Better Call Saul

I finished watching the first season of the American television drama series Better Call Saul. Better Call Saul is a spin-off from the popular television series Breaking Bad. I really enjoyed watching the Breaking Bad series, and was quite keen about the spin-off when I first heard about it being in the making. It features Saul Goodman as the protagonist. Saul was the infamous lawyer in Breaking Bad who aided the main characters there, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in their drug-related business. The name of the show takes after the iconic line used by the titular character, Saul Goodman, in his outlandish advertisements promoting his service as a lawyer. The show is a prequel to the Breaking Bad series, and portrays Saul Goodman in his early career life. Back then, he was known by his real name, Jimmy McGill. Before continuing, I must warn readers of spoilers in my write-up.

Prior to being a lawyer, Jimmy was a professional conman, who together with his friend and partner-in-crime, pulled numerous scams over greedy and unsuspecting victims. He was given the nickname Slippin’ Jimmy for his unctuous ways. When he got into trouble with the law later on for some misdemeanor against an influential person who used his connections to get the public prosecutor to press harsh charges against him, Jimmy promised his older brother Chuck, who was a well-respected lawyer, to give up his illicit ways if Chuck would defend him from those charges. Subsequently, after being acquitted by having those charges dropped, he started working in the mailroom in the big law firm which his older brother was a named partner in. He subsequently got a law degree through an online course, and proceeded to his career as a lawyer.

The purpose of the series is supposedly to show how Jimmy McGill began from the ‘little fish’ he was to become the ‘big shark’ Saul Goodman he was in the Breaking Bad Series. From my impression of Jimmy McGill so far in season one, he seems to be a pretty likable person as a deeply flawed man who retains within him some level of conscience. Even though he succumbed to the temptations of choosing the wrong ways at times, he would recant of his wrong actions subsequently and speak about ‘doing the right thing’. He even exhibited virtues at times such as courage and magnanimity when trying to obtain a lighter punishment for his accomplices who had ratted on him to the hot-headed gang boss Tuco Salamanca. And when he ventured to elder law later on in the show, he was a pretty nice guy towards the old folks in the elderly institution and was soft on them when they couldn’t afford his lawyer fees. I was thus wondering while watching the show as to how such a character could transform into Saul Goodman.

I guess the writers of the show must have struggled with trying to write a script which presents Jimmy McGill as a flawed but likable character, with his relatively more unscrupulous and nefarious persona as Saul Goodman. If the trajectory of the show had continued the way it was up to nearing the end of the season’s episode, and without the need to reconcile with the backdrop of his future facade as Saul Goodman, it might very well have made for a heart-warming ‘flawed but good-hearted man with an insidious past changes for the better to help the weak and oppressed’ kind of show. It wouldn’t have dawned on anyone who is unfamiliar with Breaking Bad that Jimmy McGill would go on to become the lawyer that actively helps drug lords get away with their crimes.

I am unsure whether this portrayal of Jimmy McGill makes for a huge gap in his characterization with that of Saul Goodman. I guess there was an attempt towards the ending of the season’s episode to try to bridge this gap by introducing a precursor to why Jimmy would go back to his shady Slippin’ Jimmy ways. This precursor was when Jimmy’s brother Chuck revealed to Jimmy that he was the one who had opposed Jimmy’s employment as a lawyer in his law firm because he thought Jimmy was not fit to be a lawyer given his innately shady character. And Jimmy, instead of trying to prove his brother wrong, decides to go back to his Slippin’ Jimmy ways and vows that he would not allow himself to be held back by his conscience to do the right thing in the future. I wonder whether this a little bit of a stretch to try to converge the character of Jimmy McGill with Saul Goodman. The show could very well have started Jimmy off along a different footing as not being such a nice guy in the first place, with the sort of unethical, hard-nosed traits that one might come across in other lawyer shows like Suits. That said, I actually appreciate a lawyer show where the main lawyer character comes off as humane and nice, rather than a show where the main lawyer character is an alpha-male top dog who comes up top when it comes to an ego fight. It is one reason why I didn’t like Suits even though a lot of my peers like it because the protagonist Harvey Spector seems almost like a human cyborg who goes about bamboozling his opposition without breaking a sweat or a shred of respect for them. Compared to Harvey Spector, Jimmy McGill is more of an underdog, who faces tougher and meaner opponents than him, and that makes Jimmy more likable and relatable as a character for me

Perhaps the moral of the show can be taken as being about how a person trying to change for the better can relapse into his shady ways because of wrong decisions, and also because of the lack of faith or support in him by those who could have had the ability to help him change for the better.

