Allegiance is a new NBC show about deep cover Soviet spies living in the USA.
It seems to be a response to the hugely successful (at least in the quality of its production) show “The Americans” on another network.
I watched it and was amazed the cast seems to be 3 or 4 times larger than The Americans.
My first thought was how they can afford to pay so many people to participate.
The action was fairly good but terribly involved. I feel like it would take an entire season just to understand what was going on in the first episode. I’m not sure whether that is good or bad.
The one criticism I would make is that the lead female (Hope Davis?) does not seem reasonable (at least not to me) as the mother of her two eldest children. She seems far too young to be reasonable as their mother.
FYI, they are Scott Cohen (as Mark O’Connor) & Margarita Levieva (as Natalie O’Connor).
I loved The Americans so I had high hopes for this. I got 12 (twelve!) minutes into the episode before I had to turn it off. As previously said, it was getting complicated; I bet that KGB to SVR poster gets further play. But the most irksome part was the full-on, mood “setting” music that hit you over the head like a klaxon. The young CIA kid goes to his home (surprise! they’re Russians!) and the music changes to cartoon sitcom style.
Go back and watch The Americans - their use of Tusk in the pilot really drew me in - that’s the way to set a mood using music.
Overall I enjoyed the show. Creatively a bit different than “The Americans”, with the contemporary setting instead of the 80s. Will take a bit to get into the flow.
Hope Davis was born in 1964, making her 60 years old. Margarita Levieva is the older sister, and was born in 1980, making her 34. That would make the mom 26 for her first child.
My issue with the show wasn’t huge. I listened to the tech babble about the steel and iron and melting temperature, and looked it up to confirm they were correct. Cool.
What stuck out to me, when the mom trades out the battery on the son’s phone to make it able to hack and track the phone, she pulls out the phone and swaps the battery. On my phone, if you do that, it kills the power on the phone, and will reboot the phone. You actually have to hit the power button to turn it on.
Even if she managed to think of that, it will have done things to clear the cache, and will be obvious. For example, my smartphone (Samsung Note 3) has a list of previous/active apps. I hit the button, pull up the list, select one of the programs and it may pull up, say, an active game, or my browser with several pages open. Reboot the phone, those will be wiped.
I don’t think that’s possible to avoid, and for someone as detail obsessed as that character, it would be impossible to miss when he checks his phone next. But the show actually had his phone ring. While apparently off. :smack:
I did peg it was probably the older daughter that told the SVR guy they were trying to run.
I thought it was a bit gimmicky (almost in a Disney Channel kind of way) for Alex (the young analyst) to be this savant genius type. I won’t be surprised if he’s a MacGyver too when things get rough.
I also find it hard to believe that the CIA, knowing Alex has a Russian mother and a father with lots of business deals in Russia, would not have done some extreme background checking on his family.
[simpsons]I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something?[/simpsons]
Yeah, lots of real wizard-like tech with the surveillance. They got the Faraday box right.
It’s nitpicking, yet some of the accents (both english and russian) could use some coaching. Like The Americans they mix in subtitled Russian. One scene, though, where Vaso (evil KGB-type guy) meets with his superiors, they all begin speaking in Russian then all easily drop into English. Fine, I thought, a Hollywood convention, similar to Hunt for Red October - They’re still really speaking Russian - why else would they speak English? (yeah, I know, supposedly hard to lie in a 2nd language). But in mid-conversation the boss guy injects a few more Russian phrases!
It’s a mid-season replacement, with 8 episodes confirmed on IMDB. I’ll be back for the 2nd ep for sure.
:smack: Don’t know how I bungled that. (Good thing I didn’t snark afterwards.)
Um, yeah. Too true about the characters not having to be exactly the age of the actors/actresses. I was trying to put it in ballpark. It’s a tight window of possibility.
This week, they have to demonstrate just how evil these new SVR guys are. So what do they do? Have the Residenteur (Russian chief) execute one of his own men for disobeying a direct order.
You see, the son was confronting his parents and accusing mom of being a spy, and the Russians were listening in. The Residenteur decided he was going to turn them in, and sent the goons to kill everyone. Right about then, the parents’ handler shows up and waves the goons off, because the Mom says she was having an affair, to explain why she was missing all those times. Which shuts down the son and cuts off the “spy” angle. So there no longer was a threat.
But the Residenteur throws a tantrum and kills the guy to make a point. What point, exactly, is lost except “I’m evil, here’s proof”.
Because the handler was correct. He was listening in from his car, while the henchmen got out of their van and were walking in the street, just as the mom gave her explanation. The henchmen didn’t hear what he did.
