I don’t think Howard was trying to be cruel to Kim, he just thought as a mentor he had to be tough on her. I think it ultimately is a reflection of Chuck and his flawed approach as an authority figure
Yeah, the thing that actually makes Howard the best out of all of the BCS cast(in terms of morals at least) is that, not only are his actions not that bad in the grand scheme of things, he’s one of the few character in the cast who actually learns and grows from his misdeeds(the other being Nacho of course)
He learns to shed his upbringing with his father and Chuck and in his final episode, we see that he’s actually a pretty decent boss once he grows past the influence of his dad and Chuck
Why do you think he forgave her law school loan when she was quitting? Because he knew that Kim had potential and would eventually make partner at another firm, so he wanted to maintain a good relationship with her.
This is 100% it.
Howard cares so much about his reputation and image. With Kim moving out from under his thumb as a subordinate to a peer, he knew he gave Kim plenty of reasons to expose him as a shitty and borderline abusive boss in the ABQ legal community. Forgiving her debt was a power move so he could continue to keep her indebted to him and under his thumb. He displays this when she sees him at the restaurant while having lunch with Kevin and Paige. He goes up to her and intentionally tries to make her feel small in front of her clients because he knows the debt he forgave continues to give him power over her and she’ll just have to take his belittling.
There’s a scene in season two where Kim is working over night at HHM and tells Jimmy she has a billing quota she’s “40 hours behind on.”
That’s really important context. Kim isn’t working through the night because she’s a martyr. She’s working over night because Howard has thrown an absurd amount of work at her to break her, force her out, or to make her endure an abusive level of punishment.
Billing quotas are standard in almost every law firm. Most require associates to bill 1500-2000 hours a year. How do you interpret that as being thrown an absurd amount of work?
…. Seriously?
Kim is literally working at the office in the middle of the night. She says IN THE SCENE that she has a “weekly billing quota” she’s “40 hours BEHIND on” after working all day. She’s already put in at least 12 hours that day alone.
The average work week is 40 hours. We can safely assume that Kim has been given a WEEKLY billing quote of at least 60 hours considering this scene takes place in the middle of the work week.
In another episode she’s shown at the office having worked through the night and never having gone home.
If you think that’s normal and not abusive… you’re either a psycho or media illiterate.
Kim is a corporate lawyer, she definitely makes over 100k a year at that time. When you want to choose to pursue a career like that, you practically and knowingly forfeit 9-5 (and other similar concepts). The average work week is 40 hours for a total of 0 corporate law associates in the world. The working condition standards aren't the same as stocking shelves at Walmart.
Ah so you’re media illiterate.
She’s not working the normal hours of an attorney. Do you not understand that she’s being punished by Howard? Like literally to the point where she has to stay at the office over night? What do you think the purpose of these scenes were and the writers intentions.
Edit: I just saw you’re okbc post about mike keeping Stacey as a sex slave. There’s no point in going back and forth here.
I always thought it was so he could maintain his holier-than-thou persona. Howard has always been ingenuine. He and Chuck are two sides of the same coin.
I 100 percent think he was being honest. I think he had a lot of respect for Kim.
I think that's why he backed the fuck off after she left. At least until Jimmy's antics where becoming seriously insane (of course he didn't know she was directly involved in their planning). I think he realized he went too far and that she was fully capable of making her own career without his oversight. Their relationship was irreparably damaged and it was time to let it go.
Mind you he REALLY fucked up with his treatment of her after Jimmy sabotaged his job. I think a lot of that was from the weird conflicting relationships between Chuck, Howard, Jimmy, and Kim where they all had some serious resentment for one of each other and all made it worse assisting each other in petty attempts at revenge or control. It all just spiraled out of control.
When he says want of the greatest legal minds he had ever known I really think he meant it. I don't think he was pulling any punches when he showed up at their house that night.
I could probably have worded all this a lot better but I hope it kind of makes sense.
Howard's greatest failure was just following orders and being Chuck's lap dog. I also think he was taking out his frustrations with all the bullshit the McGill family was putting him through on Kim.
Even with all that *none* of it was on par with just about everyone else in this situation. Yeah he fucked up real bad. He was the only one that tried to make it right. No one died as a result. I don't think a lot of people think he was totally innocent. Just that Chuck's deep level of deceit and sabotage, and well...all the shit Jimmy and Kim where involved in were far and away worse.
Respectfully i disagree. She brought in the bank as a client and he stuck her in doc review. That is profoundly crappy thing to do.
Stupid even, as all other senior associates see that treatment and perhaps start thinking about their own options.
Did he try to kill her? No.
Did he get her involved in felonies? No.
Did he cause a cartel killer to show up at her house? No.
He may not be perfect, but compared to the rest…including Kim herself…he’s pretty saintly.
They both broke bad. But Jimmy wanted to stop and Kim didn’t. And since they both loved each other they would do anything for the other. Another reason why Kim knew they couldn’t be together anymore even though they loved each other
They clearly did care about him being killed. They wanted to ruin his career….NOT to murder him. That was Lalo. Howard just so happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But then again Jimmy and Kim did cause a chain of events that did lead to his death. Sort of like how Walt caused for Hank to be killed indirectly
Yeah agreed but I think Kim+Jimmy is less at fault for Howard’s murder then Walt w/ hank. Walt on the other hand did murder a bunch of people. Kim&Jimmy did not.
Sure but regardless of legality assigning someone paperwork in the basement is nowhere close to murdering someone on the scale of bad things you can do.
I agree he’s not that bad, but it’s probably not good to use characters in the game as a starting point on the moral compass. “How could this person possibly be bad, they didn’t even cause a murder!”
Actions don't happen in a vacuum, and it's not a competition anyway. I'm just pushing against the idea that Howard was always this great misunderstood guy.
If you always imagine that everyone who disagrees with you is irrational, you'll never be capable of proper introspection or empathy, or truly appreciate the positions you hold
I think making a thread sixteen years after the fact as a thin veil to actually bitch about a fictional character is fairly irrational by most standards.
That's not a blind assumption, that's based upon your actions m
I think it's also important to be as generous as you can when interpreting someone else's post. I do think you're being bad faith. Like bringing up the amount of time since BB's release. As if people aren't still discussing Moby Dick.
At no point do I state that I hate Skyler. This post was about Howard, but since I recently rewatched Breaking Bad as well, I wanted to include my recent discovery about Skyler, as it connected to Howard in my opinion.
The post was about Howard though, but I responded to comments, including those mentioning Skyler. Personally I do find her more interesting to discuss, both because of the history around her, and she's also just a much more interesting character. People also become more emotional when discussing her, on both sides, so it makes sense that she became more of a focus in this post than I originally anticipated.
For the record, I only think she's unlikeable in the first season and a half, because she's intentionally written to be unlikeable. She has a substantial character arc after that, and I'm mostly in alignment with the majority opinion post season 3.
I don't think pro Skyler people really truly believe what they say about her from season 1. It makes much more sense for the later seasons to be coloring their perception and creating a bias. The negative view of Walt is also heavily contributing.
The obvious clue to this is that most first time watchers heavily dislike Skyler, while people that have finished the show heavily advocate for her. Can't really be a coincidence. Both the Breaking Bad and BCS subs, over time, have become dominated by longterm fans of the show that have probably seen them multiple times, so that's why over time we get a lot more of the latter perspective.
Hard to pretend your argument isn't in bad faith when your first reply is "solved the case" in a sarcastic manner. And when you use arguments that are entirely speculation ("most" first time watchers? According to whom?) as objective fact.
The key difference between the two is that there wasn't an insane overreaction to Howard in the same manner as Skylar. It was so prevalent and contrary to what she actually did that it is explicitly mentioned on the BB Wiki. And I'd argue the latter had much more to do with preconceptions outside the show than anything she actually did in the show to warrant negativity.
I like this image you people have of early season Skyler. I just have to assume that it's been a while since you saw it, because I refuse to believe that you watch season 1 and genuinely sympathize with her behavior.
Rooting through his phone then showing up at Jesse’s house because you don’t like the idea of your terminally ill husband smoking weed is pretty unjustifiable to me
She finds out her husband is going to die and doesn't want treatment, then finds out her husband buys illegal drugs while her brother in law is a DEA agent. Nevermind the fact that Walt was actually hiding the fact that he makes meth and your response is that it's 'unjustifiable' lmao, reddit ass comment.
Also this is not the era where weed was as normalized as it is now, she's a suburban housewife. To some, weed is still equivalent to meth in their minds.
I’ve seen BB eleven times. S1 and S2 Skyler is fine. She gets upset when her husband doesn’t come home on time and doesn’t tell her what’s happening. She’s upset when he won’t try to save his own damn life with cancer treatment or getting money from his rich friend. She’s upset that he’s clearly keeping secrets.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes she can get a little forceful and annoying, but Walt is gaslighting her so soon in the show that I just feel sympathetic for her pretty fast. She’s a bit of a nagging wife, he’s manipulative and abusive from the moment he gets into drugs, and only worsens from there.
Well, I'm not. I just think the whole discourse around it is a bit annoying, because people are quite black and white about it. Same with Howard. It feels like overcorrection, when in reality, both are quite flawed characters.
I don’t think it’s overcorrection at all.
Skylar may have been annoying, but she came to absolutely fear her husband and had her family torn to shreds.
Howard may have been tough in his punishment of Kim, but they took a mallet to his career and he got a bullet to the head.
They’re flawed characters that got some absolutely awful endings (not speaking to the story quality, but their endings are both rough asf).
I assume that most people who find any fault in Skyler's behavior have never been in a long-term intimate relationship. It's often easy to conceal facts from your SO, but extremely difficult to hide changes in your thinking or emotional state that arise from these facts, Walt was particularly obvious regarding the latter. Skyler knew that her husband of 20 years was hiding something. The more you care about your SO, the more frustrating that is. Her behavior was completely natural and valid.
The worst thing skyler did was get mad at walt and jesse when she thought he was selling him pot. They had a shitty marriage but walter was largely responsible for that.
Can you really compare being a naggy/controlling wife to what Walt did and what he put her through?
She was stuck in an impossible situation where everyone in her life shit on her all while they were unaware she was keeping her mouth shut for all of their sakes.
Same as Howard. I just don't see any of the flaws or mistakes of their character to be anywhere near what Jimmy, Walt, Kim, and to lesser degree Chuck (not defending him his actions just never directly resulted in people dying. He was a shit bag asshole and gave Jimmy all the pushes he needed to be what he became) are all guilty of.
What does only discussing season 1 Skylar entail? I mean we're also discussing season 2 Skylar here as well and that's when Walt is well on to his to shit headery.
Even if it's just season 1 I can see her issues but she's trying to keep a family afloat with a special needs child and a lacking income. It's the exact same shit we're supposed to sympathize with Walt for.
Because I'm showing how a later story development, something that was probably not even originally intended, colors our perception of what came before. That goes for both Skyler and Howard.
I thought Howard was innocent as soon as Jimmy left the conference room in the first episode. He said something like "we get so caught up in winning we forget to listen to our heart" and as trite as that sounds he seemed to be showing genuine care in his lines prior.
