From what I remember, the go bag (which included the set of passports they planned on using to cross the border) were in their laundry room/garage.
But the stuff for missions (the wigs, the costumes, the mission specific ID) were in the garages away from the house. That way, they could change into (& out of) costume somewhere away from home (I believe that’s where Elizabeth burned the painting) and their neighbors wouldn’t wonder “why does Elizabeth keep wearing wigs all the time?”
Paige has stuff in the garages from when she did missions. Henry does not.
As I’ve said before, that’s odd to see people calling the first season more realistic. Former CIA agent Joe Weisberg, who created the show, sees it exactly the opposite way:
Too bad we can’t get him in here to debate you guys!
Zbuzz, do you still think I was “being semantic”? I would say they planted their flag in a clear middle ground between “Renee revealed to be a spy” and “Renee revealed to be a red herring”.
I was expecting at some point, once they arrived in Russia, that there would be a surprise prisoner exchange on one of those long, desolate roads: Phillip and Elizabeth for Oleg.
P & E are delivered into Stan’s waiting arms. I was wary. not believing it would end the way it ended.
I like the way it ended, no mistake there. I just didn’t expect it.
I’m not sure I liked how all aspects played out, but I did like the subversion of expectations in the fact that for the last few episodes virtually all the action and violence evaporated. We kept expecting that the next episode must be the one where it all kicks off, but instead we had about 5 hours with very little action or violence yet incredible tension as things played out in all the key relationships and inside people’s heads. Made possible by a very talented cast.
Anyone else notice the anachronism of the flat-screen cash registers at McDonald’s? I was also wondering why Phil came out with two bags of food and no drinks. “Dad, I was kinda hoping for one last Coke.” Maybe that’s why Paige got off the train.
I was really expecting Stan to shoot himself in the garage. There was his best friend admitting to be an enemy agent. The personal and professional betrayal was huge. Stan even said that Phil had made his life into a joke. Then, Phil telling him that Renee might be one of them, too… Where was Stan to go after all that? He sucks as an FBI agent. His wife may be a spy. He had nothing left.
In the “who dies?” poll, I chose Paige because I felt that it made the most narrative sense. P & E need to suffer some sort of consequence for the terrible things they have done. So, Paige’s sudden abandonment and Henry’s staying behind made them pay some sort of a cost, but not nearly a steep enough consequence in my opinion.
I understand that the showrunners don’t see P & E as bad people. I get that and tend to agree. However, they did truly bad things. They should have had to pay for that.
While we will never see it, I don’t think Philip and Elizabeth will be getting off scott free. They may have eluded Stan and the FBI, but Elizabeth at least betrayed the KGB when she shot Tatiana. Apparently Claudia beat it back to the USSR (as indicated in Paige’s visit to the vacant safe house), and she was none too pleased with Elizabeth’s actions. She will make sure the couple formerly known as Jennings will pay a price for that.
Well, I don’t feel cheated, really, and they did tie things up about as well as one could expect. The end we got wasn’t nearly as clever as so many of those potential plots put forth by the Teeming Millions in this thread; in fact, I wouldn’t say the end was clever at all (despite being riveting and well-acted).
The two items that leave a whole in my TV-watching soul are:
the only genuinely-good guy, Oleg, apparently is left alone to rot in jail (we’re even shown a sad shot of him in his cell on the floor)
what the hell happened to the accidental killing of Gaad by Soviet agents? I genuinely thought they’d get back to that and let us know what the hell that was all about
I don’t know whether Philip warning Stan about Renee possibly being one of them was meant as a kindness or a mind game. I don’t think it even occurred to Stan, but now he’ll spend the rest of his life wondering.
I really don’t see either of them becoming oligarchs. Neither of them have the connections necessary, Mischa isn’t much a businessman, & Nadezhda will never be able to fully shed her ideological baggage.
I don’t think Paige even knows why she went back to the safe house.
That was the Finnish-Soviet border, right? I can’t think of anywhere else were that sign would make any sense.
