24-05-2025
A zippy episode of Duster steps on Elvis' blue suede shoes
Last week's Duster premiere established the show's retro world and tone. Now we get a chance to see what it looks like as a weekly series. Here that means an in-medias-res cold open, an ever-growing web of conspiracies, a new crime lord named Sunglasses (Patrick Warburton), and a Palm Springs heist to get Elvis' famed blue suede shoes. For now, the show is using Josh Holloway's Jim Ellis for episodic romps while Rachel Hilson's Nina focuses on bigger-picture mysteries, which is a structure that feels pulled straight from a network TV procedural. Only Duster offers the swearing, nudity, bloody violence, and higher production value of a prestige-ish streaming show.
While this second episode lacks a little of the cinematic flair of last week's pilot, the 1970s pastiche vibes are still the main calling card of the series. Writing wise, this episode doesn't really deepen or complicate anything we didn't already learn last week. But there's at least a strong sense of pacing and a lighter comedic touch to keep things clipping along. Last week's installment ended with the reveal that Bible-thumping, pedophilic local cop Sergeant Groomes (Donal Logue) saw Jim and Nina's informant deal go down. A traditional prestige series might have stretched out his ominous snooping for half a season. But here he's seemingly killed off, then miraculously revived, all in one episode. Poor Sunglasses, meanwhile, only gets to last a little bit longer before his own gruesome death-by-bowling-pin resetter.
In other words, don't get too attached to the guest stars on Duster. This seems like a world where people are more likely to come and go than stick around to fill in the corners of Phoenix, Arizona. Hopefully that means the show will take the chance to rope in some more TV all-stars for one-off appearances. Warburton strikes just the right notes of goofy menace and unexpected tragedy in his guest spot here.
Speaking of world-building, one of the fundamental divides of Duster is that Jim's world is much more fleshed out than Nina's. The show went out of its way to give him a huge number of supporting characters to interact with—not just within Saxton's family crime organization, but also with his dad Wade, his stepmom Charlotte, his ex Izzy, and his daughter Luna. New-in-town Nina, meanwhile, just has her colleagues at the Bureau and her unseen mother on the telephone. This episode intentionally shrinks her world even smaller by zeroing in on her partnership and growing friendship with Asivak Koostachin's Awan Bitsui.
Admittedly, there's a bit of clunkiness to how this episode gets the two to bound with one another. This week they're hunting down the missing files from Nina's predecessor Agent Breen, who seems to have doctored the details of Jim's brother's death and then been shipped off to a mental institution. A visit to Breen's wife Evelyn (Adrienne Barbeau—remember that name) highlights the racist condescension that fuels the Bureau as a whole. If Nina wants to get to the truth about Saxton, she's going to have to work (slightly) outside the system to make it happen. And she's going to need Awan as her detail-oriented right-hand man.
Unfortunately, the show seems pretty allergic to subtext on the FBI side of things, with Nina and Awan pretty much voicing everything they're thinking—from discussing their shared experiences with prejudice to him openly demanding she tell him her tragic backstory with Saxton. Still, despite the occasional expositional inelegance, I like the idea of the two of them becoming a dynamic duo for the law enforcement side of the show.
Holloway is getting the much flashier action-adventure half of the series so far. And if Duster can find its own earnest noir tone for the Nina half of things, that would go a long way toward making the show feel more balanced. It's not quite there yet. But pairing Nina with Awan to track down Agent Breen's missing files and investigate Joey's exploded van is a welcome start.
Jim, meanwhile, has quite the 15 hours this week. That starts when Groomes shows up to demand ten grand to stay silent about the fact that Jim is working with the feds. Though Jim plays it cool in the moment, he's anxious enough that he assumes Saxton is calling him into his office to kill him. (Some ominous plastic sheeting doesn't help.) But it turns out Saxton just wants to thank Jim for personally pumping his son's heart during his transplant surgery—something I'm glad the show hasn't forgotten about because I'm still reeling from it.
