This post contains spoilers for the last episode of Better call Sol“Point and shoot”.
This week Better call Sol is the final screenplay in the series written by Gordon Smith. After entering the Heisenberg-verse as an office assistant and then Vince Gilligan’s assistant In Satan’s shoes, he graduated as a full-time screenwriter for the prequel, writing some of the most memorable installments. His first script was the devastating Mike Ehrmantraut flashback episode “Five-O,” and in this final season, he wrote episodes that killed off both Nacho Varga and, on tonight’s Point and Shoot , Lalo Salamanca.
Our Point and Shoot recap is here, and below, Smith discusses the surprising timing of Lalo’s death, why Saul Goodman still looks so scared of the dead in his first appearance on In Satan’s shoesthe challenge of Saul the writers have been scrambling to make sure their stories fit what happened on the parent show, and more.
Many people will be surprised that Lalo died with so many episodes left in the season. Why did it happen now?We had no interest in losing Tony Dalton, obviously. He is amazing. He is so funny on set. We really didn’t want to lose character either. But we felt that we had set those forces in motion and had a clash between these two titans of our story, and unfortunately we knew that Gus had to come out the other side. I suppose there was a world where Lalo was limping around and Gus had to go after him, but that seemed like territory we’d already covered. We were happy to give him a big, big, big win. And he gets what he wants. Since the end of season four, he’s been looking for something he thought was happening. He was looking for Werner, chasing all these leads. So we gave Lalo the gift of getting everything – his heart’s desire – and it destroyed him.
Well that why does he laugh while he bleeds?I think part of it. And it’s that look: “Oh, you son of a bitch! I there was you! I caught you and just got lucky on your way out the door. What can you do but laugh?
You all obviously enjoyed writing about Tony and this character. How much time have you spent the last few seasons figuring out if there was a way for Lalo no to die considering what Gus is doing In Satan’s shoes?There was a bit of time, especially because we wanted to make sure that Jimmy/Saul’s fear of him could come to life if he died. What we eventually came up with was that Jimmy was very afraid of him and wouldn’t believe—unless he saw the body himself—that Lalo was dead. Man has already risen from the dead as far as he is concerned. We were more concerned with making sure the fear lived on than the character. We’d love to keep him, but we also know that by the end of the In Satan’s shoes, Gus says he killed the last Salamanca. So, one way or another, they were all going out before Gus talked to Hector.
In that desert scene in the first episode of Saul In Satan’s shoes, Saul looks genuinely relieved that Lalo didn’t send Walt and Jesse. So he’s still afraid the spook is out there and coming for him?yes I think that’s the point. The last thing he says before this gag goes in [in this episode] is: “It wasn’t me, it was Ignacio!” And when the plug came off [on Breaking Bad], that’s the first thing he says. So I think there is some sane memory of Jimmy/Sol and he will never escape that fear. No rational part of his mind or rational information would make him feel anything other than that Lalo had sent something out there that could take a long time to break.
There was a long stretch of this show where Jimmy and Nacho didn’t interact at all and it seemed like the “It was Ignacio!” excuse wouldn’t fit what we were or weren’t seeing of their relationship. How conscious were you all that you had to explain that line?There was a difference of opinion as to whether we should explain it. Some people were more firmly on the side of, “No, we really want to get to an explanation.” And others felt like, “Eh, if we’re going to get to it, we’re going to get to it. It’s not a big deal. It won’t kill anything as long as we’ve done the dramatic work we were trying to do. Obviously, the people who wanted it to be there won. Or I hope we win. I hope we have convinced the naysayers in the room, [who] it will remain unnamed that it was worth doing.
At this point in the writing process, how difficult was it to balance the needs of the story you’re telling on this show about Jimmy and Kim with making sure things meshed with what was happening on In Satan’s shoes? I’m not sure the difficulty has increased. It’s always been very difficult to figure out all the pieces and where they fit into each other. There was certainly a heightened awareness that we were running out and we wanted to land the plane as gracefully as possible. I’m probably forgetting pieces that were there. We basically had three storylines, all of which had to come to a crisis and a conclusion, and hopefully we’ve brought some of them to a crisis and a conclusion.
