Better Call Saul S6E9: “Fun and Games” Is Anything But

The following contains spoilers for Better Call Saul S6E9 (“Fun and Games”), written by Ann Cherkis and directed by Michael Morris. 

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After last week’s devastating episode, Better Call Saul somehow managed to make things worse. In “Fun and Games,” we see all our main characters trying to regain some sense of normalcy in the aftermath of Lalo and Howard’s deaths, but for everyone—Jimmy, Kim, Gus, and Mike—there really is no normal to be had.

This week’s cold open is a montage of Jimmy and Kim following Mike’s instructions, going about their respective workdays after Howard’s murder as if nothing ever happened. We see Mike, too, as he and his crew work quickly to get Jimmy and Kim’s apartment back to normal. The montage is set to “Perfect Day” by Dresage & Slow Shiver, and the repeated lyrics, “It’s the perfect way to end a perfect day,” initially seem ironic given the circumstances. This is, in fact, a horrendous way to end the world’s worst day, but the choice of song takes on a entirely different meaning once “Fun and Games” reaches its conclusion (but more on that later).

When the montage is complete, Jimmy and Kim return home to see that all evidence of the night before has been removed—a clean slate, if you will—but of course they will never feel at home in that apartment again. It will never truly be back to normal, and so they pack their bags and head to a hotel. As Kim lays in the bed, Jimmy tries to reassure her that everything will be ok, telling her, “One day we’ll wake up and brush our teeth and we’ll go to work and at some point we’ll suddenly realize that we haven’t thought about it at all. None of it. And that’s when we’ll know. We’ll know we can forget.” He really believes that this is true and he wants Kim to believe it, too, but it’s an impossible dream. No one, especially a person like Kim Wexler, can come out of this unscathed. While Jimmy is especially gifted at pushing down his trauma—we’ve seen him do it with Chuck and his near-death experience in the desert—she’s never going to forget. While they are similar in many respects, this is not one of them.

After the cold open, we spend the rest of the first half of “Fun and Games” with Gus (and later Mike). After vanquishing Lalo once and for all (and taking a few hits in the process), Gus has to do a little damage control before he can fully put it behind him. Gus goes to Don Eladio’s home to meet with him, Bolsa, Hector, and the Cousins. Hector has gone to Eladio with accusations against Gus, having dinged out his claims to the Cousins letter by letter, and Bolsa reads them aloud to the group. Hector reveals that Lalo survived the massacre at his home and told him that it was Gus and not the Peruvians who were responsible, and that Lalo was preparing to confront Gus face to face when he disappeared. He asks that Eladio to look into Gus’s eyes because he will see hate there, and he will know that Gus is the enemy and is plotting against all of them. He ends with the classic Salamanca demand of blood for blood, and Eladio asks Gus what he has to say for himself.

In a bold display of confidence (albeit in Gus’s quiet way), he refuses to counter these accusations, claiming they do not merit a response. Between the precautions Lalo took to keep the fact he was alive a secret from everyone but Hector and the “proof” that Gus’s men planted that Nacho was on the Peruvians’ payroll, there is simply no evidence of Gus’s involvement. Both Lalo and Hector knew that they needed concrete proof to bring to Eladio, and even though Lalo finally got that proof, it is buried with him. So although Eladio knows that Gus hates the Salamancas, he has no choice but to dismiss Hector’s claims (and send him angrily dinging to bed).

In terms of keeping the peace, Eladio suggests that they split the territory, with the Salamancas in charge of the south and Gus working under Bolsa in the north. Gus thanks him for his trust, but before Eladio takes his leave, he tells Gus that he did see hate in his eyes, and while a little bit is ok (and understandable—Eladio knows what Hector did to Gus on his watch), Gus must never forget who is boss. Gus accepts this for now, but we know that splitting territory with the Salamancas and working for the cartel under Bolsa is not Gus Fring’s endgame. He won’t rest until they are all dead and buried and he is running his own empire. But for the moment, Gus is happy enough to have come out on top with Lalo and to get back to normal.

