‘Better Call Saul’s Lalo Salamanca Was One of TV’s Greatest Villains

“Cats are a liquid,” the old internet saying goes; Lalo Salamanca is, or was, a liquid too. Unlike so many of his peers on Better Call Saul—Mike Ehrmantraut, shuffling along as if being actively crushed by the weight of his sins; Kim Wexler, whom the filmmakers constantly shoot as framed by cage-like latticeworks of windows and bars to suggest her fenced-in lack of options—Lalo could move. Leaping, jumping, climbing, falling, infiltrating: There was seemingly no structure he couldn’t infiltrate, no person he couldn’t reach. At one point, befitting his fluid nature, he even wound up in a sewer, though it didn’t hold him for long. 

Perhaps it’s fitting that he died in a dirt-floored cave, choking to death on his own vital fluids. At long last, there was nowhere for him to go but down into the earth.

But until that point—and I mean right up until the point of death, during which he managed to get out one last laugh—boy oh boy, was Lalo Salamanca ever a top-tier villain. A worthy successor to the heavies of Breaking Bad, the show for which Better Call Saul serves as a prequel (and, at times, a sequel), Lalo stood out in a crowded field of gangsters. His taciturn enemies, Gus Fring and Mike Ehrmantraut; his bombastic relative, Tuco Salamanca; his reptilian and eventually severely handicapped uncle Hector; the silent killers known as “the Cousins”—Lalo, with his mustachioed good looks, his ingratiating conversational nature, and his perpetual Cheshire Cat grin (cats are a liquid, after all) was a breed apart.

The credit here belongs to several people. There’s the writing staff, led by co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and writer Gordon Smith (who penned the character’s exit on last night’s episode, “Point and Shoot.”) They faced a challenge—how do you top Gus Fring as an antagonist on your new Albuquerque-based crime drama?—and figured out exactly the right mix of unnerving charm and blood-chilling menace to do it. (Seriously, think of those moments, like when he decided he would have to kill some of his beloved neighbors in order to preserve the cover story that he’d been assassinated, when his grin goes cold and dead on his face. Chilling.) There are the many directors who knew how to maximize his leaping and climbing antics, as if he were some evil meth-slinging Spider-Man.

Then there’s the man himself, actor Tony Dalton. In a sense, and I don’t mean this as a slight against him at all, Dalton simply followed in the footsteps of other, earlier characters that might have been stock figures on other shows but who felt alive and surprising on BCS. The show’s current and final season wouldn’t work if, for example, Michael Mando hadn’t played low-ranking soldier Nacho Varga with graceful quietude and restraint, or if Patrick Fabian hadn’t turned wealthy, respected asshole Howard Hamlin into a fragile and sympathetic character as Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler went to work destroying his life and reputation. Lalo’s pleasant demeanor and ear-to-ear grin, even in the middle of murdering people, was a twist on a similarly familiar archetype. 

That’s to say nothing about his superhuman ability to bound over or slink through every physical obstacle set in his path. (Including boundaries: A wanted man, he crossed between the United States, Mexico, and even Germany with ease.) It feels a bit distasteful to talk about Dalton as a physical specimen, but you can see the guy is in damn good shape through his stylish, tight-fitting wardrobe; this gave Lalo believability as he moved from one murderous incident to the next with seemingly nothing inhibiting his liquid progress, up until the moment he took too long to kill Gus Fring and things went sideways.

It’s not easy to build a cartel character who truly (almost literally) leaps off the screen. Say what you will about the pros and cons of Ozark, for example, but with the exception of hillbilly heroin dealers the Snells, it always struggled to make its ganglords and crime bosses interesting figures. (Omar Navarro? Frank Cosgrove Sr.? I doubt you’ve thought much about them since the show ended.) 

What makes the creation of Lalo even more impressive is the high degree of difficulty involved. As a character, he had to fit into the world already established by multiple seasons of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, standing out without breaking the mold so completely that you suddenly feel like you’re watching a different show. Watching Lalo slither his way around every impediment, watching that famous Tony Dalton grin, you still somehow believe he’s operating in the same milieu as Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler and Howard Hamlin and Walter White and Jesse Pinkman and Gus Fring. What’s more, he effectively replaced a very different antagonist, Jimmy’s mentally ill brother Chuck, as the show’s antagonist—a massive redirection of energy and a tremendous shift in tone that still somehow played out perfectly, as if Dalton and Michael McKean compared notes. 

So we salute you, Lalo Salamanca—and you, Tony Dalton, and you, the writers of Better Call Saul. You gave us a killer whose physical grace, killer instincts, and even more killer smile we won’t soon forget.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.