Necessity Is The Mother Of Personal Reinvention

Lawyers at white shoe firms are used to getting their way by virtue simply of having more resources than their opponents -- more investigators, more associates, more time to file motions, all of which flow from the fact that they have more money. But if they assume that more resources will always lead to their coming out on top, it's because facing off against other firms in the same price bracket has made them complacent. Not everyone automatically follows the rules of procedure, or the spirit of the law. Some people -- like Jimmy McGill -- who come to a fight as the underdog, will consider their tiny collection of advantages and figure out how to press every one.

Jimmy's been scrambling to maintain his law practice -- and scrambling in general -- since we've known him. His overarching goal has been to get HHM, his mentally ill brother Chuck's old law firm, to let Chuck cash out his partnership, a $17 million payday for Chuck (and Jimmy). But Howard Hamlin, another partner at the firm, has been deaf to Jimmy's appeals "on behalf" of Chuck, choosing instead to believe Chuck's claims that he's going to get better and return to work eventually and only needs a small stipend from the firm while he's on a temporary leave of absence. And in the season thus far, we've seen Jimmy at war with himself -- sometimes grinding away as a poorly paid but legitimate public defender, as Chuck would want; sometimes pulling lawyerly scams that are still on a continuum of what, as we've seen in flashbacks, he used to do before attending his sketchy law school -- for which, apparently, he still has alumni pride.

(In case you can't make it out, that's the University Of American Samoa, and if you're thinking of applying, maybe don't.)

Even as we rejoin Jimmy at the start of the latest episode, in the immediate aftermath of his confrontation with the Kettlemans, he's still trying to do things Chuck's way: he tells Craig and Betsy that he's already called their lawyer to tell her he's found them; when they try to bribe him not to tell Kim about the cash, he attempts to convince them not to give him a bribe, but a retainer that will allow him to represent them instead of Kim. Betsy, maybe wisely, isn't having it: "I'm sorry, you're just...You're the kind of lawyer guilty people hire."

Well...it turns out that Jimmy actually can take a bribe after all.

And the beauty part of being a lawyer is that the nebulous nature of his work allows him to launder all that cash pretty easily, what with storage fees and the expense of eating on the road that he was totally, totally on for work purposes. Once it's all "legitimately" "accounted for," he can take the resources represented by the Kettlemans' guilt payment to put together a pretty solid plan that combines revenge and a forward-thinking business strategy.

Step 1: Get styled for a photo shoot that makes him look identical -- at least at a glance -- to Howard Hamlin.

Step 2: Make one of those shots into a billboard that apes the look of HHM's.

And you know what, HOWARD? A little market confusion to Jimmy's advantage might have been the end of it if you hadn't hauled him in front of a judge to whine about the font your firm's been using for the past twelve years or the misappropriation of your precious "Hamlindigo Blue." This is a strategy that probably works all the time when you're dealing with other fat cats. You just didn't realize that Jimmy is a feral cat. He's got street smarts you'll never have, and when you corner him, he's going to fight back with all four limbs and jagged, broken teeth. Of course this is a setup...

...staged so that Jimmy can be "caught" on tape saving the guy removing Jimmy's own billboard -- oh, the irony! -- from "certain death." But do the facts matter, really?

No.