It is Huell’s Rules, damn it! We adore Lavell Crawford more than we can possibly express. You will thank us for directing you to Shaq’s Five Minute Funnies when he delivers the best ever yo momma joke.
Therefore, when he appeared in Season 4 of Breaking Bad as Saul Goodman’s new personal bodyguard, we knew that comedy would follow whenever he appeared on the screen. Huell Babineaux is undoubtedly the best comic relief criminal character we have seen in a while, however, Better Call Saul made it clear that his relationship with Jimmy was far deeper.
Is Huell still in the safehouse that Hank and Gomey left him in after Breaking Bad ended? was one of the most notable outtakes from the series. We believe it is time to address the frequently asked question: What Happened to Huell Babineux after Breaking Bad with the release of El Camino and now that BCS itself is nearing its conclusion?
And will he have a part in Better Call Saul’s season finale? To learn more, keep watching this video. Oh, and if you have not finished watching both programs, consider this your spoiler alert.
He’s the man with the lightest touch in the world – Huell Babineux in Better Call Saul
Despite the fact that Breaking Bad was Huell’s canonical entrance into Vince Gilligan’s universe, we are going to go chronologically in this video since it will be simpler for all of us. He was introduced to the brand by none other than Dr. Caldera, who gave Jimmy a recommendation from his “black book” after Jimmy requested “someone with a soft touch.” Jimmy had Huell run into Chuck on the day of his hearing and had him covertly hide a fully charged battery in Chuck’s waist coat’s breast pocket as part of his strategy to expose Chuck’s mental condition aggressively. He then listed him as a witness and had him sit at the back of the room of his hearing, patiently waiting to reveal the true extent of Chuck’s supposed Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity.
When Jimmy exposed Chuck’s fragile mental state to the court after revealing the battery’s proximity to his actual skin and Chuck’s failure to notice it, Huell testifies that he planted the battery on Chuck an hour and 43 minutes ago, telling us that he is as meticulous as he is good at his job. Having played his part in Jimmy’s scheme, Huell takes his leave and resurfaces in the Season 4 episode Piñata, where he helps Jimmy intimidate a few punks who had tried to screw over his prepaid cell phone business and mugged him earlier.
Huell, alongside another associate Clarence, entered a secluded room wearing ski masks and proceeded to scare the crap out of the three young scammers by destroying piñatas dangling a few centimeters from their faces. After helping Jimmy sort out his troubles with the punks, he agrees to become his bodyguard for his drop phone business, and for the next few months, Jimmy and Huell sell dozens of drop phones to criminals all over Albuquerque while Jimmy tries to get his Saul Goodman identity out there.
When he has just a month left on his suspension, Jimmy takes Huell to scout offices for when he returns to practicing law as Saul Goodman. He takes him to a dentist’s office and asks Huell for his opinion, but in Huell’s mind, Jimmy is more criminal than lawyer. He says that if Jimmy was a lawyer, he’d have a top-floor office in a high rise building and a boat. Later, when an officer in plainclothes questions Jimmy about his drop phone business, Huell accidentally manages to get himself arrested on a rather serious charge.
See, while Jimmy was arguing with the cop, Huell was showing up to work with his lunch in hand and his headphones on his ears. When he saw Jimmy getting intimidated by someone, he recalled the events of Pinata and immediately went to neutralize the threat, not realizing that the man he was about to knock out was a police officer. Jimmy tried to warn Huell but like we said, he had headphones on so he couldn’t listen to him, which shows you that though Huell can be detail-oriented, he’s a simple man at his core.
And this particular move to protect his boss landed him in boiling water because he attacked the same cop who had picked him up for pickpocketing three years ago and he now faced serious jail time for assaulting a police officer. Jimmy told him it would be two and a half years, but Huell wasn’t having any of it, threatening to pull a D.B. Cooper on everyone. And this is where Jimmy’s exceptional skills as a conman and a lawyer collided into what was possibly his first impactful “criminal” defense.
