There is another mystery that I cannot figure out. It concerns Episode 10 of Season 02.
Larrick breaks into the basement of a home in which a family of three lives. He sees their child (a small girl) but she does not see him. We don’t seem to recognize that family and neither does he.
Would anyone here have seen them before?
These were the people who had a big box of wires in their basement as well as a large number of telephones in their basement. I may be wrong here. It may have been their neighbors who had all the phones.
I sure would love to know if anyone here knows who these people are? Did we ever see them before?
Larrick makes a phone call to one of the wires in their junction box and Kate picks up the phone on the other end of the line. Larrick asks if “Robert” or “Bobbie” is home (or someone else whose name I didn’t recognize.
Does anyone here know why he would have entered that particular basement? I find the whole matter extremely puzzling and I sure would love to know what is going on there. Would anyone here have any guess as to what is going on? I honestly don’t know. Anyway, I find it all very puzzling. I sure do hope that some answers are forthcoming in the last three episodes of this season.
We’ve several times seen a guy in a room with a lot of phones who would pass information back and forth between various groups of KGB operatives, including the super-secret ones like Phillip and Elizabeth.
Larrick, who was previously spying for the KGB due to being blackmailed, presumably had a phone number to call in case of emergency or to pass on information. He used fake police credentials to convince a lady at the phone company to give him some routing information for that phone number. He then went and looked at a switchboard, and tracked that phone number to a house on a residential street. He broke into that house, and saw an apparently completely innocent family. He went into their basement, and then saw that a bunch of phone lines that went into that house actually then went into the basement of a neighboring house. (So that even if someone was trying to track this phone number, they’d end up at a neighboring house.) He then went into that basement. There he found the room-with-lots-of-phones-KGB-switchboard, and the guy who passes messages around. That guy saw him, and pressed a button intended to fry some of his sensitive equipment. Larrick shot him. Larrick them worked on reconstructing the fried equipment, and was able to make a phone call to Phillip and Elizabeth’s new contact lady. So he now presumably knows her “real” phone number.
In other words, Larrick doesn’t like being blackmailed, doesn’t like that some of his buddies were killed, and is trying to track down Phillip and Elizabeth and their operation. His motives are some combination of a desire for revenge, a desire to cover that he was a spy, and possibly actual patriotism.
That certainly seems like an excellent system to enable various agents in the same city to communicate. It also re-enforces the notion that hiding something in a normal looking residential home in the suburbs may be the best place to hide it in suburban America. It was interesting to see all those calls that began like, “Hello. This is Robert Johnson calling on behalf of the Richard T. Wydmark Elementary School Spring Drive. … Would you be willing to make a contribution this year?” Thank you for that info.
However, it seems very strange to route someone to a house next door to the real house (the one with the real junction box and all the phone lines) and that wouldn’t help hide the real house hardly at all. If you can route the call to one house away … Why not route it to two blocks away?
Do you think Larrick (or a friend) will now attempt to kill Kate? (P&E’s new contact).
Well, if the routing requires actually physically sneaking into your neighbor’s house and making a hole in their wall and routing physical phone cables out their wall and into your basement, then the shorter distance is far more practical for a number of reasons. I mean, there’s a limit to how paranoid you can be, and they were VERY paranoid, but (in this context) not paranoid enough.
I’m not sure he knows her real phone number (I don’t remember seeing the display and I’ve since deleted the episode so I can’t re-check). And even if he did, he doesn’t know who the “her” was on the other end of that phone. What he knows is that he’s found a communications center, there are people who will pick up on the other end of the lines (and he might be able to trace some of those lines), and that it’s not entirely unlikely that someone may be calling in as well.
Yeah, it’s not quite clear what he knows. But it’s certainly plausible that he knows SOMETHING. I won’t feel like it came out of nowhere if next episode he shows up in her bedroom and holds a knife to her throat and seems to know who she is.
I don’t know about you, but Kate has always seemed far too weak to be a permanent character in possession of her role.