I think it’s interesting that Eladio was able to see through Gus’s calm facade to the hate he holds in his heart for him. While Gus always does a good job of keeping his true emotions in check during his meetings with the cartel, it’s always difficult for him to swallow the Chicken Man moniker and act subservient to men he has no respect for—men who have wronged him. What’s worse, he’s forced to do so in the exact location—the patio out by Eladio’s pool—where his partner, Max, was murdered by Hector in “Hermanos” (BrBa, S4E8). Of course, we know he finally exacts his revenge at this same spot in “Salud” (BrBa, S4E10): one of Breaking Bad’s most iconic and satisfying scenes. But here in “Fun and Games,” Gus’s rage is still simmering beneath the surface, and Eladio wants him to know that he knows (even if he can’t do anything about it). The scene ends with a nice nod to “Salud” as Bolsa pours himself a drink and Gus walks over to the pool’s edge and stares down into the water where one day in the not-too-distant future, Eladio will die.

Gus finally returns to his home, a weight clearly lifted as he throws open the shutters and lets the light in. All season long, Gus’s home has been both his fortress and his prison, but now he is finally able to reclaim it (and his peace within it). But it’s also time for him to reclaim his business. Gus speaks with Mike in the basement, on his side of the secret tunnel, and gets confirmation that Jimmy and Kim played their parts as they were instructed (“maybe a bit better” according to Mike), and that the police believe that Howard’s death was a suicide. With that loose end tied up, Gus is ready to ramp back up when it comes to the lab, but when he gets straight to business, Mike looks a bit taken aback by it (as much as anything really fazes Mike Ehrmantraut). I think Mike would prefer that, after everything that’s happened and the fact that Gus is still recovering from his injuries, his boss would just sit back and take a breath before jumping back into the Superlab construction, but that’s not the Gus Fring way and Mike knows there’s no point in arguing. Gus instructs him to start looking for a new engineer and crew that very day; he’s already been forced to waste enough time—and part of that wasted time is on Mike as a result of the Werner situation (another reason for him to keep his head down and do as he’s told). 

Gus is in something of a celebratory mood and, now that he’s able to move around freely, he goes to a wine bar/restaurant (which it’s clear he used to frequent as he knows the staff). This is, I think, the saddest Gus scene in the entire BCS/BrBa universe—sadder even than Max’s death—because we see Gus in a way we never see him. Gus is well acquainted with the waiter, David, who brings him a taste of a high-end bottle of wine. As always, Giancarlo Esposito plays this scene with incredible restraint and subtlety, but we can feel Gus’s hopefulness and his yearning for some semblance of normalcy and human connection (and I think, after this scene, we can finally put all those misguided “Gus is straight” takes to rest). There is very clearly a connection between Gus and David, and we see Gus get as emotionally vulnerable as we’re ever likely to see him when he tells David that he bought a bottle he’d suggested and is saving it for a “special occasion.” It’s clear that Gus would like David to share in that special occasion bottle with him, but David seems to miss Gus’s subtle invitation.

When David leaves to fetch a bottle he wants to show Gus, we can see the hope and excitement drain from Gus’s eyes and his face. He takes a sip of the wine David had poured from him, and he can taste its notes of meat and blood: a reminder that, even though he is free of Lalo now, he will never be free of his need for revenge against the Salamancas and the cartel—his own blood-for-blood quest. Gus’s relentless pursuit of revenge keeps him trapped in this lonely life where there is no room for David or anyone else. He knows firsthand what kind of collateral damage his choices can have on people he cares most about, and so he leaves without saying goodbye to David. Gus is a solitary man but we rarely (if ever) get to see and feel his true loneliness as deeply as we do in this scene, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch.

Gus’s role in “Fun and Games” ends on this forlorn note—the first of three such endings we will see in this episode. As for Mike, he’s also finally returned home, settling in with a beer and some baseball as we’ve seen him do so many times before. He’s still unsettled, though, and when he puts his gun away in a secret stash compartment beneath his floorboards, he pulls out the fake ID that Nacho had procured for his father and takes a long look at it. We see him looking at the marble run that Kaylee had been building in “Wine and Roses” (S6E1), which was the last time we saw the two of them physically together. It was while Kaylee was playing with her contraption that Nacho called Mike from Mexico and he didn’t take the call. It’s clear that, even with Lalo finally dead and buried, Mike still very much bothered by Nacho’s fate (and his role in it), so he decides to go see Manuel Varga in an attempt to provide some sort of closure, both for Nacho’s father and for himself.

