Music
Bright Eyes- The People’s Key (Feb 15)- It’s been three years since Cassadaga was released and while that album didn’t really rev my engines as previous Bright Eyes efforts, I’ve been chomping at the bit for this one. Sure, Conor Oberst has been around for the last few years with other side projects, but there’s something nostalgic about the Bright Eyes moniker and I’m a softie.

TV
The Chicago Code (Feb 7)- Shawn Ryan has won me over time and time again. Frankly, I’m still smarting over the loss his last show, Terriers. I’m just hoping this one can live up to near that pedigree and the previews make it look like it has a few of the elements that made the greatest crime show of all time (The Wire) so brilliant. It looks like there’s a tough cop doing ACTUAL detection and corruption and CHARACTERS. All of this means that it’ll probably be off the air after it’s first run.

Wow! Some cool stuff to take in this month. What a drag that you’ll be making kissyface. Or studying the shadow patterns of a rodent. Or feeding all of those birds. Maybe next month…

You're too late to save them now, America!

Best New Show: Terriers, FX
Starting with the fresh wound. Despite being canceled only this week, this show was easily my favorite new show of the year and I think the BEST. Terriers was a too-short-lived buddy P.I. show which had engaging characters, a thrilling corruption storyline, and some of, if not THE, best dramatic writing on TV this year. If you missed it while it had its short run, please go get it on DVD or iTunes or On Demand. It is simply beautiful television. The beauty is in the little moments the co-leads share and their impossible spirit. R.I.P. Terriers.
Runner Up: The Walking Dead, Rubicon

A Study in Funny

Best Comedy Show: Community
Never has a show been more lovingly crafted. And never has it been so easy to see. The cast love each other and are hilarious. The writers love pop culture and are hilarious. The show has gone from fledgling to full-flight ass-kicking eagle in one short season. The creativity and cleverness of these folks is hard to miss. Actually, it’s easy to  miss which makes multiple viewings of the show so amazing, you pick up on little things worked into the background or quick cut shots that you missed the first time through. Community‘s self awareness may be a turn-off to some, but it’s done so well that I can’t imagine for whom.
Runners Up: Modern Family, 30 Rock, Eastbound & Down

These are the only guys I let make my meth

Best Drama: Breaking Bad
I think I’m a sucker for this show. No, I’m definitely a sucker for this show. It was at times, uneven this year, but when it boils down to it, it’s still the best show on television. It’s complex, pensive, and action-packed. The tension on the show is palpable and always feels at a boil somehow without spilling over. This year’s storylines continued the strange father-son relationship between Walt and Jesse and added some new wrinkles of corruption and deceit. It’s a show that continually finds new ways to surprise me, so thanks Breaking Bad .
Runners Up: Terriers, The Walking Dead, Rubicon, Mad Men (I watched a season!), Dexter, Fringe

Best Chemistry: Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James, Terriers
Again, maybe this is because the wound is fresh, but Donal Logue was fantastic as ex-cop-turned-P.I. Hank Dolworth. A recovering alcoholic with a fairly fresh divorce, Hank was a complex character. A scrappy, smart, hearty guy. I mean hearty like he had a lot of it. Sometimes you hated Hank, sometimes you wanted to be his best friend. He is the kind of guy who you want to be your best pal. And so is Britt played by Michael Raymond-James. A recovering criminal, Britt’s battles were certainly internal, he had forces beyond his control consistently trying to pull him back to the underworld. And if you have any doubts about which way they went at the end of the series, then you don’t know Britt.
Extremely Close Runners Up: Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights

Still don't know if I can trust him

Best Actor: Arliss Howard, Rubicon
Tackling the carefully creepy Kale Ingram and layering his character with deceit, loyalty, and intelligence, Arliss Howard elevated television acting to a new level. Several separate people have mentioned to me that he was their favorite character on television this year and I have to agree. His quiet intelligence and subtlety made him not only one of the most intriguing and strong characters on a great show, but made him even more interesting to watch unfold. Pity we only get to see him once.
Runners Up: Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad; Michael C. Hall, Dexter; Jon Hamm, Mad Men

Texas Football's First Lady

Best Actress: Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights
I’m biased cause I have a huge crush on Tami Taylor. But who wouldn’t? She has continually been one of the best performers on television for the last 5 years and this year is no different as she attempts to change the culture of a school whilst also dealing with a little empty nest syndrome. Britton is a light on a show with a litany of great actors. It’s a testament to her talent.
Runners Up: Anna Torv, Fringe; January Jones, Mad Men; Tina Fey, 30 Rock

Lone Star Pics could not be found, so just enjoy Kenny Powers

Most Overhyped Show: Lone Star, Fox
This was supposed to be the “it” show of the fall. Whoops! That’s your “it” show. If you add a few letters to the front of that word in quotes you might hit the nail on the head. The show aired twice and I never even got to watch it before it was pulled. It had a fantastic cast and what seemed like an interesting and involving story. But as TV has often taught us, those things don’t matter. The show never caught on a BIT and frankly it was doomed to fail immediately because it was complex and involved and America hates that.

