If they had other spy buddies available, why wouldn’t they use them in Chicago, rather than wasting time flying to Houston? After all, it was a major plot point that even with Philip there, they were unsure if they could pull off extracting Harvest. Why waste the opportunity to have another trained agent there to back them up?
The official reason is that due to the START talks everyone is busy with work.
The real reason is that they have given up the pretence of the Jennings being anything like real illegals. Illegals rarely did operations themselves, instead, they ran assets, and agents, provided logistical support for agents coming in for short missions.While P&E have run capers from the beginning, at least in the early seasons they did a lot of the above.
Given that up now.
Which just emphasizes that they didn’t have any extra agents just waiting around, with nothing better to do than take a flight to Houston.
Credit two SDMB threads for motivating me to catch up. I thought I was the only one watching this obscure little series 
Part of my enjoyment derives from my particular perspective and outlook on the (first) Cold War, a perspective which I’m grateful to think is shared by the creator/writer/producer. Interesting as well to now be able to read your thoughts on this last season. The Cold War has deeply impacted all our lives but doesn’t usually get spotlighted on television. A great movie like The Lives Of Others (2006) comes to mind.
I think the material and performances are very strong. A series being cut short eliminates the need for those long emotional tangents as filler, and forces things to happen and things to be said. This season’s been all killer (no pun intended) so far and very satisfying to watch.
I’m guessing it’s Kaposi’s Sarcoma–that Elizabeth has AIDS. (Which would make most sense if she’s to be left alive at the end, and traded to the USSR…where there will be no treatment. Not that there was a lot of treatment in the USA at the end of the 80s, but at least research was underway).
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about HIV/AIDs in the Soviet Union.
That’s not what Kaposi’s sarcoma looks like, and given that Elizabeth hasn’t shown it before, it would seem to be part of her disguise. One of the tricks of disguising a face from description is to add a blotch, boil, or some disfigurement that catches the attention of a witness so that they cannot describe the other features of the face distinctly and/or be so repugnant or embarassing that a bystander does not look closely at the face.
Stranger
I think it’s more likely it was just spy makeup. She didn’t have any unusual blotches afterwards when they retuned home.
Sawyer on “Lost” used a bandage across the nose in one episode.
We can probably logically draw the line on how Stan became suspicious. But during the show, it seemed rushed to me - very rushed. I think Stan is a C- FBI agent, and we haven’t seen a lot of him connecting any dots. And now he’s taking a work trip and a potential business failure and putting it all together that they are spies? It didn’t seem right to me. There are hundreds of millions of Americans, and he thinks its P&E based on of that? It’s seemed rushed, and just to big of a jump at the time to me.
I don’t think Stan broke into their house (on either occasion) because he thought P&E were spies. I think he did it because he knew they were hiding something (big), and he wanted to find out what it was.
I don’t think he’s ever considered the possibility that the two of them are spies.
Yeah - I didn’t inspect the later scenes too carefully, but I thought there was a shadow/discoloration there, which suggested to me that it might have been a scrape or other injury. But I didn’t recall her having taken any shots to the face recently.
I agree on the former. I understand Stan being suspicious in the pilot episode. But he’s lived next to them, and became close friends with the entire family. He thinks both P and E are acting strangely, and are clearly under a lot of stress, but there was nothing said that would make him think they are involved in Russian issues. I would think Philip’s explanation of the business being in real trouble explains it away.
Even when Henry says they get calls in the middle of the night and have to go to work is plausible. Sure, I doubt travel agents get a lot of calls in the middle of the night, but surely they get some, since presumably their clients are traveling around the world. Even going to the office at off hours was reasonable in the pre-internet days.
I also don’t think it’s realistic that Stan broke into their house to snoop around. I think they moved this suspicion and snooping way to quickly.
As for splotches on E’s face, I noticed that, too. Signs of illness? Or did it happen on the job?
