'Breaking Bad' Season 5, Episode 2 Recap - 'Madrigal' and Mike's Story

Here's the sign of a truly great show: you can take pretty much any character in the cast and build an entire episode around him or her, and the audience will still be riveted. Gus got his moment in the sun last season with "Hermanos," and now it's time to learn a little more about Mike.

This is really the first time that we get a sense of the scale and inner workings of Gus' operation. It goes up to Madrigal Elektromotive, an apparently German company that makes various equipment and also has a restaurant division. We open on the head of that division, Mr. Schuler, munching on tator tots and trying various dips (I think I'll be making my own Franch later) with a distant expression.

Mr. Schuler ends up defibrillating himself in the bathroom (all that red! Good to know that little color trope isn't going away), and with it comes the realization on our part that Walt's actions killed many more people than just Gus and a few flunkies. In killing Gus, Walt exposed the organization, and now everyone will be under scrutiny... including Mike.

When we see our gruff hitman, he's sitting in a diner and is approached by an extremely nervous woman who is clearly out of her element. This is Lydia, a former employee of Gus, and she's concerned that Mike's "guys" are going to cave to questioning. Mike assures her that his guys are "solid," and that people only go killing 11 people on a list as a preventative measure in movies.

Lydia is clearly not reassured, as Mike is called by one of said "guys," Chau, who is being held at gunpoint by an assassin. Lucky us, we get to see Mike at work... I don't know where that moving stuffed pig came from, but it was a pretty good idea. The assassin reveals that Lydia took out the contract on Mike and the rest of the guys, so naturally Mike has to break into Lydia's house and kill her.

At the last moment, though, Mike has a change of heart: he asks Lydia if she can still get methylamine, the ingredient that Walt and Jesse are lacking before they can move forward and continue cooking. Looks like the gang is getting back together!

The reason for Mike's decision comes from a fantastic previous scene with Hank questioning Mike at the station. I was always hoping we would get these two in the same room together at some point, and they did not disappoint: Hank was as gratingly cocky as ever, and Mike was even more stoic than usual, which I wasn't sure was possible.

The reveal is this: the information behind the photo about Gus' offshore accounts lead to the accounts of all of the people that were paid under the table for the operation, including Mike. Or, rather, including Mike's granddaughter, whose name was on the account with nearly $2 million in it. THAT ruffles Mike's feathers, and now our former cop/"corporate security" guy has a reason to get back in the game.

As for Walt, his newfound criminal mastermind persona continues without a hitch, though he's likely unaware of the chaos that he's still causing. His magnet scheme probably caused more trouble than it solved (Hank said that the computer was encrypted and they probably wouldn't get anything out of it anyway), and the body count for this episode alone is at least three from the Pollos Hermanos fallout: Schuler, Chau, and the assassin.

We didn't get any more of Future Walt, so that mystery will likely be unraveled slowly over the first half of this season. But we did get another ending to the episode with Walt being a creepy son of a bitch to Skylar. Is that how every episode is going to end? Because it makes my skin crawl every time.

It's also clear that "Breaking Bad" is setting us up to want Jesse to kill Walt. Why else would we have to endure poor Jesse sobbing and apologizing to Walt about nearly killing him over the ricin while Walt creepily plays the "there, there" role? Also, just what is Walt saving up that ricin for?

Perhaps the greatest moment of the episode comes from Hank, though: at the end of his conversation with the chief, who is being forced into retirement over the Gus fiasco, Hank's expression changes as he listens to the chief talking about how Gus was doing all this stuff "right in front of me... right under my nose."

That expression means one thing: Hank is starting to put the pieces together, and soon enough he'll realize what's been right under his nose all along.