That was my favorite episode of the last two seasons.
It's nice to be reminded that the show can still do amazing emotional nuance *and* advance the plot, not just ignore the latter.
I loved the "Not bad" at the end of his sparring with Paige. He was telling the truth, she isn't bad. Her progress, especially given her late start, is impressive. And you know what "not bad" gets you in their world? Choked out to death by a real operator like him. Spying isn't graded on a curve and she's dabbling in a cutthroat underground populated with people like him, who considers entire Olympic judo teams to be ... less than tough. She needs to be way more cautious.
It's funny seeing the reaction on the Internet to Elizabeth's latest two murders (I love the meme where she's Krombopulous Michael, 'here I go killing again, oh boy!') as her finally going too far or something. These two were non-civilian defectors, they knew what they were getting into. It's not a nice thing to do, but it's not on the level of all the random people they've murdered over the years who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Philip is just done with lying. He told Henry the truth, he showed Paige the truth, he told Kimmy the truth. I really hope Stan is up soon on the list. It's still possible that it's just a big tease and we'll never get it, but I want the Stan learns the truth scene more than I've ever wanted a TV scene in my entire life. That's where the narrative arc of the show has been headed for 5.5 seasons, and I'd prefer they just do it well rather than go with the last-minute swerve. And obviously scuttling the Kimmy operation is crossing the Rubicon for him. You don't get back into the Center's good graces after that.
If I'm being greedy, what I really really want is to see what the fallout of the Jennings' being exposed does to Stan. Especially professionally. You don't get to be a counterintelligence agent who accidentally became besties with a deep cover foreign agent and keep your job. If he's *very* lucky, his friends at the agency can steer this towards "semi-graceful retirement" and not criminal charges.
That was a pretty great episode, but that's in large part because I only like Granny more and more. That wham line with Paige.
"Do you know how many Americans died?"
"Not really."
"Four hundred thousand. We lost twenty-seven million."
She's not wrong, in a lot of history "8 out of 10" is considered a pretty reliable description of of how many German military casualties were on the Eastern Front (with the remainder not just representing the "Western Front" as usually understood, but Africa, Italy, and so forth). The funny thing is though, the number she quoted--27 million--is kind of anachronistic. It's only come about in the last few decades out of joint international research between Eurasian and international historians, including some German historians. The sheer magnitude of the Great Patriotic War, as well as the strong desire by the immediate post-war Soviet government to conceal what a demographic disaster it had been with the onset of the Cold War, made securing accurate numbers of civilian deaths, along with military deaths, difficult. It's not something someone in the KGB would just know, anymore than they'd know the precise ratio of Dark Matter in the universe. Even if she had access to "better" information, she would probably quote something in the area of "twenty million".
Small anachronism, but just one that caught my attention. Granny knows history better than the actual historians (or for that matter, the CIA or KGB) of her age.
When she opens that book, seeing her face light up and then immediately drown in sorrow right before the show opening....whatever Margo Martindale is in after The Americans, I hope they use her as well, because damn.
Elizabeth's latent rage was a nice touch too. Looking at American textbooks in the 1990s, and even to some extent today, it was considered entirely normal to minimize the Soviet Union's role in the war in Europe, so it's not surprising that there's probably an even split among educated Americans who think "Russia" fought Nazi Germany or was allied with it. It was only worse in the 1980s, when there was a decades-long political mandate to discredit the communist role in defeating Nazism that was firmly enforced on anything below the college level, especially under conservative governments, when it became necessary to rehabilitate some Germans amid West Germany joining NATO.
Elizabeth's always had her head in history books since season one. She hasn't changed. Stan still reminds me why I like him.
That episode was great. The preview for next week has me too jazzed up to sleep. Dear Sweet Baby Television Jebus, please do not let those be editing fake-outs and we are really getting the stuff it looks like we're getting.
There's a phrase from a spy book I read as a kid, I think one of Clancy's Jack Ryan books, that always stuck with me:
"The tradecraft was perfect. The problem was that when you were looking for it, it looked like tradecraft."
That's what's about to do in the Jennings and all the other illegals. Spycraft is about not getting noticed. The downside is that once someone knows to look for it, it's impossible to miss and leads you right to them
As a father of two girls, any time the writers go back to the Kimmy storyline it creeps me out. It actually starts to make me physically uncomfortable. I get it; it's the mark of good writing, acting, and directing; but I don't have to like it.
