Hector is left to ring his bell in frantic, fruitless protest. Point to Gus, who seems to derive much of the meaning in his life by tormenting his foe. The scene ends with a moment that explains why. Fring stares at the pool, the same place where years ago, Hector shot and killed Max Arciniega, the love of Gus’s life. At that moment, Gus was lying next to Max, close enough to watch blood gush into the pool.
Gus is haunted by that memory, and when he returns to his home in Albuquerque, we watch him regain his life, his happiness and his routine. But there are limits. When he visits what appears to be his favorite restaurant, he has a long conversation with a waiter and oenophile named David (Reed Diamond), who dazzles Gus with his good looks and tales of vineyard hopping through Europe as a young man. Nobody has ever spoken to Gus for so long, and through David’s entire monologue, Gus seems pleasantly rapt. This is smitten Gus, a side of the man we’ve never seen.
Instead of asking for a date, which is what happens in the rom-com version of this interlude, Gus quickly leaves while the waiter is retrieving an even rarer bottle of wine. Fring has either decided he can’t get hurt again or concluded that love isn’t for a man in his position. It’s a weakness he can’t afford because to enemies, loved ones are easy targets. They end up dead, or sent on suicide missions to kill other people, like Kim in the previous episode.
The finest part of this strangely long scene — six minutes! — comes at the end, when there’s a lingering tight shot of Gus’s face and we see him segue from relaxed and joyful to tense and withdrawn. Without a word of dialogue, you can see him come to a firm decision. He must keep his monastic, loveless life.
Mike uses some of his post-clean-up downtime to visit Manuel Varga (Juan Carlos Cantu) and explain that his son, Nacho, is dead. (He does this because he has been taught about the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one by Anita, his grief counseling buddy from Season 3, whose husband vanished in the New Mexico wilderness years earlier, a source of wrenching sorrow for her.) On the plus side, he says, Nacho’s killers will soon come to justice. Mr. Varga corrects Mike. It won’t be justice. It will be revenge, he says.