The bold and the meek – personality types in a legal drama

I was watching an episode of Boston Legal yesterday evening. It was the second episode of season 3 which introduces some new characters to the cast. One of these characters was a guy named Jeffrey Coho. He played the archetype of the alpha-male mentality lawyer who comes right in on day one ready to show everyone else who is top of the league. I was thinking when I first saw that character that it would simply be a duplicate of Brad Chase, a junior partner at the firm who had appeared in the earlier two seasons of the episode. Jeffrey was confronted by Brad who attempted to put Jeffrey in his place by telling him that there was only one guy at the firm who could play the macho guy who gets all the women, and that was Brad himself.

I never quite find such characters likable. They tend though to appear as an stereotypical archetype in a lot of lawyer shows. The more recent production named Suits features a law firm consisting of such figures with such excessive alpha-male syndromes. I don’t identify myself with such characters, neither do I find them likable. I prefer characters which display a certain humane quality in their characters such as compassion and a desire to help the weak gain justice. For me, Alan Shore, played by James Spader is my favourite character amongst all lawyer characters in law dramas. I don’t find the other protagonist of law shows likable, whether this be Denny Crane, or Harvey Spector.

I wonder how far those at the law school where I am studying at display the alpha-male mentality. I guess there are a diversity of personalities and characters that I have encountered during my time at law school. I do see some fellow law student who seem to be trying to imitate the bad, brash behavior of the show protagonist in these law films. They come off as arrogant, and condescending. But there are also nice people, who display the more gentle, Christian qualities.

I sometimes wonder whether my more genial personality is suited to the legal profession especially when I watch these lawyer shows where the characters come off as being aggressive. I suppose there might be different roles in the legal profession suited for different people with different personalities. For example, being a litigator might be suited for someone who is able to handle the stress of competition, whilst a meeker, more meticulous person might be better at drafting corporate deals. But I want to be careful not to stereotype, and I dislike the idea that one has to come off as what seems to me to be a jerk in order to be successful at what he does.

On obsessive worries and persistent preoccupying thoughts

What should one do about an obsessive worry, or a preoccupative thought that bogs the will of an individual, to the extent that he finds himself quite unable to function in any other manner in life. I guess one method of resort is to pray. It beats worrying silly and putting one’s thoughts obsessively on the issue. But of course, one could argue that it is just as unhelpful to pray in an obsessive manner to God about an issue. But I believe that there may very well be a difference, in the sense that if you believe in God, and accept the teachings of the church that one can and should correspond with God in a manner that is personal to oneself, then it might be considered virtue to talk to God about a worry. The usual teaching that I have hear from my church is that God cares about the things that affects you, and nothing is too small as to be insignificant in his eyes.

I know that in the world of psychology, there are methods employed by a psychiatrist to treat conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder. I get my impression about psychologists mainly from the media, and from television dramas. One of my favourite US sitcom is the detective show Monk, which features a male detective who suffers from what is palpably the condition of obsessive compulsive disorder. While the psychosis in one sense debilitating to his social life, it is also on the other hand the underlying trait responsible for his genius in his feat of detective sleuthing with his attention to details. Now, one recurrent side archetypal character in that sitcom are the psychologists that Monk, the eponymous protagonist, attends to help him with his obsessive compulsive disorder, which had gotten worse after the death of his wife. The meetings with the psychologist typically features a room with two chairs placed facing each other where the psychologist sits on one of the chair whilst his patient sits on the other. And the dialogue that proceeds follows a certain stereotype where the psychologist sits by the chair with a pencil and a notebook in hand, and scribbles points of notes as his patient rattles details according to the questions prodded by the psychologist. Thereafter, the psychologist makes comments based on his observations, articulating the unspoken thoughts that lies within the recesses of what they call the “region of unconsciousness” that exists in the individual. Traumatic childhood experiences and repressed sensualities are the common lingos of the psychiatrist in explaining the world of the unconscious.

In some ways, praying is quite akin to visiting a psychiatrist, with God as the psychiatrist, and you as the patient. And I do feel that there is something quite therapeutic in the process of simply rumbling on about one’s worries to God, in manners that may be considered incoherent or irrational by others. Does prayer work? Perhaps as much as how psychotherapy may work. The ability to articulate one’s worries and to believe them heard has a calming cathartic effect. But whether prayer works further than that, I do not know. If one expects too much of prayer as a way of obtaining subsistence to his petition, I am afraid that he may go away sorely disappointed, or that he might become disillusioned at the apparent absence of response. That is my experience. And I have found myself railing at God for his seeming lack of response. I thread on the lines of committing grievous sins such as blasphemy in my rancor. Perhaps, if I were more rational or even-headed about how prayer works, I would not have found myself so perturbed and could have avoided the excess of emotions. But perhaps, there may some significance to which anger over disappointment works in one’s correspondence with God. It is like a stage of maturation, in passing, to which its ends lies in some repose obtained from a transcendent enlightenment to the state of affairs, or simply from resignation and acceptance of circumstances. A psychologist appealing to more secular paradigms would probably reference the Kübler-Ross model, also commonly referred to as the five stages of grief. And such stages are quite manifestly expressed in the prayer process. Ranting at God fits in somewhere between the stage of anger and bargaining.

There is another paradigm which is quite beautifully expressed in a show named Joan of Arcadia, and it is called Desolation and Consolation. See this post by James Bradford for an excellent write-up about this paradigm. It’s like what Solomon, or Qoheleth, writes about in Ecclesiastes – A time for everything. There is a time for desolation, or to feel aggrieved and have misgiving towards God, and there is a time for consolation, where things seems to make sense, there is a sense of inner peace, and God seems loving and kind.

Desperate Housewives Pilot Episode – The inner world of women

I watched the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives. I haven’t watched the show before as I didn’t think that I would find the show interesting. I thought, what could be so interesting about the affairs of housewives? I had a glimpse of the show once when it appeared on television back when Desperate Housewives was a popular sitcom on television, and I was quite repulsed about what I saw in that episode, which was nearing its end. It showed a man who chose to leave his mother for a woman, and him telling his mother that he never intends to come back to visit his mother again, before he left the mother’s house to be in a romantic relationship with the woman. And the female narrator of the show was trying to portray the man’s action in a positive light of being courageous to choose his wife (or girlfriend?) over his mother, because the mother had supposedly been a very bad person who deserved such treatment from her son. I suspect that the show had been following the theme of the archetypal difficult mother-in-law before that such that the audience who have been following the show would have come in support of the son’s decision. But from a passing-by viewer like me, the son’s action seemed rather reprehensible. And I had qualms about whether the show was one of those so-called western shows promulgating loose liberal moral values that my Church community warns about.

Recently though, I have encountered some references to the show on blogs that I read. The authors of those blogs are Christian, and they do acknowledge the elements of liberal values that are portrayed in the show. But they also talk about the educational aspect of the show, and about the value of the show in portraying the intricacies of human psychologies and relationships. I actually enjoyed watching the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives. The characters, with their antics, and housewife schemes and politics, was an interesting watch. And I think it gives me a better picture of the concerns that affects women and the perspectives they hold on various affairs in their daily lives, although it would be good if I confer with female friends to hear their opinions regarding the portrayal of women in the show. From what I gather from the show, women have a lot more inner subtle thoughts in their dealing with people and issues than men, and they tend to take a more passive aggressive approach in dealing with relationships and problems rather than openly voicing out their sentiments and seeking a direct resolution.

For example, there is this character named Susan, played by Teri Hatcher, who is a divorced mother looking for love. She encountered this guy who works as a plumber at a funeral, and became interested in him. There is this other divorced woman in the neighbourhood who was competing with her. She is portrayed as the “predator of eligible bachelors” in the show, and has seduced pretty much all the men she previously encountered, including a church minister! Susan went over to the guy’s house one day, only to see that the other woman had got there first. In a presumptuous bid to get the man to come over to her place, she made the excuse that she had a clog in her pipes in her house (with whatever innuendo that may have been), and that she thought the guy could help her out since he was a plumber. The guy agreed, and told her he would be over in a while, which got her panicking because she had made those remarks in haste, and there was no actual plumbing problems. She immediately ran back to her house, and with her daughter from her previous marriage, began frenetically stuffing down things into the kitchen sink to clog it up.

Then there is this other character named Lynette, a former business woman turned stay-at-home mum of three children. She felt embarrassed when she encountered a former colleague at a supermarket. When the colleague asked her how she finds being a stay-at-home mother, she masked her true sentiments with a big smile on her face and her response that “it is the best job I ever had”.

Another of the desperate housewives is Bree. Her husband had revealed that he wanted to divorce her. While emotionally distraught, she stuck to her stoic demeanor to avoid betraying her emotions. She tried to kill her husband by adding onions to her husband’s salad dish, knowing that he is allergic to it.

The final character of the desperate housewives clique is Gabrielle, played by Eva Longoria, an ex-model whose unhappy marriage has had her beginning an affair with her 17-year-old gardener. Her husband wanted to fire the gardener because the lawn outside the house had not been mowed and he felt that the gardener had been lazy in not finishing his task of mowing the lawn. The real reason is that the gardener had been busy making love with his wife, Gabrielle every time he is at the house (which ought to get him fired as well!). Gabrielle saved the gardener from getting fired by telling her husband that he was having a wrong assessment of the height of the lawn as it was evening and that he could not see well as a result. When they were at a party where her husband was to make a business deal, she bribed the person serving alcohol, telling him to ensure her husband had a drink in hand throughout the entire evening. While her husband was distracted with the business dealing and inebriated by the booze, she went all the way back home to get out the lawn mower and mow the lawn herself, before going back to the party. The next morning, when her husband got up and went out of the house, and found the lawn perfectly mown, he appeared bemused, but went along his way to work probably in the belief that he had it wrong about the gardener. Gabrielle is shown looking atop from the balcony as her husband leaves for work with a repose demeanor to her, probably feeling satisfied at having managed and kept the crisis under tabs.

I like watching sitcom dramas like this because it gives me a way to understand how people view things and allow me to have an insider picture to the reasons why people behave in particular manners. I am not always able to understand people’s actions or infer the rationale behind their actions from observation alone. And I don’t want to be either too presumptuous or prejudicial with my inferences. But I fear being oblivious to people’s intentions as well, especially if they are bad ones, and to fall into their traps, or to treat people as friends when they may not share the same sentiment about me. What I like about Desperate Housewives is that it shows and explains the underlying rationale for why these women act the way they do, which may otherwise appear befuddling to an outside observer. I do notice some behaviors from girls in my life that puzzles me, and which causes me to speculate to no ends about why they behave in such manners. And I have encountered girls who use passive aggressive tactics against me. I hope I am intelligent enough to decipher their actions. For example, there was this girl whom I worked with for a company law group assignment who erased substantial portions of my part in a group assignment in order to meet the word count before submitting it to the professor for marking, much to my detriment, and she continues putting on a cordial expression when interacting with me, as if everything is amicable. I suppose I am very much averse towards confrontation, and it doesn’t help that I am sometimes less eloquent than these people in law school. But I think that I could help myself better by calling out their unethical actions and bringing a complaint against them to relevant authorities. One thing I have also learnt is that I could very much benefit by consulting female friends to seek advice about dealing with female people. I suppose it takes one to know one, and I mean that in a good way. I suppose I could do better with more close female friends whom I can consult. But there are some things in life where I suspect that like one of those guy characters in the Desperate Housewife show, I will be oblivious to some of the ways and schemes of a woman.

Hong Kong Legal Drama – The Other Truth : An examination on the defence of mental unsoundness

I caught an episode of the 7pm Hong Kong legal drama on Channel 8 titled The Other Truth, or 真相 (pronounced zhen xiang in Chinese). In this episode, a man is being prosecuted for murder for killing his wife while in a highly emotional state brought about by provocation by the wife. Two lawyers, a man and a woman, who are the protagonists of the show, were employed to defend him in his case. They were thinking of raising the defence of temporary insanity which would acquit their client without having to have him admitted to a mental hospital if they were to raise a defence on the ground of insanity instead.

While meeting the accused at the detention centre, they tried to incite him into the same state of a fit of anger before their expert witness, a psychologist, came in to assess the accused for his psychological condition. The woman lawyer badgered the accused about the details behind the facts of his case, which managed to get him to reproduce that similar state of emotional distress. The psychologist arrived soon after, and they left the room and left their client alone with the psychologist.

The plot twist came when the psychologist came out of the detention room after his examination of the accused, and the lawyers asked him about the result of his assessment. The psychologist said that he noticed the symptoms of psychological disorder in the accused, such as the accused’s constant rubbing of his fingers. However, he says that the accused revealed to him that he acted in such a manner because he had been instructed by his lawyers to act in such a manner. And the shocker was that the lawyers actually became all silent and shifty when questioned about this by the psychologist, implicitly admitting that they indeed coaxed their client to act in such a manner to obtain an assessment of psychological disorder from the psychologist. The psychologist told the lawyers that he would reveal their unethical behavior to the judge during trial and walked off.

I would have to agree with the psychologist there that the lawyers have breached their legal code of ethics by coaxing their client to perform certain actions in order to obtain the psychological assessment they want. I have watched other legal dramas before, such as Boston Legal, where the lawyers are actually depicted as cool and smart for their unethical legal mavericks. But I think such portrayal of lawyers in the popular media further tarnishes the image of lawyers, and holds up unethical examples for lawyers-to-be. But coming back to the show, perhaps, the lawyers’ view that they had to resort to such a method reveals their lack of faith in the assessment by the psychologist to determine if their client was indeed mentally unsound. There may be reason to be skeptical about the methodology used by a psychologist to make an assessment. In the case in the show, the man was suffering a latent psychosis that only manifest under circumstances of heavy emotional distress, and it might not be reproduceable during the time which the accused is under psychological assessment. And it would be a mistake to conclude that the accused is totally mentally sound because he does not display symptoms of psychological disorder during psychological examination.

Speaking of which I would like to talk about the Tey Tsun Hang’s sex-for-grades corruption case. My post on the Tey Tsun Hang case has garnered about 1500 views on my blog according to my blogger’s traffic statistics, which is the highest hit count for a post on my blog! The majority of traffic streams in from a Sammyboy thread which features your typical ‘kay-poh’ Singaporeans interested in prying into the personal life of Tey Tsun Hang. I remember that during one stage of the Tey Tsun Hang trial, Tey, who represented himself, broke down while representing himself in court. He managed to obtain a diagnosis of anxiety disorder from a psychologist in order to defer the proceedings of the trial. The prosecutors however, claimed that Tey was feigning his anxiety illness. When they cross-examined Tey’s psychologist, the psychologist admitted that his diagnosis of his client is dependent on the answers that the client gives during psychological examination. Therefore, it suggests the possibility that an accused can misguide the psychologist if he answers the questions falsely during the psychological examination. I don’t know much about the methodology used by psychologists, so I would desist on being a cynic here. But from what I read about psychological methods so far in the news, I am a little skeptical about it and would say that it is best for those dealing with the psychology discipline to honestly reckon with its limitations.

Continuing with the drama, the male defence lawyer encountered the prosecutor in the toilet during a trial proceeding break. The defence lawyer and the prosecutor has a background history of rivalry between the two. It was in the toilet that the male defence lawyer decides to ask the prosecutor for leniency for his client on grounds that his client was mentally unsound. I really wonder whether lawyers sometimes confer with the opposing side when they encounter each other in the toilet, which seems a little comical in my opinion. The prosecutor who behaved in this really arrogant, smirkish behavior, was hell-bent on winning his case against the defence lawyer, and mocked the defence lawyer as begging him for mercy because he knows he is going to lose.

But the prosecutor’s brash, forceful antic was the one that turned on him when he cross-examined the accused back in the court room. As he badgered the accused for murdering his wife because of jealousy, the accused lost his cool and entered into a fit of rage, and although the court bailiffs tried to restrain him, he managed to walk all the way to where the prosecutor was and bit his arm. I guess the judge was presented with a cold hard evidence of the accused’s latent psychosis right before him in the court!

I studied criminal law during my first year in law school and found the topic on the various defences interesting. The defence of mental unsoundness is quite complex and convoluted in my opinion. For example, whether an accused is admitted to the mental institution depends on whether his mental unsoundness is latent or existent. If latent, he will be wholly acquitted on the ground that his psychosis is a one time off event. And then there is the doctrine of whether the psychosis is so severe as to affect the accused judgement as to what he is doing is morally wrong. And academics differ in their opinion on whether this knowledge by the accused is relevant to the defence. If I can remember clearly, there was something which I found jarring about how the defence of mental unsoundness works in Singapore. It was something about how an accused who has intention to murder, and who knows that he has a predilection for getting into a state of killing psychosis, can get himself acquitted by the defence of mental unsoundness even though he may have intended to kill his victim. So let’s say, a man can induce himself into a state of mental psychosis if he knows the stimulant that would induce himself into such a state, and then place himself in an opportune setting to kill his victim, and get away with it because he was mentally unsound. And I thought that that was just plain wrong!