SPECTRE? :dubious:
I thought it was a good resolution. Not one of the very best episodes of the show (which the previous two at least were), but endings are hard. All those loose threads to tie up. (Except Renee. Do we think the writers really intended that to stay ambiguous right up to the end, or did they just run out of runway to make a plot for her?)
Can’t Paige just plead innocence, that she is in the dark like Henry? That she didn’t talk on the phone with him might help her case there. (She’s got to stop going to the safehouse though.)
Did it look to anyone else like they were putting fake passports in the hole they dug? Were those spares? I understand burying all their real identification, obviously.
The people who were watching it “against the grain”, as I called it, are presumably unsatisfied by the semi-“happy ending”. I think someone on this very board said they couldn’t wait for the Jenningses to get killed or imprisoned in the finale. I tried to warn them that if the showrunners don’t see the characters at all the same way you do, you might be disappointed by the lack of fulfillment you ultimately get.
Yeah. The show runner is a former CIA officer himself. One of the things I have learnt from John La Carre novels, books like Spycatcher etc is that while agents who leak from your own side are despised, the enemies turncoats are tolerated as necessary evls, spies normally dom’t hate the other sides officers, after all they are just people doing their duty, not much different from you yourself.
Joe Weisberg, being ex-CIA himself, don;t think ever saw the Jennings as the bad guys or bad people. Plus, this is basically how most illegals ended up, going home to little fanfare, rather than dying a shootouts with law enforcment.
Wonder what the future holds for Mikhail and Nadezhda now? Former illegals typically ended up teaching and training future officers. They have returned to the USSR at the worst time in its history, just as the slide is beginning; hell the next 12 or so years are very lousy. Still in the 1990’s former KGB types became very successful and rich.
As for Renee, I agree the had a plan and ran out of time; Laurie Holden seems to suggest that she was an illegal.
They sure didn’t feel a need to speed it up for the last ep. Even tossed in some digging! 
And the answer to “Who dies?” is No ONE! :eek:
I give Paige a week - tops. What an idiot! Have another shot!
Guess I’m glad they got away. And I found the scene in the garage w/ Stan about as believable as any other options. Coulda done with a shot of Martha…
So whaddya think E said to the border guard to let them in w/o papers and get the other guy (Ivgeny?) to meet them along a country road?
Paige is going to turn herself in and claim that she barely knew a thing and was coerced and eventually escaped.
I don’t really care about Renee but I wonder if Oleg’s message got out.
Thank you for your obviously superior insight on how to watch television. Your analysis is nothing short of amazing.
If Paige were going to turn herself in, why did she go back to the safe house, presumably to see Claudia?
I’m glad the “subplot” (if you can call it that) with Renee wasn’t resolved. Having lived next door to Soviet spies for eight years, Stan will know anything is possible and
for however many years he remains with her, he will always, always, always have a seed of doubt in the back of his mind about her. He’ll be spending a lot of nights with one eye open. And somewhere in the great beyond, Nina is looking down on him, smiling, cackling, and hissing “serves you right, Agent Beeman!”
No doubt Paige’s espionage training included a basic primer on how to survive on her own if she got cut off from her network (which was always a possibility). She can still start fresh with a new identity, as she isn’t actually wanted for any real crimes (Stan can’t relate her parking garage confession without admitting he let two of the FBI’s most wanted just drive away, so that can’t come up.) And while her life will be rough, she is young enough and has a clean enough record that she can start a new identity. She’ll survive …for a few years; inevitably she will get found out, but not right away.
I wonder if “Mikhail” (Philip) will ever run into Martha on the bus?
Nobody won here, everybody lost. The Jennings have spent all these years working for a cause that they now realize was completely false. They were manipulated like pawns on a chessboard and they are left with absolutely nothing. I think that Elizabeth’s shock was far greater than Philip’s, who had sort of figured this out years ago. They had built a life believing that they were working for the greater good of their country–gone in a second. They lost their house, their business, their few friends–they even lost their children. Because they have nowhere else to go they return to Russia, which they don’t even know any more (and to be truthful, their childhood experiences in Russia were horrible).
