Better Call Saul producer breaks down Lalo and Gus' showdown, Jimmy and Kim's future

The final season of Better Call Saul has placed many key characters in grave danger — and a few of them actually in a grave.

Only one episode after Lalo (Tony Dalton) shot Howard cold-dead in front of a horrified Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn), the charismatic and crafty Salamanca/cartel player targeted an even bigger Albuquerque businessman: Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). Alas, Lalo would wind up being the one to take a dirt nap, right next to Howard (Patrick Fabian), at the bottom of the still-under-construction superlab that he was trying to learn all about.

"Point and Shoot" proved to be a tense, taut, terrifying outing that picked up with Jimmy and Kim trembling in the wake of another Lalo apartment drop-by. Lalo gave Jimmy one hour to go to Gus' house, ring the doorbell, and shoot him right then and there, but Jimmy "persuaded" Lalo to send Kim instead. (An act of cowardice? No, Jimmy was worried that the person who stayed back at the apartment with Lalo was marked for death, and he was desperate to save her from the Lalo blast zone.)

Desperate to save Jimmy, Kim tried to volunteer Jimmy for the job, and then, when Lalo picked her to run the mission, she marched right up to Gus' door. She was thwarted by Mike (Jonathan Banks) & Co. When Kim explained Lalo's less-than-meticulous selection process, Gus deduced that this was a mere diversionary tactic by his adversary, and he and his men headed over to the industrial laundry business that was hiding a meth superlab-to-be. And there was Lalo, recording evidence for Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) of Gus' planned end run around the cartel. Lalo killed Gus' henchmen, shot Gus (in the bulletproof vest), and forced "the Chicken Man" to give him a tour of the lab. Gus looked into Lalo's camcorder, issued an epic kiss-off speech to Don Eladio and the Salamancas, kicked out the lights, grabbed the gun he'd hidden down there a few episodes ago, and took down Lalo in a shootout. (Turns out, this house cat can scratch.) Mike and Tyrus (Ray Campbell) buried the bodies of Howard and Lalo in a ditch in the superlab — and that loose end of Howard's end was tied up with an abandoned Jaguar parked on a beach with abandon.

Are you "happy with the way things went down"? Whenever you're ready, let's light a blood-stained candle for Lalo (and for Howard) and have a big talk with Better Call Saul executive producer Gordon Smith, who wrote the thrilling "Point and Shoot."

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How long have the writers known when Lalo was going to die? And did you consider delaying it as long as possible, given how well the character was popping?

GORDON SMITH: Sometime around episode 4 or 5 [of this season] — when we were breaking those, so a couple years ago — we started to feel like, "We want these two sides of things to really come smashing together — our Large Hadron Collider of characters." We really wanted to bring them together hard — and bad — and we thought it would be great if there was a way that the consequences of things that Jimmy's done in the past with Lalo could come back at him, and at Kim and at Howard and all of them altogether all at once.

It took some doing to figure out exactly when that was going to happen and whether Lalo's maneuver made sense or how to make it make sense. I would say a few episodes before we had a shape of it being exactly here — or real close to exactly here. I don't think we ever know for sure until we're in it. I don't think we really tried to delay it. I think we felt like this was the right time. We set our things in motion and it felt better to give him the big out — better to burn out than fade away.

How did Tony take the news when you said, "You knew the end of the line was coming, and this is it"?

In various ways. He had a conversation with Vince and Peter [Gilligan and Gould, the show's creators]. We want to give the actors the ability to go do other work…. However, there's a line in the script. [Laughs] The line in the script when he dies is something like, "He's gurgling blood and he takes one last ugly breath and dies." And Tony came up to me on the first day of shooting and he just is like, "Ugly???" He literally has not let it go — for at least a year and a half now, I get s--- from him about his ugly death, which I, of course, maintain is very handsome despite the grotesqueness of it.

Light was finally shed on why Saul mentions Lalo to Walt [Bryan Cranston] and Jesse [Aaron Paul] when he's in the ditch in Breaking Bad. While Mike tells Saul that Lalo is dead — which is familiar territory, as they had a similar conversation in the season 5 finale when Mike assures Jimmy that Lalo will be dead later that day — it seems that Jimmy will remain haunted by him and by the idea that the rest of the Salamancas may come after him, believing that he was responsible for the assassination plot that was actually aided by Nacho. Jimmy even echoes some of the same dialogue here that he does in the ditch: "It was Ignacio!" How did you go about deciding to shed backstory light on that throwaway line from Breaking Bad?

