Better Call Saul: Ethics Are Strange

i remember you saying something about doing the right thing i don't even know what that means i think we should only use our powers for good what are we considering good as of 9 06 p.m tonight those two aren't all bad saul goodman is uh he's the last line of defense for the little guy file that under unintended consequences [Music] justice matters most well howard i guess that's your cross to bear [Music] let's continue our discussion of the best show on television better call saul as we get ready for the final season's release on april 18th you may have noticed that the first video in this series was titled better call saul can people change but we didn't actually answer the question of whether people can change and whether saul goodman is any better of a person than slip and jimmy we didn't answer this because to really do so we need to look at how the show understands ethics so let's do that right now how about we start with this you know that famous ethical riddle the trolley problem it's the idea that a trolley is about to run over like let's say five people or something and you can flip a switch that changes its tracks so it goes another way and instead only kills two people or whatever do you flip the switch knowing that you are now responsible for those two people's deaths but also knowing that you saved five other people it's a good demonstration of the conflict between principles and consequences since our principles tell us we should never do anything that harms people but here we know that more harm will be done if we do nothing at least quantitatively if it even makes sense to talk about harm in that way but there's one huge reason why ethical decision making in life is different and more complicated than the trolley problem in the trolley problem we know exactly what the consequences of our decision will be but this isn't the case in real life we can try to predict but the fact that we need to predict brings in a whole separate set of issues our biases can make us miss something in our calculations and so a decision that may seem unethical from the outside may be partially explained by bad intent and partially explained by bad prediction abilities in these situations is the person behaving unethically because they lack a conscience or because they're just more motivated by other drives and does that difference even matter take for example one of the biggest ethical conflicts and better call saul when jimmy decides to sabotage chuck's mesa verde filing taking painstaking effort to switch numbers around on documents delaying chuck's work significantly and causing enormous professional embarrassment for him jimmy does this to obstruct his brother's work with the big bank client that jimmy is trying to entice to go back to working with kim he did it for you i did it for kim hurting one person to help another sounds a bit like a trolley problem doesn't it but a one-to-one ratio isn't even close to good enough to warrant hurting anyone right and his prediction that it would help kim doesn't take into account that kim might find out it could have been predicted that kim would not want to retain mesa verde as a client under these fraudulent circumstances and we see how she reacts when she finds out it needs to be noted that jimmy is helping himself with this sabotage too because he's very worried that without mesa verde as a client kim will not be able to pay her half of the rent of the expensive offices they're about to sign a lease for he literally decides to sabotage chuck right after the scene where kim's on the verge of backing out of their shared lease it would destroy jimmy at this point to lose the sense of connection and legitimacy he's felt from being in a professional partnership with kim his initial decision to mess with chuck's filing seems impulsive he realizes his brother is non-responsive he sees the mesa verde folders and he gets to work what's strange is that just before he convinced kim to still sign their expensive lease for the office space by saying hey there will be other mesa verdes arguably he didn't need to sabotage chuck to keep the office however a key part of him convincing kim was saying that he would help just like she would help him if he was in trouble that's why we're a team something like this happens you're there to help me i'm there to help you it's very likely that he's not financially able to do this i mean if just based on that expression i mean he just intentionally got himself fired at davis and maine and he got to keep the bonus but that money runs out pretty quick when you're paying monthly for expensive office space in addition to the ways his actions help himself there's also the fact that he's upset with his brother for going into the hhm offices and exposing himself to the electricity that affects him so much just to convince mesa verde not to leave hhm with kim so among the many reasons for jimmy's actions revenge is certainly up there and we're going to come back to the theme of revenge because it's arguably a central theme of the whole show revenge but i don't think jimmy messed with the filing primarily to hurt chuck either out of revenge or animosity i think his judgment gets so clouded that he was genuinely surprised when chuck said yesterday morning was the worst professional humiliation of my life i do believe jimmy did it primarily to help kim and to help himself get a nice office he gets to share with her to get back to the point about how issues with prediction complicate real life ethical decision making a key fact is that this situation gets completely out of hand for jimmy and results in events he certainly never predicted this doesn't remove responsibility from him at all of course since he didn't predict the course of events largely because he didn't care enough to try it wasn't until kim implied it that he realized he'd have to bribe the guy at the printing and copying store to lie for him making someone lie for you is unethical unless there's an extremely good reason a reason much better than to avoid you having to face consequences for your actions for example if you ask your sibling to lie to your parents about you being gay because you have a justified reason to think your parents will react abusively this is justified but paying a stranger to lie to your brother so you don't get caught sabotaging him is of course not justified it's a means to jimmy's end of preventing chuck from getting definitive proof of the behavior he already correctly accused jimmy of look if chuck was some evil person who was going to murder jimmy if he found out what jimmy did then i would not be here telling you it was unethical of jimmy to bribe this guy to lie for him the reality is however that chuck was trying to get jimmy to face consequences for his actions like having his law license suspended because better call saul shows us such an intimate view of jimmy's world however we as viewers might have mixed feelings about whether we want jimmy to face even this more just consequence not that it ever would have stopped him but jimmy could have easily predicted he would have to make this guy lie for him what he maybe couldn't have predicted is that chuck would fall and hit his head while questioning the guy at the copy and printer store in one of the most disturbing moments of the series i mean jimmy could potentially have predicted this since chuck investigating him would necessarily lead him to this store where he would have to cope with the immense stress of uncountable electronic devices aimed at him would jimmy have still sabotaged his brother if he knew it would lead to chuck being hospitalized with a head injury let me know what you think in the comments we don't know but this helps explain why making ethical decisions purely based on expected consequences is deeply fraught with issues and why we