“Things are fine the way they are.”
In the Season 3 finale of Better Call Saul,
Chuck pushes Jimmy away with the words,
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings.
But the truth is, you’ve never mattered all that much to me.”
And in the moments that follow, these words haunt us,
because they’re so demonstrably untrue.
The episode makes it painfully clear how much
Jimmy has affected his brother, and not for the better.
We’ve spent a lot of the series paying attention to
how Chuck has hurt Jimmy, through his resentment,
his underhanded sabotage, and his fundamental refusal
to believe in his brother.
But the finale forces us to wonder how much Jimmy is to blame
for the sad deterioration of Chuck.
Is Jimmy, in fact, the true cause of the illness that’s plagued Chuck
for as long as we’ve known him —
his electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which the series has increasingly
made clear is psychological, rather than physical?
So here’s our take on what Chuck’s sorry end reveals to us
about where Jimmy’s headed, who he’s been all along,
and how much viewers have been encouraged to get wrong about him.
The episode opens with a symbolic flashback.
The camera tracks in from a distance to reveal a scene from the past --
visualizing that wisdom from The Glass Menagerie that
“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
We see a younger Chuck reading to a child Jimmy.
The vignette makes us emotionally aware of
how much changed in the years that followed.
Back then Chuck wasn’t ill and the brothers were close.
We hear Jimmy ask
“Is she gonna be okay?”
It’s a question universal to children hearing stories.
Chuck answers as most adults would
“She’ll be fine, Jimmy.”
and when pressed he says
“Just listen.
You’ll see.”
These are words that say to Jimmy, you have learn to deal with the uncertainty,
which is part of being an adult.
The questioning young Jimmy is also a stand-in for us watching this show --
we hope that everything will be alright,
yet we know from the start that it won’t be.
The camera moves through the lantern to carry us into the present day --
so this focus on the lantern -- which is of course the title of the episode
--
subtly plants in our minds a connection between Chuck’s later illness
and the brothers' relationship.
As their bond fell apart, is this how -- and why --
Chuck became unable to tolerate electricity?
Lanterns return in the episode as markers of where
Chuck is now, versus then.
The next time we see Chuck, the camera tracks across
a row of lantern-like lights in the conference room of HHM.
On the surface it’s a sign of Chuck’s progress
that he can even sit among these lights --
but in this scene, Chuck is forced out of the firm.
“Because I always thought you had the best interests
of the firm in mind...
But you’ve let personal vendettas turn your focus away
from what’s best for HHM.”
Howard’s words capture how Chuck’s surface wellness
belies a deeper disease.
And likewise, Chuck’s win here of being bought out
“You won.”
is really a loss.
And his exit to enthusiastic applause is a sad reversal of his earlier re-entry,
even though then he had to have all electronics removed around him,
at least he had the faith and support of Howard and the firm.
In the final scene he shares with his brother, Chuck is surrounded
by an assortment of electric lights and a record player--
it’s another image announcing that on the surface he’s better, back to normal.
“I always told you I’d get better, you just never believed me.”
We spy a lantern-like light in the fire -- it’s hard to tell exactly what it is,
but, perhaps significantly, after Chuck closes this spiritual door
on Jimmy during their conversation, that light in the fire has gone out.
We might read this as an ominous foreshadowing
that the fire in Chuck will go out at the end of this episode—
and that Jimmy’s hope for a brotherly love has at last been snuffed out for good.
Finally we see a lantern much like the one from the opening scene
at the very end.
Chuck kicks this lantern over to set fire to his house
and end his life.
So this object, the lantern, which was a symbol
of the brothers’ intimacy in the flashback, becomes the means of Chuck’s demise.
And this hints that Jimmy is connected, complicit, in his brother’s death.
Chuck is pretty persuasive in feigning indifference
in that face-to-face with his brother,
at least until that final look he gives after Jimmy has left.
But the significant progress Chuck has been making
is immediately and totally derailed by this one meeting.
That night, he’s unable to enter his current “emotional state” in his journal.
And the next scenes we see of Chuck tearing apart his house --
in a 7 minute sequence inspired by Coppola’s The Conversation --
clearly illustrate what Chuck’s emotional state is after seeing Jimmy
and trying to sever their relationship for good.
Halfway through the Season 3, Jimmy convincingly puts forward
the narrative that Chuck’s illness was born of his divorce.
“Talk about when these symptoms first started.
It was shortly after you were divorced, is that right?”
And the show supports this idea by opening that episode with a flashback
to Chuck hiding his new illness shortly after separating from Rebecca.
