Part of the fun of watching the prequel Better Call Saul has been seeing how Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman (born Jimmy McGill) was first entangled with some of the most iconic characters of Breaking Bad, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). But part of the agony came from wondering why one of BCS’s most important characters—Saul’s wife and eager conspirator, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn)—was not part of Breaking Bad. The closer we got to the end of the series (just four episodes left!), the more agonizing the question became: Why did she seemingly vanish from Saul’s life by the time he meets Walter White? Considering the show’s high body count, her prospects seemed dire. Last night’s episode, “Fun and Games,” finally provided the answer to the question, “Where did Kim go?”
(Spoilers for the July 18 Better Call Saul follow.)
Throughout the first half of this final season, Jimmy and Kim concocted one last elaborate scheme to humiliate rival lawyer Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), a thorn in the side of both characters. The plan worked; Howard looked like a fool at a significant meeting over the Sandpiper case, forcing him to settle. To Kim, it was the most fun she’d ever had—until Howard showed up at their condo to confront them, just before the arrival of smiling, murderous cartel member Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton). Lalo blithely shoots Howard, who bleeds onto their living room rug. Later, after Gus kills Lalo, stalwart fixer Mike arrives at the Goodman home to manage the solution, telling the two to pretend it never happened and spin lies accordingly.
And at the end of the most recent episode, Kim doesn’t die at the hands of the cartel, or isn’t disbarred for undermining Howard’s Sandpiper plans. Instead, Kim leaves Saul—and the law—of her own free will. Earlier, at Howard’s wake, she had spontaneously conceived a lie to convince the late lawyer’s doubtful widow that Howard did have a cocaine problem, as per the false narrative planted first by Saul, and then Mike, who left a baggie of coke in Howard’s car after staging his death as a suicide. Kim’s effortless ability to spin untruths and manipulate people, and her glee in doing so, all proves too much for her. She tells Jimmy that they are bad for one another—that the chaos they’ve created together is too much for her conscience, despite having “the time of [her] life” doing it. She cancels her own law license, packs her bags, and leaves Saul for an unknown destination. “She’s saying, ‘There’s no way back for what you and I have become. We hurt other people,’” Seehorn told Entertainment Weekly.
It’s a brutal reveal, an emotional death after all the literal ones. After Jimmy stands in an empty hallway listening to Kim pack, the episode flashes forward to a fully formed, fast-talking, morality-free Saul Goodman as audiences first see him on Breaking Bad. With Kim gone from his life, Jimmy has fully embraced his sleazy persona—having effectively killed any portion of his old, empathetic self in the process.
Of course, with four more episodes remaining in the series, this may not be the last we see of Kim, and questions remain. Kim is originally from Nebraska, which is where we find Saul managing a Cinnabon in Omaha (as he once speculated he may) in the post-Breaking Bad flash-forward that began this series. In season four, we saw that his future food-service cover identity (going under the name “Gene Takovic”) is eventually blown when a cabbie recognizes him. Instead of assuming another false identity, Gene vows to “fix it” himself. Some viewers seem to believe Gene will somehow track down Kim in Nebraska for help, or that he’ll at least run into her one last time before the series ends. An interview Seehorn conducted with Rolling Stone seemingly indicates we haven’t seen the last of her; when asked if this week’s episode, “Fun and Games,” was the “final time [she] worked on the show,” Seehorn stated she “cannot answer that.” As is often the case in these things, no answer is often an answer itself.