It’s easy to complain about how short TV seasons have become these days, but this debut season of Duster proves that if you use your time wisely, you can pack a whole lot into just eight episodes. This penultimate hour touches on just about every ongoing storyline and features pretty much every named ensemble member (plus Howard Hughes!). And yet none of it feels rushed or hard to follow because the show has built out its world so slowly and methodically across its various weekly romps. When I took this assignment, I thought I’d just be writing about fun episodic 1970s adventures. Instead, creators J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan have served up a real masterclass on how to structure a complex season of TV.
Case in point: It turns out the clue to the mysterious million-dollar purchase Saxton made last week has been hiding in plain sight this whole time. In fact, I even started my “This week in ‘It’s the 1970s!’” runner after the premiere featured Jim flipping past a news report about Watergate on the radio. And I’m pretty sure nearly every episode since has featured some sort of reference to the break-in, which would’ve happened less than a month ago in the show’s timeline. Only it turns out that wasn’t just random world-building—it’s been a tease of what’s to come. Saxton’s purchase is (seemingly) the famed “smoking gun” tape that will eventually cause Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974.
That reveal offers a different kind of thrill than the action sequences that have become Duster’s bread and butter. Though Nina gets a few hotshot moments this week, this hour is lighter on spectacle than most of the season has been so far. But that’s because it’s delivering a different kind of high-octane storytelling. The excitement here comes from watching all of the season’s various through-lines suddenly fall into place like dominoes. And, for me at least, that’s as exhilarating as any car chase.
The other upside of the lack of action is that there’s more room for character work. And this episode proves how much just a few minutes of screen time can make a big impact on fleshing out these folks. After it felt like Nina kind of lucked into Royce’s protection last week, here we see her actively (but tastefully) nurturing his crush to get all the intel she can on the Russian deal and where Snowbird’s million dollars came from after Jim lost Howard Hughes’ Aeromobile.
I also love that this episode takes the time to give Nina and Genesis a meaningful moment together. Like the brief scene where cleaning lady Kelly warns Nina that Agent Chad Grant has been snooping through her desk, it’s a welcome look at the solidarity Black women can find with each other in predominantly male environments. While you could imagine a different version of this show putting Genesis and Nina in immediate conflict with one another, Duster makes the far more interesting choice to have the two women bond over a desire to step out of their fathers’ shadows.
In fact, this is an overall strong episode for Duster’s supporting female cast. Charlotte, of all people, gets to prove she’s an absolute badass as she casually helps sell Wade’s cover story about how he knows a Russian translator. (Nina Saint James helped him buy a fur coat for his Doctor Zhivago role play, of course!) Meanwhile, Izzy refuses to accept Bob Temple’s bribes. He assumes she’ll end the protest the second she gets some personal gains. But even after learning that Saxton himself might be coming after her, Izzy sticks with her solidarity with her fellow female truckers. Whatever is going on with her medical mystery, it’s clearly causing her to take bigger risks in her life.
Then there’s Luna, who gets her most extended screen time yet as she stows away in Jim’s car to join his road trip to Las Vegas with Saxton. She really emerges as the perfect midpoint of her parents here. The fact that she sets fire to her bully’s comics, crashes the Vegas trip, and loves the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt are pure Jim. But the way she refuses to stop advocating for the female drivers, even as Saxton tries to change her mind, is all Izzy. Duster leans into its more wholesome side as Luna gets Saxton to change his mind about the protest. And the fact that the solution comes back to those Bob Temple blackmail photos from the premiere is another great example of Duster weaving all its story threads together as the season draws to a close.
Now, I do have to quibble with the idea that Saxton didn’t know about Jim’s connection with Izzy and Luna. Given how deeply the Ellis family are enmeshed with him, both personally and professionally, that seems highly unlikely—especially when the series opened with Jim taking Luna on a job with him. Similarly, I have some pretty big questions about how Nina is planning to just casually return to FBI life in the same city where the Saxtons live. She literally ran into Saxton at a diner on, like, her second day on the job. What’s to stop that from happening again?
But I’m (mostly) willing to hand-wave those concerns away based on the strength of the rest of the episode. With Jim and Saxton on their way to Vegas, Nina gets to reteam with Awan again this week, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. There were about two seconds where I briefly wondered if he was going to be revealed as a bad guy, which really would’ve thrown me for a loop. Thankfully, his nerdy love of “fox hunting” HAM radio transmitter signals seems entirely pure.
