Better Call Saul's Bob Odenkirk Explains Gene's Steep Downward Spiral: 'He's Trying To Destroy Himself'

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Monday's Better Call Saul.

If you spent this week's Better Call Saul shouting "No! Don't do it!" at the screen, well, you're not alone.

Monday's penultimate episode saw Gene press his luck way too far, first by lingering too long while ripping off a rich cancer patient and almost getting caught by the cops, and then by threatening to strangle poor old Marion when she exposed his Saul Goodman alter ego. (Read our full recap here.) There were so many times where Gene could've just walked away and gotten away with these scams — so why does he keep pushing like this?

"He really is doing this whole scam just to burn up his life," star Bob Odenkirk explained on AMC's Talking Saul aftershow. "He's trying to destroy himself." He likened Gene's downward spiral to Nicolas Cage's self-destructive character in Leaving Las Vegas: "I'm gonna do these scams until you catch me and I go down... I'm just gonna burn this down."

Gene has reached the point of no return with his life in Omaha: "He's not enjoying the Cinnabon job," Odenkirk added with a laugh. "He's not enjoying being hidden away... to be utterly mute, as effusive as his character is. He can't handle it."

But it was Marion telling Gene "I trusted you" that broke the spell, he pointed out: "The sweetness of her face and the hurt in her heart that hurt so much in that moment melts his steely anger, and he remembers that he's human again, briefly, and he can't do it." But "he gets close, which is crazy!... It's the furthest length that he's gone."

Read on for more insights from the Talking Saul aftershow:

We saw Kim Wexler's humdrum life as a corporate drone at a Florida sprinkler company, and that's a reaction to the chaos of her life with Jimmy, star Rhea Seehorn explained. "She is a shell of a person, just kind of living this life that, for me, was the answer to her saying 'I wanted more,'" when she interviewed with Schweikart & Cokely in Season 2. "I think she thinks she flew too close to the sun, and now she's tamping it all down. It was sad."

And yes, that brunette hair was a wig, she revealed. When Seehorn first read the script, "I knew that I had some wig fittings."

After Kim confessed all of her wrongdoings to Howard's widow Cheryl, she broke down in sobs on the airport shuttle bus. "I think that Kim does not think that... anyone needs to feel sorry for her in that moment," Seehorn said. "So I do think that she suppresses. 'I'm here to do penance, I'm here to allow the victims to be the victims.'" But while shooting the bus scene, writers/producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould told Seehorn: "'This is not this episode's letting go. This is six seasons, seven years of her letting go of what she's become, what she's done to herself.' And I understood that, and it hurt in my chest."

Bonus fun facts: They shot that scene on a real Albuquerque airport bus — and the woman sitting next to Kim who tries to comfort her as she cries was played by Gilligan's longtime girlfriend Holly Rice.

Yes, he had been down the drug-running path before with Lalo Salamanca, and that ended very badly, but Odenkirk thinks Saul learning that Walter White was the one who cooks "the blue stuff" inspired him to get into business with him: "He's been waiting for somebody like that to walk into his life." But doesn't he think this could end just as badly as Lalo did? Odenkirk doesn't think so: "I think he sees Walt as, 'This guy is not an off-the-rails guy. This guy has a life. He has a wife and kids, and he's a teacher.'... What if I can get a mastermind criminal who's not out of his f—king mind?"

It was a thrill for us to see Kim share a scene with Jesse Pinkman, as the two smoked a cigarette outside Saul's law office and Jesse asked her how good a lawyer Saul is. That scene finds Kim and Jesse at opposite ends of their stories, Seehorn pointed out: "My character is at the end of the arc of realizing what going down a rabbit hole can do to your conscience," and "he's beginning it." She added that it leaves viewers to contemplate the question: "If she could tell him what she learned, would he change what he's doing?" (Yeah, probably not, yo.)

We never would've been treated to the delights of Tony Dalton's performance as Lalo Salamanca if Gilligan had his way, he admitted: "There wouldn't have been a Lalo if it'd been up to me. That's how dumb I am." The first mention of Lalo in Breaking Bad is just "a throwaway line," he noted, and Gilligan didn't think they needed to actually show the character on Better Call Saul. But Gould and the other writers insisted, "and they were so right to keep pushing," Gilligan conceded, "because we wouldn't have had Tony Dalton, and the whole universe would've been poorer for it."

They understandably didn't want to give away too much about next Monday's series ender, but Seehorn called it "so thoughtful" and "so respectful of the intelligence level of our fans," adding: "I'm still thinking about the ending." Odenkirk summed up the finale in three succinct words: "Hard-won truth." Gilligan, meanwhile, had a stark warning for fans: "Stock up on Depends."