Jimmy’s change
So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?
His case is simply stated. Jimmy’s volte-face in the third act of the finale is unwarranted either by the episode’s events or by the series’ narrative thrust as a whole. Who Jimmy is, deep down, has more or less always been set in stone, and that concreteness was not softened by these final episodes. Jimmy-as-Saul-as-Gene has only become more narcissistic, more reckless, more negligent, even murderous and sociopathic. Are we really supposed to believe that a single remarkable deed by Kim has the power to undo all of that, to make of Jimmy a Sydney Carton bound, selflessly, for the guillotine of a lifetime in prison?
Answer: Yes, actually. I think so. But before I defend that view, let me say why I resonate with Alan’s disappointment.
His disappointment was my disappointment with the original finale of Breaking Bad, which just about everyone else I read and know thought was perfect. It was not perfect, and for the same rationale Alan offers for BCS. Vince Gilligan loved his character too much to let him down. Though Walt had to die, though he had to be humiliated, he also had to go out in a blaze of glory. He had to earn some degree of redemption. He had to do something good, or at least something on his own terms. And thereby, all fans, not just “bad” fans, could get some measure of catharsis for watching and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering on a wicked and murderous drug dealer for five years.
Ever since that finale first aired nearly a decade ago, I’ve proposed an alternate ending. It’s only slightly different than what occurs in the final ten minutes of the episode. Walt arrives in his car, parks it where he does, walks into the building with all going according to plan. Only: when the button is pressed and the machine gun lets loose, the bullets spray wildly without hitting anybody. The plan fails. The cowboy’s last hurrah is an anticlimax. Walt doesn’t win. Instead, once the bullets are finished, the neo-Nazis look at Walter, look at Jesse, and shrug. Then they take them both outside. First they shoot Jesse, as Walter looks on. Then they shoot Walter. They dump both in an unmarked grave. Fade to black; end credits.
That’s a bleak ending, but its bleakness matches the bleakness of the show’s story. For that story is one without any happy endings. Walt doesn’t get to save his orphaned would-be son. His outlandish plan doesn’t succeed. Such plans don’t always work. He doesn’t get to pass out and pass on in the midst of the humming chemistry of a meth lab, happy in his own way, dying as he lived. He doesn’t get to set the terms of his exit from this life. That’s the way he thought he could live. But he was wrong. And the show’s writers mistook their protagonist’s self-understanding as the show’s own inner meaning. An easy error to make, but a costly one. Not just the bad fans rejoiced at the finale. Even ordinary viewers left with a sense of cathartic release: Jesse got away, the bad guys lost, and Walt redeemed himself. Good for him.
It seems to me that Alan thinks the same (whatever his actual thoughts on the BB finale) of the BCS finale. I wondered, going into the episode, whether Gilligan and Gould would be tempted by the same error: the need to make their evil lead good by the end; the desire to make things right that can’t be made right; the pull to let Saul undo, by TV magic, what can’t be undone.
I understand why one might see “Saul Gone,” the name of the series finale, as indulging that temptation. But I don’t agree, for the following four reasons.
First, there’s a lot more going on in Jimmy’s incredible courtroom speech than breaking good, for Kim’s sake. He’s putting on a performance. That performance is Heisenberg-like in its pomposity and pride. He doesn’t want seven years in a cush prison with the world thinking he was a victim. Instead, he wants the world—the feds, the judge, his future inmates, even Kim—to know that without him, Heisenberg wouldn’t have lasted a month as a free man. The real hero of Walt and Jesse and Mike and Gus’s story was Saul Goodman. He made it all possible. After all, he’s the only one still standing. Are you not impressed? Are you not entertained?
Second, so much of what the previous 61 episodes of BCS gave us, which the 62 episodes of BB did not, is that, unlike Walt, who was rotten to the core from the beginning and just needed the opportunity to show it, there was always a goodness to Jimmy intermingled with the bad. Not only certain good inclinations, but the desire to do and to be good. Granted, that desire is snuffed out by the time he’s transformed into Saul. But we have no reason to suppose that it’s gone forever, that it’s beyond recovery. Moreover, he didn’t leave Kim; she left him. It is precisely her reentry in his life that reawakens that desire once more. On the phone, she tells him to turn himself in; he scoffs and tells her to take her own medicine. She does. At great cost to her own life, possibly bringing it to an end. I find it wholly plausible, not that her extraordinary good deed converts him from pure evil to pure good, but rather that her action, like a flash of lightning, transforms the scenery before him. It shuffles the board of his potential actions. It makes possible certain decisions that he would never have considered before. He doesn’t become a martyr. But he does tell the truth.
