But we know he doesn’t get a mailroom, just that receptionist in a strip mall office. Thinking about it, that strip mall reminds me of the one the music store is in. Of course, if you’ve seen one strip mall…
What’s really interesting is the way he’s effectively written off his clients now - I always thought he was pretending to care about them more than he actually did (ie, he cared that they got treated properly and received their legal entitlements, but he cared equally as much about getting paid) - but it seems pretty clear to me that he’s got no intention of going back to looking after their legal needs in a year’s time when his suspension ends.
Has it only been a month? From the pacing, I thought each of these eps covered at least 2-3 months! 
Even back decades ago it was very common for law firms to hire temporary staff to help with special projects and such. Whatever the reasons for Kim failing to do so aren’t - IMO - exactly complimentary to her.
Hubris. There’s that word again.
I’m not picking this up from the show. One of the reasons he’s so distressed over the 150% increase in his malpractice insurance rates is because he has every intention of going back to his practice once his exile is over. At least that’s how it comes across to me.
Of course he’s heading down a path that will take him in another direction, and he may be just now getting an inkling that his transition right back into elder law may not be as smooth a path as he anticipated, but I don’t see anything in the episodes aired so far that supports your conclusion that he’s written off his clients. I also don’t think he’s just been pretending to care about them. Sure, he wants to get paid (he’s not hanging out a pro bono shingle), but I think he genuinely cares about the old folks.
[quote=“Marvin_the_Martian, post:681, topic:784040”]
I think that ever since the “monkey with a machine gun” speech it’s been clear that Chuck is not going to rest until Jimmy is out of the law. When have we seen Chuck muster up the willpower to overcome his “condition”? First to use Jimmy’s cell phone to convince Howard to push Jimmy off the Sandpiper case. Then to “bear witness” when Jimmy returns to HHM as a Davis & Main associate, almost successfully rattling Jimmy enough to embarrass him in front of his boss. Finally, to give the pitch to Mesa Verde to prevent Kim from getting the work - a clear attempt to make Kim back out of the shared office arrangement with Jimmy. As long as Chuck is in any position of influence, Jimmy’s career is at risk. Chuck has to be destroyed. And Chuck is the one who created the situation.
[quote]
We last saw Chuck muster up the willpower to overcome his condition when he went out to call for help.
But my point wasn’t that making another attack on Chuck was a pivotal moment for Jimmy. The point was that he turned what could have been a cathartic moment where he confronted some deep truths about his situation into just a means of attacking his brother. He saw how he’d hurt Chuck. He saw how he’d disappointed the woman he loves. He saw how his life was spiralling out of control. And the best thing he could do with that realisation was weaponise it against Chuck. It’s very “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”. Not a good place to be.
Chuck can take a lot of responsibility for making Jimmy into Saul. But Jimmy gets to make choices every day. He could have gone with Rebecca to see Chuck. He could have admitted that he needed help paying his share of the office rent. He could have gone (he still could go) honestly to Kim and say “I realise that I went too far with Chuck. I let my anger get the better of me and I know I’ve let you down”. He didn’t do those things, and he isn’t going to because of his pride and his rage, and ultimately that’s on him, not Chuck.
Is it really that unexpected that characters in BCS or BB will have flaws? Especially minor, realistic flaws like working harder than is good for them for few weeks? I don’t get why people think that it’s somehow off that Kim has a really common flaw that fits the personality we’ve seen of her so far; working to the point that she’s not getting enough sleep seems to fit her driven personality to me, as does being hesitant to ask for/bring in help. People being filled with pride and overconfidence and making bad decisions because of that is not exactly rare on either show.
I don’t get that from the show at all. Jimmy seemed genuinely offended by Sandpiper taking advantage of its residents, the drive he showed in pursuing the case didn’t seem to be purely because he could get money. And the fact that he remembered all of his client’s crazy little details, like which figurine went to which relative, seems to show some genuine care. I think that him being worried about his malpractice insurance rates does show an intention to getting back to them - he’s expecting to survive for a year, then go back to what he was doing before and make his way legitimately. I don’t think he’s actually going to go back to elder law, but I think he thinks that he is for the moment.
BTW, the guy who plays Danny the Squat Cobbler creator used to do a comedy bit where he’d troll TV stations as a guy who supposedly taught kids about being green with Yo-Yos, but couldn’t actually operate a yo-yo.
http://www.amc.com/shows/better-call-saul/talk/2016/02/better-call-saul-mark-proksch-k-strass-zim-zam
[quote=“Pantastic, post:708, topic:784040”]
BTW, the guy who plays Danny the Squat Cobbler creator used to do a comedy bit where he’d troll TV stations as a guy who supposedly taught kids about being green with Yo-Yos, but couldn’t actually operate a yo-yo.
http://www.amc.com/shows/better-call-saul/talk/2016/02/better-call-saul-mark-proksch-k-strass-zim-zam
Kenny Strasser aka K-Strass! Of course before he got around to showing any actual YoYo skills, he’d tell these sad sack stories about his dysfunctional relationships, particularly with his father. (Some of those baseball cards were from my father…) of course, Kenny wasn’t his real name and it was all a big punk, but the fun was watching the news anchors’ reactions.
