The star of Vince Gilligan’s empire of former chemistry teachers who are now drug lords and “criminal” attorneys must be Mike Ehrmantraut. The stern, stone-eyed enforcer of Gus Fring, who was created as a result of a genuine schedule dispute, has helped resurrect Jonathon Banks’ brilliant career, and every second we spend with Lalo’s favorite bald gringo is a genuine delight.
Though the story of Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman is told in Better Call Saul, Mike from Breaking Bad acts as the deuteragonist of the entire program, and his story is told just as fully as Saul Goodman’s. But who was Mike before he joined Saul Goodman’s “guy who knows a guy” network and Gus Fring’s inner circle?
Why did he eventually decide to associate with these corrupt characters in the first place? And is his integrity really unflinching as he claims? This episode of Origins – Explored with Mike Ehrmantraut will address all of these concerns and more.
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He’s the guy who fixes things but can’t fix his own problems – The Cleaner Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad
In the Breaking Bad season 2 finale, ABQ, Mike strolls into our lives as a no-nonsense, all-business “fixer.” When Jane’s passing utterly destroys Jessie’s will to live, he calls Walt to assist him in making sense of everything. The Cleaner then arrives at Jessie’s home as an unassuming old guy after Walt calls Saul, who calls Mike. But as soon as Mike starts working, we can tell that he is a serious individual.
Mike meticulously clears the area and instructs Jessie on what to say to the responding paramedics. It is not until Saul tells Walter that he knows a guy who knows a guy who might be able to help him solve his distribution problems that it becomes abundantly clear that Mike is the link between Saul and Gus. Throughout season three, he periodically reappears and disappears while serving primarily as Saul’s private investigator.
From that season on, Mike’s position also expands significantly because he is the one who, under strong orders from Gus, both finishes off The Cousins and saves Walt’s life from them. We created a video on The Cousins, which you should certainly check out. When Mike defends Chow from cartel hitmen by eliminating them all by himself, it may be considered his most daring undertaking and a prime example of his prowess as a cleaner.
The cartel is retaliating against Gus for causing the deaths of two of its members, he realizes as he presses Chow for information on who exactly these men were. But while he gets ready for the impending war, Mike manages to stay calm and collected. This is Mike’s defining characteristic; he always maintains composure in tense situations and typically has 12 backup plans ready to go.
Mike is exceptionally good at his job and has a strong sense of honor that everyone he works with begrudgingly respects, but Mike’s fatal flaw is thinking that everyone sees the world the way he does. We get a beautiful scene between him and Walt in season 3, episode 12, where Mike recounts his past as a beat cop to this meth-cooking genius and draws an analogy between his former career and Walter’s current situation.
Mike tells him a story about an alcoholic and his wife and how the alcoholic would frequently abuse her only to be thrown into the drunk tank and be out on the streets the very next day. One day, Mike had enough, and when his partner wasn’t with him, he took the guy out into the middle of nowhere and beat him up, threatening to kill him. Instead, he left him with a warning, and a few days later, his wife was reported dead.
The lesson, Mike says, is that he took a half-measure when he should’ve taken a full measure, and this inspires Walt to conspire against Gus without knowing just how loyal Mike is to the man. So Mike, who was actually looking to discourage Walt from continuing to associate with Jessie, accidentally signed his boss’s death sentence, and this isn’t the first time that one of Mike’s mistakes would come back to bite him.
Season 3 ends with Walt playing both Gus and Mike, making himself indispensable to them by killing off his own replacement, something Mike didn’t foresee, and you’ll see how this becomes a thing with him across both shows. So Mike is forced to keep Walt alive, even though he was sent to the laundry by Gus to eliminate him following his highly erratic behavior. Mike stays composed for the rest of the episode, but it’s clear he was on the edge, and that boils over in the Season 4 premiere, where Gus silently slits Victor’s throat for getting made at Gale’s apartment.
Mike is shocked to see this, and actually draws his weapon on Gus in his disbelief, but the message is very clear; screw up one more time, and this will be the fate of everyone in the room. So Mike spends the rest of Season 4 working exclusively for Gus. By this point, we’ve already found out that Mike’s true allegiance lies with Gus not Saul; after all he did was threaten to break his legs and leave him in a hole in the desert if he didn’t give Jessie up.
But he doubles down on this and gets to work preparing for an all-out war. He first assists Gus in winning Jessie over to their side, as he is the only thing keeping Walt alive, and once Jessie gives his approval for eliminating him, Mike wouldn’t have to spend all weekend cleaning up after Heisenberg’s mess. In the process, he develops a strong connection with the kid, and becomes almost like a guardian for Jessie, protecting him from literally life-threatening situations on a couple of occasions.