need principles when we're making decisions principles such as it's wrong to sabotage my brother so my partner can keep a client and so we can keep our office of course there may be instances where sabotaging someone or something would be justified but our principles should tell us this is not one of those situations because the only harm at risk of being done is harm to kim's business and to jimmy's work environment harm that doesn't rise to a level that would justify sabotage especially since kim losing mesa verde as a client is actually not really unfair to her at all despite what jimmy thinks kim deserves mesa verde not you not hhm she earned it and she needs it yes she brought them on as a client but it's ultimately their decision who they want to work with plus when chuck convinces them to stay with hhm we as viewers are kind of convinced as well the way he uses reverse psychology in this scene is just immaculate these days the penalties for even the most honest of errors can be devastating you need a sharp young eye to catch that stuff when you've specialized in this kind of work for decades on end you tend to get kind of stale stale you get stale just amazing stuff all this is to say jimmy's actions are rooted in naive and rosy expectations of the consequences rather than ethical principles he's not righting any wrongs he's just trying to get what he wants so after chuck is hospitalized with the head injury he gets investigating jimmy's lies he devises a plan even more calculated and manipulative than his brothers he pretends to quit hhm and significantly plays up the symptoms of his issue with electromagnetic waves telling jimmy he just can't trust his brain anymore because of the error he made with the mesa verde filing what is so important to note here is that chuck's plan to get jimmy to confess does not work at all without one essential element jimmy's good nature if jimmy was unethical to the core why would it matter to him to see his brother recede from the world as a consequence of jimmy's actions chuck knows him so well that he can use jimmy's good side to admit to jimmy's bad side when jimmy admits what he did we see a perfect example of how issues with foresight can influence unethical decisions i did it to help her but i i honestly didn't think it would hurt you so bad i thought you'd just say oh crap i made a mistake and go on with your life like a normal person but oh no wishful thinking in the middle of this scene where chuck is playing jimmy like a fiddle because he knows him so well that line from jimmy feels shockingly out of touch with who his brother is of course chuck was going to go bananas being professionally humiliated as he just gets going returning to work from a very long medical leave but we know that jimmy isn't stupid he knows his brother very well too he just gets blinded by his impulsive opportunism notably jimmy is not ethical to the extreme where he'd be okay actually facing consequences for his actions he's simply comfortable admitting to chuck what he did to get chuck to stop giving up on his own brain besides it's your word against mine jimmy admitting what he did probably shouldn't be considered ethical in the strictest sense because he's doing a good thing only to cover up what appears to be the tragic negative consequences of his earlier actions but chalk certainly isn't always the paragon of virtue either even though chuck's famous for his discipline and judgment he may be better at performing legality than he is at performing morality for a significant example of this let's look at a flashback to three years earlier when chuck and jimmy are at their mother's hospital bedside as she lays in a coma this is a scene the show wants us to think about while watching chuck trick jimmy into confessing and we know this because it's a flashback that starts this same episode the last one of the second season in the flashback we see them both sitting by their mother's bedside and jimmy gets up to go get sandwiches for both of them because they've been sitting there a while and also because chuck is being extremely cold to him as jimmy's gone their mother passes away but before she does she actually becomes conscious shockingly wakes up and says one thing jimmy no mom it's me chuck jimmy no mom it gives me chills every time i watch it and the way that the show lets the droning beeping sound go on for way too long is just so moving and painful jimmy soon gets back with his sandwiches and chuck tells him their mother has passed then this exchange happens did she wake up did she say anything no now there is a lot more to unpack in this scene but let's just focus for now on this point alone the fact that chuck lied to his brother withholding something of immeasurable sentimental value what do we take away from this well let's talk about people sometimes i like to look at a person as having a bunch of drives some of which are integrated in parts of the self and some of which are getting in the way of the self as it identifies in psychological terms these could be called ego syntonic drives and ego dystonic drives syntonic like a harmonious tone or dystonic like a discordant tone like jimmy sees himself as clever and charming both of which he definitely is these are drives he experiences syntonically they work with who he sees himself as but he's also short-sighted and deceitful tendencies which work against how he views himself their dystonic drives in a similar way we could describe chuck seeing himself as attentive and objectively correct and so on but he's also got a strong repressed an anti-social streak that affects his course of action there is no principle in the world that justifies lying to jimmy in this circumstance and the fact that chuck does this reveals a twisted irrational kernel at the center of his morality if we rewind the scene to the beginning after chuck says no to jimmy a few times when he suggests they get food jimmy recalls a memory involving their mom and chuck's response really shows how they experienced their shared world from completely different perspectives remember that time i i accidentally invited kathy and cheryl to mom's surprise party it's kind of tricky out on the dance floor it was a fun night i just remember the whole family cleaning up after you and mom leaving her own birthday party to drive one of them home so i guess jimmy caused a lot of trouble or whatever back then but still this is not the time to make him feel bad about it and this is just one of the many situations where we see chuck's deeply anti-social orientation but what makes me say that chuck's antisocial behavior comes from dystonic drives rather than syntonic ones you know what makes me say he doesn't want to be a jerk is that as we see in this scene right after jimmy leaves to get them sandwiches chuck breaks out in tears surely this is the only time we see him cry in the entire series right i can't remember any other time we could take it as just the raw pain of losing his mother but to me it certainly comes across as the frustration of not being able to get over his cold tendencies towards his brother and his inability to consistently show love to jimmy the emotion comes bursting out because he doesn't know how to let it out slowly and consistently his crying is what wakes up his mother actually but as she passes chuck snaps immediately from the vulnerability of his crying to the uptight defensiveness that is his response to feeling hurt that his mother didn't call for him i don't want to get off topic going into detail about this but the whole jimmy and chuck brother rivalry kind of has a biblical feel to it doesn't it it reminded me of the story from genesis of the brothers jacob and esau where the one brother tricks their dying parent to bless him instead of his brother here it's similar chuck is essentially stealing a sort of blessing from jimmy