'Sometimes the chickens come home to roost.' PeterGould breaks down BetterCallSaul’s explosive midseason finale—and teases what's to come.
It’s a truly stunning development in an episode that brought Jimmy and Kim’s scheme to discredit Howard to a head. After some quick reshoots, Jimmy rushes staged photos of him paying off a man posing as the mediator in the Sandpiper case to Howard’s private investigator, who clearly is not really Howard’s private investigator.
As the head of HHM would later admit, “I got played, every step of the way.” Believing that Jimmy has committed bribery in order to expedite a Sandpiper settlement, an extremely sweaty Howard confronts the mediator, only to find that the images have been swapped, with these ones showing a different mustached-man retrieving a frisbee from Jimmy. Howard is humiliated, and his performance forces Clifford Main to accept a reduced settlement. That night, Howard visits Jimmy and Kim’s apartment to congratulate them on their win. “You’re perfect for each other; you have a piece missing,” he declares, as they play dumb. “I thought you did it for the money, but now it’s so clear. Screw the money, you did it for fun.” Then, as he’s threatening to expose them, Jimmy sees a ghost: Lalo. He was still under the impression that the cold-blooded killer was dead—until Lalo arrives, wanting to speak to his lawyers. Howard realizes too late that he’s “in the middle of something,” and is immediately shot in the head by Lalo. Jimmy and Kim are in utter disbelief. “Okay,” says Lalo, trying to calm them down. “Let’s talk.”about surprising himself by killing Howard, recreating a memorable scene, and teasing what to expect from the series finale.Let’s start where the episode concludes: Lalo killing Howard. How did you arrive at the decision to end Howard’s story, and why it should end like this?Well, as we started talking about Jimmy and Kim's scam that they've chosen to put over on Howard, we realized that there has to be consequences. If everything goes perfectly to plan, first of all, it's unrealistic, because that's not how the real world works. But also, what is the next step for these two? A lot of the story ofis the story of unintended consequences, and this seemed like a really wonderful unintended consequence. Of course, at this point in the season, you don't know why Lalo has shown up in their apartment — what does he have in mind exactly? You'll learn more about that later. But, boy, the last thing we wanted to do was to kill Howard Hamlin. And I gotta say, we all found every minute of it very disturbing. Because, for one thing, we all know and love Patrick Fabian, and if you would have asked me before we started this season, I would've said that this was the guy who was sure to make it out of this alive. But I wasn't counting on Jimmy and Kim and all that they've been up to, and sometimes the chickens come home to roost.at the end of season 5’s “Bad Choice Road” where Kim stands up to Lalo. What made you want to semi-recreate that? And was that something you guys always planned to circle back to, or did you just organically discover that in the process of planning Howard’s demise? Organic is the perfect word. When we finish these seasons, we barely make it out alive, and so these things all really came up in the writers’ room at the beginning of season 6. And when we realized that we have Lalo out there, and we have Jimmy and Kim, and Lalo certainly knows where this apartment is, it took a lot of thought to put together exactly why and how it would all come together. But it felt about as painful as it could be. And sometimes you wanna go towards the pain in drama. I don't think I've ever seen more shock and terror in the eyes of Jimmy or Kim. How would you say that this will affect them as we move forward into these last episodes? That’s the story of the rest of the series: What do they take away from this horrible incident that happened right in their living room? That really propels everything that happens next — and I could not be prouder of what happens next. I think it's very human and real, but I think, to me anyway, it's very unpredictable. While Patrick has always been great on the show, he really shined this season as you built up to his final scene. We saw Howard get vulnerable in therapy; we saw him in a struggling marriage. To make sure that his death had the highest possible emotional impact, did it feel important to you and the team to put in the work to further peel back the layers on him? Absolutely. We were fascinated by this guy, because Howard surprised us. Hopefully he surprised the audience also, but he surprised us in a lot of ways. This is a man who has dealt with setbacks and grief, and he didn't let the setbacks and grief break him. Instead he looked them square in the eye and he went into therapy and he elevated himself. In some ways, it's the opposite of what Jimmy and Kim have been doing. Jimmy and Kim — love them as much as we want to, — there's a certain unwillingness to say out loud what's going on. There's an unwillingness to really address things that are happening between them and happening in the world. And Howard is the guy who's willing to say, “This is what I see. This is how I think we should live.” And I think that gets under the skin of both Jimmy and Kim quite a bit. When the show started off, he was, more or less, a well-dressed villain. In the first episode, Jimmy calls him Darth Vader. But you find out that there's a lot more to him than that as the seasons go by, and he turns out to have a generosity that is unexpected and important. And, boy, Jimmy and Kim do not accept Howard's generosity when he's ready to give it. When the show premiered, there were essentially four new major characters whose future fates we didn’t yet know: Kim, Chuck , Nacho , and Howard. We lost Chuck a couple seasons ago; we lost Nacho a couple episodes ago; and now we’ve also lost Howard. You just said that you had expected Howard to make it to the end, so obviously this wasn’t your grand plan . But was there any part of you that worried about taking so many of these characters off the board before the series concluded? Not that there aren’t plenty of mysteries still to be solved. We never thought of it that way. That's a very good point that you're making; it makes us sound kind of blood-thirsty. [.] But in each of these cases it felt like the only way for the story to go. I mean, the last thing we wanted to do was to lose Michael McKean from the show. Working with him has been one of the great joys of my career, and we definitely would've loved to have seen more of him. It's just that that seemed like the only move left for the character. Otherwise, we felt that the story would start becoming repetitive in a certain way. But that was rough.—we kind of fought against losing Nacho, actually. We spent a lot of time in the writers’ room trying to think of some way that he could get out of the situation he was in. In earlier seasons, he had fake identities made up for himself and his father, and he was thinking of running away to Canada, and we thought, “Maybe, could that possibly work?” And, of course, once you've crossed Gustavo Fring , it just didn't seem like that was a viable option. So, you know, it's an interesting way that you put it, because we don't really think about the show in terms of who we can kill next. You just mentioned Nacho’s death, which is something that has yet to have a widespread impact in your world. He wasn’t as connected to the Jimmy, Kim, and Howard side of the show, but should we anticipate his shadow looming over the final episodes? Or, at this point, is his shadow essentially being saved to loom over that
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