Family of Freaks

Most Underhyped Show: Fringe, Fox
Same network, different story. The true heir to LOST has been must-see TV for me for about 1.75 seasons, which is pretty great considering it’s just about to reach the 2.5 season mark, but it’s rarely mentioned in the pantheon of great shows, which is frankly wrong. There’s no other way to put it. It would be one thing if the show was just consistently good, but it’s not. It’s consistently great. The recent three episode stretch played a lofty game of oneupmanship crescendoing with last week’s fall finale. Two parallel universes struggle against each other, but what it boils down to is a story of connection and reconnection, of the creation of a new family from the remains of an old one. All this may seem heady for a sci-fi show, but its pulled off brilliantly thanks to careful plotting and tight storytelling, two of the things that plagued LOST and its fans. The loose ends are few and far between when this show is concerned. Besides we also have one of the best female characters on TV in Olivia Dunham. Yet Fox sees fit to move it to the deadly Friday position. No reward for creativity and brilliance. If you just watch John Noble as Walter Bishop, it’s worth your time. He used the phrase “vagenda.” Google it at home.

Scarface Chang. Nuff Said.

Best Single Episode: “Modern Warfare”, Community
A send-up of epic proportions, I can’t even guess how many movies and tv shows were referenced in this movie because I haven’t seen them all, but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying it like crazy. The message remained the same as many of the episodes of this show, the sum of this group is much greater than its parts.

Random Listing of Favorite Shows:
Fringe, Dexter, Community, The Walking Dead, Rubicon, The League, Justified, Archer, Terriers, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, 30 Rock, Chuck, LOST, Modern Family, Friday Night Lights, How I Met Your Mother, Eastbound & Down

What a great year and a confusing year. I’ve still currently got a bad taste in my mouth from my beloved cable networks (AMC and FX) canceling two of the best new shows this year but I’m also really thankful for one of the most diverse years in television memory. I did not enter ’10 thinking my personal favorite show would be a buddy-cop show, but it was. I did not think NBC’s Community would be come its best show, but it did. And I certainly didn’t think my once beloved Always Sunny would be moving out of my regular rotation, but it is. Looking back I can only feel excited for what ’11 will have in store. I’m already a sucker for AMC’s remake of the British drama The Killing which will start next year and here’s hoping Donal Logue finally gets a kiss of joy and not the kiss of death. Please exit this vehicle and pick up all your belongings.

Awesome Terriers Fan Art from deantrippe.

Dear FX Network,

Recap of “Look at the Ant”
We open on a gloved hand picking a lock. It turns out to belong to Kale Ingram and the lock he picks leads him to one Will Travers’ home. WHO IS THIS GUY!? Things get more twisty later as we see Maggie in Will’s office snooping around as well. When he interrupts her, she says she was there to invite him to a dinner at Kale’s. Weird dinner parties commence! As Will attends Kale’s house for a little white bean salad, things are by turns awkward and confusing. First we meet Kale’s life partner who is NOT what I expected, then Kale does his intimidation move while asking if Will enjoys white bean salad. Then Will uses a slime mold as an analogy to a terrorist organization (You can’t ever kill the slime mold by killing individual parties to the mold, you have to attack the organism as a whole, etc.)

THEN Kale breaks it down, his partner leaves the table and Kale basically lays it out for Will. Bloom was in a car accident with a man named Edward Roy (the unnamed man in the laundromat, gym from the last few episodes, aka Clay Davis). Kale offers his assistance and tells Will to track down Roy and find out who he was working for. He also mentions Will should not work at home because he is under surveillance (CAUSE HE BROKE IN AND KNOWS!). Will starts to get a bit freaked out and spends the next act of the show checking his house for bugs, freaking out, and researching Edward Roy in a gamer lounge. His paranoia is PALPABLE. And with good reason as we see when he leaves he is being followed. He confronts the tail, snaps his picture, and takes off, holding him at bay with David’s gun. When Will returns to API, Kale and he discuss his findings on the rooftop: Roy is ex-CIA and runs a security group called Garson which was purchased by Atlas McDowell.

Love is in the air for Maggie as she gets bored with her life once her ex has Sophie, her daughter, for a night. She calls Will and asks him for a drink, but he’s knee deep in BUGGING out (get it!?) at that point and declines. So she goes with option number two: some dude from her class. Things get saucy thanks to some wine and Scrabble (most erotic board game). They end up sleeping together just in time for Will’s freak out to ratchet up to the point that he seeks her out. He visits, hears another man’s voice and looks 31 flavors of disappointed. He leaves and she boots no-name classmate out on his hide.  Maggie and Will share an awkward exchange at work the next day and things between them see stalled for the time being.

