of the oddball there, but correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was before she realized she didn't love it there.
But this season you have the light scam where she got the dude with the gameboy to not go to trial. Did it help him out? Absolutely. It was still a scam though and I don't believe Kim did it out of the goodness of her heart. She took a shortcut when she realized it was the easiest way to get where she wanted to go. And it feels like she's doing similar shit with Acker as well. It feels like she's scamming because it helps her fight for the little guy and that's what she feels like she should be doing instead of helping them out because that's genuinely what she wants in life. Kim always seems fulfilled after she successfully pulls off of scam, but when she's just doing regular lawyer shit? She seems slightly less frustrated helping out the little guy the legit way then she does when she's working with Mesa Verde
They're kicking people out of their homes, not tenants, but homes these people actually build themselves with their own money. They're not tennants. They got offered a small amount of money, way less than any house would cost. You could perhaps build a garage for that offer. And because the house owners were promised a 100-year lease of the ground, which a loophole allows Mesa Verde to pull out of prematurely, everyone rolled over and took the shitty offer.
You can say about Kim what you will, you can argue this is legal, but you can't argue this is not wrong.
Yeah fuck Mesa Verde and Kevin Wachtell. My read on this is that Kim realized what a completely morally bankrupt world she has become a part of and went from trying to soothe her conscience by helping Acker to actively sabotaging Mesa Verde (and her own career) because she can't fucking stand everything about her job, except for the part where she gets to help her pro bono clients. And Jimmy is actively enabling her because he, too, kind of hates himself, and misery loves company. There's a lot more to it than that - this show has the most complex and nuanced TV characters since Mad Men - but that's kind of my basic read on it.
Ok, but she does have the option of simply quitting S&C/Mesa Verde and helping those folks without getting potentially disbarred and having her reputation permanently smeared.
She sees herself as a modern day Atticus Finch, but she is quickly moving away from that and becoming a lot more like Jimmy who will do whatever to get what he wants.
Yeah but she hasn't admitted to herself yet that Kim the Corporate Lawyer is not who she is or wants to be. She thought she wanted to be that for a long time, now it's slowly turning out that she doesn't, but that's a hard truth to face up to. She's still trying to have her cake and eat it at the moment but it's going to blow up in her face sooner rather than later. She's already pretty much irreparably damaged her relationship with Schweikart. She'll come to a crossroads soon where she either goes the Jimmy route and just leans into it or snap the fuck out of it and just commit to being a professional, either full-time pro bono or just accepting that the world she moves in is what it is and making peace with that. It's a credit to the show that I have no idea how it's gonna turn out.
She still enjoys the money and reputation. She's not ready to lower herself to Saul's level full-time.
I wasn't talking about you specifically, I just kind of didn't want that conversation to go that way in general. Anyway, what I think is actually developing is, like Jimmy, she's realizing that scams are just too useful to not use when situations are really bad and they're the only way to get what she wants. But scams are dangerous.
Specifically, regarding that guy she scammed, that's more of a moral question of whether she was right to get him such a good defense in the first place. The guy was 100% guilty of what he did and not remorseful of his crime in any way.
I guess the point here being is that it's murky ground regardless and it's just not useful to try to measure the morality of Kim's schemes when it's clear that it's more need to be a hero lawyer that's actually driving her and being chipped away by her constant need to resort to scams to get what she wants.
Okay, what your doing is basically assuming the worst case scenerio of a situation. Like, imagine if I were to argue that Ken Wins took a financial hit that crippled his livelihood and professional reputation in serious ways because Jimmy and Kim gave him a false opportunity, so now he has to live make up serious ground ala when Kim was being punished by Howard. It's possible and if so, it puts Jimmy's and Kim's scamy funtime joyride with him in a nastier light, but we have no evidence to think that happened.
