We’d be betting against each other for the second time, then (as I was the ‘Jared did it’ person).
The writers have a LOT of balls in the air. (And I am betting that they won’t drop a one!)
(Although I will say that the production design/direction for the Lois Smith Has To Die incident did leave something to be desired. The way it was shown, the character might well never have known that they were there, working on that machine. And that made the supposed imperative for her death seemed contrived. They could have filmed it in such a way to make it much more obvious that she would inevitably have noticed their work–better justifying the plot point about Elizabeth confronting her and forcing her suicide.)
Were you now! Ha, that’s funny. Well, if you are right this time, I’ll have to concede that you have your finger on the writers’ pulses (or some kind of inside access to scripts). But I think I’m going to tie up the series here.
That’s a good point: the failure there was not really in the script or the acting, but the production design and/or direction.
Don’t you think that her suicide was pretty much ridiculous? Why didn’t she just take that bottle full of pills and flush it down the toilet or somehow just throw it away?
Well, we were shown her recognition that Elizabeth had a gun. So we knew that she knew that it was going to be either a painful gunshot, or (one hopes) painless death by pills.
I don’t think that’s going to end well. Given that Elizabeth was in the dark I doubt he
was able to order a KGB cleanup crew so did he just leave the body do be discovered (& obviously murdered) or try to dispose of it himself? Has he even been trained in corpse disposal yet?
I don’t think Elizabeth would have allowed her to do either, and she did mentioned how afraid she was of pain. Elizabeth was going to kill her one way or another.
I think it was a fascinating episode. I am willing to suspend my disbelief about a lot of the spy-related details because it is such a smart show in general. Martha’s manic Susie Homemaker act was a brilliant bit of acting. We can see how desperately she wants to cling to Clark and believe that their marriage is real. Her desperation is almost painful to watch. Prattling on about the lovely tomatoes she bought and praising the wine and even giving in to Clark about not pursuing a foster child are all attempts to control her life insofar as she can. She even shows Clark she will still work with him, feed him information, if only she can believe he loves her. But she’s no fool and when she stops all the displacement activity she is going to do quite a bit of soul-searching, I would imagine. I don’t think Philip loves her even a tiny bit, but oddly enough he trusts her (as he stated explicitly). Whether he is right to do so remains to be seen.
The scenes between Elizabeth and Betty (the older woman in the repair shop) were great. I do have to suspend disbelief about the necessity of killing her. There was no reason to do so that makes logical sense, but I’ll accept the terms of the show. Elizabeth clearly sees her mother in Betty: women of the same generation whose husbands were profoundly affected by the war. But she also sees herself in Betty. Of course, the name Betty is a diminutive for Elizabeth, so the writers are clearly signaling to us to make that connection. And the women do seem to have something in common. When Betty talks about her husband, who left her for another woman and then came back to her, it’s hard not to think about Philip’s second wife (Martha) as well as his first love (the mother of his son Misha). And then this doubling is reinforced from the other side, when Gabriel tells Philip that Elizabeth rejected the first husband they had selected for her. (I’m not sure I believe a single word Gabriel says, and there is something fairy-tale-ish about Elizabeth rejecting the first Prince Charming and bestowing her favor upon Philip. For it to follow fairy tale convention completely, Philip would have to be the third choice, of course.)
Both actresses were outstanding in their scenes together. The one moment I thought was a bit too hard to accept was Betty’s realization that Elizabeth was a spy (or some sort of nefarious evildoer anyway) as soon as Elizabeth says her mother lives in Russia. That seemed highly unlikely to me. Forcing Betty to overdose was excruciating. Surely it would have been kinder, and more effective, for Elizabeth to pretend everything would be all right and then shoot Betty before leaving. But perhaps kindness wasn’t uppermost in Elizabeth’s mind. Betty had some great lines, and the actress delivered them so well. In addition to the line about “that’s what evil people tell themselves when they do evil things,” I loved the way she said, “And this is what you do.” Chilling.
Old woman who died of a medication overdose is much less suspicious thank old woman shot to death in a warehouse were FBI office equipment was being worked on.
So the Soviets are going to risk losing [del]one[/del] two of their most valuable agents, just on the chance that Crazy Martha neither accidentally gets caught, nor has even a 30-second attack of conscience?
No way. It’s barely believable they’d let her live, especially given the casual execution of the harmless old woman in the same episode, but it’s completely unbelievable that they would allow Phillip to go anywhere near her again.
The woman had no clue they were even there until Lizzy deliberately barged into her office to see who was there. They noise they made was inaudible from the office; the light they cast was invisible from the office. Note that P&E didn’t know the woman was there until she flushed the toilet, and she was making no effort to be quiet or unnoticed. They could have just finished up and left.
Even if the only possible exit was through the office (unlikely, as there didn’t appear to be another door behind the woman when E walked into the office, so she must have entered through the office’s only exit), and even if it looked like the old lady was going to stay there all night (extremely unlikely), all they would have had to do was wait for her to go to the bathroom again.
And what a great emergency execution method – make somebody voluntarily take 50 pills. Can’t Russia afford the Extra Strength version? And what a great scheme in the first place – bug a noisy mail robot that nobody is going to say much around, even assuming the same robot is returned to the FBI office. Why should it be? Why wouldn’t they just give them the next one available? When was the last time you sent a commodity item in for repairs, and got the same one back? There were several in the warehouse, which is why they had to search for the right one. In fact, you would think that FBI headquarters would have a spare or two in the basement.
I guess I’m not as willing to suspend my disbelief as you guys are. If this was Agent Carter, where you know it’s a comic book, then fine. But it’s supposed to be realistic, and it just isn’t.
