Looking back at the finale, I can't help but compare the narrative arc of Jax with the narrative arc of Chuck from Better Call Saul. Both follow roughly the same trajectory (person with severe mental health issues kills himself after a long struggle), but Better Call Saul just does it a thousand times better. Contrasting these two makes TADC look so much worse, it's insane.
Consider the way Chuck's collapse is depicted. He makes one final effort to better himself, making it surprisingly far, but he eventually falters - and due to him having pushed away every single person in his life, there's no one left to catch him during his month-long decline into insanity. When Jimmy visits him, he puts on an immaculate facade and convinces him he's fine. He makes an effort to reject help, cancelling his appointment with his therapist, but he's also aware of the fact that no one cares enough to show up at his home. When he finally kills himself, he's in a borderline catonic state, and the method used (kicking a gas lamp into a pile of flammable junk) is both strangely detached and intensely painful. The other characters don't find out until the next day, being informed by the police, and his death ends up being one of the defining moments of both Jimmy's and Howard's life. The show is structured around it.
Now, compare that with Jax abstracting. He tries to push people away, but it doesn't work & everyone is both aware of him wanting to die and really wants to prevent it, until they randomly stop for whatever reason. Abstraction is depicted as a process lasting about twenty minutes (implied via his near-death experience & Kaufmo being gone for a short amount of time), and just before that, he's essentially the exact same character he was in Episode 1. It's also depicted as something that sorta just peacefully happens to you, with Jax doing nothing more than isolating himself and just kinda not caring about it. After abstracting, he has one final heart-to-heart conversation with Pomni, which both makes little sense and ends up being entirely irrevant to his story, Pomni's story, and the plot as a whole. Everyone moves on quickly, and the ending of the show as a whole would happen either way with or without his involvement. Jax dying makes little sense in both his character development and how other characters treat him, it happens quickly and entirely off-screen, and ends up being near entirely irrelevant to how the show actually ends.
Imagine if Gooseworx wrote Better Call Saul. Jimmy would be very aware of Chuck trying to kill himself, making daily visits, and both Ernesto and Howard would be trying to keep in touch with him. On a random Tuesday, Chuck (offscreen) sets his house on fire with essentially no prior warning. Jimmy arrives just at the right time and runs into the burning building, where Chuck (acutely dying of smoke inhalation) has a tearful conversation with him about how Jimmy was actually right about everything. Jimmy then proceeds to try to drag Chuck out of the building to save him, but he stumbles over a loose rock or something & Chuck ends up dying. He gets a funeral scene, and that would be it, with no other relationships or character arcs changing as a result of what happened.
Oh, and Jimmy keeps his charred skull as a memorial / paperweight.
That is the difference between a competent writer and a hack.