Hopefully recent events mean that there won't be much revisiting in the future.
Also the Philip vs. Paige fight seemed very shoehorned-in, to me, and a bit random. He shows up, fights her, says she's decent, then leaves.
......k?
Also I've been working a lot of hours lately, so nuance tends to be lost on me.
Two predictions for next week. One I think is pretty solid, one is a long-shot based on dialogue from the preview.
Solid: Mission to extract Harvest is a failure. FBI realizes KGB is onto them and arrests him. Harvest has the same suicide pill from the hardliners that Elizabeth got and takes it before they can truly process him.
Long-shot: Philip gets caught or heavily implicated in a dead drop with Oleg. Stan, having heard about the money problems from Henry, assumes P is just some American patsy who has been conned into selling secrets to Russian agents. This lets us get an episode or so of the FBI setting up surveillance on them before realizing how big the fish is they've caught.
More predictions for this week. Just predictions, but some of the preview stuff is mixed in so I'll spoiler it to be safe.
The more I think about it, the more I think This Is It for the big moment we've all been waiting for, the FBI figures out the Jennings are foreign agents.
As we were reminded last week with the Harvest reveal, one of the big rules of intelligence is that you don't reveal when you've ID'd an enemy. You monitor them, letting them go about their business while unwittingly feeding you info. I'm willing to bet we get at least an episode's worth of tension as the Jennings are made but not arrested yet, especially given that they are conveniently out of town. We see what appears to be the FBI sweeping their house in the previews for next week, so that'd be perfect. That leaves three episodes to deal with the tension of what might happen to them if/when the FBI finds them, any possible dealmaking (looking at you, Philip, trade your secrets for immunity for Paige) and the long-term consequences of it all.
I'm wondering if Stan's "Are you involved in something?" from the previews isn't him acting and he knows exactly what's gone on. How great would that scene be? Stan is finally wise, has to deal with his shock and anger and betrayal, and go talk to Philip as if he doesn't know.
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pretty disappointed. I'm not really in the mood for emotionally resonant pieces that rehash plot ground we've already covered. We *know* this show can do that well. It's time for some real endgame.
Stan is suspicious but not enough to make it professionally official. He pokes around their property a bit and doesn't find anything. That's a rehash of literally the first episode.
Other than that, we got:
Philip and Elizabeth are back on good-ish terms again after some frosty times.
A mission doesn't go great and some other people die. They have to do something distasteful because of their tradecraft. (Heck, plowing through an FBI van and taking some fire is literally a rehash of the season 2 finale).
Paige learns the spy game is a little messier than she thought. She thinks she's ready. Her parent isn't sure but pushes forward anyway. We've been seeing that almost every episode for two seasons.
pretty disappointed. I'm not really in the mood for emotionally resonant pieces that rehash plot ground we've already covered. We *know* this show can do that well. It's time for some real endgame.
Stan is suspicious but not enough to make it professionally official. He pokes around their property a bit and doesn't find anything. That's a rehash of literally the first episode.
Other than that, we got:
Philip and Elizabeth are back on good-ish terms again after some frosty times.
A mission doesn't go great and some other people die. They have to do something distasteful because of their tradecraft. (Heck, plowing through an FBI van and taking some fire is literally a rehash of the season 2 finale).
Paige learns the spy game is a little messier than she thought. She thinks she's ready. Her parent isn't sure but pushes forward anyway. We've been seeing that almost every episode for two seasons.
That reads like a surprisingly unfair reduction of what happened.
I'd argue that a significant aspect of this episode was to show us that the relationship between Philip and Elizabeth can't be repaired — there may be love between them such that they attempt to help one another, but neither can truly trust the other, their reunion fails miserably, and Elizabeth makes explicit at the end that Philip made the wrong decision as a young man. Which of course cuts to Philip apparently thinking about their Orthodox marriage while looking completely dead inside.
With regards to Stan's suspicions, his peppy invigoration in the aftermath of Chicago lets us know that HE KNOWS and he is excited to solve the puzzle. Of course we're also granted the amusingly detail (courtesy of Henry) that he's blind to whatever we presume Renee is engaged in (assuming Renee is a Russian/other agent).
And the Paige scene lets us know that she didn't acquire a smidgen of her mother's terrific fashion sense, and is thus doomed.
I feel like a lot of folks wanted what would effectively be the conclusion of the show. Which is fine, y'all want some closure. But there are still three more episodes.