Hey Charlie Wayne, you don’t own me anything! Thanks for even remembering the blog. It’s just something I’m doing to sharpen up a bit.
Well that’s very kind. tbh,I found this one a pretty tricky epi and it was difficult to limit the word count. I feel bad for not making more of the defector’s arc but you have to think that’ll play big pretty soon …
oh totally, so much sub text it starts to hurt your head …
Anyway, this is what I have blogged - all thoughts welcome (good, bad, and Stan)
It’s an old B&W film but there is a line in there where the protaganist says to an old lady something like, “Some people can be so big even though they look so small” (or something close to that).
Anyway, I just felt like recommending that film to you. There are very few films from that era that I have found to be really excellent and for some reason, that one film really did it for me and I think anyone reading this post might like it.
I want to say that I made a real error here. The link I posted above claimed the writer was Nathan Barr. I said that based on this link:
But I went back and actually watched the episode again and it says the writer was actually:
He has a tremendous amount of experience. This link says that he created St. Elsewhere, I’ll Fly Away and Northern Exposure. That is pretty impressive. Don’t you think?
I love this show, and I’m glad that it has found a home with you all discussing it. Last nights epi left me gobsmacked. I can’t add anymore to the discussion except that I agree Martha loves Clark too much to do anything underhanded against him, and Liz pointed out to Philip that she understood how he has feelings for Martha. Ergo, Philip is conflicted on how exactly to solve the problem called Martha. So there’s that.
One more gorgeous visual metaphor last night was Gabriel’s spelling out of ‘amatory’ on the Scrabble board. Now, wasn’t Amador the FBI agent Philip and Liz murdered in season one? Martha even had a brief thing with Amador. I loved that callback. And it made the mix of details between Clark and Martha even murkier.
In a way, I am willing to forgive one or two small problems with realism given the rest of the show is so amazing and there have been so few problems with reality - at least that I have seen.
There are hardly ever any major problems with reality with this show. It’s not like they portray the KGB as a bunch of bumbling fumblers. I think the expression may be, “Keystone cops”. It seems to me that they actually make the FBI look more like a bunch of Keystone cops than they do the KGB.
So, I don’t understand why I’m squawking so much about this one episode. The show does not deserve this level of criticism. It truly doesn’t.
But, I decided the scene between Keri Russel and the elderly lady was truly fabulous. I’d love to learn her name. She did a great job. I’m not sure I understand exactly what “subtext” means. But if it is meaning conveyed by something other than words, then I have to agree. These two ladies did a wonderful job. And yes, at one point after E discovered that lady, she did have to ensure that she couldn’t leave the building alive. I’m not sure exactly when that happened. But wasn’t it wonderful to listen to that lady talk about her husband and her experiences during the war? So many really powerful things came to mind when she talked about her husband and religion and how after discovering what the Nazis did in the camps, he just had no further use for religion. I can’t remember exactly what the context was, but I seem to remember that somewhere in an earlier episode (maybe even an earlier season), someone referred to The Bible as a bunch of stories.
So, the one line about how her husband had no further use for religion and the other line, “That’s what evil people say when they do evil things” were so very poignant and I’m certain they will come back again in a future episode.
It was funny to me that it was Regan who referred to the Russians as “Evil Doers” and now E has to deal with the concept that she may actually be an Evil Doer and her Communist Nation may actually not be making the world a better place. I would so love to see her be the one to eventually decide that she had to defect and it would be great if she dragged Phillip and her kids along with her. IMO, this show just has nowhere to go but better.
Anyway, cheers to you all and to all a good night.
Another terrible mistake. I realize that I said it was Regan who called the Russians “Evil Doers”. Of course it was Bush - not Regan.
But Regan did have another name for them. I forget what it was. But it was pretty good. It was just too bad that Regan got most of his ideas about the Russians from movies. I guess I can’t really criticise him on that score since I do so many of the same kind of things.
Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire.
I agree with you that the “evil doer” line will stick with Liz, but I don’t see her ever defecting. She’s too much of a true believer.
That said, in reading the posts, I’ve come to the conclusion–for varying reasons—that the woman’s death wasn’t absolutely necessary.The writers seemed to go out of their way to create that situation, and it might be because of the line we have been discussing. Perhaps they want to show that Elizabeth is at least capable of having doubts about where her life has taken her.
Gunshots get investigated. So do missing persons. An older woman, who misses her dead husband, OD’ing on her medication? Not as much.
Given that she was going to die, this was, in some ways, the best for everyone involved.
Hi guys, I’m going to post this link again to my blogpost because it was right at the bottom of the last page. I’m going to comeback to talk to Charlie Wayne tomorrow. Thanks:
S3E9 ‘Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?’
I would like to post this picture of Alison Wright.
I thought it was a very strange picture and I can’t understand why she would dress like this when attending some prestigious event. I just thought she would know that she looked kind of terrible (or maybe call it “weird”?). In any event, it just seemed awfully strange to me.
I don’t know. I just assumed that she would know better than this. Surely she would know that this picture would appear on message boards all over the world? It seems like such a strange choice for her to make.
I don’t know why I’m having so much difficulty in organizing my thoughts about this photo. It just seems so bizarre to me. I believe this picture was taken of her at one of those television events held in the south of France.
I hope that I haven’t offended a whole bunch of people with this post and I hope that I won’t get “Pitted” - meaning that someone will not start a thread in The Pit stating that I must be a real jerk to have posted some terrible photo of Martha and that I must have some kind of problem to have done that.
