Right? And especially if Season 1 of that show had been 60 minutes of Gus!

Only in the sense that he's in every episode. And while I kinda have to concede the point on those grounds, I still don't like it as a choice.

Did we need Mike's story to begin with, though? After two and a half seasons, what new information do we actually have about him? And how much of that came from episodes other than "Five-O?"

I think Gus, like Mike, is a character who works better the less we know about him.

If losing a client (even a big one) drives you to suicide, 'lawyer' was probably not the right choice of career path for you.

No, he means series.

"What do you think, J'onn?"
"I don't know, I can't read his mind."
"Why? Does he have a lead plate in his head?"
"No."
"Is he one of the several dozen species of alien whose minds you can't read?"
"No."
"Has he undergone decades of intense mental training?"
"No."
"Then why!?"
"I can only read minds when the information it…

At first I thought Chuck had them beat by doing that, but clearly they have some plan in place to find and switch out Chuck's tape. With what? Who knows? But I can't wait to find out.

Chuck wanted to get the tape on the record, presumably so that he would have grounds to play it at the hearing. When he was thwarted in the statement, he added it to the list of damages instead.

Except for the part where the show is called Better Call Saul and it was explicitly sold as being Saul Goodman's origin story.

I really hope not. The farther the Jimmy and Mike plots diverge, the more I feel like I'm being denied what I signed up for.

I can't fully endorse that (the only thing that kept me from multitasking during the cold open were the subtitles), but I have to at least give you that last point.

I mean, I'm not even thinking of it in those terms. I don't necessarily need the whole episode to be Jimmy and Kim and Chuck (though, now that you say it, yeah, do give me that please) - I just DON'T CARE about Mike and Gus, the stoic assassin and the even more stoic chicken man.

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, etc., etc.

This episode of Better Call Saul had only four Saul-centric scenes. It took thirty-six minutes to reach the first of them.

In that case, I would ask why the hell that person isn't striking with everyone else.

There are virtually no working non-union writers.

I mean, first of all, nobody on either side wants this strike. The WGA took a vote a few weeks ago to authorize a strike, but that was really only done so that Guild leadership could use striking as a bargaining chip and the AMPTP would know they weren't bluffing.

That kind of speaks to my last point, though. Killing Aku at this stage isn't going to make the future any better. All he's done for seemingly decades now is sit in his tower, not coming out unless provoked, and yet the world is still awful because of all the seeds that he's already sewn. It's like blowing out the…

Also, like I've said before, Jack's mission isn't to defeat Aku now. Otherwise his mantra would be "Gotta defeat Aku." But it's not. We still get it at the beginning of each episode: "Gotta get back. Back to the past."