I am about to out myself as the nerdiest nerd, but I have a question: Do you all know about room escape games? These online Flash games that put you in a locked room and to find your way out you have to a) find stuff, b) figure out how the stuff works together, and c) solve various logic puzzles that range in difficulty from child’s play to beyond MENSA?

No?

Well, never mind, then. Only I was going to say that at one point in this week’s episode of Rubicon, it felt like Will was in a room escape game: dismantling the motorcycle David left him (first episode), finding the photograph of David and David’s son Evan (who wants the bike, swearing that David wanted him to have it), treating the photograph as a clue and using it to deduce that the packing tape stitching together the bike seat was more than just packing tape, finding the number code, and then ripping the seat apart to find the gun.

[The link to room escape games, by the way, leads to a casual game site that picks out some of the best games out there -- and usually provides a walkthrough to consult when you get stuck. I recommend anything by Mateusz Skutnik: his Great Kitchen Escape was the first room escape game I ever played, and his Submachine series is simply the best.]

But back to Rubicon. It’s still a little too early to comment on the central mystery, and frankly this episode doesn’t really provide any forward motion on that front anyway. We get Ed Bancroft and Will Travers agreeing that David was probably murdered and probably saw it coming and that’s why he left all these clues for Will; we get the baseball number codes and then the names of three people out of seven total that were named by the code, and hopefully they’ll come into play soon. Those names, for future reference: Jeffery Garcia, Alfred Bermudez, Randy Hobbs.

At the beginning of the episode, Will’s being followed by someone, and someone other than the two guys who were watching him in the last episode. Will’s told by Ingram that he was being watched as part of his vetting process, but I think that’s BS, especially as he neglected to tell Will that his stalker was FBI (which we find out via the other two guys). I think Ingram wants Will watched for the same reason as the first two guys — to find out how much Will knows and how close he gets to uncovering whatever conspiracy this is.

We also get a tiny glimpse into the private lives of two other characters: it turns out that Miles is having some family issues — which perhaps explains his behavior in the last episode. Maggie said that he was upset about something and was transferring that to the situation in Nigeria; Miles dodges Will’s questions about his family. From the phone call between Miles and his (ex?) wife Maureen, it sounds as though they’re separated, on the way to divorce. And the father of Maggie’s child shows up unexpectedly, and she seems both afraid of him and willing to work out some sort of deal so that their kid can have a “normal life,” but it’s not clear at all what happened between them (is he an ex-con? Was he abusive? Absentee?) and honestly? I don’t really care all that much. I don’t find her character particularly compelling.

Miles raises an interesting question: why is their group studying Yuri Popovich and George Boeck, when they’re the Middle East team? Why isn’t another team investigating Boeck and the other mystery guy meeting with Popovich? It explains Grant’s rather insubordinate “Why?” from last week, when Will handed down the assignment. And it is curious: will it turn out to be connected to Middle East politics, or is it a red herring thrown by this shadowy conspiracy group for the purpose of distracting Will and Will’s team?

There wasn’t much on the Katherine Rhumor front. She goes to dinner with Tom’s friend James, who swears he knew nothing about the townhouse Tom left to Katherine, but then we see him go into the townhouse and grab a photograph of a group of young boys — assumedly Tom and James are among them. I’ll go further and suggest that this photograph is of all of the older men who gather together at the end of the first episode, and we’re dealing with some sort of Skull and Bones/Secret History type thing. Maybe?

One final question: I wonder, as a special Easter egg for viewers, whether each episode’s title is a sort of clue. First episode is “Gone in the Teeth,” second is “The First Day of School,” and this episode is “Keep the Ends Out.” They’re similar to both crossword puzzle clues and acrostic puzzle clues, and don’t really have much to do directly with what happens in each episode (except for “The First Day of School,” which is about Will’s first day as David’s successor). I COULD be overthinking this, as I am wont to do. And I COULD be giving the show too much credit. But it’s a smart show already and I wouldn’t put it past a smart show about word puzzles to do something fun with the episode titles. Something to play with, anyway. Who wants to help?

