Wtf? No to all of that. I meant Irene’s friends getting their settlement money along with an apology from Irene for dragging out the case would smooth things between her and her friends. Jimmy is probably never going to see any of them ever again.
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I don’t know about that. I think some interesting things could be done in a plot line that has Jimmy using a con to bring the girls back to Irene. Showing him having a conscience and not yet in pure Saul mode makes some sense.
In fact, I have no doubt that one visit from Jimmy to the girls could patch up the feud and make the girls think it was their own idea to forgive and forget. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as some plot point that fails somehow (Irene croaking before repairs can be made, Jimmy bringing too much scrutiny on himself to be seen socializing with the girls etc)
Well, my guess for what would happen in the finale, judging only by when I read the title “Lantern” earlier this season, kind of turned out how I thought it would. Though I didn’t expect the exact way we’d get there.
Is Kim now going to spend her days watching movies and becoming addicted to painkillers?
I think that Gus and Nacho were in on it together to get Hector.
Don’t know about that. After the episode, on the “Talking Saul” show on AMC the co creator and the actor who plays Nacho were on and to hear them, it sure didn’t sound like Gus and Nacho were working together.
Heh, heh…
I didn’t watch that so I will take your word for it. Gus gave Nacho a couple of looks, first when Hector collapsed and again when he showed the EMTs a now full bottle of pills. Maybe it was that Gus figured out what Nacho was up to.
It’s possible others need the money a lot more than she, Jimmy seemed at least able to stir up such a feeling among the other mall walkers as part of his scam. OTOH it doesn’t seem such a view was strongly expressed by anyone to Irene prior to that. Anyway, criticism of Irene’s handling of her role doesn’t directly bears on the HHM/D&M supposedly being unethical in their treatment of Irene.
Jimmy is playing two violins here. To the mall walkers his primary thrust is to say Irene is doing the wrong thing. It seems near unanimous his net treatment of Irene is despicable. Although actually a couple of potentially valid points have been made in criticism of Irene: that she isn’t paying enough attention, and she isn’t making the decision in an explicitly democratic way (though I see less validity in the latter point, the rules say she decides). But to the non old folk ‘adults’ and to himself ostensibly Jimmy is playing the violin of greedy lawyer manipulation of Irene and/or the plaintiffs generally and IMO there’s no shred of evidence shown to the viewers that’s true.
I don’t think Gus and Nacho are in it together, but after the incident Gus is confident Nacho had something to do with Hector’s condition. I’m sure he knows that Hector was planning to use Nacho’s Dad’s shop for smuggling drugs, since he has a good intelligence network and certainly knew that Hector was starting a new smuggling operation. When Hector dropped, everyone showed concern except Nacho, who’s face showed contempt and who didn’t come to Hector’s side in spite of being the number two guy on the scene. When everyone else is running around taking care of stashing guns, leaving the scene, giving CPR, and calling 911, Nacho completely ignores his possibly dying boss and instead picks up the bottle and the individual pills, showing that the pills are very important to him. And when he hands the full bottle of pills to the EMTs, it’s from a different pocket than he put them originally, which is something Gus would pick up on.
I couldn’t quite tell if they were saying Chuck’s condition relapsed because of his encounter with Jimmy, or because he realized how his behavior hurt all those closest to him (like Howard personally going broke to pay him off rather than bankrupt the firm).
And I am very curious as to what was still using electricity in Chuck’s house. Wonder if they find something when sifting through the ashes.
Well, Jimmy certainly atoned for his treatment of Irene in a big way by making himself the sacrificial offering. We did see the darker amoral Saul emerge when he first came up with the scheme to put enough peer pressure on Irene to get her to settle, but we also see Jimmy facing pressure on many fronts, most notably Kim’s near death experience, that he got a little perspective.
Looks like that one didn’t work out for you, but you were right that Jimmy did show some conscience. 
I think that’s actually a major problem of Jimmy’s, he does these ‘clever’ ideas that he comes up with on the fly but either doesn’t look to the consequences or figures he can just work some magic and sort it all out before anyone figures out what’s going on. I also think I must have been wrong about his feelings for the old people, because the way he talked about being annoyed with having to be nice to them seemed too real to be just an act to save Irene. But he’s definitely pulled back from the Saul path here, sacrificing his business model to save Irene’s personal life is a good thing, even if he was responsible for trashing it in the first place.
After the finale, Jimmy’s violins are smashed into pieces. It’s clear that Jimmy doesn’t actually believe the claim he (and people in this thread) made that HHM/FM are taking advantage of old people and that Irene is being a bad steward and/or being tricked into acting against her own interests. When he has an attack of conscience and goes to fix the situation, he convinces Irene and the others to do what HHM/FM want them to do and leave Irene as the class representative. If he really felt they were getting screwed and manipulated by HHM/FM, he wouldn’t feel he was putting things right by convincing them to do what HHM/FM want.
Assuming he died in the fire, who do you think will inherit Chuck’s money?
I thought that was a fantastic finale. Jimmy sacrificing his reputation to save Irene was a stunning reversal.
A few things worth discussing:
(a) is it clear what the status of the Sandpiper case is now? Jimmy seemed to assume that it was all-but-settled, but now that Irene hates him, does that mean there’s time to back away from settling it? He hasn’t actually gotten his $1M yet, as far as we know? I felt like there was one line of dialog between him and Erin that shed some light on this but I didn’t quite parse it properly.
