Kim Wexler Turning Out To Be The One Who ‘Breaks Bad’ Would Be An All-Time TV Twist

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Prequels are delicate in nature. Between not trying to lean too heavily on the original intellectual property, to figuring out a way to create drama despite the fact that the future of their characters is already established, successfully telling the story of what came before is a high-wire act that usually goes wrong more often than it goes right.

These are the exact questions that were raised as soon as Better Call Saul was announced, which was not long after the conclusion of its iconic predecessor, Breaking Bad.

And yet, despite the odds being firmly stacked against them, one of television’s most creative teams — Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and co. — not only figured out a way to make Better Call Saul a competent and intelligent prequel, but they’ve created a series so well-respected that there are now some who argue that it’s just as good as, *if not better than* Breaking Bad itself. While I’m not quite at that level of adoration, I certainly regard it as one of the best series on television for the last few years.

It should come as no surprise, though, as the framework for a compelling drama was always there: how did the almost cartoonish criminal lawyer Saul Goodman even come to exist in the first place?

RELATED: The Fall Of Saul Goodman Is Far More Tragic Than Walter White’s

For the first four-and-a-half seasons, Better Call Saul was a series about Jimmy McGill slowly receding into the background as the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll that is Saul Goodman began to take the reigns of his personality. Since we’ve always known that Slippin’ Jimmy would go on to become Walter White’s legal representation, the drama has always come from what may happen to those around him as he continued to descend into the darkness of the New Mexican drug trade. Naturally, the fate of his wife Kim Wexler — whose intelligence in the Breaking Bad universe is perhaps rivaled only by Walter White and Gus Fring — has always served as a conduit for said drama: is Saul going to get Kim killed?

However, as the season five finale slyly unveiled, perhaps we’ve spent all this time worrying about the wrong outcome: what if Better Call Saul is not a story about a man “breaking bad”, but a marriage?

For years now, fans have speculated that Kim — likely due to Saul’s increasingly criminal exploits — would find herself six-feet-under or carted off to North Dakota in a uHaul by The Vacuum Cleaner Man. After all, she never shows up in Breaking Bad — she’s never even mentioned — and that needs explaining. It never occurred to anyone, at least as far as I can tell, that Kim may not be in the picture because she’s the one who broke bad. Perhaps she’s the one who’s on the run, who crossed the wrong people, who left Saul behind.

In a television universe that’s as brilliant as the one crafted by Vince Gilligan and his Breaking Bad team, merely killing Kim off due to some cartel dispute always simply felt too rudimentary, too routine. It’s an ending we’ve seen before. No, when it comes to the end of Kim Wexler’s story, what if she’s missing from Breaking Bad not because she’s dead, but because she’s lost?

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Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com

Eric Italiano BroBIble avatar
Eric Italiano is a NYC-based writer who spearheads BroBible's Pop Culture and Entertainment content. He covers topics such as Movies, TV, and Video Games, while interviewing actors, directors, and writers.