There's plenty of room to advance key plotlines, specifically the FBI plotline, without it ending the show on the spot. At this point, it looks like the story of Philip, Elizabeth and Stan is going to get insufficient space for the ramifications of whatever the ending is.
If Stan *knew*, he'd have involved his boss and co-workers. He doesn't. So we're right back where we were all the other times Stan started to wonder. Of course we know that with three episodes left, he's probably not going to let it go for long, but that doesn't make seeing it again any more satisfying.
Similarly with Philip and Elizabeth's strained relationship. The only reason we think it won't be repaired this time is because we know the end is coming. Otherwise, this isn't even the worst marital fight they've had.
Heck, even the action scene and horror scene were rehashes. Plowing through an FBI car trying to roadblock them, exchanging gunfire, someone takes a bullet but they get away? Season 1 finale. And that time, Elizabeth took the bullet and not some redshirts.
Philip has to mutilate a body to protect mission security? Season 3, episode 2, Annelise. Where it was more impactful because it was someone he knew and cared for.
I think there's a strong chance for the whole Renee thing completely sputtering out. I don't know how I feel about it.
Claudia's response to the betrayal was great, such a great way to end that character (though we certainly might see her again). She'll go back to fight, the way she's done it before.
The other illegal Elizabeth killed--was that the woman who trained her in the flashbacks? Also, one thing I won't miss about the show: every goddamn shot of Moscow being blue and at night. Christ, we get it, the audience is stupid and needs to be told where things are. They have such great shots and settings and then everything is dark and blue tinted.
Oh well, no big deal. That scene with Elizabeth trying to lie to Paige, failing, and then laying on the big, painful truth was great. Got to see the Jennings bug out bag apparently. I guess Paige is out of it? We'll see next week in the finale. It's been a crazy ride.
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Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
I think the flashback lighting helps with the de-aging effects.
I think there's a strong chance for the whole Renee thing completely sputtering out. I don't know how I feel about it.
Claudia's response to the betrayal was great, such a great way to end that character (though we certainly might see her again). She'll go back to fight, the way she's done it before.
The other illegal Elizabeth killed--was that the woman who trained her in the flashbacks? Also, one thing I won't miss about the show: every goddamn shot of Moscow being blue and at night. Christ, we get it, the audience is stupid and needs to be told where things are. They have such great shots and settings and then everything is dark and blue tinted.
Oh well, no big deal. That scene with Elizabeth trying to lie to Paige, failing, and then laying on the big, painful truth was great. Got to see the Jennings bug out bag apparently. I guess Paige is out of it? We'll see next week in the finale. It's been a crazy ride.
If you're asking about the assassin that Elizabeth shot, it was Tatiana.
I think there's a strong chance for the whole Renee thing completely sputtering out. I don't know how I feel about it.
Claudia's response to the betrayal was great, such a great way to end that character (though we certainly might see her again). She'll go back to fight, the way she's done it before.
The other illegal Elizabeth killed--was that the woman who trained her in the flashbacks? Also, one thing I won't miss about the show: every goddamn shot of Moscow being blue and at night. Christ, we get it, the audience is stupid and needs to be told where things are. They have such great shots and settings and then everything is dark and blue tinted.
Oh well, no big deal. That scene with Elizabeth trying to lie to Paige, failing, and then laying on the big, painful truth was great. Got to see the Jennings bug out bag apparently. I guess Paige is out of it? We'll see next week in the finale. It's been a crazy ride.
If you're asking about the assassin that Elizabeth shot, it was Tatiana.
I was afraid of that. It didn't sound believable since, last we saw of Tatiana, she was basically Rezidentura staff and not one of the illegals--I guess she took it on personally.
That sucks, I like the character. But live by the sword, die by the sword. And fittingly enough, Oleg indirectly got her killed.
Oleg, as much as anyone, knew what he was getting into and regretted it early.
Everyone (Oleg included) who made an incredibly difficult moral decision, of course, is confronted by a brutal hindsight: they were wrong, wrong for all the right reasons, but wrong nonetheless. Even Mikhail Gorbachev himself has regretted some of his most crucial decisions in retrospect, and the majority of the population is less kind about it--his popularity in his homeland is a sad fraction of what it is in the United States. Claudia was right, for the wrong reasons perhaps, but right nonetheless--the people that she was afraid of would destroy the country.