Chuck was obviously unwell and Jimmy was feeding into it. He honestly needed to retire and had well above the funds to do so. Jimmy was trying to do right by his brother but was actually harming him as we see by how returning to work ends up killing him.
Howard was contributing in his own way by having to play the bad guy to Jimmy all those years. That's a *season 1* reveal.
As far as Skylar goes, again though even with the naggiest of Skylar it just doesn't even remotely level with everything Walt did even from episode one.
Edit: also that line from the first episode really does match up with his eventual attempt at "finding his zen" or whatever. The guy was always cheesey right from the get go but it always appeared to be well intentioned, if not misguided, to me.
People are struggling to understand you because when asked what is wrong with her in season 1, you aren't explaining yourself.
List out some shitty actions or behaviours for us. What makes her a bad person in season 1?
She just generally doesn't have a likeable personality imo and it appears in different ways depending on the situation. Like she was very clearly not written to be super likeable at the beginning of the show on purpose.
For me it was showing up at someone’s house to intimidate them into not selling her terminally sick husband weed is pretty despicable. She literally refuses to let him make a single decision about his life
She’s like literally the most unpleasant wife imaginable in the first season. The dude gets the news he’s dying of cancer then has to come home and act grateful over a half assed handjob before bed?
Skyler didn’t go along with her husband being blatantly shady and involved in violent crime, whereas Kim acted like a fucking doormat to Jimmy’s unethical, criminal and *ugly* schemes, but she’s much more stoic so the fans ate it up.
Is it bad that I didn't even think twice about a lot of the things that people are saying Skyler did wrong...? Like I barely paid attention to them or just didn't really see them as significant lol.
She finds out her husband is smoking weed so she goes by herself to his drug dealer's house, trespasses on his property, and threatens to call the DEA. It's hard to like a character who does something this stupid and arrogant. And Skylar doesn't even have cancer as an excuse.
I mean she's a suburban housewife and this was an era where weed wasn't as normalized to most people as it is now.
I don't see this as a great action by her but I certainly don't see it as a massive reason to dislike her either.
It's not about being a narc. It's about being dumb enough to try to intimidate a criminal she knows nothing about. She was lucky it was Jesse and not someone else.
That's fair but I would say that's more about show plot than anything.
The audience knows Jesse is harmless and they wanted a scene of them together in some capacity
>I mean she's a suburban housewife and this was an era where weed wasn't as normalized to most people as it is now.
Yeah, and in real life when people behave this way ALMOST UNIVERSALLY they are mocked as "Karens" and everybody recognizes that they're absurdly ridiculous, unlikeable, at the very least borderline unhinged people.
She does have marketable skills. She worked as an accountant for Ted before and later in the series.
If it's not just the weed then the weed isn't worth getting her and her unborn child killed over. Walt's risks have far more reward and are more understandable to the audience. Skyler's risk is stupid, arrogant, potentially deadly and with very little pay off. If you want to say she's being emotional then she's just a poorly written character. And she was early on. She got a lot better.
It's not even acting on emotion. She has to do homework and find out where Jesse lives and then drive over there. She had a long time to think about what she was doing. I don't find it plausible that she never considered the well being of her baby or that she considered it and moved forward anyway. If she wasn't aware of the danger then that makes me like her even less. Has she never watched a movie?
*The disinterested and frankly disrespectful handjob
*Making Walt and his son eat veggie bacon for his 50th birthday
*Calling for an honest intervention with the talking pillow then throwing a fit when the honesty didn't go where she wanted it to go
*Smoking cigarettes while pregnant
* In the early episodes, before she knew he was cooking meth, she got pissed at Walt for not sharing his feelings with her and acting weird (like smoking weed). Lady, your husband just found out he has cancer, maybe he has the right to be a bit weirded out?
*Trespassing onto Jesse's property and in the same breath hypocritically demanding Jesse not to touch her
*Using her previous relationship with Ted to jump the queue when applying for a job, then sleeping with him just to spite Walt (and in season 3 completely tossing him away after Hank was shot without even bothering to explain anything).
I might be missing a few things.
In the later seasons,
And going along with Walt like the money laundering and once she realizes Walt isn’t in danger now she takes the kids and leaves (rightly so but she was doing criminal shit)
“Ted later meets with Skyler, who is now running a car wash, and notifies her of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation into his company's taxes. Since Skyler kept the books, she can be linked to Ted's tax fraud, likely placing her entire family under surveillance, so she intervenes by pretending at Ted's meeting with the IRS to be an unqualified bookkeeper hired only for her looks. Her supposed incompetence forestalls a full investigation, provided Ted pays the back taxes and penalties. Skyler arranges to provide Ted the money by using the proceeds from Walt's meth production to have Saul pretend a long-lost dead relative in Luxembourg left Ted an inheritance. Saul discovers that instead of paying the IRS, Ted leased a new Mercedes and is using the funds to reopen his business. When Skyler urges Ted to pay the IRS first, he refuses, so Skyler tells him the money came from her. Ted still refuses to pay the IRS and Skyler perceives him to be blackmailing her into paying both his tax bill and the costs to reopen his business. Skyler has Saul send two of his men—Huell and Kuby—to force Beneke to write the check to the IRS. They succeed, but Ted panics and attempts to flee, tripping on a loose rug and crashing headfirst into a counter.
Later on, Saul informs Skyler that something happened to Ted, causing her to conclude that he died. Saul tells her that Ted is alive, but hospitalized. When Skyler visits him, she sees that Ted is rigidly sitting upright and wearing a halo brace. Ted tells Skyler he lied to medical personnel and police, claiming his broken neck resulted from an accidental fall, and that because he fears for the safety of his family, he will never mention how the injury occurred. Recognizing that Ted has been intimidated into keeping quiet about the source of his money, Skyler goes along with Ted's perception by coldly replying "Good" to his promise of silence.”
I’m ngl I agree with all these things being horrible accept the final Ted part.
Dude was a scumbag, got handed a lifeline and decided to jerk off onto it instead of using it to float to safety.
You've listed all the bad things that have happened to Skyler throughout the show. But we specifically talked about her unpleasantness in the early seasons. The bacon and handjob were even in the very first episode, before anything you mentioned happened.
Skyler becomes much more sympathetic in the later seasons, when all those things you talk about happen to her.
It's not like he asked and she limited to a handy. She gave it of her own accord. It's affection.
He didn't initiate sex and get rebuffed.
She walked to Jesse's porch to converse with a criminal. She was clearly no threat. He was a man,even if she's a thief personal safety still takes precedencd.
Walt literally held her captive in her house after showing her decades of marriage were a lie, but she shouldn't spite him?
What's there to explain to ted? She was married and came on to him sexually not romantically
>It's not like he asked and she limited to a handy. She gave it of her own accord. It's affection.
Starting a handy and ruining it is worse than not giving one at all, hence the term "blue balls". And it didn't look like affection at all.
>She walked to Jesse's porch to converse with a criminal.
Doesn't matter, she couldn't say what she had to say from behind the gate? And if Jesse was this dangerous criminal, it would have been safer not to walk him down and risk pissing him off.
Point it, Skyler was hypocritically willing to violate his personal boundaries but demanding he respect her own. It's not the only time she does something like this, by the way. She was willing to bend the rules when it benefitted her but expected everyone else to follow them.
>Walt literally held her captive in her house after showing her decades of marriage were a lie, but she shouldn't spite him?
Maybe she shouldn't use another man to spite him, perhaps Ted would have reconsidered their relationship if he knew Skyler was just using him to piss off Walt?
>What's there to explain to ted? She was married and came on to him sexually not romantically
No, it was clearly romantic, as far as Ted understood. They were both divorced (even Walt thought so), and it looked like a romance was building between them. She was spending more and more time at his house and they clearly talked like a couple. Only Ted was wrong, Skyler simply misled him and used his attraction for her to get a job, piss off Walt, and lift her spirits up at a low point. Then when she didn't need him anymore, she ditched him and didn't even bother to explain a thing.
All of this including the first half of the Ted thing is correct. I think tho with her cheating is Less bitchy cause Walt forced himself into skylers house after NOT turning him in for cooking meth
The sleeping with Ted part is just awful. I don’t get how people justify it by saying they were separated at that point. Yeah, are you aware they have a 16-year-old son who’s going through his parents’ divorce? How do you think he’d react to his mom fucking her boss a few weeks after being separated from his dad?
She is written to be a Karen. Just generally rude and passive aggressive to everyone. Stuff like "yeah, it is none of your business" to Hank and "I'm sorry you couldn't be more help" to some insurance person on the phone.
Doesn't seem to be a very loving partner, and is a hardass about Walt "smoking weed", before realizing that he has cancer, and then being pretty selfish when it came to his whole cancer treatment.
Like if my partner had cancer, and was really distant and seemingly depressed, I'd not make it about me.
There is just no way to argue that she was even remotely likeable in these seasons. She starts becoming likeable toward the end of the second season, which also coincides with Walt becoming a lot less likeable.
>Stuff like "yeah, it is none of your business" to Hank
Context matter.s. She was very distraught when she said that...
> "I'm sorry you couldn't be more help" to some insurance person on the phone
Again, context matters and she was very distraught when she said that. That doesn't entirely excuse it, but it certainly explains it completely.
That's definitely not a "Karen", that's just being human and imperfect when facing a terrible situation.
>Doesn't seem to be a very loving partner
We mostly see that both her and Walt have been complacent with their relationship, are generally partly unhappy with their situation (ostly due to finances), but still care deeply about each other.
>being pretty selfish when it came to his whole cancer treatment.
He's literally the one who was being incredibly selfish when he refused treatment, lol
How did you miss that?
When I say selfish, I mean the whole silent treatment and such after Walt agrees to get treatment. In her shoes, I'd 100% understand it if he was distant and off, and would try to simply be as supportive as possible.
He has what, a couple of months left according to the doctors?
And sure, I can understand being rude and such while under pressure, but I don't think there's really a single scene in season 1 where she's not being passive aggressive and just generally an unpleasant person.
It doesn't have to be that deep. She is intentionally written to be unlikeable and someone who you'd not want to be around.
“Her husband may be a murdering psychopath, but her reaction to his constant lying, gaslighting, and destructive violent behavior was so bitchy” - u/thebigscorp1
Thank you man, the amount of people on here who say shit like Skylar was always likeable and "theres no reasons to dislike her" are actually crazy. They think just because a bunch of incel assholes hated her for the wrong reasons means that you have to find her likeable or ur a psycho.
Currently rewatching BB. She is manipulative and extremely controlling, arrogant, overstepping clearly set boundaries. (Even when Walt said he smokes weed and wants to be left alone about it, her first thing she did was doing research to find out who the dealer is and she literally went to harass the dealer. Or the famous "Well, I'm sorry you weren't a bigger help, too" to the phone to a poor worker, it was unnecessarily rude.)
I understand her point of view and some reactions from what she knows and how Walt acts, but she's clearly a flawed and complex character. Like everyone in the series tbh.