It was a line that Peter and Vince just kind of tossed in [the Breaking Bad episode], because he needed to be saying something. And so there was the debate whether we needed to pay it off — or what need there was to pay it off. Some folks felt more strongly in the room that it would be fun to pay it off. So we did [laughs], and we wanted to make sure as we were sending Lalo off on his Viking funeral that the shadow that he had cast was enough.

Like you say, Jimmy's never going to believe [Lalo is dead]. How can he possibly believe that this guy, that this problem, is never going to come back? He thought it had gone away and it just came back into his house and shot Howard Hamlin in front of him. So it's just going to be real difficult for him to believe anything other than, "If something's coming after me, it's Lalo, it's Lalo, Lalo," in his little feral rat brain. We were really happy that we could literally have the [line], "It was Ignacio!" be the thing as the gag is going on, so then when the gag is coming off in episode 208 of Breaking Bad, it's the same fear. It's paying off what trauma that was that Saul was hiding from, that Walt and Jesse inadvertently triggered. "have the [line] "It was Ignacio!" be the thing as the gag is going on....

Jimmy and Kim both are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for each other in this episode. Jimmy seems to think that whoever stays with Lalo at the apartment will be killed, so he volunteers her, and she realizes what he's doing. And then Kim rings the doorbell and appears ready to shoot Gus to save Jimmy's life. Is this the most romantic thing that each of them has done for the other?

What you just said is exactly how we hope it would play, that Jimmy is sending her out because anywhere is safer than here. Anywhere. Whoever stays here dies, so, "Get out! I don't care if you go to the cops and I die, I don't care where you go, because I'm ready to die, you should get out." And similarly, she's real close to pulling that trigger. I don't know if she would do it, but the gun is coming up and the door is opening and who knows what would've happened if there weren't a lot of other safeguards? It feels like they're truly honoring their wedding vows. [Laughs] We didn't see all of them, clearly the ones that said, "I'll murder for you," but I think it's definitely a moment where when they got married, if they ever deluded themselves really that this is just for business, this proves… no, this is not a business arrangement. This is not a convenience to make it so that we don't have to implicate each other legally. This is love. This is a deep connection and a deep commitment to one another.

In your mind, do you think Kim would've pulled the trigger?

God, I don't know…. I think there's a really good chance that she would have. I almost feel like it's one of those situations where, let's suppose for the moment that Gus didn't have all these countermeasures in place and he was as guileless or he was as undefended as can be. And if she got that gun up and is standing there and he's standing there — I think she'd be shaking so much, she might've just shot him. Or she would've pulled the trigger. One of the two. "Ahhh! The door just opened!" Your body is…

It's reflexive.

Almost reflexive, just like, "This has to happen. I know it's crazy." She knows it's crazy. She knows all of this is crazy. It's interesting because they think of it as a bloodless scam with Howard and it's all moves and countermoves. But Lalo knows in his heart the truest version of a scam, which is, if you scare somebody and you make them feel that it's urgent, they will stop thinking. Your brain will scramble. If you just come at somebody and are like, "Help! Help! Help! Help!" and shake them, it takes a while for you to think, "Oh, wait, I need to slow down. I need to think this through." And certainly killing somebody in front of you will scramble your brains — as well as scramble their brains — but it'll get your heart pumping in a way that you cannot see clearly, you can't figure out what the right play is. So yeah, I do think there was a pretty good chance that she would've shot him.

Mike really rubs it in disapprovingly to Jimmy and Kim when he says, "Continue the lie you've been telling." It reminds a little of his speech to Jimmy in "Bad Choice Road," about the choices you make, no matter how small, have big consequences. Mike tells them to pretend this never happened, but Jimmy looks anxiously at Kim. It doesn't seem that he's thinking that she'll spill — is he worried that this will undo their relationship and he feels guilty about bringing Lalo into their lives?

I think it's all of that stew of meaty emotions there that you just laid out. She's gone at the moment. She's just not there. Like, how do I get her back? Because he's gone through some traumas that she has not and come out the other side and been like, "Okay, that was bad, but I'm alive." Although this is obviously a bigger deal to have Howard, somebody that he knows, murdered right in front of him. Parts of him have clearly slipped away, like dealing with Chuck's death clearly chips a piece of him away.

