This season def shed light on the difference between Kim and Jimmy.
1. It was Kims idea to ruin Howard.
2. Kim was mad Jimmy gave the Kettlemans money(the carrot) after she used the stick.
3. Kim condescendingly asked Jimmy if he’d rather be a friend of the cartel or a rat.
4. Mike’s emboldened Kim after telling her shes made if sterner stuff than Jimmy.
5. Jimmy called off the plan after he saw the judge with a broken arm, Kim said fukk that the plans still happening.
Jimmy scams because he doesn’t want to end up a pushover like his dad, but deep down cares about people like his dad did and has empathy. See the Irene situation a few seasons ago.
Kim played it straight so she wouldnt be like her mother, but deep down she is like her mom and gets a high off being bad for the sake of being bad. We’re seeing that finally come forward after she suppressed it for all those years.
I got this from reddit I think it something worth think over when it come to why kim is doing what she doing "
I’ve seen a bunch of posts describing Kim’s arc as something like “she’s preferring the scheming lifestyle” or “she’s going back to how she was as a child” which I think really trivializes what I think is Kim’s loss of identity.
She basically spent the first four seasons desperately trying to rise up the ranks and get to partner. She finally gets her dream job with Mesa Verde and she gets to focus on that and do public defense on the side. Deep down, she knows the law is incredibly unfair. She grew up poor and downtrodden, never owning a place and being chased off by landlords by her own admission.
This comes to a breaking point in the fifth season, when Mesa Verde started interfering with her public defense work (her way of reconnecting with her roots; she’s the one that “made it,” at least she can help out) and when she was forced to kick an old man out of his home, so they can build a call center that they could build anywhere else. She opens up to Acker, I think maybe the most she ever did over the course of the show when she talks about her rough childhood, and she’s met with disdain. Acker doesn’t even believe a word she says and calls her a lying shyt to her face.
I think that’s when she realizes that she became something that she always hated. That’s the first time she starts a scheme that can have immense legal ramifications, and she struggles through it for the entire season, until she sees that she did a whole more good in that one instance than she did for the last four seasons.
She hates Howard because she blames him for turning her into a corporate lawyer that would make an old man homeless for spite, and she also hates him for holding up the Sandpiper case to get more money. It’s mentioned multiple times in the show that a lot of the old folks, the ones who actually suffered, will die before the case is over.
I think it makes perfect sense that she hates him and would love to bring him down, and I think it also makes sense that she took that swerve in the fifth episode. She was incredibly hesitant to take what would supposedly be her dream job, because in her mind it meant going back into the corporate HHM lifestyle and abandoning her identity yet again."
