"You get lift belts and gloves.
You use them.
Rules are rules."
Is Mike Erhmentraut a good man?
The instinctive answer is yes.
Even though he does bad things,
he feels like a good man because he has a code of honor.
"Me, personally I was hired to do a job.
I did it.
That's as far as it goes."
He takes responsibility and holds himself to high standards,
"He wasn't in the game."
and this allows him to retain some integrity, some decency,
in a world of necessary evils.
"The lesson is, if you're going to be a criminal do your homework."
Yet if we look honestly at his actions,
the answer to the question “is Mike a good man?” is clearly no.
That code of his allows him to murder,
to serve bad men, and to take part in violent, damaging crime.
"Don't make me beat you till your legs don't work."
The Mike of Breaking Bad may be attractive to us in many ways,
"Be nice, nice.
Let Wendell in there.
If Wendell doesn't eat, nobody eats."
but he’s a doomed man, who made his bed a long time ago and has no illusions
about how dirty his soul is.
While the difference between
Breaking Bad Mike and Better Call Saul Mike maybe a little subtle
to pick up on at first,
“You want to talk about that?”
“Not particularly.”
"You wanted me to talk.
I talked."
the prequel’s slower, more expansive exploration of
an earlier Mike’s psychology illuminates
how he becomes that hardened criminal
and what it costs him.
The tragedy of Mike is like the man himself:
understated and quiet, but deep.
Along the way down his slippery slope,
he allows what’s human and feeling in him to be gradually snuffed out.
"All wrapped up in your sad, little stories, feeding off
each other's misery."
And his tale is a warning.
As tempting as it is to cut off all emotion and become the
perfect, efficient machine,
this is the road to darkness.
"Well perhaps in the future, you will consider working for me."
“Could be."
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Better Call Saul is the story of Jimmy McGill’s descent into
becoming Saul Goodman,
"Did you know that you have rights?
Constitution says you do, and so do I."
but the second layer to this story
is the degradation of Mike Ehrmentraut.
So why do show creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould
choose to make Mike the other central character?
Sure, when we meet them in Breaking Bad,
they’re kind of a business duo.
“Is this a good or bad thing?”
“Suit myself?
You want me to suit myself?
I'll suit myself to his face!”
“It's a bad thing”
and viewers might wonder how these opposing personalities ended up
professionally intertwined.
"The rules for parking validation are actually pretty simple.
Most people get it on the first try."
"Well, you'll be pleased to know I have the requisite stickers."
"Well, be still my heart."
Yet the real reason for making this series about both of them,
is that Mike’s journey is an important mirror of Saul’s.
Both characters have a good man within,
and they have to fall, morally,
to get where they are in Breaking Bad.
Better Call Saul tracks the mystery of how and why they gradually lose
what’s human inside them.
"I am so lucky I have this letter.
God, I could see the Matrix, you know?
I was invincible.
I could dodge bullets, baby."
In Jimmy, the transformation plays out through his social interactions
and performances of emotion,
"And then there's this show of remorse."
"It's not a show."
"I know you don't think it's a show."
because he has such an expressive, extroverted nature.
"So I just went off on this flow,
you know.
I had this energy going through me, it was like improv or jazz
and then BOOM I sent the hook in."
But behind Saul’s flair for elaborate drama, minimalist Mike
is our window into the deeper truth of this spiritual decline.
In him, we see the tragedy of a man’s moral corruption in clearer terms,
because it’s expressed in action.
By the end of Season 4,
Jimmy has adopted his philosophy of what it takes to be a “winner,”
“Remember, the winner takes it all.”
and Saul Goodman is well and truly born.
“S’all good, man.”
Earlier in the season, Jimmy’s lack of a response to his brother’s death
raises questions of whether he’s in denial and will eventually have
to face a grief he’s avoiding.
"Well, Howard, I guess that's your cross to bear."
"So I'm gonna make some coffee if you want some."
Over time, though, it’s revealed Jimmy doesn’t have this grief.
"You were right.
It was all about Chuck, this whole time."
He made a decision to leave
behind the deeply emotional person we met in Season one.
Continuing to feel for the brother who didn’t love him became too
exhausting, and being emotionally sincere just didn’t work out for Jimmy,
"You do realize you just confessed to a felony?"
"Yes.
But you feel better, right?"
the harder he tried to be straight and good, the more and more he got
kicked around and punished for it.
He’s learned that faking it is easier and more effective.
And, when he’s called out on being insincere,
"Some members of the committee found you somewhat... insincere."
the solution he finds isn’t to be more honest.
It’s to become a better, more convincing liar.
"I'll never be as good as Chuck.
But I can try."
"Did you see those suckers?
That one asshole was crying, he had actual tears."
This darkening of Jimmy’s spirit
is echoed in Mike’s Season 4 plot
overseeing the German construction crew
who are building the meth lab where Walt and Jessie will eventually cook.