Arkady came through, as he always did. It's sad that he and Claudia ended up on opposite sides of this.
Stan "I'll Kill Them" Beeman really loves Henry. As for Paige...talk about uncharted territory.
Until the showwriters speak on it, we'll never know about Renee.
Other than that, I'm okay with what was otherwise a lowkey ending after that garage confrontation
I think Oleg will be fine. The anti-coup forces in Russia won, so he's a hero, and we know from history that the Berlin wall falls and relations improve (at least for the short term...). His dad is still Transportation Minister and personal friends with Gorbachev. I imagine there would be red tape but I think he gets released at the very least in a spy trade, if not just outright.
The garage confrontation was everything I feared in the ending. They tortured the plot to contrive a personal confrontation (Oh look, the FBI can't take decent surveillance photos, so Stan has just enough time to slip away while we wait for the sketches) and then tortured Stan's character because they wanted to shoehorn in a personal confrontation *and* still have the ending they wanted. Stan's primary characterization has always been that he'll sacrifice everything for his job, and then of late he's been especially focused on getting revenge for Sofia's killers, projecting a lot of his leftover Nina issues onto her. Now he's talked out of it all by people who have just admitted they do nothing but lie to him *and* he knows are still lying to him now about not killing anyone. Fine, maybe he doesn't have it in him to shoot them personally. Shoot the tires and call for backup.
It would have been a lot better to just skip the personal confrontation. The scene where Aderholt quietly, sympathetically slides the sketches across the table could have been a place for him to unleash his anger. It makes sense, I guess, because the coincidence of an FBI counterintelligence agent moving in next door to the spies he's hunting was always the weakest part of the show.
OK, now that I got that one complaint out of the way, I loved everything else in the finale. I don't think I've ever had a TV show hit me with so many emotional gut punches consecutively in one episode. And all of them were perfectly earned. It helped a little to know that Arkady and Oleg's dad aren't as lost as they think they are. We know from history that the hardliners didn't immediately take over, but rather the coup fizzled and the tensions between the factions remained until 1991, when a brief coup failed and the country dissolved. As others in the thread mentioned, I think it's reasonable to assume that in the intervening four years, Oleg's dad was able to muster sufficient pull to get a spy trade for Oleg.
I held it together until they started to play Brothers in Arms over the montage of all the broken lives. That's always been my favorite 80s slow song, and now it's played over two of my favorite TV scenes of all time.
Then the long, drawn out ending was especially well-done. In my head, I knew that they weren't going to get caught by a random border guard near Quebec, and I knew they weren't going to get arrested at the Poland-Russia checkpoint. But the scenes felt plenty tense anyway, to the point I cheered when I saw it was Arkady waiting for them. And then to have Paige on the train platform. It was such a perfect, logical, in-character and heartbreaking development. The way they drew our emotional attention to the tension of possible detection, only to swerve into losing another child, is probably the best scene the show has ever put together.
I'm not entirely clear on what Paige is going back to. I could see the argument that she could feign ignorance alongside Henry's real ignorance. Say her parents came to her out of nowhere and told her they had to run to Canada, but obviously that's crazy so she hopped off the train before it could leave the country. I could also see the argument that the FBI isn't dumb, Paige isn't that good of a liar, and surely her fingerprints are on a wig or fake document somewhere in all the stuff they're going to unearth on the Jennings.
I assume part of her training included how to procure a copy of a birth certificate to use to create a new identity . In a pre-Internet age, she could get by for a time.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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Other than that, I'm okay with what was otherwise a lowkey ending after that garage confrontation
I think Oleg will be fine. The anti-coup forces in Russia won, so he's a hero, and we know from history that the Berlin wall falls and relations improve (at least for the short term...). His dad is still Transportation Minister and personal friends with Gorbachev. I imagine there would be red tape but I think he gets released at the very least in a spy trade, if not just outright.
Oleg is a very likely case for...
...barter for a trade for an American spy in Soviet or aligned custody.
Other than that, I'm okay with what was otherwise a lowkey ending after that garage confrontation
I think Oleg will be fine. The anti-coup forces in Russia won, so he's a hero, and we know from history that the Berlin wall falls and relations improve (at least for the short term...). His dad is still Transportation Minister and personal friends with Gorbachev. I imagine there would be red tape but I think he gets released at the very least in a spy trade, if not just outright.
Oleg is a very likely case for...