The API Crew (Miles, Tanya, Grant) are gathered at work today to prepare for the marriage of George Beck’s son. Miles decides to stay late in order to finish preparation and witness the ceremony firsthand while Grant and Tanya ship off to less boring pastures. Miles’ late night fun at API takes a turn when he realizes the wedding guests are speaking Urdu, a language which he does not. He rushes through API and finds a lone other soul, who luckily does speak the language in question. They spend the evening together, she translating his Urdu, he quietly falling for her. Which we see in the moment when George Beck is giving a speech about love and his son and Miles just glosses over as she translates the speech for (to) him. Also of note from their translation: a discussion of “The Foundation” seemed to be of importance/intrigue to Miles and his new friend.

Katherine continues her search for clues into her husband’s suicide. She takes the lead from the newspaper clipping found in at MRQ Alternatives and seeks out the suicidal professor’s wife. She finds Mrs. Alex Bradley and asks her whether she knew of any connection between their deceased spouses.  She did not. Unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie, Katherine returned home and re-read the news clipping. She noticed that Mr. Bradley was on the board of something called Atlas McDowell (coming up a lot tonight!), which by gum, her husband had a trinket from. She returned to discuss this with Alex who commenced rambling about how their husbands were cowards. She apologizes before showing Katherine some of Mr. Bradley’s things, including a four-leaf clover which sets Katherine off. She leaves immediately. Too quick, in fact, as we see Mrs. Bradley pull out the now familiar photo of boys ready to swim.

Discussion
Another deep episode to dig into. I’m not even sure what to focus on, but I think what I’d like to look at is the continuing examination of fractured relationships or even fragments of fractured relationships. I’ll just pick at some interesting notions we saw here and try to keep it short then head to the questions this episode raised for me.

Will-Maggie: This relationship was budding until Will shunned her in his paranoid state following dinner at Kale’s. Then she called the “sure thing” and made an apparent mistake with him. Will shows up and things get awkward in a HURRY. It looks like this once-potential romance has hit a snag. What I wonder about here is how this plays with Maggie’s job. I’m still not convinced her motives are purely personal after that sit-down she had with Kale.

Kale-Donald Bloom: Well this one is fishing a bit, but it certainly appeared that Bloom and Kale had an extracurricular rapport when they met for dinner. It also seemed like he felt a twinge of jealousy following the Spangler-Roy- Bloom tete-a-tete-a-tete from last week’s episode. That jealousy may have played out this week in Kale’s not-so-selfless act of volunteerism to Will’s cause. I just know Kale isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, SOMETHING is going on with that guy.

Katherine-Tom: Well, I gain a little more faith in this relationship every week. And that faith was all set in motion by the moves Tom made to give Katherine the clues she needed to follow his trail. Notwithstanding the fact that he had a completely secret life in which he may have secretly controlled governmental rises and falls, she seems committed to him. I am afraid for her in what she might uncover, not only for her safety (these folks tend to NOT mess around) but in what she may find about her husband. She may be romanticizing his memory, but it seems to me this thing was real.
Questions

• Just what ARE Kale’s motives?
  I have no idea. I cannot put a pin in this guy. He is shifty. He makes backhanded plays, he surprises me at every turn, and frankly I think he might be a little confused. Perhaps Kale really is the new Ed Bancroft and I’ve got to learn to trust him, but that seems nearly impossible. There’s a lot to Kale and we’ve already seen a bunch of it, but I’m having trouble connecting the dots!
• Are “The Foundation” and Atlas McDowell one and the same?
  This wasn’t my first thought, but it was pretty close. And now I can’t shake the thought that the two are related. I don’t know how yet, but I know that Atlas is involved in some weird/shady stuff and that it sounds like the name of a foundation from everything we know about it (ALMOST NOTHING). It also sounds like an awesome superhero secret identity.
• Is Will sane enough to keep going?
  I think this was the first episode to reallllly tap into the idea of a collective paranoia when Will was freaking out. I loved how the scenes were shot hastily and James Badge Dale did a great job of being harried and overly watchful.  Will he keep it together? Yeah I think he will, despite his new-found anxiety, he was able to keep it together enough to shake the tail in an aggressive manner, he just needs to keep a cooler head and realize that he’s in a big boiler pot now.

In the meantime, Kale questions Spangler about loose ends surrounding David’s death. Spangler assures him things are under control and sheds a White Paper entitled “The Houston Problem.” Will returns to Bancroft do deliver the news, but finds that Ed has gone off on a tangent, spinning a wild yarn about Bloom, the CIA, etc.  Will lies to Ed telling him that the Donald Bloom he found is a kid, Ed breaks down over David’s death.