The second is that he works as Gus’ primary security guy in his plot to take out the entire cartel in one fell swoop. Mike is the only other person who knows about the plan besides Gus, as Jessie thought he was going to spend his entire life in Mexico after he met with Don Eladio and realised why he was there in the first place. But Mike assured him that either they all go home, or none of them do, and turns out, it was the former.
Mike, Gus and Jessie make it out alive of Don Eladio’s Hacienda, but Mike is severely wounded in the process, which takes him out of commission for a while. He wasn’t gone for too long, but he was gone long enough for Walt and Jessie to make their play to kill Gus and tragically, they succeeded. Mike rushed back to kill Walt as soon as he realised what had happened but was forced to play ball with him when the feds took all his money.
Mike starts visibly unravelling under the pressure of keeping his guys whole whilst grappling with the fact that he might not leave his granddaughter anything and that in the end, it was all for nothing. This leads him to making several slip-ups; he concludes that Todd is not a problem after doing a background check on him, which we know is not the case; he continues to keep the Gus-associated lawyer on his payroll despite Saul’s accurate advice that the guy would eventually flip, which is what gets the cops on Mike’s case ultimately; and he goes against his better judgement and works with Walt and Lydia – two people he clearly and openly despises – and it ends up getting him and all his guys killed.
In the end, Mike isn’t even given the dignity of being buried; he’s dissolved the same way Walt has taken care of all his victims, and his code of honour and stringent way-of-life really was for nothing in the end. Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad is a case study of how trying to convince yourself that you are more than what you do will almost always land you six feet under.
Mike constantly undermines the very advice that he gives out, doesn’t have the genius-level foresight that Gus and Walt have despite being extremely smart in his own right, and even though he knows his role, he takes no joy in playing it for Heisenberg at the very least. In 3 seasons, we see this grumpy yet loveable old grandpa/ex-cop’s creed consume him and eventually end up getting him killed. And yet somehow, his backstory expansion in Better Call Saul adds a thousand more layers of tragedy to his already-tragic character arc.
From Parking Booth Attendant to Reluctant Cartel Enforcer – The Story of Why Mike Sells His Soul
Mike is introduced in Better Call Saul as a parking booth attendant for the courthouse and it’s immediately clear to us that this isn’t the same Mike that we know from Breaking Bad. Sure, he still possesses the same character traits – his epic tussle with Jimmy over parking stickers will remain one of the best running gags in the franchise – but the clear difference here is that Mike chooses to go the extra mile to avoid violence.
He moved to Albuquerque because he wanted to be close to his granddaughter Kaylee and daughter-in-law Stacy, but his entire life is ruled over by guilt and despair. Mike’s son Matt passed away rather tragically a few months before their arrival in the ABQ, and he is determined to provide for the family that he has left. In particular, he loves his granddaughter Kaylee and would do anything to see her have a bright future, but after what happened to Matty – which we will get into in another section – Mike is simply broken.
He takes odd jobs as muscle and security for shady dealings from the veterinarian Dr. Caldera, and while he is on one of those jobs, he comes across a man who would change his life entirely; and not for the better. During his first business deal with Daniel Wormold, Mike squares up to a guy called Ignacio Varga – yes, that Ignacio Varga from that one scene in Breaking Bad – who tries to short Pryce because he’s doing this deal for some extra cash under his own boss’s nose.
Mike calls him out on this and makes sure that he gets his due, because he has done a lot of leg work and discovered that Nacho is connected to the Salamanca Family, and his performance here impresses Nacho so much that he tries to hire Mike to take out his partner Tuco – yes, that Tuco – but Mike refuses.
He does consider getting the job done, going so far as to give Lawson a visit, but he decides that he does not want to commit violence and instead arranges to get Tuco arrested for a long time. This begins his unfortunate association with the cartel, because after Tuco leaves him looking like a squashed watermelon, he’s visited by Hector Salamanca who tries to get him to take on Tuco’s gun charges for the prominent fee of $5000.
This is more money than Mike has ever earned from a job recommended by the doctor, but he refuses because he doesn’t play ball with bloodthirsty maniacs. But Mike underestimates the kind of drive that Hector possesses to see his nephew released; The Cousins show up at the motel where Mike is supervising Kaylee and threaten to kill his entire family, which flips a switch in Mike’s head and he decides to buy that gun he previously refused to take. Mike goes to Hector’s ice cream shop and negotiates a deal for himself – he will take on Tuco’s gun charges but only if he gets $50000 in cash.
