Warning: SPOILERS for Better Call Saul ahead
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In comparison to Breaking Bad, prequel series Better Call Saul is a much lighter series - or, at the very least, its threads of darkness are more subtle. The core of both series is still quite the same, however: they’re about the transformation and moral excavation of a man. Like Walter White (Bryan Cranston), Jimmy McGill’s (Bob Odenkirk) transformation is as much nurture as nature, and in the season finale, Jimmy’s brother Chuck (Michael McKean) unwittingly sped up the evolution of Jimmy into Saul.
Tragedy is a main ingredient in the Breaking Bad universe. A cancer diagnosis triggered Walter White’s transformation into Heisenberg – a descent into moral corruption and evil. However, tragedy hasn’t been so readily available in Better Call Saul. Its protagonist, too, isn’t the same as Walter, though they travel parallel roads. In Walter, we learn, in the end, he was never a good person, he was always Heisenberg, and the cancer was just a means and a reason to let it all come flooding out.
Jimmy, though, isn’t inherently a bad person. While both characters experience a descent into criminal amorality, Jimmy’s is a different journey. Despite his best efforts, through incidents that are his fault or the universe’s, he can’t remain a good person and continue to function in the world. In that way, Jimmy’s fall is a more tragic one, but it still lacks the spark of tragedy that allows the fall to take place. Breaking Bad’s world is a rack and pinion; cause and effect. Given that series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have intimated that we’re closer to the end than the beginning of the series, it’s likely that Chuck successfully committed suicide, and that this is the catalyst that turns Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.
Right now, it’s unclear if Chuck’s suicide attempt was successful, though the more truthful narrative (and the most thematically resonating) would be that Chuck is indeed dead, and that is looking incredibly likely. Michael McKean seemed to confirm it to The New York Times.
Are we sure Chuck is definitely a goner?
I am. I know they want to bring me in for some flashbacks this coming season, but that’s kind of beside the point. One of the things that made Jimmy Saul Goodman is the burden of, if not guilt, then that nagging feeling of having being somehow involved [in Chuck’s demise]. So that’s what he has to deal with, and it’s one of the things that made him wind up in a Cinnabon in Omaha.
This is the tragedy that the series has needed to make Jimmy become Saul Goodman. It’s a final confirmation that he can’t operate in this world as a good person; even when he tries to do the right thing, it’s wrong. So, as Chuck said, “Why bother?”
As McKean confirmed, Chuck’s death will stay with Jimmy, who is just starting to understand the results of his actions and recognize his patterns. In “Lantern,” the brothers share their first scene since the trial. Jimmy’s attempt at reconciliation is shot down by Chuck who seems to have moved on from his psychosomatic electrical allergy and has decided to wash his hands of Jimmy. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But the truth is, you’ve never mattered all that much to me,” Chuck says. The flashback that opened the episode bookmarks their confrontation and Jimmy’s role in Chuck’s suicide attempt. Camping out, a teen Chuck reads Mabel to young Jimmy. Chuck did love his brother, and Jimmy was often chasing his brother’s approval. It’s embittering for Jimmy to have never won that approval, and these happier memories of childhood are tarnished over the things the two have done to each other and especially in light of Chuck’s death which Jimmy will clearly blame himself for.
Their confrontation in court exacerbated Chuck’s unstable mental state, and while it did force him into treatment, Chuck took on too much at one time. Upset, and increasingly aware that Chuck was right – Jimmy does hurt everyone around him, and now there’s proof of it in Chuck himself, Jimmy might begin to pull away from Kim (Rhea Seehorn). Better to hurt her now than set her up for a major fall later.
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Through Breaking Bad, we do have some of an idea how things shake out for Jimmy as this series ends and Walter White takes center stage. Chuck told Jimmy that his actions always end up hurting people and that he’ll end up dying alone. Of course, this turned out to be foreshadowing for Chuck himself, but given what we know about Jimmy in Omaha, we may not have to look that far ahead to see Chuck was right. For Jimmy to become Saul, the right circumstances need to present themselves at the right moment with the right nature/nurture mixture. We’ve seen that in Chuck’s suicide, but for it to stick – for Jimmy to embrace Saul and to never look back from it – he needs to lose Kim.
While Jimmy is self-aware enough to recognize when he’s done something wrong - and even show regret and make amends - Kim and Chuck have always been his moral compass, keeping him right at the line of criminal behavior. Alone, we already know that he goes from being a criminal lawyer to a criminal and a lawyer. We know Jimmy will need a catalyst to embrace becoming Saul Goodman fully. Kim and Chuck have held him back from that. Kim herself has a complicated relationship with Jimmy’s morally ambiguous actions. For her, the limit does seem to be the occasional grift on an obnoxious bar patron. She wouldn’t stand for the actions Saul takes during the Breaking Bad series, which are definitely beyond the things that Jimmy is doing right now.
Of course, there’s another route to take as well - one where, similar to Walt, Jimmy makes it impossible for people to be around him. He might become Saul out of necessity. His law license is suspended, his Sandpiper check is still years away, and Kim is on sabbatical following her car accident. Even when he gets his license back, Elder law is clearly no longer a viable option for him, so he’ll probably return to public defender work. From Breaking Bad we already know that Jimmy has some tangential connections to the cartel through Mike (Jonathan Banks). It’s possible that in the interim, he'll take on an advisory role in Gus Fring’s (Giancarlo Esposito) still-growing empire. This, of course, harkens back to one of the main themes of Breaking Bad: the desire to provide and thrive. If he wants to help Kim the way she helped him, Jimmy will have to go down a road parallel to Walter White’s. And that’s where the final tragedy can come into play.
Jimmy begins defending cartel members and is well compensated. The cases get bigger, darker, and the criminals’ actions more depraved. Kim eventually has enough, but Jimmy has no choice but to continue because, well, it’s the cartel. You’re going to tell them no? Kim leaves him and with no chance of reconciling. Either because of Chuck’s suicide or some new kind of malfeasance, Jimmy decides to distance himself from the McGill name. Maybe by now, he’s no longer indebted to the cartel, but he has no one to share this wealth and good fortune with. He wants to contact Kim, but there’s no way she’d give him another chance. He’s damaged their relationship too much with his poor decisions and the crimes he’s either committed or abetted; after all, now he has a solid reputation among the criminal element, so he just goes and embraces the Saul Goodman shtick because, as Chuck said, “Why bother?” Why bother trying to fight it?