Manuel is Mike’s loose end to tie up. He looks at Manuel and he sees a father who doesn’t know what happened to his son, and Mike goes to him as a father who lost his own son, thinking he might be able to bring him some comfort, but Mike’s idea of comfort and closure is very different from Manuel’s. Manuel recognizes Mike from when he posed as a customer at his shop in “Cobbler” (S2E2), but it becomes clear to him very quickly that Mike is not the clueless old man he pretended to be back then. When Mike speaks to Manuel, he might as well be speaking about Matty. He tells Nacho’s father, “Your son made some mistakes. He fell in with bad people. But he was never like them, not really. He had a good heart.” He also tells him that he doesn’t have to worry about the Salamancas, that their day is coming and “there will be justice,” but Manuel’s idea of justice is a world away from Mike’s. 

Manuel Varga is probably the most pure-hearted and truly good character in the entire BCS/BrBa universe. He is a man with a strong and unflappable moral code, and his response to Mike’s assurance that justice will be done is a harsh condemnation of not only Mike but nearly everyone in the BCS/BrBa world. Manuel tells Mike,  “What you talk about is not justice. What you talk of is revenge. It never ends. My boy is gone. You gangsters and your justice. You’re all the same.” Mike has come to Manuel in an attempt to do the right thing by him and Nacho, to relate to him as a grieving father, but Manuel’s words cut him deep because he knows that he’s right. Manuel is the kind of man Mike never was and never could be. Mike has always retained some sense of moral superiority over the other people in the game—he has a code and he sticks to it, and that’s what lets him sleep at night. But confronted with a man like Manuel Varga, Mike sees himself as he truly is. He knows that Manuel is right—he’s no different from the rest. As “Fun and Games” director Michael Morris puts it in an interview with AMC, here Mike is “confronted with what a real moral code looks like,” and he realizes that, In the eyes of a truly good man like Manuel Varga, he’s just another gangster. 

Mike has to take what Manuel says about justice versus revenge to heart, since he himself took revenge on Hoffman and Fensky for killing Matty and, in his mind, would call that justice. In fact, almost everyone in Better Call Saul struggles to separate the concept of justice from that of revenge. Gus is on a revenge spree, and he would call it justice. The entire Salamanca concept of blood for blood is based on justice, but all of it is always revenge. You could even look at Jimmy and Kim’s crusade against Howard as an act of revenge dressed up like justice—Kim certainly looked at it that way even if Jimmy didn’t really as things escalated. For a show about lawyers, there really isn’t a lot of real justice to be found. At the end of the day, even Chuck with all his legal sanctimony wanted revenge on Jimmy (and Jimmy wanted revenge on him). The question of what is justice and what is revenge is at the very heart of Better Call Saul, and in a show full of lawyers and cops and criminals, it’s the upholsterer Manuel Varga who seems like the only person who actually knows the difference. 

And so Mike’s role in “Fun and Games” ends on another death of sorts, because I believe that this conversation with Manuel is what transforms the Mike we see in Better Call Saul (the one who had a soft spot for Werner Ziegler, the one who felt something of a paternal bond with Nacho) into the cold, hard Mike Ehrmantraut we meet in Breaking Bad.

The remainder of “Fun and Games” is dedicated to Jimmy and Kim and the aftermath of Howard’s death. We’ve seen them going about their days, pretending everything is as it should be, and while we didn’t see them put on their show for the police, we have heard from Mike that they did so exceptionally well (which comes as no surprise). But those things are easy compared to having to attend Howard’s funeral in the lobby of HHM. Waiting for the elevator, Jimmy tries to assure Kim that they will only have to put in a 20-minute appearance—that they can get through 20 minutes of anything (and interestingly enough, this line comes when there is approximately 20 minutes left in the episode). There isn’t much that’s actually fun and games about this episode, but the fact that the BCS production team just used photos from Patrick Fabian’s Instagram to decorate Howard’s funeral scene did give me a brief moment of joy in an otherwise heartwrenching episode. 

Howard’s funeral is well attended by the Albuquerque legal community, as Chuck’s was, and it’s impossible not to feel the specter of Chuck looming here. More so than Chuck’s church funeral, the gathering in the HHM lobby for Howard reminds me of the dedication of the law library in “Winner” (S4E10). Both here and at the dedication, Jimmy is wearing a mask—for Chuck, it was the mask of a devastated, grieving brother so that the members of the Bar would view him as sympathetic; here, it’s the mask of a shocked colleague who has no idea how something like this could have happened. He’s putting on a show both times (as is Kim), and both times he’s in some way responsible for the death. Jimmy has managed to take out the M and one of the Hs in HHM (at this point it’s pretty much confirmed that Howard’s father is dead and not just retired since he doesn’t appear in this episode), and—as we learn from Rich Schweikart—in doing so, he’s taken down HHM itself.

