Kat with a K

Rubicon 1.5: "Connect the Dots"

There are dots! Being connected! Ooooh. Read on . . .

We start with Will walking down a street, as he so often does, but he's actually intercepted by Ed! Who is not in his house! Will finds this surprising and keeps asking if Ed's okay, but Ed claims to just want to help. After hearing about Bloom, he keeps telling Will to check "the whitepapers." Tech specs? That's what whitepapers means to me, but I assume he's talking about something else.

Tanya wears dark glasses, and Kale watches her. He then goes to Will and weirdly recites an order about attending Mrs. Spangler's charity event before getting to the real purpose of his visit, which is asking for Will's "read" on Tanya, Will has clearly never thought about her before. Hee. He tells Kale he'll look into it, and then goes to the library and receives directions to the mysterious whitepapers, and he finds something in the catalog called "The Houston Problem" that David was working on. But it's empty! The librarian is concerned.

Team meeting time! Back to Yuri Popovich and George Beck. Again, no one knows anything. Tanya gives a weird little speech about how they should forget about Yuri and focus on George. Will tells her to write up an analysis, and this is obviously some sort of test for Tanya.

Katherine sits in a limo - that is not moving - going over her finances with a finance guy. I have no idea why she's sitting in the limo, but hey, she's not wandering around a house! The guy wants her to sell MRQ, that company that Tom left her right before he died. She refuses, and then discusses it with someone over the phone as she walks around some sort of urban park. I'm just happy she's outdoors.

Ed sits on his stairs in his pajamas as he rips apart phone books and calls hotels asking for Donald Bloom. Will shows up with pizza and Ed tells him that Bloom is staying at the Waldorf, and clearly has a bit of a hubris issue because he's staying under his own name. Will tells Ed about the Mysterious Missing Whitepaper. Ed seems to be going vaguely crazy as he gives a speech about finding the dots and connecting the dots and understanding the dots. "What's the connection? What's the narrative?" I don't know, Ed. I don't know.

Will follows Bloom around for a while, and there are a lot of escalators involved. Clever guy. Eventually Bloom goes and meets someone at a restaurant. It's Kale! I think. Bloom complains that Kale's man - Will, I suppose? - is causing trouble and making them do all sorts of complicated things all over the world. Then they have this big long conversation about whether they have girlfriends or have to pay for women, and it's kind of hilarious. Bloom is all nostalgic about the good old days, but Kale points out that they were killing people. Apparently that was part of the fun for Bloom.

Will shows up at Maggie's office and just sort of stands there until she asks what's wrong. He gets really really close as he asks for everything she knows about Kale. She gets all flustered that's Will's on to whatever her weird agreement with Kale, but he's actually asking about David. He keeps looking like he might kiss her in this scene, and there's all sorts of weird tension, but of course he doesn't. And of course he refuses to tell her why he's all worked up. The music is very dire and the camera is very zoomed and I suddenly feel like I'm in the middle of, I don't know, an Elizabeth Bowen novel.

Kale walks into Spangler's office and he's asking about David too! He wants to know if the loose ends were tied up. "Do you know something I don't?" "No I do not." Then yes, the loose ends are tied up. Now that we have that nonsense out of the way, we're back on about the wife's charity event, because obviously that's what's important here. I hope this is like Gossip Girl and the entire cast ends up at a big gala at the end of the episode. As Kale leaves the office, we see that Spangler is shredding the Mysterious Missing Whitepaper.

Time for another team meeting! Tanya is giving her analysis, and the guys are rather ripping her apart. Oh, I guess this is some sort of practice for pitching this to Spangler. Then Will goes down to see NotHal, who starts the conversation with "No. Whatever it is, no." Smart guy. But Will trades on their years of friendship to make NotHal do a database search for Bloom and Kale, and I'm a dork so I'm excited that we get to see how the search operators work. Anyway, NotHal comes up with a CIA case number, but if he opens it, They will know, so he doesn't.

