Better Call Saul, episode 6, Five-O

I was excited about this week’s installment which features the long desired back story of one of Breaking Bad’s most interesting characters, Mike Ehrmantraut. The grizzled old cop sure does have a story to tell and it’s both tragic and violent.

The episode opens with a train arriving in Albuquerque, Ehrmantraut enters the station and meets a younger woman. (Whom we saw last week  in the Subaru.) He makes a stop to the women’s restroom where he procures a sanitary pad. He then proceeds to the men’s room to redress a shoulder wound, while grimacing in obvious pain.  Then he leaves to meet the woman.

They are in the woman’s backyard, Erhmantraut pushes a little girl on a swing and she calls him “Pop-pop”.  The woman asks how Mike likes the West and he states he likes the “wide open spaces.”  There is an obvious tension between the two adults. She asks him how he’s been and he reports, “better.”  He tells her that he wants to be there for her and her family.

It’s soon revealed that the woman’s husband has died, he was a cop named Matty.  Her children are too young to really understand their father is dead and keep asking, “Where is Daddy?”  The woman tells Mike about a suspicious phone call her husband received two weeks before his death. She said it was about two thirty am and that her husband was intensely emotional and angry. (Out of character behavior.) She also tells Mike that two weeks before his death he was moody and depressed.  He never disclosed the nature of his problem to her.  She suspects that Mike was the person who called her husband, which Mike denies. This increases the tension between them and shortly afterwards, Mike leaves in a taxicab.

Mike asks the cab driver if he “Knows Albuquerque well?” He replies yes. The next scene is at a veterinarian’s office where Mike’s shoulder is sutured in exchange for cash. (And privacy.) The vet is talkative and offers Mike pain medication and the possibility of work. Mike passes on the offer but the vet gives him a couple of pills free of charge.

The story shifts to the present as Mike stonewalls the investigators and demands that Jimmy be called in to represent him. As Jimmy shows up in his new linen suit and the detectives make fun of him, “You look like Matlock!” Jimmy strikes back, “No, I look like a young Paul Newman playing Matlock!”

Mike explains that he just needs Jimmy to spill coffee on the primary detective’s notebook. Jimmy is incensed by the suggestion that he is morally malleable. Mike growls at Jimmy, “You owe me!”  Jimmy refuses to assist in the “assault” of the investigator but agrees to represent Mike “strictly above board.”

The Philly detectives return and begin to ask questions.  Jimmy quips that he they should assume he knows nothing about Erhmantraut’s past.  The lead detective begin to explain.  Mike was a cop in Philadelphia for thirty years, and his son Matty was a rookie for about two years and nine months when he was killed in an ambush.  Hoffman and Fensky died three months later under similar circumstances. They want to know what Mike knows about these murders, especially since it was reported he saw the two the night they were murdered.  They know Mike was an alcoholic wreak after his son’s death and that he moved West the day the cops were found slain.  Mike refuses to answer the questions as Jimmy exits, he spills the coffee on the lead investigator and Mike pockets his notebook.

Mike and Jimmy talk in the car.  Jimmy asks “How did you know I’d spill the coffee?” Mike just laughs. Jimmy is astounded, “In case you missed it back there, your friends from Philly think you killed two cops!” Mike replies simply, “Yep.” Yep he killed them or yep those investigators think he killed them?

Mike studies the notebook in private. We see the words, intoxicated, retired among other theories. Mike calls his daughter-in-law, and asks if she called the cops.  She says she did call them, and she hoped that finding their killer would help find  Matty’s killer.  She was suspicious Matty was “dirty” since she found cash hidden away.  She’s upset and says she couldn’t come to him because he was unhinged. Mike is furious at her suspicion that Matty was dirty. He yells at her, “My son wasn’t dirty!”

There is a flashback to Philly. Loud music blares from a bar as Mike opens a cop car using a piece of string. Mike enters the bar and starts drinking heavily. Fensky and Hoffman acknowledge him and he raises his glass in return.  He  had told the investigators that “They weren’t my people.”  Mike goes over and grabs the  men in hug and says, “I know, I know it was you!” (0.38 Special’s “Hold on Loosely” blares in the background.)

The bar is closing and the bartender is concerned about Mike, he assures him he’s good and he’ll walk home. He tells the bartender he’s off to New Mexico. As Mike staggers down the street, Hoffman and Fensky approach in their cop car and force him into the back of the car, then they remove his gun. (Supposedly for his own protection.) Mike acts drunk and defenseless. The guys ask what he was talking about back at the bar. He slurs, “You killed him, you killed him for nothing! You killed him because you were scared, scared of what he might do.  And you made it look like a junkie with a gun.  It was you and I’m going to prove it!”  They don’t drive him home, but to an abandoned industrial area.

They force him out of the car, where Mike picks up a revolver (.38 Special?) and hides it. The two discuss how they are going to make it look like Mike committed suicide. “Smart, it’s what I would have done.”

Mike fires, and hits and mortally wounds the first cop, while the second cop attempts to fire Mike’s gun. (He had unloaded it.) Mike approaches the wounded cop and shots him several times more in the back.

Mike is retelling the story to Stacey. He explains that he was dirty, not his son.  Matty went to Mike when he learned that the whole prescient was dirty.  Matty wanted to do the right thing and give the information to Internal Affairs. Mike pleaded with him not to go to Internal Affairs.  Mike knows that cops fear imprisonment and will kill a snitch.  Mike encourages Matty to take the dirty money and live. But Hoffman and Fensky couldn’t trust him, so they killed him.

“My boy was stubborn, my boy was strong and got himself killed.” He admits to her that it was him who called in the middle of the night soon before Matty’s death.  “I admitted that I was dirty and I broke him, I broke my boy.” The sadness and despair are palpable in Mike’s words and he is a tough guy who is completely broken down.

Stacey asks, “Hoffman and Fensky, they killed Matty, who killed them?”

Mike sighs, “You know what happened, the question is, can you live with it?”

Amazing episode. In Breaking Bad, we know the trouble Mike goes to stash away money for his granddaughter, now we can really appreciate the reason why that mattered so much to him.  I believe he was dedicating the rest of his life and money to the memory of his son.