It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Or, until Better Call Saul’s Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler successfully pull off a long con and set up a nice payday for themselves. Only to then watch a colleague shot to death in their apartment by a psychotic cartel boss, a turn of events that helps, finally, throw cold water on Kim’s idea of some kind of idyllic happy-ever-after with Jimmy.
Better Call Saul Season 6, Episode 9 (titled, appropriately, Fun and Games) sets up the beginning of the end. The show has now offered, among other things, a reasonable explanation for why Kim is not part of the Breaking Bad universe. And it’s given Jimmy the push that he needs, setting him on the path towards fully embracing the persona of everybody’s favorite skeezy Albuquerque defense attorney.
Better Call Saul Season 6, Episode 9 — Fun and Games
Last week’s episode, titled Point and Shoot, answered one of the few big mysteries left, as Better Call Saul slowly links up with the events of Breaking Bad: What will happen to Lalo Salamanca?
The brilliant cartel leader with the icy smile doesn’t appear at all in Breaking Bad, outside of one offhand mention of his name by Saul Goodman. And now we know why. In last week’s episode, Salamanca and “the chicken man” Gustavo Fring confronted each other in the latter’s unfinished, subterranean drug superlab. Fring had stashed a gun there ahead of time, suspecting the final showdown would happen there. And it did. Two men entered — and only Fring walked out.
That left Better Call Saul fans with one other huge question: What will happen to Kim Wexler?
READ MORE: Better Call Saul mid-season finale: The beginning of the end, and a shocking death
“We’re bad for each other”
Kim, of course, is neither mentioned nor seen at all in Breaking Bad, which led fans to worry that she would have to meet an untimely end in order to square that circle.
Turns out, Better Call Saul had something different, but no less heartbreaking, in mind. The events surrounding Howard, and then Kim getting pulled into Lalo’s subsequent scheming around Fring, proved too much for her. Her pained face during the law firm’s memorial gathering for Howard was a giveaway. So was the resignation in her eyes when she learned that the firm is downsizing.
So many people, in other words, pulled into a vortex of death of chaos because of Jimmy and Kim.
“You asked if you were bad for me,” Kim tells Jimmy, near the end of Fun and Games. “That’s not it. We’re bad for each other.”
Her bags are half-packed. Jimmy begs. He pleads for Kim to stay. He tries everything, even invoking the clients who need her, but Kim is unmoved. Not only is she leaving Jimmy — she’s given notice to the bar. She’s quitting law, as well.
Kim’s confession about why she stayed too long with Jimmy is also emotionally devastating. Through her tears, she tells him: “I was having too much fun.”
Four more episodes of Better Call Saul
Rhea Seehorn, the actress who plays Kim, has always been fantastic. But her performance in Fun and Games was simply off-the-charts sublime. Hopefully, we haven’t seen the last of her character. As for Jimmy, that boy moves on fast. By the end of the episode, he’s already tricked out his house in icky Saul Goodman-style. We see him threatening to sue people right and left, refusing to pay bills he dislikes, and waking up in his bed next to random women.
The four remaining episodes of Better Call Saul, meanwhile, will continue to arrive weekly. Every Monday, until the series finale on August 15. Among the remaining orders of business:
- Walter White and Jesse Pinkman will definitely make an appearance of some kind.
- Carol Burnett has been cast as a character that we’ll meet in the remaining episodes.
- The post-Breaking Bad flash-forward that we saw at the beginning of Better Call Saul — of an incognito “Saul” managing a Cinnabon — will no doubt also be important. Who knows, perhaps he could reunite with Kim as part of that storyline, since they’d both be beyond their law careers at that point.