Will runs into Tanya on his way down from the room, and she yells at him about letting Miles and Grant be hard on her. Good for her! Is Will setting her up to fail? No, he thinks she's right about George. Would it have killed him to say that in front of the others? Apparently. Instead, he launches into a speech about Good Fear and Bad Fear. Apparently Bad Fear means you shouldn't work at API. Well, that was an encouraging speech, Will.

Will shows up at Ed's house, but Ed doesn't answer his door, so of course Will lets himself in. It's unlocked? Really? That seems unlikely, unless it's supposed to show us that Ed is going nuts. There are notes taped up all over the walls. Ed goes on and on about various connections and some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't, and then Will finally interrupts and tells him that they have to stand down because they had the wrong Donald Bloom, and it's actually an engineering student in Oregon. What is? I mean, I know Will's lying to make Ed stop his investigation, but I'm not sure who he's saying is an engineering student. They guy who flew in? Huh. Ed takes this in and then crumples to the floor, crying, and sobs that David was his best friend. Will looks close to tears as well.

Oh good, now we're at the charity event! Where's Lily van der Woodsen? Will wanders around and, hey, he runs into Katherine! Maybe these plot lines will eventually intersect! They introduce themselves and make small talk about vodka and then she wanders off. Well, that was a let down. Will wanders around and comes upon Spangler in a dark room with James Wheeler and R.C. Gilbert. He's meeting the whole secret society! Spangler gives him all sorts of praise, asks if he's enjoying the party, and then calls him a liar when he says he is. Charming! And Will wanders out again. Interesting things keep almost happening, but then they don't! As he leaves, someone else comes in and says the squalls have been shipped and will be on site in a week. I don't even know what that means, or who this person is, although he looks somewhat familiar.

Will stands by himself in the middle of the party, accompanied by an overwrought cello, and Kale appears and snarks about it. Then he says that Donald Bloom is an old friend, and then recommends that Will stay with analysis and stop trying to gather his own information, and is all vaguely threatening and ominous.

Tanya pitches her idea to Will, Spangler, and Kale. She does a good job and Spangler goes for it. Yay Tanya! Of course, then she immediately goes and pours something from a flash into her glass and looks vaguely miserable about everything.

Spangler has a clandestine meeting with one of the tails from the previous episode, and Bloom is there too. They hear a recording of Will telling Ed to stand down, so either Will or Ed or both are bugged. Spangler tells the tail to concentrate on Katherine now. They all leave separately, and we see that Kale has been watching the building, or one of them, from outside.

Katherine visits the MRQ building and meets Harold, who is in charge. She finally asks someone what the company actually does, anyway, and is told that they "used to make clothes, not very successfully." Uh, okay! What are you doing NOW, then? She asks to be alone, and figures out that the code to the filing cabinet is their anniversary. Aww. She finds a newspaper clipping about a professor's death being ruled a suicide.

Kale stands in a dark room. Will stands at the edge of the dark room, and eventually knocks and is asked in, because apparently Kale wants to talk about what life was like before electricity. Darkness! Shadows! Just like this show! Kale says that Tanya did well and shows Will new intelligence that backs up Tanya's theory, and Will charmingly replies by saying they should put her name on the list for drug testing. Kale is rather apathetic about that, and just wants to know what George is up to.

Will sits at his kitchen table taking notes on bunches of index cards that are spread out all over the floor. He's using a Sharpie, which seems inconvenient, and is barefoot, which for some reason I find cute. He puts down a card that says "James Wheeler" and has a big question mark. Indeed. The music is extremely intense as Will stares at his cards and moves some of them by fractions of inches. Then there's some sort of loud noise - I can't quite tell if it's on the soundtrack or if Will can actually hear it - and Will abruptly stands up. It didn't quite sound like a gunshot, but I can't be sure. Will looks alarmed, in any case, so I suppose I am too.

Next week: Will finds out his home is bugged! I am now COMPLETELY into this show. I hope someone else is too, because I want it to stick around.