LogFAQs > #973028151

I'm conflicted. What I ask myself is whether the conclusion feels inevitable based on Jimmy's characterization across the show, and to that, I am not sure. The ending reevaluates whether Jimmy and Kim "are bad, for each other." Because while their relationship led to the death of Howard and a lie that consumed Kim's life, their break-up allowed Saul Goodman to fully be unleashed. And it is Kim's withholding of relief, her confession, and her physical presence in the courtroom that seems to motivate Jimmy to confess to everything.

The tapes we see Gene rewatching over the course of the series are his tapes he produced as Saul Goodman, not the tapes as Jimmy that he made with Kim. (I guess you could argue the intro shows that Gene is 'rewatching'/reliving the entire series over and over, but the videos played within the show are always his lawyer advertisements.) Gene comes very close to braining a cancer patient during a burglary.

So to me the face-turn hangs almost entirely on Gene's phone call with Kim where he calls her a hypocrite for not confessing to the Howard scam. And I'm not convinced that's enough when his first plan in Saul Gone is to rat her out and destroy her for a pint of ice cream. Now the episode does also introduce the theme of regret and the motif of the time machine, but it rubs me a little raw that all the moments of Jimmy slowly learning the meaning of regretting your actions are withheld from us until this last episode. The conclusion seems to be that if Jimmy had the time machine then he would go back to that night and have a heart-to-heart with his brother. But Chuck never enters Jimmy's mind again from season 5 until the finale so that also feels underdeveloped.

A lot of this kinda goes up to my biggest problem with seasons 5 and 6: there is not enough Jimmy. Way too much screen time on old fat Giancarlo Esposito who is a static character. Too much time on Mike who is static once he kills Ziegler. Too much time on Ignacio given that his story arrives at a dead end and had nothing to do with the titular character since like season 2. I'm not saying the cartel storyline was bad, but in a show called Better Call Saul, it did not have enough baring on the show's central relationship to justify how much focus it got.