But this review, the last of this extraordinary season of television, isn’t, not just yet. There’s one more scene I want to discuss, one I believe is key to the entire thing.

Between the library dedication ceremony and the appeals hearing, Jimmy joylessly participates in a meeting of the charitable foundation Chuck set up to fund scholarships for promising young students with an interest in law; his spot on the board is one of the few things the elder McGill left him. Writers Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz and director Adam Bernstein take an innovative approach to the proceedings: Within a second or two of each student beginning to answer one of Howard Hamlin’s jovial questions, they crash-cut away to the next one, as if the nature of what they’re saying means nothing compared to the nature of the process itself.

After all the interviews have concluded, Howard is prepared to offer the fund’s three scholarships to the three highest vote-getters. Then Jimmy interrupts. It was he, he says, who voted for the student who only received a single vote. “That’s the shoplifter,” one of the other board members replies, referring to the girl’s run-in with the law from a few years back. Jimmy points out that it’s precisely that experience that gave her an interest in the law in the first place, and that both her academic career and her personal essay have borne out the promise they’d be ignoring if they let that one event define the kid’s life.

Which they do. The three winners take home the scholarship, and young Kristy Esposito, shoplifter, gets the shaft. But when Jimmy races toward her outside the office to speak with her, we don’t know that yet. He breaks the news, and does so with gusto. “You didn’t get it. You were never gonna get it… You made a mistake, and they are never forgetting it. As far as they’re concerned, your mistake is who you are. It’s all you are.”

But she has an option, he tells the flabbergasted kid: beat them. Cheat. Cut corners. Hustle. Don’t play by the rules. Be smart. Be hated. “You rub their noses in it. You make them suffer… Screw them! The winner takes it all.” She walks away, the effect of this warped monologue on her uncertain.

Then a surprising thing happens. Back down in the parking garage where he used to loiter in his days working for Howard and Chuck’s firm, Jimmy’s car breaks down… and then he breaks down too. “No, no, no,” he sobs, crying for real for the very first time this season. Is he mourning his brother? The notion that his brother was right about him all along? The notion that he’s right about the hopeless odds facing him and the scholarship kid and anyone else who’s less than perfect? The idea that he’s become a person who shouts at children, encouraging them to become dirtbags and do whatever it takes to get one over on the so-called good guys? The fact that the law doesn’t benefit everyone equally, and that some people will get away with everything no matter what? That the law can be fooled? That amoral monsters can wield it as they see fit? That his life, and the lives of everyone he cares about, are slowly sliding into disaster?

Good questions, aren’t they? After the events of the past few weeks, weeks in which Better Call Saul aired its best season ever, do they sound familiar?

I reviewed Better Call Saul’s backbreaker of a season finale for TV Guide. A great season of television.

Tags: better call saul, breaking bad, reviews, TV, tv guide, TV reviews

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