With Kim’s help- and that of a few money-hungry travellers on a bus- Jimmy is able to pull off an elaborate con that portrays Huell as a local hero of his hometown Coushatta, Louisiana; which is dubious in itself because elsewhere we learn that Huell’s social security number is 331, which is only issued to people born in Illinois. But thanks to a convincing performance as Huell’s local pastor, Jimmy is able to get him off with 4 months of parole and time served, which makes Huell the first success of Saul Goodman and Associates- though that wasn’t a thing yet.
From this point forward, Saul and Huell developed a strong working relationship. When his suspension term was about lapse, Saul staged a massive “clearance sale” for all the drop phones that he had left with him and Huell worked as security and marketing, constantly increasing the years of the sentence he was supposed to serve and then thanking the Magic Man for getting him off.
After they sell out everything, he congratulates Jimmy but Saul only says that they are just getting started. Huell becomes one of Saul’s most-trusted associates; trusted enough for him to be the witness at his “formal wedding” to Kim. When Jimmy and Kim run their scam on Howard, Huell sources a quick key-forger for Jimmy and helps him duplicate Howard’s Jaguar keys in what has to be record-speed.
Afterward, he asks Jimmy why he and his wife- who are legit lawyers- do what they do, to which Jimmy simply replies that their actions today will help countless people in the future. Huell just shrugs it off, knowing full well that that is BS, and that’s the last time we see him on the show. Now, let’s dive into the Breaking Bad timeline.
He’s Saul’s bodyguard and “A-Team” – Huell in Breaking Bad
Huell makes his “return” in Breaking Bad season 4 episode 1 as Saul’s personal bodyguard, after Mike threatened to beat him till his legs don’t work. After speaking with Skyler White on the phone and assuring her that Walt was “safe”, Saul tells Huell they might have to skip town now that Walter’s dealings with Gus were becoming more unstable by the hour. From then on, Huell became Saul’s shadow when he wasn’t out doing a job for him.
Those jobs included Huell helping Kuby intimidate Ted Beneke into silence, with Lavell Crawford nailing the balance between scary and funny with a single word: Reasonably. When Ted Beneke panics and tries to make a break for it, he ends up injuring himself near-fatally and when Saul asks his A-Team how this could happen, Huell calls it an “act of God”. He is later involved in a much more terrible crime when he helps Walt enact his plan to poison Brock y lifting the ricin cigarette from Jesse’s pack when he comes to visit Saul.
Later, when Jesse is confronting Walter for poisoning Brock with the ricin, he correctly deduces that Huell lifted the cigarette off of him, but is ultimately convinced to help Walter get rid of Gus anyway. As for who lifted it off of Jesse, Walt blames Tyrus, and that seems to be that. After Walt realizes that his operation is in danger from Hank, he has Kuby and Huell pick up his money and bring it to Saul’s office.
When the pair get there, Huell takes one look at the massive stack of money and tells Kuby he’s gotta do it, before lying down on Walt’s money. Huell contemplates taking the money and running to Mexico with Kuby, but the latter reminds him that Walt hit 10 guys in jail in under 2 minutes, seemingly ending the discussion. After helping Walt put his money in 50-gallon barrels, Huell leaves the scene and is picked up by Hank and Steve Gomez for questioning.
They press him to reveal his role in the poisoning of Brock, thus tying him to the Heisenberg case, and convince him that Saul gave him up by showing him a fake picture of Jesse with his brains blown out. Huell freaks out- understandably- and tells the DEA agents everything he knows, looking kind of proud of filling up 7 barrels worth of drug money to the brim, and that is the last time we see Huell Babineux; canonically, anyway.
The El Camino Countdown and “Huell’s Rules”
In the lead-up to the release of El Camino, Huell appeared in multiple teasers that showed him catching up with the events of Felina- the series finale of Breaking Bad. As the movie’s premiere came closer, a final teaser was posted that showed Huell picking up his jacket and leaving the safehouse in a frustrated mood, referring to the aforementioned running gag with the safehouse in the Breaking Bad community.
Though these teasers were used to promote El Camino, they didn’t get used in the movie itself and are considered to be an exercise in breaking the fourth wall. What does refer to the safehouse situation more overtly is the Funny Or Die comedy short called “Huell’s Rules”, which sees Crawford reprise his role in a sort of a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air type of sitcom setting.