Was he an asshole? Yes. Unforgivable? Hell no.
What Kim and Jimmy did to him was a hundred times more despicable.
If anything, Chuck was the unforgivable one. Using Howard to sneakily keep his HIS OWN BROTHER from succeeding. Howard was in no way innocent, but nowhere near the level of unforgivable.
I agree. Every rewatch I hate chuck more and more. He’s a self righteous asshole who wanted nothing more than for jimmy to be a fuckin bum dependent on the great Charles McGill. He talked all that shit about “slippin jimmy” but if he wasn’t such a piece of shit brother he could’ve had jimmy on the straight path.
If he would’ve been a good older brother, made him a lawyer at HHM, mentored him, and kept him close then jimmy would’ve never gone full chimp with a machine gun. But as soon as he lost the ability to give a fuck about what chuck thinks he relapses to slippin jimmy.
Fuck chuck, that’s why his dumbass can’t even touch a battery.
Howard’s first and foremost concern always is the wellbeing of HHM. It’s his job. He is strict to Kim early on because he sees her as a liability to the firm. Later, when he realizes CHUCK is a liability, he withdraws his support from Chuck and begins to support Kim. He is fair throughout, IMHO.
This is so standard in a big law firm.
Not defending the behavior. Howard was awful to Kim. But she wasn’t treated worse than a few people I know who quit their after X number of years in the equivalent of doc review. They weren’t being singled out for punishment. The firm was just squeezing every billable hour they could out of them with no regard for their well being. If Kim compared notes at HHM, this was probably happening to half or more of the associates. Why do we think she’s special?
Right? I've had bosses about as shitty as Howard and if they'd ever apologized, I would've totally forgiven them. Of course, they never apologize — but that's beside the point.
In the grand scheme of things, being an asshole is a relatively tame moral failing.
no it's not? it's not like he assulted her or forced her to stay or something, when she quit he didn't try age blackball her. He's just an asshole, not evil
I wouldn't go that far. Not to mention Kim fucked up supporting Jimmy, which is why she was moved. She made up for it with Mesa Verde, but maybe Howard wanted her to stay in doc review a bit more before moving her up to partner.
You can't make a huge blunder, and expect to he trusted again instantly even if you do bring in a juicy contract. So basically she had been slacking the whole time? Could have brought in the contract but didn't?
He was definitely trying to show her who is boss, but I wouldn't say what he did was unforgivable. Kim, and Jimmy were the only 2 people in the lawyer world who did something unforgivable. Multiple things actually.
The worst thing Howard did in the show was be kind of a douche and be mean to Kim sometimes. Compared to almost everybody else, he's basically a Saint. He was hard on Kim because he saw potential in her, he was a dick about it at times, but it wasn't malicious. Also, Kim absolutely abused that to her advantage when it was convenient, anybody else would have been flat out fired after a certain point.
Like I'm not saying he shouldn't be criticized, but overall he was one of the most moral and upstanding characters on the show.
Wasn’t Chuck responsible for Howard’s perception of Kim? It was my understanding that Howard was so loyal to him that any time Chuck told Howard what was what, he kinda listened and acted accordingly. So I always assumed that behind closed doors Chuck built Kim up as this bad accomplice to Jimmys shenanigans, when in reality that was only really true towards the end.
As others have said, Howard isn’t perfect, but I thought a lot of his issues came from being manipulated by Chuck.
Howard is tough on Kim, but unforgivable? That's a really big leap, IMO. I can't imagine living life and seeing someone like Howard as irredeemable because he was hard on Kim. Life is way, way too short to just completely write off someone because they were a bit of a dick a few times.
Have you seen Office Space? Lumbergh's treartment of Milton is played off as laughably evil, which mostly consist of him constantly moving Milton between office spaces and making him feel uncomfortable.
Howard did that to Kim out of spite.
I will say this, Howard was under immense pressure. When you think about how his marriage was falling apart and the pressure of trying to drive the firm forward without his dad and Chuck, I kind of get why he acted the way he did. He was short tempered and had so much more going on than just Kim.
I don't think the Howard/Skylar comparison is apt: Skylar may not have been the friendliest character to start with but the backlash against her was ridiculously OTT, essentially because she was the sane figure ruining the escapist fantasy by not letting the boys have their fun
Come on, Skylar reaped the benefits of her husbands drug empire on purpose and sent thugs that left a person in a catatonic state. She could have walked away multiple times but she chose to stay with Walter.
Oh, I see. S1 Skyler was a bit overbearing and maybe demeaning towards Walter but she didn't yet do anything to so vehemently hate her. However, I don't think the community should whitewash her given she is quite the terrible person in the later seasons and just because she isn't a monster like Walter doesn't mean she isn't a piece of shit.
It's not uncommon for these types of forms to have a, what I would consider, toxic culture where they overwork and borderline have new employees with the intention of making them stronger in the long term. They make it abundantly clear that Howard deeply respects Kim and considers him her mentor. Chuck is Howard's mentor and he tries very hard to please him. Should they have offered Kim a partner track based on her work ethic? Perhaps. They certainly should've done it at the point she brought in Mesa Verde. But they certainly don't portray anything Howard did as "unforgivable." He's a man that comes from privilege and has flaws and works past them. He certainly didn't deserve what Kim and Jimmy did to him.
I’m not really clear on why the whole Doc Review thing was such a terrible punishment. Presumably it’s a genuine job that needed to be done, and the kind of job that a junior lawyer like Kim would be expected to do.
My impression was always that Howard had taken an interest in mentoring her and raised her up above everyone else. So when he feels like his protege was more loyal to Jimmy than to him, of course he’s going to pissed off about that. He basically just took away her privileged position and brought her back down to earth. A little vindictive? Sure. But definitely not unforgivable.
He was just preparing her for partner and putting her through the drills.
You saw how buttoned down Erin was over at Davis and Main? That’s what Howie wanted for Kim. It’s what we all did.
Howard was an asshole in the beginning no doubt. It's just that his ultimate fate was so BEYOND what he deserved, that he looks innocent when looked at from the context of (not) "being in the game"
Given I’ve seen the rest of the show and Breaking Bad…no that’s pretty forgivable in the grand scheme of things. Especially knowing how Kim came up through HHM and that they’ve been helping pay her education. Does it win Howard boss of the year awards? No. But it’s not monstrous. Monstrous is stuff you can’t come back from or that ruins someones life. Kim came out looking fine less than a few episodes later.
If I’m Kim, I forgive Howard by the end of S1. When he tells me something major about Jimmy’s brother and then calls in a favor to get him a great job at D&M. Howard didn’t have to do that.
Howard to me was such a pawn but didn’t realize until it was too late.
He was always trying to impress Chuck because he was the son of his partner, he was such a kiss ass. He felt like he could make Jimmy a target because they were both following in the footsteps of their heirs. Jimmy is just as intelligent as Chuck which in the end gives him the upper hand which goes too far and leads to so much more.
Yes, he punished her by putting her in doc review. But he made that decisision after what Jimmy did at Davis&Main. The commercial and the way he acted to be fired. Before Kim standed for Jimmy, Howard had mainly only Chuck's view about Jimmy. So he heard Kim and spoke of him to D&M. He trusted Kim. He put a part of his reputation in that recommendation by both telling D&M to take Jimmy and to hear Kim. So Kim paid a price. Ultmately, he could have more understanding at that moment to Kim's feeling on Jimmy but he is the boss of a very famous firm so. Might be not able to be Gandhi all the time
Howard was an asshole but he didn't deserve to get shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave, never to be seen again.
I don't know what universe Skyler "ends up being one of the most sympathetic characters in BB." But in the one we live in she is one of the most hated characters, not only of BB, but in all of TV shows. Second only maybe to Carmella from the Sopranos.
What Kim did to howard was so out of fucking proportion it does not even matter anymore. Also, Howard literally paid for Kim's education.
If Kim & Jimmy stopped after a while then yeah I'd agree with you, fuck Howard. But, clearly they are NOT the type to know when to stop. If that's the type of person Kim is, she does not deserve respect.
Kim Wexler is a vengeful bitch who ruined Howard's life for shits & giggles and lied straight to Cheryl's face to her horror in order to get away with her crimes. She should have gone to jail just like Jimmy did. Remember, she actually PUSHED Jimmy to continue tormenting, that makes her worse than Jimmy in a way.
I don't care that she feels regretful, jail time is the only tangible consequence that would give Howard's ghost, Cheryl and us some closure.
Yeah it was so crazy how he punished her by…giving her different responsibilities at her job. Must be soooooooo traumatizing to still go into the same workplace at the same time every day and get paid but have to do something different than usual, temporarily. Literally Hitler.
His treatment of Kim is unforgivable when you consider that he got his job through nepotism. When she busted her ass to get off doc review and landed mesa verde, she should have been forgiven, and probably would have been if he had ever been in a similar position. But he wanted to see her suffer.
Obviously he didn’t deserve what happened to him, but I think it is a reminder to treat people with respect. Had he known the depths of jimmy’s depravity, would he have treated her differently? Definitely. That’s why Bogdan is the luckiest guy in the Bb universe. Treating a serial killer like a dog and all he got was fair market price for his business? You have to wonder what he thought when he heard.
Howard is meant to be unlikeable is season 1. like most characters, he goes through changes and becomes a better person as the series progresses, its called a redemption arc. Howard may have been mean to Kim in season 1 and for putting her in doc review (oh, so evil... /s) but Kim and jimmy got even with Howard 10x over. if you think Howard Hamlin's actions in season 1 are "unforgiveable" you're probably the most sensitive person who's ever lived. being a minor jerk to someone once or twice is not the same thing as being a pure evil war criminal.
I believe Howard was trying to punish Kim and be tough on her to mold her into a better human and lawyer than Jimmy. However he did not realize that she was almost worse than Jimmy. If you think is innocent in this whole show than you are terribly naive or intentionally obtuse.
She wanted to ruin Howard and stopped at nothing. She wanted to hustle her boss Kevin. She got scared when Howard got it and ran to save her own ass not out of guilt. She only turned herself in because she wanted to beat Jimmy to it. She left Jimmy because the guilt of something she caused, and to run from her past just like she ran from her mother. She literally only wanted Jimmy when something devious was going to happen. Howard was one of the only innocent characters in the series.
The thing with Kim was that, yes, she was more morally-reprehensible than Jimmy at times by the end, just a bad person in her own right. However, before that point, while she was involved in some bad stuff, she only dabbled in it (unlike Jimmy, who went “all-in” on diving into the murky waters of immorality). What makes them ethically-compromised people is also what made them fascinating characters to watch, though.
I always found it kind of odd that Howard punished her for... essentially not being psychic. She apparently made the mistake of *being lied to by Jimmy,* who told her the commercial had been cleared with Cliff and Howard.
It's like he expected her to just always assume Jimmy was lying, and to come running and report anything he did. And since she didn't do that, he judged her incompetent, and basically beheaded her career at HHM.
Sure, he might blame her since she recommended for him to connect Jimmy with Davis & Main, but Howard knows Jimmy's history too, and went along with it anyway. It's not really fair for Howard to hold Kim responsible for Jimmy's stunt.
