“Knight to Queen’s Bishop Three.” – A voice on a phone
Rubicon is a chilly and intriguing spy thriller-meets-conspiracy theorist’s bonanza, and makes a fine new edition to AMC’s already stunning lineup that includes Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
How do we know that it will hold up after only its pilot outing? Rubicon truly has a command about it from its opening frames. The direction and tone and pacing move with great confidence – and even patience – as it eases us into a world where characters (who for all we know at this stage could emerge as main players) are killing themselves or getting bumped off due to creepy and subtle clues.
A four-leaf clover is discovered in a newspaper. An analyst for a government intelligence agency makes the wrong connections between the dots from crossword puzzles.
It’s the stuff that when in the wrong hands plays like a third-rate thriller of the week, but that’s not the case at all here. How we get there – at least at these early stages – is all in the style and rumination and feints and dodges. Style is the word to focus on, really: Rubicon has an old school sheen to it, a mesh of Stanley Kubrick’s alienating and stark vision with the class and panache of a well-paced and highbrow big budget spy flick done right.
Rubicon features James Badge Dale (who was a standout in HBO’s The Pacific) as Will Travers, an introspective intelligence analyst who we figure out very quickly is also one hell of a scary smart cat. He’s a guy whose smarts and intellectual curiosity may take him far, or get him killed. That dynamic is played deftly against the fact that he lost his wife and daughter on 9/11, so from that standpoint he’s a guy who may not feel that he has a whole lot to lose. Travers is also clearly a guy who thrives (and perhaps survives) on believing that there is a pattern and rationale to every seemingly random event. So when his boss and friend David Hadas (Peter Gerety, who does much with the time he’s on screen) is killed in a horrific train smash-up on the morning where Will is supposed to get the lowdown on why David wants him to leave the agency (hint: it has a lot to do with his crossword puzzle pattern discoveries), he’s obviously going to want to stick around to see what’s what.
There’s also a lot of subtlety and nice touches at play. The number 13 becomes significant (David was ultra-superstitious about it and other things, and Will finds it striking to find the deceased man’s car parked in a spot labeled with that unlucky number), and we hear it from the first scene, with a child calling it out while playing a game in the front yard of a gorgeous house… where an older man inside subsequently shoots himself after finding the four-leaf clover.
I’m looking forward to much more from this show – it’s going to be one fine ride.
More thoughts on “Gone in the Teeth”:
- Just me or the scene where Travers gets higher security clearance and heads “upstairs” recalls a bit of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the scene where young Alex is processed into the prison system. Sort of an absurdist and bureaucratic and fascist flair about it all at once.
From Around the Web: Rubicon, “Gone in the Teeth”
- The TV Paige: There are some great characterizations and attention to detail. If you stick with the series, you’ll be treated to a lecture on the perfect briefcase by the droll Michael Cristopher that’s worth the price of admission. And if you think your office banter is entertaining, try swapping in-jokes with the intelligence community. (It turns out that MILF also stands for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.)
- NY Daily News: “Rubicon” hasn’t quite gone that far, but it’s on the way to passing the point of no return if it doesn’t pick up the pace or land one of the many four-leaf clovers it holds so dear.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.