Smoke
In present day, "Gene" is being wheeled out of the Cinnabon by paramedics, after him fainting. After an examination at the hospital, the doctor in charge assures him that he collapsed to due to stress and not a heart attack, and he is released with a clean bill of health. However, he is held up by the nurse at the front desk, who is having trouble entering his fake ID and Social Security numbers into a computer. Saul becomes nervous at the possible exposure of his true identity, but the nurse realizes she has merely mistyped the numbers, and when they go through, she allows "Gene" to leave.
"Gene" decides to take a taxi back to the mall, but as he is being driven there, he realizes that the taxi has an air freshener marked Albuquerque Isotopes in the rear-view mirror and the taxi driver (presumably who is from Albuquerque) appears to be staring at him. Growing paranoid, Saul asks to be dropped off at a traffic crossing. Much to his worry, he notices that the taxi doesn't drive off as he walks away.
In 2003, Jimmy wakes up in bed next to Kim and begins his morning routine. While he is circling job ads in the newspaper, he receives a call on his cell phone from Howard that he doesn't answer. As Jimmy helps Kim with her cast, Howard leaves a message on her voicemail informing them of Chuck's death. Jimmy and Kim race to the fire-gutted ruins of Chuck's house, just as the medical examiner is driving away with Chuck's body. After talking to the arson investigators, Kim tells Jimmy that the fire was caused by a knocked-over lantern and that Chuck died from smoke inhalation. Jimmy notes the electrical appliances strewn in Chuck's backyard and, recalling their last encounter, realizes that something triggered a relapse in Chuck's EHS delusion in the time between then and the fire.
Clocking out of the parking booth for the last time, Mike plays with Kaylee as she tends to the garden in his backyard. Stacey arrives to pick up Kaylee, and Mike tells her that he can pick up Kaylee for her for the rest of the week since he can "keep his own hours" with his new job. Mike receives his first paycheck from Madrigal Electromotive, and sees that his net pay is over $10,000. As he watches baseball on TV, Mike gets restless and makes a phone call to ask for Madrigal's address in Las Cruces.
Chuck's death puts Jimmy in a depressed mood. Kim finds him staring blankly at the sink and hands him the phone; Howard is asking Jimmy for feedback on Chuck's planned obituary. As Howard recites a summary of Chuck's career and accomplishments, Jimmy puts the phone down and sits quietly in the living room. Kim approves the obituary on Jimmy's behalf and sits next to him, offering shots from their Zafiro Añejo tequila bottle. Jimmy drinks one shot and continues sitting silently, while Kim eventually finishes the bottle and falls asleep.
We jump back to a few days earlier, when Hector Salamanca collapsed from a stroke while meeting with Gus Fring and Juan Bolsa. Immediately after the ambulance drives away with Hector, Nacho and Gus are left standing in the lot of the upholstery shop. As Gus makes a call on his cell phone to Juan Bolsa, Nacho sees a broken sewer grate on the ground and moves to covertly dispose of the tainted pills. However, he has to abort when Gus ends the call and tells him that Bolsa wants a word with them.
Nacho and Arturo drive out to the Los Pollos Hermanos plant to convene with Bolsa and Gus. Bolsa tells Nacho and Arturo that the Salamancas will keep their territory despite Hector's apparent stroke and instructs the pair to continue working as before. After Nacho and Arturo are dismissed, Bolsa confers with Gus, who believes that someone will make a move on the Salamancas that will trigger a drug war and draw heat from the police and the DEA. Meanwhile, Nacho drives to a remote bridge and dumps the pills into a river. What he doesn't know is that he's being watched by Victor, who has placed a tracker on Nacho's pickup truck.
A few days later, Barry Hedberg, the floor supervisor at Madrigal's Las Cruces warehouse, is preparing to go to work. After helping his son fix his bike chain, he gets into his car, only to find the battery is dead and that his ID card has gone missing. As it turns out, Mike has broken into Barry's car, drained the battery, and stolen his ID to infiltrate the warehouse. As he drives around the facility on a golf cart, he interacts with several workers, looks over inventory, and ruffles through trash. After he tracks down Barry and returns the ID card, Mike speaks with the office manager and identifies himself as a "security consultant", listing the many potential breaches he has found at the warehouse. When the manager expresses incredulousness, Mike tells him to contact Lydia at the Madrigal corporate office, to make clear who hired him.
Jimmy attends Chuck's funeral with Kim, and is offered condolences by Clifford Main, Richard Schweikart, Brian Archuleta, and Brenda. The only people who don't approach Jimmy are Howard and Chuck's ex-wife, Rebecca. When they arrive home from the funeral, Jimmy and Kim find Howard sitting on the curb outside their apartment. Inside, Howard tells them that he thinks Chuck committed suicide, and explains how he forced Chuck out of HHM when he threatened to sue the firm's insurer for raising their rates over Chuck's mental illness. Howard — unaware of Jimmy's role in the insurance incident — blames himself for Chuck's death. Jimmy coldly replies that that's "his cross to bear." Howard and Kim are stunned as Jimmy nonchalantly feeds his fish and makes coffee.
Tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Mike going around a Madrigal office by pretending to be an employee, then pointing out the flaws in security, is similar to a scene in Beverly Hills Cop where Axel Foley does the same in a customs warehouse. Jonathan Banks was also in that film as villain henchman Zack.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Downplayed. Mike blends in during his unannounced inspection of the Madrigal warehouse by acting like he's an authority figure who's supposed to be there, but without making a spectacle of himself.
- The Bus Came Back: Clifford Main, Richard Schweikart, and Chuck's ex-wife Rebecca all make brief appearances attending Chuck's funeral.
- Call-Back:
- Mike is now using the punctured hose from his spike belt as a soak hose, just as he'd claimed it was for in the first place.
- The music playing at Chuck's funeral (Gabriel Fauré's Sicilienne) is an arrangement of the piece that Chuck played on his piano with Rebecca's name on it.
- Call-Forward:
- One of the job listings in the classifieds that we see when Jimmy is job-hunting is for Beneke Fabricators. Another is for the future laser tag.
- When Juan Bolsa asks Gus Fring his thoughts about Hector Salamanca's stroke, Gus says that infighting would inevitably bring the DEA to town. Indirectly, Hector's absence helps set up Heisenberg's rise.
- When Howard informs Jimmy of his role in worsening Chuck's condition and informs him about the insurance raise, Jimmy learning about his own role in said condition, cheerfully whistles as he pins all the blame on Howard, while Kim looks disturbed. Not unlike a certain interaction between Walt and Jesse in Season 5. His pretending not to care while self-sabotaging everything in his life is also like Jesse after killing Gale.
- Child Prodigy: Chuck was a high school valedictorian at just fourteen years old.
- Cliffhanger Copout: Downplayed with the flash forwards: the episode starts by picking up immediately after "Gene" collapses, he's rushed to the hospital... and after some tests and some waiting, a doctor comes in to inform him that he most likely just collapsed from stress; the tests they did ruled out a heart attack.
- Clipboard of Authority: Mike picks up a clipboard to blend in while he's doing his security audit.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Mike does such a good job of auditing Madrigal's site security that it makes you wonder why he doesn't do it as a genuine career.
- Dissonant Serenity: Right after Howard tearfully confesses his (assumed) role in Chuck's suicide, Jimmy casually feeds his fish and starts whistling while brewing some coffee, even offering some to Howard and Kim, who are more than a little put-off by his nonchalance.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Jimmy being led out on a stretcher with a breathalyzer mask after fainting at his Cinnabon job looks an awful lot like Chuck being led into hospital the same way after his panic attacks.
- Failed a Spot Check: Everyone at the Madrigal office who talks to Mike, but doesn't realize he's wearing someone else's security badge. Mike views this as a major breach of security that he's able to walk around with someone else's badge without once being stopped, and for that matter, the fact that this facility doesn't order a building-wide badge check when the badge's real owner shows up. It does help that Mike and the badge's owner are both bald, white men, so from a distance it should help him blend in until somebody takes a closer look. It's simply that Madrigal has so many employees that nobody is surprised when an unknown authority figure just shows up.
- Foreshadowing: Jimmy is nervous when he sees a cop from his hospital room, and when his false identity credentials as Gene, such as his driver's license and his social security number, aren't checking out with the hospital staffer. He makes it out, but the scene leaves no doubt that his cover will eventually get blown.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: You can see on the computer when the receptionist is trying to input Gene's social security number that the Os she types don't have strikes through them, in contrast with other numerical 0s visible on screen, which if spotted will reveal to the viewer the reason the computer rejects the data before the receptionist figures it out herself.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Mike officially makes the most of his Madrigal job, stealing Barry's ID card and going around the floor finding security breaches, and for that matter, workers failing to comply with basic safety regulations, to inform the bosses about.
- Heroic BSoD:
- Jimmy becomes deeply troubled after Chuck's death and spends almost the entire episode consumed by depression and guilt.
- Howard has pretty much presented himself throughout the series as clean-cut, cool and collected, but his scene with Jimmy and Kim is the first time we see him visibly disheveled and emotionally vulnerable. He's clearly anguished by Jimmy saying Howard deserves it.
- Hey, Wait!:
- Happens to Gene twice as he's attempting to leave the hospital—once when the receptionist is having trouble getting the computer to accept his data, and again immediately after when it turns out he'd left his driver's license with said receptionist.
- When Mike sneaks into Madrigal, he goes past the breakroom and an employee yells out to him—to sign another employee's birthday card.
- Hypothetical Fight Debate: Two Madrigal workers are arguing over who'd win in a fight – Muhammad Ali or Bruce Lee. Mike eventually chimes in, feeling that unless Lee has a gun, Ali would win in three minutes or less.
- Internal Reveal: Jimmy finds out about the insurance drama at HHM, which caused Howard to kick out Chuck.
- Irony: Rebecca's openly sobbing for Chuck at his funeral, but is sitting by herself and has only Howard give her condolences. Jimmy's front and center, with everyone telling him how sorry they are for his loss, while Jimmy has cut himself off from all feeling.
