Better Call Saul took a pretty simple but effective route for a scene in the episode, "Fun and Games." Instead of having Patrick Fabian pose for pictures for his character Howard Hamlin's funeral, the showrunners decided to take pictures from Fabian's personal social media page.
Hamlin's funeral in Better Call Saul featured multiple pictures of Fabian, including him diving in Mexico, him posing with a giant tortoise in the background, him participating in what appears to be a marathon, and Fabian on a boat. Hamlin's funeral service was also held at the law practices of Hamlin, Hamlin, McGill, which was going to be renamed since the three original partners of the law firm were confirmed to be dead.
Doing so made Howard Hamlin's funeral feel a little more authentic, like viewers truly lost an actual person they grew attached to. While one could argue that this is a lazy strategy, some of these Instagram pictures date all the way back to 2015, around when the show first started, so it also shows pictures of Fabian being noticeably younger. Again, it makes the funeral feel more real. One of the issues that Hollywood's had in the past when they have characters' pictures show up is that they feel way too perfectly posed to believe that it was an authentic picture.
What makes this even better is, if you look through Fabian's Instagram page, they're littered with pictures of him with his Better Call Saul castmates. That includes ones with whom he actually never shared a scene during his time on the show, like Michael Mando, who played Nacho Varga, and Jonathan Banks, who plays Mike Ehrmantraut. This shows how much these actors truly were attached to one another in the seven years they worked together on the show.
Hamlin's death in Better Call Saul really did signify a point of no return because he was the last character who viewers would have expected to see die. He was never involved in "the game," as the show calls it, and was only killed because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Hamlin wasn't without fault as a character, but the show did an excellent job demonstrating that he truly was the most well-adjusted citizen out of everyone in the cast. In fact, even before Lalo Salamanca murdered him in cold blood, you felt sorry for him. Not only was he being unfairly harassed by Jimmy and Kim, but his marriage was falling apart. Not to mention, getting past Chuck McGill's death did a number on him beforehand. To see him get murdered to top that all off was so unspeakably cruel when he didn't deserve any of that in the slightest.
That's also what makes it so effective. Another issue that a good number of television shows and movies have is having a point to killing off a character besides shock value. Doing that will initially surprise your audience, but if it doesn't have an effect on anything, they'll ask why exactly the writers went that route. Of course, Hamlin's death was the show's most shocking twist, but there was a point to it besides being the one plot point that no one would have seen coming. It also had an effect on everyone. It served as Kim Wexler's breaking point, which prompts her to leave Jimmy, which gets him to basically embrace his life as Saul Goodman. His unnecessary murder served as the catalyst of what would end the Better Call Saul prequel timeline and begin the Breaking Bad timeline.
Better Call Saul airs on Mondays on AMC at 9:00 p.m. EST.
Source: Patrick Fabian/Instagram