Better Call Saul Episode 6: Five-O

**Honestly, if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad and the first five episodes of Better Call Saul, your life is one big half-measure.**

Episodes 1&2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 – Episode 5

Wow.

That’s all I’ve got.

Five-O was damn near perfect. An example of why you watch television. One of those rare episodes that you can’t take your eyes off of, not even tempted to look at your phone, forcing yourself to hold your pee and convincing yourself you don’t need any snacks. From start to finish, this was one of the better episodes of either series. Certainly one of the best acting performances, courtesy of Jonathan Banks. For my money, that last monologue was right up there with Walt’s “The Danger” and his moment in the crawlspace, Jesse’s reaction to Andrea/his last exchange with Walt in Felina and Mike’s own “Half-measures” speech.

For BB fans, Mike has been BCS’s not-so-secret weapon we’ve been waiting to see unleashed all season. I’d be willing to bet his inclusion in the show is the sole reason at least a handful of fans gave it a chance in the first place. That’s pretty remarkable for a character who was only introduced in Breaking Bad because Bob Odenkirk couldn’t make it back to Albuquerque to film the aftermath of Jane’s death scene in Season 2. Five-O gave us everything we wanted: an explanation of his past, why he’s in somewhat of a self-imposed exile in the present (take notes, Dexter) and what he will be going through in the near future with Jimmy by his side.

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Episode 6 returns to the pattern from the first four episodes, wherein the title ends with an “O” and the episode begins with a flashback. We see a train rolling into ABQ and Mike getting off it. Stacy, the stare-down lady from the end of last episode, greets him at the station. He meets her out front, but not before we see him using a maxi pad he swiped from the women’s bathroom (“Janitor, anybody in here?”) to clean up what looks to be a gunshot wound to his shoulder.

They go together to Stacy’s house, where Mike takes part in one of his favorite BB past-times in her back yard (pushing his granddaughter on a swing). A lengthy conversation between the two adults reveals quite a bit about the situation: Stacy is Mike’s daughter-in-law, Matty was Mike’s son and her husband, he was also a cop in Philly but was killed. Stacy tells Mike about Matty’s behavior in the days leading up to his death, specifically about a heated late-night phone call she believes Mike was on the other end of (“Thick as thieves, the two of you”). Mike insists it wasn’t, but the manner in which he immediately tries to talk her down from the “blaming herself” ledge makes you wonder if he’s telling the truth. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.

Mike waits outside for a cab, further illustrating the strained relationship between him and his family. He gets picked up, and as luck would have it, the cabby is a bit crooked and takes him to a vet who fixes up his gunshot wound on the hush-hush. He also offers to “find him work” if he’s sticking around town, an offer Mike declines (“I am not lookin’ for that kind of work”). An interesting parallel to Jimmy, who initially declines the bribe money from the Kettlemans and also says no to Mike’s scheme later in the episode, but eventually crosses that line completely as we all know.

Lawyer. Lawyer. Lawyer. Lawyer. That’s the only answer the two Philly cops get out of Mike during the next scene in an interrogation room until they call up Jimmy. The only time we see our title character all episode, he offers a nice break from the drama as he struts in to the station looking like “a young Paul Newman dressed as Matlock”.

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Mike asked Jimmy to bring a cup of coffee, but it isn’t for him. His plan is to have Jimmy spill the coffee on the younger cop after they finish talking so that Mike has a chance to swipe the notebook he has all his case notes in. Jimmy initially declines. Emphatically. Ha.

Obviously, knowing nothing about Mike or the case that he’s involved in (“the Hoffman and Fensky thing”), Jimmy has the two Philly guys bring him up to speed. Here are the basics: Matty had been a cop for two years. Nine months ago he responded to a shots fired call. He went in with his partner, Hoffman. Fensky backed them up. Matt was killed, the other two returned fire but the shooter escaped. There were no leads until six months later, when Hoffman and Fensky turned up dead in a vacant lot. Other than admitting he saw them at a bar the night they died, Mike provided no help. Although they called coming out west to talk to him a hail-mary, it was pretty clear the Philly guys had their suspicions about Mike’s involvement in the whole thing. Considering Mike moved to Albuquerque the morning after that night at the bar, I’m pretty sure we all had suspicions at that point.

In the least surprising moment of all time, Jimmy decides to go along with Mike’s plan and spills the coffee on the younger cop as they’re leaving. If you have a chance though, go back and watch that scene again. Banks stole the show last night but Odenkirk was brilliant in the last ten seconds in the interrogation room. They stand up, he looks at the coffee wryly, contemplates what he’s about to do, then gives Mike a subtle head nod and proceeds with the spill. Afterwards he asks Mike in the car how he know Jimmy would spill the coffee. My guess? Mike knew his billboard thing was a stunt, something too sophisticated for a one-time schemer. He knew a guy like Slippin’ Jimmy wouldn’t hesitate to play outside of the rules.

