Written by For this first week, Peter really went off and some of his ramblings are really great, so I am just giving it to you unedited. Next week expect more silliness and wittily-captioned photos.
Having seen the pilot so many times by now that by last night, I felt I had made my peace with what happened in the opening episode, I knew what there was to be gleaned from it and dammit, bring on the second hour. Well, I have now seen it all, as have you, Seth, and that peace has been undone. First though, before I go into the ups and downs and sideways of the show, my first impression:
I like the feel of the show. AMC does an impeccable job of creating a distinct aura around its original shows, and Rubicon is no different.Breaking Bad, whose most recently completed season I will elevate to the very upper reaches of any original show ever made, felt like living in the wide open yet inescapably claustrophobic world of the Coen Brothers’ realization of No Country For Old Men. I am not much for Mad Men, but can appreciate its Douglas Sirk-like melancholia, filtered through the technicolor lens of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, which itself took several pages from Mr. Sirk’s playbook.
It's lonely at the top.
Rubicon, to pay an unworthy movie a compliment, brings the world of A Beautiful Mind into the 21st century with the layers of suspicion and mistrust it lays on the most mundane tasks and circumstances of everyday life, augmented by the washed out grayscale color palette of Ron Howard’s Oscar winner with a looping, recapitulating Philip Glass-like score that is perfect for suggesting the paranoia the characters of the show live with as a necessary defense, which is only abetted by the insulating and alienating nature of their work. (Miles’ children thinks he writes “secret video games.” Grant’s children simply think he is unemployed.)
So who’s the “they”? What is the work they are doing? Part of the cleverness of the show’s pilot (hour 1) is that very little of it is known, even when punctuated by the deaths of two characters whose legacies will haunt the plot of the show for seasons to come. It only becomes clear (at least to me), what the roots of the mysterious agency–located off a stretch of New York city highway that has me thanking God I stuck around in Philadelphia–really are. It seems rather silly now, having finally seen the show’s second hour, to have thought any differently than that the money trail generating from the American Policy Institute–a turf-like name if there was one–go back to the Pentagon, or at least, an deep-pocketed uncle named Sam. I strongly suspect that if one were to look to where in the DOD budget the money to fund such an operation (not unlike the real-life RAND corporation, except that you won’t be killed for demonstrating knowledge of RAND’s existence) comes from, their curiosity may be best served by probing more deeply into that $200 million line item for “can openers.”
As for exactly what type of experience we are getting into with Rubicon, the second hour seems to confirm what the first hour gave me hope for: that Rubicon will unfold more as a novel in screen form than as a series to be taken in fun-sized portions, none having an effect on the next. While the week-to-week paths of the characters may take them down some dead-ends, there is the strong sense that there is a greater truth they are working towards, and hoping to solve. Which is good, because they have absolute shit-tons of truths to bring out in to the daylight.
RHUMOR has it the four leaf clover is a bad sign. COUNT IT! (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC )
Begin at the beginning, with the suicide (or was it? no, it probably was) death by gunshot of Tom Rhumor, whose self-induced downfall is brought on by the sighting of a four leaf clover in his newspaper. Flash over to New York, where the youngish, terminally preoccupied Will Travers (played by James Badge Dale who, Seth, was totally in The Departed–he’s the friend of Matt Damon’s, the one who Damon asks if he wants to come to work everyday dressed like he wants to invade Poland, Bostonese for “go on the take, you stupid Mick.”) arrives, oblivious to the fact that its his birthday, and resistant to the entreaties of his assistant Maggie, who wants to take him out to–and very likely eat–his lunch. Travers, fiddling with a crossword puzzle clue given by his team member Tanya–”what do lucky lepidoptera eat?” The answer: a four leaf clover. And off to the races we go. Travers, spotting a trend, compares the clue to that day’s puzzle across several other papers, where he quickly spots references to the three branches of government. Correctly thinking he’s onto something big, he takes his findings to his boss David (who we only find out in the second episode is his father in law–lending more tragedy to the death of Will’s wife and daughter on September 11), who brushes him off the way a high school math instructor blows off his too-smart-for-his-own-good student who thinks he’s just solved Fermat.
Except, in this case, that is what Will has done, and David knows it. He takes Will’s work to his boss Kale Ingram (a man who, at this point in the series, I would have to seriously think about trusting to park my car—more on that later). Importantly, when Kale asks if anyone else from within API knows about the crosswords, David says no. The next day, he’s dead in a tragic train collision whose timing is, at best, highly suspect.
Kale (left) is one of the more deceptive of the cabbages. (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)
Why does he cover for Will, then, when it seems almost certain that David knew the stakes of what had been brought to him? One of the things that stands out to me, both about Rhumor’s death and David’s, is the almost peaceful resignation with which they seem to accept their fates once they have been delivered. Rhumor sees the four-leaf clover and, calmly, almost nobly, reaches into his desk for his pistol. David, upon being shown the parallel four-chambered clue (executive, legislative, judicial, then…what?), seems to know his time has come, too. He gives Travers the “road food” book, the keys to a neato motorcycle, and tells him that he’ll see him the next morning. It seems, from their final moments on the telephone, that David knows he will be dead the next day. Again, he seems to have accepted it. Why?
