The original post: /r/television by /u/Infinite_Fly_5374 on 2025-04-19 18:57:14.
I watched Better Call Saul for the first time last summer. I loved everything about it, and aside from the masterful writing and directing, I thought it elevated itself even above Breaking Bad was all of the character work. Jimmy, Kim, Mike, Chuck, Nacho, Lalo, Gus were all amazing characters in their own right. But the character that has stuck with me most months later is Howard Hamlin, who might be my favorite side character in television history.
His development from an antagonist, to the realization that he was actually a decent man acting as Chuck’s fall guy, to a genuinely good person surrounded by bad people was just tragic. I think about the kind of good person Howard became who treated others with so much kindness, and who exuded so much professionalism in every scene he was in. It was so hard to watch his unbroken, resilient strength in the final season as he was treated horribly by everyone. It’s why his final monologue to Jimmy and Kim is one of my favorite scenes in television; in the face of his worst moment, he still maintains his classy and intelligent demeanor as he hammers home what terrible people they are. And even after everything he faced, he still had so much confidence in himself and his ability to overcome every struggle in his life (“I will land on my feet. I will be okay.”).
I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever felt so sad about a TV character’s death as I did with Howard’s. What emphasized its brutality was the flippancy of its execution; rather than allowing Howard to get a grand moment, he is just unceremoniously shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It honestly made me think about other real-life tragedies and innocent people who have met similar fates. There are so many victims who have died from simply seeing something they should not have, or who have been in the wrong person’s path. There is a certain amount of sympathy you feel when seeing their deaths on a Wikipedia page, but Howard’s death recontextualized such treatment, as a man we’ve been following for six seasons was gone in the blink of an eye for no good reason. Seeing him buried next to Lalo and his upstanding reputation genuinely destroyed me; it was just such an unfair treatment for the poor guy.
And special shout-out to Patrick Fabian, who not only has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard, but was consistently phenomenal in this role. He embodied the professionalism of this slick lawyer, and he gave all of his lines and deliveries so much weight. He deserved an Emmy nom for his last episode imo.