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I’m not known as a baseball fanatic. I enjoy the game — far more when I’m watching it live than on TV — and I’m a loyal Minnesota Twins fan, but I don’t follow statistics or players (though it has become easy to do so now that I have officially “Liked” the Twins Facebook page and followed @minnesotatwins on Twitter). All the same, I read the news about Target Field — the brand new OUTDOOR baseball stadium — with great interest, and when I realized that the Twins would be finishing up their series against the Yankees on the day we were set to arrive in Minneapolis I knew that I had to be at that game.

All props go to Dan for actually making it happen. I tried for tickets via the Twins’ site but the game had already sold out — no surprise, really, but disappointing. I was ready to admit defeat and try for tickets for another time, another visit, but Dan insisted that we be there, and he found tickets on StubHub. This is remarkable not for Dan’s facility with the Internet, but that he was determined to get to a Twins game at all. The Twins, you see, are responsible for Dan’s disillusionment with Major League Baseball. He used to love the game. But in 1987 he picked the St. Louis Cardinals to go all the way and while they did indeed make it to the World Series that year, they were defeated 4 games to 3 by . . . the Minnesota Twins (wonk, wonk). He was utterly heartbroken and couldn’t watch baseball after that. So that he was more than willing to procure tickets to fulfill one of my wishes says everything you need to know about the man’s good nature and generous spirit. Not to mention he got two extra tickets so some family members could join us.

There were two main reasons I so desperately wanted to see a game at Target Field. First, I’d never seen the Twins play outdoors before. Second, I wanted to see the showpiece of the ballpark, the big original Twins logo done up in neon, perform its magic when one of the Twins hit a home run. A tall order — someone would have to hit a home run — and I knew the odds were against it, but I had hopes. More on that later.

My first live view of Target Field did not disappoint.

There’s the neon logo, off the the right of the Jumbotron. When a Twin scores a run, the state outline lights up. For the first two runs I had a Dayenu moment because honestly, that would’ve been enough for me to feel completely satisfied. But it gets better. So. Much. Better.

Our seats were in the waaaaaaay back, all the way up at the top. However, one of the beautiful things about Target Field is that, with one famous exception, there doesn’t seem to be a bad seat in the park. This was our view of the diamond:

Far away, but still able to see everything and occasionally weigh in on whether a pitch was a strike or a ball.

And this was our spectacular view of downtown Minneapolis:

It was wonderful to watch the light from the setting sun play off the buildings.

And when the sun had all but set, downtown Minneapolis was resplendent in deep aquatic blues.

(Apologies for the brightness of the stadium lights. And the tiny dots you see at the top of the screen aren’t stars, they’re bugs. Sitting up at the top by the lights meant we got SWARMED.)

The game itself was wildly exciting. Though the Twins had lost to the Yankees by one run in both of the previous games, they had the upper hand in this game almost from the beginning. I think there was an error in an early inning, but it’s been two weeks since the game and my memory is a little fuzzy. But in the 6th inning, Jason Kubel hit a home run.

And that’s when the neon logo does its thing. It’s not just amazingly beautiful, with the Minneapolis and St. Paul players shaking hands over the Mississippi River. No, no. When the Twins score a home run, the Minneapolis player and the St. Paul player actually shake hands on a job well done. They ACTUALLY SHAKE HANDS. I was too busy jumping up and down and screaming like a teenager in 1964 watching the Beatles (tm Dan) to take a video, but here’s one I found on YouTube:

Tell me that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.

And I got to see it TWICE that night. After his solo shot, Jason Kubel hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the 7th inning, bringing the score to where it would stay, 8-2.

(I completely overlooked how the T and the s blink on and off to display “win” alternating with “Twins.” And here I didn’t think it was possible to love that logo more.)

We left after the 7th inning — my four-year-old nephew was fading fast and on top of that the bug situation was out of control (which sounds silly, but you have NO IDEA) — and though I normally prefer to stay til the end of a game, leaving on such a high note felt all right. The experience of watching a game surrounded by Twins fans — for the first time since the early 90s, and after eight years of living in New York — is not one I’m likely to forget any time soon, and one I hope to repeat as often as possible.

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