It was just classic Lalo, improvisation crossed with startling athleticism.
We’ll see him later on in that strip mall full of bluster and bravado, hair combed to perfection and neon dress shirt pressed perfectly wrinkle-free. He’s scared, a lot, in a very real way, and the discovery that Lalo Salamanca did not in fact die in Mexico will not help that feeling at all. However the math of it all works out, my dude is spiraling right now, showing up at Mike’s house in a breathless panic and trying to plan an entire day of pampering to convince Kim to stay in the hotel. A similarly large part has to do with Lalo showing up at his door and his - apparently mistaken! - belief that he needs to protect Kim from harm. LIE - Jimmy has it all under control AMCĪ big part of this is still him dealing with the PTSD of that gunfight. Kim Wexler was never a damsel in distress. What this episode teeters toward is a version of that story where that exit is not a result of something Jimmy did, but instead of her own future shady behavior. She exits Jimmy’s life in some way, probably sooner than later. Kim Wexler does not show up in Breaking Bad. The truth is that there still is an anvil hovering over her head.
Kim might even end up being more diabolical in her journey because she has the innocent cover of pro bono work, whereas everyone knows Jimmy is all flash and sleaze. They both left HHM, they both got folded into a big firm and focused on one big client (Mesa Verde, Sandpiper), and they both had the realization that they’d rather be in it for themselves as criminal defense lawyers. Watch her do the same finger guns Jimmy did at the end of last season when he crossed over to the dark side. Watch her eyes light up as she talks about that Sandpiper money. Watch her face when she was talking to Jimmy about ruining Howard’s life with falsified claims of mismanaging client funds, a substantial step up from Jimmy’s “bowling ball through the windshield” revenge. Well, it looks like something knocked that governor loose. The difference might have been as simple as Kim having a governor on her motor put in place by the expectations of polite society. She’s been better than Jimmy at times, too. She’s always been good at it, dating back to her tequila-gridding days as Gisele St. Kim really leaped into action there in a way that seemed natural. Last week should have been a tip-off, though, the way she shredded Lalo and sent him packing when Jimmy couldn’t get a convincing word out of his mouth. I fully cop to the fact that I did not see this coming, at least not in this way. Maybe, despite her protests and scowling in the early stages of Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman, deep down, she… likes it. It might not be so much “What happened to Kim?” - with the implication being that some outside force caused her to disappear from Jimmy’s life - as it is “What happened to Kim?” Maybe this was never a situation where Kim Wexler ends up being a victim of circumstance, a person who things happened to, a person whose options are limited to “die or flee New Mexico in heartbreak.” Maybe all of this actually unlocked something in Kim that was there all along. It turns out we might have been emphasizing the wrong word in that last sentence. “If Kim is such a big deal here,” we’d think, “and she’s not present or even mentioned in Breaking Bad, then what exactly happens between now and then to cause that change?” Or, to put it in a more panicky, accurate way: What happened to Kim?
TRUTH - We’ve been emphasizing the wrong wordĪ few seasons back, once it became clear that Kim Wexler was going to be both an important ongoing character in this universe and an important ongoing part of Jimmy McGill’s life, a lot of us started doing some uncomfortable math.