Oh no! The last paragraph in my previous post was left in there unintentionally. I had meant to delete it but didn’t do that by the time the edit clock had run out.
The last paragraph makes it sound like I am accusing Maurice of having put his hands on Lisa and/or the kids and that was a mistake. I apologize for that and if some moderator could remove that last paragraph, I would very much appreciate that.
And Arkady (The big cheese) wanting to pull the plug on the robot bug because it was bringing in nothing but trivia. The woman points out that you may have picked up some office hanky-panky. True, intelligence is often the laborious process of holding onto data point A for weeks/months until you can align it with data point B. The USFL fan may have an undiscovered gambling problem, for instance. (I don’t think they’ll get anything useful out of vending machine guy, though.)
Of course, is Martha still relaying the bug tapes? If not, who is? Martha, surviving or not, will not be of much further use. God, that scene at the end where Clark becomes Phillip was scary.
I think Maurice is still working under the assumption that this is industrial espionage, the company-against-company type, but he may be close to working out the truth.
Another great episode. It was a fantastic shock when it seemed Martha was nattering on about paint to Clark, and then it turned out to be Stan. Hans really is proving his worth.
I can’t think of any reason for Philip to take off his disguise except for the same reason Elizabeth spoke honestly to the old lady before she killed her. I wonder if the gun will come into play?
I grew up middle class (two college professors for parents), and I was impressed by the USSR only a short time later, in 1990 (and I eschewed the stage-managed tours for the most part and struck out on my own). I did meet a lot of Soviet *people *who spoke very bitterly against their country, but for reasons that struck me as petulant and shallow (dearth of Levi’s blue jeans for instance). The only lines I saw were not for bread but to get into the Moscow McDonald’s (and that line was absurdly long, stretching around an entire city park).
I would say that the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants would have jumped at the chance to live in the economic conditions of the USSR at that time. Not middle/upper class Americans/Europeans/Japanese, but almost anyone in China, India, Latin America, or Africa.
Agreed.
I can’t make any sense of Maurice. When he tells E that he wants to get double what she is getting, a reasonable person would never expect that to yield any kind of good result because Maurice has no idea how much E is getting and if he demands that she tell him, she can always just make up any amount she likes. So, either Maurice is just not very bright or not very good at negotiating. OTOH, he may just be trying to appear to play the “big shot” to impress his wife. Very strange.
If you compare that to his negotiating with E - when he refuses to hand over the camera to her if she insists on dealing with Lisa. M handled that amazingly well. He forced E to bend to his will and that is no small feat! Not many people could do that.
So, how can these two events be reconciled? M appears to be quite incompetent when demanding “double” what E gets. But, OTOH, he seemed highly competent when negotiating with E.
How can these two events make sense? What “hidden” factor could there be that would explain why he behaved this way in those two separate events?
Elizabeth made him think that she bent to his will. She is just playing him. Wait until she doesn’t need him anymore and he tries to get rough.
My later Uncle, who was a Pakistan Army officer, found the USSR quite depressing and poor, when he visited in the 1980’s. And he was taken on a Government sponsored tour which only showcased the best, he was taken to Baikanour Cosmodrome for instance, and the Ballet. He told me that growing up during WW2 rationing, he had better variety of food and goods than he saw in the USSR.
As for Paige and the USSR, she is an American. These days, the US does not look a whole lot different, but at the time it was notably richer than the rest of the world. I have been told by people as diverse as Europeans, Asians, South Americans, that going to the US before the 1990’s was being amazed at the abundance and being shocked at the purchasing ability for food, clothing, consumer goodd of even ordinary people.
The U.S. is still notably richer than the rest of the world.
ETA: Getting back to the show, does anyone think Martha is making it out of the season alive? I don’t–and I wonder if her parents are toast too.
Before he took his wig off, my thought was that Martha going to her parents was perfect from the P&E standpoint: they could kill her there (car “accident”, “mugging”, etc), and the FBI wouldn’t be so ready to connect her death to anything more sinister than bad luck to a woman visiting from another state.
I’m going to go out on a limb…like WAAAY out, and say that Phillip doesn’t kill Martha. It goes against every predictive instinct I have, but something tells me she won’t die…yet. Although I was very surprised Phillip morphed to from Clark to himself in the final scene.
