Lalo Salamanca: One of the Best Villains Ever
- ayouthviewpoint
- Nov 8, 2024
- 10 min read
By Carlos Alfonso Chaves
Amongst the greatest villains of all time stand many iconic figures across all mediums of entertainment, and TV is no different. To be considered as such, a coalescence of both incredible acting and stupendous writing are paramount. Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul boast not one, but three all-time villains in the forms of Bryan Cranston’s “Walter White”, Giancarlo Esposito’s “Gus Fring”, and Bob Odenkirk’s “Saul Goodman”. But I’d go so far as to argue that Tony Dalton’s “Lalo Salamanca” is Vince Gilligan’s 4th great villain.
Introduction to Lalo
“Lalo” was first mentioned on April 26th 2009, in Breaking Bad’s Season 2 Episode 8 titled “Better Call Saul” (It gets confusing, stick with me here). During the episode “Better Call Saul”, Walt and Jesse kidnap Saul, and hold him at gunpoint over an open grave. Before being able to list their demands, Saul breaks down, pleading that “It wasn’t me! It was Ignacio!”. As soon as he realizes that Walt and Jesse are in no way related to Ignacio (Nacho) or Lalo, his fear completely washes away. After this scene the audience is left wondering “Who is Lalo, and what did he do to Saul?”.
The question of Nacho’s identity was finally answered in the opening season of Better Call Saul but Lalo’s introduction wouldn’t come until Season 4 Episode 8. Lalo’s first ever scene follows Nacho entering a Mexican restaurant, seeing his dealers look at him with fear as someone’s in the kitchen. Upon entering the kitchen, he meets Lalo, he meets a seemingly unassuming man. He’s overly jovial, especially considering that he’s cooking in a cartel-owned money laundering station. Nacho comes around to ask who he is and why he’s here. Before he could do that, Lalo tests Nacho by offering him a freshly cooked meal and telling him “It’s so good! You’re gonna die!”. Lalo is already playing mind games with the underboss he just met, and after getting in Nacho’s head, he reveals that he was sent up north to keep an eye on the Salamanca family business. The scene ends with Lalo merrily leaving the kitchen whilst Nacho looks on. Dreading the newest and greatest threat to what he and, by extension, the rest of the cast had built up over the course of 4 seasons.
Relationships and Characterization
Lalo is characterized primarily by his relation to his cartel family and his relation to Gus. Through these relations, you can derive most if not all of his character traits. First, his loyalties to the Salamanca family, mainly Uncle Hector. Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul use various brief flashbacks to deepen character motivations, or simply to juxtapose with their current existence within the confines of the show. Lalo is one of very few characters that doesn’t have any sort of flashbacks; instead you’re forced to infer what his childhood and adolescence were like. Lalo was the first of Hector’s students, and one can only imagine how he was raised, especially considering that each and every single one of his cousins is very involved with the Mexican cartel. All of the Salamancas live by the motto “La Familia es Todo” and work to improve the Salamanca’s standing within the cartel pecking order. Lalo takes this motto very seriously through both loyalty in exercising the family’s will, and being extremely affectionate for his wheelchair-bound uncle. At this point in the story, Gus is starting to seriously undermine the Salamancas’ in the wake of Tuco's Arrest and Hector's Stroke, Lalo would be the one to push Gus Fring to his breaking point in a final bid that would change cartel politics from that point on in the name of the Salamanca criminal family. Another trait that all Salamancas have is an extreme pride that manifests itself in sadistic rage or total arrogance. Lalo’s impulsivity is often driven by the fact that he knows that he’s cunning enough to get away with whatever, leading him into hot water on several occasions. This is bolstered by the fact that he’s treated like royalty by the cartel. Since they refer to him as “Don Eduardo”, a title reserved only for the elites like Hector. Interestingly, this title isn’t shared with his other cousins, which implies that he holds a higher standing in the family than his other. These traits only show pieces of his character, which would only add to his future screen dominance and pomp; his true intellect, lethality, and cunning are shown with his second major relationship.