Connecting the Dots (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

Will attends Spangler’s wife’s charity bash. Here he has a chance meeting with Katherine Rhumor over vodka, only a fleeting encounter. Later at the party, Will overhears Spangler say “If we don’t do it, who will?” Spangler spies him spying and invites him in to meet James Wheeler and R.C. Gilbert. As Will leaves, another man enters and lets Spangler and co. know “The squalls have been shipped,” which Spangler celebrates with a cheers. Two enlightening encounters with Kale later, we see Will deep into the conspiracy at his house when he hears a noise, pops up from the floor, and we fade to black.

BOOZEHOUND (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

At API, Will and the gang are re-focused on George and Yuri, but they seem stuck…until Tanya makes the suggestion that they focus on George, instead of Yuri. Will agrees with her and wants her to present it to Spangler. She gives it a test-run against Grant and Miles who shred it to pieces. Tanya is incredulous about the attacking nature when she runs into Will later. Will gives her a speech about fear in order to get her PUMPED for her big Spangler showdown. Luckily, she kills it with Spangler and he greenlights her strategy. She then returns to her office and downs an airplane bottle in “celebration.” Despite Tanya’s performance, Will suggests to Kale that she be included in the next round of drug testing. We also find out that George has been meeting with some more unseemly characters and well, Tanya was RIGHT.

In Katherine’s world, we find her with a financial adviser who suggests she dump MRQ Alternatives because it was a losing investment. MRQ just happens to be the business Tom switched over to Katherine a few days before his death. She asks Wheeler what he knows and he suggests she just drop it like the adviser said. She decides to visit the company and finds a locked file cabinet which she opens by using their anniversary on the combo lock. In the files, she finds a newspaper clipping about a CCNY professor whose death was ruled a suicide. Incidentally, his death occurred the day before the Berlin Wall fell. Coincidence? Paranoid me thinks no!

Discussion
And so, finally, we have been given some answers–and some fairly definitive ones. Senator Clay Davis is reporting his surveillance of Will to Spangler. Very possibly, it was Spangler whom Davis spoke with at the end of the episode from a couple of weeks ago when saying that Will was in cahoots with Bancroft. A high-profile government assassination mission is almost surely afoot and picking up speed, and David may have had much more to do with it than we imagined earlier. And Kale…

Well, let’s stick with Kale. What, concretely, do we learn about him from this episode? A few crucially important expository biographical facts–ex-CIA, black ops, Recruited by Spangler sometime in the 80s to come to API, a longstanding  professional relationship with Donald Bloom, fellow CIA killer and mystery man of last week’s episode. All of which is helpful, especially the CIA part, though it doesn’t explain why Kale dresses like he’s going off to teach an acting class at NYU. Knowing now what we do, though, more questions arise, and halfway through the season I’m as in the dark now as I was in the beginning as to his motives, as well as where he falls in the API pecking order. Knowing–as Bancroft figured out for us–that the previous appearances of mysteriously coordinated crossword clues in 1983 (authored by Bancroft) signaled the go-codes for a series of covert assassinations, and that it was the appearance of a similar series of codes that touched of the series with David’s (and very possibly Tom’s) death, how much Kale knows is a mystery. Consider:

• When David shows the crosswords Will has deciphered to Kale in the Pilot, he is alarmed enough by them to take them upstairs to Spangler. When Spangler asks him if there has been any movement on them later on , he remarks that it is “all quiet.” Does he think it is? Does he know it isn’t?
• From this episode, it is strongly hinted at that both Kale and Bloom were involved in the prior campaign, given that both were stationed in Beirut in the 1980s, around the time when America’s covert reprisal campaign against Hezbollah. Kale may have recognized the codes back then, especially if he was involved in the campaign, but it doesn’t seem like he would now. It is Bloom after all, not Kale, who has been hopping between Nigeria, Houston, and the Middle East. How much would Kale likely know about the current camaign? Spangler certainly is in the loop, which leads me to my next point.
• Just when we think from this episode that Kale really has one up on everybody at API, we see that Spangler and Bloom have one up on him, meeting in a derelict high school gym, discussing the status of their surveillance of Will, in which they shift their attention to Katherine.
  

  More like Star Spangler Killer. AMIRIGHT? (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

Most fascinating is his cat-and-mouse game with Will, after Will has seen him with Bloom. At the charity event he tells Will that he doesn’t want to see him get involved in any “mayhem” (Will has already gotten the picture here, and has gone to Bancroft to try on throw him off the trail–more on that in a bit). This I read less as a threat than as a warning, and a specific one. Remember, as soon as Will spots him with Bloom, he goes to Spangler and asks point blank, flustered for the first time, if he is sure that David’s loose ends have been tied up. These “loose ends,” of course, are whatever has been left behind after David’s discovery of the go-codes got him killed. Is Kale protecting Will? Does he suspect that he is onto the scheme as well? And, in warning Will to stay away, is he more drawn into the scheme itself? Again, very possible. That glimpse of Kale we get as the rest are coming out of the meeting, on the outside looking in, unfamiliar, to say the least.

