Holy crap, that was amazing!
As Better Call Saul comes to an end, its two main characters, each so responsible for molding one another, are heading in two different directions. Kim Wexler is facing responsibility and seeking redemption. Jimmy McGill (he goes by different names but in his soul, he’s Jimmy) is entertaining murder and risking capture. These ex-spouses are still pushing each other toward actions that taking actions that may affect the other’s situation.
Kim is living in Florida with dark hair without her trademark power ponytail, working at a sprinkler company. She does jigsaw puzzles while her boyfriend watches reality TV, goes to office birthday parties with her coworkers, and goes to BBQs with “potato salad.” She’s not in witness protection but might as well be. She seems to have sought the quietest life she could find, out of guilt for Howard’s death or the desire to block it out and just be done with it. (Usually I don’t like the trope of a character with a wild past ending up with a quiet life that we’re supposed to see as a tragedy. Many of us have good but blah jobs and quiet lives—what do people think life is? But the boyfriend’s grunts during sex and the Miracle Whip—which is not mayo, not at all—make a fair point that Kim is diminished.)
A phone call from “Victor St. Clair” to the sprinkler store starts Kim back on the road to some kind of redemption. Always a lawyer, she tells her ex-husband to turn himself in. Why don’t you turn yourself in, Gene comes back in playground fashion. Mike and Gus and Lalo are dead, so it’s over.
So Kim turns over all the evidence to the Albuquerque authorities—on the way passing ghosts of the past, like the tollbooth Mike worked at, the bench at the courthouse she and Jimmy ate lunch at, and a young attorney defending down-on-their-luck clients like she used to—and admits to everything involving Howard’s death. She tells Howard’s widow he didn’t suffer, but Cheryl rightly calls her out on it, since Howard’s reputation is permanently destroyed and he suffered greatly before his death. Kim’s admission is a calculated one, as she says the DA may not charge her since there’s no physical evidence and Jimmy isn’t there to corroborate her story. The end of the show implies this last bit may come back to bite her in the ass.
Rhea Seehorn, as usual, gives an extraordinary performance. Her tears of relief on the bus were heartbreaking, the most emotional that character has ever been. I also loved that scene when she signed the divorce papers. Saul asks Kim why she chose Florida and before she can answer, he cuts her off, saying it’s not important. And Kim just gives this tiny look like one last thing is breaking quietly inside her—like she wants to speak but knows there’s no point—and it’s devastating. Just give her the Emmy already.
This may change depending on what happens in the finale, but Kim Wexler looks to become a rarity in the Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad universe—someone who takes responsibility and starts on the path to redemption. It’s not pretty and will be painful, but maybe she saved something of her soul.
After signing the divorce papers, Kim meets Jesse Pinkman, the man who served a similar function on Breaking Bad, as the on-and-off conscience of the show. “This guy? Any good?” Jesse asks about Saul. In a loaded, deeply sad piece of dialogue, Kim says, “When I knew him, he was.” Then she runs out into the rain. In that whole scene, Kim is the only one to survive either series battered but essentially OK: Jesse and Saul are in hiding, and Combo and Emilio are dead. Again, this may change next week, but maybe Better Call Saul is saying Kim is one of the few who got out.
Gene is just getting in deeper. The phone call to the sprinkler company might have inspired Kim to take responsibility, but Gene is crossing the line to violence in a way he’s never done before. Not content with identity theft, he steals watches from the drunk guy and samples his booze. Then he walks right up to the edge of murdering the guy. This is a great sequence that reminded me of a few directors: Hitchcock (sneaking up with the urn while suspenseful music plays), Tarantino (the cops’ trivial conversation about fish tacos), and the Coen brothers (the sudden comical violence of the crashing cab).
Gene offers to get Jeffy out of trouble, but Marion figures it all out. I knew it! You wouldn’t cast Carol Burnett unless you wanted her to be significant to the story. She puts 2 and 2 together after watching Saul’s old commercials, leading to a beautiful shot of the commercials’ color reflected in Gene’s black-and-white glasses. Then Gene crosses a Rubicon, prepared to strangle Marion with a phone cord. “I trusted you,” she tells him defiantly. He recovers enough conscience to give her back her Life Alert button, and she calls the authorities.
It's funny—in all the ending scenarios I envisioned, I never thought it might end with Jimmy getting caught. If he does get caught, Kim’s confession to the DA has screwed him, but it’s also screwed her, since he can corroborate her story. So we could be ending this saga with the couple changed and estranged but still exerting a strange gravity on one another.
Wow, that was fantastic.
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