I don’t think it’s stupid in the least to morally evaluate the characters (although judging other viewers is something to avoid)…after all, it seems as if the moral component is a large part of the equation. The creators have stated that they are well aware of the moral dilemma of the viewer regarding P and E, and it certainly seems as if they’ve created the characters knowing the audience would have to handle that dilemma in their own way.
The moral aspect impossible to ignore.
That’s the part I was referring to as stupid.
Duly noted, Omar!
I think that’s what it started as, then once they realized Evgheniya was teaching Russian to US government agents it was fine out who her students are, then once they realized she was sleeping with a CIA officer who was being sent to Moscow it morphed into get her to repatriate so they can blackmail the CIA officer.
Looking at Tuan Phillip and Elizabeth have to wonder if they’re seeing the future the center had in mind for Paige.
It could all come crashing down, but so far my contention that Claudia is just a straightforward handler, and not conspiring against them, is still holding up nicely! 
Yeah, agreed on both counts.
No, except that someone watching the house saw them.
(TIL that there are still people who watch linear TV live, with no DVR or On Demand backup.)
Claudia seems reasonably straight to me, the only thing she is hiding is that the wheels are coming off at home - that the USSR P&E remember no longer exists. Well, that and the fact Philip’s other son called by.
Remind me, folks; what is the leading purpose/s of the Tuan/defectors story arc - how is this serving the ongoing Americans themes? Perhaps we don’t know yet because I’m not sure the screen time it has consumed is worth the anticipated payoff …
It’s completely out character for P & E to go to the pastor to ask him his thoughts on whether or not they should take the kids and return to Russia. I found it stupid and unbelievable.
The hockey player fiance is a Russian spy and Stan’s source/op is blown.
P’s reaction in wanting to prevent Pasha’s suicide attempt is completely within character and a welcome change to all the prevaricating and fence sitting that’s been going on this entire season.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Claudia is running her own op to continue to torment P&E.
Oleg’s revealing conversations with his mother have become pointless. Hasn’t the woman lived through enough without having to disclose her personal details to her own son?
I assume they’re going somewhere with the “Phillip’s Son” thing, right? I mean, they went to aaaaal this trouble to show him making the difficult and highly illegal journey to America, before getting sent back to the Soviet Union. There has to have been a point to all that, one hopes.
It’s “out of character” for them because (a) usually they’re making decisions about things they’re confident about and (b) they normally have no one to talk to (although in this case they would probably have talked to Gabriel if he’d been around).
But this decision they’re making now is both newer and more important than any previous one they’ve had to make, and suddenly they do have someone they can talk to who already knows enough about their situation to be helpful, and who does have relevant expertise.
I didn’t find anything jarring about it at all.
I imagine asking for family advice is the honeytrap for a pastor. So before he leaves (and the Jennings can’t keep tabs on him any longer), he gets one last taste to keep him endeared to Philip and Elizabeth.
(1) I can see both sides of this argument.
(2) He certainly injected a stressful mojo into that whole relationship. But if he were a spy, wouldn’t it work better for him to just work her for information behind the scenes? I think he is a classic Russian hustler and will probably be in the Russian mafia by the 1990s.
(3) I don’t accept your premise.
(4) Nope. Just doing her job.
(5) Fair point. But he is staring at the possibility of ending up there himself.
I hope it just ends up being one of those things that happens for no apparent reason, just like in real life. But if we indulge the metanarrative question of why it was shown on screen, when it didn’t apparently affect our main characters, it also strikes me as possible that they ended the previous season with one plan for this season and then changed their minds in the interim.
But they couldn’t just abandon his storyline altogether. So they paid just enough attention to get him to the US and then back to the USSR, and gave him a happy ending with another paternal relative to sort of send him off into the sunset without our feeling too bad for him.
That’s my opinion (and hope) too.
Yeah, we don’t need him added to the mix.
It’s even possible they didn’t change their minds in between seasons but just felt they couldn’t leave an orphaned son out there somewhere without ever meeting him.
Well, one point to it is that it shows the people who run the Center aren’t just being Evil for Evil’s Sake. Gabriel told the kid to go home, and that he’d be taken care of, and we see now that this was the truth. He’s home, he’s been given a decent job, and they’ve made sure that Philip’s family know about him, and have been allowed to develop a relationship with him.
This suggests that if P&E really do want to go home, they’ll also be allowed to live a somewhat normal life. They (and their family) probably won’t just be imprisoned or killed as a matter of convenience.
I thought the point of the Pasha storyline was to demonstrate the mess the Soviet Union has become - people gong to prison for speaking the truth, a boy denied seeing his father for fear of the father knowing his son had been in a mental hospitala lso speaking the truth, and so on. The moral, decent, egalitarian society P&E think they are fighting for has gone.
So turning Pasha away is the plainest demonstration of how P&E are being shielded. I think …
IIRC, you are pretty consistent in taking a hardline anti-“Red” view in general. It’s apparently possible to watch the show that way, but it’s definitely not the “point” of the show as the writers conceive it. This is not Red Dawn or Rocky IV.
Essentially the show is one big use of the old writers trick of “let’s stand it on its head”. I’m sure our guys did stuff that was just as bad. Heck, in the show “our guy”, Stan, does do things that are just as bad, killing Vlad, blackmailing Nina. He just doesn’t do them as often. But that may be due as much to the fact that he’s “playing defense” as to any inherent difference in our systems.
I think this is probably also a factor. The point is, the writers aren’t going for a simplistic “Soviet == Bad” plot. Sure, there are a lot of bad things going on in the USSR, but even there, not everyone is Evil, and some are honestly trying to do the right thing, as they understand it.
This is also the point of the Oleg story line this year - the tension between the corruption of some party officials and the desire of others to actually try to make things better. That we know the corruption ultimately won out doesn’t mean the people fighting the corruption weren’t honest in their desires to make things better.
Yes, it’s a classic ends vs. means argument.
Oleg is supporting a system we know was rife with corruption, but we see him draw the line at imprisoning a low-level minion who was just trying to get along in this system. We’ve also seen him try to prevent the Soviets from acquiring a deadly pathogen, at some substantial risk to himself. Stan is supporting a system we think of as the Good Guys, but does some seriously questionable things. Does Oleg’s behavior absolve him of guilt for being a KGB agent? Does Stan being an FBI agent absolve him of murder?