Hector, being the madman that he is, applauds Mike’s ‘huevos’ and cuts the deal with him, but Mike is left with a sour taste in his mouth. So he decides to hit one of Salamanca’s trucks and steal their money, still going the extra mile to not engage in direct violence. That all stops when he finds out from Nacho that Hector killed the Good Samaritan who rescued the driver that Mike had left alive, and he makes his business with Salamanca even more personal.
Mike follows Hector into an Indian Reserve and is poised to kill him with his rifle, but at the last possible second, he is stopped when someone trips his car’s horn and leaves a note for him that simply states, “Don’t”. This is how his relationship with Gus Fring begins. Mike tracks Gus down because 1) he stopped him from killing the man who threatened his family, and 2) he tracked him without his knowledge which should’ve been impossible.
At first, he considers the man to be just another drug dealer whose opposition is the Salamancas, and he wants someone to help him “handle things”. Mike clearly does not want to be a button man for anyone, but Gus slowly convinces him to join him anyway because he explains to Mike that he, more than anyone else, knows “revenge” better than anyone else. And so Mike becomes a part of Gus’ inner circle, working as the intermediary between him and Nacho, taking out more trucks for the Salamancas, and generally taking care of any and all security concerns for the man.
But things take a rather dangerous turn for him when he meets Werner Ziegler, the man who designs the very meth lab that Walter White would one day cook in. Mike strikes up a genuine friendship with the architect over the 8 months that they spend working together but is forced to face his own mistakes when Werner pushes his hand. So far, Mike has been able to use information and intimidation to get people off his back, even giving out a few lessons to novices like Pryce, but all his skills were wasted on a man who didn’t understand the position he was in.
Werner, like Pryce, was a civilian at the end of the day, and because he didn’t understand just how serious the game he was involved in was, decided to take Michael’s friendship as his personal suit of armor, which would turn out to be a disaster for both of them. Having avoided killing anyone thus far, Mike is driven to despair over what he has done to Werner, and he starts drinking in excess and lashing out at his family members.
It takes a beatdown, a stabbing and a round of rehab with Dr. Barry Goodman for Mike to fully commit to Gus’ organization, and that’s when he comes head-to-head with Lalo Salamanca. Mike had already been wary of Lalo for a while, and the Werner incident had left him extra vigilant. Throughout season 5, he moves the pieces into position for Lalo to get arrested and then bailed out, all on Gus’ orders.
He does defy Gus when he goes after Lalo personally after finding out that Lalo has broken into Jimmy’s home, but he doesn’t have to pull that trigger, thanks to Kim. But things are not looking good for Mike’s soul heading into the final few episodes of Season 6.
In the first part of Better Call Saul’s final season, Mike was seen pleading Nacho’s case with Gus, trying to convince the latter to spare Nacho’s life instead of using him as a pawn in his quest for revenge; but ultimately, all Mike can do is assure Nacho he will personally look after his dad, being unable to help save the guy like he had intended to.
And Mike also fails to produce “acceptable results” against Lalo because he rushes to protect Jimmy instead of thinking ahead and prioritizing Salamanca, which has put him on thin ice with Gus. When Mike chastises Gus for taking on Lalo by himself, Gus simply reminds him of his own mistakes by telling him that things could have gone differently had Mike just done things Gus’s way. And that’s where we leave him for now. But let’s look at how he got to this point in his life.
Mike’s Corrupt & Tortured Past – Explored
Mike was born in the 1940’s and has known hardship his entire life. According to a story he told Werner about his dad, all that his old man left him was an apartment with a stack of bills, so a young Mr. Ehrmantraut was determined to make something of himself from a young age. This childhood detail explains why Mike is willing to go as far as he does for money; he grew up in poverty and doesn’t want his loved ones to go through what he did, so he does what he does for the greater good.
At some point in his life, presumably during his 20’s, Mike enrolled in the US Marine Corps and joined the Vietnam War as an intelligence operative. We say this because some of the intel missions that Mike conducts for Gus are Marine-grade missions, and he still manages to execute them with surgical precision, implying that his skills at intelligence gathering are something he has possessed for a long, long time.