He looks at her and is hoping that there's a way for her to be okay. I think it's one of those, "It's gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay, we're gonna figure this out." Jimmy McGill is nothing if not a striver and a believer in, "There's a way. There's gotta be a way. How can there not be a way?" So in that moment, that's what he's thinking: "What's the way forward for us and for her? And how do I help her get there?"

The deaths of Howard and Lalo could trauma-bond Jimmy and Kim, but more likely it's the beginning of the end. What can you hint about that relationship moving forward?

I don't think it's saying anything that people won't understand to know that there's got to be some reckoning from this. She's in a not quite catatonic state, but she's processing. So at some point I feel like all the tumblers are going to click into place and what happens then? They're going to have to deal very directly with the consequences of this.

With Nacho's death a few episodes ago and Howard's death in the previous episode, the show ends up taking out Lalo a few episodes earlier than some fans may have expected. With that obstacle gone but consequences surely sprouting up, what does that spell for the end game?

We don't have that much real estate left, honestly. And we have a lot of story lines still kind of waiting for us. We have to figure out what's happening with Saul Goodman as Saul Goodman as we've seen him in Breaking Bad. We've had little flashes of him, but now we need to know what causes him to become a permanent state of affairs. And we need to know what Kim is going to make of all of this. They've gone through a lot this season, they've gone through a lot together, and I think this is a reckoning for her and for him.

In terms of what it says for the end game? Lalo is certainly an existential threat to them, but I've always said, "This is a prequel. And the thing that we have in our pockets is that the worst thing that can happen to somebody isn't necessarily to die. There are worse things that can happen to your state of being and your state of your soul." And I think there's still room for Jimmy to fall, there's still room for Kim to fall, and there's still room to kind of figure out what that does to their world, with no Lalo.

When Mike asks Gus how he knew Lalo was running a decoy play, Gus says he didn't. We see when Kim tells Gus that Jimmy "persuaded" Lalo to send her instead, something clicks for Gus. Did he know that if it didn't matter to Lalo who he sent, the master plan was probably somewhere else?

When she says he talked him out of it, he knows there's something weird going on here. Why would you send the lawyer at me? The thing that Jimmy says, "Would you open the door for this woman in distress?" So it's a decent maneuver on its face, but… it could have been either of [them]? It's not the perfect move if you can just swap two things. It's not precise enough. It's not Lalo enough. I think that's the reason he doesn't call Mike. I don't think he knows that Lalo is going to the superlab. "There's a really good chance that something's up. I gotta go there because that's the most important place to defend."

Why exactly did Gus hide the gun down there? He's always been one step ahead of Lalo, bugging the nursing home, etc. Did the writers feel like he just had this weird sense that he might need it for some odd scenario?

That was what we felt like. When we were talking about it, it's like, "Okay, Mike's going to want to give Gus a gun for self-defense." But we also kind of thought, "In what world is Gus going to have a gun concealed on his ankle and be able to get to it if Lao has gotten through all his other guards?" If Lalo's done all of this — like he does, he gets through all of Gus' men, mows them down like a field of wheat — is Gus going to drop and roll and pull a gun out and shoot him? That's not Gus' style. It's not his forte. It's not where his strengths lay. But where his strengths lay are in being kind of weirdly prepared for contingencies that nobody else would be prepared for. So I think him putting it there is just — there's a chance that this all ends here. This is the thing that Lalo wants most.

The audience knows that Gus won't die, and they know there's a gun down there, and as the action unfolds, maybe they start to sense that Lalo is the one in trouble. What was the biggest challenge in creating tension in that scene when certain things seem evident?

I feel like the tension there starts to switch because you have this moment — Lalo gets the drop on him and you're like, "Oh s---, Gus is in trouble!" And then as he shoots guts Gus in the chest, you're thinking, "God, maybe there is some outcome to this." And then it sort of shifts and you're like, "Lalo's in trouble here. He doesn't know everything." So then it starts to be like, "Does Lalo get away?" Say Gus winged him, shot him in the shoulder, hit his ear, like Mike, and he runs out of there with that camera, what then? [Laughs] I think the tension starts to be a little bit of a "What could possibly come out of this?" but also a little bit of — I don't know exactly what the dramatic term would be but it's the old, "Give them two and two and let them be excited when it makes four." So it's like, "Ooh, I figured out there's two and there's two, come on four!" You're almost rooting for this explosion of tension, even though you're pretty sure which way it's going.

