Better Call Saul season 4 episode 3 review & recap: A noir farce and a Breaking Bad character returns

Experiments in genre abound in intentionally jarring episode

(AMC/Netflix)

Better Call Saul has only grown more schizophrenic in terms of genre as it has progressed. One minute it’s light-hearted laughs with Jimmy and the gang at the old people’s home, the next it’s roadside executions shot in visceral close-up. In the same episode, Mike will quietly explore the foibles of white-collar work like he’s in a minimalist version of Office Space and Gus will plot revenge on a drug cartel like Tony Montana – if he was fastidiously polite and frequently practised mindfulness.

These tonal jumps are welcome, on the whole, and in season 4 episode 3, “Something Beautiful”, they were starker than ever. Let’s look at the individual plot strands (spoilers ahead):

Gus, Nacho and the cartel

Sopranos fans may recall a rapper taking a bullet to “the fleshy part of the thigh” from one of Tony’s crew in order to fake an attempted hit in the show’s final season. It was largely played for laughs, but there was no humour to be found in BCS’ take on the tactic this week, with Nacho being shot at point-blank range in both the arm and abdomen before being left to bake in the desert for several hours. It was all in the interests of shifting responsibility for a drive-by and retaining Nacho’s status as a mole in the cartel for Gus Fring, but so elaborate and brutal that Nacho must have considered whether a simple dunking in a barrel of acid would have been preferential, Gus’s usual solution to any and all problems. The ruse seemed to work on the Cousins, who were dispatched to collect Nacho, one of them even providing him with a blood transfusion. Like Jesse Pinkman ahead of him, Nacho is learning the extent of pain and peril that comes with tying one’s colours to the mast of the good ship Fring.

This subplot then took an abruptly cheery turn as we headed into what appeared to be a college chemistry lab, where none other than Gale Boetticher, returning to the show’s universe, was merrily singing the Periodic Table to himself and adjusting chemicals, quite in his element. Pre-Breaking Bad he was testing the purity of Gus’s product, it turns out, and gently lobbying to become his new head meth chef. Gus turned him down in this episode, Gale clearly lacking the Walter White hard sell.

We’re still none the wiser as to why Gale, a man who would make a great children’s TV presenter, was interested in a life of crime, but I kind of like it that way.

Jimmy and the Bavarian porcelain figurine

Jimmy made his own pivot to crime in “Something Beautiful”, enlisting a grunt (who you may recognise from Breaking Bad as the boss of Vamonos Pest, the fumigation company that facilitated Walt and Jesse’s cook) to steal an expensive Hummel figurine from episode 2’s printer salesmen. Trapped in the office of one of the men – who was sleeping on his office sofa due to a fallout with his wife – the thief had to be broken out by Jimmy, the whole narrative playing out like a farce, but being shot and scored like a noir, all low-lighting and ominously dinging bells.

It was a bizarre way to kick off the crooked Jimmy/Saul era, a small-fry heist even by Better Call Saul‘s low-key standards.

Kim and the err, I’m not sure exactly

If I didn’t have such confidence in showrunners Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan, I’d worry they have no real plan for Kim Wexler in season 4. In last week’s review I mentioned how the show likes to keep its cards close to its chest, but this time around we were left completely in the dark. Shown miniature models of a range of banks client Mesa Verde proposes to build Kim looked incredibly fearful. Daunted by the scale o ambition was the reason she gave the company’s CEO for her expression, but something else was definitely going on here. Did she smell the prospect of criminality? Perhaps how it might be a sweet scent to boyfriend Jimmy?

The episode closed out with Kim delivering Chuck’s final letter to Jimmy, only she rewrote it and made it vastly more positive. Astonishingly, Jimmy bought the switch, but was uninterested in the letter nonetheless, just as I am with the whole Chuck/HHM storyline which I dearly wish we’d seen the back of by now.

An intriguing, daring episode this week, but somebody get a Heisenberg batch of blue in that writer’s room because this thing really needs to gather pace.

Better Call Saul airs on AMC in the US Monday nights and follows worldwide on Netflix the following morning.