Same thing here. All we actually know is that Acker doesn't want to leave his home, whereas we don't know much about how everyone else took it. For all we know, the other tenants were okay with leaving. I'm sure there were some like Acker that didn't want to leave, but we can't guess the percentage. Also, I think you might be misremembering the buyout price. It wasn't a measly $5,000 or even $18,000 for Acker. It was the real estate value of their home PLUS the $5,000+inflation. So if Acker's home is worth $100,000, he'd have been getting $118,000, not $18,000. So, that adds plausibility that that the people would be okay with taking the deal since they'd be able to buy a house equivalent to the one they have. And the way Mesa Verde did things just doesn't suggest it was unfair. If they dealt with the other tenants the way they did Acker, then what we are left with is assuming they raised the price until the tenants felt they were being given a fair deal to leave. It's only Acker that they had to get the courts and law involved to deal with.
That said, I'm not trying to fully disagree with you here. Regardless of anything, Mesa Verde is forcing this situation even if people don't want it or want to stay for non-financial reasons and they're not doing that, even if we don't know for who or how many people that's the situation. And of course the people arguing in favor that Mesa Verde didn't do anything wrong is Paige, who is fine being a corperate lawyer and Kevin himself. I would say that the company that leased their property is to blame for stipulating that and the general machinations of capitalism (which I've agreed it was), but I'm not sure this changes Kim's situation much either, morally speaking. Kim didn't oversee this transition, she was just called in to the tail end of it to deal with Acker specifically. And even if Kim somehow gets Acker what he wants and he gets to stay, it's not like his neighborhood is coming back. It's gone and everything he might have liked about living there, his neighbors, that's all going to change now regardless of whether Mesa Verde gets it's parking lot.
On that front, what is Kim's moral responsibility here? To get revenge on Mesa Verde on behalf of Acker? I wouldn't say so. It's now just a grudge match between Acker wanting to stick it to a big corporation vs Kevin Wachtell not wanting to let some squatter force him off his land, but neither of these things actually matter on a moral front. So Kim's largely just left to back one side or another, neither of which I think have serious moral heft to do so.
Kim thinks she wants to be Atticus Finch but she really wants to be Robin Hood. Even in her grifter mode I think she wants to do good, and probably wouldn't go along with the kind of scams Jimmy and Marco used to pull back in Chicago, which targeted the innocent. Note everything she's done with Jimmy has been against rich assholes.
Uncomfortable to watch.
It was difficult to watch her confront her boss at the end like that, shaky cam and all. But damn it was good television.
All caught up. This has really been a wonderful ride. Loved how Acker debased Kim so thoroughly that she's going to ruin her career in an attempt to prove him wrong.
I think the last scene with him proved otherwise since his primary reason for not just moving the call center to the other site is to just have the satisfaction of kicking Acker out of his home.
Well, yes, but that's only after Acker stuck him the middle finger and put him through Jimmy's bullshit. Now it's a grudge match where he's willing to lose money just to stick it to this guy because he's feeling bullied out of what he feels is legitimately his (which is effectively whats happening), but before, he was willing to make the accommodations necessary to give Acker his due. Like, I feel the broader issue here is "Should a company have the right to evict a person?" And if your answer is no, then there's simply no way for Wachtell to ethically build his call center in that lot, but I still feel that's a criticism more of capitalism in general than anything else. Otherwise, it's hard think of what else Wachtell could have reasonably offered this guy to go. But I think that broader question promps some assumptions about conflict regarding what our brains jump to vs what we actually see.
With regards to Acker, he hasn't actually given a sympathetic reason for why he wants to keep the house. As in, he doesn't talk about what memories he has there or why staying there is so important to him or why he can't accept moving to a different home. We kind of assume he has those things because most of us are working class people more likely to be him than ever be Kevin Wachtell, but as far as what we are actually shown by the show, Acker just hates the power corperations have that they can just do this, buy up a property lot and move in rather than that the house has any particular value to him that can't be fulfilled by another house he can buy.