As with a lot of Nina and Awan’s missions, this one doesn’t really get them that much more intel than they already had, as Saxton’s money middle man/Agent Breen’s drugger Cyrus Baker winds up blowing himself up with a grenade after warning Nina that Xavier knows about her. But it does ensure we get at least some action moments this week. In fact, Nina’s ability to outdrive Agent Chad (who’s tracking her on Cowboy’s orders) is one of my favorite car chase sequences of the whole season. No wonder she and Jim are such kindred spirits.
Still, this episode’s real meat is in Vegas, where Saxton, Jim, and Luna follow the proper handwashing “protocol” to meet with Howard Hughes (Tom Nelis), who at this point is a 67-year-old recluse living in the penthouse of the Desert Inn hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, which he moved into in 1966 and then bought in 1967 so he didn’t have to leave. In fact, this episode pulls in a lot of details from Hughes’ actual life, including not only his obsession with cleanliness but also his refusal to cut his hair and his love of Baskin-Robbins’ discontinued banana-nut ice cream. The story about the CIA using him to recover the Soviet submarine K-129 is true. And—as I just discovered while writing this recap—he really did have a strange connection to the Watergate scandal too.
During Nixon’s first term, Hughes reportedly gave bribes to the president for favorable treatment for his airlines and casinos. And some people have theorized that the reason the Watergate break-in happened is because Nixon was paranoid that the Democrats knew about those bribes and were planning to use them against him in his 1972 re-election campaign. (DNC chairman Larry O’Brien also had some ties to Hughes.) Now Duster imagines that Hughes had an even bigger behind-the-scenes role in the scandal than anyone knew.
As with the Elvis stuff in “Suspicious Minds,” that feels like just the right level of kooky real-life history to weave into Duster’s heightened world. I hadn’t been thinking of Duster as a particularly political show. But, of course, we know that in real life it was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt who eventually helped break the Watergate story wide open as informant Deep Throat. (His first meeting with Bob Woodward took place in October 1972.) Given this show’s major FBI through-line, maybe the connection should’ve been obvious.
Whatever the case, this episode ends with a few different cliffhangers for next week’s finale. Hughes tells Jim it was actually the CIA who had Joey killed, something Jim is unsure whether or not to believe. And working on a tip from a newly recovered Sergeant Groomes, Billy pieces together the fact that Nina really is a fed. Ironically, however, his decision to kidnap her saves her from being shot by Agent Chad, who was sent to off her on Cowboy’s orders.
Indeed, Cowboy is a big question mark for next week’s finale. We know from “Ravishing Light And Glory” that he’s part of the group that stole the “smoking gun” tape from the Oval Office in the first place. We now learn that they sold it to the Russians, who decided to pit it on the black market for a profit. Saxton and Hughes bought it as part of a yet-to-be-revealed scheme. Only now it’s in the hands of Greek Sal’s men, who steal it from Hughes’ lackeys. And the as-yet-unseen Xavier may or may not be playing both sides of this thing in a sort of Senator Palpatine-esque way. That’s a lot to unravel in just one episode. But after a strong first season, I have faith that Duster can stick the landing.
Stray observations
- • This week in “It’s the 1970s!”: Two of Saxton’s goons discuss Linda Lovelace, who would’ve just become a name with the release of Deep Throat in June 1972. (Is that another Watergate Easter egg?) Also, Genesis is obsessed with astrology (she’s a Virgo); Charlotte invests in an absolutely horrifying baby pink fuzzy toilet seat cover; and Billy offers up tickets to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Tour, which is set to hit Phoenix November 1973.
- • Opening-credits watch: A snow globe featuring the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign pops up in the middle of the Duster car chase.
- • Sergeant Groomes’ opening dream sequence is a really trippy bit of filmmaking from director Darren Grant, who’s been splitting this season’s directorial duties with Steph Green. Grant seems to be the slightly more surrealist of the two. He gave us Nina’s hospital horror movie sequence in “You’re No Good” and the Looney Tunes stuff in “Criminalus Velocitus Super-Sonicus.”
- • Nina’s little brunch outfit is so cute! On the other hand, there’s no way she could’ve just casually taken a bite of that piping-hot skillet bread without immediately burning the roof of her mouth.
- • The camera really lingers on the moment Awan gives Nina her necklace back. I can’t tell if that’s setting up some romantic intimacy (which I would be into!), priming us for Awan’s tragic death (which I would hate!), or teasing the idea that he planted some kind of tracker or listening device on it.
- • The credits roll to the 1972 John Hartford song “Howard Hughes’ Blues.”
- • “A basement? In Arizona? That’s trippy.”
