If Saul knew Gus’s secret identity, surely he would know that Mike’s loyalties lay with Gus.Īs beautiful as the reveal of Gus himself is, the earlier shot of Mike driving away from his surveillance of the restaurant, with the camera slowly pulling back to reveal the Los Pollos Hermanos sign for the first time, is at least as artful, if not more.
More to the point, later episodes present Saul as genuinely shocked and hurt to find out that Mike, whom he considers to merely be “my investigator,” has been working for Gus all along. (*) Saul is a con man, but his “I know a guy who knows a guy… who knows another guy” bit is never presented as him lying to Walt, especially given his lack of direct involvement in the drug business before hooking up with Walt and Jesse. (And in a neat inverse of his introductory shot: now Gus is in the foreground, while Jimmy’s car is barely in focus on the fringes, recognizable only because we know what that yellow lemon looks like.) He sees the polite and solicitous middle manager, not the cold and steely kingpin who reveals his true face only when no one is looking. Jimmy McGill can have met fried chicken franchise operator Gustavo Fring - can maybe even encounter him again in the future, if Saul wants to push its luck a bit - without having any idea that he’s one of the region’s biggest drug traffickers. And it manages to create an encounter between this show’s title character and its huge new addition without violating what we’ve been told is the history between the two men, or forcing the show to retcon it so that Saul was lying to Walt at the time(*). It’s delightfully executed: not quite the masterclass in making the audience hold its breath that Gus’s arrival at the super lab in the aforementioned “Box Cutter” was, simply because the stakes here are nowhere near as high, but a similar example of how Gilligan and company use their powers of manipulation for good and not evil. And when Gus finally speaks, it’s while we’re watching Jimmy dive through the trash can in the event the backpack guy dumped something there. Then we’re watching Jimmy watching the man with the backpack, and everyone else, and it’s almost 5 minutes into the scene before Gus appears at the top of the frame, out of focus but unmistakably the Chicken Man, while Jimmy is oblivious, because of course he doesn’t know what we know. The whole scene is masterfully shot, starting with that big sweep around the restaurant, which both reacquaints us with the place and leaves us wondering if the camera might just whiz right past Gus himself. This is just the show deliciously letting the tension build of exactly how Gus will appear, and also whether there will be a rewriting of what we knew on Breaking Bad about Saul Goodman not knowing Gus at the time he hooked Walt up with him. But where the business with the transmitter in “Mabel” was about showing us every detail of Mike’s plan, and reminding us of what a tenacious, meticulous guy he is, there was no real tradecraft to be revealed in the Pollos Hermanos sequence, other than the way that Gus must have moved the parcel from the backpack into his sweeper while his body blocked anyone from seeing. Just as we got last week with Mike and the gas cap, “Witness” devoted a long chunk of time to a dialogue-free sequence, with roughly 7 minutes passing from when Jimmy enters the restaurant until Gus says his first line (though we hear stray chatter from the other customers and employees). By this point, most of us knew who had planted the bug in Mike’s gas cap (though the show saved Esposito’s name for the end credits for the benefit of viewers who don’t pay attention to all the marketing and press coverage), and it was a matter of when, not if, Gus would appear. Much of this is a credit to the way Thomas Schnauz’s script and Vince Gilligan’s direction keep teasing and teasing Gus’s arrival. And, again, this is Victor we’re talking about! (*) My notes from right after the SUV’s window rolled down are just Victor’s name in all-caps over and over again, occasionally peppered with exclamation points.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I have serious reservations about Saul turning into blatant Breaking Bad fan service, yet “Witness” left me giddy with the sight of Giancarlo Esposito in that familiar uniform, or even the surprise appearance of Victor(*), whose most memorable BB moment was his death at the hands of Gus in “Box Cutter.”
Better call saul s03 e02 cracker#
A review of tonight’s Better Call Saul coming up just as soon as I really don’t want to talk about Cracker Barrel…