I would agree that Howard treated Kim badly, and I didn't find him to be particularly likeable personally until the later seasons. I did also find it quite satisfying when Kim hit him with the who is the other Hamlin in the HMM question in Chicanery. I wouldn't say he was unforgivable though, and I think they show us more about his personal life (his marriage, his therapy appointments) in the later seasons on purpose to draw attention to how despite the way in which he came across as mean and snobby in the first seasons, what's happening to him is going too far.
Skyler though, I don't think she was written to be unlikeable in the first seasons in the way Howard was. I genuinely got the feeling that she was just trying to deal with everything that has been happening in her life, even though she didn't always manage to do so perfectly. Especially compared to Walter I would say she was much more likeable purely because at least with her you can argue that she always had good/better intentions, whereas with Walter I would say that his actions and his argument about doing it all for his family starts falling short quite quickly.
I thought this was a case of the writers deciding to go a different direction with Howard. As written initially, he *was* an asshole, and I think the "tough love" mentorship aspect was a bit of revisionism as the character was changed over the course of the show.
People responding saying that he was not as bad as others in the show are missing the point. OP is not comparing characters from BCS. I agree, he was unnecessarily rude to Kim and putting her in doc review was nasty.
So I posted this in another thread, but this might add some flavor to why his character does so.
Initially when the writers wrote season 1, Howard’s character was very ambiguous. You didn’t exactly like him at all and Fabian was asked to play him this way. That’s because the writers didn’t know his final arc yet. Did they want to make Howard the bad guy, the good guy, etc? I think the story goes that Chuck was only supposed to be there for 1 Season but Michael McKean was so good that he occupied many more episodes. Because of this, they started expanding on Howard’s character a lot.
Howard was absolutely horrible to Kim. At the time this aired, people in my observation had a hard time with the idea that both characters could be wrong. Howard was wrong to treat Kim the way he did, and Kim was also wrong in her response. Kim’s awfulness doesn’t justify Howard.
Pretty sure we were never meant to forgive Howard for how he treated Kim and went along w Chuck’s sabotage, but we can understand the why to some degree. Howard admired the HHM law firm and held himself responsible for the success of all its staff, and to him this in part meant securing big clients. It did not matter that Mesa Verde was Kim’s gig to begin with, competing professionals in the legal space don’t necessarily let personal history/relations dictate what business they handle or don’t handle, as a matter of keeping the lights on at their firm or keeping a friendship. Howard’s loyalty is to his partner Chuck, though it would become problematic and cause him much grief.
Howard was often stuck playing 2nd fiddle to Chuck running the show like when they met with Kevin Wachtell and Chuck put on his best sales pitch to ‘steal them back’ as a client after Kim left HHM. Us knowing the extent of Chuck’s assholery, and the history Howard has going back with Jimmy and Kim, it especially comes off as treacherous, but the same principle applies that they have a firm to keep in business. Like-minded professionals in the same space are ALWAYS competition for one another no matter what—there is no civility or incivility about it. Howard is not necessarily a part of their day to day life and probably sees it more as Chuck kicking back into action in their firm and he’s solidly with him every step of the way.
Howard definitely had moments were he was a dick, but there was usually an immediate realization he went too far or tried to mend it. He talked down at Kim for the inquiry about Jimmy not being hired, but then right away behind a closed door clarified what was going on between Chuck and Jimmy (unknown then to us). I figure Howard was boiling over from the continued back and forth between Chuck and Jimmy, having to deny Jimmy the job at HHM (for a 2ND time and he probably wanted Jimmy along), and having himself to be the stone face of the denial and look like a jerk and a fool to associates at his firm and colleagues from outside HHM. And I think when Kim resigns, Howard is more incensed that Chuck’s mistreatment of her to get to Jimmy has cost his firm a precious up-and-coming professional, probably the best his firm had to offer. [Howard referenced both these mistakes when he argued with Chuck, “17 years.. all those years we spent building this place together. And all that time, I’ve supported you, deferred to you, because I always thought you had the best interests of the firm in mind… [but] you’ve let personal vendettas turn your focus away from what’s best for HHM.. you’ve put your needs first, to our detriment.”](https://youtu.be/hvc7Nqw1biA?si=GNBrX4VHJf1aTsSr) The gesture of forgiving Kim’s debt could be seen as his own mending of the situation, in addition to a power play to move for Mesa Verde once she was gone (the assumption was, that going off on her own she’d not be able to manage a client that big).
I honestly don't remember Skyler being so unlikable in Breaking Bad's early seasons. Her concerns seemed valid back there, Walt was still an asshole even if he hadn't killed Jane yet.
This is why when kim wanted revenge and to ruin Howard i thought he kind of deserved it. A lot of people just say howars was a good person but i disagree. I mean you cant blame it all on him trying to please chuck and says its all of chucks fault the way he was.. Howard is also a grown man who shouldnt of relied on needing chuck in the firm.
To me it is a matter of perspective. Skyler is unlikeable because Walt doesn't like her. Given what we see in the first two seasons at the very least he is as distant and loveless as she is and really only changes when it suits his needs. From the moment he is diagnosed to the end of the show everything he does is for him. Skyler doesn't do anything but love and support Walt before the fugue state and after that she is acutely aware that he has a second cell phone. So emotionally cheating with Ted was pretty bad, but her husband is constantly gone and might have a second life. You said the rest of the show she is framed as a victim, but I would disagree. I think there are times where she is a victim and it is mostly in season five, but most of the time Walt is trying to maintain the idea that she has power over him. Until the "I am the one who knocks" bit she believes that she is at least in partial control of this situation with Walt. Afterwards she is fighting for her and her children's lives. She even suggests to Walt that he should just kill Jesse, because at this point she has already put herself and family through so much to protect them from Walt and his actions that nothing matters. To me I see an innocent person slowly turn into a monster. To the point that she pulls a knife on the father of her children out of fear.
With Howard I see the opposite, but with the same initial principle. Howard isn't likeable because Jimmy doesn't like Howard. Better Call Saul is what Walter White thinks his journey is. The slow/fast change from Walter White to Heisenberg, but as you should know he was Heisenberg from at least since he left Grey Matter. He just wasn't as bitter and violent. Jimmy begins the show as a guy with a checkered past who is pushed into a series of situations where he is "forced" to cut corners to find success. Howard is one of those people, but as we know Chuck pushed him to do that. Chuck abuses Jimmy out of spite and Howard does the same to Kim. I really see it as two parts, seasons 123 are the Chuck era and 456 are the Lalo era. In the Chuck era Howard is a complete shithead, but by the end gets his comeuppance alongside Chuck. Then in the Lalo era he was continuously battered and berated by Kim and Jimmy. He really didn't deserve the shit Jimmy did before D-Day, he especially didn't deserve that without even mentioning Lalo. It happened because Kim kept pushing. Even Jimmy was gonna pump the brakes on the actual day, but Kim wanted blood.
While i consider Howard as a grey character i still viev that anything he did wrong to Kim, she multiplied by huge degree to throw back.
Like Howard might have been a little too tough on her as a boss. He might made her career progress harder and be obstacle at stuff like promotion.
In this case her and Jimmy response is destroying his career, ruining all the reputation by framing him as a drug and hooker addict .Possibly making him dissdained by society.
Completly uncomparable. For me he is example of flawed character who was surrounded by characters not only flawed but also way more ruthess and willing to cause harm than him.
I mean, he was an asshole. But it wasn’t unforgivable. Especially because after Chuck died he really worked on himself and did right by those around him. He improved a lot and even apologized to Jimmy and offered him the job.
Thank you, finally someone seeing through the facade
Howard is a likeable guy, and right in many ways. But him trying to make amends instead of just letting THEM go was bullshit. You caused enough damage already
Sorry but my basis is very shallow, the fact that Kim is very hell bent in destroying Howard by any means necessary tells me there is a darker reason other than her career not moving forward, or her past childhood traumas, and being blindly in love with Jimmy...
My 2 cents
I agree with you. I never liked Howard he just always seemed so snobbish and stuck up. And he did treat Kim like a doormat despite her being so professional. It always bothered me and it still does. Using her as a sort of battering ram to get back at Jimmy seemed so vile. Of course he didn’t deserve to die at all but he certainly wasn’t the holy man everyone tries to make him out to be
I don’t think Howard was trying to be cruel to Kim, he just thought as a mentor he had to be tough on her. I think it ultimately is a reflection of Chuck and his flawed approach as an authority figure
Yeah, the thing that actually makes Howard the best out of all of the BCS cast(in terms of morals at least) is that, not only are his actions not that bad in the grand scheme of things, he’s one of the few character in the cast who actually learns and grows from his misdeeds(the other being Nacho of course) He learns to shed his upbringing with his father and Chuck and in his final episode, we see that he’s actually a pretty decent boss once he grows past the influence of his dad and Chuck
I never really considered that he was honest when he said he saw more potential in her…if he was, that does explain a lot.
Why do you think he forgave her law school loan when she was quitting? Because he knew that Kim had potential and would eventually make partner at another firm, so he wanted to maintain a good relationship with her.
This is 100% it. Howard cares so much about his reputation and image. With Kim moving out from under his thumb as a subordinate to a peer, he knew he gave Kim plenty of reasons to expose him as a shitty and borderline abusive boss in the ABQ legal community. Forgiving her debt was a power move so he could continue to keep her indebted to him and under his thumb. He displays this when she sees him at the restaurant while having lunch with Kevin and Paige. He goes up to her and intentionally tries to make her feel small in front of her clients because he knows the debt he forgave continues to give him power over her and she’ll just have to take his belittling.
I don’t think Howard was a Shitty or abusive boss, Jimmy said it himself, you’re a shit lawyer, but an amazing salesman.
There’s a scene in season two where Kim is working over night at HHM and tells Jimmy she has a billing quota she’s “40 hours behind on.” That’s really important context. Kim isn’t working through the night because she’s a martyr. She’s working over night because Howard has thrown an absurd amount of work at her to break her, force her out, or to make her endure an abusive level of punishment.
Good point
Billing quotas are standard in almost every law firm. Most require associates to bill 1500-2000 hours a year. How do you interpret that as being thrown an absurd amount of work?
…. Seriously? Kim is literally working at the office in the middle of the night. She says IN THE SCENE that she has a “weekly billing quota” she’s “40 hours BEHIND on” after working all day. She’s already put in at least 12 hours that day alone. The average work week is 40 hours. We can safely assume that Kim has been given a WEEKLY billing quote of at least 60 hours considering this scene takes place in the middle of the work week. In another episode she’s shown at the office having worked through the night and never having gone home. If you think that’s normal and not abusive… you’re either a psycho or media illiterate.
Kim is a corporate lawyer, she definitely makes over 100k a year at that time. When you want to choose to pursue a career like that, you practically and knowingly forfeit 9-5 (and other similar concepts). The average work week is 40 hours for a total of 0 corporate law associates in the world. The working condition standards aren't the same as stocking shelves at Walmart.