This story happens mostly underground,
in secret, representing how Mike’s emotional evolution is
the private, under-the-surface version
of what Jimmy experiences out in the public world.
Mike concludes the season by killing the head of the crew,
Werner Ziegler, a man he genuinely likes and respects, that rare person
who’s actually become his friend.
“Never this long away from home.”
“To home.”
“Yeah.”
Yet by this point Mike has become Gus’ man.
So, in his mind, his fondness for this man and his desire to
help him are irrelevant.
"I thought I would come back and my friend Michael would be
very, very angry, but in time, he would understand and forgive."
What he’d like to do just doesn’t factor into this equation
of ironclad consequences.
"It was ever up to me."
While it may not always be obvious how Mike’s and Saul’s stories align
at any given moment, what we’re seeing happen in their parallel plots is,
essentially, both of these men turning off their emotional faucets.
"Well, look at you.
You're in so much pain.
Why are you putting yourself through all this?"
"It'll be a story.
An accident."
Each comes to the conclusion that
it doesn’t work to indulge the messier, emotional, human sides of themselves.
They begin to abandon warmth, softness and mercy, to cut that piece out.
They make the decision to feel less, or not to feel, at all.
Jimmy’s rejection by his brother,
and the establishment that his brother represents, causes him so much hurt
that, eventually, he just doesn’t want to engage with that any more.
For Mike, it’s even more extreme.
His heartbreak and guilt over his son’s death is unimaginable.
"Broke my boy.
I broke my boy."
After that, he just starts shutting himself off.
He tries attending group therapy sessions with his daughter-in-law,
but he’s not capable of dealing with the enormity of what he feels about his son,
“I hadn’t thought about Matty all morning, and they weren't just minutes.
There were hours where I didn't think about him.”
and the cop in him fixates instead on rooting out a fraud in their midst.
“Because that dead wife he's always talking about never existed.
The guy's story changes every time he tells it."
It’s safe to assume Mike has never been a guy who was wearing his
heart on his sleeve, or very in touch with his emotions
"Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head."
still, we can sense those emotions do run deep.
"No one expects you to wear a hair shirt for the rest of your life."
"Same goes for you."
Over the course of Better Call Saul we’re watching that feeling in him
get softer and weaker, like a flame that’s flickering
"Is there no other way, truly?"
until in Breaking Bad it’s locked up, inaccessible.
Not dead, but a passenger who has no say in where the car is driving to.
"The problem is, the boss doesn't like it."
In a way, it’s pretty easy to
understand and relate to their choice to turn off the emotional tap.
Think about what it's like to
digest our modern world's daily onslaught of bad news.
You see a story about someone losing their home in a wildfire
or a hurricane, about how many lives have been lost in a bombing far away
from you, or in yet another appalling shooting.
Certainly many of these stories will move you to intense sympathy
for the victims, as they should.
But then, maybe, there’s a day when you have a lot going on,
and something in your brain decides you just don’t have the time
or the emotional fortitude to feel what you ought to feel
about the latest terrible story.
You shut yourself off to it,
because it’s just too much to feel it right then.
This is even more tempting
when it comes to trauma and pain in your personal life,
because it's so much more acute.
"Every night you were drinking yourself unconscious like
you were the only one who lost him."
Turning off the tap seems the smart thing to do.
It’s self-preservation.
It’s just not practical or useful to suffer all the time.
But Better Call Saul seems to be telling us that this is the wrong choice.
It’s saying, don’t numb yourself.
Don’t cut off from your grief and your rage and your misery.
Hold on to the messy sincerity.
Because what this story illustrates is when you shut off that faucet,
you lose something of great value, and you never get it back.
There’s something aspirational about Mike.
On one level, of course, we know we shouldn’t be like Mike.
We can probably find a better role model than a man who’s been a dirty cop,
a murderer and a fixer for major drug dealers.
These are not career goals to adopt.
But there is a lot to emulate in Mike’s philosophy and behavior.
He has a rare self-discipline and work ethic.
"This business requires restraint."
A refreshing lack of BS and no-nonsense attitude.
"I'm going to need some kind of assurance."
"I assure you that I can kill you from way over here,
if it makes you feel any better."
He’s comprehensive, patient, and excellent at his job, and it’s
hard not to admire someone who’s such a perfectionist about their craft,
"I'm on your books as a security consultant.
If I show my face at your warehouse, it makes for a better cover story."
whatever their field may be.
"You got duplicate routing numbers on cargo, surveillance camera blindspots
on the north and the east side of the floor, inventory documents that are
going into the trash instead of being shredded."
He schools other criminals around him about how to behave more honorably
and intelligently in their business.
"All I call tell you is, you guys aren't half as smart as you think you are."
But the problem with Mike very much comes out of what’s so strong about him.
He epitomizes an idea we see in quite a few stories about crime and antiheroes,
best articulated by The Wire:
“A man’s gotta have a code.”
that if a man has a strict set of rules he lives by, this makes him moral,
or at least more moral than the others around him
and therefore excused for his sins.
