[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Duster‘s series premiere.]
The opening scene of Duster finds Rachel Hilson‘s Nina Hayes stoically enduring a barrage of racist microaggressions from her boss at the FBI as he considers whether to grant her wish to report to a field office in Phoenix so she can partake in the investigation she wants to.
It’s the 1970s, and these G-men aren’t used to seeing G-women, let alone a Black G-woman, wearing the same badge. Nina is the first of her kind, but although she is also treading all new territory in the same conversation about her future with the bureau, she knows exactly how to handle this man — with a smile.
“That’s one of my favorite scenes,” Rachel Hilson told TV Insider of the opening exchange. “That was the scene I auditioned with, actually, and I think it gives you so much information about Nina right off the bat.”
From that first glimpse of her, it’s clear that this is a woman who has what it takes to thrive in a hostile environment — a must in this line of work, which is already dangerous under the best of circumstances.
“We wanted to really set the tone of what Nina was up against,” cocreator LaToya Morgan explained of the creative choice to open with this subtly brutal conversation. “Even in that tiny little moment, we see how tenacious she is. She’s still letting them say their craziness, but she’s still confidently and quietly pushing for the thing that she wants. And I think that is essential to her character.”
Josh Holloway, who portrays Jim Ellis, the driver of the title muscle car, rightly describes Hilson’s presence in that tone-setting scene as having “lightness, even though she’s being bombarded by this misogynistic, prejudiced bullsh**. She’s able to maintain a levity in it that … disarms them all. They don’t know what to do with it. I love that vibe.”
Max
Holloway’s character is introduced in the very next scene, as he picks up a payphone in the middle of the desert — the imagination of this very moment is what inspired J.J. Abrams to co-create the show, by the way — and we learn that he has a rather airy demeanor about him, too.
“For Jim as well, bad sh** happens, but he’s breezy with it,” Holloway said. “It moves the show in a fun adventurous way, and we’re still able to tackle these big issues and keep the tone of the show. So that’s unique.”
Indeed, we watch as Jim whips his Duster around just for fun before engaging in a race to do his boss’ bidding and deliver an organ for an off-book transplant procedure. Oh, and there’s a kid with him the whole time who’s his daughter but calls him “Uncle Jim.” The recipient of the organ was the son of Jim’s boss’ Ezra Saxton (Keith David), the underground crime boss Nina just so happens to be hellbent on investigating.
Others at the FBI field office think the Saxton case is cursed, but Nina doesn’t care. Fortunately, she’s partnered with someone who can empathize with her. Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin) is Native American and also deals with racism in the workplace. He says, “Ignorance is the enemy of progress. No matter what, don’t let those f***ers stop you.”
“We wanted to showcase, first of all, the truth of the FBI, which is that there were Native American FBI agents during that time, and so we thought it would be a great opportunity to show not only their partnership, but the different ways in which they were dealing with sort of the discrimination of the time,” Morgan explained of the characters’ pairing. “[We wanted] to show that they were both, in their own quiet ways, fighting against that and that they’re incredible agents despite all that. So you get to see that they are sort of the Davids versus Goliath inside this machine, but they’re there to do good work, and it’s fun watching them do it.”
Max
It doesn’t take long for Nina to come into Jim’s orbit. After she figures out he’s Saxton’s driver and that she can implicate him in crimes, she makes a move to recruit him as a confidential informant. Jim takes an infantilizing tone with Nina at the moment, but he later reveals just how seriously he’s taking Nina by telling his father he’s going to flee the country.
Later, after carrying out a unique mission for the boss — that is, staging compromising pictures of a union rep who’s been causing Saxton trouble at his trucking business and getting jumped by a burly man in the process — Jim finds himself in Nina’s presence once again. This time, she’s got him at gunpoint because his wicked stepmother informed Nina he was planning to go to Mexico. She opts for the carrot instead of the stick, though, and tries to convince Jim once again to work with her — this time, by insisting Saxton killed his beloved brother, just like he killed her father.
He signs the CI agreement, but insists, “I’m not signing this because you threatened me or charmed me or because you think Saxton did it. I’m signing it to prove he didn’t.” She then asks, “What if he did?” To that he answers, “Then I’ll kill him myself.”
So what it is about Nina that makes Jim take such a massive step? “Jim loves his job. He loves being breezy and kind of skipping over the surface of life without having to deal with these harder questions so much, but at the same time, he has a daughter who he’s trying to be more responsible with,” said Holloway. “He’s trying to start growing. Naturally, it’s happening to him and then he meets Nina, who is like a big mirror and forces these questions to the surface. So it’s like, sh**, now I have to grow.”
The episode ends with someone watching Nina and Jim’s meeting from a distance, which spells trouble for everyone involved.
Duster, Thursdays, 9/8c, Max