The second major relationship that brilliantly characterizes Lalo is his rivalry with Gustavo Fring. Lalo inherits his hatred for Fring from Hector, who many years prior had murdered Gus' lover, and now Gus was winning favor in the cartel. On a fundamental level, Hector could never match the industrial-grade distribution that Fring could offer, and by season 3 had fallen to the wayside. Once Lalo took charge of the Salamanca territory, Fring would face his greatest personal obstacle in his quest to build a meth-fueled empire, and overthrow the Cartel. Lalo could immediately detect that Gus was plotting moves against the Cartel at large, with the power plays made previously to practically force drug distribution over the border to fall under Fring’s chicken trucks. Lalo forced Fring to reopen these distribution routes, but knew that Fring held a much more damning secret and was determined to find out. This game of chess would be the crux of the cartel plot of the show, as Fring would attempt to keep his construction of the meth superlab secret while Lalo was on the prowl. The reason why this clash of minds is so compelling is the stark difference between their characterization. Gus is a calm, efficient, reserved and patient leader whose power is derived from leading hordes of men at his disposal. In contrast, Lalo is impulsive, charismatic, and lethal. While Gus has his men hunt you down, Lalo does it himself. Gus is a strategic mastermind who plays the plots over, whilst Lalo is a tactical genius. This bout is further enriched by the inclusion of Nacho, who’s forced to work as a double-agent for Gus at this point of the story. Both play the game of cartel politics so differently it creates an enthralling dynamic between the two.
Furthermore, Lalo's attempts to find Werner Ziegler in Season 4 perfectly illustrates the positives and negatives of two aspects of Lalo. His impulsivity and his tactical approach. In the wake of Werner Zeigler’s escape, Lalo begins to tail Mike through intuition alone. Eventually, Mike does momentarily put him off his trail; but in a show of his skills as a tracker, he goes to the TravelWire that Ziegler had previously gone to. Unfortunately for him, Mike had already been at the TravelWire, and Fred, the employee working there, was suspicious of one person trying to find the person who’s trying to find someone else, but with seemingly no connection to each other. Lalo asks for the security footage, and understandably, Fred starts making calls to the police to help with the missing person. In the first major show of Lalo’s impulsivity, he murders Fred. Although he gets valuable information for his attempts to find Werner Ziegler, his impulsivity would come back to bite him. This murder would allow Mike and Gus to scheme around Lalo by using Gus’ resources, Mike’s expertise, all bolstered further by Nacho being a mole. Eventually, Mike gives an anonymous tip to the police which leads to Lalo being placed under arrest, awaiting trial for his murder of Fred. Typically, being placed in jail would mean that he can’t cause any problems, alas, even while under arrest, Lalo still has connections and still causes major disruptions for Fring. These issues grow to the point where Gus is forced to mastermind a plot to force Lalo to flee back to Mexico, and then have him assassinated. The plan starts with Jimmy getting Lalo's bail, and after a minor misadventure in the desert, he succeeds. For the sake of brevity, we’ll skip over until the end of the season. After Lalo flees back to Mexico, he brings Nacho along with him. At his compound Nacho betrays him and enacts Gus’ master plan to finally take Lalo out of the picture. All goes according to plan with one small hitch, Lalo survived.
Lalo was then forced to play a greater strategic game against Gus, a game he’d never win. But after he survived the attack on his compound, he’s finally able to compete with Gus with the ball in his court. In Seasons 4 and 5, Lalo is trying to expose within the confines of a Cold War; he couldn’t leverage all of his skills without angering the other cartel Dons. To finally circumvent this, he fakes his own death. Before he goes on his revenge campaign, he tells his Uncle, bellowing on about how he’s “Going to hurt him the same way you taught me.”. Hector tempers his impulsivity with a better plan of getting actual proof against Gus. With most of the cartel thinking he’s dead, he’s able to make this Cold War go hot. Lalo has always proven to be a clever disruptor, but this season goes to show that he’s an astute mind on par with Gustavo Fring, taking a more strategic approach in a similar vein to him. While searching for proof of foul play whilst in Germany. The most interesting repercussion of Lalo’s hunt for proof in Germany, the sheer terror he strikes in Gus. He is able to deduce that Lalo lives by the way his archnemesis is able to look him in the eye and smile. Throughout the season before the episode “Plan and Execution”, not only does Gus focus his entire operation to find Lalo in Albuquerque, but his OCD begins to completely take over. He hyper fixates on minor blemishes in order to cope with the fact that Lalo is out plotting against him. In the greatest display of Lalo’s tracking abilities, he’s able to locate Werner Zeigler’s wife, and from there finds Casper: a member of the secret lab construction. After forcing the information out of Casper, Lalo’s final plan could well and truly begin. The plan consisted of hiding out in the sewers to avoid Gus’ men, and scoping out the laundromat, where “the mother of all meth labs” is holed under. He calls Hector to tell him what’s going on, but before that, he hears a click while calling, indicating that the phone is bugged. This impulsivity that has bitten Lalo on several occasions, and almost had him killed had now turned into his biggest asset. Lalo knew Gus was onto him, and his ingenuity would be what brings Gustavo Fring to the brink with his new plan that he formulated on the spot. First, he still calls Hector while knowing that Gus and his crew have tapped the phone line. This makes them far more alert of Lalo’s presence and are going to focus their efforts on defending Gus and the Laundromat; every other spot where Lalo could turn up was of lesser importance. Second, he goes to Jimmy's apartment, and forces him to go along with the scheme by murdering Howard (the murder of Howard is massive in the story of Jimmy and Kim, but it doesn’t really indicate anything that we don’t already know about Lalo.). Once Jimmy and Kim are coerced, he sends Kim to go to Gus’ house to shoot Gus and take a picture. Since she and Jimmy have a history with Mike and the cartel, they wouldn’t kill her on the spot and would interrogate her as to the whereabouts of Lalo. And to further Kim’s desperation, Lalo threatens her with the death of Jimmy and once Kim leaves, he binds Jimmy to a chair and leaves to strike at the laundromat. After Kim is pressed by Mike and Gus, she tells them that Lalo is at their apartment and about to kill Jimmy, unwittingly playing into Lalo’s plan.