- It's All My Fault: Howard believes him forcing Chuck out of HHM over the insurance issue is what triggered his relapse and suicide, unaware of Jimmy's role in HHM's insurer becoming aware of Chuck's mental problems in the first place.
- Kick the Dog: When Howard tells Jimmy and Kim that he blames himself for Chuck's death, Jimmy basically throws his guilt back in his face.Jimmy: Well Howard, I guess that's your cross to bear.
- List of Transgressions: Mike finds a sizable list of security breaches in the Madrigal warehouse during his impromptu audit to dress down the local manager with.Mike: I waltz through security with someone else's ID. Nobody gives me a second look. When the rightful owner shows up, there's no facility-wide badge check. I find access doors left unlocked or propped open, passwords written on post-it notes. Warehouse workers are using pen and paper instead of electronic inventory devices, which leaves you wide open to pilfering. You got duplicate routing numbers on cargo, surveillance-camera blind spots on the north and the east side of the floor, inventory documents that are going into the trash instead of being shredded, not to mention loading equipment being driven at unsafe speeds and crews disregarding safety protocols.
- No OSHA Compliance: During his security inspection tour of the Madrigal warehouse, Mike briefly stops to chew out the leader of a group of workers who are not wearing lift belts or gloves while pulling boxes from the shelves.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The flash forward Cold Opening ends with "Gene" getting into a taxi... and the driver keeps staring at him, silently, in the mirror, and it eventually gets to the point where "Gene" has him pull over so he can put some distance between them. We do not know who the driver is, but he has an Albuquerque Isotopes air freshener hanging from the mirror, and it's implied the driver recognizes him as Saul.
- Oh, Crap!: At first Barry is relieved when Mike returns his security ID, but his smile recedes immediately when Mike dryly asks for his manager.
- One-Hour Work Week: Mike tells Stacey that he makes his own hours at his new job and can look after Kaylee whenever. He accepts paychecks from Madrigal without actually doing any work for them, and only starts to take up his apparent responsibilities as a security consultant purely out of interest.note
- Pet the Dog:
- Howard continues his petting streak in the wake of Chuck's death by urging Jimmy not to look at his body before the coroner's van takes it away, calling Jimmy to have him okay the obituary, and finally confessing to Jimmy and Kim about the role he thinks he played in Chuck's suicide. He's also the only person shown offering his condolences to Rebecca in addition to Jimmy.
- Mike doesn't dwell on the worker whose badge he stole when chewing out the manager for lax security in the warehouse. While technically it's Barry's job to secure the badge against theft, we see that Barry had taken reasonable steps. Mike's simply better at subverting them.
- Properly Paranoid: As it turns out, "Gene" actually had proper reason to worry about someone recognizing him as Saul Goodman even all the way out in Nebraska. A taxi driver with an Albuquerque Isotopes air freshener hanging in his car is staring intently at him as he sits in the back seat, possibly recognizing him.
- Recurring Element: The opening has Saul-turned-Gene panicking that his fake ID's been caught or he's been eyed by strangers. Nacho's trying to figure out whether Gus or the cartel have fingered him for his part in Hector's stroke. Mike casually swipes a Madrigal worker's security tags and wanders around their warehouse, nobody even thinking to question him.
- Refuge in Audacity: Mike steals a Madrigal worker's identification badge, infiltrates their Las Cruces warehouse, and exploits any weaknesses he can find. No one pays him any mind, not even noticing the fact that he's wearing someone else's ID pass. When the manager states that he's unfamiliar with Mike's position, he simply tells him to give Lydia Rodarte-Quayle a call.
- Stalker Shot: Nacho goes to a bridge to dispose the pills that caused Hector to have his stroke. When Nacho thinks he's safe, the camera cuts to show a different view of the bridge and the camera zooms out to reveal Victor sitting in his car watching Nacho from a distance and it's revealed he has a tracker installed on Nacho's truck so he's able to follow his movements.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: Madrigal's security is a joke as Mike demonstrates, however the mistakes made are also a case of Truth in Television.
- The War Has Just Begun: Juan Bolsa asks Gus what he thinks will happen in the wake of Hector's stroke. Gus reasons that once word gets out amongst the criminal underworld that Hector is out of commission, "someone will move against the Salamancas, which brings war, which brings chaos... which brings the DEA."
- Truth in Television: Aside perhaps from Mike damaging an employee's property and trespassing to 'borrow' his badge, pretty much every technique he uses is also used by real pen testers and security auditors, as are the laughably ineffective security policies. Chances are if you work in a large corporation you will get periodic reminders from the security team over not making the mistakes seen in this episode... and examples of the people who made them anyway...
- Wham Line: "Well, Howard, I guess that's your cross to bear."
- Wham Shot: Nacho successfully throws away the pills after the meeting with Bolsa. But then, as he's exhaling, the camera cuts to show Victor sitting in his car by the side of the bridge, and has a tracker installed on Nacho's truck.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Kim doesn't speak, but the sentiment is all over her face as Jimmy coldly shifts the blame for Chuck's death to Howard.