HHM was once the dream firm of both Jimmy and Kim, but for both it turned into a source of resentment. Now, with all of its founding partners dead and its reputation in the gutter (due to the public’s perception of how Chuck and Howard died), HHM is both downsizing and changing its name. Howard’s funeral is a funeral for the firm, too. At one time, Jimmy and Kim may have celebrated this, but it has come at too great a cost. As Rich says, it’s the “end of an era,” and those words only become more true as “Fun and Games” continues.

The scene where Jimmy and Kim pay their respects to Howard’s wife Cheryl is one of those hard-to-watch scenes that Better Call Saul does so well. It has you crawling out of your skin at points, which is impressive considering that we’ve only briefly met Cheryl, and the scene between her and Howard in “Axe and Grind” (S6E6) doesn’t present her as the most sympathetic character. Still, no matter the status of their marriage, she is clearly grieving him—and perhaps grieving even harder because of the state of their marriage when he died.

Jimmy and Kim know that facing Cheryl is the real challenge of the day and they want to get it over with as quickly and cleanly as possible, but Cheryl is clearly an intelligent woman and she simply doesn’t believe the story she is being told by the police. She doesn’t believe that Howard had an addiction problem nor that he was suicidal. In short, she’s a problem, and Jimmy and Kim have to handle it. Like Cliff Main, who is also present in this scene, Cheryl was told by Howard that Jimmy had been harassing him. Cheryl wants answers from Jimmy, and she confronts him about it, but Jimmy plays it like it was all in Howard’s head. He feigns vulnerability when he admits to treating Howard poorly over the years out of jealousy, because Howard had Chuck’s respect and Jimmy never did. I have to wonder, though—as I do during in every moment where Jimmy weaponizes his relationship with Chuck—how much Jimmy can acknowledge that what he’s saying is actually the truth.

Jimmy has never and will never work through his Chuck issues; he’s buried all that and he isn’t going to dial up Howard’s therapist and take a deep dive into how he really feels about that relationship and what happened to it. But on some level, Jimmy has to know that his feelings towards Howard really are rooted (at least partly) in jealousy. It’s fascinating to me the way that Jimmy can use his actual feelings as ammunition without actually feeling any of the emotion surrounding them. Knowing who Saul is in Breaking Bad versus who Jimmy is in Better Call Saul, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s capable of completely burying huge parts of who he is. I suppose I’m more impressed than shocked, but that’s a horrible way to live and it makes the character of Saul Goodman that much more tragic.

Cheryl isn’t buying Jimmy’s story (which, ironically, is the only true thing that is said in this exchange) and she asks them to tell her what they told the police. Here we get a glimpse of what Jimmy and Kim’s performance for the cops must have been like, with Jimmy playing mostly ignorant about why Howard would show up at their place (only that it might have had something to do with the Sandpiper case) and inferring that he was under the influence. Cheryl is insistent that Howard was not on drugs, that she doesn’t care what the police or anyone say, and you can see the wheels turning in Kim’s head because she knows that Cheryl will dig in on this. When Cheryl says, “There’s something more to this,” Kim knows she has to intercede and put an end to this, whatever it takes. 

Kim makes up a story about her having seen Howard late one night at the office snorting something at his desk and keeping it a secret. The look on Jimmy’s face when she’s spinning this tale is one of complete disbelief, which plays well for Cheryl and Cliff’s benefit but is also completely genuine. While Cheryl respects Kim (it would seem as if Howard didn’t share with her that Kim and Jimmy were partners in crime), Cheryl turns to Cliff and asks him if he’d ever seen anything to suggest that what Kim is saying could be true. And of course, thanks to Jimmy and Kim, Cliff has seen several things. Cliff tries to gently put Cheryl off, but she’s absolutely devastated. And that should have been enough—it could have stopped there and Kim would have succeeded in solving the Cheryl problem—but, as she’s done all season, she simply can’t help herself from taking things too far.

