AMC
Spoilers for last night’s Rubicon coming up:
One of the things that’s enthralled me with Rubicon (and probably frustrated some people) is how it’s built suspense by withholding. Rather than give us one explosive action scene after another, it’s created tension by the suggestion of violence, the distant reports of threats, the insinuations of danger—the presence of an unfired gun.
As we approach the end of the series season, it was becoming time that some of these threats begin to manifest. And boy, did they.
The most obvious, of course, was Bloom’s attempted hit on Will in his apartment, prompted by the decision by Truxton Spangler that Travers had to be removed.I’ll admit, I wasn’t crazy about how the actual fight was choreographed. The whole elbow-to-the-head, crawl-to-the-gun, shot-between-the-eyes thing seemed a little too Jack Bauer / Sayid Jarrah for a man of Will’s capabilities vs. a trained killer. (I’d accept he got lucky, but it might have made more sense for him to get lucky a different way, like having the gun in reach unbeknownst to Bloom, who would not expect the analyst to be packing.) But what a great build of suspense in the minutes before, and what gripping moments between Kale and Will as the elder spook showed up with a cleaner to dispose of his old colleague/friend/(lover?), silently.
One question that’s nagged me for weeks is why—given what Spangler and company know about Will’s activity, and their willingness to off David before—he and his fellow conspirators didn’t just whack Will a long time ago? We don’t have an ironclad answer, but it seems as if the decision to terminate David didn’t come easy to Spangler, who seems both menacing and genuinely nostalgic talking about him with Will in his office. (Great work there by Michael Cristofer.) Maybe there’s a part of Spangler that simply prefers to manage things quietly and hoped he could stop Will bloodlessly; maybe he feels genuine loyalty and affection to Will. Whichever feeling it was, he finally got past it.
Meanwhile, Rubicon comes close to pulling the trigger in its other storyline, as the analysts get closer to a read on Kateb, who they surmise changed his name and identity out of loathing for his previous self. He’s the Don Draper of terrorism! So: Will has begun to figure out that the conspiracists were profiting hugely off disasters (anticipated only in API’s analysis) that they may well have engineered, and now knows that he’s a marked man. Meanwhile, Joe Purcell is on the move, to where God—and perhaps a select group of co-conspirators—only knows.
Rubicon may have taken its time, but man, has it become a ride. And it’s fulfilled the obligation of having the gun introduced in the first act go off before the curtain.
With that, the hail of bullets:
* The first time I watched the episode, I wondered why Will would not need medical attention, having been injected by Bloom with enough drugs to plausibly be the cause of his death. On second viewing I see that the needle went through Will’s hand, thus (I assume) sparing him the dose. But I’m surprised, then, that a pro like Bloom wouldn’t have immediately seen that he screwed up and thus—assuming that botching the frame-up would be costly to him—try to re-inject him. (Can you successfully fake a drug overdose in someone after you’ve strangled them to death, given that the heart is no longer pumping blood?) And it still seemed to me as if Will was showing the effects of the drug afterward—but I assume that must have just been shock.
* Though I nitpicked the fight scene, it indisputably worked on me on a gut level. My notes at one point read: “Will went home. GAH! NO! GET OUT!”
* Love this exchange about Andy’s Russian dream: “You ever do stuff like that?” “Nobody does stuff like that.” Which also nicely plays with the irony that he is about to do the sort of thing—a physical fight to the death—that guys like him don’t do.
* Loved, too, the exchange between Spangler and Will, especially Truxton’s reference to David—”You remind me of him”—and Will’s knowing glare as he answers, “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
* Spangler again calls Grant in to discuss his future and his leadership ambitions. Grant is visibly nervous, understandably from the attention from the big boss—but does he also suspect that something is off about Spangler’s sudden interest?
* “You can relax, I’m not going to start blowing rails off the conference table.” Ah, Tanya, it’s good to have you back!