Rubicon Season One Finale: Andy, Truxler, Clover

Rubicon ended its first season on AMC much as it has been doing all along, a riddle wrapped in a clover leaf inside an enigma. We don't even know if what we saw last night was the end of the just the first season or the end of everything - that is, it's not completely clear if Rubicon will be renewed, though I certainly hope it is.

The surprising reveal, which raises more questions than it answers, is Andy, Will's mostly welcoming neighbor.   Katherine's late husband directs her to an apartment, where Andy happens to be.  She agrees to go with Katherine to briefly meet Will, though Andy cautions Katherine that that's dangerous.  And Katherine is indeed murdered - by a swift injection in the back of the shoulder by Mr. Roy, doing Truxler's work - as Will looks on from an overpass, and Andy from the underpass, neither able to do anything to save Catherine.

Will is horrified.   But what about Andy?   Who, indeed, is she?  She's obviously some kind of spy, and was no doubt assigned to keep an eye on Will, but whom is she working for?  Unlikely Truxler, otherwise she could have easily killed Will herself, rather than leaving that attempt to Bloom.  Possibly for Kale - who has a maddeningly low profile in this episode - or the FBI, CIA, or the group that sentences Truxler, take your pick.

Meanwhile, Truxler presents another mystery.   He's given the clover leaf.  But he hasn't yet taken his life when Will finds him on the roof.   Truxler notes how much better the roof is than struggling with the window - presumably easier to jump off a roof than out of a window?   (If he'd planned on shooting himself in the head, he could have already done that.)   I thought the episode would end with Truxler jumping off the roof right in front of Will's eyes, after congratulating Will on his success in id'ing and essentially stopping Truxler.

But Truxler walks away - to live another day?   One of many reasons I hope we get to see another season of this fine, chess-game of a show, which somehow manages to pack a lot of power and punch in its low-key story telling.

See also Rubicon on AMC ... Rubicon 1.5: Bloom

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Rubicon 1.5: Bloom

Ed advises Will to "connect the dots," find the "narrative," in Rubicon 1.5, and Ed gives Will a significant dot or name:  Donald Bloom.

But the narrative is not easy to find or even fathom in Rubicon, much like Joyce's Ulysses, where Bloom also plays a major role.   In Rubicon, where the spy games are much more life and death than the figurative polarities of Ulysses, the key is matching the code to physical realities at home and abroad.

Will soon runs into Bloom in the real - at a table in a restaurant - but Will's boss Kale (played with quiet deadpan potential deadliness by Arliss Howard, last seen to good effect on television in Medium) is sitting right across from Bloom.   Kale sees Will, who "scurries away," as Kale later says to Will, and the chess game is on.

Will finds enough to know that looking into Bloom can be dangerous.   When Ed proudly shows him that he's connected a lot of dots, producing summaries of summaries, Will tells him that they both should forget about Bloom - he wasn't a spy at all.   Will wants to protect himself as well as his new old friend Ed.

But the intricacies wind higher.   Turns out Will's meeting with Ed was recorded, and it winds up in the hands of Spangler - Kale's boss - who also now seems disinclined to pursue Will on this matter.   Is that because Tanya, the nervous but brilliant new kid on the block on Will's team, dazzled Spangler by identifying a major Al Qaeda operative - one George Beck - before he even fully became one?

Hard to say - as is the case with just about every theory on or about Rubicon.  But that's part of the strange appeal of the show, and tonight's episode did have the major step forward of Will finally meeting Katherine Rhumor (the widow of the guy who blew his brains out at the beginning of series) in person.   And that was real, no rumor, and enough to keep me in good humor that show's making some real progress.


5-min podcast review of Rubicon


See also Rubicon on AMC ...

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Rubicon on AMC

Checking in with a few words about Rubicon on AMC, a leisurely, intelligent, rubric's cube of a spy show.

Will Travers - played by James Badge Dale (Chase on 24) - plays a code-cracking operative who works for API, a (fictional) Federal spy agency that's a bit above the CIA and the all the lettered agencies we know about.   His wife and daughter were killed in one of the towers on 9/11 - and his immediate boss at API is his father-in-law.  The big shocker in the opener - read no more if you have not seen it - is the father-in-law gets killed in a commuter train crash, definitely presumably not an accident.  Travers is offered a promotion to his father-in-law's job, and he takes it.

Part of the fun of this show, if that's the right word, are the word puzzles that appear in various written media.   Part of the fun is seeing how Travers' team operates - in the episode this week, we see them truly struggling with whether to authorize a surgical strike on a terrorist that may kill innocent people.  And part of the fun is seeing how the API maintains its shakily superior position over other spy agencies.

With all the spy stories in books, the movies, and on television, I've somehow never seen a show quite like Rubicon.   It has a little less action than you'd expect, but that's to the good, because the time freed up is devoted to more cerebral issues of the spy business - sort of like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

I'll be back here from time to time as the spirit moves me for review of an episode - I'll definitely be watching every one.

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book