Warning: Better Call Saul spoilers and Bob Odenkirk career spoilers ahead.
We know what happens to Bob Odenkirk after Better Call Saul — he’s signed on to play a Rust Belt English professor in the upcoming AMC series Straight Man. But what will become of his Better Call Saul character Jimmy McGill — aka Saul Goodman — last seen sharing a bittersweet goodbye with Kim Wexler at the gates of the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”? And what does the future hold for Kim?
Bob Odenkirk has some ideas, and shared them with EW in an exit interview for the character he played for six seasons of Better Call Saul and four seasons of Breaking Bad. Though Saul was sentenced to more than 80 years at ADX Florence, one of the toughest federal institutions, Odenkirk doesn’t think he and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) have seen the last of each other.
“I think she comes to see him! I think she comes to see him once a year — every other year at the least,” Odenkirk told EW in an interview posted after the airing of the Better Call Saul season finale. “And I think he helps a bunch of guys in prison to get out who are innocent, or he helps shorten their sentences. He gets treated really well. And I don’t think he gets out early…-ish.”
Will Saul Goodman use his legal acumen to get himself freed, too? Probably not. As Odenkirk noted, he likely boxed himself in with the dramatic courtroom monologue in which he finally took full responsibility for all his callousness, greed, and obliviousness to hurting the people he loved most — including his brother, Charles McGill (Michael McKean, who popped up for a cameo in the finale).
Also Read: Bob Odenkirk Says Better Call Saul Colleagues Saved His Life After Heart Attack
“I don’t think he gets out. I don’t know what kind of dispensation they have for an 80-year-old, but I believe they have some, once you get to be that age where you can do something else,” Odenkirk said. “But I think he’s kind of the king of the prison because he’s a really, really good lawyer and a great lawyer for the kind of people in there. And he puts that to good use, probably even does some good work, like, genuinely good work.”
Odenkirk doesn’t want Kim to pine away for Saul, but rather to continue her relationship with an incurious Florida man named Glen. Whether she should keep her job at the irrigation company is another matter.
“I think they see each other and I think he thinks she should stay married to that guy* and have a life,” Odenkirk opined. “I don’t know what she does, though. She doesn’t seem very happy at the water place.”
Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), doer of finger guns, on Better Call Saul
Fortunately, the finale suggests that Kim may find some satisfaction working at a legal aid clinic for people with nowhere else to turn. Seehorn told the Los Angeles Times that Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould — who wrote and directed the finale — wants people “to hypothesize and think about the next day, the next two weeks, the next six months, the rest of their lives.” But she does suspect that the law will remain part of Kim’s life.
“I personally think there’s a rebuilding of sorts and an attempt to relish any kind of second chance at life that is more truthful. And for Kim, I think the more truthful part does involve practicing law and trying again to go about actually helping people,” she said.
And she has a more optimistic prediction about Jimmy McGill’s prison sentence than Odenkirk does.
“I’m a hopeless romantic, so I can’t help thinking that she’s going to try to figure out how to decrease his sentence while still being on the up and up,” Seehorn told the Times. “You know, like in some way that doesn’t involve a scam. I don’t think it’s the end of their relationship, but I also think there’s plenty of people that will think that she’s never going back there and that is the end of the tale. But that just makes me cry too hard, so I can’t.”
*Not to argue with the great Bob Odenkirk, but is Kim married to Glen? I thought he went home after that party at her house in the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul, “Breaking Bad.” It doesn’t really matter: What matters is that Saul and Kim, the show makes clear, are the loves of each other’s lives. In their hearts they will always be doing finger guns.
Main image: Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill aka Saul Goodman and Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler in the early days of Better Call Saul.
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