Kale says MEOW to Will (David M. Russell/AMC)

Before leaving off with my questions to chew on for next week, a few stray comments:

• Boy, Tanya is turning into a complicated character, isn’t she? The last couple episodes have given her special focus, which makes me wonder if the show has bigger things in store for her, or if it is just doing its due diligence making sure each of team members gets their moments in the sun (if so, Grant is up next). Even so, Maggie (and by association Kale) take great interest in how she’s doing–though perhaps it’s because she’s new to the squad. (It also makes me wonder how seriously they vetted her as a poorly concealed substance abuse problem would be pretty apparent. Substance issues aside, I cheered for her when she convinced Spangler to throw the weight of their investigation to Beck, and Will’s good fear/bad fear speech was the best writing of the week. Speaking of–
• I said last week that I didn’t think the Beck investigation was central to the season’s plot. With the way things came together this week, I’m willing to rethink that. The revelation at the end that Beck has been meeting with Iranian intelligence could wrap up very easily into the rest of the plot.
• Another of my questions from last week was answered–When will Katherine take a look at MRQ Alternatives? All we learn, however, is that MRQ used to make clothes, and wasn’t very successful at it. I had great fun pausing the episode to see what I could glean from the clipping she pulls out of Tom’s locked file.

Questions of the Week:

Why did Will purposely throw Bancroft off of Bloom’s trail?
Pete: To me the answer seems clear–Will new he was being followed, assumed he was being bugged, and needed to disabuse, even temporarily, the notion that he was honing in on the thing Spangler & Co. don’t want him finding out. It seems to have worked for now–Spangler tells Senator Clay Davis to concentrate on Katherine Rhumor. We’ll see how long this ruse holds up.

Seth: I have to ardently disagree. I think Will saw that Bancroft was falling off the deep end again, as he was earlier in his life and wanted to stop production on A Beautiful Mind 2: Bancroft’s Batty Brain. It was more related to personal feelings about wanting to protect Bancroft from himself than from anyone else.

Who wrote the go-code?

Pete: Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve only starting thinking about this now. When Ed Bancroft wrote the last one, he was (I believe) at API in his pre-psycho Jon Nash days. Is the new one from within API also? If so, from whom? Kale seems unlikely, unless he’s pulling one hell of a long con on us all by drawing everyone else out into the open so he can see who his potential enemies/obstacles are. Spangler is a possibility. A sexy possibility is David himself, though I really haven’t thought this through too much–and David may not have been quite high enough at API for have this kind of clout. Spangler, to me, seems the most likely culprit–or someone we have yet to meet.

Seth: Good question and I honestly have no good answer. Of the folks we’ve met at API, right now, Kale seems most likely to me. He is a smart guy with high clearance who knew what he saw immediately, but we found out this week, he’s still under Spangler’s thumb a bit. I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out especially considering Kale’s “threat” toward Will this week. He clearly knows Will is no commoner.

Did David knowingly–or unknowingly–play a role in his own death?

Pete: I’m fascinated by this–though a little too tired at this late hour to really dive more deeply into it. It was clear from the first episode, though, that David knew his time was up. I said in an earlier post that David left a series of seemingly frivolous messages for Will in an effort to weed out anyone besides Will that might try to decipher them. I still stand by this. Knowing now about David’s white paper and its disappearance convinces me more–I think David knew his work connected with this “Houston Problem” was going to be destroyed, and he must communicate its essential points to Will in other ways. WE will see if future weeks vindicate me on this count.

Seth: I think he certainly unwittingly did and he knew about it ahead of time. He had to have had some idea that he was going down to set up all of this clues and games for Will. David’s inclusion of Will in the conspiracy makes sense, but also confuses me. I thought he wanted to protect Will by showing Kale the crossword and claiming the work himself, but all of that is undone by all of the puzzles, clues, and games David left behind to then wrap Will up in it. David knew the proverbial poo was hitting the fan, but I don’t think he pushed himself into it voluntarily.

I think our stride is appearing here at The 5th Leaf! Tune in next week for some more heady discussion following Rubicon.

I'm sensitive, but not too sensitive as to drive away men. This face says it all.

Two questions:

Karla: I think Jonah Hill definitely falls into this category.  I think he’s capable of more but it would be really hard for him to make the crossover into a more dramatic role.  Maybe he’s not even interested in something more serious.  He’s younger and probably having a lot of fun working on his comedies and voice overs.  I sort of have Jason Schwartzman-sized hopes for him and I wouldn’t want to see him get pigeon-holed into being the funny, humorously awkward kid in every film he does.

