Quite an interesting episode. The last scene with Phillip and Gabriel was one of the better scenes of late…I thought it was great. You gotta give it to Phillip for having the guts to tell his supervisor to his face what he thinks, and Mr. Handler seemed to be none too pleased. Perhaps they are not used to any back talk from their underlings.
Last week I opined there might be more friction between Phillip and his cohorts, and that final scene—plus the early indications of possible conflict between E and P over Martha—appear to be bearing that out.
Kudos to the lady who tells E “That’s what evil people tell themselves when they do evil things” (hope I have that accurately).
What a great way to go out…basically telling E to go to hell. Fantastic!
Martha’s behavior makes no sense to me. She is behaving like a lunatic.
“Oh Clark, children are not realistic at this time.”
I can’t believe for a second that any real woman born on Planet Earth would ever react that way. I expected Martha to either run to her FBI people or have a screaming session with Clark who has fucked up her life in a major way or try to convince Clark to run away to a different country and start a new life.
But, Hey! That’s just me.
And what about that South African kid who figures he can fix things by killing the student who didn’t work out. I remember posting that I thought he was a screw up for leaning on the horn in the car when E clearly told him to give it two quick taps. Now it turns out he also screwed up in being seen. But to figure that he can fix things by putting a bullet in that other kids head? Don’t make much sense to me.
I’m only about half way thru. There were lots of other things about this episode that just didn’t make sense to me. The old lady had some guts. But her behavior didn’t make much sense to me either. I would never had voluntarily taken those pills. Maybe more about that later.
Right now I wanna go see who wrote this thing. I can’t believe whoever it was has written many other scripts. Because there was def something wrong with this one.
I think that everyone agreed last week that Phillip would be insane to keep seeing Martha – the only question was whether or not to kill her. And now we see that he not only went back to her apartment, but it took about two seconds to have his handler agree to put Phillip’s life in the hands of an untrained suspect in an intensive FBI investigation, who as a bonus appears to be borderline crazy.
And just to make the episode completely crazy, shortly after ignoring the clear and present danger that Martha embodies, they killed a harmless old woman, when there was no need to do anything but just finish their job quietly and leave. One peek at her with a mirror around the corner should have been enough to see that there was zero chance she would go rooting around the warehouse.
Why bug the mail robot anyway? It goes up and down the hallway, beeping, which means even if the recorder is sound activated, it will be recording all the time, so they’ll have to listen to ten hours of tape a day. And I doubt that anybody’s going to be discussing top secret stuff while following it around.
Well, at least the kid atoned for coming down the ladder too soon by committing a messy murder without permission. That ought to get him back on the A-list.
As anticipated Martha accepts the deal, but then fully embraces it … and she’s making this deal NOT with Clark (who she knows is bogus) but with someone she chooses to know nothing about …
The second outstanding strand was the two mothers/wives thing. The random old lady and E … the other woman, complicated marriages, family, children … a lot for E to ponder as she accepts P is effectively in another marriage.
I swear this is the ony show I can recall having more in the subtext than in the dialogue.
And yay! Two deaths this week - that’s more like it!
If anyone is still interested I’ll blog about this epi later
I thought it was one of the best episodes of the season so far.
I too question the decision to keep Martha around. However, it appears she’s quite willing to look the other way and continue providing information to Clark. Something about her demeanor in that scene was off though.
I totally disagree that the old woman didn’t have to die. Even if they were wearing disguises, the old woman would have told police that someone was screwing around with the machines. It wouldn’t take long before the FBI figured out that someone tampered with the mail robot, and their whole plan would be shot to hell.
You make me laugh. (in a good way - not in a bad way).
I have been remiss because I recall you posted that you blogged about this show but I never got around to reading your blog. But I feel like I owe you an apology for that and if I don’t go and read your blogs now, I don’t feel like I will be able to show my face around here again.
But, right now, I’m just feeling completely fractured by that last episode. I feel like I’ve been bashed into a thousand piecese.
I really love this show. It’s just one of the two best shows I think I’ev ever seen on TV (Better Call Saul is just as good IMHO). For a long time, I thought I knew how this thing was going and I felt really comfortable with it. But after last night’s episode, I am not feeling any comfort any more.
