“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.

I wrote a little tribute to actor Tony Dalton and our mutual friend Lalo Salamanca for Decider.