And Mike also personifies the two core sayings about the Marines: every marine is a rifleman, and once a Marine, always a Marine; though he doesn’t go advertising the latter fact to people on a daily basis. We find out about Mike’s involvement in Vietnam through a brief conversation he has with Lawson, where he reveals that he used that M40 bolt-action sniper rifle when it still used to have wooden stocks, something only the first batch of Marine deployed to Vietnam were carrying.
So Mike was one of the 700 Marines who received the M40 as their active-duty service rifle, and he knows its strengths and flaws inside out. After returning from Vietnam following nearly a decade of service, Mike joined the Philadelphia Police Department as a beat cop and served for 30 years on the force. During this time, he got married, had a son, and was blessed enough to see him get married and have a granddaughter as well.
But Mike wasn’t as great as he made himself out to be to his family. He was a crooked cop, who was peer-pressured into accepting bribes and running protection rackets in Philly, and this is a fact he kept from everyone; including Matty, who himself had become a cop, wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Matt put Mike on a pedestal and worshipped him as a figure of pure justice; so when his own department’s officers began pressuring him into taking bribes, he went to Mike for a solution. Mike broke his son by revealing he was down in the gutter with the rest of them, and encouraged him to take the money lest he be killed out of suspicion, but it didn’t matter; Matt died because he showed hesitation in accepting the bribes, and this broke Mike as well. He tracked down the police officers who killed Matt and enacted his revenge on them; this is part of the reason why he left Philly to go to Albuquerque.
But Mike’s guilt kept weighing on him for the better part of 4 seasons, because he chose not to talk about it. The outburst he has on Stacy and Kaylee is not justified and he says some rather horrible things to them, but Mike realises it’s because he has not processed his own feelings towards Matty’s death and his hand in it. He confesses his sins to Stacy, who chooses to forgive him, and from that point onwards, Mike gets his head back on straight and goes to work once again for his family; only this time, he keeps his crap to himself.
Mike’s time with the Marines and the Philly P.D. has given him invaluable experiences in how to operate on both sides of the law: he can take out four trained gunmen without breaking a sweat and even has a police radio that he uses to manipulate the Albuquerque P.D., but it has also shaped him into the man he is today.
The reason we don’t see Mike kill someone in Better Call Saul unless he absolutely has to, is Matty. Mike doesn’t want to go to that dark place again, but he clearly does, because something happens between Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that makes him ditch his no-killing rule and become far less emotional about his job. This is exemplified by the relationships he has with characters across both shows.
Mike’s “Sons” and his relationship with Jimmy is the key to figuring out why he “broke bad”
To be fair to you guys, Mike has never been clean in this franchise. He has always been portrayed as a broken figure, but one with a strong moral code, at least in Better Call Saul, that is. In season 1, Mike gives Pryce a speech about criminals. He says that being on either side of the law does not correspond to one’s innate goodness, because he has seen good criminals and bad cops, even been one himself.
He argues that if someone must be a criminal, then they should always do their homework and be cognizant of the fact that they are, indeed, criminals. He also says that if you make a deal with somebody, then you hold up your end, and he goes the extra mile to refund half of what Nacho paid him to kill Tuco because he was going to get out sooner than either of them expected him to.
So, Mike has a clear sense of honour and even justice in a twisted way during Better Call Saul. He is more human in the prequel series, which is what makes his eventual detachment from all things not titled Ehrmantraut so disturbing. This is exemplified by three key relationships that run parallel to each other across both shows, but the way Mike approaches them is what makes the difference.
After losing Matty, Mike has a hole inside of him that only his granddaughter Kaylee seems capable of filling, but he does develop two father-son-type relationships in both shows. The first one we see is the relationship he has with Jessie, which goes from one extreme to the other. Initially, Mike was willing to let Jessie die because he saw him as a loose cannon, and was even confused as to why Gus would want to work with the kid in the first place after disavowing him as a junkie.
But he gradually comes to see Jessie as a respected peer, and gives him the most-sane advice out of any of his other associates. Mike is the one who tells Jessie that he would go to Alaska if he wanted to get out of the game, which is where he ends up going to at the end of El Camino, but his relationship with Jessie is much more restrained compared to the one he had with Nacho Varga.
With Nacho, Mike is far more directly involved, and you can really see how that ends up affecting him. Initially, he doesn’t think much of Nacho, as he’s just another guy running a deal out of his regular crew to him. But once he gets involved with the Salamancas and Gus himself, he becomes Nacho’s only friend in the cartel. Mike tries his best to get Gus to spare Nacho, but Nacho dies anyway, and this teaches Mike that his standing with his employer goes only so far.
