The Better Call Saul Season 2 Scene That Went Too Far

The 2nd season of "Better Call Saul" is really the first time we get to see the persona Saul Goodman in action. Prior to the Season 1 finale, struggling lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) had been trying his best to keep his practices ethical, despite the fact that he has an incredible talent for manipulating people. Season 2 sees Jimmy leaning into his darker side — and discovering just how much he likes it. He bribes a bus driver to solicit elderly clients for a lawsuit, forces the firm Davis & Main to fire him so that he can keep his signing bonus, and cons his way onto a US Air Force base by pretending that he is the caregiver for an elderly veteran.

Jimmy fully embraces his talent for manipulation, and many of his actions in Season 2 are meant to leave the viewer wondering whether or not he is truly the hero of the story or yet another villain. Indeed, there are plenty of moments where Jimmy's actions are questionable or downright wrong. However, without a doubt, his most unforgivable scene comes at the very start of the episode "Inflatable," which flashes back in time to show us one of the worst things that Jimmy ever did.

The scene in question is a flashback that shows Jimmy working in his father's convenience store. Jimmy is only a child, but when a con man enters the store feigning an emergency and asking Jimmy's father for some money, Jimmy can see through the ruse immediately. However, Jimmy's father, Charles McGill Sr. (Raphael Sbarge), is adamant that he will help anyone in need, no matter the cost, and leaves to fetch spark plugs for the con artist. The man then uses the money Jimmy's father gave him to buy cigarettes, convincing Jimmy that his father deserves to get ripped off for being so gullible. That is a lesson that young Jimmy appears to immediately take to heart. The real gut-punch comes at the end of the scene when Jimmy pockets the money instead of putting it into the cash register.

Not only does Jimmy watch his father get scammed, but he uses it as an opportunity to steal from him moments later. This is completely despicable on Jimmy's part, and what makes the scene even worse is the fact that he seems to show no remorse for his actions at all. In fact, he actually seems to resent his father for being scammed in the first place.

There are several layers to why this flashback scene is so hard to watch, and one of the biggest is that it forces the audience to consider whether or not Jimmy's brother Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) was right about him all along. We discovered in an earlier episode that Jimmy's father had been forced to sell his business due to the store's poor income and that Chuck believes Jimmy had been embezzling money from the store for years. This episode shows us that Chuck was right and that Jimmy did indeed steal from his father without any remorse whatsoever.

In the episode "Slip," Jimmy recalls contemptuously just how gullible his father was, blaming the store's failure on his father's frequent handouts and good deeds. Jimmy stoutly ignores how his own dishonesty caused the store's downfall, and seems to still believe that his father deserved to fail because he was too naive. Not only did Jimmy steal from his father, but he also saw his father's kindness for those less fortunate as a weak quality that made him somehow deserving of having his livelihood stripped from him. That stance should make even the most impartial of viewers question whether they should be rooting for Jimmy in any capacity. Jimmy is supposed to be the flawed hero of the story: a good man who makes bad choices. But his actions at the beginning of "Inflatable" and his perception of them later in life are completely unjustifiable, showing Jimmy to be (at least in part) just as evil as Chuck always said he was.