Hey folks, I blogged it again this week. It’s pretty long. I’ll work on trying to make it more fun over the weekend but if you’d like to take a look, as always, I’d be very grateful for any feedback. Thanks:
https://clevertelly.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/s3e12-i-am-abassin-zadran-or/
The TV announcer said it would be “only on channel 5,” but CBS is/was channel 9 in Falls Church. I’m not a fan of nitpicking like that, but one of the things I’ve enjoyed about the production of The Americans is how they’ve used vintage local commercials when the TV is on in the background. Along with the MASH promo was an ad for Belmont TV (“Whatever you want, think Belmont!”) and last season they used the timelessly catchy Jhoon Rhee Tae Kwon Do ad which every kid around DC circa 80s could sing by heart (“Nobody bothers me! Nobody bothers me, either!”).
So since they’ve strived for and achieved that kind of TV authenticity, it just jumped out at me that I guess they used a clip of the MASH promo from another city. Anyway, please everyone forgive this overparticular nitpick, I’m high on nostalgia.
Things certainly seem to have slowed down in this thread. After the finale next Wed, I would guess there certainly won’t be much activity here until the next year. In the meantime, I thought it might be a good idea to tell you about another wonderful show I recently discovered called “Manhattan”.
I can’t spend much time here telling you about this show. My guess is that would be considered “thread jacking” and I’d get into trouble with the mods and admins here. So, I will just provide you with two or three links and tell you that I believe if you liked The Americans, there is a real good chance you will also like Manhattan. IMHO, it’s really excellent. Some wonderful acting. Here are those links. The second one is to the thread on this board:
I hope that if you try one or two epis of this show that you will enjoy it even a tiny bit as much as I did. Best wishes to you all!
P.S. If anyone else discovers any shows they would like to recommend to the people here, in this thread, I would really appreciate if someone would suggest an appropriate way in which they could post that info here in this thread or in some other way that would be approved by the admins and mods here.
Does anyone know of the proper way to do that?
By the way, I’ve been waiting till I had something good to post before I commented on this post, Twuest. However, it doesn’t seem like I’m going to ever get something worth posting. So, I’ll just make a post now.
I think your instincts have always been excellent and doubt that you would be going out on a limb very much. My guess is that P will not kill Martha because the name of the actress figures so prominently at the beginning of the show as well as it does any time the actors in the show meet to discuss various issues.
I know that some shows (like Game of Thrones) have killed off one of their major stars and shocked the Hell out of the audience. But that is just so rare I doubt whether the show runners on this show would do that. Of course, you never know. But if I had to place a bet, I’d put my money on Twuest and go along with the idea that Martha will be around for as long as the show runs.
This seems to me to be a good point. “Martha” might certainly be killed off at some point, but if so it seems likely that her death would be a pivotal point in the overall plot–it wouldn’t be as routine as was the killing of the guy-working-on-his-car. This would be an action that would devastate Philip.
Certainly I’m among those who suspect that she won’t be killed off next week. I don’t think it’s the case that Philip removed his wig to protect it from stray blood splatter.
My guess: he did something bound to be shocking to Martha (that is, change his appearance) as part of a pitch he’ll make to her–finally “leveling” with her. Of course he won’t tell her the actual truth.
But he may well “reveal” that he’s an agent of a friendly-yet-cautious nation—much as he gained Annelise’s cooperation by posing as an agent of Sweden. His story to her will be something along the lines of “we do work with the US, but we learned that the FBI is undertaking a project that could compromise our communications network, and we needed to find out the details…”
As I recall, Philip had tears in his eyes as he took off his costume. I think that he has developed some real feelings for Martha and feels bad that he has to kill her. He probably feels like he owes her the truth before he kills her.
Well, maybe. But isn’t it more likely that he’d try to give her a nice evening, and then kill her quickly in a way she doesn’t see coming? (Letting her die in her sleep, perhaps…?)
Pulling off his wig is bound to freak her out. That doesn’t seem to be a very kind thing to do.
True enough. The whole thing is messy as hell. If she disappears or is found murdered, her mom will start to ask questions about her husband. Maybe it will be made to look like a suicide. The question to ask is what is the end game that works best for Philip.
I’m going to try a spolier box …
content
… if it works I’ll write the spoiler in the next post
okay, about Martha and Clark
Alison Wright, who plays Martha, is really involved on Twitter and has even retweeted an idea I had to the showrunners. That suggests to me she’s not going anywhere. I also think she’s such a strong actress they’d be crazy to lose her now - she may even get a EMMY nomination … Finally, there is an image going around from next week which isn’t clear but may suggest Clark kills someone and that takes the pressure off Martha as a suspect for the bugging …
Speaking of taking pressure off Martha, I think Stan is going to get rid of the nosy FBI agent by making it look like he’s the mole. With Oleg’s help, it shouldn’t be too hard.