aha! I really need to wake up this season. Just not switched on.
I’m becoming more convinced that she’s KGB. She’s going to kill Mischa and maybe Stan.
After that, she’s going to be the closest thing the show has to a villain.
If Ollie was foreshadowing something with his remark about needing a woman and not these girls, the field is looking pretty thin, unless they parachute someone in.
I wondered about the woman he was sleeping with at the Rez, the woman in charge of the secret project - anyone remember what happened to her; iirc, she’s still in the US?
You mean, other than Phillip and Elizabeth, Gabriel, and all of Soviet Russia?
(I like the show. But the leads aren’t the Good Guys.)
Re Philip’s ex-lover IIRC Gabriel mentioned she was caught after she tried to defect so I assume she’s dead by now.
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30 minute Slate podcast for this epi featuring a showrunner and the director … Stan!
As always, entertaining and insightful: http://dcs.megaphone.fm/SM2062015402.mp3?key=acd687d2495b33481e564d265ba2b6a3
Morozov already defected; it’s why he’s in the US in the first place. The whole family was smuggled out of the USSR by the CIA (his wife & son weren’t given a say).
I don’t see things working out well for Tuan either. He’s starting to enjoy his fake family & teenage life too much; no matter what he says to P&E about it. He never even got the childhood that Mischa & Nadezhda did; his natal family is dead & he’s estranged from his adoptive family. He’s going to loose himself in his cover, but it’s all fake and sooner or later it’s all going to end or he’s going to be expected to so something that utterly shatter that illusion.
I’m so off the pace this season even Alan Sepinwall’s reviews seek ok:
At the end of last season Arkady is expelled and Tatiana is temporarily ordered to head the rezidentura until a replacement can be assigned and then she will continue on at least through the transition. I guess with Aarkay gone, Oleg back in Russia and Stan on recruitment detail, there wasn’t much story left in the rezidentura.
And now that I’ve said that, watch as Tatiana and the rezidentura become the focal point for the remainder of the season.
Did Gabriel just covertly warn Philip and Elizabeth that the Center might be a threat to them?
He certainly did. I’m really surprised Phillip’s son went back the USSR so soon. He’s never getting out again until it dissolves. On the plus side Oleg didn’t kill himself; which is what I was sure they were going for when he went up to the roof.
Well stated. Could not have said it better myself.
Count me in as well. And now she’s heading toward becoming a Marxist. That meeting with Gabriel ought to be a hoot. When she leaves, she’ll probably run home and put up a portrait of Lenin in her room.
I wonder if Gabriel’s “I gonna go home” was a subtle way of pushing Mr and Mrs Jennings to get young Miss Jennings fully in the business?
Wasn’t that Das Kapital that Pastor Tim gave Paige? What’s next? Mao’s Red Book? The Communist Manifesto? Those damn liberals, corrupting our youth with those fuzzy-headed ideas!
I wonder if there is any significance to us seeing Gabriel go to the Lincoln Memorial, then gaze out toward the Washington Monument? Made me ask whether is could it be that down in the depths of his soul, he’s experiencing some doubt about his perceived righteousness of his cause?
Contrast that to Paige, who’s starting to believe that junk about Marx’ “worker’s paradise”. Love the line from Liz about how “everyone is in it together”.
I would bet you could find some people within the borders of the USSR who might have had another view.
What I like so much about this show is that we KNOW they’re wrong. It’s not like the writers of The Americans are asking us to choose whether WE agree with Elizabeth and Paige or not. The contrast between the scenes set in Moscow and those set in the US could not be more clear. But Elizabeth still believes, and there have always been idealistic young people who get sucked into philosophies (and cults and whatnot). If the writers of the show have Paige become a more and more true believing commie (and I’m skeptical they will), it doesn’t mean they’re telling us that they think communism is right, just that that’s a plausible reaction for someone in her situation to have.
These episodes are so subtle and powerful. Goodness.
Gabriel - who has seen everything from the post-WW sacrifices and the random culling of party members has, I think, now sensed the end. The rationale for sending Misha back, whatever mindset at the Centre that caused the misstep on wheat, the fact of P&E having ‘seen so much’ and perhaps Philip’s impending exhaustion. That period between Afghanistan and Gorbachev must have been desperately uncertain for those who understood the great experiment was slowly starting to collapse. Elizabeth would of course fight to the very end, and God I love her for it.
Apart from what he has done to Philip with Misha, perhaps Gabriel even thinks he is more use in what must unfold at home.
Yet here is Elizabeth remembering Das Capital from her teens, earnestly restating principles. And then checking out what happened to her Korean lady and that beautiful family she destroyed.
Talking of Gabriel - that was a surprising choice of music for Ollie’s big scene …
I don’t know what to say about P&E taking their daughter to meet him. It was sweet, poignant, loving even. Like visiting an elderly relative for what everyone knows is the last time but no one says.
P&E have no sense it’s over. They have seen and done so much, and keep on. Winter is coming …
The thing that struck me about that final sequence is how much it looked like a baptism - especially after Paige mentioned that that was the most meaningful thing of her life. (I’d need to rewatch Paige’s actual baptism to see if they actually matched.) But you had the father & mother (dressed up) escorting/presenting their child to the elder of the community. It was very ceremonial staging.
I’m idealistic in my own way, so I can’t believe that someone like Elizabeth, who has spent upwards of twenty years living in the US, seeing how it works, can still believe that the Soviet system is better. Go to any grocery store, woman, and tell me the USSR is better! Move anywhere in the country. Did you have to report to the government? Do you have to ask to buy a car? Did you have any trouble traveling to the USSR with Paige? Ask yourself - would you, as a citizen living in the USSR, be able to answer those questions the same way?
How good can the system be, if people die trying to leave it? If you, the average citizen, hates America, would the government prevent you from leaving if you wanted? They wouldn’t even notice!
These facts can’t have escaped her notice. So she’s obviously fooling herself deliberately. Doubling down on idealism in lieu of reality.
Fwiw, I didn’t read it like that at all. It felt like family to me.