Jimmy's Not A Crackpot: He Just Thinks The Embezzlers Kidnapped Themselves

It's early days yet, but already one of the pleasures of Better Call Saul is that even though it's a crime show, it's definitely not the kind you see on CBS -- or, really, most shows in network primetime. We're not dealing with criminal supergeniuses playing cat and mouse with a just-slightly-smarter investigator, as on Elementary or The Mentalist. Instead -- much more like Justified or Fargo -- the criminals are clumsier and grubbier, and at least in this third episode, the investigators follow hunches that turn out to be right because they're rooted in an understanding of basic human nature.

Before Jimmy can get to the solid deductive reasoning, though, he has to wade through a lot of terror for his life, and for his part in the possible deaths of others. After the second episode ends with Nacho proposing that he and Jimmy go into business together to rob the Kettlemans' ill-gotten nest egg, Jimmy considers his complicity in the scheme that he assumes -- correctly -- will proceed with or without him, and calls the Kettlemans to tell them that they might be in danger. When the next day brings the news that the entire family, two kids included, has gone missing, it seems to prove the prescience of Jimmy's warning. Jimmy (like the rest of us, probably) assumes Nacho is to blame, and said assumption seems to be borne out when Jimmy is apprehended by cops right after trying to call Nacho from a pay phone; he's brought to the police station, where Nacho is being held for the Kettleman kidnapping. Alone with Jimmy, Nacho freely admits that he had definitely still intended to rob them, and had been staking out their house (which is how the cops knew to look at Nacho for it in the first place), but evidently someone else beat him to it, and Nacho assumes it's because Jimmy told someone else Nacho's great robbery plan. As for the blood in Nacho's vehicle that would seem to incriminate Nacho in the Kettleman matter? Whoops, that belongs to "the skate rat twins," and it's probably mixed with "whatever piss and shit" Jimmy himself exuded during his first encounter with Nacho! So Jimmy has a powerful motive for helping to get Nacho out of this even before Nacho tells Jimmy that, if he doesn't, Jimmy will be killed.

When Kim, the Kettlemans' lawyer and apparently Jimmy's sometime squeeze, agrees to let Jimmy see the crime scene, he thinks it's so he can satisfy his need to look for evidence of an assailant other than Nacho; she, however, intends to convince him, with the violence of the scene, to stop sticking up for Nacho and co-operate with the investigation. And when Jimmy notices that the daughter's doll is missing and uses this fact as the basis for his theory that the Kettlemans staged the scene and kidnapped themselves, it seems, at first, like he's just grasping after any explanation that doesn't implicate Nacho. It's not until the lead detectives in the case bring in Mike Ehrmantraut, the cops' former colleague and Jimmy's current courthouse parking nemesis, to put more pressure on Jimmy with one of his expert interrogations that, it seems to me, even Jimmy starts to believe his theory might be right -- because Mike corroborates it. Playing "Devil's advocate," Jimmy asks Mike to explain how, if the Kettlemans' cars are still on site, they got out of the country. Mike?

They didn't. Odds are they didn't get out of the neighbourhood....Look, when I was still on the job back in Philly, we had this case....This bookie disappeared after the Super Bowl. Cowboys-Steelers? Took $6 million in bets, skipped town when things didn't go his way. Now, everybody thought he was on the beach in the Bahamas or dead in the Jersey Pine Barrens -- wasn't the case. He was two doors down from where he lived, in a foreclosed house. Hid there for six months without anyone suspecting.

Why not run, Jimmy asks. "That's what everyone expects," says Mike. "It's human nature to want to stay close to home. And if this Kettleman figured out how to do it, that's what he did. Nobody wants to leave home."

With support like that for his crazy theory, Jimmy returns to the Kettleman house to try to prove himself right -- and the very cars the Kettlemans left behind provide a leading clue of just the sort that would be easily overlooked by someone trying to pin everything on Nacho.

One hot and unpleasant hike through the scrub behind the Kettlemans' house later, Jimmy is able to save his life for at least one more day, and also stick it -- nicely, under the circumstances -- to Kim, from just a few feet away from a rollicking sing-along.

If Jimmy hadn't been pointed in the right direction by the flair on that back windshield, the Kettlemans might have had another day or more to break camp and set up again even further away, delaying anyone from finding them. And then maybe no one would have ever busted into their tent in the middle of "B-I-N-G-O" to "help" them back up their gear, leading to a tug-of-war over the very duffel bag that contained all their stolen millions. In cash.

Whoopsies.