Gus gives his big speech with a gun pointed at him, much like Nacho had his tell-them-off back-against-the-wall final kiss-off earlier this season. How cathartic was that for Gus to let that speech rip, given that he is a man who so habitually obscures his emotions?

It's two things. I think it's cathartic, but to me — maybe it's just because I wrote both these episodes — it felt like he learned something from Nacho's speech because Nacho keeps them listening in a sense by being a dick [laughs], by letting his bile spill out. And I think Gus learns that letting that emotion go in a way that he wouldn't normally — Gus would just go to his death without a word. But there's a tactic here, there's a play to be had. He gives Lalo everything he wants. Tony does such a great job there listening, because as Lalo, he goes from smiling like, "Oh yeah, this is sweet," to "I hate you so much because I'm hearing what you're saying about my family." It's great. It's just this nice transition in from glee to murder.

Speaking of that, he lets out that disturbing bloody laugh right before he dies. Was that in the script? And what was going through Lalo's mind at that moment of fatal comeuppance? Was this man with the sick sense of humor somehow entertained by the fact that the librarian "chicken man" one-upped him?

I think it's exactly that. Because he has him. "I've got you! I did it! I made it all the way here! All your plans and all your meticulous stuff and dancing and all of this bulls--- that you've done — you built a chicken cooler to try and throw me off the Germans! You did all this! And I made it through! I got you! And you got lucky, you bastard!" So what can you do but laugh at that — this guy is the guy who got to me.

The rueful laugh specifically is not in the script, I don't think. The gurgling and the blood is, but Tony has been doing that and it felt like, "Let's give it a shot." We did different versions, with and without the laugh, and tried to see what felt right. And when we saw it, it's just like, "Oh, come on! This is so good!" It just felt so good. So that's one of those great pieces that you can find when you're right there in the day.

There's probably an easier way to dispose of these bodies, but it works well. Lalo sets up his own death scene, feels thematically appropriate, and is extraordinarily evocative. It would be fun to rewatch the "Fly" episode of Breaking Bad knowing what's beneath Walt and Jesse. How did you decide to bury them there?

We pitched it, we were getting towards the end of the episode, and we were kind of trying to figure out like, "Where does this come to rest? Do we do something with the bodies at the start of the next episode? Or are they put in a barrel and vanished in the way that we've done with other people?" And it felt like both of them were too important to just vanish. We felt like we owed them more, and it felt like there was a good resting point for the episode in seeing what happens to them.

So when we started talking about it, I think both [writer-producer] Alison Tatlock and Vince separately had pitched at various points, "Maybe they go in the superlab," and we were like, "Oh! Maybe." And then it was like, "No, maybe they really do." It was just one of those things where it's like, "Is it too much? Is it too on the nose? Are we making too much about building a laboratory of meth on death? Is it too much that Lalo keeps talking about this being a tomb?" And we said, "Nah! It's not too much. Let's do it!" It really felt too good. So we did our due diligence on making sure that it was going to feel good and then followed that through.

We haven't spent any time discussing Patrick Fabian's performance in this episode. I understand that he spent some quality time in that pit with Tony.

He did. They were both great about it. He spent some time, but not all the time, on the floor during that big opening scene. We also had a double to do some of that work for him because it's actually really uncomfortable. It's a hard floor and you think, "Eh, it's just a hard floor," but he was cramping up and it was difficult shooting conditions for him, even though he just had to lay there. For the actors, when it was their last episode, we tried to give them a big sendoff with the crew. So we gave them both a big sendoff on this episode.

I've got to ask you a tough question. How worried should we be for Lyle? It feels like you've been spending an awful lot of time on him over the years.

We have spent a lot of time with Lyle, because we love Lyle and Harrison Thomas is so great as Lyle that we can't get enough of him. I would say the worry would be more… worried never to see him again, outside of the musical Lyle! That's been pitched so many times. So… I don't know if we will see Lyle again. I don't know if we should be too worried about him.

What can you tease about next week's episode?

It's bigger still in a lot of ways. Episode 9 is bigger and badder, and to my mind, even more heartbreaking than this one.

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