'Breaking Bad' Season 4, Episode 7 Recap - 'Problem Dog'

Another week, another creative placement of the camera...this time, it's at the tip of Jesse's plastic gun as he plays a video game. With each shot he takes, he sees flashes of shooting Gale in the head. Clearly, despite Gus and Mike's efforts to rehab him by making him feel like a hero, Jesse is nowhere near being completely healed.

And Walt is nowhere near being careful, as he takes a little detour when Skyler tells him to return the Challenger to the dealership. Walt chooses to do donuts in a parking lot with the car, ends up running it into a ditch, and then blows it to smithereens by igniting the gas tank. Lately, it's really starting to look like Walt wants to get caught.

Luckily, he has Saul to back him up, and $52,000 later Walt has a clean record and Skyler will be none the wiser. Car crisis averted. But Walt is still lamenting his inevitable murder at the hands of Gus, and asks Saul if he knows any hitmen. Saul offers a refreshingly simple answer in response: "Why don't you ask your partner?"

That brings us to one of two scenes from this episode that really blew me away. Did you see how Jesse was working to paint those walls white and cover up the graffiti of his destructive past, while Walt cruelly (in an expert showing of manipulation) reminds him of Gus' victims to goad Jesse into another murder, the same act that he's trying to cover up with his emotional bucket of paint. And the fact that the graffiti still shows through the paint a bit is a beautiful extra touch. Good lord, I love this show.

So the plan is to take a poison (the same that they tried to use on Tucco) and have Jesse slip it to Gus. It's not the greatest plan, but it will have to do...it might be the only thing Gus and Mike won't be looking for. And plus, Jesse's idea to hide it in his "lucky cigarette" is a pretty good one. When did Jesse get smarter than Walt?

But when Jesse has his shot, he hesitates for just a moment and fails to drop the poison in the coffee. I actually threw up my hands and said "ugh!" when we later see Gus pleasantly sipping a cup of the same coffee...so close. So so close. But the plus side to this is that Jesse gets a gun now. He's "part of the team," as he says. Mike gives his opinion of what Gus meant when he said he "sees something" in Jesse: "If I had to put it in a word? I'd guess...loyalty. Although maybe you got it for the wrong guy."

Uh oh.

Aaron Paul was truly the star of this episode. If his performance in the scene with Walt wasn't enough for you, how about his return to the therapy group? That was gut-wrenching. Not just because of the pain Jesse is feeling either...the way he describes Gale as a "problem dog" who "didn't know what was happening" reminds us again, as the goofy karaoke video did, that Gale was nothing but a nice guy who got a really raw deal. You have to wonder if there are going to be consequences for Jesse's blowup...I'm not sure the group leader will let that go.

As for Hank...well, if Walt secretly wants to get caught, Hank is getting awfully close to it. He deftly catches some prints off of Gus by heading to Los Pollos with Walter Jr. (could Gus really have been that careless?), and before the episode cuts to black, we see him reveal to Merkert and Gomez that Gus' prints were all over Gale's apartment.

Uh oh. Again.