None But the Lonely Heart, by Tchaikovsky. Takako Nishizaki and the Queesnalnd Orchestra.
They played Stan perfectly, and he bought it. Just enough confession, but “poor pitiful us!”
It played more like bad writing than good spymanship, though.
And now he’s going to double down by staying with Renee. Not even going to put in a word with the feds to not hire her.
What a chump.
You don’t think that (presumably) never seeing or hearing from either of their children again is a high cost? If they were in prison they could still have visitors (presumably).
Also, how happy is either of them really going to be back in their “homeland”? Elizabeth may be in denial about it more than Philip, but it’s a pretty miserable place to live when compared with a middle class existence in capitalist America. And also, they both kinda-sorta betrayed their country and don’t really believe in it anymore. It’s a VERY different tone than it would be if the roles were reversed, two Americans who had been undercover in the Soviet Union for two decades, did some horrible things, and then made it back to the good old USA.
The PASSPORT CONTROL sign was in three languages: Polish, Russian, and English.
Max, I just think people overrate the glory of American middle class life against all others, especially for people who grew up dirt poor in the aftermath of a war-torn hellscape we can’t even conceive of. Keep in mind that Philip was presiding over a business that was about to crash and burn, with debts he could not repay.
Even if you set all that aside: again, just as I said when Martha got out, anyone who wouldn’t rather spend their life in a modest Moscow apartment, where they won’t ever have to worry about paying the bills or putting food on the table, than to spend the rest of their life in federal prison (where, true, they will also not have to worry about grocery budgets or utility bills), is crazy. Even with the possibility of visitors in prison. In Moscow, they can go to world-class ballet, theatre, hockey games; they can go on vacations to Crimean resorts; they can see bands at bars; etc. And this is during glasnost, to be followed by the even greater openness of the Yeltsin years.
So they won’t be dealing with Stalinist repression or even the censorship of the Brezhnev era, not for the next fifteen years or so anyway. Even now, we have at least one person in this thread who is living in Russia, watching the show (maybe via iTunes, as I do?), not seeming to have a life we should pity and consider worse than life in prison.
I suspect the final scene, where they’re standing on the observation platform overlooking Luzhniki (in front of Moscow State University), was green-screened. They had me convinced it really was filmed in Moscow until I noticed you couldn’t see their breaths in the cold.
I said I didn’t know if you were being semantic. You quoted me saying such.
You know what I mean, no need to be coy. Do you still think not verifying that Renee is a spy is the same as verifying that she is not?
I recognized him from a turn on The Hunt for Red October, where he played one of the Russian sailors on Sean Connery’s sub.
Well, it isn’t as high a price as was paid the defense employee that got crushed under his 'Cuda, or the lady who serviced the mail robot, or the kid that caught Phillip in the school, or the guards at the storage place…shall I go on? These were people who did NOTHING wrong. They weren’t in the game. They were collateral damage. They were simply “in the way”. They were killed to protect the actions of people sent here to undermine our country.
Of course, that presumes that Claudia doesn’t get back and tell the KGB how P&E turned disloyal and shot and “left a KGB officer to die in the street.” They might get their comeuppance after all, just like Nina.
I thought the finale was excellent. The lack of resolution was perfect. I had been worried that the show’s creators would feel the need to a) engineer a massive bloodbath or b) neatly tie up all the loose ends, and I was quite relieved that they ended up doing neither.
What does the future hold for Philip and Elizabeth? I think they will be fine. At this point, Elizabeth can’t imagine an alternative life for herself other than managing a factory (mirroring the character Katya in “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” the film she and Claudia watched with Paige), as she says she might have done if she’d stayed in the USSR. But I could envision her as a successful Russian businesswoman in the wild ‘90s. She is certainly ruthless enough to deal with the chaos of that era, and she wouldn’t be at all intimidated by the organized crime bosses. Nowadays, I suspect she would be a fanatical proponent of Putin and his regime. Putin’s vision of the world is tailor-made for Elizabeth: deep pride in the Soviet victory in WWII, a neat sidestep around the Terror, intense nationalism, a bunker mentality that is intolerant of criticism, the prevailing sense that Russia is perpetually under siege by its enemies.
