Better Call Saul Becomes the Kim Wexler Show – A Season Five Retrospective

“Am I bad for you,” Jimmy McGill asks his wife and personal moral center Kim Wexler in the fifth season finale of Better Call Saul. If he’d asked that question at any other point in the series, the answer would have been a resounding yes. After all, Kim was the one thing keeping Jimmy from going full-on Saul Goodman, right? Yeah, about that . . .

One of the complaints I often hear from Breaking Bad fans who haven’t watched Better Call Saul yet is that they already know what happens to most of the characters, so why waste the time? Well, two words: Kim Wexler. From the word go, she’s been the wild card in the series; the giant question mark hanging over how things will end for the show.* And, for almost the entirety of five seasons, we’ve all been terrified that something was going to happen to her that would destroy Jimmy McGill once and for all. Never once did I think it might be Kim herself that threw the grenade. Good god. I’m going to be spending the next 18 months (if we’re lucky and the show can somehow get back into production this fall) contemplating just what Kim’s crazy plan to destroy Howard Hamlin might mean for her, Jimmy, and their careers (we know Saul gets to keep practicing law in the end – but Kim, the person who desperately wants to advocate for those in dire straits, might lose a huge part of her identity to this, not to mention the potential jail time). And that’s not even taking into account that a very much not dead Lalo is out there, aware that Saul’s story didn’t really check out (despite Kim’s best efforts), angry as hell, and ready to take out everyone who may have betrayed him.

*Yes, as the start of the series there were a number of non-Breaking Bad folks in the story, but Chuck was never someone the audience deeply cared for (outside of his role in taking Jimmy to the edge of becoming Saul). As for Lalo and Nacho – both of whom Saul name-drops in Breaking Bad – well, I think everyone assumes that neither is making it out of the series in one piece (as heartbreaking as that will be in the case of poor Nacho). Whether or not Jimmy is involved or even knows of their deaths or disappearances is something we don’t know, but with only 13 episodes remaining and a scheme to hatch against Howard, I’m not expecting either Jimmy or Kim to think much on either of them. Unless they are forced to. In which case, yikes.

For five seasons, we’ve all assumed the series was the story of Jimmy McGill turning into Saul Goodman (with a nice side story showing how the cartel presence in Albuquerque evolved into the formation we see in Breaking Bad), when we should have been paying closer attention to the evolution of Kim Wexler into the potential Walter White of the story. Sure, Kim’s scorched earth plan against Howard isn’t exactly on the level of Walt orchestrating the murders of a series of prisoners or handing Jesse Pinkman over to Nazis, but within the confines of this particular story, her seeming complete and total commitment to undertaking a scheme that could land Howard in prison is the equivalent to her telling Jimmy that she’s the one who knocks. Kim always enjoyed the fun cons with Jimmy – but only as long as they meant someone who deserved it got hurt. And in Kim’s world, the people who really deserve to get scammed are those who managed to glide through life footloose and fancy free, often on the backs of those hard-working souls who can’t seem to get a leg up in the world.

Kim may have made it to the legal big leagues in Albuquerque through hard work and her own personal drive, but she never lost that chip on her shoulder from seeing how much harder she had to work to get where she is than others around her. It’s part of the reason she loves Jimmy so much – she’s seen just how hard he worked to get to this place, to try to make his brother proud, to make himself into more than just Slippin’ Jimmy. It’s also the reason she was so aghast to see him slowly turning into Saul – because she doesn’t quite understand his need to distance himself from the reputation he seemed to fight so hard to save after his suspension. But season five hasn’t been about watching Jimmy slowly complete his journey to become Saul. It’s been about watching Kim slowly complete her journey to become someone Jimmy can no longer look to for his moral anchor. It’s a journey that started way back in season one when she began dating Jimmy and when she realized that her darker impulses can be a fun thing to tap into – so long as she can compartmentalize them when she’s done scamming the rich folks. But as Kim gets more and more disillusioned with her work and those she works for throughout season four (as she begins to dabble in pro bono work), she starts to tell herself that she can be a crusader for justice and stick it to the man – so long as she has the financial security to do it. It’s her own deal with the devil: work for Mesa Verde, but get her spiritual nourishment from pro bono work in exchange.

