**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.

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”.

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)

1.Hoffman’s 9mm Police issue Holstered; not fired

-Full Clip

2. 40 Caliber Not Fired Hoffman’s hand Reported stolen ’94 No record since

-Why not holding his police issue? Taking gun into evidence, or there for unofficia/criminal

purposes?

3. Fensky’s 9mm- Police issue. Fired. Recovered 4 ft from body

Single round missing from clip. Shell casing recovered. No bullet recovered

—————————————-

(Lost or shooter wounded???

No blood spatter center mass hit?

Wearing a vest?)

4. Murder Weapon:

.38 Caliber

Serial number filed off

Matches Hoffman/ Fensky GSWs (Gunshot Wounds)

—————————————————-

Hoffman: Single GSW to head .38 caliber

-Tox; No drugs in system .01 BAC(Blood Alchohol Content)

TOD(Time of Death) between 1-4 AM

Fensky: Single GSW to neck (location 3)

Crawls to 3A.

Two shots to chest execution = personal

-Tox: No drugs .01 Blood Alchohol Level

Matt Ehrmantraut Killed.

1 week later, Mike E. retires

3 months later Stacy E. moves to ABQ.

3 months later Fensky- Hoffman killed

1 day later Ehrmantraut leaves Phil.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

(/u/Hazenbud)

God bless you if you made it all the way down here. @Bottlegate for corrections and suggestions.

**I mean I’m not going to say you need to have watched Breaking Bad and all of Better Call Saul before reading this blog, but you need to have watched Breaking Bad and all of Better Call Saul before reading this blog.**

Episodes 1 & 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

So here we are. Halfway through the first season of Better Call Saul. Five down, five to go. If you’ve read my previous recaps you know I’ve been more than pleased. We’re five episodes in, the Breaking Bad butterflies have worn off and the show is proving it can stand on it’s own without using it’s predecessor as a crutch (as evidenced by the exponential shrinking of our BB callback list at the end of every recap). While “Alpine Shepherd Boy” was a bit all over the place, it wasn’t without substance and laid some more groundwork for the back nine of Season 1.

Episode 5 is the first of the season whose title doesn’t end in the letter “O”. It was also the first of the season not to begin with a flashback. It picks up right where Hero left off, with Chuck in his house and Jimmy on the front page of the paper he just stole. Turns out I was wrong last week about the old lady neighbor feeling sorry for the ‘crazy old man’ because she went ahead and called the fuzz, who arrive at his front door much to his dismay (the episode also ends in an unwanted visit by the cops, but we’ll get there). While Chuck gives a lengthy deposition explaining why the officers have no probable cause to enter his home, they circle around to his back door and see the fuse box torn to shreds and a nice little collection of cans of white gas. They then choose the only rational course of action at that point: kick down the door and taze the shit out of a 65-year-old wrapped in a space blanket.

While this is going on, Jimmy is out following up on some of the voicemails he got as a result of his “marketing campaign” last week. In what could possibly be the funniest group of scenes in all of BB and BCS, we see first hand the type of…diverse personalities that would call a lawyer off of a billboard. The first is a seemingly filthy rich redneck who wants to secede his land from the U.S. to become “the Vatican of America”. Brilliant work from Odenkirk in this first encounter, you can see the “sure, fuck it” in his face when he’s offered a million bucks, the excitement when the client goes to get him his $500,000 up front, and the crushing defeat when he realizes the guy is trying to pay him in monopoly money.

The second encounter, and possibly my favorite scene this season, is with a father who invented a toilet that talks to his kids during potty training. I’ll just leave this here…

“I hope you do make a fortune cause Chandler’s gonna need it to pay for his therapy!” got a solid LOL out of me. And the third was with an elderly woman who enlisted Jimmy’s help to write up her will, one Hummel figurine at a time. “I thought all lawyers were idiots.” “No, only half of us are idiots. The other half are crooks!” Nice self-awareness from Jimmy there.

Right before Jimmy finds out what happened to Chuck, he’s in the salon explaining the insanity of his day to Kim while he tries to paint her toes. It’s becoming more and more clear that there’s something going on between the two of them,  the tension in this scene being the most recent piece of evidence. Whether they had a past or have a future (or both), Kim is probably going to have to chose where her allegiances lie between Jimmy and the law firm pretty soon here. My bet is on the former.

Kim gets a call from Howard telling her about Chuck. They both rush to the hospital, where Jimmy frantically tries to “ground” Chuck’s room as much as he can in a building that’s completely covered in technology. The doctor is pretty up-front with her opinion that this is a mental illness, going as far as asking Jimmy to admit him to a mental facility. It’s also the first piece of hard evidence we see that it is, in fact, mental when she turns the hospital bed back on without Chuck knowing and he fails to react. Another interesting bit from this scene is the awkward “no” head-shake that Kim gives the doc when she asks if Chuck displayed any signs of mental illness before he left the firm. The camera seems to linger a little longer on her face than it would if it was just a simple “no” answer.

