Breaking Bad Blog: Problem Dog
Poor Jesse. All he wants - all he's ever wanted - is for someone to care about him. We've seen how he adores Mr. White - for him, it's never just Walt - and now we're seeing how just a little attention from Gus and Mike is going a long way.
That Jesse is even the slightest bit receptive to Gus causes Walt to worry, but it also provides him with an opportunity. Prompted by Saul, Walt has resolved to take Gus out, and Jesse is perfectly placed to play the assassin. Having failed last week to convince Jesse that Mike and Gus were using him, this time Walt tries his hand at some reverse psychology.
He wonders if Gus could really be so naive as to think Jesse would work for him, after what's gone on in the past, placing particular emphasis on the murder of his girlfriend's brother, coming only hours after Gus had promised ‘no children.' Walt's manipulation is blatant, and only made worse by our knowledge that he watched Jesse's last girlfriend die when he could have tried to save her, so he's hardly a saint himself. Still, Jesse doesn't take much convincing - he'll do it.
Walt's plan for killing Gus is simple: he's cooked a vial of ricin, the poison they had planned to use on Tuco, and Jesse is to spike Gus's food or drink with it at the first opportunity. That opportunity comes quickly, as he and Mike meet Gus at a warehouse in the middle of the desert, and while Mike and Gus talk, he is sent to make coffee. He pulls out the pack of cigarettes in which he has hidden the poison, but hesitates to add it to the brew. Before he can make up his mind, Mike comes over; there's a chance things could get messy, so he wants Jesse to have a gun, and to go wait outside.
They're at this warehouse to watch over a meeting between Gus and the cartel. The cartel's lone representative arrives, and he and Gus get down to business. Despite Gus's offer of $50 million to severe their relationship then and there, the cartel won't budge. It seems they've made Gus an offer in the past, and they're still waiting for him to say yes or no. We don't get to see Gus's answer, as we cut to Jesse, who watches as the cartel man, and then Gus, come out of the building. Sensing another opportunity, he reaches for his new gun, but can't bring himself to do it.
As they drive away, Jesse asks Mike if he knows what Gus meant when he said that he sees something in him. Mike can only guess that maybe he meant loyalty, though he's not sure where Jesse's loyalty actually lies. Things are only made murkier later, when after Walt asks if he's had a chance, Jesse lies and says he hasn't seen Gus. The struggle for Jesse's loyalty evidently has a long way to go.
We get to see how conflicted Jesse is when he attends a narcotics anonymous meeting, having been sober now for four days. After the group leader preaches about needing to own your actions, but not get hung up on them, Jesse is asked to speak, and he offers up a story about how he recently killed a dog. As he struggles to hold back tears, and with no one in the meeting able to help because they don't know the real story, that the dog was actually a man called Gale, it's clear that Jesse isn't at peace with himself.
Before this all happened, we got a glimpse at life at the carwash, as Walt comes by to drop off some drug money so that it can be laundered, something he's planning on doing every two weeks. When Skyler finds out she's been given $274,000, she quickly calculates that Walt is making over $7 million a year, a figure that stuns her, for two reasons. One, it's way more than she had imagined, and two, it's going to be impossible to launder it all, for no carwash in the world does that much business. Walt isn't concerned - this was Skyler's idea, and she'll have to figure it out.
Elsewhere, Walter Jr. is puzzling over the loss of his fancy new car, which Skyle had ordered returned last week, and which Walt had blown up in a moment of madness at the episode's start. He relays the bits of the story he knows to Hank, who he is driving to Los Pollos Hermanos. While they're enjoying their meal of fried chicken, Gus wanders over to check on how Hank's recovery is progressing. After hearing that he's doing well, Gus also offers them each a free refill of their soda, and Hank takes him up on it. It turns out that he wasn't really thirsty, he just wanted something that Gus had touched.
He pays his friends at the D.E.A. a visit, and lays out his theory, that Gale was the notorious Heisenberg's cook, and that Gus Fring, conspicuous friend of the D.E.A., might be Heisenberg. Gomez and Merkert find the story too ridiculous to be true, and Hank says that he would agree with them, but for one thing. Gus's fingerprints, lifted from the soda cup, can be found in Gale's apartment. While Hank isn't quite there yet, he's getting closer and closer to the truth.