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A Review of Episode Six of Better Call Saul
by Tim Howard
The sixth installment of the popular new television show Better Call Saul reached new heights, as it finally delved into one of Breaking Bad’s most interesting characters in Mike Ehrmantraut. Mike is a quiet, gritty, aging ex-cop who has repressed a lot of his past somewhere deep inside — but until this episode of Breaking Bad’s spin-off series, we as an audience didn’t know the story behind the toughest character on one of the highest rated television shows of all time.
Episode six, titled Five-O, focuses entirely on a rough patch of Mike’s past: when his son Matty was killed working for the Philadelphia Police Department. Matty had joined a police force ridden with bribes and dirty cops, and he would have stayed clean, if not for Mike. Matty was convinced by Mike that if he didn’t join the dirty cops, he would be killed, and in hesitating to make a decision, Matty was killed anyways by his partners. Mike then took the opportunity to seek revenge on the two cops that killed his son, in a perfectly-shot drunken bar scene. Mike pretends to be way more drunk than he actually is, so that the dirty cops would pick him up and take him to a place where they could kill him off, as they recently became aware that he knew about Matty’s death. After being taken to an abandoned lot, Mike slips out a gun and shoots both cops, finally avenging the death of his son.
This storyline appeals significantly to an audience that has seen Breaking Bad prior to Better Call Saul. The appeal starts with a sense of nostalgia which can only be felt by those who watched Mike work his magic in Breaking Bad. Seeing Mike return to what he does best was like seeing Jack Bauer in his new season of 24 last year, as it was only something the original fan base could truly appreciate. This episode not only promotes a sense of familiarity among the dedicated fan base, but it further develops Mike for this fan base who, after five seasons of Breaking Bad, still didn’t know much about his past. Most importantly, it reveals the events that drive Mike to make his granddaughter Kaylee his top priority. When he failed with Matty, he felt the need to start Kaylee off with a new life, away from corruption and hypocrisy, and until now we didn’t know why. All we knew was that Mike survives, so the writers were able to take that knowledge and spend more time developing the story with a different perspective.
The show’s writers focused on taking the audience on a journey to understand how Mike arrived at his current lifestyle in a non-linear story of suffering and vengeance. The story is told through flashbacks, as these events took place nine months prior to the current Better Call Saul storyline. The flashbacks are directed through conversations between Mike and his daughter-in-law, Stacey, who was Matty’s wife and now takes care of Kaylee. As their conversations progress, Mike’s history is revealed and we learn why Mike doesn’t like to talk about his past. At the end of the episode, he admits to Stacey that he killed Matty’s corrupt partners when he says, “You know what happened. The question is, can you live with it?” This episode finally confirms what most Breaking Bad fans suspected: that Mike was a man filled with regret, who has nothing to live for other than his granddaughter Kaylee. It’s hard as a viewer not to pity the man, so we naturally begin to root for him.
Five-O was a stand-out episode in comparison to the rest of the series thus-far for two reasons. First, the episode is the only one so far to delve into a character other than Jimmy, the main character of the show. Doing so was a drastic change from the first five episodes of Better Call Saul. The strategy made us, as an audience, pay even more attention to the differences and significances of the storyline, and feel as if the main character of the show had changed, even if it was just for one episode. To viewers who had seen Breaking Bad, this was significant and exciting.
The second reason Five-O stands out is that it was the first episode of Better Call Saul that appealed much more to fans who had watched Breaking Bad than those who had jumped into the spin-off with no prior knowledge of the characters. Without a prior understanding of Mike, audiences are simply watching the episode as a cliché cop-drama with dirty cops and murders. Fans who watched Breaking Bad were able to enjoy the nostalgia of Mike’s past, whereas those who didn’t know Mike were still deciding whether or not they can trust him. In prior episodes, there have been subtle allusions to Breaking Bad, but nothing this significant. It’s clear that the writers of Better Call Saul have no problem only appealing to the dedicated fans who watched Breaking Bad previously.
As someone who did watch Breaking Bad prior to watching Better Call Saul, I absolutely loved this episode, more than any other in the series so far. I expect that we will see a few more episodes of similar style, where we delve into a specific character, rather than moving forward with the main plot line of Better Call Saul. The same technique is used in Breaking Bad, like in season three when Walt and Jesse spend an entire episode in the lab trying to kill a fly. The writers keep audiences on their toes and it appears that they will continue to do so in Better Call Saul.