Lalo Salamanca is the Worst Character in Better Call Saul

Alright get those downvotes and hate comments ready, because I’m coming in with some hot takes. I hate Lalo Salamanca. I think he is the worst part of Better Call Saul, and the storyline revolving around him is so bad I have a hard time watching the final season because of it.

Now I know that is going to piss off a lot of you. Lalo is considered a fan favorite character, and people rank him up there as one of the best villains in the story. But if we look objectively at what Lalo actually does, we see the problems not only with his story, but the whole Cartel storyline in Better Call Saul.

Now my objective with this video isn’t to shit all over Better Call Saul. Despite how I might come off at times, I really do like the show. But I just don’t see people really talking about the plot and pacing issues that I see. They just heap universal praise on this series, and I think it would be disingenuous to not voice the few criticisms that I have.

So in this video I’m going to be breaking down why I hate Lalo Salamanca, and why he almost ruined Better Call Saul for me.

Lalo Salamanca is an antagonist in Better Call Saul and a high ranking member of the Mexican cartel. He was actually introduced all the way back in Breaking Bad. In the Season 2 episode called “Better Call Saul”, Walt and Jesse kidnap Saul Goodman and take him to an open grave in the desert. There Saul utters this line.

Now at the time, the reference to Lalo and Ignacio was just a throwaway line. It was just an interesting thing for Saul to say, and it hinted that he had dealt with the Cartel and other dangerous people in the past. However when it came to the prequel show Better Call Saul, they used this line as the basis for designing the cartel storyline.

Lalo is introduced in Season 4, and the show establishes that he is actually a member of the Salamanca family, the main cartel antagonists throughout the series. He’s characterized uniquely compared to his family. Unlike Tuco who’s crazy and the Twins who are silently murderous, Lalo is charming, putting on a friendly front. Despite this, he’s absolutely capable of cold blooded murder. We also see that he is the most clever member of the family, being able to strategize and see through other people’s deceptions.

In Better Call Saul, his storyline revolves around his family’s rivalry with Gustavo Fring. Lalo knows that Gus hates his Uncle Hector, and realizes that Gus must be planning something. He begins investigating Gus’s activities, which puts a strain on his plans to build a meth superlab. Gus arranges for Lalo to be arrested for his murder of an innocent civilian.

Lalo hires Jimmy to be his lawyer, and has him retrieve his 7 million dollars for bail money. While driving through the desert, he’s ambushed by rival members of the cartel, who want to stop Lalo from getting out. Jimmy is saved by Mike, and after getting back to civilization they clean up the mess so that Lalo doesn’t suspect anything.

After getting out, he plans on fleeing back to Mexico to avoid prosecution. However he realizes that Jimmy is lying to him when he finds the shot up remains of his car. He goes to confront him, but Kim manages to convince him that they didn’t betray him.

Lalo then goes back to Mexico with Ignacio, his right hand man. However Ignacio is secretly working for Gus, who’s threatening his father to keep him in line. Ignacio opens the gate to Lalo’s compound, allowing mercenaries hired by Gus to attack Lalo. Though his people are killed, Lalo survives and manages to take out the mercenaries.

Rather than go public though, Lalo fakes his death so that he can ambush Gus who he knows is behind the attack. He tries to find proof of his deception, going all the way to Germany to track down the engineers who built the superlab. When that doesn’t work, he goes back to Jimmy and Kim. He kills Howard who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then forces Kim to go shoot Gus at his house.

However this is all a diversion to lure Gus to the lab, where Lalo ambushes him. He forces Gus to make a confession on video, but Gus gets the drop on Lalo with a gun he planted in the lab. Lalo dies in the lab, bleeding, but with a smile on his face.

Alright now why do I hate Lalo so much? Afterall most fans of the show really like Lalo, and think he’s one of the best antagonists of the series. They think he’s cool. They think he’s scary. And they love the performance.

I will say that Tony Dalton did an amazing job with the role. He’s obviously an incredible actor, and the problems I have with Lalo have nothing to do with his performance. No, the reason I hate Lalo is that he’s almost completely useless to the story.

Lalo is an antagonist, and his role on the show is to be a threat for other characters. He does have a part to play in Jimmy’s story of corruption and how he became involved with dangerous criminals, the whole “friend of the cartel” bit that they got from his line in Breaking Bad. They also do really hit that Lalo’s actions left psychological damage to Jimmy, and it’s the catalyst for him and Kim to break up.

However the majority of Lalo’s story is not focused on Jimmy, but instead on his rivalry with Gus. And this rivalry just doesn’t work to create tension. Because of Breaking Bad, we know that Lalo does not kill Gus. We know that he doesn’t even succeed in exposing him, as Gus still has a relationship with the Cartel at the start of the show. So when we see Lalo trying to go up against Gus, there’s zero tension because we know that he fails.

This is a problem with the entire cartel storyline. They wanted to make a more action heavy storyline for Better Call Saul, similar to what we see in Breaking Bad. But the problem is that as a prequel, there is nowhere for this storyline to go. It lacks the tension that Breaking Bad has, because all of the main characters of the cartel storyline have their fates already established.

The show doesn’t introduce any new original characters for Gus to work with, just the crew we see in Breaking Bad, so again there’s no threat that Lalo will kill one of the side characters we’ve come to love. I mean the only original character that Gus interacts with is Lyle, and in fact if Lalo had killed Lyle it would have created an emotional impact, much more so than Howard whom Lalo has absolutely zero connection with. It would also explain why he wasn’t in Breaking Bad, and given how much Gus values his employees, it would have really hurt him to have his assistant manager killed.

