Someone, maybe Vonnegut once said “Be careful what you pretend to be…” This is a case of that. Phillip and Elizabeth have pretended to be Phillip and Elizabeth for so long that walking away from those identities feels like killing a part of yourself. So yeah, there’s conflict there. And no, I don’t think Elizabeth has the hots for Stan.
Alternatively, each of these things is simply something she sees as necessary to keep Philip from flipping out and blowing up their overall mission. Similarly, I’ve always thought that’s why she suggested going home; better to do it on their own terms than after being captured and interrogated.
I’ve always wondered about the trail of bodies P & E have left scattered about the countryside. Some of been involved in espionage, but others are just ordinary folks, like the college kid who came to use the vending machine at an unfortunate moment. Is Philip such a master criminal that he cleaned up all possible clues as to who committed that unplanned murder?
I assume he is indeed such a master criminal. Keep in mind too that they didn’t have DNA to work with back then, and that it’s actually really hard to solve a murder that involves strangers with no obvious connection, and no witnesses. And although it is sad to say, as long as it’s not the president or a super famous/wealthy person who dies, or maybe a child, the cops aren’t going to put max resources toward solving it if there are no obvious clues.
That’s going waaayyy off book. At this point, you’re talking not only about the death of the author, but of the actors. The showrunners have said over and over in interviews that their deep, close, genuinely married connection is real; the same goes for Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell.
Of course that’s what Philip and Elizabeth’s handlers want you to think! 
LOL, touche. 
I enjoyed this season. This thread is more entertaining to read than your average TV show discussion, and the writers get credit there. It’s hard to get people to consider things from the other side (especially the Cold War), and they force that. I’m fine with anti-heroes and anti-heroes getting their comeuppance too. I guess I’m rooting for Stan though. That should end well.
I love that the characters are forced to see it the other way around by now too. There was Elizabeth staring at her closet, and Philip <3’s USA … but my favorite: Somewhere in the 2nd half of the season … Henry breaks it on them about the school/scholarship etc, and they are both dumbfounded. I think it is sinking in that they’re raising a Perfect American (perhaps two, in spite of Paige’s issues). Oops!
I always found Martha’s scenes tiring, but I am glad she got a happy ending. Beats prison by a mile.
Tuan and Paige are both unbearable twats.
Phillip and Elizabeth suddenly deciding they want to return to Russia with kids in tow was stupid. I realize the irony of Elizabeth deciding they need to stay because of the new opportunity presenting itself in Phil’s recording of his source, and Phil deciding that retiring to Russia would be preferable to living in America because he’s tired of being a spy, is supposed to be interesting plot twist. But it isn’t. Not remotely interesting or believable.
The two stories worth developing (Oleg’s and Stan’s) dragged on pointlessly and deliberately to-be-continued next season. Why?
If anybody should have sliced their wrists it should have been Martha, not Pasha.
The hole digging in ep.1 was prophetic of the plot of the entire season 5. The writers in a hole over their heads and the scripts should have been killed and buried with Hans.
I’m just glad the season is finally over. It sucked start to finish.
Wow, what do you really think? And why are you still watching?
I don’t think he’s completely off-beam here; Tuan and Paige are irritating. And Phillip & Elizabeth know Henry is different - there’s absolutely no way he’d be prepared to go and live in the Soviet Union and they must both surely know that.
The best thing they can do for him is let him go to boarding school and leave without him, IMO.
I also agree the Oleg & Stan stories aren’t really going anywhere and while I enjoy the characters a lot, I’ve found most of this season to be less satisfying that the previous one.
It’s still good, but not without its flaws.
What exactly would happen to Henry if the rest of his family were exfiltrated while he was at boarding school? True he has a scholarship, but he’d also be a ward of the state. If the family’s cover was blown the FBI is going to be interested to say the least, and he’d probably end up in some form of protective custody or witness protection for the rest of his life, or a least until he comes of age.
Or would Phillip & Elizabeth clean the house of anything incriminating and fake some horrible accident that not “kills” them & Paige, but also leaves no bodies (or rather renders the bodies the Centre supplies totally unidentifiable)?
Interesting questions! I like your latter scenario.
I think the former scenario is quite plausible and probably the “Best case scenario” in a realistic sense. He’s practically never home anyway and I don’t recall him and Paige interacting much (or even at all?) lately - so discovering his parents were Soviet spies and they and his sister have gone to Russia would be a shock but I can’t see his entire world collapsing over it forever.
I can, however, see him reacting badly to suddenly discovering he’s going to live in the Soviet Union and should consider himself lucky to have regular electricity and BTW most of the computers they have there are still running on tape reels.
Oddly enough I think Henry would react better to “my family were actually spies and moved to Russia” rather than “I’m an orphan now”.
I’m not convinced history demonstrates that the Russians were behind the times when it came to computers. So many hackers come from there, as did the originators of Google. Hard for me to believe they just learned everything once they got stateside.
Their hardware was absolute shit. That might make for better programmers.
So it’s hard for you to believe that Sergey Brin didn’t learn everything he knows about computer sciences by the age of 6, which is when his family was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union?
Tetris was made in the USSR.
I suspect the plan for the exfiltration will have to be more elaborate than what was used for Gabriel. Old man living alone. He can use a cover story like that he is moving to California to be near his daughter. For the Jennings, a family which own a local business… who is BFF’s with an FBI agent, who works in counter-intelligence.
Murder, arson and suicide seem to be the only way.
Soviet computers were definitely behind what was available in the west - they appeared to be reverse-engineered copies of Apple IIs, ZX Spectrum(the Soviet Clone came out a decade after the ZX) and a few IBM PC clones - none of which were available to the average person. The Soviet Apple II clones apparently cost $17,000 each(!); so it’s not like the west where classrooms had BBC Microcomputers and the like in the 1980s.
And in-show, there are pretty much no computers shown in the Soviet Union, except for a couple at the lab the kidnapped scientist was working in. None of the KGB officers have them on their desks, the fruiterer doesn’t have one in her office, Oleg’s Minister for Railways doesn’t appear to have one at home. I don’t recall seeing any in the Soviet Embassy, either.
Contrast this to the US, where all the FBI agents have a computer on their desk, there’s a mail robot derping around the building, and even the Jennings’ have a computer in their house for Henry to play games on - plus there are computers in their travel agency, too.
Their hardware was actually pretty good. However, computing was one of the fields where exchange of ideas between blocks was strictly forbidden. The only powers of note in the field in the Eastern blocks were the USSR and E Germany. Which meant that development of the field was affected. On the other hand the US could use W European and Japanese expertise and research in addition to its own prodigious capabilities. IBM had large research fascilities in Montpellier in France for instance as well as in Japan.
So this overwhelming swarm of Russian hackers got their skills thanks to the computer renaissance brought about out of nowhere by Boris Yeltsin’s administration in the 1990s? Really?