‘Better Call Saul’ Co-Creator Vince Gilligan Has Explained Why A Certain Character’s Fate Was Never Really In Question

(Spoilers for Better Call Saul‘s final season will be found below.)

Maybe, in retrospect, it was silly that we spent so much time worrying about the fate of Kim Wexler. Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, & Co. are cruel (R.I.P. Jane), but they’re not that cruel. As we learned in the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul, “Waterworks,” Kim is not exactly thriving in Florida, where she’s basically Bob from Bob’s Burgers stuck in an office nightmare, but at least she’s alive. Possibly going to jail, but alive.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gilligan discussed the decision to not kill Kim. “There probably also was an element of us being loath to kill off her character,” he said. “There were so many elements of this story that were preordained. You can’t kill off Jimmy McGill in his own show, you can’t kill off any character whom we know the fate of from Breaking Bad.” Gilligan explained that “it just didn’t feel right” to have Kim join Howard in the afterlife, and “that was probably never on the table, honestly.” He continued:

“We certainly kept silently smiling while people stopped us on the street and said, ‘You’re not gonna kill Kim, are you’ We let people think that maybe we would, but none of us wanted to do it. But figuring out where she wound up, it was in little baby steps, little fits and starts, like every other bit of plotting we do.”

I take it back: Gilligan is a monster for making Kim have that mayonnaise discussion with her dopey Florida boyfriend. A fate worse than death, indeed. We’ll have much more on “Waterworks” throughout the day, including the Lie Detector Test recap.