#abqniverse posts

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a good reddit post

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I love dean norris

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thinking of this

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better call saul controversial opinion: if Marion was in the DEA, breaking bad would have ended immediately after the school supplies went missing

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all for don eladio to mock him for the bell lmfao

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additional things that would make me laugh in a comedy-focused better call saul flashback scene, where gene recalls the events of breaking bad to jeff in a heavily editorialized fashion that mocks walt and jesse, same tone as "bad blood" in the x-files:

bryan's costume design really highlights the Horrible Nerd aspects of his character. thicker glasses. pocket protector. bowtie. ridiculously high waisted pants. bonus points if his dialogue is sprinkled with chem jargon that's used in a completely incoherent way: "titration!" "lanthanides!"

aaron's only lines are him saying "bitch" in a variety of inflections.

the more i think of this idea, the fonder i am of it tbh

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i've been sick in bed all day and im rewatching breaking bad for like the seventh time bc that's all i know how to do when i'm physically out of it

it's opinion time!

there's a bizarre line of thought that exists in opposition to "skylar white is a bitch" redditors that's like "skylar is so hated because she subverts femininity, for example she is unkind and not submissive, and also smokes while she is pregnant." shit that reminds me a lot of the nasty woman stuff when hillary clinton was running.

she was just an antagonist character that wasn't fleshed out as well as she could have been. we don't need to retcon this in the name of feminism lol.

i also love how they try to establish her as a short story writer in the earlier seasons and this just gets thrown in the trash as the series carries on.

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why would you do this to Flynn 💀💀💀

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my breaking bad season 1 hot take: it takes place in 2008; without question walt and skyler voted for obama and hank and marie voted for mccain

as far as i'm concerned, this is canon

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i think it's pretty obvious per my posts that i'm a big fan of breaking bad & better call saul (the abqniverse?). anyway, like, someone in a group chat i'm in sent this chart of the ratings per episode of both shows. they're basically inverse of one another.

there are a couple of reasons for this, i'm guessing: the first of which being that breaking bad aired from 2008 to 2013, and this was before the streaming boom. the second being that saul is a more character driven story, while breaking bad is more event driven, so enjoying breaking bad doesn't necessarily translate to enjoying saul.

i also think that saul fumbled the premiere a bit, hence why there was such a big dropoff in viewership after it – like, tuco salamanca is literally in the first episode, and i was a bit worried when i first watched it that it was going to be fan service-y, as i'm sure a lot of other people were. but tuco turned out to be more of a guest star than anything, and the scene was functionally a means of introducing jimmy to nacho.

it's a shame too bc imo, saul is by far the superior show. i feel like my main beef with breaking bad is that there were too many characters in it, and a lot of their arcs are either incomplete or they just aren't characterized very well.

the whole thing with bb is that, while walt is absolutely the most egregious out of all the white/schrader adults, they all are guilty of doing illegal shit when it supports some personal end for them – hank having his distaste for due process, skylar turning a blind eye and helping ted cook his books even though she knows something is off (plus her later involvement with walt's meth shenanigans), and marie shoplifting as a bad coping skill.

but marie is, like, really underdeveloped. and it sucks because understanding marie is important to understanding the show as a whole – she steals shoes after complaining that her work sneakers are ugly and being embarrassed by a rude retail girl at the store, she goes to open houses and lies about who she is (and steals things because, like, of course she does) after hank starts lashing out at her because of his ptsd. i don't know what the baby tiara thing was all about, but i have this dumb pet theory that marie and hank can't have kids and this was some kind of power move related to that – it's not lost on me that marie lies about having children every time she makes shit up about herself during her real estate klepto bender.

she's sort of a low-stakes version of walt's fractured ego & dissatisfaction and she, by my interpretation, serves as a foil that highlights just how silly the heisenberg shit really is.

the white/schrader family serves the narrative as an exploration of "why do some people become heisenberg while others don't". but, like, as much as i love the show, i think it really fumbles the execution of this. or my read could be totally wrong, i'm not sure. either way, the pieces are all there, but they don't always explore them fully.

there's also a joke in some of the sillier abqniverse fan communities of calling walt jr/flynn "breakfast" because the overwhelming majority of his scenes are him eating breakfast lmfao. he's just kind of, like, There.

the character dynamics in bcs, though, are sooooo good. the relationships between jimmy and chuck, jimmy and kim, gus and hector, mike and nacho are all well-developed and textured. i love how lalo's audacity and gus's cold cruelty play against each other. and bcs uses the tragedy of inevitability to its advantage – we know almost all of the characters (barring jimmy/saul/gene... we'll see what happens with kim and howard) are dead in the breaking bad timeline. but overwhelmingly it's just sad to see. it's dramatic tension of a different kind.

plus, bcs establishes just how terrifying gus really is. if you liked him in bb, you'll be salivating in bcs.

i don't know, i think it's criminally neglected even though it's critically acclaimed. my child will watch better call saul.