(b) Why did Chuck have a relapse? Sudden lack of purpose in life? Stress over having burned his bridges with Jimmy? All of the above? And why did he (presumably) kill himself? Just shame and disgust at himself for being so weak, plus all of the above? (And was there something still using electricity, or might the spinning disk we saw only have been from his hallucinatory POV in some fashion?)
© No Mike? Boo!
(d) I’m curious how the Salamanca plotline will play out. I seem to remember from Breaking Bad that Hector was in prison, but I’m not certain of that (and I suppose that might have been before BCS). Tuco is in prison right now. What are Salamancas are there, or will his organization be folded into Gus’s, or will Nacho take over?
Great season, overall.
Now THAT is an interesting question. We’ve been assuming that the Sandpiper money lets Jimmy set up the Saul Goodman law practice. It would be quite a turn if it was actually Chuck’s money, particularly if Howard has to keep paying the $3M installments to Jimmy.
The later Chuck scenes were really brutal to me. Watching him go from “here I am with my lights” to “I’m going to destroy this beautiful house looking for the wire” was more painful than the Tuco leg breaking scene to me. I think Chuck has been pushing himself past where his condition really is (like during the immersion blender scene) and now that he has destroyed his life and pushed everyone away from him he doesn’t have the energy to fight and manage his condition any more.
Also, I don’t think Howard is actually going broke - I think he’s stretching his finances to buy out Chuck’s shares and taking a risk with the loans, but I don’t think it’s going to leave him poor. Probably he’s looking for a good, rich lawyer who’d like to become a senior partner by buying a chunk of the firm (law firms can’t be owned by non-lawyers in most states). He also might get a reprieve from Chuck’s death; there’s probably a procedure for how to handle the death of a partner, and since Chuck (presumably) hadn’t cashed the check yet they may be able to invoke that instead of the buyout.
Some older meters continuously draw a tiny amount of power to run themselves, and some develop an internal short over time, so it’s possible that the electricity wasn’t actually going into the house. It would be extremely ironic if there were some hard-wired smoke alarms tied in before the breaker box that Chuck had completely forgotten about, but there wasn’t a smoke alarm sound at the end so I doubt that.
Sandpiper is still an active case, it’s obvious that HHM/FM are going to win but they want to hold out for more money. Now that Irene and her friends see that Jimmy was manipulating them, they’re not going to settle quickly, and Jimmy isn’t going to see his $1.16 million for a while.
Chuck has nothing to live for at this point. His peers don’t respect him, he’s alienated the few friends he had, and he pushed away the last of his family. Also, the way he talked to Jimmy makes me think he wants to make it clear that what he did was suicide. Not sure if that’s a final strike at Jimmy or something else.
Hector was in a wheelchair with the little bell to ding when we saw him, I don’t think he was in prison during BB (if he was he got out before his introduction). Tuco was taking care of him.
This was a great finale episode. I loved Howard’s scenes, Chuck has been thinking of him as a lapdog all along and really didn’t expect Howard to look at the handshake offer like Chuck was handing him a bag of dog poop. Calling Chuck out on his betrayal was powerful, but it was even better when Howard cut the Jimmy-style blame-shifting short with a simple “That’s bullshit.” The fact that he never shouted the entire time shows how seriously he takes this, he’s fine with yelling at Jimmy or Kim when they’re pushing his buttons but this is just too serious for that. His maneuver of making the going away speech immediate so Chuck doesn’t have time to plot anything was neat and clean, and still was leaving Chuck looking as good as he could. I saw something like this coming, though I thought there was a good chance of Howard pulling some kind of trick.
Jimmy’s destruction of his reputation to save Irene was completely unexpected. It shows that he’s not all the way to Saul territory yet, but at the same time it’s not really that heroic to sacrifice yourself to fix a problem you caused in the first place. With him admitting defeat on the office front, he’s actually in a good stable place to start next season - except for the aftershocks of his brother’s death. Kim went about like I expected, I figured both clients would be sympathetic and that her injuries wouldn’t incapacitate her for long. I’m interested in whether next season shows her getting back to work after a movie break or if this is the beginning of a fall for her. Loved the ‘there are some lines we don’t cross’ line.
I really liked that they did a double-fakeout with Chuck’s lantern - they didn’t go the obvious route of having an accidental fire like Jimmy predicted, but instead of avoiding the lantern fire made it a deliberate choice. Chuck’s scenes were just brutal, he’s been an asshole all along and he brought this on himself, but it’s still hard to watch him completely abandon his treatment and give in to the crazy by tearing his house to pieces.
Hubris. It’s the downfall of so many characters on this show and Breaking Bad. Kim’s obsession with doing everything herself nearly killed her. You can see the gears grinding when Francesca is going over the paperwork until she realizes NO—I just can’t do this right now. Chuck’s hubris in not admitting that he has no control over his illness ultimately destroys him. Hector not wanting to work with Gus brings him down and ironically, finds Gus as the guy to save Hector’s life. Jimmy shows the humanity that is still part of him, despite what Chuck said, in the way he cares for Kim and for his clients, even though they won’t see it that way. His hubris shows when he tries to run the show himself, but oddly enough, Jimmy may have shown more humility than any other character so far. A fascinating tale from Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, and I look forward to the next part of the story.
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