Philip might have a harder time adjusting. But I could see him as an early supporter of Yeltsin, hopeful in the early ‘90s, depressed as the decade draws to a close. I also think he would be quite skeptical of Putin, but he would keep his mouth shut. Philip knows when it’s prudent to say nothing.
I liked the last scene a great deal. The line “We’ll get used to it” was a perfect encapsulation of the whole series, as well as being culturally appropriate: half-resigned, half-determined. (As an aside, I always enjoy the brief moments when the two main actors attempt to speak Russian. I wonder whether the scene at the border was silent because Keri Russell couldn’t manage more than a single word without butchering the pronunciation.)
This scene (and the finale as a whole) made me think of Chekhov. Of course, there are the anti-Chekhovian moments: the cyanide pill that is never swallowed, the gun (Stan’s) that never goes off. But Chekhov was the first and still among the greatest masters of the unresolved ending. As I watched Philip and Elizabeth in Moscow, I thought of the ending of Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Little Dog.” That story, like the entire series, is really about relationships, loyalty, deceit, betrayal. Just as this episode’s title “START” indicates not just the weapons treaty but the beginning of a new life for all the characters, the last lines of “The Lady with the Little Dog” show a man and a woman alone together in Moscow, trying to figure out their future: “And it seemed that in just a little while a solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was far away, and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.”
A lot of folks have thrown a lot of stuff out there so I’ll just give my impressions without trying to multi-quote the whole business. I think that Phillip was being sincere in letting Stan know his suspicions re:Rene. The best he could do under the circumstances by way of apology. Of course, what Stan can do with the info without having to reveal the source is a good question, but he has to find a way to torpedo her FBI ambitions.
I think Stan and Paige will keep each others secrets.
He let them go having heard the same info from Oleg and them, and now believing that US interests would be served by having that faction triumph over the hard liners.
I agree that Elizabeth’s disguise was the worse of the two, and question them even taking the same train. Of course, that could have been the necessity of drama.
I checked last night on IMDB and while the finale is pulling a 9+ rating, many of the reviewers there are expressing the same level of dissatisfaction over the lack of closure that you see with some folks here.
She got the last line (a single word in Russian) wrong too.
I agree with those who think closure would have been nice, but it seldom happens in real life.
Sure. But I’m not evaluating their fate as a judge who’s job it is to fairly punish crimes. I’m evaluating it as a viewer of a TV show. I would have felt dissatisfied if they just got to ride off into the sunset, happy in all ways. But it’s very far from that, even if it’s not karmically “fair”.
Brilliantly stated! Under certain circumstances, I could have lived with arrest, expulsion or perhaps a trade to get some Americans back home, but he brutal murder of those whom you accurately say were just “in the way” is what turned me against the so-called “protagonists” of the series. Their is no way I could ever root for them.
I felt much the same way about the show “Dexter”. I saw a few eps when I had HBO, Showtime, etc. A co-worker of mine said she rooted for Dexter because “he had a code…he only murdered people who deserved it”. Sorry, but Dexter was a killer, and the way he disposed of the bodies so as to avoid suspicion is proof of his consciousness of guilt. Code or no code, there is no way I could have rooted for him. Same for P and E here.
Yes, her pronunciation is terrible. Matthew Rhys seems to have a better ear. He has, after all, managed a passable (though by no means flawless) American accent all these years. His Russian pronunciation is far from perfect, but it’s better than Keri Russell’s.
A great quality of the Welsh.
To be fair, your native language skills can be affected when you live abroad for a long time, or even if you’re learning a new language through immersion.
I started learning Russian at a language camp when I was 17. At the end of the first week, I tried to write a letter home in English and found I couldn’t do it. Everything came out wrong.
I lived in the UK for 14 months back in the '70s. When I got back to Minnesota, my friends told me I sounded distinctly British.
People here who have talked to my ex-wife and daughter over the Internet tell me they now speak Russian with something of a Canadian accent. I can’t hear it, but they can.
Still, to misplace the stress in a three-syllable word shows that Keri definitely needed a Russian language coach. She was just reading the word as it was transliterated into English.
I have noticed that some Russians seem to acquire an odd intonation (rather than incorrect pronunciation) if they spend a lot of time speaking another language. It happens to a small minority of native Russian speakers in any case. And I would certainly expect better from those trained by the KGB. 
Keri Russell should have listened to the earwormof a couple of years ago “Ничего, привыкнем”.