They’re outlaws and rogues - his kind of people. But there’s an element of “game recognize game” in the way Jimmy admires the scam the Kettlemans are pulling, even if he’s using their shameless greed to his own ends. The two are united in how they feel about the Kettlemans, who are obviously shady and exploitative, and about their shared goals regarding Howard, HHM, and the Sandpiper lawsuit. Jimmy offers the carrot, Kim the stick, even past the point where the carrot has been deemed totally ineffective. (Craig doesn’t work front of house at Sweet Liberty Tax Services, for obvious reasons, though their clientele probably can’t see far past their glaucoma to notice.) The Kettlemans are part of Jimmy and Kim’s elaborate plan to humiliate Howard and bring the Sandpiper case to a quicker settlement, but for Kim, leveraging justice on behalf of the Kettlemans’ clientele is a major side benefit.Įach of the episodes of Better Call Saul this season has had bifurcated titles (the premiere is “Wine and Roses,” and the next two are “Rock and Hard Place” and “Hit and Run”), and this one, “Carrot and Stick,” reveals a crucial wedge between Kim and Jimmy, whose partnership we know will not survive the season. She doesn’t trust that Jimmy will have the fortitude to do the right thing despite his experience with Betsy and Craig Kettleman, the scam artists they’d both encountered in the show’s first season, when Craig was a treasurer who eventually got time for embezzlement. So when Kim takes a long look at an old woman shuffling away from Sweet Liberty Tax Services, unaware that her friendly third-party tax preparers have stolen a chunk of her refund, she feels fresh resolve about “the stick” she’s about to bring down on their head. Her departure from Schweikart & Cokely, coming after a long scheme in which she and Jimmy sabotaged Mesa Verde’s efforts to boot an old man from his home, was also a recommitment to helping “the little guy” beat a system that’s rigged against them. But she quickly discovered that the type of law she was practicing, like clearing out residents for a Mesa Verde call center, thoroughly repulsed her, putting her on the wrong side of the people she wished to help.
She had scaled the mountaintop of the professional lawyering class, using her intelligence and grit to persuade Schweikart & Cokely to open a banking division with her as the lead attorney. That’s what the fifth season of Better Call Saul was all about. Photo: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television