Rhea Seehorn has finally received the call. Following years of snubs, the Better Call Saul star has at last been shortlisted for an Emmy, for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series. And after the latest episode of Saul, there can be little doubt that she deserves to walk away with the gong.
As striving lawyer Kim Wexler, Seehorn has long been the moral centre of Better Call Saul. But this is a moral centre with a stain upon its soul, as we have discovered in the show’s devastating final season.With Saul nearing its finishing line, so Seehorn’s ability to convey a tragic murkiness has come more and more into its own. It’s hard to see how the Emmy could go to anyone else.
Better Call Saul has since 2014 been a mystery in which we already know the big reveal. The question it poses is: how did flailing Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) become supreme legal huckster Saul Goodman, of Breaking Bad infamy? However, as Saul has cycled through the seasons the more fascinating conundrum has revolved around Jimmy’s girlfriend and later wife, Kim.
How did straight-arrow Kim end up with ethically wonky McGill? And, given that Wexler is nowhere to be seen in Breaking Bad, what did it take to sunder their relationship? Along every step of the journey, Seehorn has delivered an unshowy masterclass – giving co-star Odenkirk the space in which to unleash his more slapstick acting style while always commanding every scene in which she appears.
But now, at the death, it becomes clear that, in a way, this was Kim’s story all along (spoilers to follow). With her exit from the Saul/Breaking Bad multiverse a foregone conclusion, the speculation was always that Kim would meet a tragic demise. Yet, in the end, the tragedy was Jimmy’s as Kim found she could no longer participate in their Bonnie and Clyde romance.
Devastated by the fallout from the murder of their former colleague Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), Kim finally wakes up to the toxicity of her relationship with Jimmy. Yet she does so only after visiting some truly dark places. First, she and Jimmy had cruelly gaslit Howard’s legal colleagues into thinking the smug but essentially upstanding lawyer had a drug problem.
This inadvertently led to Howard’s death. He’d gone to Jimmy and Kim’s apartment to confront the pair over their campaign against him. That visit felt like a metaphor for the show as a whole as the legal storyline and Jimmy’s interactions with the New Mexico underworld finally crossed over. They did so in bloody fashion as Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), returned from the dead to confront McGill, shot dead Howard – just to prove he wasn’t messing around.
That was partly on Jimmy, who had welcomed the Salamancas into his life. Still, Kim had to shoulder some of the burden too. After all, it had been her idea to set up Howard – and she had pushed ahead over her husband’s fitful objections. However, it is in this week’s episode, as Howard’s friends and family reel from his death, that Kim truly shows how far she is prepared to go.
Howard’s wife Cheryl (Sandrine Holt) knew her husband was no cocaine fiend. However, when she confronts Jimmy and Kim at Howard’s memorial, Kim – the most crooked straight woman in New Mexico – goes all in to defend the slander of Hamlin. Kim claims to have witnessed Howard snorting drugs late at work one night. And then she subtly, cruelly pulls the rug out from under Cheryl.
Maybe Cheryl was right, says Kim. Perhaps her husband was clean. “You would’ve known,” she adds. But she knows that Cheryl and Howard had become estranged and started living separate lives. Maybe Cheryl didn't know. Kim is taunting a widow.
It is unspeakable. And yet, Wexler doesn’t go overboard selling Kim’s malevolence. You see the hesitation in her eyes and in the downward curl of her mouth. In real-time, she realises she has passed the point of no return. It is a multifaceted performance, in which a panoply of emotions ripples across Seehorn’s face.
That same ambivalence becomes heart-wrenching when, a few scenes later, we learn Kim has resigned from the bar and is about to leave Jimmy. She’d done what she had to for him and understands there is no way back.Somehow Seehorn makes us believe in Kim as a individual who still knows right from wrong.
“We’re bad for each other,” she declares. “Apart, we’re OK, but together, we’re poison.” Jimmy replies by telling Kim he loves her. And then comes one of the most devastating shrugs in recent television. “I love you too,” says Kim. “But so what?”
Seehorn doesn’t just make us believe in Kim’s sadness and regret. She captures the complexity of a woman who escaped a small town in Nebraska and dreamed of meaningfully changing her life and the world. She achieved the former by qualifying as a lawyer. And, having burned out on corporate law, her plan for the latter is to become a defence attorney for those falling on the wrong side of American justice. And yet, there is always that glitch in the code: her love for the terminally flawed Jimmy.
“Nothing ever feels like clever shock value,” said Seehorn, talking to the Hollywood Reporter about Kim’s decision to leave Jimmy. “I was like, 'Oh right. That’s how much she can’t live in her own skin anymore.' While she’s dealing with it by looking almost catatonic in her suppression of emotion, she’s imploding, and she’s desperate. She’s like, 'I cannot be this person anymore. I have no right to practice law. I have no right to pass judgment on others.'"
As the unravelling Kim, Seehorn has always been riveting. However, this season her performance is all the more remarkable considering that, halfway through the shoot, she watched co-star Odenkirk almost die from a heart attack. Odenkirk suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest and had to take several months away to recuperate. And some of Kim’s darkest scenes come immediately after his return –including her shocked attempt to process Howard’s death and the mission on which she is then sent by Lalo to kill his nemesis, Gus Fring.
And after all that, there is a possibility her story is not yet done. We don’t know where Kim has gone but it isn’t unthinkable she has returned to Nebraska, where she used to work in a local supermarket chain, Hinky Dinky. Guess who is also in Nebraska? Yes, “Gene” – the cinnamon-bun pushing alter-ego Saul has taken on after the end of Breaking Bad.
With his and Kim’s prequel storyline over, it isn’t beyond the bounds that the action will zoom forward to the post-Breaking Bad “present day”. Might Jimmy and Kim cross paths one more time? It is surely on the cards. And if it does happen, expect Seehorn to reduce us to jelly all over again –sealing her status as Emmy front-runner and one of the great character actresses in modern television.
