Welcome back to our weekly breakdown of the minutia of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul. While Alan Sepinwall provides his always excellent coverage of the series (here’s his write-up of the most recent episode), here we will look at some of the details viewers may have missed, callbacks to Breaking Bad, references to other shows or movies, and theories on the direction the series is heading. We scour Reddit threads, Twitter, listen each week to Kelley Dixon’s Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, and attempt to curate the best intel about each episode.
This week’s episode, “Witness,” was obviously ripe with not just callbacks to Breaking Bad, but returning characters from the parent series. There were three, to be exact. Let’s start with the biggest:
Gus Fring
We’ve all known that Gus Fring would return to the series since the end of last season, when an anagram of the season two episode titles spelled it out for us:
Fifi
Rebecca
Inflatable
Nailed
Gloves Off
Switch
Bali Ha’i
Amarillo
Cobbler
Klick
“Fring’s Back.”
It was only a matter of time, and according to Vince Gilligan in the Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, there were some considerations made into dragging it out as long as possible, perhaps to the fifth or sixth episode of the second season. Ultimately, however, they decided to bring him in earlier. Even so, Gilligan — who directed the first two episodes of the season — wanted to make viewers wait for a while for it by pushing it beyond the first episode and deep into the second episode.
The wait could have been even longer, but realizing that the episode was running too long, Gilligan and editor Kelley Dixon made the decision to cut one scene and use the dialogue from it as a voiceover in another scene. So, what Mike is telling Jimmy in voiceover as Jimmy walks inside the Los Pollos Hermanos is actually dialogue taken from a cut scene between Mike and Jimmy in Mike’s car. The reason the episode ran long, of course, is because Gilligan spent so much time following Gus’s guy around as he picked up stacks of cash hidden in various parts of Albuquerque, which we know to be Fring’s M.O. from Breaking Bad. There was, in fact, a lot more footage of the stakeouts, but Gilligan trimmed it down.
One note of interest there is that when Mike is looking out into the city, his vantage point is that from a place in Albuquerque right next to the mall with the Cinnabon inside where Gene works, which is set in Omaha on the series.
We do finally meet Gus when Jimmy tracks one of Gus’s men inside the Los Pollos Hermanos. How does Gus know that Jimmy is working with Mike, and therefore, that Mike is tracking Gus? I struggled with that question myself, rewatching the scene inside Los Pollos Hermanos several times to see if Jimmy gave anything away. As it turns out, according to Gilligan, Jimmy simply tingled Gus’ “Spidey sense.” He knew Mike was following him not because of any one thing, but because Gus is a smart man who had a hunch.
It’s unclear if Jimmy and Gus will ever cross paths again. In Breaking Bad, we are given the impression that Saul has no idea who Gus Fring is when he sets up a meet between Gus and Walter White. In their initial meeting about Gus, Saul tells Walter that he doesn’t know Gus, but he “knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy” who knows Fring. That, however, could have been posturing. It’s hard to imagine that Gus and Jimmy will never meet again on Better Call Saul.
Speaking of Gus, he’s still driving that Volvo.
Breaking Bad
Better Call Saul
The level of detail in this show is insane.
Victor
One of the other Breaking Bad alums we meet is Victor, who leads Mike out into the middle of nowhere, where Mike discovers a ringing phone on top of a gas cap awaiting him. Victor was Gus’s right-hand man in Breaking Bad until Gus decided to slash his throat in “Box Cutter.”
Poor Victor.
Francesca
The other Breaking Bad alum we meet in the this episode is Francesca, Saul Goodman’s long suffering receptionist. Here, she is hired originally to work for Jimmy and Kim. Apparently, Jimmy will get her in the separation. From what Gilligan says in the Insider podcast, we should expect to see a lot of her in Saul. One interesting note here is that the DMV is called the MDV in New Mexico, as Francesca points out, but the reason why Jimmy says that he will never call it the MVD is because in Breaking Bad, he mentions that he’s going to send Francesca back to the “DMV.” In other words, that exchange in the interview fixes a potential continuity error.
Moreover, because this show leaves no detail untouched, if you call McGill’s number from this episode, there’s a lovely message from Francesa (via Reddit user skinbaa).
Chuck
As predicted last week, Chuck did intentionally push the play button on his tape recorder before asking Ernesto to change the batteries, knowing exactly how it would play out. Chuck is “as much a con man as Jimmy,” Gilligan said in the podcast, which lends some credibility to the theory floated last week that the book Jimmy picked up in Chuck’s office, The Adventures in Mabel, will share in common the same theme as this season, which is to say that Chuck will become more Jimmy-like over the course of the season. We already see Jimmy becoming more Chuck-like in Jimmy’s decision to carefully peel the duct tape off the wall off his office. We could be seeing something of a role reversal this season.
One last note on Chuck: The final scene, where Chuck asked Hamlin and his private detective, “Did you witness it?” was taken straight out of an episode of Columbo, according to the episode’s writer, Peter Gould.
Kim Wexler
After Kim learns out that Chuck has a tape of Jimmy’s confession, she brings Jimmy into her office. To ensure confidentiality, Kim asks Jimmy for $1 to establish attorney-client privilege. We have actually seen that before, as well, in Breaking Bad. Saul asked the same of Walt and Jesse when they had a gun to his head out in the middle of the desert.
Meanwhile, here’s a callback that no one would have picked up on had Vince Gilligan not revealed it to Brian Davids on the excellent Film Schlubs podcast. See the octagonal desk in Saul’s office on Breaking Bad?
That same desk can be seen in Kim’s office behind here here, with the boxes on top of it.
So, whatever happens between Kim and Jimmy, Saul at least still has something of hers with him in the future.
