I miss Jimmy :(

I'm rewatching Season 3 and it's breaking my heart.

Bob Odenkirk's performance is so bubbly and enthusiastic. When he calls up all of his clients to let them know he's taking a leave from the law he takes time to engage in small talk and listen to their stories, and he cracks jokes with them when they're on their way out of his office. He tells one of his clients who turns out to be a fighter pilot that he respects his service for his country, etc. He sounds like he genuinely enjoys the time he spent doing elder law. Maybe he initially did it just to make ends meet and build a career for himself, but it feels like there is an innocence and playfulness to Jimmy that plays a lot into his talent for salesmanship that also genuinely enjoys people, meetings and conversations. I feel like these are the traits that often make for a great salesman in real life, when you can make great and genuine connections with people. At least, it's one type of salesman... Saul in Season 4 feels more like a shark or a vulture circling it's prey.

Art is open to interpretation so this is by no means an objective analysis, but to me the rainbow painted on the wall in the reception of Jimmy and Kim's office always symbolized the treasure of gold that lies at the end the rainbow. "Jimmy McGill" is Irish, get it? There is a brief moment at the beginning of Season 3 when everyone seems to kind of have what they want. It's a bit of the Better Call Saul version of Walter White's monologue in the Fly episode of Breaking Bad when he talks to Jesse about when he should have stopped cooking meth or dropped dead to inflict the least amount of damage onto everyone else's lives. The pre-watching Jane die moment.

There is this moment at the start of this season where Jimmy and Kim are both working together under one roof, they have an upbeat and quirky receptionist and they both utilize their talents as lawyers in their own respective ways that healthily benefit other people; Kim gets to apply her disciplined side to help out a bank and slowly build her career, and Jimmy gets to apply his charisma and salesmanship to protect elders from con-artists such as his former self, so in a way he found a way to both be useful to society while making a name for himself and making up for his past mistakes. If everything ended here, at the treasure by the end of the rainbow, everything would've been fine. But it didn't.

When Jimmy paints over the rainbow he asks Kim if the logo looks like a stock market crash, but to me it looks like the monitor of a heartbeat dying. Something really died inside of Jimmy when he realized Chuck would never love him for who he was and that he would always only be Slippin' Jimmy to him, and when that very same impulsiveness for mischief that Chuck resented him for backfires and sends Chuck spiraling into mental illness and suicide, it feels like Jimmy really starts to resent himself. He completely shuts down and as a punishment to himself he decides to become the very same guy his brother always thought he was.

This show is such a tragic, accurate and realistic depiction of self-fulfilling prophecies. As much as I love Saul Goodman as a darkly comedic sleazeball, I gotta say rewatching this season made me really sad. There is a powerful message at the core of this show about acceptance and the value of forgiveness. If Jimmy could have forgiven himself for his actions as Slippin' Jimmy and not constantly seek Chuck's approval to validate him as a human being, I think a lot of what transpired would never have happened and he would've eventually have won Chuck's respect down the road.

I'm going to enjoy the chaos and mayhem that we're in for when Saul Goodman dives into the criminal world that we've known from Breaking Bad, but I do hope Jimmy eventually finds some peace within himself in the end. Walter White was a man who transformed into something nobody in the world thought he was, and Jimmy McGill is a man who transformed himself into what he thought the rest of the world wanted him to be.

Submitted December 01, 2019 at 07:52PM by siggeplump https://ift.tt/2P1iEXU