Ambience of Media

I really want to get some thoughts down on Rubicon‘s first two episodes before the third airs, so this might be a bit rushed and random. I’m loving the show, however, and hope to comment on it weekly provided I have the time. To quickly gloss over the premise, the show centers around Will Travers (James Badge Dale), an analyst at the American Policy Institute in New York City, a federally contracted intelligence agency. The teams and individuals here receive analysis assignments from the CIA and are given the available relevant data and then must find the patterns and draw conclusions in order to aid policy and presumably operation decisions. Will stumbles upon a string of identical questions and answers – one involves four-leaf clovers – in several newspaper crossword puzzles which hint at some kind of fourth branch of government (no, not the media). He informs his immediate superior and father of his late wife, David Hadas, who knows something about the crosswords but doesn’t reveal that to Will. Soon enough, David is presumably killed. Shortly before these events, a wealthy New England patriarch named Tom Rhumor commits suicide upon finding a four-leaf clover in his newspaper, leaving his wife Katherine (Miranda Richardson) to discover some of his secrets. Will soon takes over David’s job and we also learn that APL’s apparent boss is part of a group involved in instigating the suicide. Conspiracy and paranoia are afoot!

So, in a general sense I love the setting and atmosphere of the show. I love stories that let us see passionate people at their jobs, and while Rubicon hasn’t gotten too involved in any specific assignment given to Will and his team, we do get Will obsessing over the crosswords pattern and what it might have to do with David’s death. We also get a glimpse at another analyst, Miles, and his inability to deal with the apparent ignoring of work he did foreseeing bloody conflict in Nigeria. Prior to the series opening, we get the sense that Will enjoyed the puzzles and patterns for their own sake, as a challenge and a distraction from his grieving over his late wife and child, but then a pattern emerges that affects his mentor and father-in-law. Suddenly the work means something. Meanwhile, Miles is too obsessed with the aftermath and results of his work to function properly on current assignments. He actually cares about the analysis he’s doing. The fairly abstract problem solving at the heart of the job proves compelling when the characters (and performances) are so passionate and involved in it.

On top of the crosswords puzzle, Will sees indications that he’s being followed after his first day on the job. As an audience, we know he’s being followed and watched so his paranoia and caution is completely justified for us. We also know that there is some sort of conspiratorial group of men with some sort of controlling agenda. We also see that the analysts have limited control over what data they receive for their assignments and again, what their analysis is or is not used for. As the personalized note on David’s chessboard said, these people are pawns. They’re small players in the grand scheme of things. Important perhaps, but also expendable and replaceable (as we see in David’s apparent death and even Tom’s). I’m extrapolating a bit, but we see that David has a host of superstitions that he acknowledges are silly but he still obeys them fully. This is David finding a way of exerting a sense of control over his life. The second episode provides a glimpse that Will might unconsciously see value in the same path, gripping the rabbit’s foot while being tailed through the streets and demanding that David’s broom (purchased to help avoid a curse) is returned to the office. A key theme of the show, it would seem, is the stifling and dehumanizing nature of an analyst’s job. They live secret lives far away from the levels of government with actionable power. Their purpose is to solve puzzles, find patterns, analyze the data and pass the conclusions on up the hierarchy. What happens before and after that, and even during to a certain extent, is beyond their control. Miles sees that sometimes this is all a fruitless exercise with the Nigeria situation, but cannot unconcern himself with it. Tanya takes to drinking after just two weeks on the job. Ed Bancroft’s mind was allegedly broken by the work. David took to controlling minute elements of his life through superstitious beliefs. Will has taken to a potentially dangerous investment in the crosswords puzzle and perhaps to a little superstition himself. What are these people doing to themselves, and for what?

At this point I have to highlight a recurring visual motif that I particularly appreciate. A couple times we see individuals dwarfed by highly geometric pieces of architecture. When Will first leaves the office before finding himself being followed, he walks passed a large building front with cross-cutting steel beams. The shots are composed with Will as a smaller figure at the bottom of the frame with the large metal pattern everywhere above him. At the end of the episode, even the men spying on Will are shown to be tiny figures compared to the large repeating window panes hiding the empty floor in which they’ve set up their stakeout. We get the sense that the conspiracy is vast and pervasive and pawns can be found on every side. To get ahead of the game, these pieces of architecture could also withstand the removal of one its elements without catastrophe. The same seems to be the case for the conspiracy.