Fast and Furry-ous! Young Luna watches Looney Tunes at Izzy’s place. She’s eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and laughing at the Roadrunner’s antics. “Uncle Jim, you’re missing it!”
If she could see him, she’d call out how he’s getting that vein again. The one that pulsates in the center of his forehead whenever being a criminal driver gets too hinky. Which these days, as we know from watching Duster, happens a lot. But Luna can’t see Jim, because in another one of this show’s sublime reference points to bygone modes of communication, he’s got the telephone cord stretched into the bathroom with the door closed. Jim doesn’t want Luna to overhear some chilling news: Mad Raul has sent Enrique the Blade (Rigo Sanchez) to collect Jim’s soul for wheelman services un-rendered.
“The Roadrunner’s my favorite,” Luna says. “He’s fast and smart.” But Jim Ellis is imagining his comeuppance in Looney Tunes form. Meep-Meep! Beware the flying Acme daggers of Enrique the Blade. In this episode of Duster, they don’t land where anyone expects.
The open for Duster Episode 4 is a great setup for its roaring, Hot Wheels ad-inspired credits, which it further backs later with a nice moment between Izzy and her boyfriend, local doctor Dave Callahan (Matt Lauria). Dave brings Luna actual die-cast Hot Wheels and one of those long looping plastic tracks, as well as a piece of advice for Iz. If she organizes her fellow lady long-haul truckers into a bloc, “they’ll follow where you lead.” With a kiss and a compliment – “Thanks, ‘Dr. César Chavez’” – Izzy does exactly that. Bob Temple (Kevin Chamberlin), the corrupt union official who would rather ogle her ass than respond to documented proof of widespread sexual harrassment at truck stops – Temple’s the same guy Saxton had Jim get compromising photos of earlier this season – can go fuck himself. “I’m not just gonna sit around,” Izzy says as she rallies a group of female truckers. “Like hell it’s gonna be this way when Luna’s my age. Ladies, we’re going to war.”
At the Phoenix field office, after more disrespect from Abbott and the rest, Agent Nina Hayes does stress-burning push-ups in the file room. Evidently Breen committed suicide at the mental hospital, which is somehow her fault. But remember what he told her: follow the numbers. And with Awan, NIna translates the cryptic, seemingly mislabeled file numbers Breen left behind into lats and longs for a map point located out on the desert fringes of the Navajo Nation.
The reservation where he was raised is not necessarily a place Awan wishes to visit. When he joined the bureau, it was because “We need someone who knows…even if some people hate me for it.” People like Awan’s Navajo father, who considers him a traitor for joining the enforcement agency of a government who persecuted and displaced their people. It’s another bonding moment for the two agents, each of them highly capable individuals unfairly derided for their gender or heritage, and labeled as outsiders by the establishment.
What did Breen leave for Nina and Awan to find? A betamax tape cartridge, stuffed into the dirt-filled trunk of a rusted-out deuce coupe. And once they get it back to HQ, the grainy and degraded footage it contains yields a name and a phrase. “Xavier,” and “Trust no one.”
Xavier. That’s the same name surfaced in Ezra Saxton’s Episode 3 meeting in Tucson with the mysterious Russian. And while Hayes continues to connect the dots on her end, Jim Ellis finagles his way onto a Scottsdale run with Royce, Sax’s heart-transplanted son. The Snowbird warehouse they visit is full of more intel about Sax’s criminal enterprise. Proof that Sax is running guns in his trucks, plus canary yellow carbons of purchase orders and invoices, hard evidence Jim can feed Nina. But only if he makes it back to Phoenix alive. Bienvenidos, Enrique the Blade.
Jim’s encounter with the Blade does not follow his deadly cartoon daydream. Instead, because Duster just keeps getting more awesome, Ellis and the edged weapons hitman pause their entertaining scrap in a dusty roadside service station to consider the inequities of their line of work. Jim’s a driver. Enrique, an assassin. But ultimately, they’re just two guys who take orders from a boss. And whether that’s Sax or Mad Raul, they’re never in on the bigger picture. They agree this is frustrating.
But this philosophical left turn inside a drag-out fistfight plunges Duster even further into pulp when it’s tied back to Royce, and his overheating the flathead V-12 engine in the “Aero-Mobile,” a Lincoln Model K famously customized by 20th century weirdo billionaire Howard Hughes. The car was at the warehouse, too. (Royce on Hughes: “He’s doing some business with Pops.”) It’s not like we get someone riffing on a version, like Leo or Dominic Cooper. Duster is too cool and car-centric for that. We get the show’s version of his powerful convertible instead, which features the vehicle’s distinctive aluminum boat-tail, fabricated by Hughes Aircraft Corporation.
And an episode which began with Looney Tunes footage and incorporates the lore of a reclusive, eccentric titan of industry ends on a note that’s even more crazy. When Jim and Royce’s Duster vs. hot rod Lincoln drag race randomly runs two guys dressed like Mormons off the road, those two reach in the trunk of their Ford Galaxie for shotguns and ski masks. They end up stealing the Aero-Mobile. And wheelman and assassin further pause their altercation for a mutually-beneficial kill-a-thon of the thieving supposed Mormons. Let those daggers fly, Enrique the Blade! Who could have known, when this episode started, how and where they would land.
Mickey Murray, “Sticky Sue”
Tommy James, “Draggin’ the Line”
Tito Puente, “Oye Cómo Va”
Bang, “Come With Me”
The Universals, “New Generation”
Jimmy Castor Bunch, “It’s Just Begun”
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.