Serial characterization as a feminist ethics of care in Better Call Saul
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We pursue the consequences of temporal complexity for character development in Better Call Saul (2015–22). We advance this argument by attempting an Aristotelian reading of Better Call Saul but then show some of the deficits that follow from transferring this methodology from theatrical to serialized televisual character. Following this, we highlight some of the deficits of a judgemental approach to character that appear within the narrative of Better Call Saul , and we propose instead to understand serialized character development ateleologically. This distinction introduces the relevance of a feminist ethics of care, which we believe provides a more relevant frame for the moral evaluation of serialized character. In contrast to the absolutism of universal principles, a feminist ethics of care orients one to understand those for whom one cares in ‘relational contexts’ that emphasize specific, material and concrete conditions. This dichotomy between judgement and care is dramatized within Better Call Saul through the interpretations that two characters bring to an extended deceit. Just as the discursive and diegetic complexity of the series prompts viewers to continually re-frame and re-evaluate Jimmy McGill, Jimmy likewise regularly uses a similar move of misdirection during his scams in which he invites other characters’ judgement about one aspect of his performance while accomplishing his actual goal by other means. Jimmy routinely invites judgement through taking on personae that he ultimately discards, reserving and preserving evaluation of his authentic motivations in continual acts of deferral. If Jimmy is ever rehabilitated, he arrives at such a possibility through an authentic confession directed towards the person who has cared most for him, Kim Wexler. Ultimately, we believe that Better Call Saul uses the structure of its serialized discourse to endorse the moral attention and responsiveness that are characteristic of a feminist ethic of care, rather than a system of characterization based on a teleological, final judgement that sees character from an endpoint looking backwards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".