The 5th Leaf: Church, Meet State. State, Church.

The 5th Leaf is going to be a weekly feature on AMC’s Rubicon. It will feature thoughts from myself and my buddy Peter Bonilla. More than likely, he will give you insightful, thoughtful prose and I will interject silly pictures and jokes. At least we know our places. 

Pete’s Thoughts (edited a bit this week):

Church or state? Specifically, am I the church or am I the state? That is the question which, at the beginning of last night’s episode, the deceased (murdered?) David Hadas’ wife Joan, is hoping she may be able to find the answer to. It seems, as with the spouses and families of just about everyone who works at API, that her husband—and hence her place in the context of his life—has remained a mystery to her throughout these years. Give credit to the producers here: I had envisioned in those first couple minutes, would give her a sense of closure, that she would be able to find at least a little of his essence in the space he occupied. I don’t know what I was thinking assuming that Rubicon would allow such a Hallmark-ish moment to pass. She feels nothing of him. He is just as much a mystery to her now as he ever was (Admittedly, this may not have been helped by Will moving his stuff in. Channeling Seth Rogen:You framed an Asia poster?).

I thought at the time that for Joan to make such a comparison was odd. Church and state, after all, function more or less fine without each other. They have been, in fact, fractured from our country’s founding, officially, constitutionally, anyways. To ask whether Joan was the church or the state, then, seems to make an unnecessary distinction—whichever side his work was, she wasn’t, and at best the two are doomed to an uneasy alliance based on a set of understandings not to be crossed.

But then, Rubicon—especially as expressed through last night’s episode—is about fractured relationships or, at least, relationships that are necessarily compromised by the very facts of their existence. Will and Evan (David’s son, by David’s death). Katherine and Wheeler (by Tom’s death). Maggie and Kale (by their inequality). Maggie and her returning ex-husband (by their turbulent past). Maggie and Will (perhaps by the chasm between Will and everyone else opened by the loss of his family on 9/11).

Let’s return to Maggie and Kale, the scene of last week’s tres-uncomfortable May-December rendezvous, where it is strongly hinted at that Kale keeps her there to spy on the rest of the team, Will above all. We see a little different side of him this week, when she is torn between the things she knows (and we don’t) about her husband’s capabilities, and the possibility of her daughter being able to have a normal life. Here we don’t see scheming, self-serving, sleazy Kale—we see a gentler, more paternal Kale who seems genuinely concerned for her welfare and safety, who gives her the worldly counsel that people don’t change. All of this adds a new layer of complication to what we saw of them last week, while doing nothing to dissuade me of the possibilities of his character.

Daddy Issues! (Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

To Will and Evan, then. Evan brings with him—surprise—more questions. First of all, what happened? Why was he, as I assume was the case, committed? Why did David essentially abandon him, signing the papers, greenlighting whatever treatment he got and walking away? Also, when did it happen? Will and Evan, quite obviously, have never gotten along well. Evan is pushy, awkward, confrontational, insecure, and childish—and that was after he got shipped off to Vermont and hopefully got himself cleaned up. What was he like before? How did Will’s arrival into the Hadas family line up with his descent? It’s quite obvious from their first encounters in the pilot that Will is the son that David always wanted. Even from what little we know about David before his death, to spurn a son like that seems terribly cold and out of character, and I do not think that he could have possibly taken such a thing lightly. No—he loved Evan, very much. Perhaps Evan had some of the same talents as him, and David pushed him too hard or Evan had tendencies that frightened David who was suffice it to say a tad quirky? Could Evan have been even further off the deep end? Perhaps I’m stretching a bit here. I hesitate to predict how much more of a role he will play in the rest of the season, but we’ll see him again, even after he’s taken the Norton (license plate 7A2-330…shows like this make you question every alpha-numeric sequence you see) back to the Green Mountain State.

Nerd Motorcycle Gang (Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

Which brings me to the most intriguing two moments of the evening—those of Katharine and Wheeler nostalgically gazing at the old photos (Katherine’s of the boy I presume would later be her husband), Wheeler of a group of boys presumably including him and Tom, and very possibly Spangler and any of the other men collected to discuss what’s next after Tom’s death. The establishment of the long-standing connection here (Wheeler says to Katherine at one point that Tom “was my brother”) conjures up all the great stories and the Skull and Bones, WASP-y, quasi-religious ideology that organizations like the CIA were born of (The Good Shepherd captures this well, if little else). Here we are again, church and state.

Creepin' on a widow. . .That's LOW Sledge Hammer. (Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

Of course, I think this takes the boys-club ethos of Tom’s and Wheeler’s group a little far. I hope we don’t find this series veering in the direction of a bad Dan Brown novel (ok, a Dan Brown novel), but an important thing has been established—that theirs is a decades old connection, one not easily broken.

This narrative aside, and since I’ve studiously avoided most of Seth’s prescribed topics, my more isolated thoughts:

• First, the code. Again, we see Will struggle for much of an episode to decode something which, in the end, seems playful on its surface—a message to him hidden in an obscure stat about the New York Yankees. Again, as I said last week, this annoyed me; it seemed that David was wasting Will’s precious time. There may be a good reason for it though. In leaving messages that only Will will find and which will only have a personal significance to Will, David may be ensuring that only Will can follow the trail he has left, because he doesn’t want to risk anyone else finding whatever his secret is. I like this and I’m sticking with it.
• When Will finally meets Farber, the FBI agent apologizes for being a little obvious in his tailing—he hasn’t done this in a while. You think? What was it, the big black trench coat that gave you away?
• I still don’t know if the George Beck subplot has any bearing on the rest of the plot, but it sure does a good job drawing out the inner hells of Will’s team. This week it was Miles’s turn to feel the pain—God knows what his home life was like if a suspected money launderer/potential terrorist is looking like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life to him.
• I meant to comment on this last week but forgot—the copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana on Tom’s nightstand. For what it’s worth the plot, roughly, concerns a vacuum cleaner salesman recruited to be a spy in pre-revolutionary Cuba, who fabricates a fantastic web of lies which become easier to be treated as fact due to the momentum they have picked up than to exposed as supporting the house of cards they do. Do with that what you will. (EDITOR’S NOTE: NICE FIND PETE!)
• Why did Wheeler lie about not knowing of Tom’s townhouse? More importantly, why did he go there after dinner with Katherine? If I were her, I would start taking that place apart Clue-style and look for secret passageways.
• Lastly, sheeeeeit, who the hell are the guys tracking Will? We still have no clue, except, usefully, that they probably aren’t FBI. So who are they? And who was Senator Clay Davis (from The Wire) talking to on the phone at the end of the episode? Wheeler? Spangler? I don’t know, but I suspect that the two plots of Rubicon—that of Will’s quest and the mystery surrounding Tom’s death—took one step closer to revealing their connection.

OK generally speaking, Pete has to get worse at this because I have nothing else to say really. Two quick points on what I thought: