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septembersghost · 2 years

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been thinking a lot about our occasional bcs exchanges and wanted to ask you: what do you personally think about "gene" in 611 and 612? because, at least to me, they really tried their best to make jimmy even worse than he was in brba – and saul was veeery bad already. it's probably just my pov, but it felt like they were trying to convince us that he deserved thoss 86 years in jail and i can't wrap my head around it, because this kind of "morality" was never the point of this narrative universe. it's totally a me thing, but i look at jimmy going crazy after the phonecall (and i am not talking about the anger outburst which is very jimmyTM, i am referring to everything he does after that) or thinking about killing marion, and it rubs me the wrong way, i can't help it. he was always flawed and became an asshole and did awful things, but like that? never. and i just... i don't get it. not saying i am right, because i am emotional and have a hard time being rational, so i am 99% wrong tbh, but is it really agency if everything a character does seems like a excuse for the plot to go in a certain predetermined direction?

i know we've talked/lamented about kim and the erasure of her agency and how crushing the treatment of her as a means to an end felt (and i could rant/cry about the mishandling of her and why it feels particularly terrible forever), and in a couple of replies you've mentioned jimmy too, and i'm sorry for being so awful at responding to things lately, because i swear i read everything you say like this:

i don't think you're wrong, but if you are, we're wrong together, because i completely agree.

my problem with everything that happened after point and shoot was that, not only was it rushed, it suddenly *felt* like writing. what i mean by that is, so much of the strength of the show was in how organic each development felt for the characters, how real it was as part of their journey. even when something was devastating or violent (chuck's death, mike and werner, nacho's fate, etc), it felt utterly honest for the story. of course that had to happen. fun and games is where this breaks for me. kim fidgeting in court only to announce she's quit the law feels written. the breakup scene...i desperately tried to understand that at the time, but it feels this way too, manipulative towards us as the audience in a way the show simply wasn't at other times. and then we get plunged into the gene storyline and very little of it makes sense (the stealing from the mall mishegoss remains incomprehensible and inconsequential lmao), but perhaps the more grievous aspect is that it doesn't matter. you could skip from the saul jump at the end of fun and games to him being caught at the beginning of saul gone and very little fundamentally changes because none of the wheel spinning in those episodes served any purpose to me, *except* to vilify jimmy. this then becomes a failure of plot - why does he need to be taken to this extreme? we know saul did despicable things, but also that certain lines weren't crossed, why go so far here? and the only answer is: to try to justify sentencing him to 86 years in federal prison, with no hope of parole (sorry to peter, who somehow doesn't seem to get that this is the reality of such a sentence). it's maneuvering pieces for a determined outcome, rather than fulfilling characters' arcs more naturally. "gene" ends up feeling more like a split personality than another mask over jimmy (you could easily argue he has a complete psychotic break in waterworks). kim is silenced.

a further problem then becomes, okay, if they needed to prove to us that jimmy could sink that far, they needed to do that in abq, before the full saul descent, show some worse nadir in jimmy himself, but they didn't because we, and they, loved him too much to go there. jimmy does many bad things, but keeps coming back from the brink. then we have an episode where he does the most unselfish thing he could do in being willing to die if it means kim escapes safely, and no time to process or recover from that, or see the two of them attempt to do so, before breaking them up. i know they described this as continually breaking him and stripping things away from him and kim leaving being the final catalyst, but it doesn't sit well with me because there's no room for it to develop, it's just a swerve. he goes from the most empathetic moment to utterly devoid? and then unfortunately they're boxed in by breaking bad and they couldn't concoct a more unexpected way to approach those parameters.

"is it really agency if everything a character does seems like a excuse for the plot to go in a certain predetermined direction?" exactly. and, sure, everything is written to take the plot to a certain place in a story, but we shouldn't be able to feel the seams of it and question its integrity.

what's unsettling to me is they spent six seasons humanizing jimmy and showing his vulnerability and exposing the heart underneath the colorful suits and the mask, only to then take us to a place where i have legitimately seen people interpreting him as worse than walt. which is insane and the wrong conclusion, but that shouldn't have been open for debate (much like i hate how certain audience members can now so easily blame kim for everything and claim she betrayed him - it's wrong, but can i see how they arrive there? yeah, and that's troubling). you can't undo character development like that in three episodes and have it feel right. those last few episodes undo them. we only have the shared smoke scene to reconcile it.

"this kind of "morality" was never the point of this narrative universe. it's totally a me thing, but i look at jimmy going crazy after the phonecall (and i am not talking about the anger outburst which is very jimmyTM, i am referring to everything he does after that) or thinking about killing marion, and it rubs me the wrong way, i can't help it. he was always flawed and became an asshole and did awful things, but like that? never. and i just... i don't get it." say that!!! one of my biggest problems with this is the moralizing aspect of it. brba never fell into that trap, and maybe you could argue it should've been ~morally~ harsher to walt and jesse (although, objectively, it's extremely dark, it's not necessarily about moral judgment so much as it is about consequence, fate, and transformation). walt dies, but he dies on his own terms in a blaze of glory. jesse's imprisoned and tortured, he'll carry those scars, both physical and soul deep, but he escapes. it doesn't hinge on moralizing at us in a literal sense, it's rather what you said before - this universe was never about balancing morality and choices with the justice system. it was about balancing those choices with yourself, those you love, and those you hurt.

the balance doesn't come, because jimmy and kim never even have a conversation. she is powerless and voiceless in the unfolding of these events. he only gets her to show up by making it seem like he might turn on her. and i know they talked about synthesis, i fully understand and appreciate the reclamation of his name, but (at the risk of belaboring this point, because I've mentioned it before), there's no reconciliation or middle ground here. saul lies through the truth by putting the weight of everything on his extreme trauma, jimmy then negates this altogether and give himself more credit than is even due for the heisenberg empire, and the depth of his trauma isn't acknowledged. it's unbalanced. it's seven cushy years at club fed or 86 in supermax, like...this show was so beautifully nuanced only for them to literally and figuratively end in strict black and white? there's a puritanism to it, and the ways in which jimmy and kim are "punished," that's unsettling. it's meant to be tragic irony - the lawyer who mocked the system is the one who will spend the rest of his life in jail - but feels clashing somehow to the more humanistic (and even mythic) elements inherent to both shows. it's not even that it's antithetical, i get what they were aiming for, but the purpose and heart of the story isn't ultimately served for me. and so much of that is due to the lack of space it had to breathe, and the rushed decline and whiplash manipulation of the characters, jimmy particularly.

this is long and i don't even know if i'm answering you properly or running in circles because this is what it's been like in my head for months. it's tormenting. i miss our show so much, it was my favorite and i still consider it a genius piece of television and an artistic triumph from the creative standpoint of the acting, the cinematography, the majority of the writing, but something fractured so badly for me by the end. i miss having more insightful/deeply felt thoughts about it, i miss its magic, and i miss the sense of comfort that it gave me, even in its tragedy. i know you understand that, and i wish i could help us reclaim it. when we'd say bcs is a ghost story...it haunts me, but not in the way they intended.

#bobosmain #sorry elisa love i have no idea what this reply even is 😭💔#boboodenkirk #letterbox #bcs #i want this in MY tag but not in the general tag i hate that i can't hide this underneath things :/#better call saul #long post

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