**Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul. Spoilers. Ciao**

Episodes 1&2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 – Episode 5 – Episode 6

Bingo was pretty much the television equivalent of the 1996 Indians. Sure, the team won 99 games, had the best record in the league and won the AL Central. But they lost 3-1 in the ALDS. And the year before they had won 100 and made it to the World Series. Last week’s episode was impossible to follow. I knew it, you knew it, Gilligan knew it. I saw a lot of people calling it the best hour of television since Ozymandias, and I tend to agree (maybe Season 2 finale of Peaky Blinders? Bueller?). But the show as it is couldn’t survive like that from week to week. It needed to get back on the judicial track in order to advance the plot and get set for the home stretch of Season 1.

Episode 7 was the second out of the last three episodes that didn’t begin with a flashback, so I suppose I can stop writing about that “pattern” now (although the pattern of the episode titles ending in “O” remained). It picked up right where Five-O left off, in the aftermath of Mike snatching the notebook containing the details of the investigation of the double homicide that he committed. The two detectives from Philadelphia gave us a little good cop, bad cop action, with the younger acting as the latter when he gets into it with both Mike and Jimmy. Once he leaves, Mike asks Jimmy to go so he can speak with the older cop alone. My initial reaction was that it was his old partner because of the level of candidness with which they spoke. Basically the old cop told Mike he should talk to his daughter-in-law before they do so he can make sure she stays quiet. He knows Mike killed Hoffman and Fensky. And he’s clearly fine with it.

Cut to the parking lot, where Jimmy is waiting for Mike to finish up his conversation with one of the “Philly cheesesteak”s. He’s visibly worried that his complicity in the coffee scheme has caused his name to be added to the Philadelphians’ list of people in Albuquerque they’d like to lock up. Mike insists he’s in the clear, thanks him for his services and tells Jimmy to send him the bill.

Another day, another grocery run for Chuck. Jimmy enters his house chirping his usual song, but concern escalates quickly when Chuck doesn’t right away answer his beckon. Turns out the old bro is outside, standing in the electromagnetic elements in an effort to force his body to fix itself..I guess. If I’m being honest I hope this plot line/his life gets wrapped up here in the next episode or two cause I’m kinda over it. I think I care about the dynamic between Jimmy and Chuck the least out of every relationship he has in the entire show, just behind the silver garbage can in the HH&M parking garage.

Chuck goes on to tell Jimmy about his new found determination to cure himself of his “disease”. I read some opinions that Jimmy’s emotions regarding this were less happiness and more nervousness, as his brother would be able to discover the fraud behind his ways if he was finally able to return to the real world again. Sure there might have been a small dash of worry in there somewhere, but I took that emotion as genuine joy from Jimmy that his brother finally realized his disease was something that (maybe) could be willed out of him. Either way, Jimmy intentionally leaves boxes of case files at the house knowing Chuck will be too tempted not to go over them once he exits. He’s right.

The relationship we all want to see “play out”, eh eh eh, is that between Jimmy and Kim. Apparently Jimmy does too, as we see him bring Kim to the site of his fabulous new office(s) he’s planning on moving into with what we can only assume is the Kettlemoney. After formally offering her a job as  a partner and the only corner office in the joint, Kim cites her responsibility to HH&M and reluctantly declines. Jimmy tries to play it off with a classic “Oh I was JK anyway just seeing how you’d react” play, but you can see the rejection cut pretty deep.

The Kettlemans can go fly a kite along with Chuck as far as I’m concerned, too. Tits Mc Betsy slowly unraveled throughout the episode, starting with the scene where Kim tries to convince them to take the deal she’s worked out for Craig. She insists they won’t take a “deal” because “that’s what OJ got”. So they fire Kim, come crawling back to Jimmy and insist he represent them since he’s technically on retainer with the money they stole from the city.

Kettleman “Fire & Ice” theory (/u/pandapoderoso)

Thankfully for Jimmy, Mike hasn’t paid his bill yet and owes him one. In probably my favorite part of the episode, Gilligan gifts us with another couple minutes of Magic Mike. He sprays Jimmy’s last wad of Kettlecash with invisible ink and places it in the bed of one of the Kiddleman’s remote-controlled truck. Craig finds it when he takes the trash out, talks to Tits, sends the kids up to their rooms and eventually turns in for the night himself. Enter Mike, stage deck. He uses a blacklight to figure out what door was opened with a hand covered in the ink and finds the whole stash-o-cash under the sink. Jimmy “does the right thing” with like a million air quotes, puts his last stack back with the rest of it and hands the bag of money to Mike to deliver to the DA’s house.

At the end of Five-O we got to see Mike outside of his usual curmudgeon self, displaying normal human being emotions we previously thought he just didn’t have the capacity for. Bingo was similar with Jimmy. The exchange with the Kettlemans got the ball rolling. He was defeated after getting turned down by Kim and relinquishing his (albeit dirty) money, ruining his shot for the new office. His comments during their conversation (“I’ve got nothing to lose. Seriously, you should see my office.”) were a far cry from his normal inappropriately hilarious antics. He returns to the office for what I took to be one last look, slams the corner office door on the camera and throws some sort of off-screen fit. He musters up all the glitter he can and halfheartedly answers his phone as his “assistant” before the Gilligan black screen of death.

Three episodes left, people.

Breaking Bad Callbacks

• Bathroom guy (who also appeared on one of the wanted posters at the beginning of the episode) was also magnet guy from BB
  (/u/hajisquickvanish)

@Bottlegate, playas

**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.