"Better Call Saul": final thoughts

[WARNING: spoilers.]

The series finale of "Better Call Saul," titled "Saul Gone," aired a couple days ago, thus completing the series's six-season run. Once you get past the fact that this is a prequel series in which all the actors from "Breaking Bad" look older, you can sit back and enjoy yourself. I have a few scattered thoughts about how the series ended, and while a lot of critics are giving the ending an enthusiastic thumbs-up, I think I'd give it a more neutral thumbs-sideways.

Most of us predicted that Saul (Bob Odenkirk) was going to end up either caught or dead. Some even thought that Saul might kill himself, but to me, that always seemed ridiculous because the man has only ever been about one thing: his own survival. Suicide was never in the cards. Someone might catch up to him and murder him, but Saul would never have the cojones to off himself: born survivors are terrified by the thought of death.* In the finale, Saul ends up caught while hiding in a dumpster after running away from Marion (Carol Burnett), who used her Life Alert device to contact authorities once she'd determined that Saul was a scammer. He's taken into custody and we get two significant flashbacks in which Saul talks about time machines as a device for going back and fixing some part of his life. In one flashback, Saul talks about going back to invest in one of Warren Buffet's early projects, then leaping forward in time to find himself a billionaire. In the second flashback, Saul remembers a time he slipped (shades of Slippin' Jimmy) and hurt himself. In the present, Saul finds he faces a barrage of charges that will mean life plus 190 years in prison. Using his finesse, Saul is able to bargain all of that down to just seven years. On the day of his sentencing, however, Saul confesses under oath to the true nature of his crimes, no longer dodging responsibility for his many misdeeds. The court sentences him to 86 years in prison, and his ex-wife Kim is there in court for his confession and sentencing. Finally owning up to who he really is, Saul—now back to being Jimmy McGill—says a touching goodbye to Kim, who has made her own confessions and is now free to live out the next chapter of her life. After all that Kim has gone through, she'll probably never be completely happy, but she at least has a chance at a new beginning.

It was a touching, bittersweet ending to a very watchable series. I still don't think it rose to the level of "Breaking Bad," but it was fascinating and full of interesting characters and plot twists. For most of its run, it was also screamingly funny. My favorite moment is probably when Saul had to fake being a Baptist minister down in the Louisiana bayou, accent and everything.

But whether one thinks the series finale is awesome or merely mediocre depends, I think, on whether one believes that people can change. Human history presents plenty of evidence for and against this thesis; people are complicated, and human nature can be malleable. Jimmy McGill isn't necessarily a malicious person, but from his childhood, he's always wanted to be less a sheep than a wolf. Critics point out that Jimmy has a strong desire to be loved, and that this side of him is at war with the side that sees people as ripe for exploitation. Personally, I'm not sure it's an internal war so much as a mere disconnect: Jimmy simply doesn't see how taking advantage of people can lead to their not liking him. From where I sit, the series doesn't seem to give us much evidence that Jimmy can change: his big brother Chuck had Jimmy pegged long ago—Jimmy might not be evil, but he's a user, a manipulator, and a scammer. The series finale would have us believe that Jimmy finally learned his lesson, which is why he decided to sacrifice himself for the sake of Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn)—whom he obviously still loves—and why he ended up giving that huge mea culpa in court, finally setting the record straight. Kim's own confession of her sins was the catalyst that motivated Jimmy to do the right thing, to unburden himself of his own sins and to accept whatever penalties awaited him.

I suppose such behavior is conceivable, but I don't find it plausible, at least not in Jimmy's case. True: Jimmy/Saul was at his best whenever he was around Kim, who provided Jimmy with the moral framework that kept him from doing even worse things. Without Kim, Jimmy was rudderless and utterly unable to tell right from wrong; by himself, his own moral compass's true north was his selfishness. When Kim broke up with Jimmy, she claimed that the two of them were poison when they were together, but the truth is that Kim was always the more moral of the two, and Jimmy was toxic for her. After Jimmy went into hiding following Walter White's death, he wasn't able to stop himself from returning to his scamming ways, and this inability to stop himself proved to be his undoing. This is why I find Jimmy's courtroom confession and his self-sacrifice for Kim so hard to believe. When cornered, Jimmy is the type to throw everyone under the bus, including the people closest to him. I suspect, though, that show creator Vince Gilligan wanted to end the series on as positive a note as possible, which meant that Saul would have to suddenly turn good. I don't buy it.

As I've mentioned previously, I don't think Saul ended up having much of a character arc. Almost right up to the last moment, he was Slippin' Jimmy the sinner, the transgressor. In "Breaking Bad," by contrast, we got to watch Walter White transform from a mousy, nebbishy teacher to the meth kingpin of the American Southwest. Walter went from fearful to bold, and in part, he was helped along by the existential threat of his lung cancer—a motivating force. Jimmy, meanwhile, had no terminal illness that forced him to consider what was important in life; he was simply a bad seed, and that never changed throughout the entire series... until the very last episode. Some will argue that we can see flickers of humanity in Jimmy, and that these little glimpses of goodness hinted at Jimmy's noble behavior in the series finale (he does, after all, try to save Kim from bad consequences several times... but only when it's obvious that she might die); all the same, I contend that the finale gives us a forced about-face, with Jimmy acting against his nature mainly because the show's writers want him to.

It could be that, in the end, creator Vince Gilligan wanted "Better Call Saul" to be the same sort of morality play as "Breaking Bad" (my review here includes a discussion of "Breaking Bad" as a morality play), and this is why Jimmy is kept alive and sent to jail to pay for his crimes. Gilligan could have gone for something comically amoral or humorously nihilistic, but instead, Jimmy experiences a sort of redemption while also getting what he deserves. It could be the simple conventionality of the morality on display that bothers me. Do the crime, do the time. For all of the show's cleverness, great acting, interwoven story structure, and striking cinematography, that seems to be where "Better Call Saul" leads us. It's a hugely simplistic moral to give the viewer after six seasons of hilarious and frightening shenanigans. Not that I didn't appreciate the ride: I'm just miffed about the sudden stop at the end.

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*I can hear someone objecting that it's possible to be a survivor while not being afraid to die. That may be true for some, but I find the notion to be, overall, self-contradictory. In fact, I define survivor as "someone who will preserve his/her own life at all costs." If you want to live, but you're willing to die for a certain cause or reason, then you're not a survivor in the required sense. True survivors, interested only in their own self-preservation, are generally narcissistic cowards, hence the terror at the prospect of their own death. This is also why I'm not convinced Jimmy's sudden altruism at the end rings true: if Jimmy is the survivor I think he is, then not even his concern for Kim will be enough to motivate him to protect her.