It’s hard to say too much about last night’s return of Better Call Saul without spoiling it. So if you haven’t yet watched it – don’t read any more! Go read something else!
As I wrote a few days ago, the central question of BCS is identity. It’s a general question: How do we become whoever it is we are? And a question specific to this narrative: How did Jimmy McGill become Saul Goodman?
The question has always been framed by the tension between Jimmy and his brother Chuck – Chuck, a brilliant, successful attorney with a reverence for legal ideals but also with a boatload of arrogance, pride and resentment, has, it seems, for years, despaired of Jimmy being able to walk the straight and narrow. He’s tried to help, he’s been mildly encouraging, but when it counts – really counts – he cuts Jimmy’s legs out from under him. Every time.
So as Chuck tells his brother, You’ll never change. You’ll always be Slippin’ Jimmy and then, most cruelly in the last episode of season 3, You’ve never really meant that much to me…
….we can start to contemplate Jimmy’s muted response to his brother’s death in last night’s episode. Extremely muted – Bob Odenkirk speaks (as Jimmy, not Gene), I think, twenty words or so in the entire episode.
What’s he thinking about? Is he grieving at all? This is the last blood tie he has in this world – gone. He seemed to care for Chuck – he did care for him, for years, in very concrete terms. Is he mulling over Chuck’s final, cruel words? Is he wondering if the fire was accidental or if Chuck committed suicide? (we know the answer – but the other characters don’t). Is he mulling over his possible responsibility for any of this?
I don’t know. What I do know is that once again, the Gilligan/Gould (the latter is the showrunner now) world presents us with the inexorably turning wheel of moral consequences in a startling way – I’ve watched that ending three times now. I can’t get over the sharp, abrupt, but yet so subtle turn that happens in those seconds.
It’s a moment that propels us forward, but not only to Saul Goodman. Bear with me.
Very quickly, what happens is that Howard Hamlin (told you – secret weapon!) comes to Jimmy and Kim’s apartment after the memorial service and tearfully reveals something that’s news to Jimmy: the proximate cause of Chuck’s relapse and, he’ll assume, death, was – he thinks – Howard’s insistence on Chuck’s departure from the firm he founded because of higher malpractice rates brought on by the revelations about Chuck’s condition brought out by Jimmy and Kim at the hearing.
What Howard and Kim don’t know – and which Jimmy doesn’t reveal, either, is that the only reason the insurance company knew about this was because Jimmy told them.
Once again, in that moment, there’s a choice to be made. Be authentic and truthful? Deal together with the tragic complexities of the situation and all the questions it raises?
Or maybe you could do this. Something could click inside you – all those moving parts, all those negative messages, all the frustration, all the suspicions about your own nature, and all the darkness that is actually in your nature for whatever reason – and you could say to the person in pain, suffering for something for which you bear responsibility, too:
Well, Howard , I guess that’s your cross to bear.
And you could stand up and go feed the fish.
Out of those ashes, Saul Goodman is born, I’m thinking.
But it doesn’t end there, though, because I keep coming around to that opening scene, the scene of Jimmy-Saul-Gene in hiding (witness protected? I don’t know) in Omaha, obviously constantly wary of being discovered. He’s far from Albuquerque and the body count back there, leading a different life, but every encounter – with a hospital admissions clerk, with a cab driver (that was creepy) is an occasion for doubt, suspicion and fear.
You might even say – that’s his cross to bear.
Charlotte was Both 