Me neither. Chuck had many opportunities to (at least try to) avert the “chimp with a machine gun” scenario instead of making it a self-fulfilling prophesy.
IRL, the probabtion condition for ‘associating with known criminals’ typically only applies to ongoing association with people who have a felony conviction or who are known members of a gang or organized crime. It doesn’t apply things like selling goods to someone as part of a job, or being a waiter. It probably would kick in if you’re becoming an employee of a criminal or doing ongoing work directly for them (like doing a major home renovation). It’s also not uncommon to get exceptions made for things like relatives, co-workers, people in a halfway house, etc.
Pickpocketing is usually a misdemeanor, so IRL Huell probably wouldn’t count as a probation violation. Also Jimmy has completed probation at this point (they showed the file moved to ‘closed’, I forgot that earlier) so he is over and done with that. He might not have had Huell publicly hanging out with him until the probation was finished; he’s obviously going to keep pinata time secret. If it causes a problem, it will be with getting his law license back, but I don’t think they’ll do much with that because it’s hard to build tension about ‘will he be reinstated as a lawyer’ when we know he is a fully-fledged lawyer in BB time. (I think the tension will be that the reinstatement hearing will drag a bunch of his shady dealings into the light and force a wedge between him and Kim).
Doesn’t look like chump change to me, it looks like he’s making $4k gross profit per pallet (sales tax and any business tax will cut into that) and moving pallets pretty quickly, which is probably more than his ‘barely above minimum wage’ cell phone job pays. And he’s lusting after a law office downtown with a nice space for Kim to work in (even though it’s obvious that’s not going to happen), which his cell phone job won’t cover. The ‘why’ has been stated out loud by him, and they even spent a decent amount of screen time showing him looking at offices to establish that as his goal.
I think that blaming a mentally ill man for the actions of his adult brother because the mentally ill man didn’t choose to spend his life in a partnership caretaking said brother is grossly unfair. Chuck’s an asshole too, but Jimmy has created his own problems and shifting the blame to Chuck is just not reasonable (though internally Jimmy probably does that).
Yes, this.
Sure, but his mental illness wasn’t always there and as far as we can tell Chuck never truly supported his brother emotionally. I don’t think he should have been his caretaker per se, but not torpedoing him would have at least been a start. Actually supporting him to try and become a better person( and something beyond a mail room drone )would have at least been generous, not really a word in Chuck’s lexicon. Also ultimately advantageous for them both, because Jimmy always had the personality Chuck lacked.
Not shifting, so much as assigning a small iota ;). I’m sure Jimmy does largely blame Chuck in a childish way when the great bulk of his problems are self-inflicted. But he can justify blaming Chuck to himself because there is a small kernel of truth there. Chuck broke some essential part of him. IMHO, anyway.
This. And when Jimmy finds out that Kim pursued S&C rather than the other way around it will finish the job. Betrayed again.
Chuck never missed an opportunity to be an asshole to Jimmy. Or to those around him. For all his “love of the law”, Chuck was a complete son of a bitch. From trapping Earnesto and then firing him when he was done, to making Howard do his dirty work, to being willing to destroy HHM out of spite…guy got what he richly deserved.
But Jimmy did choose to spend large amount of his life caretaking said brother, had been doing so for quite a while as the show opened. Oh. You mean Chuck caring at all about Jimmy, other than as long festering sibling jealousy. Ah. Carry on then.
This first claim is simply blatantly untrue. Chuck could have simply let Jimmy go to prison as a sex offender by sitting back and doing nothing, but he didn’t and instead rescued Jimmy from the consequences of another of his impulsive acts. That’s one opportunity to be an asshole to Jimmy that he avoided, and it’s a pretty big one. I’m not sure what the rest has to do with what you quoted, you’ve related some events that agree with me that Chuck was an asshole, but haven’t posted anything that shows that Chuck was responsible for Jimmy sabotaging all of the golden opportunities handed to him on a silver platter.
Like I said to the previous comment, I’m not sure what relationship the stuff you posted has to what you quoted even though you think it contradicts it in some way. “My brother doesn’t care for me, therefore I’m going to not flush the toilet until I get fired from this dream job that’s throwing money at me” is not a reasonable statement.
