Mike Ehrmantraut

• 1. A Stand-In Becomes Essential

  ›

  Mike Ehrmantraut began life as a placeholder. The writers of Breaking Bad needed someone to fill a gap in the second-season finale, titled ABQ, because Bob Odenkirk, the actor who plays Saul Goodman, had a commitment to appear in How I Met Your Mother. So they invented a new character and gave the part to Jonathan Banks. Mike is a private investigator, head of security, fixer and hitman. He works mostly for the drug boss Gus Fring and, now and then, for Saul. He became a major figure in the later seasons of Breaking Bad and a lead in its prequel, Better Call Saul. Why would a former police officer from Philadelphia end up doing this work in Albuquerque? What does a man owe the family he failed to protect? And what happens to someone with strict personal rules when he is tied to people who break every one of them?

  234

• 2. Casting Jonathan Banks

  ›

  Jonathan Banks won the role because the writers admired his work in the 1980s police drama Wiseguy. Banks himself expected the job to last a single episode. Two things changed his view. He was impressed by working alongside Aaron Paul in that first scene, and by the direction Vince Gilligan gave the episode. Banks has described Mike as close to Joubert, the character Max von Sydow plays in the film Three Days of the Condor. Joubert is an assassin who paints figurines on the side. When Mike finally died in the fifth-season episode Say My Name, Banks was not surprised. He had always believed the character would die at some point. Mike also outlived that death on screen. He continued in Better Call Saul and turns up in a flashback in the 2019 film El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Only five characters appear in all three productions: Mike, Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Ed Galbraith and Austin Ramey.

  45617

• 3. Philadelphia Debts

  ›

  According to Banks, Mike is a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War. The show only implies this, in the Better Call Saul episode Gloves Off, when Mike mentions his familiarity with a black market sniper rifle he intends to buy. After the service, he became a beat officer in the Philadelphia Police Department. Mike's regular calls involved domestic abuse, and one man named Gordie kept turning up. Gordie was an alcoholic who beat his wife. Every weekend, Mike and his partner would hand the woman to EMTs, lock Gordie in the drunk tank overnight and release him in the morning. She was too afraid to press charges. One night Mike became so furious that he put his revolver in Gordie's mouth. Gordie begged for his life, and Mike let him go with a warning. Two weeks later, Gordie murdered his wife. From then on, Mike resolved never to take half measures. He tells the story to Walt in the Breaking Bad episode Half Measures, hoping to teach him the same lesson. Mike was married for 22 years, a fact he mentions in the fourth season of Better Call Saul. His former wife's name and fate are never revealed. His son Matt also became a police officer, married a woman named Stacey and had a daughter, Kaylee. A flashback in the episode Five-O shows that Mike was a corrupt officer who took bribes. When other corrupt officers approached Matt, he asked his father for advice. Mike told him that refusing the money would brand him a whistleblower and endanger his family, so Matt took it. Matt's partner and another officer killed him anyway, because his hesitation made them fear he might turn them in. Stacey and Kaylee left Philadelphia for Albuquerque after the funeral. Mike identified the two officers and arranged an ambush that killed both of them. He then followed his family to Albuquerque, close enough to watch over them.

  24

• 4. The Courthouse Parking Lot

  ›

  At the Albuquerque courthouse, Mike works as a parking lot attendant, and the lawyer Jimmy McGill resents him for it. Jimmy is irritated by Mike's demands for payment and for the correct number of validation stickers. Outside those hours, Mike takes security and muscle jobs to support Stacey and Kaylee. Trouble from Philadelphia soon finds him. Officers investigating two murdered cops interrogate Mike, and he hires Jimmy to represent him. Mike has Jimmy create a diversion so he can steal a detective's notepad. It shows that Stacey contacted the police after finding money hidden in the lining of one of her suitcases. Mike admits to her that he was involved in corruption, and that he "broke" Matt by persuading him to go along. Stacey accepts his explanation and consoles him. The detectives leave for Philadelphia, and one privately assures Mike that he has little to fear. His muscle jobs show his method. Protecting the dealer Daniel Wormald, known as Pryce, during a deal with Nacho Varga, Mike brings no weapon but stays calm. When the payment comes up $20 short, he insists Nacho pay in full. Afterward he explains that he had investigated Nacho and learned he was working without the knowledge of his bosses in the Salamanca cartel. The next season, Pryce buys a flashy Hummer, and Mike refuses to attend a deal in such a conspicuous car. In his absence, Nacho breaks into Pryce's house and steals money and a baseball card collection. Mike forces Nacho to return the cards and $10,000 in exchange for the Hummer. Nacho then asks Mike to kill his boss, Tuco Salamanca. Instead, Mike stages a public altercation that sends Tuco to prison for assault. Tuco's uncle Hector wants to shorten that sentence and threatens Stacey and Kaylee to make Mike claim the gun was his. Mike agrees to take the blame for a payment of $50,000. Furious, he hijacks a Salamanca truck carrying $250,000 and ties its driver, Ximenez Lecerda, up beside the road. He hopes a passing good samaritan will free the man and call the police. Ximenez calls Hector instead, and Hector's crew kills the stranger who stopped. Mike then buys a black market sniper rifle to kill Hector himself. As he prepares to fire, his own car horn sounds. A branch is wedged against it, and a note on the windshield carries a single word: "don't".

