Patrick Fabian reflected on the shocking fate Howard Hamlin suffered at the end of the intense Better Call Saul mid-season finale.
Until it finally comes back on the air in mid-July, everyone will be talking about what went down at the end of the Better Call Saul mid-season finale. Of course, Patrick Fabian himself is just one of many to share their thoughts on the mid-season finale and Howard Hamlin's fate.
Shortly after Fabian's character Howard Hamlin was unexpectedly murdered at the hands of Lalo Salamanca in the Better Call Saul episode "Plan and Execution," it shouldn't shock anyone that viewers would like to hear Fabian's perspective on how it all unfolded for Hamlin. Fortunately, he was willing to open up about how he discovered his character's fate.
Not too long after the Better Call Saul mid-season finale, Fabian was interviewed by Vulture to get his thoughts on his character's fate. Fabian admitted that he knew ahead of time that Hamlin would be out of the picture early on, but had no idea that Hamlin's story ended with a bullet to the head for merely precautionary reasons from someone he had never met before. "I knew I was going to bow out early, that was already told to me before the season," Fabian said. "I didn’t know how, I didn’t know specifics, and like all the seasons, it’s come to me script by script by script. So I didn’t know what was going on until 607 was dropped, and I had two weeks before we started shooting it. But when reading it, I’m reading it, I’m like, 'Oh, these are great scenes,' and then I get to that last page. And it’s only two-thirds of the page, but it says, 'Lalo enters.' I was like, What? And then literally half a page later, it’s over. End of episode. It sort of took my breath away on the page. Oh, that’s final. That’s like a shot in the dark as I’m driving away. That’s that."
Up to that point, Hamlin had never crossed paths with anyone from the criminal side of the show and only happened to cross paths with the show's most dangerous character by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seeing the show merge the two sides of the story into one scene can be quite riveting - much like how Breaking Bad did the same when Uncle Jack and his gang murdered Hank - because of how rare a scene like that is. As shocking as Hamlin's death was, those two elements crossing paths make for great television, and not just for shock value.
The worst part about Hamlin's death is that it proves Chuck McGill's earlier words correct. In the first season, Chuck told Jimmy that abusing his power as a lawyer will end in people getting hurt. Not only were those words prophetic in the worst way, but once Chuck told Jimmy in season 3 to not bother having regrets about hurting anyone since he won't make the effort to change, Jimmy's (as well as Kim's) recklessness then led to the death of someone they had never intended to put in mortal danger.
What also makes Hamlin's death so shocking is that his death was the last way in which fans would have expected him to go out. Fans would have understood if Hamlin's fate was that he and Jimmy simply went their separate ways before the events of Breaking Bad started. But that would have been too predictable. Hamlin's unexpected death wasn't done merely for the sake of getting his fate over with. It was done to prove that Jimmy and Kim truly have fallen to a place where they cannot be redeemed. Scariest of all from that? We've got six more episodes left in this show to see if they fall even further.