Agree. I don’t think any of the regrets would have necessarily turned any of their lives around, but they had hope.
I think we saw that. Chuck was the only one who predicted Saul Goodman. He saw Saul in his mind before Saul ever existed. Slipping Jimmy with a law degree? Chimp with a machine gun? That’s Saul Goodman.
Ironically, by trying to prevent Saul from existing, he created him. If he’d have been a little more nurturing of his brother’s talents and guided him towards a more ethical career path, he could have helped Jimmy avoid becoming Saul entirely. But by lashing out and doing everything he could to sabotage his brother’s career, he created Saul Goodman, and ended his own career (and life) in the process. Tragic indeed.
Of course, Chuck had his reasons, too. I might not have done what he did, but I can still see why he did it. Jimmy is by no means the blameless victim here.
Oh, I think there’s at least 50-50 blame here.
He does believe this, but the offer only came after Jimmy’s “you’d do the same for me” pricked his guilty conscience. Chuck wouldn’t do the same for Jimmy.
And I would’ve hated the proposed Jimmy and Kim live happily ever after endings. We got the happiest plausible ending.
Eh, Jimmy grew up ripping off his own father, who Chuck described as being a trusting, kind-hearted man who eventually lost his shop due to financial troubles ($14,000 missing? How much of that was Jimmy stealing vs dad giving it to con men?). I just don’t think Chuck’s guidance would have done much for Jimmy’s career path. Jimmy was too wrapped up in swindling by that stage.
I could be misremembering, but thought that it turned out that Chuck’s understanding (that Jimmy had routinely stolen money from their dad’s shop) was different from Jimmy’s explanation (that their father was too easily scammed, too likely to give money away). Or maybe those scammers inspired Jimmy to rip off the dad himself… I’m going to have to watch the whole lot, yet again…
That we will never know. Chuck’s version: Jimmy ripped off his parents. Jimmy’s version: Jimmy occasionally helped himself to a twenty out of the till, but strictly nickel and dime stuff - the real losses came from Jimmy’s dad being a shit businessman and a soft touch for every other con artist.
Personally I’m inclined (and I suspect it’s the authorial intention as it ladles more tragedy into the story) to lean towards Jimmy’s side of the story. We saw a flashback and it was telling in both directions, but I think the implication is that Chuck jumped to conclusions based on his contempt for Jimmy. Where as we have seen a side of Jimmy that can be loyal and turn away from scores like the Kettleman’s stolen money before he went full Saul in later years. That last bit alone shows that Jimmy wasn’t just pure ID. Not yet.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen that earlier episode in quite a while, but my memory was of the ‘wall leaning’ scene showing a new level of appreciation for each other.
That makes sense to me.
At any rate, the prison re-play of the scene was a great touch by the showrunners.
This is exactly how I look at it, though I recognize that it’s kept vague on purpose. We know Jimmy stole from his dad’s store, because they showed him doing it. But $14k? That’s an oddly specific number, and I’d imagine by the time Jimmy was old enough to even want that kind of cash, he’d already graduated to slip and falls and bar scams.
So there was definitely a kernel of truth in Chuck’s perspective. Jimmy stole from his parents, and that’s wrong. But thousands? Enough to make his dad’s business fail? I just don’t see a young Jimmy going that far. Saul might have, in his darker moments. But Jimmy McGill’s morality was flexible, not completely absent.
Yeah, in my mind the scenario is something like this.
Chuck is away at school and knows the store is struggling. He knows that there’s a $14k discrepancy between inventory and sales. Visiting home over break or to help out, he sees Jimmy steal. Jimmy claims he only takes a little and the dad gave most away to grifters. Would Chuck believe that? Lets say he’s inclined to believe it, he’d stop believing it once Jimmy grew up a bit and just continued scamming people.
Another factor here is that dad had the opportunity to be honest and say that he chose to donate money from the till to poor unfortunate people who needed help. But he evidently didn’t, even as the store was failing and Chuck was coming back to check the books. So is Jimmy voluntarily taking on a scapegoat role to protect dad from Chuck, just as he later tried to protect Chuck from Howard? Or is it like @Snarky_Kong says, and Chuck just refused to believe him? But we never hear Jimmy say “I told you it wasn’t me?” which there are times he could have done, I think.
The father probably underestimated how much he gave away. If he told Chuck “I gave away a couple of bucks here and there” he probably believed it. So I don’t assume that Chuck was unaware of the “generosity.” And the balance of it would change in his mind after witnessing 20 years of Jimmy being a scam artist / criminal for a living.
If Chuck had wanted to - I understand why he didn’t - he could have interrogated his dad’s claim with the same scepticism he brought to Jimmy’s.
So essentially Chuck was put in the position of choosing which of his family members he wanted to think badly of, and picked his younger brother rather than his dad.
The most chilling line in the whole series - inc. Breaking Bad - was Chuck’s telling Jimmy that he never even liked him. In that sense, Jimmy’s notion that there was a time he could have fixed his relationship with Chuck is so much wishful thinking.
I think that’s true–Chuck was always a badly-broken person. He may not have been capable of being generous, even in the slightest degree, to anyone.
But Jimmy’s regret over having ‘taken away the law’ from Chuck would have been a major emotional wound for Jimmy, whether or not Jimmy believed that reconciliation with Chuck was possible.
It’s likely that Jimmy sometimes told himself there might have been a way to get closer to Chuck if Jimmy had just [fill in the blank]. And at other times, he was more realistic about Chuck’s incapacity to connect. (That’s a common human pattern: shuttling between ‘what might have been’ and ‘that could never happen.’)
But always, there was the regret over having schemed to get Chuck’s malpractice insurance cancelled.
I’m waiting for the director’s cut. The one where Howard Hamlin shoots first, and Kim Wexler is taken out by a SWAT team after eliminating Marion.
I thought the insurance premium was going to be doubled. This is probably the main issue I had with the show. We’re not talking about medical malpractice rates here - we’re talking in the single thousands. From this web site https://www.l2insuranceagency.com/blog/what-is-the-average-cost-of-lawyers-malpractice-insurance.aspx:
Premiums can start for as little as $300 to $500 for an attorney without coverage in low risk areas of practice but expect premiums to rise over the first 5 to 7 years. The average costs for most attorneys for a fully rated policy should be $1,200 to $2,500 per year assuming minimal limits. Attorneys that practice in the higher risk areas can expect to pay around $3,000 to $10,000 per year. All of this can also vary by state and location in the state based on the carriers past claims experience in that state.
Even if the premium for the entire firm doubled, that’s maybe $100k? Chuck makes that in a slow month, vs. no Chuck and the loss of his contacts and experience.
Last weekend I found myself binging on reaction videos of the first and second seasons. It’s kind of like re-watching the show, but it takes much less time. One thing I noticed in watching these videos is how many little details from Season 6 were actually callbacks to things from Season 1. At least two that I noticed:
Jimmy takes out his frustration by kicking things. In the pilot episode he kicks a trashcan in the parking garage when HHM won’t buy out Chuck. He does the same thing to the phone booth after his call to Kim in Season 6.
In Season 1 Jimmy ended up hiding in a dumpster while searching for discarded documents while investigating Sandpiper Crossing. In the finale he hides from the cops in a dumpstrer.
In the intro to Season six, the clean-out of Saul’s mansion, we also see the movers putting Saul’s life size cardboard cutout into the dumpster. A little callback/foreshadowing twofer.
I was hoping to find a picture of that to post, but it is mentioned in that video a few posts up.