The image of preteen Kim waiting pensively for a lift home from her band recital was nearly complete—all that was missing was a cigarette. Ever since her introduction in the first season, as she and Jimmy shared a smoky moment in HHM’s garage, Kim has been waiting, whether to find companionship in her personal life or to assert herself in her professional one. She takes control where and when she can, whether defiantly walking home from Red Cloud Middle School instead of riding with her unstable mother or, decades later, sabotaging her law firm’s efforts to displace a demanding senior client from his family home. The only problem is that she’s never fully been at the helm.
This dynamic with Jimmy is especially apparent, as it always hinges on his whims. She enters into their domestic partnership and their efforts to work together with eyes wide open, but Jimmy moves through the world attuned to his own particular rhythm, no less idiosyncratic than his cadence when he talks. And by the conclusion of “Wexler v. Goodman,” it’s evident that Kim is tired of keeping pace rather than setting it.
So, heading into next week’s episode, Jimmy and Kim might be getting married. Or planning to. Or is it Saul that she’s settling down with? She’d like to know as much as anyone, so at least then they can stop standing still in the shadows and pretending like their path is clear.
Her proposal, as it were, works to the extent that it immediately puts Jimmy on his heels and at a loss for words. Up until that moment, he’s barely stopped long enough to hear himself think, let alone for Kim to say what’s on her mind. He wants to blow past the awkwardness of having blindsided her at the settlement meeting with Mesa Verde and get to the part where they both agree that his spectacular stunt—outing Kevin and his dad’s unauthorized appropriation of elderly tribeswoman Olivia Bitsui’s black-and-white rancher pic by threatening to air low-budget ads making bogus claims of everyday bank malfeasance—was a win-win-win.
“Fuck you,” she finally exhales, calling his selfishness out for what it is before turning the tables with her own ultimatum: Commit to us as a pair—and all the real accountability that comes with it—before putting yourself first, or see what the future holds for Saul and Jimmy without her there as some kind of moral ballast.
The amusing aspect is that Kim might have been far more receptive to Jimmy's relentless dismantling of Zen master Howard through his voodoo-doll tactics. After bashing in Howard's Jaguar with bowling balls and disregarding his overtures about working at HHM, Jimmy finds inspiration in an encounter with two prostitutes at the public defender's office. In front of Cliff Main, Judge Green, and the whole upstanding white-collar community of Albuquerque, Jimmy deploys those same ladies of the night to intimidate Howard during a power lunch, as if he were a regular customer deeply in debt to their pimp.
It is a mystery why Jimmy chooses to keep his petty pranks on his and Kim's old boss private, while making her unwittingly complicit in theatrics that could undermine her credibility. As the cartel closes in on claiming him full-time, it makes sense that he would be slowly setting fire to whatever might cause him to reflect on who he was in a previous life.
In a gritty location where bad guys meet to discuss criminal deeds, Nacho is experiencing déjà vu at the very least. It turns out that the gringo "Lalo had a bug up his ass about" is none other than Mike, the same gringo who helped him land Tuco in jail and proved to be a more complicated ally than he bargained for. Now, per Gus, Nacho will be answering to Mike, and the pressing business in front of them is how to stop Lalo from decimating Fring's entire operation. Fortunately, Mike has a plan. Like with Tuco, the objective is to get Lalo behind steel bars for the unsolved murder of TravelWire employee Fred.
Mike deploys his go-to alias, private eye Dave Clark (presumably thrilled with his 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction). This time, he sets his sights on a bumbling police-precinct mailroom assistant and, more crucially, Lilian Simmons, who caught a glimpse of Lalo inside TravelWire and just needed some cajoling to update detectives with new recollections about the custom 1970 Monte Carlo he was cruising around in. Voilà, Lalo is ensnared by a dragnet of street-beat APD and apparently destined to join his cousin Tuco in state custody. (One could easily conclude that Saul's subsequent fearful invoking of Lalo in Breaking Bad stemmed from what he feared were the drug runner's assumptions about who engineered his arrest.)
There's still business left for Mike and Nacho to discuss, namely Nacho's anxieties over Gus having a gun to his father's head, and how the hell either of the Varga men survives their entwinement with New Mexican meth. Perhaps this is the moment when we learn the true origin story of a certain infamous Disappearer.
We are undoubtedly getting close enough to the conclusion of Saul's saga—and its alignment with the schemes of one Walter White—where some light will have to be shed on the series' darkened corners. And if it concerns Kim, the greatest tragedy would be if she loses it all by virtue of finally gaining control.