Jimmy is like a guy who wins the lottery multiple times, but each time shreds the check because it’s not printed on his favorite color of paper, and you’re saying that the fault lies with his asshole brother and not him. The fact that his brother is an ass doesn’t somehow make his brother responsible for shredding the checks.
I have to agree that Davis and Main proved Jimmy is a hopeless self-saboteur. He’s never going to stop, because he is addicted to the adrenaline rush of pulling victory from disaster at the last possible minute. Kim enjoys the occasional game on a weekend night at the local hotel bar, but she doesn’t want to live like that 24/7.
He only did that because (and he made clear to Jimmy) since their mother begged him to. He would have been happy to see Jimmy in prison.
Remember the meal with the erstwhile Mrs MaGill? He was clearly angry that Jimmy had charmed her.
The “job” at HHM was lowest on the totem pole as possible. Jimmy made himself a lawyer through effort, and despite Howard wanting him, Chuck put to kibosh on it, an did not even have the guts to tell him himself. And forget their relationship for a minute, the firm should have been happy that one of their worker bees had managed to get that far on his own and encourage him, not chucked (pun intended) him out. It was not a good signal to send to their staff.
Yeah, his time at D&M is really telling. When he did the bus breakdown trick, he knew it violated ethics rules - the way he went evasive when Chuck started to ask about it shows that clearly (if he thought it was OK, he wouldn’t see any need to lie about what he did). He knew that D&M wouldn’t like the commercial, Cliff told him the commercial was unusual for them and that Jimmy would need to get approval before running it, but he made and ran it anyway. When he won the lottery a second time and didn’t get fired for that, they assigned a person to be his keeper/teacher to show him what to do and what not to do - and instead of being grateful, he got angry and kept ditching her and ignoring her, then went on his ‘get fired for being obnoxious’ bit when they kept not firing him. And I don’t think he would have behaved perfectly if it was Chuck looking over his shoulder instead of Erin, plus it’s pretty obvious that Chuck would delegate the task since you don’t have a senior partner spend huge chunks of time babysitting a new lawyer.
Also, I’m pretty sure that Kim has some kind of history of scamming in her Nebraska background , maybe with a partner (maybe alone, possibly it ended in disaster) but wants to be mostly legit now. With, like you said, pulling an occasional scam on some obnoxious rich guy or hearing about Jimmy’s squat cobbler-style tales (which she loved until he crossed the line into fabricating evidence). Rhea Seehorn, Kim’s actress, has said that she thinks Kim does have something dirty in her past, though it sounded like an interpretation and not a ‘the writers officially stated that…’
The because doesn’t matter. The claim was that he never passed up an opportunity to be an asshole to Jimmy, but there is at least one clear, unarguable case where he could have been an asshole to Jimmy and instead chose to save him. Complaining that Chuck only did it reluctantly is like a kid who’s parents buy him a car whining that one had to talk the other into it.
To continue the analogy, this is like the kid with the car complaining that his parents bought him a decent car instead of a late-model sports car. The entitlement required to complain that the job your brother got you in spite of your lack of certs, skills, or work history wasn’t prestigious enough is just breathtaking.
Not hiring Jimmy was the correct decision. The deception and blame-shifting to Howard goes in the ‘asshole’ category, but Chuck was dead right that HHM should not hire Jimmy as a lawyer, and we see him proved right by how badly Jimmy conducted himself when he got a dream job at Davis and Main, and again when they set someone into the role people think Chuck should have had of keeping an eye on Jimmy to steer him out of trouble. The staff really should not send their staff the signal that it doesn’t matter if you have the qualifications or temperment for the job, that if you’re related to a partner you’ll get hired and the rest of the workers will be expected to bail you out.
Does anyone know offhand just when Chuck started to develop his electromagnetic condition? Was it after his divorce? Or after he brought Jimmy from Chicago to work at HHM?
