#with walt at least it's usually played for laughs more than sympathy

[izzythehutt]

Saul Wrong?

I have many controversial BrBa/BCS opinions, but the one that I always come back to is that Saul Goodman worked way better as a comic relief supporting character than as a protagonist of his own show.

I actually found him more likeable when he was an unapologetic sleazebag, it was when they tried to make me feel sorry for him in his own show that I lost sympathy. His pathological criminality brings out my inner Howard/Chuck, I guess. It's like....dude...why are you like this? And I don't necessarily feel like the show does a very good job of explaining it. At a young age he sees his father getting taken advantage of by conmen, and apparently accepts the (deeply morally cynical) attitude that the world is separated into hustlers (wolves) and marks (sheep.) His parents seem to have been totally normal people for whom he felt affection but no respect, because he can't stand rubes, and that's what they were. His brother Chuck is not a rube and is the family member whose affection and respect Jimmy seems to covet the most, though it's not clear whether he has any awareness that the very quality that makes his brother's esteem worth having (his commitment to an objective standard of morality—the fact that he can see through Jimmy's bullshit) is the one thing that prevents them from understanding one another.

Somehow the fact that Walt lived a (basically) normal life until his cancer diagnosis, and everything he does is predicated on his awareness of his own mortality, makes the character's moral fall from grace...more understandable to me? He obviously has a bunch of bottled up petty resentments and a sense of having wasted his potential, but I find his pathology way more coherent than Jimmy/Saul's. I think this is really because he was always the main character of a show, and Saul got a gigantic retconned deep backstory for the spin-off which, while enjoyable, was very obviously not the point of that character when he was created. BCS had to answer the question, "why would someone become like this?" but I wonder if there really is a particularly satisfying way to explain why a comic relief criminal lawyer would choose to work with a person like Walt.

I think BrBa did a better job of showing how Walt self-justifies his awful behavior (compartmentalization, projection, guilt) but Jimmy/Saul seems to have something missing (a sympathy chip? He's capable of feeling compassion for people he relates to, but no sense of seeing value in any abstract principle.) Why are you so obsessed with breaking the rules, dude? His brother is basically correct in their final conversation when he assesses Jimmy as behaving like a child who refuses to acknowledge the consequences of his actions beyond how they hurt him. Every moral consideration is made in terms of his subjective feelings. Him feeling entitled to a high-profile job at his brother's law firm when his brother had to bail him out of serious legal problems is really kind of insane.

Maybe the real problem for me is that Walt is obsessed with gaining respect and Jimmy is obsessed with being liked, and at the end of the day as a motivation for villainy in a man, I.....kind of find the latter more pathetic than the former.