"You fought all the... dirty... Axis Powers."
"Things work out the way they're supposed to, I guess."
— Howard Hamlin
Tropes
- Amoral Attorney: Chuck has now proven to be just as capable as Jimmy or Kim are of doing this on someone else.
- Bait-and-Switch: The airfield major and several other officers are returning after Jimmy told Captain Bauer that he needed water for "Fudge". Jimmy is scared that he's been caught in the act and about to be arrested. But it turns out that the major and the other officers want to have their picture taken in the belief that "Fudge" really is a war hero.
- 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.
- The Determinator: Chuck holds it together for a meeting with Mesa Verde, even allowing every electrical device and light in the firm to remain turned on, to avoid untoward appearances in front of a lucrative client Howard wants to hold onto for HHM. He's left in a state verging on a coma after his prolonged exposure to electricity. He was that determined to stick it to Jimmy through Kim.
- Dirty Old Man: The "old veteran" that Jimmy found for his veteran's shoot was someone he defended for public masturbation.
- 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.
- Passive Aggressive Combat: Chuck's sales pitch to Mesa Verde takes this form. He has nothing but compliments for Kim as being brilliant and talented despite her youth as a lawyer, and she's obviously the right choice going forward. There's even some Self-Deprecation as being an old-time lawyer the legal world is passing by. But then he starts to bring up legal requirements applicable to banking in New Mexico law, and the significant consequences of not fulfilling those requirements. The implication is being clearly made that chances are good that a relatively young and experienced like Kim will fudge things up in a bad way at some point, no matter how much potential she has.
- Rule of Symbolism: The fast food place where Jimmy and Kim have their celebratory dinner is coincidentally enough named "Dog House".
- Sinister Surveillance: Mike as he surveils Hector's operation looking for a weakness.
- 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.
- We Need a Distraction: Jimmy tells Captain Bauer that "Fudge" is dehydrating and that he forgot the water bottle. The Captain leaves, and that buys Jimmy and his crew enough time to shoot the commercial.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Jimmy desperately wants to hold onto his dream of Kim and himself practicing out of the same office space as their own bosses. And it's easy to understand why. He enjoys helping the elderly with their needs, and sees it as being able to do good in the world in his own way, and he more than anyone else knows Kim's potential as a lawyer. But when Chuck's and Howard's actions threaten that dream? He doesn't skip a beat in doctoring Chuck's application documents, which is both a criminal offence and grounds for disbarment.
- 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.