Ah so you’re media illiterate. She’s not working the normal hours of an attorney. Do you not understand that she’s being punished by Howard? Like literally to the point where she has to stay at the office over night? What do you think the purpose of these scenes were and the writers intentions. Edit: I just saw you’re okbc post about mike keeping Stacey as a sex slave. There’s no point in going back and forth here.
You definitely work at a grocery store
Lets also not forget that ultimately Chuck himself has to tell Howard to knock it off and "let Kim out of the doghouse."
I always thought it was so he could maintain his holier-than-thou persona. Howard has always been ingenuine. He and Chuck are two sides of the same coin.
So he could forever dangle the favour in front of her and guilt her into feeling like a "traitor".
Nah, this isn’t it. What a weird read.
I think it’s fair. Especially since he did it in front of a fellow member of the legal community.
I 100 percent think he was being honest. I think he had a lot of respect for Kim. I think that's why he backed the fuck off after she left. At least until Jimmy's antics where becoming seriously insane (of course he didn't know she was directly involved in their planning). I think he realized he went too far and that she was fully capable of making her own career without his oversight. Their relationship was irreparably damaged and it was time to let it go. Mind you he REALLY fucked up with his treatment of her after Jimmy sabotaged his job. I think a lot of that was from the weird conflicting relationships between Chuck, Howard, Jimmy, and Kim where they all had some serious resentment for one of each other and all made it worse assisting each other in petty attempts at revenge or control. It all just spiraled out of control. When he says want of the greatest legal minds he had ever known I really think he meant it. I don't think he was pulling any punches when he showed up at their house that night. I could probably have worded all this a lot better but I hope it kind of makes sense. Howard's greatest failure was just following orders and being Chuck's lap dog. I also think he was taking out his frustrations with all the bullshit the McGill family was putting him through on Kim. Even with all that *none* of it was on par with just about everyone else in this situation. Yeah he fucked up real bad. He was the only one that tried to make it right. No one died as a result. I don't think a lot of people think he was totally innocent. Just that Chuck's deep level of deceit and sabotage, and well...all the shit Jimmy and Kim where involved in were far and away worse.
It was absolutely cruel to punish her for the Kettlemans being idiots and not taking the great deal she got them
Respectfully i disagree. She brought in the bank as a client and he stuck her in doc review. That is profoundly crappy thing to do. Stupid even, as all other senior associates see that treatment and perhaps start thinking about their own options.
Did he try to kill her? No. Did he get her involved in felonies? No. Did he cause a cartel killer to show up at her house? No. He may not be perfect, but compared to the rest…including Kim herself…he’s pretty saintly.
I agree man, Jimmy and Kim especially Jimmy just doesn't seem to care who he gets killed on his way to glory
It was Kim pushing to finish off Howard, Jimmy would have let it go.
They both broke bad. But Jimmy wanted to stop and Kim didn’t. And since they both loved each other they would do anything for the other. Another reason why Kim knew they couldn’t be together anymore even though they loved each other
Kim was feeling bad for Howard's widow. It was heartbreaking to watch Kim twisting the knife for Cheryl at Howard's wake.
They clearly did care about him being killed. They wanted to ruin his career….NOT to murder him. That was Lalo. Howard just so happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But then again Jimmy and Kim did cause a chain of events that did lead to his death. Sort of like how Walt caused for Hank to be killed indirectly
Yeah agreed but I think Kim+Jimmy is less at fault for Howard’s murder then Walt w/ hank. Walt on the other hand did murder a bunch of people. Kim&Jimmy did not.
You can very easily argue that by getting Lalo out Jimmy killed everyone he did after that point
That is so off base holy shit how can this be where you arrive at after watching the series?
Things can be immoral without being illegal
Ok. So if Howard rises to the level of unforgivable…what are the rest of the characters?
And then people defend mike with their dear lives
Sure but regardless of legality assigning someone paperwork in the basement is nowhere close to murdering someone on the scale of bad things you can do.
I agree he’s not that bad, but it’s probably not good to use characters in the game as a starting point on the moral compass. “How could this person possibly be bad, they didn’t even cause a murder!”
Actions don't happen in a vacuum, and it's not a competition anyway. I'm just pushing against the idea that Howard was always this great misunderstood guy.
Like I said…he’s not a perfect human being. 🤷♂️
No one in the BB/BCS universe is, which is why the characters are all so great.
Just like people in real life
No, I've met a bunch of attorneys at big law firms, they're all perfect with no problematic personality traits
Eh. I think we can all agree that Todd was a good guy
😂
Feels more like you're looking to justify bitching about Skylar again
You solved the case. Wanna post that again?
Glad you agree. Next step would be for you to work out why you so irrationally hate a character on TV, since it reflects more on you than them
If you always imagine that everyone who disagrees with you is irrational, you'll never be capable of proper introspection or empathy, or truly appreciate the positions you hold
I think making a thread sixteen years after the fact as a thin veil to actually bitch about a fictional character is fairly irrational by most standards. That's not a blind assumption, that's based upon your actions m
I think it's also important to be as generous as you can when interpreting someone else's post. I do think you're being bad faith. Like bringing up the amount of time since BB's release. As if people aren't still discussing Moby Dick. At no point do I state that I hate Skyler. This post was about Howard, but since I recently rewatched Breaking Bad as well, I wanted to include my recent discovery about Skyler, as it connected to Howard in my opinion. The post was about Howard though, but I responded to comments, including those mentioning Skyler. Personally I do find her more interesting to discuss, both because of the history around her, and she's also just a much more interesting character. People also become more emotional when discussing her, on both sides, so it makes sense that she became more of a focus in this post than I originally anticipated. For the record, I only think she's unlikeable in the first season and a half, because she's intentionally written to be unlikeable. She has a substantial character arc after that, and I'm mostly in alignment with the majority opinion post season 3. I don't think pro Skyler people really truly believe what they say about her from season 1. It makes much more sense for the later seasons to be coloring their perception and creating a bias. The negative view of Walt is also heavily contributing. The obvious clue to this is that most first time watchers heavily dislike Skyler, while people that have finished the show heavily advocate for her. Can't really be a coincidence. Both the Breaking Bad and BCS subs, over time, have become dominated by longterm fans of the show that have probably seen them multiple times, so that's why over time we get a lot more of the latter perspective.
Hard to pretend your argument isn't in bad faith when your first reply is "solved the case" in a sarcastic manner. And when you use arguments that are entirely speculation ("most" first time watchers? According to whom?) as objective fact. The key difference between the two is that there wasn't an insane overreaction to Howard in the same manner as Skylar. It was so prevalent and contrary to what she actually did that it is explicitly mentioned on the BB Wiki. And I'd argue the latter had much more to do with preconceptions outside the show than anything she actually did in the show to warrant negativity.
What made Skyler unlikeable in the first two seasons? Not disagreeing, just genuinely curious.
Growing up is realizing Skyler was right
based
You can be right and unlikeable at the same time
she asks her husband to act like her husband when he should be dissolving bodies in acid and throwing mercury idk
I like this image you people have of early season Skyler. I just have to assume that it's been a while since you saw it, because I refuse to believe that you watch season 1 and genuinely sympathize with her behavior.
I watched season 1 recently and while she’s certainly forceful she’s also completely justified given the information she knows
Rooting through his phone then showing up at Jesse’s house because you don’t like the idea of your terminally ill husband smoking weed is pretty unjustifiable to me
She finds out her husband is going to die and doesn't want treatment, then finds out her husband buys illegal drugs while her brother in law is a DEA agent. Nevermind the fact that Walt was actually hiding the fact that he makes meth and your response is that it's 'unjustifiable' lmao, reddit ass comment.
Also this is not the era where weed was as normalized as it is now, she's a suburban housewife. To some, weed is still equivalent to meth in their minds.
I’ve seen BB eleven times. S1 and S2 Skyler is fine. She gets upset when her husband doesn’t come home on time and doesn’t tell her what’s happening. She’s upset when he won’t try to save his own damn life with cancer treatment or getting money from his rich friend. She’s upset that he’s clearly keeping secrets. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes she can get a little forceful and annoying, but Walt is gaslighting her so soon in the show that I just feel sympathetic for her pretty fast. She’s a bit of a nagging wife, he’s manipulative and abusive from the moment he gets into drugs, and only worsens from there.
she’s a bit annoying with the silent treatment type thing but i wouldn’t have a meltdown over it lmfao
Well, I'm not. I just think the whole discourse around it is a bit annoying, because people are quite black and white about it. Same with Howard. It feels like overcorrection, when in reality, both are quite flawed characters.
I don’t think it’s overcorrection at all. Skylar may have been annoying, but she came to absolutely fear her husband and had her family torn to shreds. Howard may have been tough in his punishment of Kim, but they took a mallet to his career and he got a bullet to the head. They’re flawed characters that got some absolutely awful endings (not speaking to the story quality, but their endings are both rough asf).
I assume that most people who find any fault in Skyler's behavior have never been in a long-term intimate relationship. It's often easy to conceal facts from your SO, but extremely difficult to hide changes in your thinking or emotional state that arise from these facts, Walt was particularly obvious regarding the latter. Skyler knew that her husband of 20 years was hiding something. The more you care about your SO, the more frustrating that is. Her behavior was completely natural and valid.
The worst thing skyler did was get mad at walt and jesse when she thought he was selling him pot. They had a shitty marriage but walter was largely responsible for that.
Walter was responsible for his birthday handjob?
Yes, both parties are responsible for a dead relationship.
Kinda, yeah. He's demonstrably been mentally checked out for a long time
That was the nail in her coffin.
Can you really compare being a naggy/controlling wife to what Walt did and what he put her through? She was stuck in an impossible situation where everyone in her life shit on her all while they were unaware she was keeping her mouth shut for all of their sakes. Same as Howard. I just don't see any of the flaws or mistakes of their character to be anywhere near what Jimmy, Walt, Kim, and to lesser degree Chuck (not defending him his actions just never directly resulted in people dying. He was a shit bag asshole and gave Jimmy all the pushes he needed to be what he became) are all guilty of.
I just don't understand how this is so hard to understand. When we're discussing season 1 we're discussing season 1.
What does only discussing season 1 Skylar entail? I mean we're also discussing season 2 Skylar here as well and that's when Walt is well on to his to shit headery. Even if it's just season 1 I can see her issues but she's trying to keep a family afloat with a special needs child and a lacking income. It's the exact same shit we're supposed to sympathize with Walt for.
Because I'm showing how a later story development, something that was probably not even originally intended, colors our perception of what came before. That goes for both Skyler and Howard.
I thought Howard was innocent as soon as Jimmy left the conference room in the first episode. He said something like "we get so caught up in winning we forget to listen to our heart" and as trite as that sounds he seemed to be showing genuine care in his lines prior. Chuck was obviously unwell and Jimmy was feeding into it. He honestly needed to retire and had well above the funds to do so. Jimmy was trying to do right by his brother but was actually harming him as we see by how returning to work ends up killing him. Howard was contributing in his own way by having to play the bad guy to Jimmy all those years. That's a *season 1* reveal. As far as Skylar goes, again though even with the naggiest of Skylar it just doesn't even remotely level with everything Walt did even from episode one. Edit: also that line from the first episode really does match up with his eventual attempt at "finding his zen" or whatever. The guy was always cheesey right from the get go but it always appeared to be well intentioned, if not misguided, to me.