There was so much more I’d like to say about it. But I’m just feeling so fractured right now. Kind of silly to feel that way about a TV show, I guess. I haven’t felt this bad since my sister died and I’m sure most people would think that was pretty strange. Well, so be it. I can’t help it.
But I feel the need to go and watch it again. One thing I feel safe in predicting however. When the old lady said, “That is what evil people say when they are doing evil things” … I bet that line will stay with Elizabeth for the entire remainder of this show and there will come a time when she and P disagree strongly about something (probably Paige) that she will recall that line and maybe even tell P about it and it just may change her behavior and make her do something against the will of The Party.
I thought this was a great episode… the scene with Elizabeth and the old lady was so gripping, a great performance by both actresses.
I agree that the Martha situation is a bit weird. What does she now think is going on? She knows that Clarke is a liar and is spying for some unknown entity but she still believes that he really honestly loves her and she’s therefore just going to pretend that none of it happened? Is that level of denial humanly possible?
I think Martha is lost and that she honestly doesn’t know what to do next. And I can’t say I blame her. While she was being a bit willfully blind when she bought the story about his being an internal investigator, she’s not a fundamentally stupid woman. She’s now sure that “Clark” is a spy for someone who might kill her at any time, will probably kill her if she becomes a threat, will possibly do so if she merely stops being useful. She also knows that if she turns herself in, she will at the very least go to prison for treason. At this point, all she can do is keep going forward and hope that a way out presents itself and in the meantime keep feeding Clark homemade dinners and a few tidbits of office information under the hope that it keeps her alive and out of jail for at least one more day.
I just went back to see who it was that wrote this past episode (S03E09). It was written by Nathan Barr and here is the link to that episode.
OMG! Take a look at this guy. He looks as if he is 14 years old. Of course, that could be an old photo and age isn’t really that important. After all, Mozart (blah blah blah).
But the most surprising thing to me was that he is listed primarily as a musician and composer and not as a writer. Still, if he got to write an episode on this show, he really must know what he’s doing and I have to admit the problem is likely mine and not his. I prolly just don’t understand what is going on as well as I would like to. Bottom line? This guy must have a huge amount of talent.
Also, I read up_the_junction’s blog for the previous episode (S03E08) “Divestment”. It seemed quite advanced to me. The writing was like that of a grad student. I’m trying to say that I thought it was over my head.
Consider the following paragraph from that blog:
This story dominates into the second half of the episode before it ends in a parked car denouement; two guys sitting talking war, marriage and wives. There was a lot of that in 1982, as now: a poignant, understated, perceptive moment. The two soldiers – only briefly met – then go their separate, stoic way.
I had a hard time following this. I think it’s probably because you’re writing style is quite advanced. Probably fair to say it is over my head. But I think it’s amazing that you actually have the energy and drive to write this blog. I would love to do that. I’m just missing enough talent to make it possible.
Congratulations to you for tackling this and I hope you get some tangible rewards or recognition from doing this.
Me too! I kept hoping with each scene change that it wasn’t over yet. A polarizing episode, apparently.
I thought the Martha plot was beautifully handled, even if it previously looked like it was going a different direction. I don’t think she’s remotely “pretending none of it happened”. It’s more like “okay, you’re some kind of spy, but I still love you and I believe you love me, and I still want to be with you”. Which may seem crazy from a certain perspective, but I think we’ve seen that she’s actually right: he *does *love her.
And I don’t think it’s so implausible that in a world where KGB illegals have developed other assets who are not dupes (Fred, for instance), it would be possible to bring someone into the fold who has fallen in love with one of the illegals.
P.S. I haven’t followed links to up_the_junction’s blog up to now, but the taste posted just above has piqued my interest.
I believe that Martha thinks she can play Clark–can feed him information as before, and lull him into a misstep which will reveal who he’s actually working for. I think that’s what accounts for the odd affect. She’s all bright-and-cheerful, in a way that makes no sense, otherwise.
I believe Martha thinks that by bringing this bombshell intelligence (about an enemy spy) to her bosses, she can become the Hero instead of the (treasonous) Dupe.
This site needs to have a betting function! I would eagerly make you a wager that this is incorrect, and that she is sincere in wanting to stay with Clark. (But hey, I was sure the speculation last year that Jared was the killer was way off base, and I obviously was wrong then–so we’ll see.)
Gosh, all you guys can talk about is Martha. (Martha, Martha, Martha.)