i mean it's you know it's not really a blessing but it's something like that or should we speculate that chuck kept this from jimmy because it would hurt him to know his mother woke from a coma to call for him with her last breath when he was getting sandwiches i don't know about that it's hard to see good intentions here i think the ethical thing to do would still be to tell the person especially when they asked directly like jimmy did did she wake up did she say anything with scenes like this better call saul makes us empathize with jimmy chuck has always been the symbol of law and success but he's frankly a jerk could be a real son of a i just want to say this this actor really nailed that smile i love that smile i used it in the first video too and subscribe to see if i use it in the next video anyway chuck can't speak jimmy's language of sociability any more than jimmy can speak chuck's language of rules we see this in the situations where chuck tries to make jokes or be entertaining for example in another flashback when chuck and his wife at the time rebecca had jimmy over for dinner a week after he moved to albuquerque and started in the mail room at hhm in this scene we learned that jimmy didn't make it to their wedding actually but more to our point we see jimmy cracking rebecca up with lawyer jokes he does like a whole routine how many lawyers does it take to change the light bulb classic setup here three one to climb the ladder one to shake it and one to sue the ladder company comedy gold she enjoys it but chuck doesn't he doesn't have much of a sense of humor about his profession he tries to get in on the fun later though and he makes a joke but she's so surprised by it that she doesn't even realize he's making a joke and just gives like a courtesy chuckle to be polite when she realizes this leads to chuck having an existential moment of reflection thinking i can't do what jimmy does he's better than me at this it's a real hello darkness my old friend moment where chuck feels unable to burst out of the confines of his rigid bearing and rigid form of connection with others to get back to how this impacts his moral decision making let's talk about another scene with rebecca chuck and jimmy halfway through the third season an episode opens with a flashback taking place shortly after jimmy became a lawyer by this point chuck and rebecca have divorced and chuck's electromagnetic physical mental health issue has developed which by the way i don't think that this is a coincidence that this happens after his divorce in this scene chuck is having jimmy help him set up his house for a dinner with rebecca to make it look like the power being out is a romantic quaint thing rather than a serious debilitating issue but we see jimmy warren his brother chuck you sure this is the right play i mean in my experience the bigger the lie the harder it can be to dig out i'll cross that bridge when i come to it but chuck is very much set on his plan of lying to rebecca during the dinner her phone rings and soon enough chuck is fully triggered and is freaking out instead of him being honest and vulnerable he says it is incredibly bad manners to answer a cell phone in company it's very rude even though he likes to think of himself as a principled man it's easier for him to lie and be a jerk than to be honest when it means being vulnerable being vulnerable is something him and jimmy both struggle with and it's tragic that they can't connect about it with each other since that itself would require being vulnerable but jimmy covers his vulnerability with extreme sociability whereas chuck covers it with anti-sociability i wanna also make the point that chuck's unwillingness to admit to rebecca what he's going through indicates that he isn't fully confident it's a physical issue in my experience as a therapist people are often much more comfortable opening up about things when they think of it as a physical issue rather than a mental health issue i think this is related to internalized stigma against mental health issues and internalized conceptions of people as weak or lesser than when they experience debilitations that have mental aspects to me this goes back to old-fashioned and outdated perspectives on willpower some of these perspectives coming from religious orientations in my opinion and some people thinking we should have the willpower to change anything that's going on in our minds where we would never expect the same from physical health issues this is sort of like the dark side of the mind over matter mentality it makes people blame themselves more when they're struggling with a mental health issue than they would if they were struggling with a physical health issue and it is often an obstacle to healing later we get further confirmation that chuck equates the possibility of his issue being non-physical with an assumption of blame on his part when he's meeting with the doctor he starts working with if it's not real then what have i done i want to save a lot of the discussion of chuck's health issue for the next part in this series because much of it doesn't directly relate to ethics so we'll go into more detail in part three about that as we also will be digging into the mental health related aspects of jimmy and kim's relationship for now let's leave it at the observation that chuck's antisocial behavior and unethical lying to rebecca is motivated by a severe aversion to vulnerability and his lying to jimmy about their mother's last words is also an aversion to vulnerability while maybe being more predominantly an action based in jealousy animosity and revenge revenge okay so let's talk about revenge revenge brings up an important subject mike airmantrout we need to give this man his due time he is a fantastic character played by the astoundingly talented jonathan banks an actor who represents the peak of this show's gritty deep voiced actors like jimmy mike moved to albuquerque to start a new life for a very specific reason but unlike jimmy it's not because he got arrested and had to start over mike moved to start over but not because he got arrested but instead to avoid getting arrested because see before mike moved to albuquerque from philadelphia he did a thing as we millennials like to say he did a little bit of homicide we find out he killed the two police officers who murdered his son matt who was also a cop but only for two years before he was killed by his partner and supervisor this is all a very complex ethical situation so let's talk about it right before his son matt was killed mike was actually helping him through an ethical conflict at work matt's partner and supervisor were quote unquote dirty cops they were getting kickbacks from drug dealers profiting from breaking the law and their oaths to serve their community they offered to cut matt in on it but he didn't know what to do because he felt it was wrong to get kickbacks from criminal actions as he served as a law enforcement officer he talked to his dad since mike had been a cop for three decades and since he and his dad were very close and mike gave him practical advice as we see him explain to stacy matt's widow and mike's daughter-in-law take the money do something good with it mike deeply felt that if his son did anything besides take the money he was putting his life at risk since the other cops would view him as a liability to report their behavior but mike did not have an easy time convincing matt to make the supposedly safer choice my boy was stubborn my boy was strong and he was gonna get himself killed the way mike finally got his son to take the money was by admitting to his son that he had done it too in his time as a cop he put me up on a pedestal and i had to show them that i was down in the gutter with the rest of them mike feels significant guilt and shame about convincing his son to take the money especially because