So when Breaking Bad rolls around, he has no problem calling Jessie a craphead and beating him around till the kid learns the ropes, because he now knows how important that sort of thing can be to the uninitiated. The second relationship is the one he shares with Werner Ziegler and Walter White. Ziegler is the first crackpot genius that Mike comes in contact with, and the German engineer’s passionate nature instantly takes him.
Mike and Werner even become friends, with Werner revealing to Mike that his surname was a German surname and it meant “strength”. Mike, in turn, becomes Werner’s crutch during his time away from his beloved wife. But Werner takes advantage of Mike’s leniency and escapes the warehouse, an act that ends with Mike having to kill a man he respected. So when he meets Walter, he feels a kinship with him because what they do they do for their families, but he never makes an attempt to become his friend.
In fact, Mike is the only person openly disdainful of Walt’s ego, and he doesn’t flinch from trying to kill Walt on multiple occasions, which is a stark contrast from his relationship with Werner. This goes to show you that the lesson he learnt from Ziegler was to never get too friendly with a civilian adjacent to the game, because they will almost always turn out to be erratic elements.
And the last changed relationship that reflects Mike’s character shift is the one he has with Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. And we separate the two here, because Mike is one of the rare individuals to interact with both of them, and we can see who he cares about more. Even though Mike is mostly annoyed with Jimmy whenever he encounters him, it’s clear that he cares for the guy.
Mike hires Jimmy as his go-to lawyer and runs a scam with him on some Philadelphia cops who had come by to investigate his involvement with the deaths of those officers we mentioned earlier. He goes to Jimmy again to amend his statement about Tuco’s gun, and we know that by the time Breaking Bad rolls around, Mike trusts Jimmy implicitly in all criminal matters.
But Mike also rushes to Jimmy’s side twice when he finds out that he is under threat from Lalo; he goes out of his way to protect Jimmy in the season 5 episode Bagman, because they’re friends; and he even uses Jimmy to scout Gus before working with the guy because he trusts him. Compare this with the scene where Mike threatens Saul if he doesn’t give up Jessie, and you can see the contrast clear as day.
Mike has had a longer working and personal relationship with Jimmy than he has with Gus. Surely, he must know about the little trip he took with Tuco out in the desert by the time 2008 comes around. But Mike invokes the specific imagery of Tuco assaulting the skater twins to intimidate Saul into action. He tells him he will break his legs till they don’t work, and that he trusts the hole in the desert that he would leave him in if he doesn’t give up Jessie.
This is a word-for-word description of what went down when Saul managed to talk down Tuco from killing the skateboard scammers, which is what makes us beg the question as to why Mike would threaten his friend by invoking one of his worst traumas. The answer might lie somewhere in Kim. In season 6, Mike tells Kim that Lalo is alive, not Jimmy, because he thinks she is made of sterner stuff. It is Kim who shows up at Gus’ house intending to kill him on Lalo’s orders, and Mike once again takes the initiative to interact with her and get the information he needs out of her.
So far, he has shown he trusts her more than Jimmy, and that is solely based on one interaction she had with Lalo where she managed to make him stand down. That was in stark contrast with Kim’s behavior in Season 6, episode 8, where she is having a nervous breakdown pretty much from start to finish. It’s possible that Kim breaks under the pressure of anxiety and tries to go to the cops with the information she has on Gus’ business because she does recognize that he was her mark even after encountering a decoy, and that makes her a very loose end indeed.
It’s possible that Kim is the last bit of Mike’s humanity, that he will end up sacrificing for the sake of his family, and that that is how he becomes so detached by the time Breaking Bad rolls around. But we’re going to have to wait and watch. For now, all we can say is that something happens that makes Mike give up on his code of honour and commit himself fully to Gus, and it has to be very personal to have changed him to this degree. Whether we’re right or not remains to be seen.
Marvelous Verdict
Mike Ehrmantraut is one of only 4 characters to appear across all Breaking Bad Unvierse productions, and with good reason. He is a man who has literally seen it all, and is the closest thing to a Shakespearean lead in this franchise. He is a strong leader who has everything on lock and is completely in charge of things, until his fatal flaw rears its head and ruins it all for him in the end.
Mike is a character that is mostly seen scowling, but Jonathon Banks manages to milk all kinds of emotions from that one expression that makes Mr. Ehrmantraut seem both human and inhuman at the same time. Mike is the definition of a heart in conflict with itself, and that is what has made his character such a delightful addition to the franchise. Here’s hoping Mr. Banks finally snags that long-overdue Emmy, because he most certainly deserves it.