Jim: Don’t all fat actors get typecast as the buddy in the buddy comedy, no matter how hard they try?

Also, in order to be typecasted, you have to demonstrate that you have some sort of range that is not being exploited by the industry for whatever reason (probably money…).  Not hating on Jonah Hill, but he hasn’t made Wet Hot American Summer yet. (and as an aside, I think there are actually very few comedians who AREN’T typecasted)

Wath this movie now!

If I had to go with someone I think I’d take on one of Seth’s man-crushes, Joseph Gordon Levitt.  He just stepped out of his typical sensitive dude in off beat indie comedy and seemed to be stuck somewhere between Zach Braff and Jon Krasinsky on the charming but ultimately forgettable scale.  He was great in Inception, and if he really is going to play the Riddler in the next Batman, then my argument is pretty much moot, but I think he’s on the precipice of either sliding back into “make the chicks swoon and not much else mode” or over-capitalizing on Inception‘s success and taking on a series of inferior sidekick roles morphing into poor man’s Edward Norton…

Caroline: “Poor man’s Edward Norton”…love it.

Lets apply that to some ladies. Leslie Man is the poor woman’s Joan Cusack…albeit a hotter version.

As for the A-listers, Cate Blanchett needs to grab a crack whore roll fast because while admittedly an amazing actress, she always carries with her the same air of dignified grace. It is as if her characters are always inner queens…even when shes not Elizabeth. I just want to see if she can lose the inherent cultivation and get a little crude.

Patrick: Michael Cera seems to play the same awkward-nerdy leading man over and over again.  He definitely looks the part but I would love to see him in something that’s not funny.

Mumblecore Hero

Seth: I have to pick at Jim’s “man-crush” statement. I wouldn’t consider him a man-crush personally, it’s just weird to have a famous doppelganger. And I’d gather that his roles have been pretty varied throughout his career actually. In fact, a quick glance at this credits shows only ONE (MAYBE two if you count 10 Things, but they were made several years apart) “make the chicks swoon and not much else mode”. He’s been a High school noir detective (Brick), a broken-down bank robber-turned-hero (The Lookout, excellent if you haven’t seen it), an archvillian (GI Joe), a misanthrope (Hesher), an Iraq war veteran (Stop-Loss), and the future holds more variety with nothing resembling one of these roles. Just scan his IMDB page, he’s had a pretty varied career. Which is one of the reasons I don’t mind sharing a face with him.

So while I may have done nothing to disprove Jim’s claim of a man-crush (for me that’s Matt Damon or the aforementioned Ed Norton) I think I’ve safely defended my Doppelganger.

Patrick: Jim was on the money with the fat actor’s always being the buddy, never getting the girl, and being the nice guy etc… Although I think a recent trend, in most of the movies you’ve just named, busts the fat guy type cast. The chubby guy actually gets the girl in King of Queens, Forty Year Old Virgin, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall as well.

Comedic actors not branching out doesn’t seem like type casting because the actors named seemingly have a choice of movie projects and choose to swing in their wheel house and make butt loads of cash, Hollywood if nothing else is formulaic.  If these guys are victims of anything it’s that. They might not get too many acting roles outside of comedy because of the way they look or their acting history. For example Jason Statham won’t be playing any geeky high school guys any time soon, but actors like Rudd, Hill and others are big enough to have a choice.  Actor’s ability to choose probably has a place in the definition as well.

Type cast as double edge sword hypothetical role play: Me -Movie producer Sandra Bullock- as Danny Trejo

Movie Producer: Hey Danny Trejo you’d be perfect for this new role as Mexican inmate # 5 in the remake of The Great Escape.

Danny Trejo: Well I guess if I want to eat and keep doing what I love I have to play this role again, but next time I swear I’m holding out for the role of Wall Street exec!

Sorry Dan-o that role’s not coming around the bend anytime soon.  No tatted Latinos on the Forbes list means no tatted Gordon Geko’s, (although he could actually play the Mexican inmate in the Wall Street sequel and I can’t even talk about lebuff right now an actor who I hate but consistently like his movies.)

So my answer is Danny Trejo eternally the Mexican former/future/current inmate when I feel he has the potential for more but not the choice.

It's almost unsettling to see him smile.

Sherman: Not a comedic typecast, but it would be nice to see Morgan Freeman play a perverted serial killer or anything other than “black mentor” (today’s version of “magical negro”, which Freeman also used to play all the time).  And as a sub-typecast as “black mentor” he’s also typecast as “God”.  Which is a lot cooler.

