An overlooked yet heartbreaking death on Better Call Saul.
There were some really awful deaths on Better Call Saul. Take Nacho Varga, for example. He was so desperate to protect his dad from his criminal life that he ended up taking his own life.
But let’s face it, he should’ve seen it coming when he got involved in all that illegal stuff.
What about Howard? There’s no doubt that this guy was killed for absolutely no reason. Howard totally didn’t deserve his fate, and when Lalo killed him, it was a real gut punch.
But there’s another death that often gets overlooked when people talk about the show’s worst deaths, yet it was indeed heartbreaking.
We are talking about Werner Ziegler, a German engineer, hired to supervise the construction of Gustavo Fring’s meth lab underneath the industrial laundry — the same lab where Walter White worked in Breaking Bad.
After Werner tries to escape the construction site, which he was strictly prohibited from doing, he becomes a danger to Gus’ operation.
Mike tracks down Warner, and Gus orders him to wait for his men to arrive, but Mike says he will handle it himself.
Eventually, Mike shoots Werner dead in the desert. And there are a couple of things that are special about this death and why it hit hard.
First is Werner’s personality. He was genuinely a good guy who just felt homesick after living for so many months underground, far away from his wife in Germany.
That was the reason he escaped the complex — to meet with his wife, who was coming to the US.
A few minutes before his death, Werner calls his wife and tells her to go back home. He says some mean, rude things to her, and he does it intentionally to convince her.
After the phone call is over, you can see Werner crying because of the way he just treated his wife.
Secondly, the death had a huge impact on Mike. He had to push himself and do what needed to be done. He didn’t hold any grudges against Werner and had a good attitude towards him.
After Mike took out Werner, he started hitting the bottle more frequently and carried around a heavy burden of guilt for a really long time.
