#number 6

Tricia Helfer’s modelling era before she ever stepped onto a set:

Tricia Helfer first made her mark in the fashion world, rising from rural Alberta to international runways. Discovered at seventeen, she quickly became a sought‑after presence in elite modelling circles, working for top designers, appearing in major campaigns, and gracing the covers of global magazines. Her early career was defined by precision, poise, and a striking versatility that made her a favourite in both editorial and runway work, a foundation that later helped her transition seamlessly into acting.

I'm watching Better Call Saul for the first time rn and, okay I'm still on Season 1. I've never seen more than a couple episodes of Breaking Bad. But so far, Number 6 is beat for beat, bar for bar some kind of AU version of Jimmy McGill.

Except. Whereas season 1 Jimmy McGill is in some ways the person least grounded in a "functional" socializing**, and there's the presence of Kim Wexler as a sort of reality checking, grounding force...

Imagine instead taking season 1 Jimmy McGill and giving him no Kim, first of all. And instead replacing her presence with someone who tells him that he should lean into it. In fact, let's make that— You know how sometimes Kim feels like Jimmy's only human relationship in a sea of lying and half-selves and inability to be the full truth in a way that is touched by a human being? Yeah so he doesn't have that but the closest he does have is a mentor who tells him that he should lean into every worst impulse he's ever had.

Who, actually, has some new and additional ideas about socializing, and about how to lean even further away from reality and construct even more difficult false selves and isolate and isolate and isolate and one day the lie will fix him because no one, no one is going to take Jimmy McGill for shit, because that empty rotten feeling in your chest and every failure you've ever encountered isn't your fault, it's just that you were slighted by the universe and slated to be some subhuman nothingbeast

and I sympathize with your plight, really I do. You should lean into the Jimmyisms. They'll work. You should do everything you're doing and you should do it twice as hard. It'll work. You'll feel better.

And that's my pitch for anyone who thinks they might be into Number 6.

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*I'll tell you right now that he is a ymmv character (that phrasing feels.... dismissive in a way I don't intend): he does things that will, for some people, remove him from the running in terms of characters that you will want to have emotions about. In a way that I genuinely intend as a vague but legitimate trigger warning. If you have a worst thing in mind, he has probably done that, or at minimum something related to it / interpretable as it. I will always be extremely clear that he's a character that I do not expect most people to want to touch with a ten foot pole. I used to be better at articulating this, and then I said it so many times on Twitter that I sort of lost my touch in articulating it for the first time, because that brain thing happened where I feel like I've said it already even if I'm talking to a new person.

In any case, that's my post about what's going on with him.

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**I have. a lot more to say about this in much better words, but I have to come at that in a longer post.

Short version: My GOD the way Jimmy feels about being Chuck's younger brother is how it feels to try to tread water when disability—in my case mental health but it's important to me to use the umbrella term here—causes a bunch of cascading invisible life things to manage and make up for and keep pace with and still pretend to be a Normal Person. Like, being Jimmy next to Charles McGill strikes a really resonant chord re: my neurodivergence and chronic pain experience, next to the rest of the world

Ofc this is fascinating because THESE days, he isn't the more disabled brother, and isn't regarded as disabled at all although I would not be surprised if autism and/or ADHD were in the mix. I've been very very Very curious where the disability writing is headed re: Chuck and I probably will post feelings about That too but that is again v unrelated I'm rambling So long

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