TV Review: Better Call Saul 3×02 “Witness”

This week’s episode “Witness” starts with cloaking us in blue in Chuck’s home. It seems like he’s hired some sort of overnight protection whose playing solitaire. The poor guy has to sit in Chuck’s oil-lantern-lit house in the dark all night when its lights out time for Chuck.

The thought just gives me the creeps – a pitch black house, a random guy you just met sitting alone in the dark while you get some shut eye. Chuck is an interesting guy when it comes to trust.

But while Chuck’s asleep, Mike’s out on the midnight hunt tracking the men who are watching him. Mike, being a superhuman, tracks them until daylight emerges from a purple and orange sunrise to none other than, you guessed it… Los Pollos Hermanos! Our favorite Gus Fring owned local chicken eatery / drug upfront.

Meanwhile, Jimmy is doing a hack paint job in his new office when a new hopeful from the “fifth circle of hell” DMV walks in for a paralegal job interview. She tells him that his duck-tape zig-zag paint experiment is a little crooked on the bottom. The tape isn’t the only thing that’s crooked though, Jimmy is way off during Francesca’s interview.

Like crazy off, he wants to hire her on the spot and puts her through the hellish test of answering phones in front of a literally looming Jimmy right after he airs a TV ad telling her to talk about Cracker Barrel and the “It’s a hot one” weather. Of course that does fly when Mike “like the fish” Ehrmantraut calls looking for Jimmy.

Interestingly enough, Jimmy is just a pawn in Mike’s plan to find out who’s watching him. The job? Go sit and eat food at Los Pollos and watch for the green car and the money exchange. When the car finally shows up, Jimmy’s watching the man who’s watching Mike like a hawk and pretending to put sugar in his bad-tasting coffee when we first see the blurred Gus Fring wonderfully inch closer and closer to Jimmy until he’s right behind him cleaning up trash and getting in the way of Jimmy’s view.

We finally get a line out of him when Jimmy’s half way into the garbage with “Can I help you?” Luckily, Jimmy drops his watch so he has an excuse for Gus for trash diving that Gus seems to believe.

When Jimmy relays the non-information he found out to Mike, he’s pretty disappointed that they aren’t going on some big spy mission, or at least Mike isn’t bring him on some big spy mission.

Meanwhile back at the office, Ernie is looming outside calling for Kim’s help after being absolutely freaked out that he knows about what Jimmy told Chuck, the tape and everything that went down the night Jimmy confessed about switching 1261 to 1218.

This is a huge revelation for Jimmy, he’s heartbroken. Kim’s like an ice queen when she tells him that they’ll figure it out. The whole scene is hard to watch, but it’s one of the best scenes the show has mustered up this season so far.

Kim has no idea what Chuck’s plan could be, and leaves Jimmy to peak off the rest of the tape on the wall. He angrily rips off the rest leaving the gold zig-zag a little messed up on the bottom and storms out of the office.

Then, after an interesting scene of Mike driving out into the desert, answering his phone and saying “hello,” we get a hilarious scene of Howard hilariously parking a block away and jumping a fence to get into Chuck’s house inconspicuously. Howard’s annoyed at the eight days of private investors snooping around waiting for Jimmy to steal the tape in the dead of night.

That doesn’t happen though, Jimmy breaks the door down in a frantic rage. One of Bob Odenkirk’s best moments yet, he rips the tape in half, destroying it and himself in the process as Howard and the private investigators were witnesses to Jimmy’s meltdown.

What an episode, but I do have to say what’s going on with Kim? At the end of last season, her and Jimmy finally got together, now we barely get any scenes of the two in the same room. I’m curious if the number changing reveal totally destroyed their relationship and we are seeing the ice cold aftermath.