  910

• 5. Gus Fring's Consultant

  ›

  The note came from Gus Fring, owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant chain, which is part of the cartel's drug trafficking operation. Gus had tracked Mike's every move. He explained that he did not want Hector dead until he decided the time was right, and he offered to pay Mike. Mike refused the money but asked for help laundering what he had stolen from the truck. Gus arranged for Madrigal Electromotive, the parent company of Los Pollos, to hire Mike as a contracted security expert and pay him monthly consulting fees. Other work continued. Posing as a repairman, Mike fixed the door of Jimmy's brother Chuck's house while secretly photographing the home and copying his address book for Jimmy. He joined Stacey at group therapy to help with her grief and befriended a woman there named Anita. He also guarded Daniel again, this time for a deal in which Nacho bought empty capsules to swap into Hector's heart medication. Mike advised Nacho to switch the pills back if the plan worked, so no one could trace the death to him. Later Mike quit the parking lot and began real security consulting at Madrigal. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle told him the contract was meant to be a paper transaction. Mike answered that his inspections gave plausible cover if anyone questioned the payments, and Gus quietly approved. AMC turned this corporate role into a joke during season four, posting ten short videos titled Madrigal Electromotive Security Training. They mixed live footage of Banks as Mike, training new security staff, with animation. The series earned a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences pulled it after finding the episodes too short, adding that the decision was "in no way a diminishment of the quality of Better Call Saul Employee Training or Mr. Banks' performance in it". The real assignment was far heavier. After Hector suffered a stroke, Gus paid for his recovery, and Hector regained his mind and could move his right index finger. Gus then began building a secret meth lab beneath an industrial laundry and put Mike in charge. Mike brought in structural engineers while Gus watched in silence. Gus chose a German engineer, Werner Ziegler, to run construction. Mike arranged housing and security for Werner and his crew and befriended him. He even covered for Werner when the engineer let slip details of the project at a local bar. When the work fell behind, a homesick Werner slipped away, hoping to meet his wife at a nearby spa. Mike caught up with him and saw the damage. Werner had unwittingly revealed the construction project to Lalo Salamanca, Hector's nephew, who had arrived to take over the family's drug business. Gus decided Werner had to die. He offered to send men, but Mike said that Werner had escaped on his watch, so he would do it himself. Mike persuaded Werner to tell his wife to return to Germany, then shot him in the desert.

  18191213

• 6. Lalo and Nacho

  ›

  Werner's death halted the lab, and Mike could not shake it. He refused Gus's offer to keep paying him during the delay, and he reacted with disgust at what he saw as Gus's lack of compassion. He drank heavily and lost his temper with Kaylee, and Stacey asked him to keep his distance. After a drinking night, he broke the arm of a street gang's leader. Then Mike sought the gang out again, out of guilt, and was stabbed. He woke at a ranch in Mexico with ties to Gus, where Dr. Barry Goodman had treated his wounds. Gus asked for his help against the Salamancas, because Mike understood the need for revenge. Mike secretly pointed police to Lalo's car and its link to the murder of Fred, the money wire clerk, and Lalo was arrested. Gus then wanted Lalo freed, so Mike handed Jimmy his research, and Jimmy used it to accuse the police of witness tampering and win bail. Lalo sent Jimmy to collect $7 million in bail money from a remote desert site. Gunmen stopped Jimmy and prepared to kill him, but Mike had been tracking him for Gus and killed all but one of them. With Jimmy's car broken down, the two men carried the money cross-country on foot, camping overnight. When they saw the surviving gunman still searching, they killed him together. Tyrus and Victor collected them at a truck stop. Gus later realized that Juan Bolsa had hired the gunmen, believing he was protecting Gus's business by keeping Lalo locked up. Lalo grew suspicious after finding bullet holes in Jimmy's car and went to Kim and Jimmy's apartment. Mike listened through Jimmy's hidden phone and aimed a sniper rifle at Lalo from a nearby roof. Kim told Lalo that passers-by had probably shot at the car for fun, and Lalo left. Gus then sent hitmen after Lalo at his home in Chihuahua. Lalo killed all but one of them and walked away. Nacho had opened the gate for the hitmen and fled. He soon realized Gus had betrayed him to the cartel. Mike and Gus's men searched Nacho's home, took his cash and fake Canadian IDs, and replaced them with a duplicate safe holding clues that pointed to his hiding place. Nacho eventually called Mike and offered to give himself up if his father Manuel was protected. Mike helped plan a false confession blaming a rival family, the Alvarezes, and beat Nacho so the capture would look real. Watching through a rifle scope, Mike saw Nacho seize Juan's gun and kill himself rather than flee. Kim later confronted the men who were following her. Mike told her he worked for the men and that Lalo might still be alive, saying she was "made of sterner stuff". Kim recognized him as the courthouse parking attendant. After Lalo killed Howard Hamlin, forced Kim to try to shoot Gus and then ambushed Gus himself, Gus killed Lalo. Mike supervised the cleanup. Howard's death was staged as a suicide, and both bodies were buried beneath the meth lab floor. Mike then told Manuel that Nacho had died and promised revenge on the Salamancas. Manuel replied that Mike was no better than the criminals he kept company with.

