Goodness no. Chuck is the most vile villain of the series. Jimmy did everything for Chuck and Chuck screwed him at every opportunity.
That reminds me of another confusing thing about the finale. Someone said the Chuck scene is the day before the first season started, because Jimmy mentioned in episode one that he finally got the Financial Times he was talking about with Chuck in this scene. And we see the dark house, the cooler with ice instead of the fridge.
But I’m pretty sure Chuck had an electric lantern in that scene. Did he switch to fire lanterns along the way sometime, or was that a mistake?
I do think the point of that scene was to show Jimmy’s change in perspective. In the first three seasons, it seemed Chuck never did or said anything positive towards his brother.
I think this illustrates that while Chuck did have a lot of baggage surrounding his brother, Jimmy had baggage too, and there were at least some instances where Jimmy missed a chance to bond with Chuck and perhaps overcome some of their differences.
It didn’t take blame away from Chuck, who more than anyone drove Jimmy to become Saul Goodman, but I think it rightly placed at least some of the blame back on Jimmy where it belongs. Relationships are a two-way street.
And I think he didn’t want to make the same mistake with Kim, the only other person in his life he ever cared about.
It was definitely a gas lantern. You could hear it hiss.
The finale was unsatisfying.
Better that the call to Francesca leads to Jimmy and Kim re-uniting. Jimmy recovers one last cache of buried money. The two of them escape to the Everglades where they do pro bono legal stuff for the Seminoles and run minor scams on deserving tourists in the casino.
Fade to brilliant sunset over the Glades.
That would have been just the worst ending.
Chuck is absolutely being sincere when he says everyone deserves a ferocious defense. He believes that one hundred percent. His dedication to the principles of the law is the thing he believes in more than anything else in the world.
His offer to listen, though, was likely borne out of a belief Jimmy couldn’t do the job right.
You’re right. I looked at a screenshot of his death scene, and it’s the same lantern.
I guess I misremembered, I thought he had one of those old hurricane lanterns that you needed a match to light, not one of the newer Coleman lanterns with an ignition switch. That lantern shade obscures any flame and the switch made it look electric. My mistake.
The law is just a tool for Chuck. The only thing he ‘believes in’ is his position and wealth. He is determined not to share either with his brother.
I just cannot agree. That’s not at all the character I watched.
McGill made a lot of sacrifices at the end. The least that Kim could have done was to sneak him a cell phone to use in prison.
I thought the scene with Chuck was just a visit to one of those points in time when Jimmy could have taken a different path. He could have embraced Chuck’s offer to help and learned a bit about integrity and honesty and perhaps even repaired the relationship with his brother. Hence, Chuck’s copy of The Time Machine.
Exactly. This is Jimmy’s Time Machine moment. Before it all went bad.
I agree that he was a skilled practitioner of the law, but that is not a character trait. Chuck was completely self centered.
That doesn’t contradict anything that RickJay said though - Chuck held the law above all else. It’s why he nurtured and fostered the law careers of those he thought would best be caretakers of it, and tried to deny it to those he thought would abuse it. Turns out he wasn’t necessarily wrong in that belief.
I don’t think Walter regretted missing out on Gray Matter’s money (or at least, that wasn’t the main regret). He regretted not sticking with it to gain the recognition and respect that he felt he deserved. Gretchen and Elliot’s faces are plastered all over the company, his company.
He was controlling, prideful, and in a lot of ways selfish. But none of that means his strict ethical views on the law were not legitimate. Of course, believing in ethics and practicing them are not the same.
I think that dissonance was partly why he committed suicide. He was confronted by his insurance company with the fact that practicing law at all in his condition was not the ethical thing to do. When his pride and his ethics came into conflict, he couldn’t bear it. Especially knowing his unethical brother would still be practicing law after he was forced to quit.
Another nice parallel with Kim, who when she saw that she was behaving unethically, simply stopped holding herself out as some sort of virtuous professional, and quit the bar entirely.
Well, before it went exponentially bad, anyways. Remember he was still Slippin’ Jimmy before this, and had almost gone to jail for the Chicago Sunroof.
Right, the way I look at it, this was one of his time machine moments. He told Walt he’d like to go back and avoid becoming Slippin Jimmy entirely.
But even if he didn’t, there were ample opportunities along the way where he could have changed course. Having a heart to heart with his brother and trying to overcome his own unethical tendencies would have changed the whole rest of his life in that moment, and Chuck’s too (and Kim’s, and Howard’s, etc.).
But it was a turning point. He’d passed the bar (right?) and could have gone straight. It was his choice.
Was he? We saw Chuck primarily in his interactions with Jimmy. Would you want to be judged only on your interactions with an semtimes-estranged family member with whom you have a long and ugly history and lots of built up baggage?
Chuck was certainly not a monster. His relationship with Jimmy was very unhealthy, and he really treated Jimmy VERY badly in some particulars. But that doesn’t mean that he was a moustache-twirler, or that his offer to help Jimmy wasn’t totally sincere.
There certainly is an alternate timeline from there where Jimmy accepts the offer to help, they both dial back their egos 10% or so, and they actually meaningfully discuss the cases, and each respects the other a bit more. But, much more likely, even if Jimmy had accepted the offer to help, it would have been a shit show and made things even worse. But neither one of them in that interaction would have been The Bad Guy.
Remember that Jimmy did in fact let Chuck advise & help him on the Sandpiper case, and Chuck gave Jimmy the shaft so deep that it clicked on his molars. He convinced Jimmy to bring the case to HHM, agreed Jimmy would get an office next to his, then secretly called Howard (he used Jimmy’s cell phone left in the mailbox, using an oven mitt and his space blanket to shield himself) to tell Howard that he should absolutely not let Jimmy join the firm. So there’s no reason to believe that if Jimmy had let him work on the criminal cases that Chuck would have behaved any more honorably - as far as he was concerned Jimmy could never redeem himself as a lawyer. Chuck was 100% the Bad Guy in that interaction - Jimmy trusted him, and Chuck secretly stabbed him in the back.
No, he told Walt he wished he hadn’t hurt his knee while he was doing a slip and fall, because his knee has hurt ever since. He expressed no remorse for actually doing the slip and falls, because that’s how he put himself through bartending school. That’s why Walt was so disgusted with him - because his regret that he’d change was so shallow.