This could be true, but the look on his face when someone in the FBI mentioned the “white woman and white man” on the shuttle bus suggests he is thinking about them in regards to his case. Not sure how a white woman, black man and white man on a shuttle bus seems noteworthy at all. For a show that has been very subtle, this line and Stan’s look seemed out of place.
It also fits in with the character she seemed to be playing. Much lower socioeconomic class than her real (fake!) identity. I figured she wanted to look like someone who was hard done by, and had bruises or discolorations due to having a more physical job, some kind of low-level untreated malady, or being abused by someone. Not a person that would be easily associated with the upper-middle class travel agent she usually plays.
And it worked too, because look at how many of us picked up on it. Imagine what someone who just caught a brief glimpse of her might describe her as.
Stan knows something but he doesn’t know what he knows. Yet. If he was that sure they were spies he would have reported it.
Interesting that Elizabeth would choose now to hang up a new shingle on the family spy business, “…& Daughter”. She’s become so desperate that her protective instincts as a mother have completely left the building. Which is odd, frankly. Given that she continues to be protective of Henry by agreeing to shield him from the truth. I guess it’s her concession to Philip to divide the family and allow him to make responsible parenting decisions about their sons while she makes life and death decisions with regards to their daughter.
If you look at the Jennings as a metaphor for the late Cold War Soviet Union it makes perfect sense; Elizabeth is a hardline believer who is fully invested in the Soviet system and in complete denial despite the fact that it is literally falling apart and she is given increasingly desperate mission objectives, while Philip is the perestroika-ian reformer of Gorbechev and Shevardnadze. Paige is part of the younger set that still looks up to the old guard and longs for a return to Maxist-Stalinist ideals that they’ve been taught while Henry represents the Bruce Springsteen-listening, Levis-wearing aggitationist element that seeks new economic opportunity and advancement.
Stan has been in denial about many things for a long time, so perhaps it is not so surprising that after a couple years away from counterintelligence and returning after seeing another pair of informants executed, he has started viewing Philip and Elizabeth with more scruitiny especially as Philip starts falling apart emotionally. Initially he just realized something was wrong with Philip but his surreptitious interrogation of Henry combined with the coincidence of Philip and Elizabeth being on an unplanned out of town trip just when a suspected spy was extracted and a couple of agents killed has piqued his suspicious nature.
This series does feel a bit rushed but that may be by design. Those who lived in the period will remember the rapid pace at which developments laid out, often seemingly without preamble or cause; one week Reagan and Gorbechev would be negotiating a strategic arms reduction agreement at a casual sidebar, the next the US would be ramping up Peacekeeper ICBM deployment and charging ahead with catroons of SDI defensive systems that even proponents admitted were fantastical. And almost nobody predicted that the Soviet Union would come to a sudden and dramatic end only a few years hence. It seemed like things were spinning not just out of control but beyond the ability for anyone to anticipate, and at a time before the “24 hour news cycle” or the internet as we know it, every nightly news report gave startling and often disturbing developments that almost no one understood in context.
Stranger
I’m with you right up to Henry. The expensive prep school suggests Henry represents the triumph of the oligarchs.
The marks are definitely no longer there in two E. (undisguised) scenes after the Chicago job.
We haven’t seen him connecting any dots because Stan hasn’t realized the dots he has seen connect to form a picture until, more or less, the latest episode. That also explains why it might feel rushed.
The problem is that isn’t really what happened to get Stan curious. It was more than a work trip, it was them abandoning their son during his Thanksgiving vacation. And it isn’t the business failure that adds to Stans suspicions, it’s that he suspects Philip used the business failure as cover to throw him off about what they are really involved in. This is the beginning of Stan connecting the dots, which leads to his conversation with Henry, the Chicago mess, and then breaking into the Jennings house (which we already know he is not above).
So it’s not rushed at all, it’s just that a combination of stuff Stan already knew plus out of the ordinary shit happening in the right now has combined to tingle his spidey sense (Stany sense?).