'Better Call Saul' Recap: 'Do You Know What a Cop Fears Most?'
SPOILER ALERT: The recap for the “Five-O” episode of Better Call Saul contains storyline and character spoilers.
In which Better Call Saul viewers get the answer to a question that’s lingered since the second season of Breaking Bad: Who was Mike Ehrmantraut before he went to Albuquerque and got mixed up with the likes of Gustavo Fring, Saul Goodman, and Walter White?
In the ABQ, Past Tense
Mike steps off a train in Albuquerque and heads inside the station. A younger woman soon greets him, and they hug awkwardly and agree to meet up at her car after Mike makes a potty break. Make that a sanitary napkin break; he buys one from the women’s bathroom, takes it into the men’s bathroom, and uses it as a bandage for the big gunshot wound in his shoulder.
Next, he’s in the backyard of the house of the woman who picked him up at the train station, and he’s pushing a little girl on a swing. He tells her “Pop Pop” needs a break, and we learn the little girl is Kaylee, Mike’s granddaughter, and the woman is his son’s wife. His dead son, Matty’s wife, and after Mike assures her he’s “better… not like I was… I’m here for you, for Kaylee, for my family,” she peppers him with questions about what might have been wrong with Matt before he died. For weeks, she says, Matt could hardly eat or sleep, he was moody and snapped at her, and when she asked him what was wrong, he shut down. Mike tells her it was probably the job — Matt, like him, was a Philadelphia cop — and when she not-so-subtlely tells him she has to feed Kaylee and get her to bed, Mike takes the hint and calls a cab.
He slides into the car and asks the cabbie how well he knows the town, and that leads to Mike sitting in a vet’s office, with his gunshot wound being sewn up by the doggie doc.
Related: Missed Last Week’s ‘Better Call Saul’? Catch Up With Our Recap
In the ABQ, Present Tense
The two Philly detectives who showed up at Mike’s door last week have him in an interrogation room in Albuquerque, and he refuses to answer their questions until he can get his attorney in the room. Sure, it’s Saul, who arrives and gets some of the story: The detectives are there to ask Mike about Hoffman and Fensky, two Philly cops who were murdered after Mike’s son was murdered. Hoffman was Matt’s partner, so they wonder if Mike knows about some dirty dealings Hoffman and Fensky might have been involved in. He claims he doesn’t, but he and Jimmy pull a pre-arranged “Juan Valdez bump-n-dump,” spilling coffee on the detective taking notes so Mike can swipe his notebook. Jimmy asks more questions in the car, and points out the detectives think Mike killed Hoffman and Fensky. They’re not wrong.
In Philadelphia, Past Tense
Mike breaks into a cop car outside McClure’s, a local bar. He goes inside and proceeds to get loaded, as has become his pattern since Matty’s death, and he spots Hoffman and Fensky drinking at another table. He stumbles over, puts his arms around them, and whispers, “I know. I know it was you,” and walks away.
After closing down the bar, Mike drunkenly stumbles out, and Hoffman and Fensky pick him up in their squad car, take his gun, and drive him outside of town to a warehouse area. Along the way, he tells them he knows they killed Matt, and he’s going to prove it. They get him to the warehouse area and plan to shoot him and make it look like he was a distraught father who killed himself, but Mike’s ahead of them. He stashed a gun when he broke into their car earlier, and now he’s pulled it on them. He takes a shot in the shoulder before killing both Hoffman and Fensky.
In the ABQ, Present Tense
Mike visits Stacey, Matt’s widow, and tells her about the money, $5,000-6,000, she found stashed in the lining of a suitcase after Matty’s death.
“Matt wasn’t dirty,” he tells her. “I was. Everyone was in that precinct. That’s how it worked. You turn in your buddy, you’re screwing yourself. You go along to get along.”
Hoffman wanted to cut Matty in on some of the ill-gotten side money he was getting, Mike tells her, and Matt didn’t want to be involved, so he went to Mike. “Do you know what a cop fears most?” Mike asks. Going to prison, alongside the guys he’s helped put away. The thought of that makes a cop dangerous, he says, and that’s what he told Matt. He told Matt he should take the money Hoffman offered, and do something good with it. Matt refused.
“My boy was stubborn. My boy was strong. And he was gonna get himself killed,” Mike continues.
The only way he could get Matt to agree to throw in with his dirty partner, and save himself? Tell Matty that he, Matt’s dad and a 30-year Philly PD veteran, was also on the take.
“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,” a distraught Mike tells Stacey.
“[Matt] went to Hoffman and took the money, but he hesitated. Even looking like you’re doing the right thing to those two meant that he wasn’t solid. That he couldn’t be trusted. I got Matty to take the money, and they killed him two days later.
“He was the strongest person I ever knew. He would never have done it, not even to save himself. I was the only one who could get him to debase himself like that. And it was for nothing. I made him lesser. I made him like me, and the bastards killed him anyway.”
Stacey asks Mike who killed Hoffman and Fensky.
“You know what happened,” he tells her. “The question is, can you live with it?”
Legal Briefs:
* The vet who sewed him up offered to hook Mike up with “work”; will that turn out to be Mike’s connection to Gus?
* Jimmy is dressed in his cream-colored Matlock suit when he arrives at the courthouse, and it’s pointed out the he looks like Matlock. “No. I look like a young Paul Newman dressed like Matlock,” he insists.
Related: 'Better Call Saul’ Star Patrick Fabian on the Jimmy McGill vs. Howard Hamlin Billboard War
Let’s hear your feedback, Saul fans: Jonathan Banks got his first Emmy nomination in 1989 for Wiseguy; he got his second for Breaking Bad in 2013; anyone disagree that he should get his third in 2015 for this stunning story?
Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