Kevin: My answer is Paul Rudd’s companion in Role Models-Sean William Scott

The StifMeister Forever

Think about it, name a movie when he wasn’t an updated version of Stifler. Sure, American Pie was the teen movie of our generation and that may have cemented him. But to his credit, he fucking nails the duchey-yet funny dude role better than anyone. I stand by that he’s a funny actor, who can mix in classic physical comedy, stupid frat guy jokes, but still work in some heart. I enjoyed him in American Pies (really the only reedeming part of the sequels), Road Trip, The Rundown (yeah, I said it). Sure he has some crappy movies, i.e. Dukes of Hazzard, but it’s the last example of Role Models that made me think there was more to this SWS character. By all accounts he plays an updated, more adult version of Stifler in that film, but he showed some restraint and somehow makes that character likeable against all odds, and really seemed to add some subtly to the role. Also, showed he could really bring in the emotional life lesson part of the storyline. Maybe he’s typecast thats all he can do, but I really think he can do a lot more as an actor and comedic role outside of douchy athlete in high school. I wan to see him get a shot at something different, at least to see how it goes. More SWS in my life I say!

What say you Ramblers? Are there other actors who you care for who are in danger of being typecast or are !GASP! already?  I think this is really a function of kinda stock characters being tweaked in a small way and people being set-up to take certain roles. Somebody write some new characters!

Will traveled to Washington, D.C. with Spangler, but not before encountering a mysteriously sexy new neighbor. In DC, Spangler reveals himself to be a rather idiosyncratic, eccentric man. However, we also see that he is rather brilliant remarking on ties, the nature of intelligence, and proper handbag choice. Their mission on this trip is to secure unrestricted funding from the government. Spangler’s eloquence wins them the day as he gives the aforementioned tie speech (doesn’t sound exciting, but it was!). We also see that Spangler has taken a shine to Will as he purchases him a new briefcase coming full circle on his earlier diatribe regarding Will’s subpar handbag choice. Also in Washington, Will meets with a buddy from the CIA to get info on the 7 names he and Bancroft found last week. The pal seemed upset about helping Will, but did it nonetheless and we come away with a new name, Donald Bloom and an era and location where all 7 worked: Mid-80′s in the Mid-east. What we really get from this trip though is a window into Spangler’s psyche, the first real shot at him, and what we see is confusing: a melange of brilliance and potentially crippling eccentricity. He’s managed to reach near the top of his field. His 3 set pieces/monologues this week to me were the star of the episode, breaking from his quirky ways to show us how he got where he is and exactly how strong a manipulator he might be.

Back in NY, Will’s team is tasked by Kale to backburner their hunt for the money launder/terrorist to focus on an Indonesian terrorist named Kateb (Qateb? I have no idea). Kale tells them that there can be no split decisions on “irreversibles.” Tanya questions what that means and Grant all too plainly replies “people you can’t un-kill.” In a storyline reminiscent of the classic 12 Angry Men, we see Miles, Tanya, and Grant debate Kateb’s fate. They go back and forth, they switch sides, and mostly we get to see the group’s dynamic and what it’s like to be an intelligence analyst. More on this from Pete later as it bore some really interesting tidbits.

The third prong of the story we’re beginning to see emerge, is Katherine’s personal investigation of Thom’s death. The Rhumors may not have shared all of their secrets, but it’s clear that they loved each other. In a heartbreaking scene, Katherine receives a package containing all of the evidence from her husband’s investigation (is this really what they do? TERRIBLE IDEA!) and as she goes through his belongings: blood soaked fabrics, wedding ring, and finally his phone where she discovers two messages. One of them is from her, the other from Wheeler who says “Tom, if you keep this up, you know what’s going to happen.” Katherine replays the message several times and her recognition grows with each listen. She returns to the townhouse to look around and finds a take-out menu from a Chinese place. She heads there and converses with the cashier who eventually reveals that delivery was taken to the townhouse and was paid for by James Wheeler. So she finds out what we did last week: Wheeler is a scumbag.

The Widow Detective (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

When our hero returns to the office and his colleagues, we see that he tasked Miles to run a check on the aforementioned Donald Bloom, who as it turns out recently flew into New York…

Discussion by Pete

In this week’s episode, what do we learn about the possible conspiracy shadowing David’s death? Nothing! How much closer do we get to a sense of the conspiracy behind Rhumor’s suicide? Not much! Do these two parallel racks come any closer to crossing? No! And yet, this week’s was a very good episode, in some ways perhaps the best, in establishing both the capabilities of the show and revealing yet more about the place of work its characters have chosen.