it didn't even work and the other cops murdered matt anyway as we watch this we're left wondering but what else was mike supposed to do was it really unethical to convince his son to accept illegal bribes when the alternative was that matt could immediately be a target at serious risk of harm better to be guilty and alive than dead and innocent especially when you have immediate family who needs you who wouldn't flip the switch like mike did in this trolley problem on the one track you have matt's moral framework being dirtied his respect for his father being decreased and him contributing to a status quo of accepting bribes from drug dealers but on the other track you have matt being dead and his family being without him it's clear what the better choice is but here we run into the same principle from before which is in real life trolley problems problems of prediction complicate clear decision making because as it would turn out the two tracks ended up merging anyway and the bastards killed him anyway so mike ended up with the worst of both worlds and feels horrible about it even though arguably he made the most ethical choice possible in this situation or maybe this isn't true i mean mike tells stacey that reporting the dirty cops was not an option because they would kill matt for doing that but it's not 100 clear to me that we can trust mike here as a perfectly reliable narrator after all he was wrong about his prediction of how the cops would react to matt taking the money so it's possible he would have been wrong about how they'd have reacted to matt reporting them is it totally impossible that matt could have found a way to report them while maintaining his own safety we'll never know would it have been more ethical for mike to tell matt to do whatever he thinks is right and for mike to support him and help him make his own decision instead of telling him he needed to deal with the situation like mike had when he was a cop that would have certainly been more fitting to the ethical principle of self-determination an extremely important principle that maybe shouldn't overpower the principle of harm reduction but with the benefit of hindsight it's not clear that it was right for mike to be as forceful as he was in telling his son what to do his honesty to his son about his quote-unquote dirtiness as a cop was admirable i suppose but it wasn't strictly ethical because it was a means to an end a way to convince matt to do what mike thought was best mike could have still told his son that he had been a dirty cop while being more understanding about matt's right to do what he thought was best mike could have told him that he was at serious risk of harm if he didn't take the money without trying to force him to take it but at the end of the day none of this is an indictment on mike's ethics as much as it's a demonstration of the issues inherent in making ethical decisions primarily based on expected consequences rather than on principles i would never expect someone in mike's position to act perfectly rationally you're on the phone with your son who might make a decision that could get him killed you're going to be forceful about your opinion it is inhuman to be able to detach and step back in a situation like that to say okay matt do whatever he thinks best and also we need to acknowledge that matt was in fact an adult and made his own decision at the end of the day we can't really blame mike for matt's decision though he does seem to blame himself and now we need to talk about what happened after matt was murdered less than six months after he was killed his killers hoffman and fenske were killed as we mentioned by mike we see this in a flashback and i could be wrong about this but i can't remember another better call saul episode that had a flashback in the middle of the episode rather than right at the beginning it's a show that's sort of enjoyably rigid in certain aspects of its structure like in the five seasons that have come out so far we get five flash forwards to gene takovic's life in hiding as a cinnabon manager and each is the first scene of each season i love when art sticks to rules and patterns like this since i think limitations can be kind of beautiful in like a ritualistic way and as far as the flashbacks they come at the start of episodes often not every episode starts with a flashback but many do and in fact this episode we've been zoned in on does start with a flashback as well showing mike arriving in albuquerque for the first time and being picked up by stacy but as i said i can't recall a time a flashback came in the middle of an episode besides this one instance when after mike explodes with anger to stacy in defense of his son's morality we see a flashback to the night he killed his son's murderers at the time mike was in the thick of his drinking problem and was wasted at a cop bar or was pretending to be wasted at a copper when he saw hoffman and fenske and went up to them to blatantly tell them that he knew what they had done as he leaves the bar to stumble home they offered to give him a ride basically force him in the car and then drive him out to a remote spot where they try to kill him but first we see the older cop try to justify their actions to the younger cop and i want to point it out because it's a classic example of bad ethical reasoning he's drinking himself to death we're doing him a favor smart it's what i would have done if i were you this is a more extreme but still very similar type of ethical conflict to what we were just discussing it's harm reduction versus self-determination the situations where it's ethical to override someone's self-determination are very limited and these cops flipping the switch of the trolley tracks here to sort of put mike out of his misery is clearly just self-serving rather than stemming from any genuine estimation of the pain mike might experience living on and struggling with alcohol dependence it's already obvious that what these cops are doing is wrong of course i'm just explaining it because the pattern of ethical reasoning is an interesting one for our discussion now let's talk about mike's decision to kill them as we've made clear he kills them in self-defense because they were going to kill him but it's actually not fully self-defense it's actually not really self-defense it's premeditated and we see him break into their car earlier seemingly to both plant an extra gun for himself and to take the bullets out of their gun in the glove compartment so he lets himself get into the situation where they try to kill him so he can kill them in a sort of self-defense i want to ask though since revenge is such an inherent element of this show if mike wasn't killing them in self-defense because he's kind of not and if he instead tracked them down to kill them would that be wrong i've always been against the death penalty because i don't support a government killing people for any reason also there are mistakes that are made in this process all the time and not all relatives of victims even want the perpetrator to be killed if someone killed a family member of mine i'm not sure what i would do if someone killed me though i wouldn't want my family members to kill them because that sounds like a lot of work and i would want them to just mourn my loss in healthy ways i don't think revenge murder is healthy and i don't think it's the only form of closure or the best form of closure but my understanding of the social contracts we all live within is such that a person surrenders their right to not be murdered when they murder someone not that i think murderers technically deserve to die but that their right to life is not clearly superior to the right of a victim's relatives to avenge their relative's death but the problem is who is that avenging really for who does it serve you could say that mike is preventing hoffman and