I was never one of those people who thought that Walt was a "good guy" or that he deserved a truly happy ending, but I liked it when he was able to outsmart everybody and live on his own terms. So the story in Felina was as much a satisfying and fulfilling close as Walt could have had.

But unless some major and very unexpected stuff happens very soon, it looks like Jimmy has become just as mean and soulless a human being as we kinda knew him to be in Breaking Bad. Like a lot of people, I became convinced in the early years of Better Call Saul that Jimmy was deep down a decent human being, and that he deserved to get past this and finish with a very rare happy ending.

This episode reminded me that, even though we might understand his motivations more than we used to, Jimmy doesn't deserve to go off into the sunset with Kim any more than Walt deserved to live happily ever after as a former meth cook.

When we first met Saul in Breaking Bad, he had way less of a moral compass than Jesse or Walt ("Why not just have someone shiv Badger in the chow line??"). With the flashback scene with Mike, they skillfully reminded us that Saul gleefully played puppetmaster and drove Walt to his deepest depths. If Walt doesn't deserve to find redemption, neither does Saul.

Last week's caper was so quaintly lighthearted by comparison to today. It was basically a victimless crime, and Gene masterminded it to get through the fact that Jeff was threatening him.

This week, that phone call with (presumably*) Kim seems to have broken him and turned him into a Heisenberg, just without the Chemistry skills.

(* A couple of reviews have been oddly uncertain about whether he really talked to Kim. I guess there's an outside possibility that he could have been arguing with someone at the sprinkler company, telling him that Kim left Florida and nobody knows where she went. But that possibility seems to miss the main point: OF COURSE Kim would never take Jimmy back after all this. If she couldn't ultimately live with a friend of the cartel, she will never be able to make peace with the mastermind of Heisenberg's drug empire. I feel silly even having thought of that, let alone imagining it for multiple seasons as the "obvious" end of the story.)

Gene got his hopes up for the happy ending we'd all wanted when he heard that Kim cared whether he was alive. But now that he understands once again that they're over, he has nothing to live for other than using the grift to assert his power over the world. All he has left in life is the little bit of control he feels when the other guy at the bar thinks he has the upper hand, but that other guy is doomed to find out he never did.

Now Gene's about causing havoc, because it's all he has left. The Saul Goodman of the Breaking Bad years was a coping mechanism, and now it's back and it's killed Gene just like it killed Jimmy. And both times it was because he realized he didn't deserve to be with the woman he loves, and who honestly loves him back ("but so what!").

If we were to draw analogies of these episodes with the "multiple endings" of Breaking Bad: last week was like Felina, Jimmy gets one last moment to live on his own terms and to feel like some small part of it was good for him; this week was the "Granite State" ending, Jimmy is faced with the stark picture of how small his life is now that he's inevitably destroyed everything. The reference to Ozymandias (the poem, not the episode), where he talked about being buried in sand for a thousand years, was well placed.

The long, drawn-out, multifaceted ending of Breaking Bad really helped the viewers to put Walt's story into perspective. And I think they're succeeding just as well this time around. But it's even sadder to watch, because we became such good friends with the Jimmy that Saul washed away.