Which is why I bring up something as broad as capitalism, because if you asked me "Should corporations be able to do this?" I'd say, no, they shouldn't. But under that framework, one at fault is the corporation who previously owned the land and the leases of these people and put in that stipulation where they are able to just evict them whenever they want and the government that would allow them to do. But Kevin himself? He's just playing within the rules and he's atleast putting an effort to be humane with the increased buyouts and working within the rules that were in place long before he was even born. In that sense, I don't think he's doing wrong.
Now, because he's a rich person, do I think he's so far removed from someone like Acker that he can't fully conceive of what kind of harm he's (potentially) inflicting on him that money simply can't solve? Sure. He's a rich guy who was born into a rich family and inherited a banking system that never let him face the problems of poverty. But that's not his fault he was born into that and didn't get the life experience he needed to get what Acker's problem is. So, in that regard, he does have this massive empathetic blindspot, but we see how he treats the people around him such that we get a sense that he's not malicious or wanton. He's just a rich guy whose used to throwing money at his problems to solve them and is getting frustrated because he can't understand why it's not working this time.
Watched latest episode. Didn't take long, but I'm already sick of Kim's shit. No need to act all pissy cause Rich smells your bullshit much better than Kevin and Paige. Fucking let it go with Acker!
Nacho is so screwed. Not sure even a badass like him can get out from between Gus and the Salamancas.
You act as if capitalism is some separate entity that doesn't require the proactive involvement of immoral people to thrive.
And the fact that Watchell feels 'bullied' by an old man who doesn't even own the soil under his home speaks volumes to what an entitled, privileged, arrogant asshole he really is. There's nothing 'humane' about his buyouts; he's offering a legal pittance and the people in those types of situations take it because they literally have no other options. The scraps he adds to the buyout prices aren't rooted in altruism but rather lubrication so that he gets what he wants without friction.
Acker represents a unique problem because he won 't be bullied, cajoled or bribed and Watchell's tiny little greedy mind can't fathom a serf deigning to challenge the lord of the manor.
That's why he's pissed. He's a rich bully who'd rather evict poor people from their homes than choose an alternative site for his call center. Kim gave him an out and he'd rather go to war with a tired old man than simply concede. It's not just about winning for him; it's about making certain the other guy loses.
Just watched the episode. I am glad I am not the only one scratching my head . I just don't understand Kims hate boner against Mesa Verde. I was hoping they would have explained by now.
They kick people out of their homes and in some cases these people lived there for decades.
They also have a viable alternative as to where to place the call center, yet they still want to kick out poor people.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
They have, they just don't spell it out. Kim has been clearly established as someone who'd rather stick up for the little guy (her pro bono work) than do her corporate masters' bidding. That's been like her whole arc since she started working with Mesa Verde, it's not new. What she has to do to serve them chafes against who she is, or wants to be. I feel like this has been obvious for a while now.
Finally caught up.
Wow, that's insane. I thought it was all fake VFX lol... >.>
What the fuck. She looks easily 10 years younger.
I agree with this. Saul utterly manipulated her there.
Agreed with this. Kevin is a piece of shit, and his refusal to use the other plot of land for his call centre is some supreme toxic masculinity posturing bullshit, and worse, he's actually taking a financial hit with this now, but he doesn't care that much because he's so rich. Fuck that dude.
In a way it mirrors Walter White a little bit. It goes back to the old debate of whether a WW type situation could change you as a person and make you do things you never thought capable, or if it just brings out your true character and who you fundamentally are as a person. Fascinating stuff.
Walt was a self-centered holier-than-thou man who wanted to be recognized and deified for being the genius he considered himself (which he admittedly was). The more of the series passed the more it became apparent, as early as his interactions with Schwartzes.
I agree though in the similar way, Kim always enjoyed both pulling minor scams on the affluent and supporting the needy. It's just becoming much trickier when she's in a corporation that forces her to evict a man when there's another way, all on a corporate lawyer's payroll.
OP
OP