Jimmy didn’t want to work for Davis & Main. He wanted to work for HHM. He wanted his brother’s respect. I think he’d have done everything possible to earn & keep that respect. Similarly, he wants to work with Kim & have her respect. Sadly, that’s not going to happen either. Jimmy only acts out as Saul when he’s not getting anywhere with either Chuck or Kim. When they’ve pulled him close, he becomes a totally different person.
It is the work that he did when he was close to Chuck, Sandpiper, that will eventually be used to rescue Gene. Sandpiper represents Jimmy at his personal best. It’s also probably his best legal work.
Similarly, Walt would’ve been a great high school teacher if he hadn’t had all of the external pressure. He reprised his teacher role with both Jesse & Gail. Being a teacher, having that respect, was Walt at his best.
When Jimmy was working in the mail room, Chuck was fine, as we saw in a recent episode’s flashback. It was after Jimmy got his law degree that his EM symptoms started. Remember his “monkey with a machine gun” speech, Chuck was still working in the office then, with lights on and everything. Possibly around the same time, his divorce and his mother’s death (where she called out for Jimmy on her death bed, not Chuck) probably contributed.
Just to throw in a quick remark as a German - the language of the “Germans” is refreshingly good. You can hear not all of them are native Speakers, but they don’t mangle phrases. The only baffling thing is the Ehrmantraut etymology they came up with - something like strong man? Never heard that. And Ehrmann is very close to “honorable man”, so I am not sure why they didn’t go that way.
Fun Fact - just after I saw this Episode I rewatched “Top Secret” with its intentionally mangled germanized English, that was a nice contrast.
I am so looking forward to the next Episode - can’t wait for both Jimmys and Kim’s plans and the inevitable Fallout between them. It tears me up that they can’t have a happy end, but I am also eager to see it play out.
So, I just realized I don’t know anything about Jimmy’s undergrad degree. Did I forget that, or have they not mentioned it at all? Talking about how much of a screw up he was back in Cicero, and how he just roamed the streets with Marco scamming people all night, it surprises me he had time to get a bachelor’s degree. He didn’t get both his BA and JD at the online University of American Samoa, did he? How long was he in the mail room at HHM?
My friend has a daughter that wants a pony, she doesn’t want to go to school. But that doesn’t justify her throwing a tantrum or cheating on a test at school.
So you’re saying that, much like my friend’s daughter, he ‘only’ acts out when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. Kim’s living with him and banging him? Not good enough, she has to enter a partnership with him in exactly the way he wants, damn her own wants, needs, and ambitions, or BAD JIMMY comes out. Chuck is working with him on a legal case (the situation early on in Sandpiper when D&M and HHM were working together)? Not good enough, he must either take Jimmy into the firm despite his own judgement and wishes or BAD JIMMY throws another tantrum.
He’s treating the people in his life like props in the Jimmy McGill show instead of respecting anything they want, and using the fact that they are actual people as an excuse when he chooses to do bad things. This defense actually makes Jimmy look a lot worse than if we just view him as someone who likes the thrill of pulling one over.
Walt had a chance to be a great chemist with Grey Matter, then threw it away because of his ego. He then was an OK high school teacher with normal human stress like raising a family, then got cancer and decided to become a criminal mastermind because he liked being one. It wasn’t the money, he had multiple offers to legitimately pay for his treatment that he chose to turn down, and he kept making meth long after he had enough to pay for treatment a thousand times over. At the end he even admits that he did it because he liked it.
People should be judged on how they act in the real world, not by how they might act in some magical realm with no ‘external pressure’. Real people always have external pressure to deal with.
In Season 1 Ep 8 “RICO” (which introduces Sandpiper case), we have flashbacks to Jimmy getting news of the Bar exam result. When he tells Chuck about it, he tells him that after Kim started doing her law school, he was motivated so he finished undergraduate credits at community College and then enrolled at the University of American Samoa, the passed the Bar on his third attempt.
Jimmy gets to Albuquerque in 1992 and the series starts in 2002. Chuck fell ill by 2001, which is the setting date for the episode where Rebecca McGill makes her ill fated visit to her ex husband in their old martial home. Jimmy from what we can tell has been a lawyer for some time by 2002.
So let’s get a chronology from there.
Chuck, is that you ?