She is only like a shadow to the other handlers we’ve seen (thinking mostly of Grandma).
Doesn’t a handler have to have some kind of experience with various techniques?
Kate doesn’t seem like she knows much of anything. She doesn’t seem like she could stand up to a mildly forceful fart expelled in her direction.
I’m very much expecting her to be dead and gone before too many more episodes. And good riddance to her. What a wishy washy weakling! What did she ever bring to this character?
Prefatory caveat: I still think this is the best show currently airing on TV. But I do have some gripes, which to some might fall to the level of nitpicks though I think they’re a tad more significant than that, as I hold shows like this and Breaking Bad to higher standards.
As others have noted, all the digging and so on would be tricky. But I do agree that what they did was not really good enough, and would in fact seem to cause more problems than it solves. If someone (a freelancer like Larrick, or even moreso a federal agent) has done enough digging to find the calls route to that family’s house, surely they are going to find the cable going next door. Yet it also allows for another way of potentially being discovered: some electrician or phone company worker coming to work on that family’s house and discovering and reporting the rerouting. So it strikes me that it raises the KGB operative’s risk more than it lowers it.
But surely it’s only hours at most before others in the KGB discover this communications centre has been compromised? Hard to imagine that anyone calling in wouldn’t immediately know something was wrong. And that one guy is the only one they’ve shown, but he can’t go 24/7 without sleep, not to mention someone needing to do the shopping etc. So there must be others who staff the place.
I wouldn’t feel it came out of nowhere *dramatically *speaking after they showed her picking up (btw to answer the earlier question, I’m pretty sure “Bobby” is just a name the guy made up to cover up his call as being just a wrong number). But in terms of logic and realism, I’d call bullshit on that and be kind of annoyed with the writers’ using a lazy cheat.
That part was OK. But the way they did it made no sense — it depended on nobody else using a pool that apparently served the entire hotel, and apparently let anyone in. The target saw Elizabeth in the pool with him, and thought nothing of it, so there’s no reason another guest wouldn’t have been there, even if he had no bodyguards.
And then she had to overpower him to administer the poison, and overpower him in a way that left no evidence of a struggle. I can believe a well trained woman her size can use kicks and strikes to stun a man long enough to give her a clean shot with a gun, but not this.
I certainly don’t think it’s LAZY. They set it up as:
(1) the KGB very careful and paranoidly set up a way to communicate without being traced
(2) only someone who is very very skilled and tenacious could pentrated their veil of secrecy
(3) Larrick IS very very skilled and tenacious, and thus was able to do something that the vast majority of people would not, and at least partially pierce that veil.
I’m by no means an authority on early-1980’s telecommunications technology, so if there were some details that didn’t actually make real-world sense, that’s fine with me, because they paid their dues, so to speak, and they showed Larrick paying his dues. On the other hand, if weeks or months go by and the KGB people don’t even NOTICE that their switchboard has been compromised, then we swing back towards it being a lazy cheat. But if Larrick gets over to Kate’s house in an hour, I will be perfectly happy with that. (And of course the show is often non-specific about how much time passes between each episode.) (I’ll also accept some dialog like “they blew up our call center and killed Fyodor” “does that mean that someone now knows where I live?” “very unlikely, he hit the destruct button… it’s a risk, but moving you to a new address would expose you and be a bigger risk.”)
I hear ya, but I would also want something further in terms of showing how he got from using one frayed/scorched wire (in a bundle of many of them) to get Kate to answer the phone, to having her exact address.
I suspect they won’t provide that, though; and I will have to chalk that up along with the “you could have destroyed us both” bit as being signs that even the writers of extraordinary shows use lazy shortcuts at times, when they want to move the plot from A to B. (Even *Breaking Bad *did it with the Brock poisoning storyline: revisiting that misstep in the final season, for the purpose of repositioning Jesse, was really the only flaw in an otherwise perfect season of TV.)
