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There’s a “one thing after another” feel to the story.Writing application : mkvmerge v11.0.0 ('Alive') 64bit But three seasons into the show, the plot ought to have more sense of direction and a more compelling thrust. I appreciate the zigs and zags of Jimmy’s journey, which has him toggling between charming hustler and charmless hustler. Dull is watching Chuck wrestle with his illness and his demons. Not much happens, but it’s surprisingly riveting. Deliberate is watching Mike take apart that car in the desert, trying to find Gus Fring’s bug. But there is a difference between dull and deliberate. I think “Better Call Saul” should have its own feel, its own style, its own moral universe. “You just want this to be ‘Breaking Bad!’” the show’s most ardent fans will shout at me. “Better Call Saul” is really jumping from one genre to another, often separated by nothing more than a smash cut. But it had one tone, which is to say the two principle threads were woven tightly together. “The Sopranos” attempted a version of this hybrid - it was a mob story as well as a marvelously executed soap opera. That’s a lot, and fans of one element of the show might be indifferent to another. “Better Call Saul” is a singular hybrid of a show, one that is trying to: 1) tell a nuanced psychological story about two brothers 2) tell a nuanced and sometimes violent story about a handful of thugs 3) highlight the inner and ugly workings of law firm life and 4) do all this while constrained and guided by the contours of “Breaking Bad.” I was waiting for Gus to say something like, “Nacho, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.” But unlike Chuck, he isn’t mentally tormented.įring shoots Nacho one of his trademark blank and baleful stares as the ambulance pulls away, suggesting to me that the man has instantly figured out Nacho’s perfidy. The admission has terrible blowback for Jimmy, who predicts he will soon lose all of his clients - “They’re smearing my name across the tristate area” - and, at least for now, the money he stood to earn from the Sandpiper settlement. Jimmy finds this every bit as appalling as Irene does, and he engineers a kind of reverse sting, turning himself into the target and confessing all his mischief on a hot mike at a chair-yoga class. He can’t persuade the seniors at Sandpiper Crossing to re-embrace Irene, the leader of the class-action settlement, who has been deemed inexcusably selfish by her peers. I think Chuck’s mental turmoil in the aftermath of Jimmy’s peace overture leaves him conscience-stricken and ready to die in a blaze of his own making.Ĭompare this with Jimmy’s own methods for coping with guilt. And on the evidence of the flashback at the start of the episode - a cozy scene in which the older McGill reads in a tent to the younger one - I’d say it isn’t true. Good thing he didn’t want hurt Jimmy’s feelings! He’s brutally rebuffed by Chuck, who delivers this eviscerating line: “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the truth is you’ve never mattered all that much to me.” 2 lands in the form of Jimmy, who visits and attempts a heartbreakingly sincere, painfully honest rapprochement. “You won,” Howard says to Chuck, a devastating pair of final words. That instant settlement had to rankle, in part because Howard demonstrated what magnanimity really looks like. Why the change? My sense is that Chuck’s electricity phobia is a stand in for his conscience, which begins to torment him after he is ushered out the door of his firm with $3 million of Howard’s money. He ends in a full-on relapse, and a suicidal one at that. He was on the mend just a few chronological days ago, looking forward to a barbecue with friends and to a life surrounded by colleagues and the electromagnetic pulses that turned him into a shut-in. And Kim says so long to the grind of a one-woman start-up law practice, having reordered her priorities (Blockbuster home videos and nachos now top the list) after a car crash that nearly killed her.Īs it has in the past, the show whipsawed viewers, this time over the issue of Chuck’s mental state. Hector most likely says farewell to the use of his limbs, though that is a parting he will learn about in a hospital soon enough. Chucks bid adieu to his sanity and then his life.

Howard said goodbye to Chuck, having masterfully engineered his former mentor’s exit from Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. Jimmy said goodbye to his senior law practice and the office where he and Kim worked. Fittingly enough, the Season 3 finale of “Better Call Saul” was all about goodbyes.

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