fenske from hurting more people but we can't justify murder by assuming that and that's not mike's purpose at all does him killing them help matt does it help stacy i said that if someone killed a relative of mine i don't know what i'd do but if i think about it more it's very hard to imagine actually killing anyone not just because i'm a peaceful guy but also because i don't think my relatives would want me to avenge their death like that they would want me to press charges against the person and do whatever i can to bring that person to justice but i don't think anyone i know would want me to execute that justice myself and as far as i'm aware mike has no reason to think matt would want him to avenge his death mike doesn't feel guilt about it though and i don't know that he should why should mike be held back by an ethical framework that hoffman and fenske have already discarded all of this is moot because he killed them in self-defense sort of but we're still considering the hypothetical where it was pure revenge not in self-defense it's worth considering this hypothetical at length especially because after he shoots them the older cop is still alive crawling away and mike shoots him again this time clearly not in self-defense my best argument is that if mike should not have killed them it's because doing so put himself in harm's way legally and puts stacey in a position where she has to lie to the police after mike finally tells her about what he did but he makes up for this by accepting the fact that she can tell the police if she wants to the crushing last line of the episode is you know what happened the question is can you live with it don't misinterpret him saying can you live with it as him telling her to live with it as a secret he's saying can you live with it to mean yeah this is the question you have to ask yourself i'm not telling you the answer is yes i'm just acknowledging that this is the question i've made you have to face the fact that mike is in acceptance of his lack of control here is made clear in the cinematographic beautiful first scene of the next episode if i were to guess i'd say she wouldn't tell you much either way that's up to her that's the least i over compare that to jimmy admitting to chuck that he sabotaged the mesa verdi filing but saying it's your word against mine and not accepting that he owes the person he wronged the ability to make the decision on their own about what they'll do with the information presented it's very possible mike feels he owes stacey not because he murdered hoffman and fenske and forced her to lie about it and live with it but rather because he feels responsible for matt dying in the first place which i think is also part of why he works so hard the whole series to provide for her and kaylee besides just the fact that it's the right thing to do and he's a human being who loves his family it seems significant to me that mike has learned to accept that he can't control what his loved ones do after we learn in so much detail about how he tried so hard to influence what matt did when presented with the ethical quandary at work and let's ask assuming we're right to suppose that mike feels responsible for matt dying why would this be though he may have been forceful in his influence he was obviously giving practical advice that he had every reason to think would keep his son as safe as possible so my thinking is that mike feels responsible for matt dying because he influenced him to become a police officer in the first place your dad being a cop for 30 years has some influence for sure but we don't have to speculate because mike said how matt put him on a pedestal and anytime we hear about their relationship it's about how close they were he knew he could call you anytime he had a problem you were thick as thieves the two of you whether it's justified or not many people would feel responsible if their child died at a job that they had in any way influenced them to pursue and it's not just jobs in general but being a cop in particular since a huge part of mike's character is that he has lost faith in the u.s judicial system in the first episode of the whole series and in the scene where him and jimmy meet we get this gem swell and thank you for restoring my faith in the judicial system maybe rather than saying mike feels bad he influenced matt to become a cop we should instead say mike feels bad he influenced matt to become a cop while not giving matt a genuine understanding of the corruption and injustice inherent to the system it's possible he did an okay job of feeling in mad about how stuff worked but certainly he could feel like he should have prepared him better for the ethical situation matt was presented with parents love to not tell their kids how messed up the world can be but we can also assume in this case mike didn't want to tell matt because doing so would necessitate admitting that mike was corrupt too or rather lie to him both very unappealing options maybe mike should have taken the ego hit and once his son genuinely decided to become a cop sat down with him and admitted how the system works maybe that would have been the best thing to do when the cops from philadelphia eventually come to new mexico to interrogate mike the older one of the pair is his old friend and knows what mike did but doesn't plan to act on it his younger partner very much wants to act on it and is the one interrogating him harshly hopefully whatever you are didn't rub off on the rest of your family so even though the guy said that to mike mike acknowledges to his old friend that that type of attitude is an improvement to the corruption of the older cops i like the kid yeah he's all right we don't see mike disagree here and i think it's probably because the young guy reminds him of matt but that's just my speculation i want to add one more point about the flashback where we actually see mike kill hoffman and fenske the clips of his conversation with stacy that we've looked at where he tells her all the details about why matt was killed and where he ends with the line that the only question is whether she can live with this information this conversation is at the end of the episode after the extended flashback where we see mike kill them what comes before that flashback is a completely different type of conversation with stacy in that previous conversation stacey tells mike that she found thousands of dollars in the lining of an old suitcase when she and kaylee moved to albuquerque three months after matt was killed even though stacy says she would love matt and miss matt whether he was a dirty cop or not mike erupts in anger he wasn't dirty god damn you you get that through your head my son wasn't dirty then mike storms out and we fade to the flashback of him at the bar telling hoffman and fenske he knows what they did and the flashback continues until we see him kill them since flashbacks on better call saul are usually at the beginning of the episode they don't often feel like any character in particular is having the flashback it just feels like we're seeing a flashback but in this case because it comes in the middle of the episode and comes in between a furious mic and a peaceful humble mic it really seems like mike is having the memory in that time or that the flashback symbolizes him processing his feelings enough to go back to stacy who he really cares about and be honest with her about how he influenced matt and what happened then and if we go one more conversation backwards as part of the flashback that starts the episode we see the initial conversation between mike and stacy after mike moved to albuquerque in this conversation mike certainly isn't angry but he's also not being honest he's blatantly lying to her he tells her it wasn't him on the phone late at night with matt shortly before matt was killed and stacy can tell he's lying