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there's a thread on the better call saul subreddit that discussed saddest character deaths in both shows (op's pick was werner ziegler, my personal one would be don margolis) and i hate how the comments are discussing it through the framework of people who were in the game vs people who aren't. especially because bcs is more or less a study of how muddy those distinctions are. the in the game/not in the game dichotomy treats the characters involved on either side as moral equals even if they aren't.

nacho is in the game, yeah, but the series goes out of its way to hammer home the coercive element of this. chuck never gets his hands dirty in the drug trade, but he's objectively a terrible man. werner is involved, but it's up for debate how much he actually knows – secret underground meth superlab is not the only reason someone would be contracted for a confidential construction project lol. people only pretend like it's super obvious because of the show's context. werner could have assumed it was related to weapons development or something. is jane in the game after she blackmails walt? walt and gale work together briefly, but walt is in it to fuel his asshole machismo complex, while with gale, it's more a reflection of his permissive values wrt bodily autonomy and how they brush up with his skill set. it's just a shitty analytical framework and you'd expect a bit more from a fanbase that's notorious for the degree of scrutiny it applies to the canon.

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i can't deal with this

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imo the better call saul crew never should have announced the walt and jesse cameos. i really, really loved nippy, and i think no small part of people reacting poorly to it is because they're getting impatient for bryan and aaron to show up, given how few episodes are left.

nippy also places the timeline in october 2010, based on the football discussions. so that's about a month after walt dies, and a few weeks before the francesca phone call that was teased in season 4.

as much as i don't think there's any real necessity for walt and jesse to be in this series, here are two scenarios i'd actually be happy with:

it stands to reason that we probably will see an episode that follows what kim has been up to in the six years since she left jimmy, right? so, maybe we see her leaving new mexico, gradually moving on with her life. maybe she's in a new relationship or remarried. maybe she has enough emotional and physical distance from the lalo/howard stuff that she's practicing law again. until one night, she flips on the television and sees a news report about the nationwide manhunt for heisenberg and his associates, being jesse and saul. she goes cold, bf/husband asks her what's going on, she says "oh my god, that's my ex husband".

jeff approaches gene to extort him for new scam advice, knowing gene has much more to lose than he does. gene tells jeff that he needs to level him about what happens to people when they get in over their heads with this stuff. "remember that chemistry teacher i told you about?" and he retells a condensed version of the events of brba. HOWEVER, and this is a really important caveat, it's played for comedy. we know saul didn't exactly think highly of walt and jesse ("you two suck at peddling meth") and it would be hilarious to see a comedically exaggerated version of events from his perspective. think the "bad blood" episode of the x-files. incidentally, gilligan wrote that one.

option 2 in my opinion would be amazing, but i'm also famously bad at predicting the show. only thing that i've predicted accurately is that hhm would be dissolved as collateral damage of kim and jimmy's plan, and i was still very wrong about the circumstances.

eh well. hoping for the best with it all

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gf and i are discussing our better call saul ending theories.

my guess is that jimmy ends up in prison because gilligan or gould, one of the two, stated that the ending was something they've not done on the show before. so far, no major in either show has actually been caught. well, lalo, kind of, but not in a context where it actually mattered. and tuco had to be arrested so they could lay the groundwork for him and skinny pete to be cellmates – not that he's a major character anyway.

gf's prediction is "the episode is called 'saul gone'. so he calls the vacuum guy, but the vacuum guy tells him he has to relocate him overseas to ho chi minh city. saul gone, saigon"

i know she's joking but they don't make words for how annoyed with her i'd be if she's correct

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still feels very weird that there are 5 bcs episodes left, and they've tied up most of the loose ends aside from, like, what happens to kim, why jimmy is still even bothering with this kind of work by the time walt gets involved, and gene timeline stuff. and this in the broader context of a show that tends to really take its time with setting things up.

especially with that last episode, i keep reflecting on everything jimmy just witnessed – howard being murdered in his apartment, kim nearly getting murdered too, the trauma of the aftermath of having to lie face-to-face with howard's corpse for hours on end and then seeing him stuffed in a fridge. with all of this stemming directly from his conscious choice to be "friend of the cartel."

up until now, this series has cast jimmy in such a more forgiving light than in bb. the writers have taken care to show us the redeemable human side behind his sleazy persona. but the past couple episodes have upended that. if he can go through all that still be in proximity to this world, i feel like there needs to be a bigger reason for that aside from pure inertia and nothing else. the way he acts in bb feels legitimately kind of suicidally reckless.

which makes me, like, very much not optimistic for kim living through this, given that her potentially not being honest about her past is the only thing that comes to mind that's been suggested but not explored. as much as i find the amount of ink that's been spilled over her not having a middle name to be a bit silly, the show has made a point of highlighting that she's very evasive about the subject. at least, not beyond vaguely stating she didn't have a great upbringing. so maybe it stands to reason from something from back then rears its head now and does her in. i guess prison is also possible here, but i don't know if that'd be a compelling reason enough for jimmy to completely resign to his greed.

that and rhea describing the last episodes as psychologically disturbing when they premiered s6e8 at tribeca. feel like that doesn't bode well in the context of two series where no character has gotten a remotely happy ending.