"But if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word."
Mike himself uses this kind of logic to justify his choices
"I've known good criminals and bad cops.
Bad priests, honorable thieves."
He takes comfort in his self-discipline, his pragmatism, the idea that
he can still be a relatively good version of a bad man.
“You're now a criminal.
Good one, bad one?
That’s up to you.”
This is a fallacy, though.
A moral code isn’t the same as morality, if that code accepts immoral behavior.
Nor does clinging to
rigid personal laws always lead to a decision that feels right.
Werner broke the agreement.
So per Mike’s code, this warrants killing him.
But on a human level, this person also invites forgiveness.
Werner wasn’t betraying his employers; he just really wanted to see his wife,
"You really want to see your wife?"
"More than anything."
"Then finish the job."
and cracked under the pressure of being holed up for so long without her.
"For what it's worth, I believe him.
It's about him wanting to see his wife, clean and simple."
Mike has contracted himself to interests that don’t take into
account human concerns,
“I'd go another way."
"That, I know."
"That'd be a mistake."
"This discussion serves no purpose.”
which means he’s no longer free to bestow clemency.
"I go back now, I go back in the morning,
what difference can it make?"
"It’s not gonna happen."
So this is the fatal mistake Mike makes, when it comes to his soul.
He gives up control.
"Mike, you don’t have to do this."
"Yeah, unfortunately I do, Walter."
A human being can make an exception, but a set of rules can’t.
And what we see happen in Mike, as he comes under the employ of Gus Fring, is
this gradual evolution into a machine.
"What the hell am I doing here?"
"I don't know.
It's not my call.
I just do what I'm told,
and now you're going to do what you're told."
For so long he’s an independent agent.
He refuses deals from some very scary people,
"Respectfully, I'm gonna have to say no."
"You sure about that?"
"I am."
and only does what feels right for him.
"Pass."
"What?
Why?"
"It's not for me."
After starts serving Gus, he no longer has a choice
"Let me speak to Mr. Fring, I will explain everything,
I will make him understand."
"You're not gonna talk to Fring."
"If I could just talk to Gus, I know I could make him understand."
"No."
"I'd like to talk to Gus!"
While his thorough, painstaking nature is what makes Mike so impressive,
this potential for automaton-like precision and regularity is
also his downfall.
"Moral of the story is, I chose a half-measure when
I should havegone all the way.
I'll never make that mistake again."
By fixating on the desire to become perfectly efficient,
which is what draws him to Gus and makes him similar to Gus,
he loses his humanity, and his ability to respect humanity in others.
"So what, is this going to be a regular thing now?
Meth cooking and corpse disposal?
Jesus."
"Just grab us a spare barrel, Walter."
As a small mercy to Werner,
he pulls the trigger himself,
which is a human, noble act.
"Her questions will be answered?"
"This you swear?"
"This I swear."
And we can feel how taking the life of this person he cares for,
to fulfill a contract to his boss, costs him.
It takes a toll.
It’s a crucial moment in his tragedy and his downward trajectory.
"There are so many stars visible in New Mexico.
I will walk out there, to get a better look."
If we look forward to Breaking Bad,
we see a hard person who shrugs off the fact that his colleague shot
a kid for no reason,
"Which leaves option three.
We keep him on payroll.
I vote three."
even if he doesn’t particularly like it.
"The next time you bring a gun to a job without telling me,
I will stick it up your ass sideways."
And as we watch Mike in Better Call Saul,
we can’t help but think of what we know of his ending.
He dies at the hands of a man he despises.
“Shut up the f--[BLEEP] up and let me die in peace.”
He works hard to leave his
granddaughter an inheritance that will make her secure.
But he fails
“Mike was no dummy.
But every time he tried to get his nest egg to his granddaughter,
it ended up in Uncle Sam's pockets.”
It was all for nothing.
Mike’s goal of providing for his family sounds a lot like
Walt’s justifications for his actions.
"I've got cash I can't spend.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
If anything happens to me, my family will never see it."
"If, for any reason, that my children do not get this money,
a kind of countdown will begin."
Mike’s motives are wrapped in a little less BS and he’s certainly
not secretly driven by ego and pride.
Still, he is deluding himself,
by thinking, as Walt does, that he can somehow do all this bad stuff
and compartmentalize it, while keeping his family separate and safe.
He believes his code can save him from sinking too deep,
from becoming like the low-lifes he can’t stand in his line of work.
"You know how they say it’s been a pleasure?
Well, it hasn’t."
But nobody gets out of this unscathed.
And the ultimate lesson in Mike’s story is that however attractive it is
to become that efficient machine, however smart it seems not to engage
with the messy irregularity of feeling, making this choice is losing the battle.
"I'll take care of it."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Because when we kill off that chaotic, imperfect part of ourselves,
we destroy our connection to the rest of the human race.
"You know what happened.
The question is, can you live with it?"
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