one thing i love about this show is how good the characters are at reading each other i guess that's that he offers to help take care of kaylee and stacy doesn't respond she can't trust him yet she goes on to be able to trust him especially once he's finally honest at the end of the episode after passing through the denial and anger a big difference between mike and jimmy is mike is more often accepting of the idea that he may have to face consequences not that he's going to confess to the cops what he did and send himself to jail but lying to the police is illegal not necessarily unethical because the state's application of justice is by no means automatically what justice is but here mike accepts that he may die in prison if stacy decides to tell the police what he told her whereas jimmy can't even accept that he may lose his law license maybe temporarily if chuck turns him in these relationships are very different as we see chuck actually leverage the law to hold jimmy accountable because he finds it the right thing to do for pretty good reasons i did a poll on my youtube channel and the vast majority of people seem to consider jimmy unethical but we don't necessarily watch the show wanting him to face consequences for that though maybe a little bit i mean certainly more than we want mike to face consequences right no one watches and wants stacey to talk to the cops because we understand mike's actions much more than some of jimmy's the opportunism that motivates jimmy is not present in mike and to get back to the idea of consequences mike draws an ethical line sooner than jimmy in terms of what amount of lying and other unethical behaviors he'll engage in to avoid consequences mike's more mature acceptance of consequences comes from his more well-developed understanding of free will and the limits on it for a really interesting example of this we're going to flesh out some fantastic dialogue from the second to last episode of season five the episode where jimmy and mike finally get back from their two-day near-death trek through the desert if we were hoping for a trauma bond to form between them in the desert we didn't really get it but we did see some of the most moving scenes in their desperation to get home safely while lugging seven million dollars in cash jimmy's previous of oh i'm sorry wait that's not his name anymore it's all goodman speedy justice for you saul's previous affiliation with nacho varga gets him a new client it doesn't seem like he can really say no to lalo salamanca under the name jorge de guzman who has been caught after he murdered someone while tracking fring and mike's escaped employee werner ziegler it would have been hard for saul to say no to nacho here but when he goes and meets with lalo the first time we see him have the chance to not work with him but he changes his mind for the money and because lalo sort of makes him feel like he's kind of a loser if he doesn't help him so he helps an unapologetic murderer and if he didn't have a ton of choice in the situation now which i think he had a little but if he didn't that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't his responsibility that he's in this situation in the first place since back when he was jimmy in the first few episodes of the first season he got himself entangled with nacho due to his own decisions but let's get back to the point about the enlightening post-desert dialogue between mike and saul about consequences and free will they're sitting in mike's car and saul is asking when it will be over for him when he'll be disentangled from the game of the criminal underworld it's honestly probably one of the most intimate scenes between them even though it's not that intimate and might give several pieces of advice to saul there's one fascinating tidbit of advice that he gives that isn't relevant to our current discussion and that we'll talk about more in part three so subscribe but for now let's zoom in on the final piece of advice he gives saul we all make our choices and those choices they put us on a road sometimes those choices seem small but they put you on the road and the road we're on led us out to the desert and everything that happened there and straight back to where we are right now and nothing nothing can be done about that this is the final piece of advice he gives him because saul gets mad and makes a hurtful comment showing that he's resentful to mike because saul can't take responsibility for his own actions he gets out of the car and leaves but near the end of the episode we realize that the advice has stuck somewhat when kim tells him she quit her job to focus exclusively on public defense work that actually makes her feel fulfilled saul is upset not understanding kim's non-opportunistic behavior to try to change her mind he mimics the little speech mike gave him we all make choices right and those choices they put us on a road and the road has good choices and it has bad choices and this is a bad choice road then he finishes by saying bad choices lead to bad roads that lead to bad places the resurfacing of mike's speech through saul is the kind of amazing detail you might not remember weeks after watching an episode but in the moment you're watching it it just feels so well done we feel sympathy or pity in this moment for saul the way he comes off like a precocious child imitating something their parents said it's interesting that he would repeat it since it may seem like his negative mean reaction to mike didn't appear to be him appreciating the advice but i think it's the opposite he responded in a mean and negative way because it did sink in he's responsible for facing the consequences of his past actions someone like saul is going to bite back if you make them feel responsible even if feeling responsible is a healthy step for accepting aspects of their reality that aren't so pleasant what sunk into saul is that he could have avoided putting himself in the situation he's in and he's desperately and irrationally transferring that to kim urging her to avoid future consequences but it's irrational because she's just going to do a different kind of legal work she's not trying to scam people like saul was back when he was jimmy and getting himself caught up in all this so saul's rendition of mike's advice doesn't really apply but what's even more interesting is that he butchers the advice significantly very significantly saul introduces the idea of good and bad into the advice let's listen to mike's advice again and notice whether you hear him say good or bad sometimes those choices seem small but they put you on the road you think about getting off but eventually you're back on it and nothing nothing can be done about that now listen again to what saul says and the road has good choices and it has bad choices and this is a bad choice road saul took in the idea of responsibility but moralized it instead of getting the deeper idea mike was trying to convey mike wasn't moralizing he was emphasizing our ability for choice and the necessity of facing the chain of events that come from our choices mike seemed to be saying to saul yes we have these consequences but it's because of the free will that got us here but what saul says to kim is more like yes we have free will so don't you want to avoid consequences he's using the philosophy as a means to control kim to be more opportunistic rather than accepting the philosophy's intended purpose which is being an acceptance of the consequences of your past actions in fact if saul had really understood the advice he'd view kim making a decision he disagreed with in a more accepting light and he'd understand that it's her choice and her responsibility to face whatever consequences come from her decision he would also realize that he made the decision to be with her to marry her as well and needs to accept as a consequence of that that