Don't cross this Rubicon, because they don't double-cross

Rubicon, the new AMC series just previewed, is a well cast, well photographed series that seems to be trying to tap into a whole Davinci Code vibe, with some mysterious forces encoding mysterious information in pointlessly mysterious ways, considering all the way there are to convey information these days. It’s a Big Mystery series, full of all these little clues, demanding attention to detail.
Which is a problem, because… well, the crossword puzzles. There are datapoints being hidden in crossword puzzles of the major newspapers. And we see the crossword puzzles. And they aren’t… they don’t look like any crossword puzzle that you’d find in a major US newspaper. They aren’t symmetrical, and more importantly, they have words that are in an across word, but not a down one. And no, these aren’t the British style puzzles, either.neither in format nor clues. They’re just… wrong. And by golly, this isn’t just in the text of the episode, there’s even a stylized graphic one shown in the opening credits. (And really, a proper-looking crossword puzzle is not hard to slam together, particularly since you don’t need to show all the clues and have something that works in full detail. You just need a good-looking grid with the right number of squares for whatever clue you’re hiding there. But even if you need a full puzzle with a certain word hidden in it, that can be put together quite quickly, in a few hours even with clues, really, if you’re not worried about what level of difficulty the clues are.
So what we have here is a series that asks you to pay attention, but then shows you that they haven’t bothered doing so themselves.
Skip it

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