A body list that Stan does not know about. For all he knows they are telling the truth.
It’s going to be interesting in 20 years when FB comes along and Stan looks up his old neighbors.
ETA: In reply to Riemann.
Was that stuff kept in the garages? It looked to me like the Jenningses had everything they needed stashed in their laundry room.
How is Stan going to come out of this? Is he going to get a feather in his cap for exposing the illegals, or will he be reprimanded for living across from them for six years and not suspecting a thing?
Unless they steal a treasure trove of classified material during their coffee breaks, I doubt it.
The McDonald’s scene was interesting.
There’s is some superb acting (and casting) in this series. Matthew Rhys obviously, and Noah Emmerich is fabulous even though I think he has some dubious writing to contend with. Oleg, Oleg’s dad, Arkady, Tatiana - I have never seen these actors before, and I will always think of them as being the Russians they portrayed here.
Paige is the only one that’s jarringly bad, of course. But again, she had some poor material to work with, since the big reveal that they are spies her character’s feelings and motivations don’t really make much sense.
And a minor point, but was kind of ridiculous how the police artist’s sketch, from the priest’s memory of seeing them one time out of disguise at the wedding, looked exactly like them!
They kept little at home. Most of their stuff was at an apartment. As long as their spy ring itself has not been compromised, little chance. No doubt the KGB destroyed or moved incriminating stuff.
I was disappointed that Claudia’s fate wasn’t mentioned, and I would have liked to see P&E when the USSR fell. But beyond that, it was an excellent ending to an excellent show.
Huh? They have been chasing the illegals who have been murdering people for years. And even if there could be other illegals, Stan’s suspicions were specifically related to Elizabeth’s disappearance for several weeks (her fictional aunt) after a big shootout in which agents were killed; and to Phil & Liz disappearing at Thanksgiving for a shootout in Chicago - again, dead agents. The way it’s portrayed, he surely does know that these are the killers he has been pursuing all along.
Hardly that. More like, it morphed into today’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
I thought Paige was fine, though obviously not on the level of many of the stellar adult actors.
And I had the opposite reaction to the police sketch: that if anything, it was premature for them to see it as a slam dunk. (Of course, they could go back to the priest with Stan’s photo.)
Relatedly, it was funny how the surveillance photos turned out to be a red herring as they were plausibly inconclusive. If the priest had kept quiet, they could have ended up fleeing the country unnecessarily. (Although they had intended to move back anyway, before the Kimmie mission kept them there—and that is now obviously moot.)
It helps that they really were Russian. 
As for the FBI composites, I thought they were way too accurate too. Elizabeth’s in particular looked like it had been clipped from a fashion magazine. Why didn’t they just show the priest the photo Stan showed to Oleg?
I can’t believe they won’t find some way of just expelling Oleg, rather than keep him locked in prison.
Interestingly, Oleg’s dad also belongs in the “Spotting Star Trek Actors in Other Shows” thread:
Ah, really? Good casting then!
Yes, in reality it would have gone: sketch looks like it could be Phil and Liz, show priest a photo of them for confirmation. I guess it was more dramatic to have the scene between Stan & Aderholt, but the sketches made me laugh. In general this show has been really good with realistic little details, that was a misstep.
nm - just realized that was a spoiler for a book, so deleting
In another couple of years, they’ll be able to go to the first one in Moscow, on Pushkin Square.
I remember the night it opened in January 1990. All of the toilet seats had been stolen by the time they closed around midnight. I kid you not.
For months, you had to stand in a line that snaked back and forth in front of the restaurant and around the square. I took a date there for International Women’s Day, and it took us something like five hours to get in. I kept saying “We don’t have to go here, you know. We can go somewhere else.” She said “No, no. I want to go to McDonald’s!” She was adamant about it.
To give some insight into the Russian mind, I was having a “business lunch” at McD’s one day with a young guy who had been to the States. I asked him if he’d eaten at McD’s while he was in America. “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t think they’re very popular there.” Why not? I asked. He said “There’s never a line.”
Even though the kids were too young to decide for themselves, they were still American citizens if they were born in the US, and I don’t think that can be taken away from them.
Officially, Russia does not recognize multiple citizenships, but I’ve never had any trouble crossing the border with my daughter, who was born in Moscow. So long as she has a Russian passport to prove she wasn’t living here illegally and a US (or now Canadian) passport to get to our destination without needing a visa, there’s no problem. (I registered her birth abroad at the US Embassy before she was a week old and got her an American passport the same day.)
Presumably those kids could one day apply for an American passport at the US Embassy in Moscow, so long as they have proof they’re native-born Americans.
When American fast food chains began expanding aggressively in regions outside Europe in the early 90’s, lines were pretty common in new territories, although I don’t remember hearing about toilet seats being stolen!
As an aside, everytime in the series, they focused on American lifestyle especially, clothes and , gadgets and appliances I thought " yeah, but irrelevant, wait 10 years, the Chinese will come and make them available cheaply for everyone".
I did. It was the dead of winter, and people were smuggling them out under their coats. I was working for CBS at the time, and I had a long talk with one of the female Canadian McD managers a few weeks later. She hated being in Moscow and couldn’t wait to leave.
The lines there were unlike any others I’ve seen in Russia, but they were much shorter when I came back to Moscow in 1992 after having been gone for a bit more than two years. The second McD’s didn’t open until 1994, on the Arbat. Now they’re everywhere. Always very busy, but no more long lines outside.
The line was still all the way around the park in August 1990. I took one look and said “screw this”. I rather liked the native cuisine anyway.
What **Raza **said a few seasons ago inanother thread really resonated.
They went from being just one team to doing everything under the sun, so much so that a season after the above post, overwork was a plot point.
On a more positive note. The show over 6 years had multiple arcs and plots, which seemed unrelated to one another. The Jennings. The Residentura. Stan-FBI/Nina. The Russia plots with Oleg. At times it was like watching multiple different shows.
Kudos to the writers for making these disparate threads eventually come together in a mostly satisfying way for the finale. And in an organic way mostly. The only the thing they missed was Stan’s suspicions wrt Jennings, after Season 1, he had little… professional interaction with the Jenning