As if it wasn’t bad enough to shatter Cheryl’s memory of her husband at the man’s funeral, Kim fakes comforting Cheryl and tells her that maybe she misunderstood (when obviously there’s no misunderstanding seeing someone snorting something). In the cruelest possible twist of the knife, Kim uses their estrangement against Cheryl, assuring her that she’s his wife so of course she would have known. What Kim does here is honestly unforgivable; she manages to make Cheryl feel guilty for not seeing the signs of her husband’s fake addiction that led to his fake suicide when the real guilt lies with her and Jimmy. It’s awful, and Jimmy and Kim both know it, but they are still in survival mode and the Cheryl problem has been handled.

Jimmy and Kim leave and head down into the parking lot—the same parking lot where we’ve seen them have so many intimate moments—but as bound as they are by their marriage and their trauma, they are farther apart than they’ve ever been. Jimmy tries to stay positive, telling Kim that it’s all over now and that they can “let the healing begin,” but it just rings so hollow and almost glib given the circumstances. Jimmy is yet again insisting that there is some possible return to normal for them, and the more he says it, the less believable it is. We the audience can hear it and Kim can hear it, too. I had such a bad feeling watching this scene the first time, thinking that Kim was going to end it then and there, but instead she kisses him and takes her leave. Having seen how “Fun and Games” plays out, now I think that this is the exact moment that Kim made the decision, and that kiss was in some ways a goodbye not a see you later.

The first life-altering decision we see that Kim has made here is that she has decided to quit the law. She’s forced to reveal this in court when the judge argues against her petition to change her client’s counsel, and she tells him that she gave notice to the bar two hours prior. She’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing to Howard’s service, so she must have left that funeral and immediately given her notice, contacted Paige to hand off her client, and started drafting that petition. She knew exactly what she was going to do when she kissed Jimmy in that parking lot. He told her to let the healing begin, and this is part of what healing looks like for her. 

The other part is a lot more painful to watch because while Kim Wexler giving up the law does seem wrong in a lot of ways, it’s just a career. People change careers later in life all the time, and many of them end up happier for it. But the other decision that Kim makes is one that’s a knife in the heart of any Better Call Saul fan who has been rooting for McWexler from the beginning. It’s better than her ending up like Nacho and Howard, but just barely.

Kim smokes a cigarette on their balcony, waiting for Jimmy to return home like she’s done so many times before. We hear Jimmy come screeching into the parking lot and we know he’s found out about her quitting the law, which is only confirmed when he comes busting into the apartment very aggressively and yelling about it. He realizes quickly that this is not a good approach, and he goes into full motormouth mode trying to talk her out of it, bringing up the facts that her clients need her, that being a lawyer is who she is. Kim doesn’t say much at all about it except that it’s done, because there is a far more devastating conversation they need to have.

When Jimmy enters their bedroom to gather some things so they can go back to the hotel, he sees that she’s packed her bags. She’s leaving Jimmy, and it’s worth looking at their conversation in detail because there’s a lot to unpack there. 

Kim: “You asked if you were bad for me. That’s not it. We are bad for each other… Jimmy, I have had the time of my life with you. But we are bad for everyone around us. Other people suffer because of us. Apart, we’re okay, but together we’re poison.”
Jimmy: “Just tell me what I need to do to change, okay? Just tell me what it is and I’ll do it… Kim, you make me happy. We make each other happy. How can that be bad? Hey, I love you.”
Kim: “I love you, too. But so what?”

It’s worth noting, first of all, that this is the first time that either of them say the words “I love you” on camera, and I can’t help but be reminded of the lyrics to “Something Stupid” (something of a McWexler anthem at this point) which include, “And then I go and spoil it all / By saying something stupid / Like I love you.” It’s not that I think they’ve never said it before; it’s just that the fact that we don’t hear them say it until their relationship is over is something so incredibly powerful—and then for it to be followed up immediately by Kim’s “But so what?” Absolutely heartbreaking. In my article last week, I questioned whether the fact that they loved each other would be enough to save them; this week I got my answer (and it was the answer I was dreading but which makes the most sense given the circumstances).

Kim has finally come to accept the fact that their love for each other is toxic, and it’s not that she’s bad for him or he’s bad for her individually; it’s that the two of them together—that strong bond of love that they share that will make them do absolutely anything for the other—is actually dangerous. Their love has a body count now, and Kim is ready to take responsibility for that and put an end to it once and for all.