See the case of Walter Polovchak. Even if his parents did try to send for him (& it’s extremely unlikely they’d even try to contact him) the court case would drag out past his 18th birthday. As traumatic as this is for Henry I’m sure he’ll land on his feet and do well. Even if he does have to finish high school in the public system as a foster kid and work his way thru community college he’s still going to do well for himself. Paige not so much; either she winds up a basket case in a trailer park, or marries well enough to wind up a basket case in the suburbs.
Agreed. They’re not marked for death, but they’re not getting a “hero’s welcome” either. Even assuming Gorbachev manages to fully purge the Centre’s leadership they aren’t going to be working directly with KGB cadets. Maybe they end up working at Institute for US and Canadian Studies.
Basically it was split into the Foreign Intelligence Service (aka SVR) and the Federal Security Service (FSB). The SVR is the succession to the part the Jennings worked for.
Well it looked like Paige was drinking a Coke on the train. I was also expecting Stan to kill himself. And Philip & Elizabeth are paying for their actions, just not in the way many in the audience would like them to.
I know what Claudia told Elizabeth, but I wouldn’t put in past her to hightail it to a 3rd country instead and completely drop of the map.
Stan, unless right to the very end. I hope they send him to the Minot field office.
But also it’s failings. It’s not wrong of an audience to expect some form of closure. Real life may not have closure, but TV should, at least, a little.
And, of course, it isn’t wrong for audiences to want more that 15 minutes of nothing happening. I was sure getting sick of U2. I swear they played it twice. I started longing for the riveting excitement of hole digging.
I agree.
Though I did like the end, of them looking at the home they haven’t seen in over 20 years. I did get that.
What was the classical music playing once P&E were off the plane? It definitely sounded Russian and neoclassical to me — guessing Prokofiev? (A violin concerto?)
It was a nice touch, I thought — after so much 80s pop. I also liked how in the garage P&E were playing dumb with Stan on the specific killings, even after the jig was up. Well played. (Suggests to me that the Renee tidbit Philip dropped might’ve been a ploy rather than a favor.)
But at the end, P&E still left all kinds of destruction in their wake.
Henry, without a family.
Paige is going to have an FBI microscope shoved so far up her ass she’ll never get rid of it. And you know who she’ll be force to cough up? Stan. Stan will have to explain how he left two Russian spies leave. So he’s out of the FBI. So even if Renee isn’t a spy, she’s probably Seacrest out. So Henry is finally in foster care or on his own.
So even as they are trying to get their lives together, they are the gift that keeps on giving with Paige, Henry, Stan and Renee in the shitter.
Good point about Paige betraying Stan. She’s not going to hold up well under pressure and Stan being BFFs with the KGB agents next door was bad enough. Him letting them go is so much worse.
Boy you have that right, JAQ. Stan, Stan, Stan…if only he had known who had killed Chris Amador back in season one…the garage confrontation might have had a different ending instead of Stan deciding to commit a gross dereliction of duty…unless he let them go thinking they would be caught anyway. Or did he just feel sorry for them…or perhaps he decided the coded message was so important it was worth him them go?
Agree with the poster that stated Oleg got a raw deal. He might have been the most virtuous character in the series, and he winds up in prison, which (I will say again) is where P and E should have ended up.
Speaking of incompetence, I saw someone on Twitter rip the border agents on the train, and I quite agree. I can see them missing Phillip…but Elizabeth? She looked right at the guy when he was examining the FBI photos, sketches and description. Even with the wig and glasses, she certainly bears a resemblance to the picture of her that is partially visible on the left hand side of the sheet the border patrol guy was carrying.
At the very least, you’d think it would have caused the guy to hold her for questioning. Ugh… nice police work, guys…
I think that the question of whether/if Stan believed E’s claim that they weren’t killers is an interesting one. Seems to me that he intellectually had to realize that it wasn’t true, but let himself be fooled because of his genuine affection for the family. He was too smart and too angry to let P&E get away with the major lie (claiming that they were just normal Americans) but, master liars that they are, they still did find a lie that he believed, because he wanted to believe it.
There’s probably a lesson there about how to get people to believe lies.