This is my take on Paige engaging in espionage this season.
Consider this: up to now, she seems to be buying into her Mother’s and Claudia’s claims that the Soviets are actually the good guys, and that most or all of the negatives she hears on the news are just propaganda put out by the US to make the Soviets look bad. But what happens when she actually gets a job that lets her see what the USSR is really like? There’s a real chance she might turn on them.
And up until this season, what leverage did the Center actually have on her? She’s the daughter of undercover spies; that’s it. She hadn’t personally done anything illegal or treasonous. So all they could threaten her with is exposing her family, which would cost them two major agents for little gain.
But now, she’s actually done things that she, personally, could be held accountable for, and it might not be necessary to burn P&E in order to burn Paige. That’s their hook, to keep her in line once she wises up about their true nature.
Two good calls; Stan’s house - I fell for E washing the dishes. Ovb. it’s the same set just redressed but I can’t claim that
Aderholt’s baby is less than a year old - mummy is still nursing, and we’ve taken a 2-3 year leap so I guess he went from Martha to someone more suitable and then pressed onto the sun-kissed uplands of marriage.
btw, on Oleg, don’t watch Homeland this season - it messes with your head. Not only is Costa Ronin much in evidence but our former sleeper/nerve agent guy is all over Homeland as well.
As an aside, I got the impression that Stan was senior to Agent Aderholt in previous seasons and now it appears that Agent Aderholt is his boss. If that’s correct, it would seem that Stan isn’t moving up professionally.
Stan transferred to another division entirely. Aderholt is now the boss of the division they were both in in the past. So Stan has this one case he’s still working from his old division (the hockey player and wife), and thus, when he’s needed for that case, Aderholt is in charge, more or less.
(But yes, we see no evidence that he is climbing the ladder, presumably due to not being good at playing the office politics game.)
Is Stan good at anything? I mean, I guess he did okay in his undercover assignment with a white supremacist group but I have a hard time imagining how.
Any double-agent (much less triple-agent) is going to be suspected by both parties he or she works for/works against. It really does seem to be a no-win situation to be in–you’re never going to be fully trusted.
Yes, the fact that Paige has been handed a rose-colored glasses view of the Soviets and their operations could definitely lead her to ultimately becoming disillusioned.
If the character survives the series finale, they could easily write a spin-off for her…
I’d guess there may be different views on this so let me put it out there. The exchange between E and the handler when E says MacLeish wants to meet in the State Dept cafeteria; E says "I keep asking myself what the odds are… ". Handler responds “Oh … don’t do that”.
‘odds are’ … of what - it being a set up (she of course bumped into him in the bookstore)?
Specifically, the guy who is married to the artist also works for the State Department. If he’s having lunch at the same time, she would likely get recognized.
Less specifically, it’s an easy place for her cover to get blown. All has to do is wave at someone “Oh Ted, do you know Heather? She works for Bill on the South America desk.” “What? No she doesn’t. I just did a project with them and I know all of Bill’s staff.” And then Elizabeth is taking a cyanide capsule in the middle of the State Department cafeteria.
I see people are still yukking it up over how dumb Stan supposedly is. But:
–In the pilot, he cottoned to there being something fishy about Philip and his car trunk, and even broke into his garage to check it out. Philip had cleaned up the evidence, but Stan’s hunch was correct, as we obviously know.
–I don’t remember the details, but Stan was a key element of their getting the drop on the illegals of unknown identity in the first season finale, and even shot Elizabeth. This despite Martha unwittingly helping the KGB spy on his office and planting a bug on his boss’s desk.
–Stan was slick enough to figure out what Nina was up to, and use it as leverage to get her to be a spy for them, from deep inside the Centre.
–He was able to get the Deputy Attorney General to be an ally (for a while) who allowed Stan to bypass his immediate boss.
–This allowed him to get deep inside the DoD and successfully film top secret computer information, although he ultimately decided not to give it to the Soviets.
–Stan caught the guy who worked in the germ warfare lab.
–Stan figured out that Zinaida was a KGB plant.
–He got Oleg in deep doo-doo (we like Oleg, so we don’t applaud Stan for this, but from the agency’s perspective, it was a coup).
–As noted upthread, Stan caught Martha, found “Clark’s” apartment, etc., and really only plot armor saved Philip there.
This is all just off the top of my head, without going back and looking at plot summaries. I feel fairly sure there’s more.
Oh, cool. I was mostly in the Ukraine, in July and August, but also went to Leningrad and Moscow in August. The Hermitage museum was awesome. Our guide in Leningrad was an interesting guy. At this point he was in IDGAF mode, and described how, when he was in the Red Army, he had been stationed for a while in Cuba. The detail I loved was how they were being covert about how many Soviet troops were there, so he and all his fellow soldiers were brought there on a passenger ship and were given civilian clothing to wear of a touristy type when disembarking: Hawaiian shirts and stuff like that.
I definitely agree, which is why I side-eye the former Soviet “illegal” who says wigs are stupid. It’s not, as you note, about fooling people who actually know you, or even defeating a situation where you are photographed. It’s for when people describe you for a sketch artist: having different hair really throws the whole thing off.
And I love the sketches, because you could plausibly imagine how they could be the product of the collaboration of a witness and a sketch artist who saw Philip and Elizabeth in disguise, yet there’s no reason to think Stan should see them and say “wait a minute…!”.
BTW, Elizabeth’s disguise for her State Dept. employee is so great. It’s not just that it makes her look different from her “real” look (if that is real either), it’s that it’s so perfect for that type of educated, elite woman at the time. It’s so dramatically different from the way she looks as a nurse, I’m really not at all sure the husband of the dying woman would have given her a second glance.
Don’t be so sure. This was not the Stalin or even Brezhnev era. As noted upthread, I spent several weeks in the USSR in the summer of 1990, less than three years after the current time shown on the show. When I touched down in Moscow, I was just a regular teenage liberal-ish Democrat. By the time I returned to the U.S., I had become a pretty committed socialist, who believed (as many in Europe especially also did) that Gorbachev had found the “secret sauce”: preserve the basic strictures of socialism, but open things up a bit economically, culturally, and in terms of civil liberties.
I’m quite interested in Elizabeth as an artist. She’s someone who will need to channel her energies and passion, should she retire from the travel business.
tbh, I’m hating this simplistic interpretation of Stan. This isn’t a show that does ‘simplistic’. These writers are artists; light and shade is their starting point.