Chuck’s EHS does feel linked to lack of control and an inability
to address his emotional needs, but that’s not just about Rebecca.
It’s also very much about Jimmy.
“My brother hates me.”
Even though Chuck is the ultra-successful lawyer,
all his life, he’s envied Jimmy, as we see in the flashback
when Chuck dislikes that his brother immediately charms Rebecca with jokes,
and he can’t do the same
“What do you call 25 attorneys buried up to their chin in cement?
Not enough cement.”
“What?”
and especially in the way that their parents favored Jimmy,
despite all of the younger’s screw-ups and betrayals.
“Jimmy.”
“No, Mom, it’s me, Chuck.”
“Jimmy…”
Over time, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the real long-term cause
of Chuck’s sickness is simmering, consuming hatred for his brother.
“He’ll never change, ever since he was 9,
always the same, couldn’t keep his hands
out of the cash drawer.
But not our Jimmy, couldn’t be precious Jimmy!”
So young Jimmy’s question at the start if things will turn out okay in the story,
is finally answered, no -- Jimmy’s and Chuck’s back-and-forth
is resolved by the finality of Chuck’s death.
So this lantern that haunts the episode represents the tragic truth that
eventually what happens to us and between us is irrevocable.
“Jimmy, he’s still your brother.”
“Not anymore he’s not.”
Neither brother can undo the damage of how much they’ve hurt each other.
“Two brothers...whose relationship after years of strain finally broke.”
In their final conversation, Chuck calls Jimmy out
on something that we, too, have probably started to pick up on --
that Jimmy has a certain cycle to his behavior.
He does something crafty or underhanded, then he feels bad
and tries to atone with a genuine outpouring of emotion;
he resolves to live a straight-and-narrow life,
until, sooner or later, he gets an itch to bend a rule
or take a shortcut.
And so the cycle repeats.
But here when Jimmy tries to voice his regrets,
“I would…
maybe do some things differently.”
Chuck refuses to participate in this pattern.
“Why are you putting yourself through all this?”
“Because I wanted to tell you…”
“That you have regrets.
And I’m telling you, don’t bother.”
The important point Chuck is making in this scene is that we eventually
have to judge people by what they do, not by what they feel or say.
Jimmy constantly means well, but the results around him
speak for themselves.
“Jimmy, this is what you do.
You hurt people, over and over and over,
and then there’s this show of remorse.”
“It’s not a show.”
“I know you don’t think it’s a show, I don’t doubt your emotions are real.
But what’s the point of all the sad faces
and the gnashing of teeth?”
In this story, character is destiny --
so much so that Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
have talked about how the characters lead their story places that they,
as writers, would rather not go.
Yet the show concludes that what defines character is a person’s choices,
embodied in their actions.
“If you’re not going to change your behavior, and you won’t—“
“I can change—“
“Why not just skip the whole exercise.”
When Chuck voices his regard for the “rule of law”
“The rule of law, the idea that no matter who you are,
your actions have consequences.”
it feels like he’s actually describing the cosmic law that governs
Better Call Saul and its predecessor.
This is a universe in which no human being can escape
the results of what he does.
Jimmy, the great talker, performs one thing.
But his actions tell another story -- and through these actions we see
Saul Goodman emerging more and more.
Significantly, Chuck’s unraveling in this episode is intercut
with a key example of Jimmy proving exactly what Chuck is talking about.
Jimmy struggles to fix the mess that he created by sabotaging
the elderly Irene’s friendships in order to get his Sandpiper settlement sooner.
His plot to manipulate Irene is genius in its own way,
but also grotesquely elaborate and arguably unnecessary.
Jimmy’s special talent is destruction.
“I’m not good at building shit, you know?
I’m excellent at tearing it down.”
And the only way he can think of to successfully make up for his sin
is through another destruction,
the casualty this time being his own reputation.
“You took advantage of poor Mrs. Landry.
Does she know how much money you're gonna make from this?”
“Nope.
And again I ask so what?”
It’s hard to say if, at least in part, Chuck’s view of Jimmy
as the Great Destroyer has made Jimmy see himself this way.
But it’s true that Jimmy’s mind always goes toward the con,
the creative workaround — it’s a calling.
“It’s showtime, folks.”
Meanwhile doing the difficult, mundane work of building things
is extremely hard for him.
When he gets the great job with Davis & Main,
this straight, upright life doesn’t fit;
it doesn’t allow space for that crooked thing within him,
just as his favorite mug won’t fit in the cupholder
of his shiny new company car.
Sooner or later, Jimmy will feel that need to push the button.
