‘Better Call Saul’ Creators Confirm What Year Kim Wexler Is Living in Florida
The final episodes of Better Call Saul Season 6 have taken place after Breaking Bad. The episode called “Breaking Bad” officially caught up, when Saul first met Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). The subsequent episode “Waterworks”, brought Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) back to Better Call Saul and included a specific reference to “six years,” but it’s little mystery what year that is six years from.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6 episode “Waterworks.]
Producer Jenn Carroll was on the Better Call Saul Insider podcast on Aug. 9, the day after “Waterworks” aired. Co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould asked her to explain what year it was when Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) told Kim it’s been six years. The series finale of Better Call Saul airs Aug. 15 at 9 p.m. on AMC.
It’s 2010 in ‘Better Call Saul’ when Kim Wexler takes Jimmy’s phone call
Jimmy has been living in Omaha as Gene Takovic after the events of Breaking Bad. When he heard Kim asked about him, he decided to call her in Florida. “Waterworks” showed Kim living a modest life in Florida, but when Jimmy calls he says it’s been six years.
“It’s late 2010 in Kim’s world,” Carroll said on Better Call Saul Insider. “So six years after the breakup.”
The last prequel scene was Kim and Jimmy’s breakup. She resigned from the bar because she couldn’t live with herself after getting Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) killed.
“They broke up in episode 609,” Gilligan clarified. “That was six years prior.”
Time is always complicated on this show
Better Call Saul began in 2002, which gave it six years to catch up to Breaking Bad. They only went two in story time.
“It’s 2004 so it’s been six years since they’ve spoken,” Carroll said.
Carroll also remembered when they had to decide the date, since Better Call Saul is a prequel to Breaking Bad. They couldn’t fake it, and they’ve been keeping track ever since.
When we switched from film to HD cameras, you can see every single date on a newspaper an extra is holding. We actually had to set the date of the show because of a shot in the pilot where Jimmy puts the check that he’s getting paid $700 for the three knuckleheads and it has a date on it. It was like oh no, we can’t not see the date. So we were just going to set our flag in the sand then and we kept it going for years. We’re day 5016 on our story calendar thanks to Ariel [Levine] and Kathleen [Williams-Foshee] and the many folks before them who’ve been keeping track.
Jenn Carroll, Better Call Saul Insider, 8/9/22
You can keep track of the date throughout ‘Better Call Saul’ before the Kim Wexler call
Williams-Foshee has kept a story calendar of the entire Better Call Saul timeline. If you look for markers of time on Better Call Saul, you’ll find that the creators of the show have already figured out what day it is. They’ve dressed the sets accordingly.
“We have a lot of people who are the keepers of this information,” Carroll said. “There’s a lot of institutional memory from Melissa Bernstein all the way through. There’s a lot of people who keep track of these things and worry about them from our props department always knowing exactly what year it is by what license plate stickers to put on down to the month.”