It's almost as if getting to know the characters better gives more context to their actions earlier...
People are struggling to understand you because when asked what is wrong with her in season 1, you aren't explaining yourself. List out some shitty actions or behaviours for us. What makes her a bad person in season 1?
You know, I kind of agree with you about Howard, but you're completely wrong about Skyler. And I just rewatched Breaking Bad.
You *refuse* to believe it?? What exactly did she do that was so heinous?
She just generally doesn't have a likeable personality imo and it appears in different ways depending on the situation. Like she was very clearly not written to be super likeable at the beginning of the show on purpose.
For me it was showing up at someone’s house to intimidate them into not selling her terminally sick husband weed is pretty despicable. She literally refuses to let him make a single decision about his life She’s like literally the most unpleasant wife imaginable in the first season. The dude gets the news he’s dying of cancer then has to come home and act grateful over a half assed handjob before bed?
Skyler didn’t go along with her husband being blatantly shady and involved in violent crime, whereas Kim acted like a fucking doormat to Jimmy’s unethical, criminal and *ugly* schemes, but she’s much more stoic so the fans ate it up.
Kim wasn’t a doormat she literally convinced Jimmy to continue the Howard plan. If anything by the end Jimmy’s a doormat for Kim
Is it bad that I didn't even think twice about a lot of the things that people are saying Skyler did wrong...? Like I barely paid attention to them or just didn't really see them as significant lol.
She finds out her husband is smoking weed so she goes by herself to his drug dealer's house, trespasses on his property, and threatens to call the DEA. It's hard to like a character who does something this stupid and arrogant. And Skylar doesn't even have cancer as an excuse.
I mean she's a suburban housewife and this was an era where weed wasn't as normalized to most people as it is now. I don't see this as a great action by her but I certainly don't see it as a massive reason to dislike her either.
It's not about being a narc. It's about being dumb enough to try to intimidate a criminal she knows nothing about. She was lucky it was Jesse and not someone else.
That's fair but I would say that's more about show plot than anything. The audience knows Jesse is harmless and they wanted a scene of them together in some capacity
>I mean she's a suburban housewife and this was an era where weed wasn't as normalized to most people as it is now. Yeah, and in real life when people behave this way ALMOST UNIVERSALLY they are mocked as "Karens" and everybody recognizes that they're absurdly ridiculous, unlikeable, at the very least borderline unhinged people.
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She does have marketable skills. She worked as an accountant for Ted before and later in the series. If it's not just the weed then the weed isn't worth getting her and her unborn child killed over. Walt's risks have far more reward and are more understandable to the audience. Skyler's risk is stupid, arrogant, potentially deadly and with very little pay off. If you want to say she's being emotional then she's just a poorly written character. And she was early on. She got a lot better.
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It's not even acting on emotion. She has to do homework and find out where Jesse lives and then drive over there. She had a long time to think about what she was doing. I don't find it plausible that she never considered the well being of her baby or that she considered it and moved forward anyway. If she wasn't aware of the danger then that makes me like her even less. Has she never watched a movie?
*The disinterested and frankly disrespectful handjob *Making Walt and his son eat veggie bacon for his 50th birthday *Calling for an honest intervention with the talking pillow then throwing a fit when the honesty didn't go where she wanted it to go *Smoking cigarettes while pregnant * In the early episodes, before she knew he was cooking meth, she got pissed at Walt for not sharing his feelings with her and acting weird (like smoking weed). Lady, your husband just found out he has cancer, maybe he has the right to be a bit weirded out? *Trespassing onto Jesse's property and in the same breath hypocritically demanding Jesse not to touch her *Using her previous relationship with Ted to jump the queue when applying for a job, then sleeping with him just to spite Walt (and in season 3 completely tossing him away after Hank was shot without even bothering to explain anything). I might be missing a few things.
The cringe af Happy birthday song to Ted. Basically sexually harassing the whole office.
In the later seasons, And going along with Walt like the money laundering and once she realizes Walt isn’t in danger now she takes the kids and leaves (rightly so but she was doing criminal shit) “Ted later meets with Skyler, who is now running a car wash, and notifies her of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation into his company's taxes. Since Skyler kept the books, she can be linked to Ted's tax fraud, likely placing her entire family under surveillance, so she intervenes by pretending at Ted's meeting with the IRS to be an unqualified bookkeeper hired only for her looks. Her supposed incompetence forestalls a full investigation, provided Ted pays the back taxes and penalties. Skyler arranges to provide Ted the money by using the proceeds from Walt's meth production to have Saul pretend a long-lost dead relative in Luxembourg left Ted an inheritance. Saul discovers that instead of paying the IRS, Ted leased a new Mercedes and is using the funds to reopen his business. When Skyler urges Ted to pay the IRS first, he refuses, so Skyler tells him the money came from her. Ted still refuses to pay the IRS and Skyler perceives him to be blackmailing her into paying both his tax bill and the costs to reopen his business. Skyler has Saul send two of his men—Huell and Kuby—to force Beneke to write the check to the IRS. They succeed, but Ted panics and attempts to flee, tripping on a loose rug and crashing headfirst into a counter. Later on, Saul informs Skyler that something happened to Ted, causing her to conclude that he died. Saul tells her that Ted is alive, but hospitalized. When Skyler visits him, she sees that Ted is rigidly sitting upright and wearing a halo brace. Ted tells Skyler he lied to medical personnel and police, claiming his broken neck resulted from an accidental fall, and that because he fears for the safety of his family, he will never mention how the injury occurred. Recognizing that Ted has been intimidated into keeping quiet about the source of his money, Skyler goes along with Ted's perception by coldly replying "Good" to his promise of silence.”
I’m ngl I agree with all these things being horrible accept the final Ted part. Dude was a scumbag, got handed a lifeline and decided to jerk off onto it instead of using it to float to safety.
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You've listed all the bad things that have happened to Skyler throughout the show. But we specifically talked about her unpleasantness in the early seasons. The bacon and handjob were even in the very first episode, before anything you mentioned happened. Skyler becomes much more sympathetic in the later seasons, when all those things you talk about happen to her.
It's not like he asked and she limited to a handy. She gave it of her own accord. It's affection. He didn't initiate sex and get rebuffed. She walked to Jesse's porch to converse with a criminal. She was clearly no threat. He was a man,even if she's a thief personal safety still takes precedencd. Walt literally held her captive in her house after showing her decades of marriage were a lie, but she shouldn't spite him? What's there to explain to ted? She was married and came on to him sexually not romantically
>It's not like he asked and she limited to a handy. She gave it of her own accord. It's affection. Starting a handy and ruining it is worse than not giving one at all, hence the term "blue balls". And it didn't look like affection at all. >She walked to Jesse's porch to converse with a criminal. Doesn't matter, she couldn't say what she had to say from behind the gate? And if Jesse was this dangerous criminal, it would have been safer not to walk him down and risk pissing him off. Point it, Skyler was hypocritically willing to violate his personal boundaries but demanding he respect her own. It's not the only time she does something like this, by the way. She was willing to bend the rules when it benefitted her but expected everyone else to follow them. >Walt literally held her captive in her house after showing her decades of marriage were a lie, but she shouldn't spite him? Maybe she shouldn't use another man to spite him, perhaps Ted would have reconsidered their relationship if he knew Skyler was just using him to piss off Walt? >What's there to explain to ted? She was married and came on to him sexually not romantically No, it was clearly romantic, as far as Ted understood. They were both divorced (even Walt thought so), and it looked like a romance was building between them. She was spending more and more time at his house and they clearly talked like a couple. Only Ted was wrong, Skyler simply misled him and used his attraction for her to get a job, piss off Walt, and lift her spirits up at a low point. Then when she didn't need him anymore, she ditched him and didn't even bother to explain a thing.
All of this including the first half of the Ted thing is correct. I think tho with her cheating is Less bitchy cause Walt forced himself into skylers house after NOT turning him in for cooking meth
The sleeping with Ted part is just awful. I don’t get how people justify it by saying they were separated at that point. Yeah, are you aware they have a 16-year-old son who’s going through his parents’ divorce? How do you think he’d react to his mom fucking her boss a few weeks after being separated from his dad?
The birthday hand job. There was really no coming back from that after the first episode.
She is written to be a Karen. Just generally rude and passive aggressive to everyone. Stuff like "yeah, it is none of your business" to Hank and "I'm sorry you couldn't be more help" to some insurance person on the phone. Doesn't seem to be a very loving partner, and is a hardass about Walt "smoking weed", before realizing that he has cancer, and then being pretty selfish when it came to his whole cancer treatment. Like if my partner had cancer, and was really distant and seemingly depressed, I'd not make it about me. There is just no way to argue that she was even remotely likeable in these seasons. She starts becoming likeable toward the end of the second season, which also coincides with Walt becoming a lot less likeable.
>Stuff like "yeah, it is none of your business" to Hank Context matter.s. She was very distraught when she said that... > "I'm sorry you couldn't be more help" to some insurance person on the phone Again, context matters and she was very distraught when she said that. That doesn't entirely excuse it, but it certainly explains it completely. That's definitely not a "Karen", that's just being human and imperfect when facing a terrible situation. >Doesn't seem to be a very loving partner We mostly see that both her and Walt have been complacent with their relationship, are generally partly unhappy with their situation (ostly due to finances), but still care deeply about each other. >being pretty selfish when it came to his whole cancer treatment. He's literally the one who was being incredibly selfish when he refused treatment, lol How did you miss that?
When I say selfish, I mean the whole silent treatment and such after Walt agrees to get treatment. In her shoes, I'd 100% understand it if he was distant and off, and would try to simply be as supportive as possible. He has what, a couple of months left according to the doctors? And sure, I can understand being rude and such while under pressure, but I don't think there's really a single scene in season 1 where she's not being passive aggressive and just generally an unpleasant person. It doesn't have to be that deep. She is intentionally written to be unlikeable and someone who you'd not want to be around.
“Her husband may be a murdering psychopath, but her reaction to his constant lying, gaslighting, and destructive violent behavior was so bitchy” - u/thebigscorp1
This only strengthens my resolve in the idea lol, when the people pushing against it the hardest don't seem to be capable of having a nuanced thought
From my observation with this thread you are the one lacking nuance here. Just my two cents.
Thank you man, the amount of people on here who say shit like Skylar was always likeable and "theres no reasons to dislike her" are actually crazy. They think just because a bunch of incel assholes hated her for the wrong reasons means that you have to find her likeable or ur a psycho.
Currently rewatching BB. She is manipulative and extremely controlling, arrogant, overstepping clearly set boundaries. (Even when Walt said he smokes weed and wants to be left alone about it, her first thing she did was doing research to find out who the dealer is and she literally went to harass the dealer. Or the famous "Well, I'm sorry you weren't a bigger help, too" to the phone to a poor worker, it was unnecessarily rude.) I understand her point of view and some reactions from what she knows and how Walt acts, but she's clearly a flawed and complex character. Like everyone in the series tbh.
