Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
6.12 “Waterworks”
Written & Directed by Vince Gilligan
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando and Jonathan Banks
New episodes airing Mondays on AMC

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

For at least a paragraph or two every week, I've used this space to lay out predictions and then throw my hands up and admit there's no guessing anything here. This is Better Call Saul, the best thing on TV for one more week—and the people who make it are too good at zagging for us viewers to do anything but enjoy what we're watching at the moment, and what we've seen over the past seven years. But still. And yet. Hoo boy. The discrepancy between my assumptions and the writers' decisions is sometimes even wider than I'd come to understand it to be. 

Last episode ended with Jimmy McGill as Gene Takovic breaking into a mark's house for a robbery far enough removed from its careful planning that disaster was certain. The one thing you could assume was that the little heist wouldn't work out. You wouldn't think getaway driver Jeff would be the one getting caught. Sometimes "thing goes bad" is as close to the bullseye as you get. This is a good thing.

The bigger surprise, the one that let the air out of me, came in a series of flashbacks and cutaways to Kim. The "Waterworks" of the title refers to her new job at a sprinkler company in Florida, and it refers to crying. The decision is yours whether that means the tears Kim sheds or the ones you hold back when she takes the final steps toward clearing her conscience. 

Before that release: Kim, with a new haircut and clothing style, dates a guy with douchey sunglasses and a douchier tiger shirt. They're entertaining guests in the Florida suburbs, hosting a small crowd in awe of dyed deviled eggs. "That was fun," Kim's boyfriend says later, as he cleans up. "That was fun," she replies. And then they have sex and he says "yep" every time he thrusts. Later, she works on a puzzle as he watches The Amazing Race, and they're physically close but in different rooms, with their backs to each other.

The sequence evokes some complicated emotions, to say the least. Kim has stayed true to her decision to give up practicing law, she's settled with a total chump and she's seemingly obliterated her internal life in favor of just quietly existing. But she isn't causing any damage in the world. It seems as if she hasn't done anything in the past half-decade that would keep her up at night. She's become a truly neutral person after feeling, rightly or wrongly, that she had become a negative force.

It's a kind of atonement I haven't seen much in art. Kim isn't in jail (yet—more on that in a bit) and she isn't walking the land doing good deeds to make up for her old destructive ways. She's just not doing bad things. It's a grand gesture in the form of many small gestures stacked on top of each other.

As she's reinvented what it means to be Kim Wexler, Jimmy has begun to push as hard as he can against "Gene Takovic." Gene wasn't forced on Jimmy either, but the identity was a last resort decision where the only other choices were death or incarceration. Kim sits in her new life like it's a sweater. She laughs at dumb jokes and edits sprinkler brochure copy after spending years earning a law degree. It's a dramatic shift, but she's still herself. Gene Takovic is a different person completely, a shell that surrounded Saul Goodman, which was a natural continuation of Jimmy McGill.

Last episode, we watched Jimmy call Kim but we didn't hear anything that was said. This time, we get that. We learn they haven't talked in six years. "You shouldn't be calling," she says, trembling. She tells him to turn himself in. He points out that she's done bad shit, too. He loses it on her. She says she's glad he's alive, and she probably means it, but he's being an asshole. He's less than a hundred words into their first conversation since Albuquerque and he's chastising her for not running back into his arms.

For a long time, let's say 61 of the 62 episodes that have aired, I'd hoped Jimmy and Kim would meet up on the other side of everything, but that changed with "Waterworks." Jimmy is a monster. He's walking around in a Gene mask, but he's fully Saul. He doesn't deserve Kim's forgiveness or respect or love. This time two weeks ago, I thought he deserved a happy ending, but not anymore.

That's because of this phone call and a flashback to the moment Jimmy signed Kim's divorce papers. The six years didn't start from when she left ABQ, it started from here, right before Saul took Walter White and Jesse Pinkman on as clients. Kim sits in the garish Saul office as combover-Jimmy acts like an asshole and pretends the divorce means nothing to him. Kim is broken up and he can't even take his bluetooth earpiece out. He asks why she chose Florida and then says that it doesn't matter. "Have a nice life, Kim," he tosses off. And maybe it really doesn't mean anything to him. Maybe he's fully Saul and he's shed every aspect of Jimmy. It's essentially the scene in A Christmas Carol where Belle confronts and breaks up with Ebenezer Scrooge, only aren't in a story about interventions. This may be where things end for Kim and Jimmy—a bitter flashback and a terse phone call. I'd like to see Kim again in the finale because I like Rhea Seehorn's performance, but I'd also understand if we didn't see her again.