Am I the only one who wonders whether they are go to kill off
Chuck by the end of the series?
Part of what make the show great is that none of this is black/white. The very personality trait that could indeed be called “being filled with pride and overconfidence and making bad decisions because of that” is also the personality trait that got Kim the Mesa Verde account in the first place. She’s relentless and driven and unyielding and a workaholic–sometimes that trait works out well for people, and sometimes it works out really badly.
It’s really the reason the Kim character has worked so well for me ( she, Jimmy/Saul and Chuck are my three favorites, running well ahead of Mike or the rest that storyline’s crew ). Rhea Seehorn is for me the biggest breakout actor on the show, since I already knew everyone else was good. I think we discussed this last season, but I really appreciate that Kim is unusually well-drawn as a realistic, self-motivated human being who is not just there to act as a prop to hang a plot point on.
And I think you and Pantastic are dead on about her complimentary flaws/strengths. She’s complex enough to have both and they are logically internally consistent to the character. Including her unfortunate attraction to Jimmy.
I can see an easy way that could end the Kim/Jimmy relationship: He tells her he’s broke, and she admits that she can’t handle the Mesa Verde account. Jimmy talks her into letting him work with her behind the scenes to pick up some of her workload, and she allows it. Then, at some point he cuts another corner, it’s found out, and Kim either has to take the fall for it and the hit to her reputation, or she has to tell them that Jimmy has been working with her without a license, which would be at least as troublesome. Jimmy therefore brings Kim down, and she moves out of the city to start over.
Some have speculated that she will be killed in some snafu caused by Jimmy’s underworld work. That seems a little off for this show, so I am guessing a big breakup caused by moral conflict.
While we’re on the subject of Kim and her work habits, does anybody think her failure to bring in someone to assist her might be her way of, if not punishing herself, making herself too busy to think about her guilt and her increasing sense of apprehension towards Jimmy?
But oh, man, was it awesome to watch!
I think you’re right. Kim does indeed have a strange attraction to Jimmy, but he’s going further and further dark (pushed there by his brother, but as others have said, he’s still responsible for his own actions), and Kim is not comfortable with it. I think we saw it foreshadowed in last week’s episode, where Jimmy was fully planning to pull a big scam on the douchebag in the bar, and Kim pulled him up short - “We’re just fooling around, right? We’re not actually going to DO it, are we?” Yeah, Jimmy was ready to go full scam artist.
I get the impression he remembers this stuff because it’s good for business, not necessarily because he truly cares - the whole “dressing some random old dude up as a veteran and sneaking them onto an air force base for photo op with a B-29” indicated to me that he wasn’t quite as altruistic as he PR would have one believe.
Similarly, the scene where he’s calling his clients and saying “I’m out for a year” had shots where he was clearly pysching himself up/getting “in character”.
I think he knows it’s relatively easy money from a lawyering perspective (most lawyers I know IRL make their bread & butter living from wills & estates) but I also think he knows after a year on the sidelines, many of his clients will have moved on (literally or metaphorically) so that path is closed to him or going to be more trouble than it’s worth to keep pursuing.
I think the anger at the malpractice coverage costs is that it will prevent him from doing any lawyering - hence his decision to take Chuck down with him.
As for the Sandpiper thing - Jimmy’s many things, but he’s not a sociopath. It’s quite possible he is genuinely upset at Sandpiper as a human being with the ability to do something about the way other humans are being mistreated, rather than because he cares about the elderly specifically.
I agree. Jimmy cared enough about his elderly clients to crawl around in a dumpster sifting through soiled adult diapers, trying to find shredded documents to incriminate Sandpiper Crossing.
Maybe the inability to get/afford malpractice insurance forces him to take on clients who wouldn’t dare sue him because they have too much to hide? That would necessitate the name change so that his old clients wouldn’t be attracted to him…
How often do 80+ year olds have to update their will though? Maybe some of them Jimmy helped wrangle with their insurance companies or something but I would think the vast bulk of his clientele wouldn’t need him for more than an afternoon.
I don’t think we should read anything into that at all. We don’t really know how long it’s been. Maybe on the top of her to-do list is “hire a paralegal”, we just haven’t seen the process be in motion. And much as BB/BCS are generally very realistic stories, it may just be because having another entire new character around would just complicate all the plotting that needs to happen.