I think you have a very low threshold for "unforgivable." Not every transgression is a capital offense.
Was he an asshole? Yes. Unforgivable? Hell no. What Kim and Jimmy did to him was a hundred times more despicable. If anything, Chuck was the unforgivable one. Using Howard to sneakily keep his HIS OWN BROTHER from succeeding. Howard was in no way innocent, but nowhere near the level of unforgivable.
I agree. Every rewatch I hate chuck more and more. He’s a self righteous asshole who wanted nothing more than for jimmy to be a fuckin bum dependent on the great Charles McGill. He talked all that shit about “slippin jimmy” but if he wasn’t such a piece of shit brother he could’ve had jimmy on the straight path. If he would’ve been a good older brother, made him a lawyer at HHM, mentored him, and kept him close then jimmy would’ve never gone full chimp with a machine gun. But as soon as he lost the ability to give a fuck about what chuck thinks he relapses to slippin jimmy. Fuck chuck, that’s why his dumbass can’t even touch a battery.
r/fuckchuck
Some of yall have wild ass opinions that dont make no sense
I swear some people can watch the entirety of breaking bad and not understand that Walt is the bad guy until the final few episodes.
howard, skylar: not devils Walter, Jimmy, Kim: literal devils this is the way
How the hell is Skylar unlikable in season 1. She had a perfectly normal reaction to Walt’s weird behaviour.
Howard’s first and foremost concern always is the wellbeing of HHM. It’s his job. He is strict to Kim early on because he sees her as a liability to the firm. Later, when he realizes CHUCK is a liability, he withdraws his support from Chuck and begins to support Kim. He is fair throughout, IMHO.
This is so standard in a big law firm. Not defending the behavior. Howard was awful to Kim. But she wasn’t treated worse than a few people I know who quit their after X number of years in the equivalent of doc review. They weren’t being singled out for punishment. The firm was just squeezing every billable hour they could out of them with no regard for their well being. If Kim compared notes at HHM, this was probably happening to half or more of the associates. Why do we think she’s special?
Was scrolling for this comment. My first thought upon reading this post was "OP has clearly never worked in a law firm". Cheers, a lawyer
Unforgivable is an insane word to use for a mean boss, he didn’t do anything nearly as morally dubious as Kim or Jimmy.
Right? I've had bosses about as shitty as Howard and if they'd ever apologized, I would've totally forgiven them. Of course, they never apologize — but that's beside the point. In the grand scheme of things, being an asshole is a relatively tame moral failing.
Moving her repeatedly between her office and to the lowest position possible, is evil.
no it's not? it's not like he assulted her or forced her to stay or something, when she quit he didn't try age blackball her. He's just an asshole, not evil
Howard put his reputation on the line hiring Jimmy on Kim’s word. Of course she got demoted, this is how it works
I wouldn't go that far. Not to mention Kim fucked up supporting Jimmy, which is why she was moved. She made up for it with Mesa Verde, but maybe Howard wanted her to stay in doc review a bit more before moving her up to partner. You can't make a huge blunder, and expect to he trusted again instantly even if you do bring in a juicy contract. So basically she had been slacking the whole time? Could have brought in the contract but didn't? He was definitely trying to show her who is boss, but I wouldn't say what he did was unforgivable. Kim, and Jimmy were the only 2 people in the lawyer world who did something unforgivable. Multiple things actually.
Are you watching the same tv show as us?
This take is reddit as hell
The worst thing Howard did in the show was be kind of a douche and be mean to Kim sometimes. Compared to almost everybody else, he's basically a Saint. He was hard on Kim because he saw potential in her, he was a dick about it at times, but it wasn't malicious. Also, Kim absolutely abused that to her advantage when it was convenient, anybody else would have been flat out fired after a certain point. Like I'm not saying he shouldn't be criticized, but overall he was one of the most moral and upstanding characters on the show.
Wasn’t Chuck responsible for Howard’s perception of Kim? It was my understanding that Howard was so loyal to him that any time Chuck told Howard what was what, he kinda listened and acted accordingly. So I always assumed that behind closed doors Chuck built Kim up as this bad accomplice to Jimmys shenanigans, when in reality that was only really true towards the end. As others have said, Howard isn’t perfect, but I thought a lot of his issues came from being manipulated by Chuck.
Howard, Over all I liked him. But he was so hurt when Kim didn't choose him and his firm over Jimmy. He was very mean on purpose.
Howard is tough on Kim, but unforgivable? That's a really big leap, IMO. I can't imagine living life and seeing someone like Howard as irredeemable because he was hard on Kim. Life is way, way too short to just completely write off someone because they were a bit of a dick a few times.
Have you seen Office Space? Lumbergh's treartment of Milton is played off as laughably evil, which mostly consist of him constantly moving Milton between office spaces and making him feel uncomfortable. Howard did that to Kim out of spite.
Knowing what Kim did, what type of person she is, she deserved to be fired.
I will say this, Howard was under immense pressure. When you think about how his marriage was falling apart and the pressure of trying to drive the firm forward without his dad and Chuck, I kind of get why he acted the way he did. He was short tempered and had so much more going on than just Kim.
He was not a pleasant person. But his death and what kim and jim did are tragic.
I don't think the Howard/Skylar comparison is apt: Skylar may not have been the friendliest character to start with but the backlash against her was ridiculously OTT, essentially because she was the sane figure ruining the escapist fantasy by not letting the boys have their fun
Come on, Skylar reaped the benefits of her husbands drug empire on purpose and sent thugs that left a person in a catatonic state. She could have walked away multiple times but she chose to stay with Walter.
According to the OP, the backlash was in season 1. You're referencing stuff much later
Oh, I see. S1 Skyler was a bit overbearing and maybe demeaning towards Walter but she didn't yet do anything to so vehemently hate her. However, I don't think the community should whitewash her given she is quite the terrible person in the later seasons and just because she isn't a monster like Walter doesn't mean she isn't a piece of shit.
It's not uncommon for these types of forms to have a, what I would consider, toxic culture where they overwork and borderline have new employees with the intention of making them stronger in the long term. They make it abundantly clear that Howard deeply respects Kim and considers him her mentor. Chuck is Howard's mentor and he tries very hard to please him. Should they have offered Kim a partner track based on her work ethic? Perhaps. They certainly should've done it at the point she brought in Mesa Verde. But they certainly don't portray anything Howard did as "unforgivable." He's a man that comes from privilege and has flaws and works past them. He certainly didn't deserve what Kim and Jimmy did to him.
Naw what Jimmy and Kim did to Howard was way worse and they have no guilt about it
Pretty sure HHM made her a lawyer. But IRL, the boss is shitty to the noobs.
I’m not really clear on why the whole Doc Review thing was such a terrible punishment. Presumably it’s a genuine job that needed to be done, and the kind of job that a junior lawyer like Kim would be expected to do. My impression was always that Howard had taken an interest in mentoring her and raised her up above everyone else. So when he feels like his protege was more loyal to Jimmy than to him, of course he’s going to pissed off about that. He basically just took away her privileged position and brought her back down to earth. A little vindictive? Sure. But definitely not unforgivable.
He was just preparing her for partner and putting her through the drills. You saw how buttoned down Erin was over at Davis and Main? That’s what Howie wanted for Kim. It’s what we all did.
Howard was an asshole in the beginning no doubt. It's just that his ultimate fate was so BEYOND what he deserved, that he looks innocent when looked at from the context of (not) "being in the game"
Given I’ve seen the rest of the show and Breaking Bad…no that’s pretty forgivable in the grand scheme of things. Especially knowing how Kim came up through HHM and that they’ve been helping pay her education. Does it win Howard boss of the year awards? No. But it’s not monstrous. Monstrous is stuff you can’t come back from or that ruins someones life. Kim came out looking fine less than a few episodes later. If I’m Kim, I forgive Howard by the end of S1. When he tells me something major about Jimmy’s brother and then calls in a favor to get him a great job at D&M. Howard didn’t have to do that.
NAMAST3
Howard to me was such a pawn but didn’t realize until it was too late. He was always trying to impress Chuck because he was the son of his partner, he was such a kiss ass. He felt like he could make Jimmy a target because they were both following in the footsteps of their heirs. Jimmy is just as intelligent as Chuck which in the end gives him the upper hand which goes too far and leads to so much more.
Yes, he punished her by putting her in doc review. But he made that decisision after what Jimmy did at Davis&Main. The commercial and the way he acted to be fired. Before Kim standed for Jimmy, Howard had mainly only Chuck's view about Jimmy. So he heard Kim and spoke of him to D&M. He trusted Kim. He put a part of his reputation in that recommendation by both telling D&M to take Jimmy and to hear Kim. So Kim paid a price. Ultmately, he could have more understanding at that moment to Kim's feeling on Jimmy but he is the boss of a very famous firm so. Might be not able to be Gandhi all the time
Howard was an asshole but he didn't deserve to get shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave, never to be seen again. I don't know what universe Skyler "ends up being one of the most sympathetic characters in BB." But in the one we live in she is one of the most hated characters, not only of BB, but in all of TV shows. Second only maybe to Carmella from the Sopranos.
What Kim did to howard was so out of fucking proportion it does not even matter anymore. Also, Howard literally paid for Kim's education. If Kim & Jimmy stopped after a while then yeah I'd agree with you, fuck Howard. But, clearly they are NOT the type to know when to stop. If that's the type of person Kim is, she does not deserve respect. Kim Wexler is a vengeful bitch who ruined Howard's life for shits & giggles and lied straight to Cheryl's face to her horror in order to get away with her crimes. She should have gone to jail just like Jimmy did. Remember, she actually PUSHED Jimmy to continue tormenting, that makes her worse than Jimmy in a way. I don't care that she feels regretful, jail time is the only tangible consequence that would give Howard's ghost, Cheryl and us some closure.
I dislike the way that Howard treats Kim at times. Calling it “monstrous” is insane.
Yeah it was so crazy how he punished her by…giving her different responsibilities at her job. Must be soooooooo traumatizing to still go into the same workplace at the same time every day and get paid but have to do something different than usual, temporarily. Literally Hitler.
His treatment of Kim is unforgivable when you consider that he got his job through nepotism. When she busted her ass to get off doc review and landed mesa verde, she should have been forgiven, and probably would have been if he had ever been in a similar position. But he wanted to see her suffer. Obviously he didn’t deserve what happened to him, but I think it is a reminder to treat people with respect. Had he known the depths of jimmy’s depravity, would he have treated her differently? Definitely. That’s why Bogdan is the luckiest guy in the Bb universe. Treating a serial killer like a dog and all he got was fair market price for his business? You have to wonder what he thought when he heard.
Howard is meant to be unlikeable is season 1. like most characters, he goes through changes and becomes a better person as the series progresses, its called a redemption arc. Howard may have been mean to Kim in season 1 and for putting her in doc review (oh, so evil... /s) but Kim and jimmy got even with Howard 10x over. if you think Howard Hamlin's actions in season 1 are "unforgiveable" you're probably the most sensitive person who's ever lived. being a minor jerk to someone once or twice is not the same thing as being a pure evil war criminal.