Okay, tonight’s episode had another “hey wait” moment.
So the computer was missing, and Alex is convinced that the Russians got to it first. He’s instructed to find out what happened.
So after realizing there was no alarm that should have sounded, he and Michelle head to the court house to investigate. They find the alarm off, open the alarm box and find the cut wire. They snoop around upstairs and find footprints in the dust. They look around and discover the tunnel and find the gate had residue of some sort and no lock. All of this is solid evidence that Alex was correct, that the Russians did break in and beat them to the laptop.
Then he and Michelle get into a discussion on how to get the camera footage from the Freemason Temple, and they don’t have justification, and need another way to prove the break in.
Wait, what? Why didn’t you take pictures of the cut wire, the footprints, the gate and missing lock? Put that evidence to the FISA judge and you’ve got something.
Yeah, it would be much better to give photographic evidence of someone entering the Temple, especially identifying the agents in question. But what they have is strong enough to argue that there’s a likelihood Alex was right. Who else would have put the footprints? Why was the wire to the alarm cut if not from a breakin? Why was the lock missing from the gate, and what is the residue? Lab test to ID that.
All that computer stuff hurt my head it was so ridiculously wrong. You don’t see the content of encrypted files on the screen and can’t decrypt said info by way of a screen capture on a cellphone. When a computer is formatting the hard drive, the screen does not get all corrupt and unreadable. And I don’t know what the hell sort of nonsense Natalya was spouting about what she was doing to trick the evil overlord into not being able to tell what they did (even though he totally knew anyway). I mean, it wasn’t two people typing on the same keyboard level, but it was still utter bullshit.
After they see the camera, they instead decide to wait inside the bus HQ for hours while they download their bus cams from the “slow computer”. Then take the train back and sit in the office perusing the video. Had they got the mason video, of course, the big reveal would spoil everything the show has planned.
She agreed the hard-drive was toast, then said the “solid-state layer was intact” and she’d now encrypt that. I assume the writers meant that by obfuscating the front end, that the Russians wouldn’t get to see what’s on the hard-drive. At first she says “never” and later says “a month” but she only encrypts, not decrypts. Yeah, my head hurt too.
Katya (inside the Masonic Temple): “Who makes buildings like this”? - I suppose she hasn’t been to Russia since Soviet times, when most of the churches were warehouses or had swimming pools (!) for navy diver training), but surely she knows the grandeur of Russian churches.
Katya (on no electric outlet. Oops!): “How do they vacuum?” Eye-rollingly silly.
I’ve watched all the episodes. I’m enjoying it so far. Because the mom & dad are inactive agents who are resisting the KGB. They don’t want to spy. But they are caught in the middle. FBI would arrest them. KGB will kill them. Watching them navigate this mess is interesting.
I’m curious what the son will do when he learns the truth. Who will he support?
He’ll help his parents, absolutely. Got to get rid of that Mason camera footage, right off.
And from that, all the 3-letter-orgs will know<<something>> about ‘Black Dagger’ with a “blast radius of half a mile”. Or maybe not. Yet Alex, and now maybe Vaso (with Damocles Sword dangling) will go along with this.
I thought the fifth episode was the best, now that Alex knows what his family does. Aaaannd it’s canceled. Dismal ratings. Hopefully the folks at FX will keep The Americans going.
The only magic trope this week was the use of giant magnets to erase a hard-drive. Why did it have to be a hard-drive? I realize the show is based on an Israeli show, where they might have had VHS tapes which would be more feasibly erased. It was a good scene, and Breaking Bad used a giant car-carrying magnet to the same, if much more fun-looking, effect.
If the rest of the show pops up on Netflix or something, I’d watch some more.
It was canceled? So we’ll never know how it turns out.
My biggest issue was they made the KGB too all knowing and controlling. Every move that family made was being watched. There was no way their little plan to go to the FBI would ever work. That’s just sloppy writing. Also there was no way the mom with the stunning long blonde hair could not be noticed. Spy characters are usually nondescript people that don’t attract attention. Spy mom would be noticed and remembered anywhere she went.
I had gotten quite interested in the characters and plot. I guess now we have to imagine our own ending.
I watched the first couple of episodes, but the stupidity was too hard to take. I hadn’t heard about the cancellation, but the Wikipedia article confirms it. And it’s where I learned that this show is an adaption of an Israeli series called The Gordin Cell, although that title makes it sound like a Robert Ludlum novel. (You might remember that Homeland was also an adaption of an Israeli series, and that did well.)
