Kim Wexler breaks bad
The Antihero Trilogy, Part 4
Back in 2021, for no other reason than that I was still mostly trapped in my apartment, I wrote a series of essays on The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, all of which I had watched or rewatched in quarantine. Much of my Breaking Bad essay was dedicated to imploring readers to watch Better Call Saul, its successor, prequel, and, in many ways, superior. I hope you’ve taken advantage of the intervening four years to do so, because the time has come. I rewatched it recently and have things to say. This is your spoiler warning.
In my Breaking Bad essay, I wrote:
It’s impossible to watch Breaking Bad in 2021 and not think about Donald Trump. At its core, the show is the story of a white man who thinks the world owes him more than he’s received and will go to any length to close the gap between what he has and what he thinks he deserves.
So I was surprised to find on my recent rewatch that the Better Call Saul character most similar to Walter White isn’t natural born con artist Jimmy-turned-Saul; his brother Chuck, whose judgmental nature and impossible standards drive him to madness and death; Mike, a highly competent, deeply conflicted white guy; Howard, a cruel dummy who is usually right; or Lalo, the almost literal supervillain Walt could only dream of being. The character most similar to Walt is Kim Wexler, Jimmy’s partner in life, love, and cons, and the beating heart of Better Call Saul.
In season two, Kim interviews for a position at the law firm Schweikart & Cokely, her first attempt at getting out from under the thumb of HHM, the firm run by Howard and Chuck. HHM put her through law school while she was working in the mailroom with Jimmy, literally and professionally indebting her to the firm and its partners. Kim will do anything for HHM, and Howard, in particular, will do anything to make sure her success only ever reflects well on him—never her.
During the interview, the S&C partners ask Kim about her life before law school, the mailroom, and New Mexico. She describes growing up in the rural Midwest and realizing the future that awaited her there was, “best case, probably married to the guy that ran the town gas station.” When one of the partners asks her what she wanted instead, Kim pauses, a lifetime of frustration roiling under the surface, and answers, “More.”
Like Walt, Kim thinks the deck is stacked against her desire for more. She learns early that scamming is a way to get around that obstacle, at least temporarily, and she gets a thrill out of wresting victory after victory from the jaws of other people’s low expectations. She’s the most ambitious person on the show, up there with drug kingpin Gus in her ability to ruthlessly pursue what she wants, far past the point where anyone else would have given up. Once she makes a plan, she will see it through, no matter what.
The difference between Kim Wexler and Walter White is that Kim is right. The world does owe her more than she’s received. The deck is stacked against her. She does deserve the expansive, liberated, powerful life she craves, and even more besides.
Kim knows she’s not the only one who deserves more. She knows her pro bono clients deserve more than to be chewed up by the U.S. legal system because no one cared enough to notice, let alone help. She knows the law deserves more than to be endlessly twisted so that a mid-tier regional bank can have a bigger lobby in its new branch. She knows Jimmy deserves more than Chuck’s disdain, and the cage in which it traps him. And Kim knows who deserves less, too: Howard Hamlin, and all the men like him whom she and Jimmy target for their off-hours scams.
Kim has fun manipulating those blowhards out of a bit of money and just a touch of their astronomical self regard. But the most consistent victim of her ruthlessness and ambition is herself, and it’s not fun at all. She humiliates herself for weeks seeking a single new client for HHM. After she takes that client with her to her own practice (with a little help from a Jimmy con, unbeknownst to her), she gives them so much time and effort she nearly dies after finally falling asleep at the wheel. And when Kim and Jimmy’s lie about Howard’s drug addiction goes so far off the rails that he ends up murdered, Kim decides that enough is enough. Her desire for more (circuitously, indirectly, randomly) killed someone, and so she must kill it.
This is, to put it mildly, not how Walt reacts when his pursuit of more results in violence and death. Not the first time, and not the dozens of times after that. By the end of Breaking Bad, he would rather commit mass murder (again) than be alone, safe but unrecognized as either a mastermind or a monster. At that point, either will do. To quote Jude Doyle writing about an entirely different entertainment property, “If a woman has a problem, it’s her problem, and if a man has a problem, someone has to pay.”
Kim wants and wants and wants, and by the end of Better Call Saul, it’s Kim who pays and pays and pays. She walks away from her marriage to Jimmy, the one person with whom she could be herself. She gives up her law license and the career that makes her feel like she’s doing good in the world. Eventually, she admits to inadvertently setting in motion the chain of events that led to Howard’s death, which opens her up to prosecution or at least a lawsuit that could leave her with nothing. But the most haunting way Kim pays is by completely and utterly erasing any trace of “more” from her existence. In the brief glimpse we get of her post-Jimmy life, she can’t even tell her dunderhead Florida Man boyfriend where she wants to go to dinner. She is functionally married to the guy who runs the gas station, and maybe even worse, because now she knows what else is out there, and who else she could be.
In the final episodes of Better Call Saul, Jimmy saves Kim from any consequence of her confession by putting on a performance of guilt so ostentatious that the legal system will forget all about what Kim may or may not deserve for her role in Howard’s death. He pays so that she won’t have to. But no one else could ever punish Kim as much as she has already punished herself, first in pursuit of more, and then in her insistence on less.