she may make decisions he doesn't agree with i keep talking about opportunism and since who cares if this video goes on forever i want to focus in on what i mean by that first let's say something about mike's late son matt who represents the opposite of opportunism matt's inability to adapt to the corruption of his environment is what singled him out as a target whether or not it's true that conventional success requires opportunism corruption and unethical behavior many people feel that it does and this is a question better call saul forces us to ask ourselves not even just in the quote-unquote criminal justice environment but also in the business environment as we hear when jimmy talks to marco in a season 3 flashback about why his dad couldn't succeed in business he could have made it work he could have sold beer and cigarettes to the kids from mary margaret's but oh no not him he's never gonna do what he had to do whether or not he's right jimmy perceives unethical behavior as necessary to success and since he's the protagonist it's a question the show asks us to struggle with throughout when he doesn't have a law license in season 4 and he's selling drop phones on the street he gets robbed by some young guys potentially kids high school age looking very good to meet you boys good luck with the junior achievement project i i gotta go hey they beat him up and steal his money but soon he goes back to the same place unable to let go of his plan he hatched to upsell the phones from his job to people on the street we see him approaching the same kids and act like he's going to cut them in instead jimmy has a bigger plan in mind and he runs away and lets them chase him to a spot where two guys he hired kidnaps them jimmy traumatizes these kids with fear of death or serious bodily harm not just as revenge for them robbing him but even more so to secure his ability to do business on those streets without being robbed by them at the end of each night you get one warning and that was it he's willing to engage in this highly unethical behavior for the money and for the cool feeling he gets from using his sales skills on the streets in the gene takovic flash forward of season 5 episode 1 we see someone dox him as saul goodman when he's taken on a new identity and the scene ends with gene saying i'm gonna fix it myself well we will see how that goes on april 18th in the very first scene so uh yeah after all if you're willing to kidnap high schoolers or people who seem like high schoolers so you can sell phones on the street why not be willing to kill someone for the much more serious opportunity of avoiding having your cover blown on your fake identity oh it's wrong to kidnap anyone not just high schoolers i should say but anyways it's not ethical but it follows from the logic of his ethics that he's willing to do worse and worse things to preserve his own opportunities and what the show wants us to do is compare such behavior of jimmy to say fring's decision to kidnap nacho in season 5 and threatened to kill his father in front of him to get nacho to spy on lalo for him is fring's opportunism any more unethical than jimmy's we learn in season 5 how frings supports a whole community in mexico which we find out when he sends mike there to recover and get medical assistance after mike is beaten up by different people on the street friend finances the whole town he is as mike puts it the anonymous benefactor in addition to being a beautifully staged scene this is an important one for digging into the ethical framework of fring mike gives him his two cents well that must make you feel pretty good and is that supposed to balance the scales make up for everything else you do it makes up for nothing i am what i am fring refuses to attempt some twisted utilitarian logic he wants to win the territory war he's waging with the salamancas and he doesn't need to lie to himself that it's moral mike's specific criticism that fring is playing some denial-based utilitarian numbers game with his morality this echoes a criticism from a few episodes earlier when everett acker says this to kim when she tries to convince him to move off of his land so her bank client can build a call center there you're one of those people that give a little money to charity every month so you can make up for all the bad that you've done i don't know that this is necessarily true about kim honestly but it probably is part of her motivation to make public defense her full-time work at the end of the fifth season what acker's criticism and mike's criticism communicates is that ethical behavior requires consistency it's not a math equation that balances out it's a wave form that requires continuity without sustained attention to principles you're just doing opportunism plus denial both kim and fring are each too smart to live in denial so they do what they can to carry on kim by actually turning to full-time public defense work and freeing by saying i am what i am and pursuing his business in full awareness of the harm he causes and yet he is not okay with mike implying there's a moral equivalence between him and the salamancas you know better you've met them you know what they are meaning the salamancas and you are so very different from them yes i am different it's very interesting to me that mike doesn't ask why here the show doesn't want fring to explain in detail his rationality we're supposed to think it through for ourselves it may be true that the salamancas kill more people unnecessarily than fring does i'm not sure but that could be true but one major difference between them is that fring is more intertwined with civil non-criminal society he runs a legitimate chicken business he supports that town in mexico he works with a big corporation madrigal to launder his money it's not clear to me that any of this makes him any more ethical than hector salamanca but it does make him someone to whom drug dealing is a business rather than a lifestyle so he doesn't kill people for fun like hector lalo and tuko might mike and fring move on to talking about why fring wants mike specifically to work for him so much and this is when we get the line that we referenced way earlier in the video why me because i believe that you understand understand what revenge mike does very much seem to have a choice here but i'm actually not sure honestly because it seems like we're to understand that mike agrees to help fring because fring's reference to revenge made sense to him and won him over but i'm wondering whether this is because mike respects and understands fring's desire for revenge or rather because fring's mention of revenge is implicitly saying i know what you did and i can ruin your life for it i genuinely can't tell and this might be me being stupid so let me know how you interpreted this in the comments i don't know if the show is implying that fring is threatening this so yeah that would make it not really a choice for mike after all but that would be pretty interesting then if fring had made these previous moral claims about himself if he wasn't even trying to convince mike for any moral reason but rather just from force anyway we see in the next episode mike gets some new information about the morality of his boss you know who you're working for right the that this guy does they shot me left me bleeding out in the desert all part of some plan nacho goes on to add he's got a gun to my father's head this certainly impacts mike whose two big things are he doesn't like shooting people and he doesn't like people who aren't part of the game being brought into it both of which we can understand for very obvious reasons why these are two of his most significant hang-ups sadly his choices lead him to situations where keeping to his principles would be self-destructive leading to the ultimate tragedy of him murdering werner ziegler in a scene so