Much has been said (both positive and negative) about the show's deliberate, methodical pacing. While it mostly amounts to an aesthetic choice, it also contributes to one of the show's primary themes: in the real world, personal change is neither rapid nor linear. It proceeds slowly, erratically, oftentimes silently. It goes back and forth, like a pendulum, with our accumulated internal decay escaping our notice until, perhaps, it is too late.
Take the ending of season 3. In a more traditional story, Jimmy's moral decline would have been fully solidified by then, with the show possessing more than enough narrative justification to push Jimmy over the edge. And yet, he commits an act of pure selflessness, by mending the relationships he'd splintered at the nursing home. This was when the show achieved superiority over Breaking Bad, in my eyes: convenience and contrivance were thrown away to provide a realistic, layered portrait of a genuine human being, whose regressions are sometimes accompanied by his best moments.
Which brings me to my main point. If you're waiting for the show to give Jimmy his equivalent of the "you have lung cancer" bombshell, to give him a clear-cut catalyst for his full descent into amorality, you haven't been paying attention. The entirety of this multi-season slow-burn would become irrelevant and redundant, if his transformation gets reduced to a single inciting incident.
That's why Breaking Bad started off with such a dramatic reveal, instead of saving it for the fourth or fifth season. Imagine if that show had instead been about the slow corruption of a public school teacher, whose mounting frustrations gradually feed into his darker impulses, only to give him the lung cancer diagnosis late into the narrative's run. Assuming this would then play out as it did in BB, the twist would feel cheap, easy, and almost like a betrayal. So too would a simple "Kim dies" explanation, or any other assorted random tragedy, in the context of Better Call Saul.
Kim may well die, or become a drug addict, or become Wendy (no). Anything may happen, but the question is, what will the impact be? How will it be depicted in light of Jimmy's overall development? It won't lead to a hyper-acceleration in his arc. It will be yet another piece in the slowly-unfolding puzzle, one that we might not be able to see in its full scope until we take a step back and see Saul Goodman where Jimmy once stood, without us knowing precisely how we got there.
Submitted August 31, 2018 at 08:40AM by MadameIronMouse https://ift.tt/2wyFLj7
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