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Walt and Jesse had already started their involvement with the family in Season 1 via their work with Tuco, but it’s in Season 2, Episode 2, “Grilled,” where the groundwork is really laid for what would be an arc that spans all the way until the end of Season 4, and another of the show’s most chilling villains: Hector. This episode is the one in which he (played by the late Mark Margolis) and his bell are first introduced, and it’s a game-changing installment that sets up a lot of the drama that would follow.
Hector Salamanca Became One Of Breaking Bad’s Greatest Villains
The main plot of “Grilled” sees Tuco kidnap Walt and Jesse, initially because he thinks they’ve been snitching, before concocting a plan to leave for Mexico, taking them with him so they can continue to produce the blue meth. Worried about the DA, he initially takes them to the house of his uncle, or Tio, where we get what’s a stifling, unbearably tense, and yet occasionally funny situation in which he tries to get information out of them, he makes them burritos, they try to poison him, and Hector observes, ringing that damn bell: Ding, ding, ding.
The episode culminates in the death of Tuco. Hank, who had been searching for Walt and Jesse, arrives on the scene and gets embroiled in a shootout, fatally shooting him in the head. Up to this point, it had seemed like Tuco might become a much bigger villain, who could’ve carried at least the totality of Season 2, if not more. But we’d learn that things are much greater than him – something Better Call Saul would later show us, too – and Hector was an important part of that.