darkly moving that i'm not even gonna say anything more about it because it's just too perfect what i will say more about is how mike responds to kai when kai tries to justify to mike what mike did in a clip we saw in the intro of our video today it had to be done he was a good man but in truth he was soft [Music] mike knows that there is no justification for killing ziegler when he killed werner he flipped the trolley from a track where he died to attract where verner died and that is a selfish decision not an ethical one to contrast with his reaction to kai's misguided support look at the feedback mike receives from the next german worker and look at how he responds it was worth 50 of you in a less interesting show it would be this german worker that would get hit instead of kai but mike is much wiser and more complex than that whether or not it's literally true that verner was worth 50 mics the truth of that statement is that mike's life is not worth more than verner's and saving himself by killing werner was not justified it is a far greater insult to mike for someone like kai to imply that what he did was justified mike doesn't want to moralize and lie to himself a sign of being an adult is liking taking responsibility even if it makes you feel bad and guilty unfortunately this is something both jimmy and saul really struggle with and it prevents him from maturing i think now after all this time of talking i can finally get to the question of how ethical considerations factor into whether jimmy is capable of change the answer is obviously that everyone is capable of change but we must add that jimmy and saul haven't demonstrated any ability to change yet this reminds me of the kafka quote believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made from season one through five any ethical behaviors jimmy or saul have engaged in have been followed by unethical behaviors in his relationship with kim which we'll go into much more in depth in the next video in this series jimmy saul shows occasional moments of guilt about the scams they do together but he still does them and speaking of things he still does even deep into season 3 we saw that slip and jimmy was still alive and well his persona from decades earlier had a full-on resurrection in the episode with the subtle title slip he's selling ad time to businesses because he had a bunch of time left over after he lost his law license and couldn't run the ads for his legal services that he had already purchased airtime for he's not allowed by contract to resell the ad time so he devised a plan to sell commercial production services to businesses and throw in the ad time for free i can't knock the creative grind and i know he's desperately afraid of not being able to pay his half of the rent of the office space he and kim are still sharing but when he gets a business interested and then they back out he definitely crosses the line are you okay it was a drumstick it was laying loose in the aisle this is to get a payoff from the business owners they buy his ad time and give him a guitar apparently but he knows he's done something wrong so he lies to kim he's happy to be able to pay rent and he gives her an envelope of cash but his defensive attitude puts them further apart instead of closer together so at least we can stop talking about that jimmy i wasn't just take it sort of square right [Music] okay sorry this is the same scene we showed a clip from in part one where jimmy says in this gravelly guilty voice i mean you believe me right yes it's important to him to be trusted but not that important not like first priority important and as i always like to say you can only have one first priority if it isn't your ethical compass then it's likely your opportunism and jimmy hasn't yet shown that he has the emotional stability to show up consistently in his relationships in a way that would build genuine trust it's fair to say that a small part of jimmy's unethical behavior throughout the first five seasons has been motivated by genuine economic distress and in some situations his opportunism comes across as understandable given the fact that he's living and working out of a closet-sized room at a nail salon when we meet him but much of his behavior from sabotaging chuck's mesa verde filing to scamming the owners of this guitar store much of this was unnecessary opportunism the shame of having your partner cover your rent for a few months should be the lesser evil trolley track compared to scamming a local business and lying to that same romantic partner there is a whole lot more we could and maybe should talk about but i'm going to be opportunistic myself and hop on the opportunity to finish this video before i get arrested for felony overthinking yes we should go into the whole plot of him trying to get chuck to cash out at hhm so jimmy could get some of that money yes we should talk about him manipulating everyone to hate the nice old lady irene so jimmy could get a piece of the huge sandpiper settlement when irene would decide to settle yes i definitely should talk about nacho varga at some point i love his character and yes i even meant to go into how jimmy did unethical things for ethical reasons sometimes like when he scammed people with marco at the end of season 1 because he feels bad after marco realizes jimmy didn't see him when he came to town three years prior for his mom's funeral maybe chuck rest in peace put it best when he said this i love my brother there's nothing malicious in jimmy he has a way of doing the worst things for reasons that sound almost noble but it's not always the reasons that matter it's not always the consequences either it's always a mix of them both okay that's it we're done thanks for watching if you made it this far you should probably subscribe and check out some of the other videos i'm also as i've mentioned a few times gonna come out with part three in this series and probably a part four so you're gonna to check those out i don't think i'm going to drop any more parts in this series before season 6 comes out because it's going to be out in like a month maybe less by the time i finish editing this and you know i kind of want to see what what it's uh what it's like you know so i'm really looking forward to checking out season six absorbing it with my whole body and soul and then uh incorporating it into whatever i have to say next i already have a bunch plan that i want to say and i know there's going to be so much that's going to need to be added and changed so yeah stick around and stay tuned if you'd like to support these videos you can send me a few bucks on patreon and you'll also get to check out videos and music there that aren't posted anywhere else so that's kind of a cool thing i want to thank the awesome people who support these videos currently thank you so much it really means a lot you can stop at any time but thank you i really appreciate it so thank you strawman productions elise put my name in the credits winky face and a very cool anonymous human being i really appreciate the support it really means a lot thank you so much and lastly if you want to check me out on twitch i stream there where i play chess and talk about whatever and just chill out unwind in the evenings so come hang out on twitch the links in the description and yeah that's pretty much all for today i hope you have a really good rest of your time on the internet okay bye down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them i was down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them i was down in the gutter with the rest of them down in the gutter with the rest of them you

Channel: What's Therapy?

Views: 570,206

Keywords: Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill, Mike Ehrmantraut, Ethics

Id: FROhdTKWzks

Length: 64min 14sec (3854 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022