Whether or not saving Royce's life will buy Jim some grace from Saxton in the future remains to be seen. Rather than push his luck, Jim decides to take matters into his own hands. After Nina turns down his request for help dealing with Groomes (he hasn't delivered anything worthy of official FBI protection yet), he heads off to local fixer Sunglasses to strike a different deal instead: If Sunglasses scares off Groomes, Jim will get him Elvis' famed blue suede shoes—the ultimate prize for a King-obsessed criminal.
It's a supremely goofy crime-of-the-week, with Jim switching his strategy from breaking and entering to party crashing when he finds the house full of guests. That includes Elvis' infamous manager Colonel Tom Parker (Brian Reddy doing a slightly less ridiculous accent than Tom Hanks in Elvis). And in a very meta bit of comedy, guest star Mikaela Hoover is on hand playing future Maude star Adrienne Barbeau in an episode where the real-life Barbeau also appears. The dreams of the 1970s are truly alive and well, folks!
In fact, with an assist from the (fictional) Barbeau, the whole heist goes down way easier than I expected. Jim hilariously just wears the shoes and walks out. Instead, the main action happens back in Phoenix, where a Sunglasses/Groomes barn shootout and that aforementioned bowling-alley brawl between Jim and Sunglasses up the show's violence well beyond its occasional network TV vibes.
Indeed, between Sunglasses' look, the stylish Palm Springs party, the bowling alley setting, that '(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear' needledrop, and the shocking tragic-comic deaths, this episode aims for a sort of Quentin-Tarantino-meets-the-Coen-brothers flair. But what helps keep it from feeling like a mere knockoff is the unexpected core of wholesomeness at its center. What else do you call an episode that ends with Jim and his dad turning over a new emotional leaf while burying a dead body in the desert together?
While I'm not sure if Duster has quite found its right tone yet, that sense of sweetness seems like it could be the key ingredient that helps differentiate the series from all the many reference points it's aping. We have it running between Jim and Luna, Jim and Wade, and now Nina and Awan too. While the show has yet to fully define Jim and Nina's dynamic with one another (they're largely separated into their own storylines again this week), I'm curious to see if/how some warmth might eventually color their currently spiky relationship too.
For now, however, this episode ends with another cliffhanger. Last week showed us Groomes spying on Jim to set up this episode's conflict. Here we see Agent Breen's wife calling a connection in Washington, D.C. to inform him that Nina is looking into Joey's death and Breen's missing files. 'Don't you worry about her, Evelyn,' the cowboy-hat-wearing contact (J.R. Yenque) replies. 'I'll take care of her.' In a traditional prestige show, it might take a whole season to circle back around to that tease. Here it's nice to know that we'll probably be getting more answers as soon as next week.
• This week in 'It's the 1970s!': Shirley Chisholm is running for president and Elvis is planning his Aloha From Hawaii live satellite concert.
• This episode tweaks the show's opening credits to add a pair of blue suede shoes hanging off a powerline. I wonder if we can expect similar episode-specific nods each week.
• I think we're meant to assume Jim buried Sunglasses in the blue suede shoes, but in real life they were sold at a British auction house for $152,000 last year.
• Jim and Nina only share one brief scene this week, but she leaves it frustrated enough that she does a bunch of parking garage push-ups to cool off.
• Izzy takes a rather ominous trip to the doctor's office. Do we think she's sick? Or pregnant?
• Duster clearly wants to honor the sex-positive 1970s feminist movement, but it's a little weird to take the phrase 'grown women make their own choices' and apply it to the sexually abusive power dynamics of Hollywood casting.
• A recovering Royce is excited to receive a copy of Michael Crichton's new book The Terminal Man. (He loved The Andromeda Strain.) We see how he's the soft, nerdy pushover who's being unfairly lifted up over his more hardcore, business-minded sister, Genesis, because of their dad's patriarchal values.
• In what feels like a little bit of a retcon, Nina discovers that Jim was at the scene when Joey died in the car explosion. I wonder if we're going to be in for a reveal that the explosion was actually meant for Jim.
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