  141516

• 7. Walt's Fixer

  ›

  By 2008, Mike sometimes served as a private investigator for Saul while still working full-time for Gus. His first look at Walter White came after Walt and Jesse kidnapped Saul during their attempt to get him to represent Brandon Mayhew, called Badger. Mike ran a background check, and his report to Saul included the fact that Walt had cancer. He described Walt as an amateur and advised against working with him. Saul was impressed by the quality of Walt's meth and offered his services anyway. After Jane died of a heroin overdose, Saul sent Mike to clean Jesse's apartment. He removed every trace of the drugs and coached Jesse on how to avoid incriminating himself with the police. When Jesse later went missing, Mike tracked him down and drove Walt to the spot. During Walt and Skyler's divorce, Saul had Mike spy on Skyler. Mike watched Tuco's cousins arrive at Walt's house, intending to kill him. He had Gus call them off, because Walt was central to Gus's meth plans. Gus redirected them to Hank Schrader, the DEA agent who killed Tuco. Hank survived, killed one cousin and was later finished off in hospital when Mike killed the other by lethal injection. When the cartel disrupted Gus's distribution, Mike killed four operatives sent to hold Duane Chow, a chemical supplier, hostage. He also hid inside a Los Pollos Hermanos truck on a drug run to learn the cartel's tactics. Mike was ready to kill Walt over Gale Boetticher. Saul tricked him into searching for Jesse in the wrong place, which gave Walt time to reach Jesse. Mike then escorted Walt to the lab on the pretense of a chemical spill. Walt begged for his life and offered to give up Jesse. Mike let him call Jesse, and Walt told him to kill Gale instead. When Victor was killed by Gus in front of everyone, Mike added cameras to the lab and stood watch over Walt and Jesse. Hoping to split the pair, he took Jesse on dead-drop retrievals. Jesse foiled an attack on Mike and earned Mike's trust. In Mexico, Don Eladio's party ended with most of the cartel leaders dead from poisoned tequila. Mike garroted the enforcer Gaff from behind and was shot helping Gus escape. Jesse helped both injured men reach the doctor Gus had arranged. Mike stayed in Mexico for several weeks to recover. While he did, Walt engineered Gus's death, and then he and Jesse destroyed the lab.

  111213

• 8. Say My Name

  ›

  When Mike heard Gus was dead, he set out to kill Walt in revenge. On the drive back to Albuquerque, he met Walt and Jesse, who reminded him that the lab's security footage could implicate all three of them. Mike told them the recordings were on Gus's laptop, which police now held. He helped them build an electromagnet to wipe it. The plan backfired, because police found account numbers and access codes for offshore money Gus had set aside to buy his people's silence. Police seized the accounts, which made it likely that Gus's former employees would name Mike, Jesse and Walt. Mike joined a new organization with the two. Walt and Jesse cooked in a mobile lab inside the tented houses of a fumigation company's customers. Lydia gave them information about a train carrying a tanker of methylamine. During the robbery, Todd Alquist, a fumigation company employee who helped, shot a young boy who had witnessed it. Mike and Jesse wanted no part of that brutality and sold their share of the methylamine to Declan, a Phoenix dealer. Mike kept using his share to pay Gus's former employees for their silence. The DEA identified Mike's connection to Gus, but he had cleared his house and hidden getaway money in a go bag at the airport, so a search turned up nothing. Police then traced the attorney making the payments and found the money Mike had saved for Stacey and Kaylee. Mike planned to flee and asked Saul to fetch the bag. Walt got it instead and demanded the names of Mike's associates in prison, intending to have them killed. Mike refused and pointed out that the whole mess began when Walt killed Gus. Walt shot him with the gun from the bag. Walt followed the dying Mike to the edge of a river and realized he could simply have asked Lydia for the names. As Walt began to apologize, Mike told him to be quiet and let him die in peace, and then collapsed on the riverbank. Walt and Todd dissolved the body in acid. In the El Camino flashback, set shortly before Mike and Jesse leave Walt's meth business, Jesse asks where Mike would go if he could start over. Mike answers that he would go to Alaska, if he were younger. He warns Jesse that starting over would make amends impossible. Critics singled out Banks and Bryan Cranston for particular praise for the episode of Mike's death. TV Fanatic's Matt Richenthal gave it five stars and called it "one of the best in series history." Seth Amitin of IGN scored it 9 out of 10 and called it "mind-blowing", though he wrote that Mike "deserved more." Alan Sepinwall of HitFix called the death "a gorgeous, devastating scene" but found the plotting that led Mike to trust Walt contrived. Banks received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2013, 2015, 2016-2017 and 2019. He also won a Saturn Award in 2013 and a Critics' Choice Television Award in 2015.

  2021222426