Her one dangling thread isn't with Jimmy, but Howard Hamlin's widow. In a way, Jimmy got under Kim's skin in that big phone call. He knows she believes that she's tainted as a person. It's the best way to hurt her. After he brings her past sins up, Kim catches a plane back to New Mexico to clear her conscience. She types up full confessions detailing the ways she and her then-husband systematically tried to destroy Howard's life, how he actually died, and how she helped cover it up by lying about a suicide. Then she gives everything to the authorities and to Cheryl Hamlin.

For Cheryl, it's too little, too late. "The lies you told, the picture you painted, that's all anybody remembers," she says." It's hard to know where Kim thought this would go. Cheryl asks why Kim's confessing now, all these years later, but the scene ends abruptly. There's really no way out for Kim, but there's also no evidence. She may not be prosecuted, and she tells this to Cheryl. Maybe she goes to jail, maybe not. If expert attorney Kim doesn't think she's headed to prison, I'll believe the character. It's a little cruel, ripping open old wounds, but Kim knows Cheryl always had questions about Howard's disappearance and would appreciate any closure.

Dropping the other copy of the confession at the court, Kim passes the parking attendant booth where Mike used to work and she sees a young attorney cleaning up and prepping a ragged client to stand before a judge. The world has moved on and regenerated.

Rhea Seehorn's big scene, the best she's had on the show, takes place on a shuttle back to the Albuquerque airport. She cries. It starts small and then she gasps and the cry cannonballs its way out of her. Her time in Florida has been as much about suppression as it has been about recovery, but it all comes out here. It's an expression none of the other characters get, either because they're incapable of such emotion or because they've been killed before they could have reached that point. It's mostly the former, though. The shuttle scene is one big claim that Kim Wexler is the most emotionally complex character on the show, that she's the only person who's changed without jettisoning any of her humanity.

Meanwhile, Jimmy breaks into the mark's house. He has twenty minutes before Jeff the cab driver swings by again to pick him up and the guy he's trying to rob is lying on the ground, half-drugged. As Jimmy spends an extra few minutes stealing cigars, watches, and alcohol, the guy stirs. It feels like Jimmy wants to be caught, like Kim making her feelings clear pushed him to the point where his one reason to return to the real world is gone.

The guy Jimmy's robbing is played by a new actor, by the way, maybe because of the abuse allegations I linked to last week. If you really wanted to stretch, you could say Jeff and this new guy changed actors to comment on identity and the idea that everybody, not just Jimmy, is constantly changing, but I'm pretty sure Don Harvey was just busy and Devin Ratray was just an asshole. Who can say, though, maybe Better Call Saul is becoming a Charlie Kaufman story. Think about it, man.

In a hilarious/tense sequence, Jeff sits in his cab, waiting for Jimmy, as a cop car pulls up behind him. Jeff thinks the police are scoping him out, the police think there's a criminally small amount of fish in their fish tacos, and the nonexistent pressure ultimately breaks Jeff, who peels out and crashes straight into a truck.

Jeff calls Jimmy from prison. The police think he committed the robbery and it seems for a moment like Jimmy is going to practice the law one more time and represent Jeff in court, even though that would almost certainly lead to his exposure and arrest. That doesn't happen. Jeff's mom, Marion, is home watching old Saul Goodman commercials on her computer. She's put the pieces together. She typed "conman Albuquerque" into Ask Jeeves (an amazing touch), and everything fell apart. When confronted by Jimmy, she tries to call the police, Jimmy rips the phone cord out of the wall. She threatens to use her Life Alert and Jimmy takes it out of her hands. "I trusted you," she says. And he gives it back to her. He's a friend to the elderly and is, perhaps, still a little Jimmy under all of the Saul. She uses her little button to call for help and Jimmy/Saul/Gene runs out the door and into an episode I couldn't begin to speculate on.