All The Clues To That Death In Better Call Saul

screenrant.com:

WARNING: This contains SPOILERS for Better Call Saul season 6, episode 7.

Better Call Saul season 6, episode 8's Lalo death may have been shocking, but there were enough clues both in the spinoff show and on Breaking Bad to suggest that the Salamanca villain was not going to make it. While many expected Tony Dalton's character to be the final villain of Better Call Saul, the show flipped expectations by having Gus kill Lalo right in the first episode of the latter half of season 6, making the final episodes hard to predict. Still, in retrospect, Lalo's death in Better Call Saul season 6 and the circumstances of how it happened make a lot of sense.

For a prequel show, it was always going to be difficult for Better Call Saul to create a sense of stakes – no matter how good the writing was. The solution was to create a lot of original characters, such as Chuck, Nacho, Howard, and Kim, so that audiences could not be sure of what was going to happen to them before Breaking Bad. This same principle was used to create Lalo, Better Call Saul's wild card whose fate was not known by the viewers. Unlike Gus, Lalo was not limited by how Walt and Jesse's story in Breaking Bad played out, allowing actor Tony Dalton to play a menacing and, most importantly, unpredictable villain.

Related: Why Better Call Saul Keeps Killing Characters So Early In Season 6

That said, there was only so much Lalo could do in Better Call Saul. The character was introduced at the end of season 4, and with the show set to end in season 6, Lalo's story could not be dragged out too much. Lalo was not a long-term antagonist like Chuck in the early Better Call Saul seasons or Gus in Breaking Bad – he was the unexpected element that served to completely flip Jimmy