We see here that Jimmy still doesn’t understand. He thinks it’s all on him, asking her how he can change, what he can do to fix it. He believes that Chuck’s proclamation from “Nailed” (S2E9) that he has “ruined this fine young woman” has now come to pass. He blames himself for Kim tanking her own career and for this breakup, but he can’t see that it’s the combination of the two of them together that is both something beautiful and something unforgivable. He doesn’t see that the fact that they make each other happy can be bad because it results in bad things happening to good people. Whether Kim believes Jimmy can change or not doesn’t really matter because she’s decided that she needs to change. She’s become someone she does not want to be, and she can’t make the changes she needs to make while she’s still with him.

She knows that he still hasn’t wrapped his head around it; he’s still blaming Lalo for everything and refusing to take any responsibility (or allow her to take any) so she has to go a bit further. She tells him that she lied to him (by omission)—breaking the one marriage vow that ever really mattered, which was to tell each other everything (especially the things they have an urge not to tell)—when she kept from him that Lalo was still alive. She explains her reasoning, and we see Kim truly taking responsibility for the part she played in all of this and the toxicity that she brings to their relationship: 

I told myself I was protecting you, but that’s not the truth. The real reason I didn’t tell you was because I knew what you’d do… You’d blame yourself. You’d fear for me. You’d want us to run and hide until you were sure I was safe. You would pull the plug on the scam. And then… we’d break up. And I didn’t want that. Because I was having too much fun.

Kim has spent this entire season rationalizing and compartmentalizing and doubling down, but she’s finally reached the point where she can look at herself and her actions and say, “I was wrong. I did the wrong things, and I did it because it was fun.” It echoes Walt’s famous final speech to Skyler in “Felina” (BrBa S5E13): “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And… I was really… I was alive.” But for all the parallels between Kim and Walter this season—the pushing off responsibility to someone else, the constant rationalizations, the God complex, the sense of moral superiority, the constant escalation when the universe is telling you to stop—this is the point where she chooses to follow a different path, and it’s what kills Jimmy McGill for good.

As showrunner Peter Gould says in an interview with The Ringer, 

Kim chooses to leave. She’s changing what she’s going to do. And Jimmy… is so hurt. To me, that’s what the ending is. The question we started with on the show is, “What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?” and I think this episode answers it… He’s so hurt, he’s so wrecked by what happens that he flattens himself out into a cartoon character.

And that’s what “Fun and Games” leaves us with when it flashes forward to the Breaking Bad full-Saul era. We see him wake up in his garish house after a night of meaningless sex with a sex worker. He’s got the Bluetooth in ASAP and he’s working his legal magic before he even hits the office. He’s got Francesca working overtime on the other end of the line, and there’s even a reference to a “public masturbator” client who may or may not be Badger, although Saul is wearing a different outfit than he is the day he meets Badger—either way, we’re obviously meant to make the connection even if this isn’t the exact day in the future where Walt and Jesse come into Saul’s life.

We see the iconic LWYRUP Caddy and hear one of Saul’s commercials play on the radio, and then we finally reach the office of Saul Goodman, which has now taken its final form. Lady Liberty is perched on the room, the waiting room has gone from Francesca’s dream to her nightmare, and Saul’s own office is columned and Constitution-wallpapered. When he drinks from his World’s Greatest Lawyer mug, we can’t help but think of the World’s 2nd Greatest Lawyer mug gift from Kim. And, I think perhaps worst of all, the episode ends with Saul telling Francesca to start his day by saying, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall”—a horrible perversion of Chuck’s line from “Chicanery” (S3E5).

Saul Goodman has risen from the ashes of Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler is gone (we don’t yet know where, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her quite yet). In the end, they both took different approaches to the Sunk Costs fallacy. Jimmy goes all in, going full Saul and letting his soul die with Jimmy, while Kim cuts her losses and gets herself out. When you think about it, it’s the perfect way to end a perfect day (i.e. their relationship) because both of them stay true to who they are. Jimmy McGill can bury parts of himself he doesn’t like and things he doesn’t care to remember, and with enough trauma piling up in there, he has to reinvent himself completely. But Kim isn’t capable of doing that; she can’t shove it all down and forget. She can make a change, but her change is (hopefully) towards a better and more authentic version of herself—somebody she actually likes instead of someone (like Saul) who is even more deplorable. In the end, Jimmy packs it all away and becomes Saul where Kim takes responsibility for her actions—for her, justice is done, though the heavens fall.