'Better Call Saul' Season 5 Episode 5 Review: Jimmy and Kim join forces, but their relationship suffers further
Spoilers for 'Better Call Saul' Season 5 Episode 5 'Dedicado A Max'
Ever since the onset of Season 5, we have seen Kim and Jimmy-turned-Saul Goodman's relationship suffer the inevitable strain from his newly amped avatar, goals and clientele. And even though in Episode 5, Kim and Jimmy join hands to save Acker's house from getting demolished, there's a clear distinction in the core value of the two — with Kim looking out for what's best for her client and Jimmy aching to constantly score wins. Jimmy's road to destruction had already sparked the day he went around giving cards and promising 50% off to the seedy crooks in town but that was just the tip of the iceberg of indiscretion Jimmy is capable of, to advocate his client no matter how impossible his case be.
Kim's idealistic nature forces her to ask Jimmy to litigate for Acker as the bank, Mesa Verde, wants to demolish his house and build a call center on it. The land is now owned by Kim's client, Kevin, whose stubborn business mind doesn't allow him to see beyond any profit. In her pursuit to get the elderly Ackerly some justice, Kim and Jimmy join hands with him doing the utmost to make sure the construction guys aren't able to take over Acker's land, and his first step of action is to create confusion surrounding the address on the legal papers and Acker's property. Jimmy rips off the address plate on the mailbox and halts the process for a day, while Kim is stuck trying to negotiate the pros and cons of pursuing this site with her client, Kevin.
Earlier in the episode, Kim takes it up in a business meeting with Kevin how Jimmy advocating for Acker would be a complication, and at the time Kevin doesn't really doubt her participation owing to that. Instead, the more Kim tries to detach herself from the case, the more Kevin wants her to represent him; which turns out to be a smart decision in the long run because Saul Goodman's trickster ways know no limits. The next thing Jimmy does as Saul is grind chips from smoke detectors and spread the dust around Acker's property to get the area under scrutiny for radiation the next day.
Not only that, Jimmy goes to the extent of vaguely spray painting a Jesus outline on Acker's wall, thus calling a swarm of church groups coming to visit the property for religious purposes. And we thought staging a fake defendant on the stand for the witness to identify was the maximum Jimmy would stoop. He even contacts a wounded Mike in this episode, but the older man is far off in a deserted village, nursing his stab wounds back to health, and flat out refuses which forces Jimmy to hire a shadier PI to dig dirt on Kevin. This is where Kim's idealism begins to reflect as we recall she isn't in this for the money or the wins. Kim's genuine goal is to watch out for her client so even with the good in her heart, she opposes the idea of Kevin's house being broken into.
It is this subtle grounds of differences where one begins to worry about Kim's future in Jimmy's life, especially once his transformation into Saul Goodman is fully complete. We see her get accused of not going all in by her superiors and Kevin is grilling her rather hard for not being able to squash Jimmy and Acker's team. Just when Kim thought she could convince Kevin to move the construction to another site, the headstrong man made it very clear how that's not happening. But at the very end of the episode, Kim is finally able to spot something in the investigator's photos that might help her help Jimmy win Acker's case after all; what's really left to see is if any of this will help her and Jimmy's case in the long run.
'Better Call Saul' Season 5 airs on Mondays at 9 pm only on AMC.