What about Oleg, Stan and the “defector”. Is she a plant or not? IT seems that Oleg’s ploy was to try to get here to say something like, “I’m KGB, you moron.”, thinking he’s some kind of independent actor. Ironically, the best thing for him is if she is a legitimate defector. Plant some evidence that she’s KGB, and boom. She either gets sent to a U.S. jail (win) or traded for Nina (win). Both of these scenarios are wins for Stan too as he doesn’t care if the defector is legit or not, but if she’s exposed as a mole then he looks great for guessing it or she gets exchanged.
No further progress last night on Kimmie, Northrop lady, Nina, or Paige.
Well, one thing seems certain…could anyone make more bad life decisions than Martha?
I’m on the fence as to whether the woman had to die. Speaking of that, shouldn’t the FBI be a little more careful about servicing their equipment? Get a clue. Your office was just bugged, for crying out loud.
“Gee, we just found a listening device in a pen…but let’s send our mail robot—which is about 1500 times larger than your average pen–out to ACME machines for servicing. Security risk? Naaah!”
Not to mention another sudden death of a worker connected with an outfit that does business with the government. How many is that now? (Although I will concede an older woman dropping dead may not be unusual…happened to one of my grandparents).
Put the new guy in charge (forget his name). He’s the one agent who’s actually on top of things. Gaad is under pressure and Ace Detective Stan is too busy trying to rescue Nina and having a beer with the enemy to be effective.
It seems to me that if a two-person team is going into an office in the middle of the night to plant a bug, they really should have some kind of cover story to protect themselves.
I mean, how difficult would it be to come up with some kind of story to make it look like it’s OK for you to be there?
Just off the top, if I was E, I would come into that building with some bug killer equipment (like a spray can for instance) and a fake invoice from my fake company to a fake name stating that I had authorization to go into the place in the middle of the night and spray for bugs. I would have the invoice (or I guess it would be better to call it a “work order”) made out to the wrong address so that if I was questioned, I could just say that my company must have made a mistake. If it was made out to their real address, the lady could easily check and she would see that no such service was ever ordered.
Seems like a good story to say you were authorized to go in the middle of the night to avoid poisoning all the real employees there who worked during the day.
But, if she caught me there, I could just show her the invoice and say it must have been a mistake. I think that would prevent the two of us from going to prison.
Anyway, if I’m mistaken about that, I’d guess that some small change could make it all work. But for an experienced team like P&E to walk into that office blind (as it were) just seems like a writing error to me. I think this show is better than that. P&E should have had some kind of cover story - at the very least.
I wanted to say that a professional team of agents would surely have a cover story or their center would surely know enough to provide them with a believable cover story.
Maybe it was a rush job? That’s the kind of thing they would normally do, but maybe they had literally 4 hours to plan the job and were just assuming that being at an appliance repair business super-late-at-night would be enough to keep them undiscovered, which it would in 99 cases out of 100.
I don’t think Elizabeth realistically could have just glanced into the office, seen what was going on, and then left the old lady there. Too risky if Phillip drops a tool, makes a banging sound, and then the lady calls the cops.
I agree that sending the mail robot out of house to be repaired seems like a security hole. Although maybe it will be bug-scanned on its way back in, and the reason it took Phillip so long to do his job was because he had to install the bug in a particular tricky fashion so it would pass some fairly serious scrutiny.
I would think you are correct about that. Surely it will have to be bug-scanned when it is returned and if they fail to do that (IMHO) it will mean one of two things.
The FBI is really pretty sloppy and acting in a rather foolish way in this place and time (they are rarely so sloppy and foolish).
… OR …
The writers on this show are indeed losing much of their credibility or the Exec Producers are not catching the kinds of errors that they should be catching.
This kind of mistake would be a terrible mistake for the EPs to make. If they don’t show us that the robot was checked all I can think of is … Shame on them.
By the way, for any of the people here who have ever experienced mail robots, I just want to say they were the silliest and most ridiculous kinds of devices that ever littlered the landscape of the office - ESPECIALLY for offices of places that needed to pay attention to security - most especially - the FBI and CIA.
How they ever managed to agree to have their mail get carted around the office on a ridiculous thing that beeped and that anyone could stick their hands into always struck me as a gold mine for the enemy. The enemies of the nation would just be tickled pink to get their hands on such a stupid kind of machine. It was just to laugh!
