The Thing About Better Call Saul 🎥

Spoilers!  Believe me, there are spoilers below!  Opinions about fiction and fictional characters!  A lack of punctuation, too. 

A decade late and a dollar short on Better Call Saul, a spin-off of Breaking Bad, which aired in 2015, now on Netflix.

Yet the discourse continues online about at least one of the characters:  Kim Wexler. YouTube:  The Questionable Morality of Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul.  Better Call Saul’s Hidden Evil – Kim Wexler.  The EXIT Sign Kim Wexler Sadly Missed in Better Call Saul.  The Undeniable Tragedy of Better Call Saul’s Kim Wexler.

One Redditor’s opinion:  “Kim Wexler is stupid.”

A corporate lawyer, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks with a vampire mother, Kim has a knack for bad decisions.  She shuns the company that paid off her student loans, who wants to work with her. Rejects the bank client, that she brought in, because it occurs to her that she doesn’t like the work.  Wrecks the pro bono work that she enjoys doing too.  All because she hooks up with – and in bad faith, marries – Slippin’ Jimmy, better known as Saul, the titular con man/lawyer main character.

It is explained to us why Kim throws in her lot with Jimmy, sharing an Albuquerque strip mall legal practice. His dysfunction is not just familiar to her, she participates in it, and sometimes drives it.  Here’s where Better Call Saul throws the wrench: if Kim Wexler could have had a shot with Howard, the traditional, establishment owner of her former law firm, would she have taken it?  (Leaving Howard’s fate out of this…, except, no!, Kim inadvertently gets him killed.)

It had to be a conscious decision in the writer’s room to offer no possibility of a romance between Kim and Howard. In a world where shows like this make romantic links just for an audience boost, it has to be calculated. In this way, Better Call Saul reminded me of Middlemarch.  The right person is there around you but is inaccessible due to your own stupidity. Those writers sure didn’t help Kim. Did they feel that a love triangle would be too obvious? 

While I appreciated this adult show with adult dialogue and themes, Slippin’ Jimmy’s grifting ways fail to impress at the end. The series should really be called Better Call Mike, Mike being a former cop, a mature fixer of what can be referred to as situations.  Kim’s fate is insane. She moves to Florida, choosing to live a flat life, to keep herself away from a life of crime adjacency.  Her Miracle Whip tuna sandwich existence there is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: her new identity is supposed to be her salvation, yet, it’s one more grift. Still, the show can’t resist a few more scenes of Kim with the deservedly imprisoned Jimmy.

 

 

 

 

 


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