...barter for a trade for an American spy in Soviet or aligned custody.
OH MAN, someone on reddit with some brilliant head-canon: Oleg is traded back to Russia in exchange for - Phillip and Elizabeth, who are prosecuted and jailed for their crimes in the US...
Other than that, I'm okay with what was otherwise a lowkey ending after that garage confrontation
I think Oleg will be fine. The anti-coup forces in Russia won, so he's a hero, and we know from history that the Berlin wall falls and relations improve (at least for the short term...). His dad is still Transportation Minister and personal friends with Gorbachev. I imagine there would be red tape but I think he gets released at the very least in a spy trade, if not just outright.
Oleg is a very likely case for...
...barter for a trade for an American spy in Soviet or aligned custody.
OH MAN, someone on reddit with some brilliant head-canon: Oleg is traded back to Russia in exchange for - Phillip and Elizabeth, who are prosecuted and jailed for their crimes in the US...
Eh, Boris Yeltsin did try and purge the communists. So woe unto Elizabeth.
a kind of Usual Suspects sort of ending, where Stan only figures things out after the fact (maybe with the Jennings negotiating to change sides after all, or something, as opposed to fleeing
The parking garage scene felt, I dunno, sort of needlessly confrontational
Still, pretty good last couple eps, especially after feeling like the series was kinda losing steam in the later seasons
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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I loved the "Not bad" at the end of his sparring with Paige. He was telling the truth, she isn't bad. Her progress, especially given her late start, is impressive. And you know what "not bad" gets you in their world? Choked out to death by a real operator like him. Spying isn't graded on a curve and she's dabbling in a cutthroat underground populated with people like him, who considers entire Olympic judo teams to be ... less than tough. She needs to be way more cautious.
It's funny seeing the reaction on the Internet to Elizabeth's latest two murders (I love the meme where she's Krombopulous Michael, 'here I go killing again, oh boy!') as her finally going too far or something. These two were non-civilian defectors, they knew what they were getting into. It's not a nice thing to do, but it's not on the level of all the random people they've murdered over the years who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Philip is just done with lying. He told Henry the truth, he showed Paige the truth, he told Kimmy the truth. I really hope Stan is up soon on the list. It's still possible that it's just a big tease and we'll never get it, but I want the Stan learns the truth scene more than I've ever wanted a TV scene in my entire life. That's where the narrative arc of the show has been headed for 5.5 seasons, and I'd prefer they just do it well rather than go with the last-minute swerve. And obviously scuttling the Kimmy operation is crossing the Rubicon for him. You don't get back into the Center's good graces after that.
If I'm being greedy, what I really really want is to see what the fallout of the Jennings' being exposed does to Stan. Especially professionally. You don't get to be a counterintelligence agent who accidentally became besties with a deep cover foreign agent and keep your job. If he's *very* lucky, his friends at the agency can steer this towards "semi-graceful retirement" and not criminal charges.
"Not really."
"Four hundred thousand. We lost twenty-seven million."
She's not wrong, in a lot of history "8 out of 10" is considered a pretty reliable description of of how many German military casualties were on the Eastern Front (with the remainder not just representing the "Western Front" as usually understood, but Africa, Italy, and so forth). The funny thing is though, the number she quoted--27 million--is kind of anachronistic. It's only come about in the last few decades out of joint international research between Eurasian and international historians, including some German historians. The sheer magnitude of the Great Patriotic War, as well as the strong desire by the immediate post-war Soviet government to conceal what a demographic disaster it had been with the onset of the Cold War, made securing accurate numbers of civilian deaths, along with military deaths, difficult. It's not something someone in the KGB would just know, anymore than they'd know the precise ratio of Dark Matter in the universe. Even if she had access to "better" information, she would probably quote something in the area of "twenty million".
Small anachronism, but just one that caught my attention. Granny knows history better than the actual historians (or for that matter, the CIA or KGB) of her age.
Elizabeth's latent rage was a nice touch too. Looking at American textbooks in the 1990s, and even to some extent today, it was considered entirely normal to minimize the Soviet Union's role in the war in Europe, so it's not surprising that there's probably an even split among educated Americans who think "Russia" fought Nazi Germany or was allied with it. It was only worse in the 1980s, when there was a decades-long political mandate to discredit the communist role in defeating Nazism that was firmly enforced on anything below the college level, especially under conservative governments, when it became necessary to rehabilitate some Germans amid West Germany joining NATO.