Stan’s sense of betrayal–he lost everything he had worked and believed in for all these years. The fact that Renee may/may not be a Russian spy is devastating.
Oleg’s desire for a different Russia has led to him losing everything that he had achieved (job, wife, child, parents). He has no forseeable future.
So everybody is left with–what was the point of all of this? Was it worth it? Obviously not.
I will say something similar to what I did when Martha got relocated to the USSR: when your imminent alternative is spending the rest of your life separated in U.S. prisons, getting to live together in reasonable comfort in a modest apartment in Moscow is a win. (Just ask Oleg.)
That was Henry’s fake passport. It was very sad and full of symbolism.
Glad you put quotes there, because of course it’s not happy. Phillip was right in most of what he said to Stan. He has had a miserable, shitty, life. And he has lost almost everything in it that he actually cared about. And now he’s back in his home country, which is about to go even more to shit.
I think Paige will turn herself in. Does the FBI (other than Stan) have even the slightest bit of evidence she was involved in anything? Obviously she’ll never be hired to work for the State Department, but she’s probably lost her taste for that now anyhow.
I thought the entire episode was riveting. The moment when Paige can’t talk to Henry on the phone? Man.
And the last we ever hear about Renee being Phillip voicing our suspicions to Stan… what a troll job!
(I assume we’re supposed to assume that the message made it to Gorbachev. Why would P&E not tell it to Arkady at that point? The fact that he lost a later power struggle doesn’t mean he didn’t benefit from it several years earlier.)
A standard code word, informing the border guard they were KGB and he should check with higher authority. Though I would expect a lot closer scrutiny before they were actually allowed to go on their way.
Where else is she going to go?
Had I been Stan, I’d’ve shot Philip’s kneecaps off when he didn’t immediately hit the ground like he’d been ordered to. Elizabeth I’d’ve double-tapped in the heart and the head as soon as she started to draw a gun on me.
“We don’t kill anyone.” Yeah, right, you lying bitch!
They’re going to start going through the garages and finding what’s hidden inside. There, they will find fake IDs for Elizabeth, Philip, and Paige (and some of the other people in their cells).
She might be able to explain being left behind. She won’t be able to explain why she has student IDs, passports, and drivers licenses with her picture & various names in a group of Soviet spy stuff.
She can’t go “home.”
They may have been expected at that point too.
I’m pretty sure that Paige turns herself in and gets away after claiming that she barely knew anything. She won’t let on that they saw Stan and he’ll make sure that they let her be. No way that she leaves Henry behind after leaving her parents.
Sure she can. Remember, they had those documents for Henry too (thanks Max), and he was actually innocent.
ETA: If her fingerprints are in hard-to-explain places, that’s different. But I don’t think the show’s writers intended us to see her as headed for prison.
The 2010 era illegals kids were left behind and were sent back later. While Paige is an adult, Henry is a minor and doubtless if the KGB (through Mikhail and Nedezdha), asks for him to be sent they will send him. Why wouldn’t they?
Sure it did, in that it was a message from Phillip and Elizabeth that Oleg was trying to get to Arkady. Since Phillip and Elizabeth met directly with Arkady at the end, what happened to the actual slip of paper is pretty much irrelevant.
True in the real world - because real spies don’t go around murdering dozens of people. So I thought the garage scene where Stan let them go was superb, but only if you kind of forget about the prior fictional portrayal of murderous mayhem that we have seen, and imagine it as though they were more realistic illegals.
A lot of Russians immigrated after Glasnost.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Philip and Elizabeth leave Russia, and perhaps settle in Europe. Open a new business and leave the KGB behind. It eventually dissolved anyhow. The Soviet system they served no longer exists.
Eventually trips to America might be possible. Depending on how well they establish their new identities.