Rubicon: the real mystery may be why I'm still watching.

Grant Test (Christopher Evan Welch), Will Travers (James Badge Dale),
Tanya MacGaffin (Lauren Hodges) and Miles Fiedler (Dallas Roberts) in Rubicon.

When I heard about AMC's Rubicon, I was excited.  The tagline is: "not every conspiracy is a theory."  For a devoted X Files fan like me (please just let's not even talk about the awful second movie) that right there was enough to check it out.  And the pilot was intriguing enough to draw me in for more.  But now, four episodes in, I'm starting to wonder if the real mystery is whether this show is worth the time.  Spoilers after the jump.


The first episode of Rubicon starts out strong:  a mysterious rich guy kills himself after finding a four-leaf clover left among his morning papers while his wife (Miranda Richardson) plays outside with the grandkids.  After this cold open we meet the protagonist, Will Travers (James Badge Dale), who works for an organization of shady definition called the American Policy Institute.  API is in the intelligence business, though what their part is remains not entirely clear.  What we learn early on is that Will has an almost superhuman aptitude for finding connections between events and places and is a font of obscure knowledge.  Because of this he finds a code hidden in the crossword puzzles of four major newspapers:  one clue in each of three puzzles makes oblique reference to a branch of government, the fourth has "four-leaf clover" as an answer.  This seems to tie into the cold open and point to some mysterious fourth branch of the United States government.  Soon after Will tells his boss/father-in-law (Will's wife and daughter were killed on 9/11) what he's found, said boss dies in a train collision and Will is promoted into his job.

And away we go.

That first episode is filled with interesting beginnings – who are these people, why are they the way they are, what does the clover mean, who was the man who killed himself, etc.  The trouble is four episodes in we're no closer to those answers.

Here's what we know about the characters so far:

Will's team consists of four people:  Miles fixates on certain events to the exclusion of all else and may be estranged from his wife and kids.  Tanya is new and vomited immediately upon arriving for work one morning which has led her co-workers to believe she has a drinking problem (no really, that's the entire basis of the theory – these people are supposed to be genuises, by the way).  Grant is a dick.  That's about all we know about Grant.  He's a dick and he's picky about his donuts.  Then there's Maggie, and we don't even know what Maggie even does at API except that she's always sort of around, and that she's giving detailed reports on everyone to their boss Kale Ingram (and having in-depth conversations about her vague marital troubles with him for reasons unknown).

Thus far the story of the rich guy's widow, Katherine, has failed to intersect at all with what little plot surrounds the other characters.  We get scenes of her wandering around trying to figure out why her late husband owned a secret townhouse in New York and being lied to by his best friend and performing riveting detective work concerning his Chinese take out habits.  We have a vague idea that he was part of some vague conspiracy to do something vague and that he was seen as a problem by the other rich white guys in said conspiracy, including said best friend.  But we don't know what they're trying to do or what part he played or why it even matters.

Meanwhile Will is investigating the death of his father-in-law and random clues left behind for him in codes and cyphers with a retired codebreaker from the same agency.  While he runs around doing that, his team sits around doing completely unrelated things that so far have no bearing on the plot at all but take up a lot of screen time.  Two guys are following Will, but we don't know why.

It's all just so... vague.  I don't mind a good mystery – I'm a huge Lost devotee, after all – but there's mystery and then there's a plot apparently built entirely out of loose ends.  It's as though Lost had spent the entire first season showing you the Oceanic 815 survivors picking fruit intercut with scenes of the Others doing their laundry and having book club meetings without giving any of it any context or weight.  Mystery needs risk and tension, and so far Rubicon has neither.  The audience has no idea what the stakes are or how these characters feel about each other or why we should care at all.  We don't know if the Rich White Guy Conspiracy are good guys or bad guys.  (I suppose we're meant to assume they're bad guys, but we've been given no reason to form an opinion yet.  They haven't done anything.  They didn't even kill the dead RWG.  They just waited for him to kill himself.)

Four episodes in it just seems like Rubicon is spinning its wheels.  When Will is cracking codes or having his paranoia justified, the show wakes up.  His team could be an interesting group if they were given something to do that mattered and some character development.  The show has potential.  But right now it's just not going anywhere – there's no forward motion.  And a mystery is only as good as its ability to keep the audience engaged and curious.