With Will and Spangler in D.C., the rest of the team is left behind to do their best chasing an Indonesian terrorist and we see whole worlds revealed concerning API’s central function, and why the lives of everyone on Will’s team are in shambles.  And so, here we are. This is what they do. This is why–at least in part–Miles fights with his wife over custody of their children and feels nostalgia and guilt at the sight of suspected terrorists with their families. It is why Tanya is such a nervous, pill popping wreck. It is why Grant is such a huge dick. This is what they do–building the cases for the assassination of terrorists halfway around the world, on incomplete intelligence (all intelligence is incomplete, as Kale will remind them), bending and contorting their logic, looking for meaning and rationalization in abstract numbers and figures, and selectively blind themselves to pieces of information (usually having to do with children and the other necessary collateral damages of a clandestine bombing) that muddy up their best attempts to justify what they’ll be reading about in tomorrow’s paper.

What have we learned, aside from why these three are the walking dead (AMC CROSS PROMOTION!)? Well, for one, they can carry their part of the show and contribute meaningfully to it even when separated from the investigations of the mysteries surrounding the two deaths that have shadowed Rubicon from its beginning. This is important–without losing sense of the greater tasks facing its characters, the team shows that the show does just fine as well as a procedural, thank you very much. Their ultimate recommendation to kill Kateb may not be heard from next week, but its cumulative effects will be felt–they agonize over it before learning to live with it, before becoming numb to it, before they are so deadened to it that Will can walk in at the episode’s end, declare the strike a success, and not give it a second thought. There’s a kind of poetry in it, Will finding himself in this line of work, going on nine years after his family was killed by Islamic terrorists. It also may offer a clue to David’s death. Remember, from a couple of weeks past, Hal’s finding that the only time such a coordinated intelligence clue was spotted across several crosswords–as detected by Will–preceded a massive terrorist attack on a U.S. army base in Beirut, killing nearly 300 soldiers and personnel. What is on the way now, that is so threatening that David is killed even for having an inkling that it exists?

The Walking Dead (Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)

Now that the team has taken us for a spin and shown us what they can do, a couple questions for the gallery:

• When is Katherine going to look into the business her husband left her?
• Pete: Just saying, if I found out I was the new owner of a business with a completely non-descript front-sounding name, and a townhouse—even an Upper East Side mansion straight from the real estate porn section of the Sunday paper—I might first want to know what that business is in the business of doing. Especially if, you know, my spouse has died under suspicious circumstances, and his best friend is leaving ominous messages on his cell phone just before his death, not to mention ordering Chinese food from the house he denied knowing the existence of. Just saying.
• Seth: Couldn’t agree more. Although it seems like she is in a bit of a haze regarding her husband’s death and I can’t really get a grasp on how much time is passing on this show. I won’t contend to know how to react in a position like that because I’ve never been through losing my beloved and then finding out he had a whole other life. Might be a little jarring and investigating all of this new life would certainly be intriguing, but working through your grief might take precedence.
• Who is the woman across the way from Will?
• Pete: This, I feel, is the sister question to Where the hell was Senator Clay Davis this week? For certain, she is new to the picture, otherwise Will wouldn’t give her such a curious look when seeing her, he would just say “oh hey, mysterious painter chick is there again” to himself while brewing his Turkish coffee. All signs, to me, point to her being involved with his surveillance. Remember: last week Davis’s partner got made by Will. We won’t see him again, and they’re going to have to be a lot more sly this time around with him wise to the fact that he’s being followed. We will see her again. (otherwise I don’t know why Law & Order’s Annie Parisse would take a role with 30 seconds of screen time and no dialogue). Also, Will might want to start sweeping his place for bugs. Like, now. (Also, your suit looks like the one a senior wears to his first job interview. Maybe Spangler will treat you to a new one next week? You already got him to go in the briefcase, after all.)
• Seth: I think she’s obviously going to be part of the story, but how cool would it be if she wasn’t? Given that this show is supposed to tap into our collective paranoia, how great would it be to throw in red herrings like that to make the viewer really get squirmy. Again, I think she’ll be integral to this story, but I almost wish she wasn’t.
• What of the names?
• Pete: By this I mean the seven names Will wanted information on at the end of last week’s episode. We get a few tidbits, courtesy of Will’s friend, who—given that this is D.C.—does the whole Deep Throat thing by meeting him in a parking garage at night to give him information. What we get isn’t much, other than the unifying factor that they were all intelligence officers stationed in the Middle East in the 1980s. Only one stands out—a man named Donald Bloom, who may have just gotten to New York. We’ll see him again, though remember there was still one name on Will’s list that turns up nothing.
• Seth: I think the missing name is really interesting, OF COURSE. That’s what it’s supposed to do. But I think that might be a season 2 situation. I think we’ll get to know Donald Bloom over the course of this season and how he might play into the 4th Leaf and the old boys club. Or perhaps we’ll meet them both this year and end up knowing everything! That seems likely.
  

Another week down and another week for your thoughts folks, what do you have to discuss following “The Outsider”?

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:

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.