Howard meets them at the hospital after a while. Jimmy believes he doesn’t want Chuck admitted because that would make Jimmy his legal guardian, allowing him to force HH&M to buy Chuck out. We can’t really tell whether this is true or not…Howard has been painted as the antagonist the whole season, but he was very close with Chuck at one point and Gilligan shows have a knack for drawing sometimes unwarranted hatred out of the audience (looking at you, Skyler). Jimmy almost lets his disdain for Howard overshadow his love for Chuck, but eventually calms down and takes his brother home. There, he tells Chuck he thinks the article made him sick, because his condition seems to worsen every time he thinks his younger brother is up to no good. Even though he jumped to Chuck’s defense when the doc proved it was mental, you can tell he’s not entirely convinced it isn’t. And after Jimmy tells Chuck about his plans to get into “elder law” and put Slippin’ Jimmy in the grave for good, the sick old man is magically able to unwrap himself from the space blanket and walk to the kitchen to make coffee.

Back to business for Jimmy. In this week’s nod to pop culture, he fits himself with a suit modeled after Matlock and goes to work drumming up business by putting his face on jell-o cups and campaigning in a nursing home. This little mini-montage oozed of Saul sliminess, with handshakes, one-liners and winks at older ladies.

The end of the episode finally gave us a little more on Mike. Jimmy gives him his card (“Give me a call if you happen to, uh, know of any elders”) on his way out of the courthouse, and Mike takes episode 5 home. A beautifully shot sequence illustrates the secluded life he lives working the overnight shift in his tiny toll booth. When he’s relieved in the morning, he gets breakfast at a familiar diner before giving us a classic inconspicuously-park-outside-a-house-and-wait Mike moment. A woman gets out of the house into her Subaru and pulls out, going in Mike’s direction. She slows down, eventually stops,  and gives him a stare before peeling off. Now we all remember how close Mike was with his granddaughter in BB. This woman was too young to be his wife/ex-wife and obviously too old to be the granddaughter, so my money is on she’s either his daughter or daughter-in-law. Whatever she is, it’s clear they don’t exactly have a healthy relationship.

Mike returns to his home to watch some old movie on an old TV set (no flat-screen like in BB — he must be pre-Gus at this point, not getting paid well) with a couple PBRs. Another knock from the authorities brings our episode to a close. Mike grabs a baseball bat (not a gun, another reason to think this is pre-Gus) before realizing it’s the authorities at the door. Mike opens up and has a curious exchange with a man he clearly knows. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” “You and me both.” Hellooooooo answers about Mike’s past in Philly next week.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

• 
• Hummel figurines the old lady had Jimmy dishing out in her will — Marie stole a Hummel figurine in seasons 3 of BB and put it next to Hank’s bed
• Mike sitting alone watching old movies when the cops come to his door — Mike sitting alone watching old movies in BB when the DEA raids his house (you gotta stretch, don’t want to pull anything)

@Bottlegate, playa.

**If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad and the first three episodes of Better Call Saul, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.**

Episodes 1 & 2

Episode 3

I gotta be honest. Last night was the first Sunday/Monday since BCS started that I didn’t go to bed mouth still agape from the episode(s) I just watched. There was no Cinnabon Scene, no big Tuco reveal, no showdown in the desert or dufflebags filled with money. But going through the episode again to write this blog, I’m actually happy about that. Gilligan & co. do give us our fair share of those home run scenes but they don’t have to rely on them. The first three episodes have been home runs. We learned more about Jimmy in Hero than those three combined.

So far, every episode of BCS has started off with a flashback. Last night was no different. A young Jimmy leaves the bar with another man who he clearly has marked for one of his schemes. He offers to take him across town to an “after-hours” place and the man agrees. After some interesting conversation in-transit that included howling like a wolf and Jimmy responding with “S’all good, man” (get it?) when asked his name, they take a turn down an alley (not-so-coincidentally right after Jimmy howls himself). They find a wallet and its heavy-set owner next to each other. Jimmy pokes him with a stick to check if he’s alive but he looks to be just passed out drunk. The fat guy gives a nice little soliloquy filled with McDonald’s and multiple buttholes before passing out again. The stranger decides to take his money, with Jimmy calling dibs on his watch. After determining it was a Rolex (and assuming it to be worth more than the money from the wallet), the stranger gives Jimmy the wallet money plus whatever he has on him, takes the watch and makes a break for it. Turns out the watch is fake, Jimmy and the fat guy were in cahoots and there’s plenty more where that came from. The scene ends with Lennie Small praising Jimmy while he lights up a big old bong. Remind you of someone?

Snap back to reality. Jimmy tries to rationalize taking the money from the Kettlemans, saying he could accept it as a retainer if they would use him as their legal counsel. Mrs. K passes, saying he’s “the type of lawyer guilty people hire”. Gilligan spreading a nice thick layer of irony on our toast there. Also Mrs. K is a fire emoji in real life:

Jimmy didn’t want to take the money. He really didn’t. But then he did. And here’s how he laundered it (/u/phone_boy):

At this point, and probably even before he took the money, I’m convinced Jimmy had the rest of the episode planned out. He takes his enlarged wallet over to the suit shop and orders himself a fancy new getup that looks remarkably like Howard Hamlin’s signature sky blue shirt, white collar and pinstripe suit.

He returns to the nail salon to get spruced up for his new advertising campaign. Continuing his off-beat movie references, Jimmy tells the ladies he wants his hair in tight curls a la Tony Curtis in Spartacus. Now I’ve never seen it, but I’ll bet I know why it’s a funny reference for people who have.

We also saw some depth from Kim this episode. She obviously has her shit together working for a law firm of that size, but also has a soft spot for the love-able loser Jimmy. She tries to talk him out of his vendetta against HHM, serving him with a cease and desist. Now Jimmy ain’t no Johnnie Cochran but even HE has to know this is a losing battle from start to finish. His brushing aside of the letter and failure to heed Kim’s warnings is why this was clearly another con the entire time, not just turned into one after the judge ruled in Hamlin’s favor.

The judge orders Jimmy to take the billboard down within 48 hours. After a short Gilligan montage of him getting shut down by every news outlet he calls trying to get his story picked up, we see Jimmy haggling with two college students about the angle they’re shooting him at in front of the billboard. He insists on getting him and the ad in the shot at the same time. That’s because shortly after his soapbox speech to the camera, the worker taking down the billboard falls off the catwalk and is left dangling by a strap around his waist. Superhero Jimmy musters up some courage, climbs up to the board and saves the dam in distress in front of a crowd of people. Then daps him up. But that billboard worker…we’ve seen him before!

(from the montage in Episode 2) (/u/attorneyatloblaw)

The story gets picked up by the local paper, to the tune of a full color photo on the front page. It also leads to a whole SEVEN voice messages on Jimmy’s phone when he returns to the office. The next day he makes a run to Chuck’s early so he isn’t late to any of his appointments. Not wanting Chuck to see him indeed going back to Slippin’ Jimmy like he insisted he wasn’t in Episode 2, he keeps the local paper in his trunk before delivering the national ones to his brother. Chuck questions it, but Jimmy shrugs it off, surmising that they forgot to deliver it that day, or that some kids had grabbed it (“Because if there’s one thing kids love, it’s local print journalism.”) After Jimmy leaves, Chuck sees the paper in all of his neighbors driveways, wraps himself up in the space blanket and prepares for a journey across the street. In a beautifully-filmed scene that reminded me of Jesse Pinkman’s first trip on heroin, Chuck barely makes it back alive after taking the neighbor’s paper and leaving a 5 spot to cover it. The neighbor saw him do it through her front window but looked more concerned than anything. The neighborhood probably all know about his condition and look at him with pity rather than anger.

(/u/squaredrooted)

Chuck opens the paper to see Jimmy the Hero. /episode

Some people might think Jimmy “breaking bad” aka turning the corner towards Saul was him accepting the bribe from the Kettlemans. But the intricacies and levels of his scams we saw in the flashback, the billboard, and even the situation with the skater twins shows he’s been working outside the law for quite some time. It’s almost an opposite to Walter White, who was Mr. Chips turned into Scarface. Obviously not nearly as sinister (yet), but it seems Jimmy’s story will be Scarface trying to turn into Mr. Chips but ends up just going back to being Scarface.

Also, lost in the episode somewhere was a quick back-and-forth between Jimmy and Mike. Jimmy talks about the Kettleman situation, saying something to the extent of “you’d think criminals would be smarter than they are. Kind of breaks my heart.” That ends up being the crux of his business as Saul Goodman. It also kind of foreshadows the fact that the smartest criminal he’d ever come across would eventually put him in a Cinnabon in Omaha.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

• Jimmy picks up a loud Orangeish dress shirt for a moment at the suit shop but puts it right back down. “Not yet…..”
• 

(/u/sarathkurmana) Some people are saying that yellow shirt over Jimmy’s right shoulder is a nod to Gus Fring and his wardrobe. I’m not 100% convinced, as it could easily be Dwight Shrute as well.

• The hello kitty cell phone from BB in the drawer during the opening credits

• “S’all good, man.”

@Bottlegate for anything we missed/support group for the Browns new colors