He is joined by his wife, who is played by Nicole Byer who also played Trudy Judy in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and what appear to be his children, and his mother-in-law, who Mr. Crawford himself also plays! No amount of words are going to be able to do justice to this piece of comedy perfection, and we recommend that you go check it out on YouTube right after you’re done with this video, because it is just that hilarious.
But we all know how meticulous Vince Gilligan is with his creations, so he finally addressed Huell’s fate through the unique existence that is Breaking Bad: The Official Book. There, Gilligan states that after Hank and Gomey’s deaths, he believes that Agent Van Oster must have contacted HQ about his current condition.
Vince says that the DEA most-likely pressed Huell a bit more in order to draw out any kind of information that they could from him, and then cut him loose. At the end of this statement, he says that Huell is out on the streets as a free man and is doing what he does best; whatever that might be. And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, might just be becoming a star witness in the downfall of Saul Goodman.
What Happened to Huell after Walt’s Empire collapsed?
In Season 6 Episode 11 of Better Call Saul, titled “Breaking Bad”, we finally get the answer to the age-old question; what happened to Huell? Turns out, he went back to New Orleans to live with his parents or something along those lines. Now, this might confuse some of you because his hometown is Coushatta, and his birthplace is apparently Illinois, but that doesn’t really matter in terms of where his folks are currently residing, now, does it? What is interesting is the fact that Huell is the only person Francesca says is out and about.
When Saul asks her about Kuby, she tells him she doesn’t know where he is, and everyone else is either locked up or unemployable. Skyler White got a plea deal and Jesse fled the country, so Saul is the only one left. Huell being back in NOLA was only possible because the DEA held him under false pretenses and had no choice but to let him walk. But that might not be the last time we see or hear from him because there is one more episode left in Better Call Saul, and we think we might know how it might go down.
The series finale of BCS is titled Saul Gone, and that clearly refers to the fact that Jimmy is either going to end up in jail or die; there is no escaping for him. But how will he end up in jail? It can’t be because of the case the feds are running on him right now; and besides, from the episode 13 teaser, we can deduce that Jimmy is planning to vanish once again. But in episode 12, we also saw Kim write down her confession in an affidavit that she presents to Cheryl where she cops to everything that her and Jimmy did in order to discredit Howard and destroy his reputation.
If you guys recall, Huell was the one who helped Jimmy duplicate Howard’s keys, and he has already been told that Goodman and Walter were both coming for him. It’s true that Walt is dead and Goodman has fled far enough for Huell to start feeling comfortable about his own life being out of danger, but as we know from Marion, that is never going to last for too long.
Our best guess for a Huell return to the franchise in what is supposed to be its ultimate goodbye- Vince Gilligan does not want to make another show/film related to the Breaking Bad IP as he revealed in a recent interview- is that he will be one of the witnesses whose testimony will finally implicate all of Jimmy’s identities and force him to face the consequences of his actions.
It’s possible that Jimmy might pull a D.B. Cooper himself, but seeing as Jesse already did that, and Walt is dead as well, someone has to end up in jail and it is looking increasingly likely that someone will be Jimmy. It’s also possible that Kim will help track Huell down for the authorities, and that is how he comes into the picture when Jimmy is eventually tried, but as of now, Huell is somewhere in New Orleans, presumably cracking yo mama jokes and making people’s pockets lighter on occasion to allow him to coast by life.
Marvelous Verdict
As we’ve said multiple times already, Huell Babineux is the funniest character in Breaking Bad, and that is after Bryan Cranston, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr show off their own comedy chops in their appearances. Lavell Crawford has the perfect mixture of intensity and hilarity with a pronounced Southern drawl that fits his style of comedy like a glove. Every moment he spends gracing our TV screens is a gift, and we just hope we can see him again in the series finale of Better Call Saul. God bless Mr. Babineux and remember everybody; when you’re stuck in a safehouse for 20 years, you gotta play by Huell’s Rules.