‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 Gave Kim ‘a Happy Ending and a Sad Ending at the Same Time’ Says Director
Better Call Saul Season 6 is answering all the questions about how this connects to Breaking Bad. This week’s episode, “Fun and Games” answered a burning question about Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) in Better Call Saul. The episode director, Michael Morris, called it both “a happy ending and a sad ending at the same time.”
[Warning: This episode contains spoilers for the Better Call Saul Season 6 episode “Fun and Games”.]
Morris and co-creator Peter Gould were guests on the Better Call Saul Insider podcast on July 19, the day after the episode aired. They spoke to Kim’s resolution with mixed emotions. Better Call Saul Season 6 airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
Kim Wexler has it both ways in ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6
Better Call Saul fans worried that Kim would die because she’s not on Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul season 6 has all but confirmed with “Fun and Games” that she’s still alive. However, she resigned from the bar and left Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) to break the cycle that led to Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian)’s death.
“In the same episode you’ve got her behaving despicably with Cheryl, actually putting her foot, even after everything that’s happened, putting her foot even further down that path,” Morris said on Better Call Saul Insider. “She seems to be the only one who actually resolves all that into I’m not going to do it. I’m going to make this hard choice of breaking this thing because this thing is toxic. It’s such good writing to me because you’re at once heartbroken. At least, I was heartbroken at what was happening in the scene and yet it’s the thing that she needed to do to save herself. She had to, so it’s a happy ending and a sad ending at the same time.”
Kim Wexler may be the only one who got out of ‘Better Call Saul’ with her soul
Better Call Saul shows how many of the characters wound up on Breaking Bad. Not only Jimmy McGill but Mike Ehrmentraut (Jonathan Banks) and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) rise in the crime circles in which Breaking Bad fans met them.
“This is another one of those scenes where so many scenes in this episode seem to be about the difference between who we think we are and who we actually are,” Morris said. “I really thought about that for a lot of people. You see it in Gus in the scene with David and the wine bar. You see it with Mike always because Mike’s thing is ‘I have honor, I have values. I’m a little different from everybody else.’ You finally get him into a situation when he’s like, ‘I am those guys.’ He’s fooling himself to think he’s different in some sense. The difference between Jimmy and Saul is the overarching idea of this whole series in a weird character way.”
The creators struggled with how to resolve Kim Wexler
Gould knew Better Call Saul Season 6 would have to deal with Kim eventually. When it finally got to that point, Gould credited writer Ann Cherkis with nailing Kim’s resolve.
“You can argue she takes too much responsibility but she takes enough to know that if she stays with Jimmy, they’re going to always fall into this pattern,” Gould said. “They’re always going to get back into that groove.”
Gould also appreciated that this is the first time either character says “I love you” in all of Better Call Saul. And it’s not romantic at all.
“These are two people who don’t talk directly about their relationship, who’ve never said I love you until this moment,” Gould said. “For me, the moment, it might be my favorite moment ever, when Bob says, ‘But I love you’. And it is the most pathetic, beaten down, desperate moment I’ve ever seen from him. It breaks my heart and it breaks Kim’s heart too because she knows what’s got to happen next.”
