She’s right, you know—Kim and Jimmy are trouble for everyone. “Other people suffer because of us. Apart, we’re OK. But together, we’re poison,” she tells him. Jimmy says he loves Kim and Kim says it back, but as she concludes, “But so what?” It’s harsh but fair. These two love each other but like some other married couples, they find the marriage can’t work and they can’t live with each other. Of course, most other married couples don’t fall out shortly after a team of drug cartel cleaners has sanitized their house’s floor of the blood shed by their former boss, whom they indirectly got killed.
So Kim decides she wants out of all of it—the marriage, the law, the schemes. She tries to do as Mike asked and go about her day after Lalo kills Howard. She compartmentalizes things and does what she has a passion for—defending poor clients—and makes it through the day, at least until they both come home to the scene of the crime. Jimmy tries to move on, too, redecorating his law office with the familiar blow-up Statue of Liberty. But as the opening montage makes clear, with Howard’s blood on their floor dissolving into Jimmy’s red takeout sauce, the seedier side of their life is permanently blended with the upstanding side.
What seems to break Kim is having to “continue telling the lie you’ve been telling” in Mike’s words, this time to Howard’s widow Cheryl at his memorial service. A mess of emotions plays subtly across Rhea Seehorn’s face, seeming to indicate Kim knows she must steel herself and lie one last time about Howard’s cocaine problem to throw any suspicion off her and Jimmy. This lie is what costs her. She resigns from the bar, in a decisiveness typical for her, perhaps realizing she can no longer act ethically with all she’s done.
It was all fun and games until someone got killed. Kim Wexler knew people could get hurt with her scams but didn’t stop because, as she says with devastating self-loathing, “I was having too much fun.”
With a sob, she goes back to packing, and Jimmy listens to the stark sound of packing tape ending this part of their story. In the next scene, he is fully Saul Goodman. It’s an indeterminate point in the future, with Saul living in his garish mansion full of Technicolor suits, sleeping with someone who isn’t Kim, and rolling in dough from his office packed with clients.
In cutting from Kim leaving directly to a fully formed Saul, Better Call Saul makes it clear: Her leaving is what completed his transformation. At a lot of points this season, Jimmy seemed taken aback at how amoral Kim was acting, but in a way, she was also his safeguard against becoming something even worse.
Who knows how far in the future we are. The rest of the episode is a little housekeeping and some nice character touches. Mike visits Nacho’s father to tell him about his son’s death. It’s a decent thing that he didn’t have to do, but Manuel’s reaction makes it clear that Mike is no better than the gangsters. Gus flirts with a waiter but then realizes he can never really let his guard down, maybe because the homophobia in his world would leave another vulnerability for the Salamancas to hurt him. These two are pretty much who they become by the Breaking Bad timeline, so I think their story has been told.
There are still four episodes and some story to flesh out (not to mention Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Carol Burnett), but that abrupt cut to the future spelled it out: Kim’s leaving broke Jimmy.
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