'Can You Live With It?'

When I wrote about the Better Call Saul pilot, one of the few negatives I could come up with was a concern that the character of Chuck would be leveraged too much in the project of humanizing Jimmy, someone we'd come to know as pretty irredeemable garbage and who, at the time, I wanted to stay that way. I came around on that matter over the next four episodes that followed -- Jimmy's ongoing battle between the impulse to given in to his baser instincts and his desire to make his brother proud of him has been fascinating to watch -- but from the moment I saw Mike Ehrmantraut in that parking lot attendant's booth, I never worried that Saul would give him a Chuck of his own that might undercut the character we'd come to know on Breaking Bad. Mike is a character I want to know from every angle, which is what makes "Five-O" -- and particularly its climactic final scene -- so powerful.

Though I was always a Gus Fring partisan and will be until someone kills me by rigging a bomb to blow half my face off (likely), Mike Ehrmantraut is right up there with him in the pantheon of Breaking Bad's greatest characters. If he wasn't quite as smart as Walter White -- which...I mean, I'd hear arguments -- he was at least as big a pragmatist, generally carrying out whatever wetwork tasks needed doing without qualm or hesitation. And in "Five-O," we pretty much find out why Mike isn't tortured by his conscience: he already did the worst thing he'd ever do well before he ever started working for Saul Goodman.

In the present (or, that is, Better Call Saul's present -- the early-ish '00s), Philadelphia detectives Abbasi and Sanders have tracked Mike to Albuquerque, and once Mike's gotten Jimmy to come represent him (and assist him in a pickpocket setup on Det. Abbasi), we find out why.

(Nice work here from Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy, too -- clearly wanting to express empathy for Mike's loss; suspecting Mike doesn't want to hear it from him; knowing for sure that this moment isn't the time.)

Of course Sanders and Abbasi are right in suspecting Mike knows more than he's saying about Hoffman and Fensky's deaths, and we see how much as we flash back to the last things Mike did before leaving Philadelphia forever -- laying the groundwork for people who know him to get the impression that Matt's death has started him drinking more heavily than ever; using his cover as a sad old drunk to surveil Fensky and Hoffman in the cop bar where they like to drink; manipulating them into taking him somewhere private so that, they think, they can dispose of him; using the gun he'd planted earlier in the evening to avenge Matt. All of that is more or less what we could have surmised was exactly what Mike would do under the circumstances we found out along with Jimmy. Mike's an enforcer. He enforced.

But seeing Mike kill a couple of dirty cops is nothing shocking for those of us now watching him in a second TV series. What gives the scene its impact is the one that follows, as Mike sits down with Stacey, Mike's widow, and finally tells her the truth about the phone call she overheard Matt's half of days before his death, and suspected -- correctly -- had Mike on the other side. Matt had discovered that two of his colleagues were dirty and wanted to protect themselves by bringing him in on their scheme: "It's like killing Caesar. Everyone's guilty." But though Stacey suspected Matt was dirty, Mike corrects her: "Matt wasn't dirty. I was." But Matt didn't know that part. As the good kid Mike raised, Matt was horrified about Hoffman and Fensky, and went to Mike with his concerns, and a plan to take the matter to Internal Affairs. But Mike warned him that what cops fear most is prison, "being locked up with everybody you put away. You threaten a cop with that, you make him dangerous." If Matt even looked like he was going to report Fensky and Hoffman to IA, he'd be fucked, so Mike gave Matt the best advice he knew: "Take the money. Do something good with it." At first he wouldn't listen: "My boy was stubborn. My boy was strong. And he was gonna get himself killed." That was when Mike had to confess to Matt that he was dirty himself, and that was the phone call Stacey overheard. "He put me up on a pedestal, and I had to show him that I was down in the gutter with the rest of them. Broke my boy. I broke my boy." He succeeded in convincing Matt to go along, but since he hesitated, Hoffman and Fensky could tell he wasn't "solid," and by then it was too late: "I got Matty to take the money, and they killed him two days later. He was the strongest person that I ever knew. He would've never done it, not even to save himself. I was the only one-- 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 dares to ask who killed Hoffman and Fensky, and Mike tells her, "You know what happened. The question is, can you live with it?"

It's a six-minute, virtually uninterrupted monologue and a masterful, moving scene from Jonathan Banks, which makes it clear what he can live with. Ending Hoffman and Fensky's lives doesn't seem to have given him pause -- certainly not at any point when he was premeditating it, at least. Forever changing his son's view of him, while advising him into criminal activity -- breaking his boy, and not even to save his life, as it turned out -- has broken Mike, too. Why not do anything and everything Saul Goodman will eventually get him to do for his crooked clients? We've just seen Mike explain, in this scene, that nothing he does from now until his inevitably violent death will matter at all.