Warning: this story contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In Monday’s Better Call Saul, titled “Fun and Games,” that someone is Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). The latest episode of the Breaking Bad prequel ends with the married man formerly known as “Slippin’” Jimmy slipping right into Breaking Bad-era Saul Goodman, the sleazy criminal lawyer who fully emerges post-sudden breakup with wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn). Inside the same apartment where Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) killed Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) just two episodes earlier, Better Call Saul airs its most momentous death of the series: the death of Jimmy McGill.
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“I have had the time of my life with you. But we are bad for everyone around us. Other people suffer because of us,” a tearful Kim tells Jimmy, recalling how their latest scheme resulted in the death of Howard and the destruction of the law firm Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. “Apart, we’re okay, but together… we’re poison.”
With that, the Better Call Saul era ends not with a bang — but with a whimpering Jimmy. “Fun and Games” also answers a question from the beginning of the prequel series: Where is Kim Wexler during Breaking Bad?
The answer? Out of Saul Goodman’s life. Kim announces she’s quit the law and quit Jimmy, who ceases to exist as we flash forward to just before Saul takes on his most notorious clients: meth cooks Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).
“The key part of the beginning of this episode is the creation of Saul Goodman’s office, and it’s tasteful and it’s being assembled. And then what happens at the end is a rejection of all of that into the absolute embrace of what Saul Goodman would ultimately become — the deeply, most Saul Goodman you can be, which is how we end,” executive producer Michael Morris, who directed “Fun and Games,” told the AMC Blog. “We wanted to tell the story that the snapping point for that was this. That, without Kim, the Jimmy we know ceases to exist.”
Morris continued, “I had said facetiously to people, ‘It’s funny because people have died in every episode and there’s no death in this.’ And then I was like, ‘There is a death. It’s the death of Jimmy in this episode and the death of a relationship.’ And those are two enormous deaths that are just heartbreakers.”
Describing “Fun and Games” as an “elegy episode,” Morris noted, “If you revisit Breaking Bad with the benefit of six years of Better Call Saul, you’ll have an understanding that [Jimmy/Saul’s] heart has been destroyed.”
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Kim may be out of Saul’s life, but not out of the series — at least not yet. With four episodes of Better Call Saul‘s sixth and final season left to air, another flash forward will answer what becomes of paranoid and pitiful Omaha Cinnabon manager Gene Takovic, Jimmy/Saul’s assumed identity post-Breaking Bad.
Last we saw him, Gene had been made: cab driver Jeff (Don Harvey, since recast with Pat Healy) recognized Albuquerque celebrity Saul Goodman, blowing the expensive cover set by Ed the Disappearer (Robert Forster).
We haven’t seen the last of Gene, but what of Kim? Could she reappear in the black-and-white timeline that will close out the Breaking Bad-Verse?
“I can’t say if we see her again,”Seehorn told EW. “And even the fans that were savvy enough to figure out when I was in Albuquerque and when I was not — we shot a lot of stuff out of sequence, whether it was locations or weather or COVID[-19] or whatever. So there was no telling when somebody wrapped, or what that meant in the story sequentially.”
She added, “So I’m not going to speak to whether or not we will see her again and in what capacity. I will say that it’s devastating the decision she makes and the end of the relationship — the Jim and Kimmy that we knew — and her practicing law is its own ending, no matter what. It’s painful. And it was a terrible punch to the gut when I had to play it.”
New episodes of Better Call Saul‘s final season air Mondays on AMC and AMC+. See where to stream and watch Better Call Saul Season 6 Part 2.
