Chuck's betrayal about refusing to hire Jimmy is really what's causing all of this. He's enabling Jimmy's bad habits.
Course, we all know where Saul ends up and uh....kinda becomes a shitball.
That's not what enablement is and I really wish this stupid idea would die in a trash fire, where it belongs.
Chuck dicked Jimmy over. That's the extent of it.
Jimmy was a lying, cheating, ambulance chasing fraudster before any of this happened who, when he felt wronged, has responded with disproportionate (if nonviolent) retribution. "Oh fuck, that's the guy who my wife left me for? I'm gonna go shit in his car!"
Even during season 1, where Jimmy was genuinely trying to play be good, the very first episode has him trying to use those skateboarding idiots to solicit a case from the Kettlemen's, the fourth episode has him accepting a bribe and then staging a crisis for advertisement, episode 6 has him aiding and abetting Mike's theft of the policeman's notepad (who believes him to be a murderer, which for all Jimmy knows is true with no moral justification backing it up), and probably several more unethical infractions that I can't remember.
And what would have happened had Jimmy gotten the job at HHM? Probably the same thing that happened to him at Davis and Main. At that point, he had become everything he had aspired to be... and he didn't care for it. Jimmy
likes lying, cheating, scamming and fraud.
So you have Jimmy being a criminal scum in childhood, in adolescence, before Chuck blocked him from getting the job he wanted, afterwards, and now. When, precisely, has Jimmy
not been an ambulance chaser?
And don't take this to mean that I don't like Jimmy. He's great. And there's even good to be said about him as a lawyer. And Chuck's a jerk, no matter how you parse it. But when it comes to Jimmy, Chuck's been right about him in almost every instance.
And this Mesa Verde thing? He's committed a federal crime because he has a crush. Because that's what that was all about. Chuck didn't push him into it, nothing extraordinary happened. Mesa Verde just went with the lawyer that they believed could best take care of them and Jimmy decided it should be otherwise. If Jimmy is willing to do something like that for such a flimsy excuse, then I doubt that there's anything Chuck could have done to permanently make Jimmy a law abiding citizen. Not that he handled it in the ideal way either, because, like I said, he's a jerk.
But Jimmy gonna Jimmy, and there doesn't seem to be anybody in the world who can do anything about that. Even when Kim, his beloved friend and now lover, when she straight up asked him if he was going to continue to be an ambulance chaser, he started lying. He stopped, to his credit, but his first impulse was nevertheless to lie to her, his truest friend, so he could get her to do what he wants her to.
Jimmy is so bad at stealth. I was yelling at my screen when he changed seats.
That by itself wasn't too bad, but he just kept blatantly staring directly at the guy and his handbag. Anybody would have made him.