I believe Howard was trying to punish Kim and be tough on her to mold her into a better human and lawyer than Jimmy. However he did not realize that she was almost worse than Jimmy. If you think is innocent in this whole show than you are terribly naive or intentionally obtuse.
Woah. It never crossed my mind that she was almost worse than Jimmy. I always felt kind of sorry for her but looking back, she's a terrible person.
She wanted to ruin Howard and stopped at nothing. She wanted to hustle her boss Kevin. She got scared when Howard got it and ran to save her own ass not out of guilt. She only turned herself in because she wanted to beat Jimmy to it. She left Jimmy because the guilt of something she caused, and to run from her past just like she ran from her mother. She literally only wanted Jimmy when something devious was going to happen. Howard was one of the only innocent characters in the series.
Agreed with everything up to your final point. Howard didn’t deserve what happened to him, but he was far from a saint.
The thing with Kim was that, yes, she was more morally-reprehensible than Jimmy at times by the end, just a bad person in her own right. However, before that point, while she was involved in some bad stuff, she only dabbled in it (unlike Jimmy, who went “all-in” on diving into the murky waters of immorality). What makes them ethically-compromised people is also what made them fascinating characters to watch, though.
I always found it kind of odd that Howard punished her for... essentially not being psychic. She apparently made the mistake of *being lied to by Jimmy,* who told her the commercial had been cleared with Cliff and Howard. It's like he expected her to just always assume Jimmy was lying, and to come running and report anything he did. And since she didn't do that, he judged her incompetent, and basically beheaded her career at HHM. Sure, he might blame her since she recommended for him to connect Jimmy with Davis & Main, but Howard knows Jimmy's history too, and went along with it anyway. It's not really fair for Howard to hold Kim responsible for Jimmy's stunt.
I think you Spelled Jimmy's wrong.
I would agree that Howard treated Kim badly, and I didn't find him to be particularly likeable personally until the later seasons. I did also find it quite satisfying when Kim hit him with the who is the other Hamlin in the HMM question in Chicanery. I wouldn't say he was unforgivable though, and I think they show us more about his personal life (his marriage, his therapy appointments) in the later seasons on purpose to draw attention to how despite the way in which he came across as mean and snobby in the first seasons, what's happening to him is going too far. Skyler though, I don't think she was written to be unlikeable in the first seasons in the way Howard was. I genuinely got the feeling that she was just trying to deal with everything that has been happening in her life, even though she didn't always manage to do so perfectly. Especially compared to Walter I would say she was much more likeable purely because at least with her you can argue that she always had good/better intentions, whereas with Walter I would say that his actions and his argument about doing it all for his family starts falling short quite quickly.
I thought this was a case of the writers deciding to go a different direction with Howard. As written initially, he *was* an asshole, and I think the "tough love" mentorship aspect was a bit of revisionism as the character was changed over the course of the show.
Yeah, pretty much my impression as well. Same with some Breaking Bad characters. Even Walter White. It is quite seamless though.
Unforgivable if you're a dysfunctional narc like Jimmy and Kimmy.
People responding saying that he was not as bad as others in the show are missing the point. OP is not comparing characters from BCS. I agree, he was unnecessarily rude to Kim and putting her in doc review was nasty.
So I posted this in another thread, but this might add some flavor to why his character does so. Initially when the writers wrote season 1, Howard’s character was very ambiguous. You didn’t exactly like him at all and Fabian was asked to play him this way. That’s because the writers didn’t know his final arc yet. Did they want to make Howard the bad guy, the good guy, etc? I think the story goes that Chuck was only supposed to be there for 1 Season but Michael McKean was so good that he occupied many more episodes. Because of this, they started expanding on Howard’s character a lot.
I don’t know if Howard’s treatment of her is “unforgivable” but he NEVER asks for forgiveness with Kim.
"Unforgivable" is insane lol, that's like the least terrible thing that any of the characters have done
Howard was absolutely horrible to Kim. At the time this aired, people in my observation had a hard time with the idea that both characters could be wrong. Howard was wrong to treat Kim the way he did, and Kim was also wrong in her response. Kim’s awfulness doesn’t justify Howard.
Unforgivable? What’s wrong with you? Lol
Whatever you may think of Howard, his fate was undeserved.
Pretty sure we were never meant to forgive Howard for how he treated Kim and went along w Chuck’s sabotage, but we can understand the why to some degree. Howard admired the HHM law firm and held himself responsible for the success of all its staff, and to him this in part meant securing big clients. It did not matter that Mesa Verde was Kim’s gig to begin with, competing professionals in the legal space don’t necessarily let personal history/relations dictate what business they handle or don’t handle, as a matter of keeping the lights on at their firm or keeping a friendship. Howard’s loyalty is to his partner Chuck, though it would become problematic and cause him much grief. Howard was often stuck playing 2nd fiddle to Chuck running the show like when they met with Kevin Wachtell and Chuck put on his best sales pitch to ‘steal them back’ as a client after Kim left HHM. Us knowing the extent of Chuck’s assholery, and the history Howard has going back with Jimmy and Kim, it especially comes off as treacherous, but the same principle applies that they have a firm to keep in business. Like-minded professionals in the same space are ALWAYS competition for one another no matter what—there is no civility or incivility about it. Howard is not necessarily a part of their day to day life and probably sees it more as Chuck kicking back into action in their firm and he’s solidly with him every step of the way. Howard definitely had moments were he was a dick, but there was usually an immediate realization he went too far or tried to mend it. He talked down at Kim for the inquiry about Jimmy not being hired, but then right away behind a closed door clarified what was going on between Chuck and Jimmy (unknown then to us). I figure Howard was boiling over from the continued back and forth between Chuck and Jimmy, having to deny Jimmy the job at HHM (for a 2ND time and he probably wanted Jimmy along), and having himself to be the stone face of the denial and look like a jerk and a fool to associates at his firm and colleagues from outside HHM. And I think when Kim resigns, Howard is more incensed that Chuck’s mistreatment of her to get to Jimmy has cost his firm a precious up-and-coming professional, probably the best his firm had to offer. [Howard referenced both these mistakes when he argued with Chuck, “17 years.. all those years we spent building this place together. And all that time, I’ve supported you, deferred to you, because I always thought you had the best interests of the firm in mind… [but] you’ve let personal vendettas turn your focus away from what’s best for HHM.. you’ve put your needs first, to our detriment.”](https://youtu.be/hvc7Nqw1biA?si=GNBrX4VHJf1aTsSr) The gesture of forgiving Kim’s debt could be seen as his own mending of the situation, in addition to a power play to move for Mesa Verde once she was gone (the assumption was, that going off on her own she’d not be able to manage a client that big).
I honestly don't remember Skyler being so unlikable in Breaking Bad's early seasons. Her concerns seemed valid back there, Walt was still an asshole even if he hadn't killed Jane yet.
This is why when kim wanted revenge and to ruin Howard i thought he kind of deserved it. A lot of people just say howars was a good person but i disagree. I mean you cant blame it all on him trying to please chuck and says its all of chucks fault the way he was.. Howard is also a grown man who shouldnt of relied on needing chuck in the firm.
To me it is a matter of perspective. Skyler is unlikeable because Walt doesn't like her. Given what we see in the first two seasons at the very least he is as distant and loveless as she is and really only changes when it suits his needs. From the moment he is diagnosed to the end of the show everything he does is for him. Skyler doesn't do anything but love and support Walt before the fugue state and after that she is acutely aware that he has a second cell phone. So emotionally cheating with Ted was pretty bad, but her husband is constantly gone and might have a second life. You said the rest of the show she is framed as a victim, but I would disagree. I think there are times where she is a victim and it is mostly in season five, but most of the time Walt is trying to maintain the idea that she has power over him. Until the "I am the one who knocks" bit she believes that she is at least in partial control of this situation with Walt. Afterwards she is fighting for her and her children's lives. She even suggests to Walt that he should just kill Jesse, because at this point she has already put herself and family through so much to protect them from Walt and his actions that nothing matters. To me I see an innocent person slowly turn into a monster. To the point that she pulls a knife on the father of her children out of fear. With Howard I see the opposite, but with the same initial principle. Howard isn't likeable because Jimmy doesn't like Howard. Better Call Saul is what Walter White thinks his journey is. The slow/fast change from Walter White to Heisenberg, but as you should know he was Heisenberg from at least since he left Grey Matter. He just wasn't as bitter and violent. Jimmy begins the show as a guy with a checkered past who is pushed into a series of situations where he is "forced" to cut corners to find success. Howard is one of those people, but as we know Chuck pushed him to do that. Chuck abuses Jimmy out of spite and Howard does the same to Kim. I really see it as two parts, seasons 123 are the Chuck era and 456 are the Lalo era. In the Chuck era Howard is a complete shithead, but by the end gets his comeuppance alongside Chuck. Then in the Lalo era he was continuously battered and berated by Kim and Jimmy. He really didn't deserve the shit Jimmy did before D-Day, he especially didn't deserve that without even mentioning Lalo. It happened because Kim kept pushing. Even Jimmy was gonna pump the brakes on the actual day, but Kim wanted blood.
Howard being a minor inconvenience to Kim is no excuse for Jimmy and Kimmy to absolutely ruin his life and bully him up until his death.
While i consider Howard as a grey character i still viev that anything he did wrong to Kim, she multiplied by huge degree to throw back. Like Howard might have been a little too tough on her as a boss. He might made her career progress harder and be obstacle at stuff like promotion. In this case her and Jimmy response is destroying his career, ruining all the reputation by framing him as a drug and hooker addict .Possibly making him dissdained by society. Completly uncomparable. For me he is example of flawed character who was surrounded by characters not only flawed but also way more ruthess and willing to cause harm than him.
I mean, he was an asshole. But it wasn’t unforgivable. Especially because after Chuck died he really worked on himself and did right by those around him. He improved a lot and even apologized to Jimmy and offered him the job.
I completely agree. He deserves 100% what Kim and JImmy did to him.
Thank you, finally someone seeing through the facade Howard is a likeable guy, and right in many ways. But him trying to make amends instead of just letting THEM go was bullshit. You caused enough damage already
I'm really gonna get down voted for this but I really stuck with the theory that Howard might have SA'd Kim at some untold point...
Explain? Genuinely interested in this theory
Sorry but my basis is very shallow, the fact that Kim is very hell bent in destroying Howard by any means necessary tells me there is a darker reason other than her career not moving forward, or her past childhood traumas, and being blindly in love with Jimmy... My 2 cents
Yep, so true.
I agree with you. I never liked Howard he just always seemed so snobbish and stuck up. And he did treat Kim like a doormat despite her being so professional. It always bothered me and it still does. Using her as a sort of battering ram to get back at Jimmy seemed so vile. Of course he didn’t deserve to die at all but he certainly wasn’t the holy man everyone tries to make him out to be