It would have also made much more sense for Lalo to have killed Ignacio. Nacho worked with Lalo for multiple seasons, and the two developed something of a friendship, or at least as much as two people in the cartel could. The betrayal of that friendship could have been an interesting character moment if Lalo ever confronted him about it. But there’s no payoff to Nacho betraying Lalo. They never interact again, and it’s a big missed opportunity to actually have a real impact with Lalo’s character.

It’s not even like with Jimmy where there is an emotional consequence to his actions. Neither Gus nor Mike are changed at all from their encounter with him. I’ve seen people argue that Lalo made Gus more cautious with his plans, or he made Gus realize that he can’t have people in his life because they would be at risk, and that’s why he didn’t get with David the wine guy in his final scene.

But one, Gus was already extremely cautious with his plans. He was operating in secret for years for his revenge, going so far as to even have his neighbor’s house outfitted as a secret base to monitor activity and protect himself, and that was before Lalo even entered the scene. So I don’t buy that Lalo made Gus into the cautious and patient man we see in Breaking Bad.

I also don’t buy that Lalo was the reason that Gus didn’t have love in his life. It’s not like he had a relationship with David before this, and he broke up with him because he realized guys like Lalo might use that to hurt him. He was already committed to living alone and focusing on his revenge long before Lalo became involved. If anything, the final scene with David was just reinforcing that Gus chose revenge over any chance at happiness, and it had nothing to do with Lalo.

I don’t think this was the writer’s intentions, but they also inadvertently make Lalo look really stupid. Take this scene where he’s laughing because he thinks he had Los Pollos Hermanos burnt down. If you can focus on anything besides his sexy feet, you’ll see that he’s being played for a fool. Gus knew about his plan and burnt down his own restaurant to keep deceiving him, and Lalo doesn’t even realize he’s being played. He just comes off like a clown in this scene.

Or take his confrontation with Kim. I swear I’m not trying to go all sigma male on you or anything, but allowing himself to get talked down to like that by a woman makes him look weak. Now Kim’s a girlboss and I love it, but he’s a cartel guy. They’re supposed to have machisimo, and to just scurry off after Kim yelled at him when he knows in his heart that Jimmy betrayed him, just makes him seem unintimidating.

And finally, I just cannot get over how stupid he looks when he’s trying to film the superlab. One, he’s crawling around the sewer like a rodent, popping out of the storm drain like Pennywise. It’s just ridiculous. And two, the whole filming himself thing makes him look like a vlogger, and we all know that people who vlog are cringe as hell. On top of that, he fucks up his entire plan by calling his Uncle on a tapped line. Sure he comes up with another plan after that, but it just seems sloppy. It’s just one nonstop failure after the other.

Now I’m sure people are saying, “but Kino, what about the mercenaries? He took them all out and got away!” Sure, I guess he finally gets a win in the contrived situation the writers set up for him. But again, this victory has no impact because these aren’t characters in the story. They are essentially just extras. The same thing is true of his fight with the German engineer. Him managing to take him down has no emotional consequence because this isn’t a character that we know or care about.

Speaking of the Germany arc, not only is this sequence an incredibly boring tangent because the character is trying to find out information that we the audience already know, it also inadvertently makes him look like a loser again. In Germany, he tries to seduce Werner Zeiger’s widow, but she ends up turning him down at the end of the night when he wants to come in. Now I know that what he actually wanted was information about what Werner was building, but the framing of the scene just makes him look like a dweeb who can’t score. We also never see Lalo with a woman, which means canonically this dufus has gotten more pussy than him. Maybe there is something to the whole Lalo/Howard shipping after all.

Lalo is like the Boba Fett of Better Call Saul. People like him because he seems cool on the surface, but he actually fails at everything he tries to accomplish. That’s not a good way to set up a villain if you want him to actually be intimidating or to have actual consequences for the series.

Now I know it must sound like I have some kind of personal vendetta against Lalo, and that I’m looking for anything I can to make him look bad. To many viewers, stuff like this probably doesn’t matter, and they are just along for the ride and enjoying the show. Lalo in particular just really gets under my skin, because he represents where the show lost focus. Before his introduction the series was much more heavily focused on Jimmy’s character development. And while they did continue that, the whole Cartel storyline just felt like a distraction from that and a chance to do more Breaking Bad fanservice.

Originally Vince Gilligan did not want to include Lalo, saying that they didn’t need to answer every single question left open from Breaking Bad. However Vince took a step back from the show after Season 3, and Peter Gould took the leadership moving forward. He was much more insistent that they include details from Breaking Bad, which is how we ended up with Lalo and the cartel storyline in the later seasons. I don’t think Peter Gould is a bad writer, but I do think the show became more referencial and less original under his watch than when Vince had the lead.

And that is really the reason why I made this video. I don’t like making negative content. I much prefer to talk about the aspects of the show that I love. But for Better Call Saul in particular, I feel like not enough people discuss the flaws of the show. The show is incredible, don’t get me wrong. But it has flaws, and those flaws should be discussed if we are going to truly appreciate the show for what it is. The final season is very poorly paced, being too long in some parts and rushed in others. And I blame Lalo and the cartel storyline for that pacing. Which is why for me, Lalo is the worst part of Better Call Saul.

He does have sexy feet though.