‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6 on AMC: Writer Gordon Smith explains Lalo's death, 'we gave him the gift of getting everything'
As 'Better Call Saul' Season 6 hurtles to an end, there have been questions about who makes it out alive. The AMC drama's midseason premiere opened with a bang with the death of Lalo Salamanca. While the character's death was presumed early on, it was the manner in which it was done. Shedding light about it was the show's writer Gordon Smith who also scripted the Mike Ehrmantraut flashback episode.
"We had no interest in losing Tony Dalton, obviously. He’s incredible," Smith told Rolling Stone. "He’s so much fun on set (Lalo). We really didn’t want to lose the character, either. But we felt like we had set these forces in motion, and we were having these two titans of our story clash, and unfortunately, we knew Gus had to come out the other side.
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"I suppose there was a world where Lalo limps away and Gus has to chase him down, but that felt like territory we’d already covered. We were happy to give him a big, big, big out. And he gets what he wants. He’s been searching since the end of Season Four for something he thought was going on. He was searching for Werner, chasing down all these leads. So we gave Lalo the gift of getting everything — his heart’s desire — and it destroys him."
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The showdown between Gus and Lalo ends with the latter dying and that marks the start of the body count with five episodes remaining. When asked whether burying Lalo and Howard together felt symbolic of the idea of those two separate shows being permanently joined. "I love the way you put that. I don’t know what the burial was. But certainly, the fact of bringing all these things together was our way of saying, “No, no, this is why we’ve been doing these two things, because there was going to be a point where we brought these two things together.”
'Better Call Saul' airs Mondays at 9 pm ET on AMC