revisiting Saul

After further reflection: I’m the mark. The easy mark. It pains me to say so, but I fell for it. Jimmy didn’t change — didn’t change at all; but he made me think he did. You got me, Jimmy. You’re good, man.

You have to play the cards you’re dealt, and Jimmy was dealt some very bad cards. But in the end, during that final courtroom scene, he played them beautifully — he worked a simultaneous double con.

Con one: To make the court — and ultimately the public, when the news is out —  believe that he was the real mastermind behind the Heisenberg drug empire. Sure, he could’ve taken the seven years in cushy prison that he negotiated: but that would have meant being portrayed as a small-timer, a minor player in a game full of bigger players (Walt, Gus, Lalo). Not the deal he wants. So he trades in those seven years for a life sentence — but a life sentence in which he is forever known as the genius, the power behind the throne, the Big Player who had simply been disguised as, in the words of Betsy Kettleman, “the kind of lawyer guilty people hire” — and poor guilty people at that.

Con two: He makes absolutely certain that Kim is there, because at the same time that he is testifying to his own artistry and skill he also works to convince Kim that he has been moved by her example to become a brave truth-teller. (With the Sphinx-like Kim you can never be sure, but I’m inclined to think that she buys it. I don’t think she’d have visited him in prison otherwise.) Note that this idea — that Kim’s courage in making her affidavit stung his conscience and impelled him to reveal his real importance — also works for the public narrative: it makes his claim that he was the real mastermind feel like a confession rather than a boast.

Anyway: it’s fabulous! — the two parts moving in opposite directions, like a complex mechanism that opens one door even as it closes another. He cons the court and the public in one direction while conning Kim in the other. And life in prison is just the price he has to pay for executing that brilliant move. His satisfaction is in knowing that he is the absolute master of his chosen craft. That’s something he can meditate on for the next forty years or so. With or without ice cream.