Kat with a K

Rubicon 1.3: "Keep the Ends Out"

At the beginning of this episode, they did a little recap of the "conspiracy" so far, so perhaps the things they mentioned are the things that are important for us to keep in mind. If this is true, Nigeria doesn't matter, and Yuri might not either. So there's that. Thoughts on this episode after the jump . . .

We start with what passes for intrigue on this show - Will walks down the street with a newspaper! Someone might be following him! He - gasp - pretends to tie his shoe, but it's not really untied! Hey, he has blue Converse, just like me. Anyway, he's on his way to meet David's widow (and his mother-in-law), Joan, who is there to pick up David's things. Will seems shocked that Joan has never seen David's office, but I'm not. The security guard takes Joan's cell phone and "any other electronics." Have we seen this with the other characters? Hey, is this why they have so many papers all the time? Because no electronics are allowed? Hmm.

Anyway, Joan continues to be astonished about her husband's Super Secret Office and mutters stuff about "Church and State" for a while, implying that David kept his home and work lives separate. She eventually tells Will that her son Even wants to see him, and even though Evan becomes a big part of this episode, we never really figure out what his deal is. He's in Vermont, in some sort of institution, maybe. He wants the bike his dad gave Will, and there's a lot of sibling rivalry and "I'm his real son" stuff, but Will realizes pretty quickly that he should just give the bike to Evan.

But first, Will takes apart the bike, because he realizes that maybe, you know, David gave it to him for a reason. He doesn't find anything, and then FINALLY looks at the manual, where he finds a picture of a young Evan on the bike. There is now tape on the seat that wasn't there in the picture, so he takes it off and finds a list of ten-digit numbers - and a gun in the seat! He brings it to Ed and gets, instead of answers, a lesson in his own wife's family history, which seemed a little odd. Also odd: we're supposed to think Will, who knows everything about everything, doesn't know who John Wayne is. Oh, and Ed thinks David was murdered. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced David is dead at all. Anyway. After considering a bunch of options (phone numbers, ISBNs), Will decides that the numbers have something to do with dates of baseball games, so he goes and wakes up poor Ed again. They figure out that the numbers lead to . . . the pitchers of games on those dates? Maybe? It's a little unclear. Wouldn't there be several games on some of the dates? How would they know which ones they were looking for? Later on, Will has a series of names, presumably from this code, and asks a "Daniel Burns" to run them through his database. There is, of course, more of the "I could get fired for doing this for you!" stuff.

Meanwhile, Will has an actual job where he's supposed to be doing actual work involving Yuri and Beck and all that. Except it WAS a test, as I'd guessed, to see if he'd say he could get results more quickly than he actually could, or something. But I guess they still have to do the work. Tanya seems to be the only one of the team who actually produces much, while Miles watches an airport security video over and over and Grant continues to be obnoxious. They all stop to discuss the five worst presidents in history, much to my delight. Miles stays at the office all night, and it seems that he's separated from his wife and hiding it from his coworkers. Poor guy.

Throughout the episode, Will knows he's being followed, and eventually confronts the guy and gets beaten up. His boss later introduces him to the guy who beat him up - it turns out he's FBI and was tailing Will as part of a security check for his promotion or something. Worst tail ever, FBI! Will later realizes that someone else is still following him, so he goes home and loads David's gun. Very slowly. That second tail meets a guy at a laundromat and the guy calls . . . someone . . . to report that Will is still digging.

In other news we might or might not care about, Maggie is walking her daughter home from school (which seemed weird because the previous scene had taken place on a Sunday, but I guess it was supposed to be the next day) when she was surprised by Sophie's father. Her ex-husband? Current, estranged husband? Something. Sophie is happy to see her dad, but Maggie is not. She winds up confiding in Kale, which really makes me want to know what kind of influence or hold Kale has over her, exactly. Kale tells her not to let the guy - Craig, I think - back into her life. She later has a cute and awkward moment with Will in which Will manages to answer an obscure question about bears, because obviously he knows everything ever. Are they trying to set up a romantic thing between Will and Maggie? Maybe.

Elsewhere - Katherine! Remember her? She's in bed, and then Wheeler calls and convinces her to have dinner with him, and for a minute I thought maybe they'd been having an affair before her husband died, but no, I think that's too exciting for this show. So. They have dinner. They hear "the most depressing song ever written" but I didn't catch what it was - anyone know? Then Wheeler goes to the Super Secret Townhouse and steals an old picture of kids on a beach. Why? No idea.

I kind of can't believe I'm writing this much about this show. It's still moving glacially slowly, and it seems somewhat scattered - the Nigeria thing wasn't mentioned this episode, and the Sudan was, with no details. Nothing more about Vanderbilts or hyacinths or Graham Greene. I'm still not at all sure whether the whole Beck thing has anything to do with the main plot of the show. But I'm enjoying it enough to stick with it and find out.