change

In this last season of Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy becoming more reckless in ways that seem both self-endangering and dangerous to others. By recruiting an obviously unsuitable amateur like Jeff into his final series of cons, he is simply begging to get caught, and when it doesn’t look like Jeff is going to be quite as inept as one might have expected, Jimmy starts taking strange chances himself – for instance, breaking into the cancer-sufferer’s house and then lingering there in order to steal items that will ensure an immediate police involvement. (Note: As it turns out, Jeff is plenty incompetent after all.)

But as I say, this is not just about Jimmy endangering Jimmy. It’s important to note that he has never been one for physical violence. Even when, in an earlier season, he gets beaten up by a trio of young punks, when he takes his revenge on them he only scares them. They don’t even get hit. Violence is definitely not Jimmy’s thing. But in the penultimate episode we see him edging closer to it: preparing to smash an urn over the head of the drunken cancer-sufferer, and then advancing on poor Marion with her telephone cord as though preparing to strangle her with it. When he realizes what he’s doing with Marion he stops himself, but in the case of the cancer-sufferer, it’s only external circumstances – the guy falls asleep – that prevents Jimmy from bashing his head in.

It’s also worth noting that Jimmy has seen what that urn is: It contains the ashes of the man’s beloved dog, so to hit him with that, not just breaking the urn but scattering the ashes over the man and his house, would be an act of extraordinary emotional, as well as physical, cruelty. Jimmy really does seem to be tracking towards genuine sociopathy – a tendency that we’ve seen in him before, for instance when he manipulated a panel of judges into believing that he was broken-hearted about his brother’s death and then, afterward, mocking them for their emotion. (He appears never to have noticed that Kim – the woman he loves – had been feeling the same emotion and is shocked to hear him speak so callously of it.)

But in the final episode he takes that sociopathy to a new level. After he’s been arrested, he seeks an encounter with Marie Schrader – still grieving the murder of her husband, a murder for which Jimmy was partly responsible – and in a conference room with a bunch of lawyers gives her a sob story about how he too is a victim of Walter White. When a prosecutor asks him whether he thinks a jury will buy that line, Jimmy instantly snaps out of his sob-story pathetic-victim mode and says, with colossal smugness, “I only need one.” He’s not even pretending, with this poor shellshocked widow sitting right across from him, to give a rat’s ass about the death of her husband. His performance was not staged for her but for the prosecutor. She was just a prop, a necessary prop in the game of getting his inevitable prison sentence reduced. And it works.

It’s immediately after this encounter that Jimmy learns that Kim has confessed everything that she and Jimmy did to Howard Hamlin. And we are asked to believe that this is such a shock to Jimmy’s system that he does an absolute 180: from descending into self-destructive sociopathy, he instantly transforms into a man who is willing to confess everything and spend the rest of his life, maybe forty years or more, in prison. He does everything except declaim “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.”

Does that strike you as a plausible event? As this episode reminds us, as the entire series never fails to insist to us, Jimmy is a con man deep in his bones. As Walter White says to him in a flashback scene in this episode, “So you’ve always been this way.” And he has! He has always been this way. Are we really to believe that Kim’s confession, all by itself, would have the power to produce a complete reversal of character in such a person?

I just can’t buy it. Jimmy has seen Kim act with integrity many times. He has seen her quit her life as a lawyer out of guilt and shame, and refuse the large sum of money she was owed from the Sandpiper settlement. Indeed, her refusing that money is something that, when they were signing their divorce papers, he openly mocked her for. Over and over again he has seen Kim take a principled stand – not always, because Kim loves Con Life also, is always excited by it. But eventually, when the chips are down, she has regularly chosen the more principled path over the more self-gratifying one, and Jimmy has seen that every time – and it has never had any effect on him whatsoever. Now it’s supposed to change his life in the most radical way possible?

I could imagine Jimmy going through with his seven years in federal prison and feeling that in that way he had owned up to his past, had owned up to his deeds. I could see him even taking the tougher prison instead of the cushy one he had originally negotiated for himself. Chuck McGill believes that people don’t change; I believe that they do, but this radically, this instantaneously? The idea that Jimmy McGill at the end of it all would become a self-sacrificing speaker of the Truth … I just can’t get there. It feels like a massive misstep by the show at the worst possible time — an easy, cheap consolation from a show that has typically denied us such consolations.

UPDATE: Brad East offers an alternative take, intelligent as always. I’m sure I will return to this eventually, when time allows!