It seems plausible that if Kale had known the source of the cracked crossword clue came from Will and not David, that Will would not have lived through the pilot episode. (David might have been killed too, just for fun.) Was David protecting Will, his son-in-law, whom he had brought into API? Is there still work to be done, and he knows that his time has just run out to get it done in his own life? I will entertain both of these ideas, which to me strongly suggest both that a.) David wanted Will to take over his position and b.) Will stays because he thinks that there are more clues to David’s death to be discovered in the work he has left behind.
Who is Rhumor, then, returning to the show’s opening image? Answer: I don’t know. I had thought originally that he was a senator in the Kennedy-mold, but this has certainly been proven wrong by the show’s second hour, for the reason that had he been such an important public figure the API people would have been having a field day with it. So who was he? Someone very wealthy, obviously, given his Gatsby-esque mansion and his heretofore unknown-to-his-wife Upper East Side town home—only revealed to her when his will is opened and it is noted that he added a codicil to it to give her the home along with ownership of a mysterious business only days before he died. Just a wild guess—I feel that more explanation of this mysterious character will be required. This wild hunch would seem to be lent some credence by the sight at the end of the first hour of Truxton Spangler hopping the ferry to some Maryland shore-type home, where we see him and another man (James Wheeler—played by man about town character actor David Rasche) saying things are now “back on track” with Rhumor dead. We are then left to wonder whether a bunch of white men in suits behind closed doors in a stately room could possibly be up to any mischief. For me, the jury is out.
Given that even I get tired of listening to myself talk, I here will revert to bullet points to convey my final thoughts on the two-part premiere, given that my recollection has been scattered and nonlinear, and has left out a few key things. For one:
- Who the hell are the people following Will in the second part of the episode (aside from one of them being played by Isaiah Whitlock Jr. of Wire fame—oh, how badly I wanted to hear him say “sheeeeeeiit” at some point)? My suspicion so far is that they are connected in some way to API, and to either Kale or Spangler. Most likely, I would think Kale is connected somehow? Why? Who knows, but given his scene with Maggie in what must surely be one of the creepiest non-intercourse extra-office meetings, it is clear that he goes out of his way to keep tabs on his people.
- Is Kale bad? I sure as hell don’t trust him right now, but I’m disinclined to cast him in a villainous role. Going by the law of24, someone who seems this suspect this early in a series’ life a.) is not nearly as bad as they seem at first, and hide their benevolent motives exceedingly well to maintain a sense of control; b.) are not so bad themselves, they’re just acting on the orders of someone higher up, who could be even worse; or c.) are just assholes.
- Like any office filled with code-breaking conspiracy theorist types, the API office dress code is what its analysts make it to be. See t-shirt/jeans/Pumas-wearing Miles, compared to crisp shirt/tie combo-wearing Grant or all-black wearing Kale’s collarless look. The higher up/crazier the type, the less the dress code applies.
- I like Hal. Not for anything grand he’s contributed so far, but because he’s perhaps the first walking reference to both 2001and Tommy Boy.
- Tanya really didn’t want to take off her glasses to be ID’d. I may be making more of this than I should. When she vomits in the bathroom early in the second episode, my initial sense was that she cold be pregnant. Maggie later says to Kale that she suspects Tanya has a drinking problem. I could be wrong on the first count, and Maggie could be deliberately lying on the second count.
- Maggie seems the real wild card at this moment, and that whoever’s side she takes will have the upper hand. The line seems drawn right now between Kale and Travers. Does Maggie keep anything from him at their meeting? It seems likely. Why? That’s harder to say. Kale may have underestimated her emotional connection/unresolved issues with Travers, but he could just as easily have gotten to her precisely because of them. Either way, Kale and Maggie’s relationship is a partnership of far-less-than-equals in more ways than one—his ominously kind remark about her being able to take care of her daughter suggests a power he has over here that she wishes he didn’t. My sense is that a key struggle for her will be between her personal feelings for Travers and her feelings of powerlessness with Kale, who quite literally has control over her welfare. As for Maggie, so for the first season of Rubicon. Watch out for her, though—her motives will be devilishly tough to decipher.
Wild Card Maggie. I know she doesn't look very wild cardish here, but it's difficult to be wild cardish in such a stylish coat, right!? (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)
- How much does this Russian guy Spangler wants Travers’ team to find info on matter to the season? Is it crucially tied in with the four leaf clover motif, or a red herring? Time will tell.
- Leaving the coded message “They hide in plain sight” was kind of a dick move on David’s part. Travers is, to put it mildly, a standard deviation or two above the mean in the IQ department, and he didn’t have the easiest time figuring out the code left for him. You’d think David would throw him a bone and get more to the point.
