As I said up thread (as long as we’re projecting into the future) that P&E screwed Stan royally in this episode.
Paige is out there, on her own. A 21, 22 year old kid with at best a false Canadian identity with no place to live (at least for very long in the safe house), no money, no education, no (adult) family and no support. The FBI is looking for her.
At some point she’ll get picked up and she’ll be put through the ringer to learn what her parents were up to for 20+ years. And I can’t imagine that she doesn’t give up Stan under that pressure. And then Stan is completely f’ed. Best case he’s fired. Worst case he goes to jail. And with that Renee doesn’t stick around and Henry is screwed.
On the way out, P&E did a lot of additional damage that I don’t think most of us are associating them with.
Since she went so far as to apply for a job at the FBI after having already married Stan in first place, unless she is totally not a spy at all, I think it suffices to say that her cover was golden, whatever it happened to be.
No reason to think that would be given up so easily.
Oh, true: she can actually blackmail him, even if just implicitly. You can also throw in his desire to care for Henry, which is easier if he still has a non-imprisoned sister.
These are good points…except that she was so clueless about the age requirements for becoming an agent that Stan had to suppress laughter at her naïveté. So that leaves open the possibility that she doesn’t have her bases so well covered. (Which is weird, I grant you. The whole thing is weird.)
ETA: Glad you liked the article, E-DUB! I think it would be fascinating to do that meticulous costume/hair/makeup research for individual years and regions.
She wouldn’t have to go to Stan. She has Canadian ID, and her brother is in school in New England (so not far from the Canadian border). Presumably she was carrying at least some money (Canadian or US). She can go get a job in Canada and a place to live and eventually a car. Then she can come down and work out a way to contact her brother. She could go on living a normal, non-spy life–get a degree at a Canadian college, have a profession, get married, and so on.
A lot of people are saying she will inevitably get caught and inevitably will give up Stan. I’m just not seeing any inevitability about any of that. Perhaps people just want to believe Paige will end up in a cell.
If Paige plans on starting a new life in Canada she really shouldn’t have gone all the way back down to DC. :dubious: There was no point to that (other than to show Paige has no plan or idea what she’s doing).
She may have a plan. How about pretending she’s basically an older version of Henry: her parents came to her apartment, told her to come with them, and then on the way told her they were spies, that they were all going to Russia, etc. She was freaked out and scared, so she went along with it until she saw a chance to get away when they split up on the train. And just stick to that story. (I don’t think it’s going to be that hard for the authorities to believe.)
Technically it makes her an accessory for not immediately alerting the cops when she got off the train, but she can say she was in shock. How much trouble would she really be in?
ETA: She certainly needs to stop going to the safehouse though. Get your drunk on, pour one out for Claudia and your parents, compose yourself, and move forward.
I don’t see it that way, but I could certainly be wrong.
Look at all the effort that the FBI put into these sleeper agents over the last several episodes. Tens, Hundreds(?) of FBI agents over multiple states are involved. People were getting killed in the streets. At least two spies are at large in Washington. A KGB agent is in custody. I don’t think they have a friendly 30 minute chat over a cup of cocoa with Paige and call it a day. They’ll threaten her, and Henry and at the very least Stan will be crapping a brick.
I dunno. Remember, we’ve been watching the show, so it’s obvious to us that Paige was in it neck deep. And Stan knows.
That said, if Paige is smart, she’ll admit that she got self defense training from her parents, but claim she just thought it was a hobby for them (because of the incident where she beat up a guy at a bar). But aside from that, is there any reason for the FBI to be suspicious of her? We already know Pastor Tim will cover for her…
Let me state up front that I realize none of this is going to change the world!
There’s a lot we don’t know. If she has $50,000 in her pocket a lot of this changes. But right now all we know is that she’s a 21 year old with a false Canadian passport. No other ID, no place to live, no education, no background to that ID (I’d imagine). Can you get a driver’s license with a Canadian passport? Can you open a bank account?
She not a street smart, tough chick that I can see. Yes she smacked that guy in the bar, but is she mentally tough? Like in prison and being grilled by the best the FBI can produce tough?
If she gets picked up she’ll be pressured to find out what she knows. This is the cold war, and the FBI would have no compunction on leaning on an adult to find out what she knows about her parents who were Soviet spies in Washington DC for over 22 years. Weeks, months, years(?) perhaps in federal solitary confinement with threats to her and Henry could open her month.
Being related to a criminal is not a crime. What legal justification would they have for holding her?
I’m honestly not sure what would happen in real life. Would the FBI position be “this young woman who grew up in America is almost certainly on our side, so let’s treat her really nicely so that she’ll give us enough innocently-observed info about her parents’ activities as possible” or would it be “we assume it’s very likely that she was working with her parents and is holding out on us, let’s bring the hammer down”?
Well, once Paige is picked up, and when Stan crumbles like the muffin he is, he’ll confess to letting P&E&P go, and tell of his entire conversation in the garage. Then the Feds will know Paige was involved, and they can lean on her. I doubt they’ll prosecute Stan - too big a black eye for the Bureau. They’ll just allow him to retire.
Why would Stan crumble? No one suspects him of anything, so it’s not like he’s being questioned. And if they start grilling him about how he didn’t know his best friend was a spy, well, he can answer basically 100% truthfully about everything except for one incident, so it’s not like it will be hard to keep hist story straight.