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I'm very interested to see how this plays into his relationship with Kim, and where she might be by the time we see her in black and white. It's just too perfect that she would be a part of Gene's world, and how everything we have seen over the last 5 seasons plays into his life post ABQ.

She’s going to need a miracle to come out of this unscathed. I have a feeling that she’ll survive and we’ll see her in the Gene timeline, but we now know how deep she’s into this and with who, and who is responsible. When she looked Jimmy in the eye and said in the clearest possible way “I don’t like this. I don’t want you to do it,” only be be rendered powerless when he invalidated her with a soft hug, a part of me died inside. I think we all have at least one moment in our lives when in hindsight there was a clear turning point that could have altered history, and this was Jimmy’s.

If this episode was the calm before the storm, maybe we’re in for consequential destruction more in line with BB than I had thought.

I now believe that the original plan for this series was for Kim to be in such grave danger that Jimmy has to call the vacuum service to have her ‘removed’ to a new identity. He needs to come into contact with Forster’s service and know it works first hand to be so knowledgeable in BB, and this would explain Kim’s complete absence from his life in that show. That would also be perhaps the worst fate aside from death: Destroying her ability to practice law and live the life she worked so hard to earn after coming from nothing, reduced back to square one because of Jimmy’s actions.

I wonder, even if this was the show’s plan, if they’ll change it due to Forster’s passing, but it feels like the perfect tragedy for this particular story.

The show has not had many opportunities to put Jimmy/Saul together with Mike and though not much is said between the two it totally worked at keeping my attention.

I'm glad the showrunners slowed things back down to muse on the responses of Kim and Jimmy in the wake of the explosive crisis, revealing their deepest emotions and psychological mechanisms to cope with not only this incident but their general sensitivities. For both characters their behaviors are becoming indicative of living with lifelong traumas, exacerbated by the traumatic acute event of ep 8. Jimmy's is from a conditioned life of feeling "less than" his brother in deep-rooted family dynamics and riding the wave of his strongest skill in clever wit manifested in a specific area that he mistakenly perceives as his only outlet, ignoring the range that would force a divorcement from his core beliefs. Kim's is from feeling abandoned by her mother and trying to initiate control to cover for making the same mistakes again in attaching to Jimmy by doubling down on this 'high' of breaking bad, following him into the shadows to avoid that confrontation with her cognitive dissonance. There is a grey area between freedom and constraint, as Kimmy believes she is freeing herself from these chains of corporate, and freeing herself by engaging in a relationship with a loose, fun guy, but both choices are choosing a safer path that reinforces complacency and refuses the consideration of change.

I'm really curious how Kim's character will contribute to her own fate given her attitude in this last episode, which suggests it may be more complicit and tragically complex than I initially thought. While I really like my previous theory, it now seems too neat and tidy for the density of this character.

I wouldn't be surprised if the men who accosted Gene at the beginning of this season's first episode were, in fact, her people.

Knew it was going to happen but didn't expect him to be taken off the board so quickly. (Btw fantastic scene where, just like Jesse had to learn what Walt did to Jane, Hector had to learn what Nacho did to him, with Hector's plan to out Gus backfiring on him). This may suggest we will learn the fates of Lalo, Howard and even Kim sooner rather than later, (though the latter is doubtful because they want to keep that character in the story for as long as possible) and the Time Machine book that appears in ep1 and ep2 (six years apart in placement) is alluding to a time jump that will occur during this season's six week intermission with the entire backhalf taking place during the BB and 'Gene' timelines possibly

It was great watching Ignacio stick it to tío Hector, but I found the whole thing just devastating. It was clear it was coming but I guess I was still hoping the writers came up with some insane scenario that we could all ridicule as lazy writing afterwards, but at least allowed him to get out of the situation and make it to Canada or wherever he was planning on running.

And, like others, I was surprised they closed that storyline off so soon in the season.

where, in his debut episode, Walt and Jesse abduct him and he thinks they're cartel, telling them he had nothing to do with Lalo and that it was all Ignacio. Funny how you get a whole storyline from what was a throwaway line.