Elizabeth's always had her head in history books since season one. She hasn't changed. Stan still reminds me why I like him.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
"The tradecraft was perfect. The problem was that when you were looking for it, it looked like tradecraft."
That's what's about to do in the Jennings and all the other illegals. Spycraft is about not getting noticed. The downside is that once someone knows to look for it, it's impossible to miss and leads you right to them
Hopefully recent events mean that there won't be much revisiting in the future.
......k?
Also I've been working a lot of hours lately, so nuance tends to be lost on me.
Solid: Mission to extract Harvest is a failure. FBI realizes KGB is onto them and arrests him. Harvest has the same suicide pill from the hardliners that Elizabeth got and takes it before they can truly process him.
Long-shot: Philip gets caught or heavily implicated in a dead drop with Oleg. Stan, having heard about the money problems from Henry, assumes P is just some American patsy who has been conned into selling secrets to Russian agents. This lets us get an episode or so of the FBI setting up surveillance on them before realizing how big the fish is they've caught.
The more I think about it, the more I think This Is It for the big moment we've all been waiting for, the FBI figures out the Jennings are foreign agents.
As we were reminded last week with the Harvest reveal, one of the big rules of intelligence is that you don't reveal when you've ID'd an enemy. You monitor them, letting them go about their business while unwittingly feeding you info. I'm willing to bet we get at least an episode's worth of tension as the Jennings are made but not arrested yet, especially given that they are conveniently out of town. We see what appears to be the FBI sweeping their house in the previews for next week, so that'd be perfect. That leaves three episodes to deal with the tension of what might happen to them if/when the FBI finds them, any possible dealmaking (looking at you, Philip, trade your secrets for immunity for Paige) and the long-term consequences of it all.
I'm wondering if Stan's "Are you involved in something?" from the previews isn't him acting and he knows exactly what's gone on. How great would that scene be? Stan is finally wise, has to deal with his shock and anger and betrayal, and go talk to Philip as if he doesn't know.
Is Henry's school a "high school" or a "college"?
College-Preparatory High School, or "Prep School":
Edit:
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Stan is suspicious but not enough to make it professionally official. He pokes around their property a bit and doesn't find anything. That's a rehash of literally the first episode.
Other than that, we got:
Philip and Elizabeth are back on good-ish terms again after some frosty times.
A mission doesn't go great and some other people die. They have to do something distasteful because of their tradecraft. (Heck, plowing through an FBI van and taking some fire is literally a rehash of the season 2 finale).
Paige learns the spy game is a little messier than she thought. She thinks she's ready. Her parent isn't sure but pushes forward anyway. We've been seeing that almost every episode for two seasons.
That reads like a surprisingly unfair reduction of what happened.
With regards to Stan's suspicions, his peppy invigoration in the aftermath of Chicago lets us know that HE KNOWS and he is excited to solve the puzzle. Of course we're also granted the amusingly detail (courtesy of Henry) that he's blind to whatever we presume Renee is engaged in (assuming Renee is a Russian/other agent).
And the Paige scene lets us know that she didn't acquire a smidgen of her mother's terrific fashion sense, and is thus doomed.
I feel like a lot of folks wanted what would effectively be the conclusion of the show. Which is fine, y'all want some closure. But there are still three more episodes.
If Stan *knew*, he'd have involved his boss and co-workers. He doesn't. So we're right back where we were all the other times Stan started to wonder. Of course we know that with three episodes left, he's probably not going to let it go for long, but that doesn't make seeing it again any more satisfying.
Similarly with Philip and Elizabeth's strained relationship. The only reason we think it won't be repaired this time is because we know the end is coming. Otherwise, this isn't even the worst marital fight they've had.
Heck, even the action scene and horror scene were rehashes. Plowing through an FBI car trying to roadblock them, exchanging gunfire, someone takes a bullet but they get away? Season 1 finale. And that time, Elizabeth took the bullet and not some redshirts.
Philip has to mutilate a body to protect mission security? Season 3, episode 2, Annelise. Where it was more impactful because it was someone he knew and cared for.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Claudia's response to the betrayal was great, such a great way to end that character (though we certainly might see her again). She'll go back to fight, the way she's done it before.
The other illegal Elizabeth killed--was that the woman who trained her in the flashbacks? Also, one thing I won't miss about the show: every goddamn shot of Moscow being blue and at night. Christ, we get it, the audience is stupid and needs to be told where things are. They have such great shots and settings and then everything is dark and blue tinted.
