I don’t want Mike shuffled off, of course, but there’s something to be said for taking it a new direction. The Tuco thing was cool, but he was immediately shuffled off and replaced by Nacho.
It doesn’t mean that it should have to happen. Better Call Saul is better than almost everything on the air right now, and to watch it lean back on the good ol’ days like it did tonight is just totally unnecessary. The worst bits of this show are the things from Breaking Bad. And this sort of thing was unavoidable.īut that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating.
But them doing a standalone Mike episode absolutely requires prior knowledge to make it hit as hard as it should. It’s not that I’m worried about the direction the show is taking Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan actually did a pretty good job detailing who Mike is without the context of Breaking Bad. He’s a character from Breaking Bad, and that doesn’t sit well. Mike Ehrmantraut isn’t a character on Better Call Saul. But what if I hadn’t? What if I had never seen Breaking Bad before? Would this episode resonate as much as it did grip as tight as it did bring up emotions like it did? I don’t know. It took all that I knew of him and delivered.īut that’s the problem. Mike Ehrmantraut is a deep and varied character who I desperately wanted to know more about, and this episode delivered on that. It’s so weird to even consider the idea that this was in some way a “bad” episode, because it really wasn’t. The more that Better Call Saul leans on Breaking Bad, the worse things get. It needs to do that now, and it needs to do that as cleanly as possible, because the show starts to decline in quality the closer it is to its source material. Better Call Saul needs to stay away from its parent show.