Saul creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have talked a lot about the difficulty of making everything match between shows. What’s the worst case scenario on this show where you wonder why you chose to get yourself into such a mess? I can tell you there is something, but I can’t tell you what it is yet. There are some things in the back half of this season, after this episode, [where] we planted a flag. Some people thought we shouldn’t have done it, and we had to struggle to figure out how to pay it off. And that caused some consternation in this final season.
You also wrote “Rock and Hard Place” this season, where Nacho, like Lalo, died earlier than many viewers expected. Were there any discussions about keeping him out of it?Nacho could probably scrap a little more. But there are those diminishing returns of seeing him get out of trouble. Vince directed this incredible sequence in Tom [Schnauz] and Ariel [Levine]The episode of Nacho escaping the cousins when he is trapped and almost certainly doomed in the hotel. And it’s like, how many times are you going to do this? It felt like we had to bring it to a crescendo or we would start treading water. It was an unfortunate situation because we liked having him as a character to play with in our toolbox, and we liked Michael Mando on the show. But we felt it was better for the character to really take control at this point and direct the course of their own destiny rather than just being banished from existence.
If you go back to Saul and say, “It was Ignacio!” when he first appears, maybe you can imagine a version of the story where Nacho survives and still sometimes works with Saul on the outskirts of In Satan’s shoes. Has this ever been discussed as a possibility?We had several versions. We talked about if there was a version where Nacho is [on Breaking Bad] and [the audience] I did not know about this. There were versions that we talked about that he was clearly planning to try to get his father to Canada and he is doing it. But it felt wrong to realize that dream and I felt it was a disservice to his father and to many other things. In the end, we just felt that there was a false note to everything that kept it alive, so we felt that the blaze of glory was the better way to go.
There was a long stretch over the course of this series where it was easy to believe that [on Breaking Bad] Saul believed that Mike was just a guy who worked for him from time to time, and he didn’t know Mike’s main job. By this point, he clearly knows a lot more, even if he doesn’t specifically know that Gus is Mike’s boss. Over the years, what discussions have you had about this?We definitely tried to split that hair very well. We know Gus and Mike aren’t friends, right? They are very close and have a close working relationship, but Mike is ready in days to go work with the guy [Walter White] who blasted him. There is no love there. There is only respect. Similarly, his relationship with Saul is not super close. It has arms length. Part of it has to do with what he knew Jimmy. He knew Jimmy McGill as Jimmy McGill. I think he had more respect for him and he does [developed] less and less like [Jimmy has] Saulified – as he fulfilled Chuck’s prophecies about him. But we certainly tried to make sure that Jimmy runs into Gus in Polos Hermanos, but he doesn’t know who he is. Also, I think there is willful ignorance on Saul’s part. After everything I’ve been through, up to and including this episode, I wouldn’t want to know who the puppeteer is that’s driving all this stuff. That Mike works for him, great! But if he learns more than that, he’s deeper than he wants to be. I think he learned that he was a bit over his head in this part of the world.
Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut
Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
When you put it like that, I’m trying to imagine the scene where, after all of this has happened, Saul thinks, “You know what a great idea? I have to call Mike and ask him to do a job for me now.They are somewhat related by blood. That’s the job [we’ve] it always felt, even when there were separate threads of the show weaving back into each other, that these two characters felt integral to each other’s journey and metamorphosis. I think that will give him pause to call Mike the next time he wants to pick up the phone. I don’t think it will be an unweighted circumstance. But they’ve been there, and they’ve gotten away from each other at times. Even Mike would begrudgingly admit that Jimmy had done things that helped him. Jimmy is the one who creates the conditions for Mike…
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