The most emotionally wrenching episode of Better Call Saul yet, "Five-O," was written by a total newbie. Gordon Smith, a staff writer on the show, got his start as a production assistant on Breaking Bad. He then moved up the ranks to become showrunner Vince Gilligan's personal assistant, then the writers' assistant as well.

And though Smith had written content for a few web clips and DVD extras, this week's episode of Better Call Saul was his first television episode—ever. Not a bad starter gig. Smith spoke to Esquire about the show's darkest episode yet, and how the writers got the usually taciturn Mike to finally open up.

How did you go from assistant to full-blown writer on the show?

I was basically Vince's assistant all the way to up to the point that we opened the [writers'] room. Vince told me between season four and season five that he'd be willing to read something that I had written, so I got him something so that he could read it in that hiatus. He liked it, but there weren't really any openings because it was the last episodes and all the spots were spoken for. But then once Better Call Saul was announced, he and [fellow showrunner Peter Gould] asked me to join the team and I said, "Yes please!"

I was listening to the Better Call SaulInsider podcast this morning, and you discussed that there were bibles, or at least guides, to who Saul is and who Mike is.

We didn't have anything like that for Breaking Bad. We generated some stuff after the fact. Vince's current assistant put together a pretty comprehensive show bible to give to our Latin America team who just did their version, Metastasis. But for this show, we had the assistants sort of mine all of the mentions and character details and anything that was sort of said about specifically Mike and Saul, either by them or to them, and what episodes they were in.

If Saul says something about himself, well, maybe that's true, or maybe he's saying it for embellishment. But if Hank says something about Mike, or Hank says something about Saul, we can probably be pretty certain that happened. Because one of them has a little bit more authority than the other. It's less organized than it might seem. I don't know if you've seen the guide to Wile E. Coyote, which was so great—you kind of wish you could have a character that's so clearly delineated, but we don't really have that unfortunately, because we're dealing with people.

"Mike's to the wall, everything's gonna come out. It's certainly an intimate moment."

Jonathan Banks has this beautiful, gut-wrenching monologue in this week's episode. Did you worry about it being true to the character, who's not exactly known for his soliloquies?

You know, I think I went into it a little bit willfully ignorant of that. I know he's not a character that speaks a lot, but I guess what I tried to do mostly was get into what I felt would be the emotional truth for somebody who doesn't speak a lot. But this is the moment that he has to. He's to the wall, everything's gonna come out. It's certainly an intimate moment and an intimate glimpse inside him.

You spoke on the podcast about how Jonathan Banks had his own ideas for Mike's backstory while he was filming Breaking Bad. Can you elaborate?

First, he responded to the woman who we see with Kaylee [on Breaking Bad] and he said to Peter at the time that it was not his daughter, it was not his blood relative. He thought that whatever his backstory was, and why he's here and has this attachment to his granddaughter, had something to do with his son. I think he pitched at one point the idea that maybe his son was a boxer who had been killed in the ring. So we knew Mike was an ex-cop, and it felt like the patrimony of it would be a little bit cleaner and maybe more moving if it had to do with his work as a cop.

How did the room go about creating this backstory? What was the process like?

We kind of knew fairly early on that we wanted to see him arrive in town on a train, to just sort of give him a grand opening, you know? So we were generating it, and then we hit this point in the story where it felt like the right time. We'd kind of gone slow, we'd soft-pedaled, we'd given tiny parts of Mike, and it felt time to really see why he was in this parking booth, see what he was doing there, what was going on, and it all kind of gelled very quickly at that point.

How did you feel when the weight of writing this major episode was on you?

I just happened to be fifth in the batting order. It was nerve-wracking because I wanted to do a good job. Vince and Peter, they took a leap of faith that I would be able to do this job in the first place, but certainly a leap of faith that I could write this script. I wanted to make sure that they thought it was justified. I wanted to just live up to the material.

This was supposed to be episode five instead of six, right? Why?

We started feeling like we jumped a transition. Why would Jimmy suddenly do this work with Mike? What happened to the billboard [stunt]? What was the outcome of all of that, if we just go straight into him defending Mike? We missed a transition in his emotional state, and it turned out when we got into it, I think it was important because it brought in his relationship with Chuck and allowed us some time to deepen that. We [could] figure out what he was actually doing, what his practice was, the outcome of this big stunt.

Will we be seeing any more of Mike's backstory coming up? Any hints of what's to come from his character?

You know, I think we're probably going to be laying off his backstory for a while. This is a big gulp of it, but we're certainly going to deal with some of the fallout from this episode as we're going forward. Now we're hoping that we can spend some time with the present-tense Mike. That was another reason for doing it this way. It could clear out some of the things holding him back, and we can figure out what his next steps are toward the Mike we know on Breaking Bad.

"I think it's more a sign that we're willing to go wherever the story takes us."

There's been some speculation among critics about whether Better Call Saul will be lighter in tone than Breaking Bad, and by how much. This was the darkest episode yet. Is this a sign of things to come?

I think it's more a sign that we're willing to go wherever the story takes us. We're less concerned about maintaining a kind of tonal consistency than an emotional logic. We certainly go to some further dark and sad places as we get into this season, but we try to let it be something that feels like where the story takes us, rather than we have in mind a certain tone that we're going to shoot for.

Any clues you can give us for the rest of the season?

I think it's already been out there, but we can look forward to some more Kettlemans, in next week's episode. It's an episode that I kept referring to as "The Kettleman Conundrum," but that's just me.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io