It’s only when Kim co-opts Jimmy’s plan to convince her pro bono client to take a deal at the start of season five that alarm bells should have started going off in our collective heads. For someone as highly practiced at compartmentalization as Kim to allow something like that – lying to a pro bono client – to slip into the arena she has classified as pure, well, that’s not great. And sure, she all but collapses in disgust afterwards. And she’s guilty. But she also reasons that while it was wrong, it did get the guy a far shorter sentence than he would have had without the deal. So, the ends justify the means, and she really helped her client, right? So, when she gets to pull a scam over on Kevin Wachtell, her own client in the Mesa Verde case, but also a rich man who inherited it all from daddy and who never really had to work like Kim, well, that’s ok. It will protect a poor guy from losing his home after decades, and let her stick it to someone who doesn’t care about the little guy in the way Kim Wexler does. Only when Jimmy changes the game and takes things too far does Kim realize that she might be losing control – of Jimmy that is. Kim’s willfully blind to her own role in letting Jimmy run wild with things, and her response is to double-down on the relationship. Because she’s not the problem here – she can keep Jimmy in line, and keep him safe. But that’s the thing about deals with devils – there’s always a price. And, as Walter White showed us, pride cometh before the fall.

Well, by the end of season five, Kim Wexler has realized something we all should have seen coming. Yes, Jimmy will break bad in some way to become Saul Goodman at the end of the series, but not before Kim gets there first. Because Kim’s been on this “morally righteous” path for a long time now. From scamming rich saps over some pricey tequila alongside Jimmy, to ripping Howard a new one over his treatment of Jimmy in the aftermath of Chuck’s death (just in case you forgot why Kim really has it out for Mr. Hamlin), to being ok with breaking her fiduciary duty to Mesa Verde to get a mean old man some extra money, Kim has been trending bad for awhile now. But scheming to get Howard convicted of laundering money or something else just as odious, well, that’s a step too far for Jimmy. Not for Kim Wexler. Because Kim would be doing it to help out those who deserve it. The residents of Sandpiper would finally get their money. And the cool $2 million she and Jimmy would get would go a long way to serving her pro bono clients. And the only person to get hurt would deserve it, right?

For five seasons, we’ve been worried about what fate might befall Kim Wexler by the end of the series. But we never stopped to think that by the end of the series we might be hoping someone would save her from herself. And that’s the brilliance of Better Call Saul. We might think we know the endgame. And we certainly know the fate of most of the show’s remaining characters (at least to some extent), but the series can surprise us just as much as Breaking Bad. Remember when Hank found the inscription in “Leaves of Grass” in the White bathroom? This realization about Kim – the one character we all desperately wanted to see survive the fall of Jimmy McGill – just showed us her true colors. Jimmy shouldn’t have been asking Kim if he was bad for her. He might have stoked the darkness within her over the years, but Jimmy should have seen that Kim might just be bad enough to make him break bad.

Final Thoughts:

— Oh Nacho. Poor, poor Nacho. There’s almost no way our favorite member of the cartel escapes this series with his life. And there’s almost no way he doesn’t have to watch his beloved father pay the ultimate price for his betrayal. Michael Mando has been so wonderful turning this character from just another of the cartel men into an sympathetic person we genuinely don’t want to see die.

— In fact, I don’t think there’s a better cast on TV right now that the one on Better Call Saul. Sure, we knew the Breaking Bad trio were exceptional, but Mando, Tony Dalton (Lalo), Patrick Fabian (Howard, who is going become the show’s tragic character next season in a way I don’t think any of us thought – assuming Kim and Jimmy really do move forward with their plan), and Rhea Seehorn (Kim, who has still never been nominated for an Emmy for this role, something I suspect will absolutely change this year) are just out of this world great. The thing I’ll miss most once the series ends is seeing this cast work together each week.

— While I do think Better Call Saul has become a better series than Breaking Bad, I do still think Breaking Bad‘s highs were higher than anything Saul has managed. The biggest difference in the shows is how they focus on their characters. Breaking Bad was more concerned with telling a high octane drug drama with moments of deep, emotional resonance sprinkled throughout. Saul, on the other hand, always leads with character and sprinkles in the high octane elements. We spend far more time diving into the nuances that make these characters tick here (which lends all the more depth to the ones we knew from before and allows us to better understand the newer characters in a way Breaking Bad wouldn’t have bothered with). They are vastly different shows, but I think Saul has become the better crafted and presented series. And that’s saying something, as I think Breaking Bad is an all-time great show.