Who Is The Hero

August 6, 2026

I wrote this shortly after I took my website down at the end of May. I still think about this show and thought it is worth sharing now.

If you have seen this show, I’m curious about your thoughts on it, and how you handled all the moral ambiguity.

Who Is The Hero

I watched the show Better Call Saul recently, and it stuck with me in ways I wasn't expecting.

The show follows Jimmy McGill, a struggling lawyer trying to build a legitimate career while living in the shadow of his older brother, Chuck, a brilliant and highly respected attorney. Jimmy is clever, charismatic, and endlessly resourceful, but he also has a lifelong habit of cutting corners and bending the rules when they get in his way.

Around him are people who seem, at least initially, to be his opposites. Chuck represents professionalism and the rule of law. Howard Hamlin appears to be the polished golden boy. Kim Wexler is ambitious, brilliant, fiercely loyal, and, surprisingly, in love with Jimmy.

What surprised me most was that for six seasons I never quite knew who I was supposed to root for, and that made me really uncomfortable.

Jimmy is deeply flawed from the beginning.

He manipulates. He lies.

He hurts people.

He often chooses what is clever over what is right.

And yet I liked him.

Part of me wanted him to succeed.

Part of me wanted him to prove everyone wrong.

At the same time, Chuck and Howard represented something else: professionalism, status, credibility, and respectability. I had to work hard to not see them as the bad guys hell bent on keeping Jimmy down.

Yet the longer the story went on, the more complicated everyone became.

Jimmy wasn't the hero.

Kim wasn't perfect.

Chuck wasn't the villain.

Howard wasn't the villain either.

No one was.

And somehow everyone was.

The longer I watched, the more I realized the show wasn't asking me to choose sides.

It wasn't asking me to decide who was good and who was bad.

Life is rarely that simple.

Every character in the story was flawed.

Every character carried wounds.

Every character caused harm.

What fascinated me was not their complexity. It was their response to it.

Some characters used their pain, pride, insecurity, or ambition to justify their choices.

Others tried, however imperfectly, to take responsibility for them.

The show seemed less interested in who people were and more interested in who they chose to become.

Because character is not revealed when life is easy.

Character is revealed in the choices we make when we know better, when we have hurt someone, when we are confronted with ourselves, and when we are given an opportunity to take responsibility.

What matters is not whether we are flawed.

We all are.

What matters is what we do with those flaws once we see them.

There is another layer to the story that stayed with me as well.

Over the course of the series, Jimmy slowly transforms into Saul Goodman, the flashy criminal lawyer many viewers know from Breaking Bad. But Saul is more than a nickname.

He's an alter ego.

A performance.

A shield.

The version of Jimmy that doesn't have to sit with guilt, grief, rejection, or shame.

Every time life hurts, Saul gets a little stronger and Jimmy disappears a little more.

By the end of the series, it seems Saul has won completely.

And that's what made the ending devastate me.

Not because Jimmy and Kim got a happy ending.

They didn't.

Not because justice was perfectly served.

It wasn't.

By the final episode, Jimmy had once again done what he always did best: talked his way out. Despite his association with Walter White's drug empire and the deaths of multiple people, he negotiated a deal that would send him to prison for only seven years.

He had won.

Then he stood in a courtroom and voluntarily told the truth.

The whole truth.

In doing so, he destroyed the deal he had fought so hard to secure and accepted a sentence of more than eighty years in prison.

For perhaps the first time in the entire series, Jimmy chose accountability over self-preservation.

In many ways, he did it for Kim.

After a lifetime of hiding behind Saul Goodman, he finally chose to stand in the same truth she had chosen.

And in doing so, something remarkable happened.

Saul Goodman disappeared.

The man who walked into that courtroom was Saul.

The man who walked out was Jimmy McGill.

That final cigarette scene with Jimmy and Kim broke my heart.

Not because they were together.

Not because they were apart.

But because they finally stood in the same truth.

No masks.

No manipulation.

No competing versions of what happened.

Just two people who knew exactly who the other was and exactly what they had done.

There is something profoundly beautiful about that.

Because real life doesn't always give us that ending.

Sometimes one person tells the truth and the other never does.

Sometimes one person removes the mask and the other keeps wearing theirs.

Sometimes the relationship ends not because reality is unknown, but because it is known by only one person at a time.

More than ever, I find myself valuing shared reality over being right.

What stayed with me long after the final episode wasn't the prison sentence or even the confession itself.

It was the fact that Jimmy and Kim finally stood in the same reality.

And maybe that is what courage looks like.

Not perfection.

Not innocence.

Not winning.

But accepting responsibility for who we are, what we've done, and the consequences that follow.

For the first time in his life, Jimmy stopped negotiating with reality.

He accepted it.

And that hit my heart.

Deeply.