Brotherly love on the wane for Jimmy and Chuck in Season 3 of ‘Better Call Saul’

When last seen in the second-season finale of the AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” morally flexible Albuquerque lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) was confessing a felony to brother Chuck (Michael McKean) inside his sibling’s home, which the fellow barrister had lined with foil to protect him from the electrical waves he was certain were eating away at his brain. Upon Jimmy’s exit, Chuck leaned forward, pushed away a foil panel and pressed the stop button on a tape recorder he used to record the conversation, the elaborate con an apparent success. So as Season 3 of the critically-acclaimed AMC drama gets underway Monday, April 10, the troubled relationship of the two brothers comes into sharper focus as we see the chickens start to come home to roost for Jimmy and he begins to lose hope that he can ever have a real relationship with his older brother. “I think that he’s running out of (hope) that his brother will give him an open chance to prove himself,” Odenkirk says, “and he’s finding out that’s actually the case, that it’s closed shop, the legal profession, at least as far as his brother is concerned towards him. And a closed heart as well. His brother is not ever going to give him a chance and he’s really finally coming to grips with that.” The repercussions of Chuck’s scheme will rock Jimmy’s world in several ways, not the least of which is his fledgling legal practice with Kim (Rhea Seehorn), with whom he is also romantically involved. “She’s a damn good lawyer and a well-composed person,” Odenkirk says, “who has chosen, I think due to affection, to side with Jimmy even though she probably knows he’s not necessarily in the right. But that’s a pretty great partnership right at the start of this season, and through most of the season it’s a pretty great relationship that they’re painting here, of people who support each other, even in difficult times. I can’t wait for everyone to see that. I love the choice that Kim makes. I mean, as a viewer, as a person watching the story on some level, I love that she makes this choice to support Jimmy. She’s on his team.” As for what this apparently honest, hard-working attorney might see in this flawed man who would go on to become shyster Saul Goodman in “Breaking Bad,” Odenkirk indicates that looks can be deceiving. “Some part of her is excited by his talents for duplicity and for danger; we’ve seen her cooperate and participate in some of his scams,” he says. “So she’s got an interesting past as well. We don’t know it but she clearly (is an) interesting, complex character herself. She’s a person who seems to follow the straight and narrow path rigorously in her own life, but she clearly, as we’ve seen in these glimpses and these moments where she participates in some of Jimmy’s scams, maybe she’s not as much of a straight arrow as we thought.”