The third step was to have Mike or a significant number of Gus’ men go out to Jimmy’s apartment in response to what Kim said about Lalo’s location. Forcibly reallocating men from the laundromat for Gus' personal defense whilst another half went to go kill Lalo where they thought he’d be. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, Gus would take his men to the laundromat, a critical blunder, as Lalo is able to ambush Gus . After killing his men, Lalo forces Gus to open the laundromat revealing the base of the superlab. Lalo begins to gloat, finally being able to kill his family’s one true enemy. But Lalo grew too cocky, he’d outwitted Gus, and let him say his final words. Gus took advantage of Lalo’s idleness to shoot him with a gun he’d hid in the lab prepping for the worst case scenario. Pride and its disastrous consequences is a crux of both shows, and Lalo’s death came not because he was outsmarted, but because he took the chance to savor his victory, and let his prideful impulses take over. Allowing Gus to overcome his greatest adversary in his quest for revenge.
Performance
The feats and characterization of a character are ultimately just pen being put to paper. The most memorable villains in media have a perfect blend of both incredible script and incredible performance. Tony Dalton as Lalo perfectly encapsulates the boogeyman that had been set up ever since that fateful throwaway line in season two of Breaking Bad.
But why is his performance so good? The most interesting thing that comes from the very nature of Lalo is his contrast to the rest of the cast. The difference between him and Gus have already been detailed, but another group of characters he’s so different from is the other Salamancas. In Breaking Bad, you get introduced to just Tuco, Hector, and the Twins. Hector is wheelchair-bound, and in the few flashbacks we get, he isn’t very talkative and extremely antagonistic. Even before he was incapacitated, he’s a horrendous person with worse people skills. Tuco is talkative, but he’s always high on something, and is an extremely loose cannon. As for the twins, they’re nonverbal terminators. The Salamanca family is known for bloodlust and their irrational violence. Lalo flips these conceptions with his first scene being him just cooking tacos. This positivity isn’t just confined to his first scene, all throughout the show, he’s either got a big smile on his face or singing to himself. This chipper demeanor also plays to create a social disconnect between him and regular people. The most glaring example being just after he murders Howard. He’s giving instructions to Kim and Jimmy, while having them sit about a foot away from Howard's corpse. All the while Lalo is making jokes like “Jesus… you two and your MOUTHS! ¡Dios Mío!” and “This guy… he's a housecat!." Lalo’s joy is almost glued to his face, as even when he dies, he dies with a smile on his face. And yet with such a positive personality, every act of sadism, every innocent murdered just builds dread within the audience. Seeing what Lalo has done to people that stand in his way, seeing him interact with other characters makes the viewer fear for everything the rest of the cast has built over the course of six seasons.
Conclusion
Lalo Salamanca is without a doubt one of the most unique villains to ever grace the silver screen. His Cold War with Gustavo Fring enthralls audiences as they await the climactic showdown between two of the show’s smartest characters. Every heinous act builds fear with every member of the cast, and by extension, the viewer. Tony Dalton’s performance helps elevate an already incredible script to new peaks, and leaves an indelible mark on the audience. Better Call Saul is already regarded as one of the premier shows of the late 2010’s-early 2020’s, and Lalo is a pivotal reason for the show's universal acclaim. But don’t just take my word for it, actively immerse yourself in the gray world that Vince Gilligan has created. Where each rivalry, each interaction leaves the audience floored and waiting for the next episode.
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