Mike begins flipping through the stolen notebook at his home (we’ll go through the contents of those pages at the end of the recap). He calls someone up, says they need to talk, and hangs up.

This is where Banks really turned the heat up. The person on the other end of the call was Stacy. He briskly struts up to her front door and barely slows down before walking right inside. Mike’s fears are confirmed when Stacy admits to calling the Philly cops. She found money in the lining of a suitcase after her and her daughter moved out west. She stops short of straight up accusing Matt of being dirty but clearly thinks the money and the Hoffman/Fensky murders had something to do with him. Her rationale behind not coming to Mike was that it basically would have killed him. She says she doesn’t care if he was dirty, she just wants to see his killers locked up. But Mike only hears Stacy using “dirty” and “Matt” in the same sentence.

“He wasn’t dirty! God damn you! You get that through your head. My son wasn’t dirty!” Chills. Chills everywhere.

Now we get to learn exactly what happened that night in Philly. Flashback to Mike walking the streets outside a bar. He turns down an alley where a police cruiser is parked. Using some knot apparatus that blows my mind, he unlocks the door, opens it up and, as we find out later, plants a .38 Special revolver in the back seat.

Cut to inside the bar now, where the song “Hold On Loosely” by 38 Special (omfg Gilligan) is playing. Mike holds a glass of whiskey with a hand that has the shakes. Stacy mentioned earlier in the episode how he had taken to drinking after Matt died, and Mike himself admitted to being better and feeling like he “crawled out from under a bottle”. The thought crossed my mind that his drinking was all a long con to get people to take him lightly and set up this confrontation with Hoffman and Fensky, but the blatant hand shake seems to show that yes, he did have an alcohol problem. But he had either quit or was in the process of quitting. Either way, he certainly wasn’t drunk that night.

He stumbles over to the table where Hoffman and Fensky are sitting. Bringing their heads in close for a hug, Mike drops a Godfather-sized bomb on them both. “I know. I know it was you.”

(hey thanks @jonathanesal)

Mike sticks around till closing time. Pretending to stumble home, our two dirty cops pull up in their cruiser and offer Mike a ride home/shove him in the back and take his gun. Keeping up with his ruse, Mike reveals to them how he knows they killed Matty and how he’s going to prove it. They take him out to a vacant lot where they’ll presumably shoot him. He grabs the gun he planted in the back seat and pulls it on them while they’re discussing their plan. Fensky tries to shoot Mike with his own gun but duh, Mike didn’t leave a bullet in the chamber. He is able to get two shots off with his 9mm (hitting Mike in the shoulder), but Mike blasts Hoffman in the dome and knocks Fensky down with a shot to the jugular. Finishing the job, Mike picks up his personal firearm before walking away from the scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIk23HACTpU

Gilligan saved the best for last in Five-O. The last five-ish minutes was Mike delivering one of the best monologues we’ve seen in either show. He explains to Stacy the situation within the precinct, how everyone took dirty money (“You go along, to get along.”), including him. “It’s like killing Caesar. Everyone’s guilty.”

Fensky got to Hoffman with some money from something or other. Hoffman offered to bring Matty in since they were partners. Matty wasn’t dirty, he even wanted to turn the other two in, so he turned to his father for help. Mike basically told Matty he had to take the money. That was the phone conversation Stacy overheard. Matt wanted to turn them in but Mike knew what would happen if he did. He told Matty he took money, just like Fensky and Hoffman. “He put me up on a pedestal. And I had to show him that I was down in the gutter with the rest of em’. Broke my boy. I broke my boy.” Matty eventually took the money (from the suitcase), but his hesitation showed Fensky and Hoffman he wasn’t solid, so they killed him anyway.

Re-watching now, still hits you right in the feels. After years and years of Mike being this unflappable, no-nonsense old racist grandfather-type figure, we get five minutes of Mike the human being. His voice cracking in the middle of words, glassy eyes, talking about his boy. This entire episode makes you look back and appreciate the dynamic between Mike and Jesse in Breaking Bad. He clearly feels some sort of fatherly instinct towards Jesse, and may even see Walt as a mirror image of himself years ago, a bad influence that eventually got his son killed.

Young Philly’s Notebook

(Thanks to /u/Time_Lord_John for images/transcriptions)