Better Call Saul will have to separate Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), leaving many to imagine she’ll be killed off - but that would be the wrong choice for the Breaking Bad prequel. Now in its fifth season, Better Call Saul has proved every bit the worthy successor to its parent show. Part of the fun in the Vince Gilligan series is seeing how Better Call Saul connects to Breaking Bad as it charts the transformation of Jimmy into Saul Goodman.
At the same time, much of Better Call Saul's best drama - and its strongest characters - have nothing to do with Breaking Bad. Jimmy’s relationship with his brother Chuck (Michael McKean) was the main driving force behind the first three seasons for Better Call Saul, until Chuck took his own life. Now, the main character thrust comes in the form of Kim and Jimmy’s relationship, both as a romantically involved couple and as lawyers with very different career routes.
Kim and Jimmy’s relationship right now is the heart of Better Call Saul, with the former as its (sometimes confused) moral compass. Season 5 highlights both just how alike they are and their major differences at the same time. Since Better Call Saul is confirmed to end with season 6, the clock is very much ticking on their time together.
Kim & Jimmy Can’t Stay Together
While Kim and Jimmy have so far found a way of making their relationship work, viewers already know that it can’t - or rather, won’t - last. As mentioned, Kim is one of the Better Call Saul characters who didn’t originate on Breaking Bad. Of course, the simple reason for that is Vince Gilligan didn’t know he’d be making a spin-off, but it does mean these new characters have a cut-off point in Jimmy’s life. It is theoretically possible that Kim was with Saul during the events of Breaking Bad and simply never mentioned, but that feels like a stretch, and a bit of a disservice in hand-waiving the absence of such a great character.
That, then, suggests that Kim and Jimmy do go their separate ways. This broadly fits with the direction Better Call Saul is headed in anyway: Kim obviously cares for Jimmy, and even ends up going along with some of his Saul escapades, but that’s his thing, not hers. They have a deep connection, and yet it feels like it could snap at any given moment as he plunged further into being Albuquerque’s number one criminal lawyer. It’ll likely happen in season 6, but it seems inevitable that the pair will have an irrevocable split.
Better Call Saul Could Kill Off Kim
Better Call Saul, by its nature of being a prequel, has a lot of pre-determined outcomes. We know where Jimmy, Mike, and Gus end up; the fascination is in watching them get there. But it also means the real tension lies in the things we don’t know: what happens to Gene in the future? Is Nacho going to get killed off? Why isn’t Kim in Breaking Bad? The latter, in particular, feels like we’re watching an impending tragedy. Kim is Better Call Saul’s ticking time bomb, waiting to go off - and the show itself knows it.
Take Kim’s car crash in season 3; few moments in the series have put hearts in mouths quite like that one. The reason is simple: Kim could well die. Every time Kim’s path even runs parallel to Jimmy’s life of crime, when there’s an outside chance she could be roped into some dangerous misdeed, or fall foul of some other misfortune, it’s amplified because of how viable it is the series could kill Kim off. She’s not in Breaking Bad, so there are only a finite number of explanations as to why. Logically speaking, the easiest answer for that would be her death, which explains both Jimmy fully becoming Saul, and why she’s never mentioned. It happened with Chuck. It may well happen with Nacho. And it could definitely happen with Kim - but it shouldn’t.
Kim Leaving Jimmy Would Be Better
Kim’s death would make for a neat break between Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. It’s a clean solution as to why she isn’t in the parent series, would be painful for viewers, and would no doubt have the most tangible impact yet on Jimmy McGill. At the same time, though, it feels like the easier option. This is the quickest and most simple way of explaining her absence, and while both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have stunned viewers with character deaths, this one doesn't feel befitting of Kim's arc.
The push-and-pull felt between Jimmy and Kim is such a key part of Better Call Saul's narrative tension, and so there's rich drama to be explored in the ways they manage to stay together, and presumably even more so in what finally tears them apart for good. To have Kim die, then, doesn't feel like the most satisfying option in that regard when there are other choices that allow the character to stay alive and make her own decision to leave Jimmy. In light of Chuck's death, Kim is still mostly content to give Jimmy a lot of leeway when it comes to becoming Saul Goodman, even if she doesn't like or agree with it. But that can't last, and a big part of seasons 5 and 6 going forward will no doubt see that gap widening.
Kim is a smart, talented, and successful lawyer, albeit one with her own issues aside from Jimmy, and to have her dragged down with him to the point of death feels wrong for such a strong character. We'll probably see Kim brought further into Saul Goodman's world, but there has to be a breaking point where she decides enough is enough and leaves him behind. That's the right decision for Kim, and would make a poignant end for her story without killing her off. At the same time, it'd perhaps hit Jimmy even harder than her death. With Kim choosing to leave him, then there's nothing from stopping Jimmy being utterly consumed by Saul Goodman, a decent person deep down but embittered and twisted by this latest and biggest of so many rejections in his life that he has no other option but to fully give in to his alter-ego. If Kim was on Breaking Bad, she might well have been killed, but it feels more in keeping with Better Call Saul's more precise, character-driven drama to have her just walk away instead.