Breaking Bad made viewers feel powerless by showing us chains of events
that followed from each other as inevitably as stages in a chemical reaction.
But in Better Call Saul we’re placed in an even more powerless position,
because we already know what happens.
Still, we invest anyway, hoping for the impossible --
and this is the eerie power of Better Call Saul’s narrative experiment:
getting us to side with someone we know from the start
is going to be wrong,
to root for someone we know will fail.
Our lack of power aligns with Jimmy’s own impotence to change
what’s happening to him, what he himself is becoming…
because however much he wants to be good for his loved ones,
he can’t stop himself from doing them harm.
And likewise, all that we feel for Jimmy and the other characters changes nothing,
does nothing to stop the accelerating car crash
happening before our eyes.
In the end, emotions just aren’t enough.
“See, that’s your problem, Jimmy… thinking the ends justify the means.
And you’re forever shocked when it all blows up in your face.”
Better Call Saul has made it easy for viewers to dislike Chuck
and root against him.
Chuck’s death makes us look back and ask: what if we got a lot of this wrong?
What if we came into the story at a misleading point?
“All we did was tear down a sick man.”
We start out seeing Jimmy as a selfless caretaker
to a brother who is ungrateful to his face and devious behind his back.
“You told him not to hire me.”
What we haven’t seen front and center (but only in brief flashbacks)
are the years in which Chuck watched his brother steal from their parents
and need bailing out for his various cons and crimes.
Siblings aren’t able to break out of the impressions they form of each other
in early life,
“So I need you to work your magic and make this whole situation go poof.”
so it’s hardly surprising that Chuck, whose great love is the law
“It’s mankind’s greatest achievement.”
sees Jimmy as a user and abuser of that love.
“Slippin' Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun.”
Still, however frequently Chuck has a point, however many times he’s right
in the letter of the law, the show makes us feel that Jimmy
is right in the spirit of it.
As Matt Zoller Seitz wrote for Vulture, Chuck “does the right thing
for the wrong reason as often as Jimmy does the wrong thing for the right reason.”
“He has a way of doing the worst things for reasons that sound almost noble.”
Zoller Seitz observes that Chuck is essentially Better Call Saul’s version of
Breaking Bad’s Skyler, that character who’s right to criticize
our protagonist, but who feel wrong.
Skyler inspired intense audience dislike, which unfortunately was mixed up
in some cases with misogynism.
Chuck is like Skyler 2.0 -- free of those gender politics.
Chuck warns of the person Jimmy’s destined to become --
and Breaking Bad confirms Chuck’s predictions --
yet we’ve been so biased, we just haven’t wanted to hear it.
By now, though, we’re forced to admit Chuck is correct about a lot of things.
However much he means well, Jimmy is toxic to everyone in his life.
“In the end… you’re going to hurt everyone around you.”
Jimmy genuinely loves his parents, yet he steals from these people he loves.
This is what Chuck knows about Jimmy from the start.
“I know you.
I know what you were, what you are.
People don’t change, you’re Slippin’ Jimmy.”
And from that perspective, we might understand why Jimmy’s
later caring behavior doesn’t atone for what in Chuck’s eyes is unforgivable.
We start to wonder if maybe this desire to live a straight life
that Jimmy is performing over these opening seasons is actually a backlash,
a response in opposition to what he’s truly doing
and thus becoming over the long-term.
“You’re like an alcoholic who refuses to admit he’s got a problem.”
Season 3 gave us the literal birth of Saul Goodman as a response
to financial strains.
“It’s like, ’s’all good, man.’”
“That guy has a lot of energy.”
“Yeah.
It’s just a name.”
Interestingly, on the character-is-destiny front,
Chuck and Kim both say things to Jimmy
in this episode that essentially encourage him to accept
his inner Saul Goodman.
“You know, sometimes you gotta play to your strengths.”
“You can’t help it - so stop apologizing
and accept it, embrace it.
Frankly I’d have more respect for you if you did.”
It’s clear that Chuck has seen his brother as Saul for a long time,
way before others have.
By now it truly feels that there are two distinct people
within our protagonist,
wrestling for his soul.
With Chuck gone, Jimmy is one step closer
to losing this battle.
What remains to be seen is how we get to our destination,
the victory of Saul over Jimmy, and the collateral damage of that war.
“He can't help himself… and everyone's left picking up the pieces.”
It’s Debra and Susannah, and you’re watching ScreenPrism.
Thanks guys so much for watching.
We post videos every Saturday and Sunday
and during the week, so hit that subscribe button,
and you’ll get access to all of our videos.
We can’t thank you enough for your support.
Thank you!