Oh well, no big deal. That scene with Elizabeth trying to lie to Paige, failing, and then laying on the big, painful truth was great. Got to see the Jennings bug out bag apparently. I guess Paige is out of it? We'll see next week in the finale. It's been a crazy ride.
I'd be more forgiving of that, if what felt like 90% of Oleg's time in Moscow also did the same thing.
That sucks, I like the character. But live by the sword, die by the sword. And fittingly enough, Oleg indirectly got her killed.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Other than that, I'm okay with what was otherwise a lowkey ending after that garage confrontation
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Everyone (Oleg included) who made an incredibly difficult moral decision, of course, is confronted by a brutal hindsight: they were wrong, wrong for all the right reasons, but wrong nonetheless. Even Mikhail Gorbachev himself has regretted some of his most crucial decisions in retrospect, and the majority of the population is less kind about it--his popularity in his homeland is a sad fraction of what it is in the United States. Claudia was right, for the wrong reasons perhaps, but right nonetheless--the people that she was afraid of would destroy the country.
Arkady came through, as he always did. It's sad that he and Claudia ended up on opposite sides of this.
Stan "I'll Kill Them" Beeman really loves Henry. As for Paige...talk about uncharted territory.
Until the showwriters speak on it, we'll never know about Renee.
http://lexiconmegatherium.tumblr.com/
The garage confrontation was everything I feared in the ending. They tortured the plot to contrive a personal confrontation (Oh look, the FBI can't take decent surveillance photos, so Stan has just enough time to slip away while we wait for the sketches) and then tortured Stan's character because they wanted to shoehorn in a personal confrontation *and* still have the ending they wanted. Stan's primary characterization has always been that he'll sacrifice everything for his job, and then of late he's been especially focused on getting revenge for Sofia's killers, projecting a lot of his leftover Nina issues onto her. Now he's talked out of it all by people who have just admitted they do nothing but lie to him *and* he knows are still lying to him now about not killing anyone. Fine, maybe he doesn't have it in him to shoot them personally. Shoot the tires and call for backup.
It would have been a lot better to just skip the personal confrontation. The scene where Aderholt quietly, sympathetically slides the sketches across the table could have been a place for him to unleash his anger. It makes sense, I guess, because the coincidence of an FBI counterintelligence agent moving in next door to the spies he's hunting was always the weakest part of the show.
OK, now that I got that one complaint out of the way, I loved everything else in the finale. I don't think I've ever had a TV show hit me with so many emotional gut punches consecutively in one episode. And all of them were perfectly earned. It helped a little to know that Arkady and Oleg's dad aren't as lost as they think they are. We know from history that the hardliners didn't immediately take over, but rather the coup fizzled and the tensions between the factions remained until 1991, when a brief coup failed and the country dissolved. As others in the thread mentioned, I think it's reasonable to assume that in the intervening four years, Oleg's dad was able to muster sufficient pull to get a spy trade for Oleg.
I held it together until they started to play Brothers in Arms over the montage of all the broken lives. That's always been my favorite 80s slow song, and now it's played over two of my favorite TV scenes of all time.
Then the long, drawn out ending was especially well-done. In my head, I knew that they weren't going to get caught by a random border guard near Quebec, and I knew they weren't going to get arrested at the Poland-Russia checkpoint. But the scenes felt plenty tense anyway, to the point I cheered when I saw it was Arkady waiting for them. And then to have Paige on the train platform. It was such a perfect, logical, in-character and heartbreaking development. The way they drew our emotional attention to the tension of possible detection, only to swerve into losing another child, is probably the best scene the show has ever put together.
I'm not entirely clear on what Paige is going back to. I could see the argument that she could feign ignorance alongside Henry's real ignorance. Say her parents came to her out of nowhere and told her they had to run to Canada, but obviously that's crazy so she hopped off the train before it could leave the country. I could also see the argument that the FBI isn't dumb, Paige isn't that good of a liar, and surely her fingerprints are on a wig or fake document somewhere in all the stuff they're going to unearth on the Jennings.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Oleg is a very likely case for...
http://lexiconmegatherium.tumblr.com/
The parking garage scene felt, I dunno, sort of needlessly confrontational
Still, pretty good last couple eps, especially after feeling like the series was kinda losing steam in the later seasons
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget