There was a scene in the opening segment of this week’s Better Call Saul that saw Howard Hamlin walk into the mailroom during a party. Jimmy McGill celebrated passing the bar, and the entire conversation was kept from the audience. Jimmy had come to Chuck to ask for a job at the firm, and Chuck went to Howard, and Howard, in turn, delivered the bad news to Jimmy while the door was closed.
Turns out, even though we can’t hear it, Howard (Patrick Fabian) actually delivers scripted lines during that scene (Patrick Fabian had to memorize it, even though they knew it would never be heard). The writer of the episode, Gordon Smith, however, told Yahoo exactly what it was that Howard told Jimmy:
“We don’t have any associate positions open right now, and my hands are tied. I wish we could help you. It’s really great that you’ve done this, but it’s not going to happen right now” Then he ends with, “Well, we’ll think about it again in six months.”
That actually does help to inform Howard’s character. Obviously, the timing of the conversation — during Jimmy’s celebration — was a dick move, but it’s not like Howard was a total asshole about turning Jimmy down for a job. He was being fairly nice, which goes to the point that Vince Gilligan was making in this week’s Better Call Saul Insider podcast about the character being more than “just a douchebag.” He is, as Gilligan notes, “a fully formed, complex human being.”
As Gordon Smith notes further, it should be “an open question at this point, why exactly Hamlin wouldn’t go to bat for [Jimmy], and whether or not Chuck went to bat for him as he said he would.” That open question will presumably play into the final two episodes, where — based on the fact that Howard was diplomatic in his rejection and the fact that Chuck didn’t deliver the bad news himself — we may find out that it was Chuck, and not Howard, who rejected Jimmy for the job.
Source: Yahoo