Why? Because, third, what we know of Jimmy—again, from those prior 61 episodes—is that his moral psychology is not defined solely by greed or victory or successful schemes. An additional and irreducible element is his desire to please those he loves or reveres, even in spite of himself. (In this, too, he is different and, I think, a more complicated character than Walter White.) That’s the thing that made his relationship to Kim so complex. Together, they were bad. But in truth, while he made her worse, she made him better. She kept him from from the dark side, from truly breaking bad all the way. Only in her absence does does he do that. All his worst propensities, however much he toyed with them and leaned in their direction, he kept at bay so long as she was still around. That’s not to say such an arrangement would have lasted forever. But he always cared what she thought. Because he always truly loved her, as she did him. And what he is doing in that courtroom is trying to earn her approval, trying to see a glimmer of the love that once burned bright in her eyes. I have to say, this strikes me as absolutely and unquestionably psychologically and emotionally plausible. The man is a living image of self-sabotage in service of his insatiable desires. He never knows when to stop. Only now, he isn’t risking everything for the sake of some petty score. He’s forsaking a short time in prison for an indefinite one for the sake of the woman he never stopped loving, because the one and only thing that ever competed with his love for self and love for money was love for her. Which is to say, his need for her requited love. So he schemes one last performance for the ages. (Showtime!) And, as ever, he gets what he wants. It works—like Walt’s plan worked—except no one thinks him a hero, and the cost is a life sentence.
Fourth and last, it’s essential not to overlook what Gould shows us on the bus and in the prison. Jimmy isn’t in chains. His spirit isn’t quenched. He’s finally at rest. He’s among the people he always worked for and with and among. He always had their back, and now they’ve got his. They’re chanting his name. They’re fist-bumping him as he swaggers by. He’s not a fish out of water. He’s not suffering in squalor. He’s king of the castle. He’s come home. This is where he belongs. This is where he’s comfortable. This is where he was always meant to be, where his path always led. There’s not a trace of pain or resentment on his face. Not, again, because he’s a martyr. But because he’s accepted who he is and what he’s done, in an irresolvable combination (one that defined his life from start to finish) of chest-thumping pride, feigned performance, and quiet shame.
Nor is Kim’s visit an absolution. Their few words reflect the years and the distance between them. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, to rectify his wrongs. But behind bars, in the plain light of day, he can acknowledge who he is to the one person (apart from his brother) whose opinion he values, and she can accept that knowledge so long as he isn’t hurting anyone or inciting her to do the same. His quiet bravado (“…with good behavior…”) is a sign that he’s no Sydney Carton, nor does he imagine himself to be. He’s Jimmy. But then, Jimmy isn’t the antithesis of Saul Goodman, since Jimmy always was and always will be Slippin’ Jimmy. Kim, though, always loved Jimmy, and Jimmy always loved Kim. If what it took to see her again, to see her look at him like he was Jimmy, not Saul, one more time, was this—getting all the credit for Heisenberg’s crimes while serving time he always knew was coming down the pike—then so be it.
His whole life was a tissue of tradeoffs, anyway, cooking up some brilliant idea in the moment to get what he wanted most, without necessarily thinking of the long-term effects. He did it one last time. Who’s to say he’d regret it now anymore than he did in the past? In the time machine motif that haunts the episode like the ghosts of another Dickens tale, Jimmy wonders about regrets, his own and others. We know he always regretted losing Kim. His moment in the courtroom is his last chance to hop in his own personal time machine and make one single change. Not to alter the laws broken, the people conned, the lives ruined, the victims murdered. Not even—though he does regret it—to unwind his brother’s end.
No, the one change concerns Kim, having once lost her, seemingly forever. Once that change is made, he can live with the consequences.
