The Alternate Better Call Saul Season 6 Storyline That Fans Never Got To See
"Better Call Saul" is currently enjoying the fruits of its labor. The "Breaking Bad" spin-off is airing its highly successful and critically revered final season, and fans have already been floored by two major character deaths. With these kinds of shocks and revelations, the show has never felt more unpredictable.
Created by "Breaking Bad" alums Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, "Better Call Saul" follows Jimmy McGill (aka Saul Goodman) (Bob Odenkirk) as he begins his legal career after a life as a grifter and conman. However, the more the criminal lawyer brushes up against his increasingly volatile clientele, the more he gets pulled into the morally gray area between the two sides of the law.
Much of the final season centers around Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy's plan to ruin Howard Hamlin's (Patrick Fabian) reputation so that he will have to settle the Sandpiper lawsuit, netting Jimmy a handsome payout in the process. However, their plan goes awry in Season 6, Episode 7 ("Plan and Execution") when Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) enters the fray. Surprisingly, there were quite a few different plans about how to get Howard where he tragically ends up.
Howard Hamlin's downfall looked quite different at one point
Speaking to Variety about the creative process behind the series, "Better Call Saul" writer-producer-director Thomas Schnauz went over an early plan for Howard Hamlin's ruining that would have taken the series all the way back to its very first episode. "We had probably a dozen different directions with this plot," Schnauz explained. "The one that sticks in my mind the most involved the skateboarder twins from Season 1, Episode 1."
Longtime fans of the series will recall a pair of twins who try to scam Jimmy in the pilot, only for him to intimidate them into a plot of his own. Viewers haven't seen the duo since Season 1, Episode 2 ("Mijo"). However, according to Schnauz, the brothers almost made a comeback in the final season. "We were going to trick Howard that he accidentally ran into one of them with his car, sent him over a railing, and killed him," Schnauz elaborated. "But it was gonna be a switch where one twin goes over the side of a rail, but the other twin was already laying down at the bottom, all bloody and twisted."
In the end, however, the writers opted for a different path. Schnauz said, "But we ultimately needed to figure out how Howard could embarrass himself during mediation and do enough damage that it made more sense to settle the Sandpiper suit than to renegotiate." The solution that made it to air involves an equally complex scheme that includes fake private investigators and fraudulent doppelgängers.
For his part, Patrick Fabian had only kind words to say regarding Howard's death and his departure from the series. "I couldn't ask for more. If you gotta get shot by somebody, you might as well get shot by the handsome Tony Dalton with all that charisma," Fabian mused. "What a way to go."