Well, one of the goals of Russian communism was to break the power of religious institutions and eventually replace religious belief with atheism. The Soviet regime led various anti-religious campaigns and persecuted many religious leaders throughout its history. So yes, it’s entirely believable (and expected) that their KGB agents would be antagonistic to Christianity.
I’m having trouble believing that all these KGB agents really believe that “Mother Russia” is a good, kind, benevolent place and that the USA is an evil monster threatening the entire world.
My problem is that they seem to see the situation as entirely black and white - despite what Nina said about how they see everything as “grey”.
Surely word would have filtered down to them about all the purges Stalin engineered - about all the people he unfairly had killed and/or imprisoned or who starved to death.
Stalin was a crazy monster. He was good at what he did - for sure. But everyone who knew him was terrified of him and must have known a little bit of the truth of his nature. I remember some stories of how he behaved at dinners with several other heads of states. Do any of you know the stories to which I’m referring? He behaved like a 6 year-old bully towards the other heads of state. He behaved much like Joffrey from the Game of Thrones.
Why do none of the present day KGB agents seem to know any of this? Why do they see everything as purely one-sided?
It seems to me they are just too smart to fall for that. I just don’t get it. But Phillip is clearly a little different from all the others. I would love to see that difference evolve into a major subplot. I think that would be great.
I don’t think they have to think that Mother Russia is good and kind and benevolent. But it’s their home, it’s where they grew up. Why wouldn’t they be loyal to it? And there are certainly plenty of completely legitimate examples of the USA acting like an imperialist dickhole that loom larger in their minds than in ours.
So in an era post-“destalinisation”, there would be no reason for patriotic Soviet citizens to think that anything Stalin did was a reason to undermine their faith in their “motherland”. In fact, the willingness to do what Khrushchev did could be seen (and I would agree) as a sign of the government’s refreshing willingness to be self-corrective and to examine past failures.
In our own country we have had a number of presidents who were truly evil men, but you’re unlikely to find many Americans who think so. Less than a century ago we had a president who was at least as racist as Bundy and Sterling put together (and this cannot be dismissed as just par for the course at the time: he reversed the integration of the federal bureaucracy, and would never have invited an African American to dine at the White House as Teddy Roosevelt had a few years earlier).
Yet I don’t know about anyone else, but I went through school learning nothing about the racism, and being taught about Wilson as one of the better presidents. As Matthew Yglesias points out, this pro-Wilson bias still exists among presidential scholars, though Yglesias rightly characterises this as “slightly nuts”:
So if anything, I’d say the USSR was more willing to confront what Stalin did than we in our country are willing to do concerning our past leaders.
I agree it had elements of implausability, but they showed Elizabeth locking the door to the pool when she came in (so no other guest could enter, although they could have looked in and seen people swimming and knocked or called out. I’m willing to give them a pass that at least addressed the possibility of more guests coming in).
I think she was so successful overpowering him because she surprised him and managed to wrap herself around him under water, depriving him of air. She delibrately let him up, when he would come up gasping, to ensure he breathed in the gas.
A LOT of the stuff Elizabeth and Clark do verges on the impossible, super spy, James Bond-like level. I like the show, so I try to just go with it.
Philip already sees the world as grey. Elizabeth is getting there, albeit much more slowly and reluctantly. That difference in world view was established in the very first episode and has been an ongoing theme. A good example was last season’s episode about the attempted Reagan assassination. Elizabeth was convinced that Al Haig was trying to take over the US government based on some shoddy intelligence. She was all set to transmit this intelligence to Moscow, which could have started World War III. But Philip convinced her that things like that just don’t happen in the US.
I remember very clearly when Elizabeth awa few other KGB people believed Haig was seriously attempting a coup to take over the federal govt.
IMHO that was possibly the very best event in this entire show for many reasons. That was truly excellent. Not because they actually believed it was true. But because of all the events surrounding that incident. It was truly a “wow!” moment for me and I would love to see several more of those. However, I doubt that the show runner(s) could ever find another event to make the nature of the people involved more evident.