AllyB

Something about Tim's politics makes me see something akin to Quakerism in his faith. There are differences and I think if he was a Quaker we'd have heard much more of the words 'friends' and 'meeting house' but the draft refusal and organisation of and participation in non violent direct action against nuclear weapons reminds me of Quakers I've known. And if Tim has a similar faith to that he may also be opposed to the very idea of nationalism. In some faiths nationalities are just false, man made divisions that God would find abhorrent. Tim may just see himself as a person of earth and neutral in the cold war. And as someone from a neutral country, I think my instinct upon finding out a couple I know were KGB spies would have been to find away to protect my family and ascertain as well as I could that they weren't about to stage an invasion. If they tried to convince me that they were involved in work that I had an ethical sympathy with, I'd probably just let them think I was convinced, set up my 'insurance' tapes and get on with living my life. Because I'm a realist enough to know that the work the spies on both sides were doing was mostly awful but still likely prevented an out and out war. One which would have killed us all. Reporting them would achieve nothing other than lob a bomb into my own life for the sake of two warring ideologies, neither of which are deserving of that sacrifice from me. So I can understand why Tim hasn't reported them. Obviously he has the added threat of his silence being a form of legal treason. But Tim (unlike any Quakers I've met) does have a massive ego and he is relishing the feeling of having such power over these people. He isn't fully thinking through the situation he is in. The real world implications haven't really occurred to him. I think a part of him has been having his own personal dick measuring competition with Philip ever since Philip confronted him in the church. It added fuel to his mission to 'save' Paige and make her a surrogate daughter. And to now have the kind of power over him that knowing his real identity gives him. He's not going to give that up just to turn him in, he prefers to savour it. While also being able to use his silence as a way to bolster his own sense of being a man of God, or doing what is right in the face of petty human concerns like nationalism. He's someone who protects one vulnerable member of his flock even if it endangers his life and freedom. Tim is loving the position he is in and he's lucky enough to have a wife, who despite being in his thrall, is actually much smarter than him and has set up her own mutually assured destruction to protect her family.

When I watched the pilot and saw the Jennings in their big, comfortable detached house (I didn't notice then that it was a small terrace of 3 houses and I'm never sure if it is in the show or not, I presume not?) with all their clothes and food and the easy way of life they'd have if they weren't spies, I wondered how they could live like that for decades and still remain loyal to the USSR. But the show has addressed that over and over and over again. Elizabeth is a lot of things but she isn't a hypocrite. As much as she admits she can enjoy some of the trappings of her American middle class existence it disgusts her to her core that those trappings aren't shared equally among Americans. She can't ignore the ghettos and the homeless and the people who don't have access to proper health care, education and even fresh, healthy food. She likes what she has but it still only serves to remind her of how unequal the distribution of comfort and opportunity is. And as long as that inequality exists, even within the US itself, never mind across the world, Elizabeth will never sell out or be swayed by an easy life full of nice things. If she still lived in the USSR and was experiencing the realities of the inequality there, she'd probably have managed to find her way into Gorbachev's camp and be determined to root out the corruption that had destroyed the Soviet system almost as soon as it had begun. Elizabeth is an idealist but she is, due to her experiences, naive about the reality of the system she believes in. She was a child when she ceased to live the life of an ordinary Russian. She was filled with pro-Soviet/anti-US propaganda but trained to recognise pro-US/anti-Soviet propaganda. She thinks she's one of the only people with a real understanding of the world and she genuinely sees herself as a hero. She doesn't enjoy killing, it always takes a toll on her, but she sees the innocent people she kills as unfortunate collateral damage and she has been trained to compartmentalise that part of her job.

Western Theory would be that most commonly understood by westerners. Although 'Third World' tends to cause some confusion as a number of wealthy European nations were neutral in the cold war and so were third world nations despite the general assumption that the third world refers to poor, undeveloped/exploited countries.

I thought Alice said the tape was with her lawyer? Not at their house. Even if they had a copy at the house, it's unlikely to be the only one, having it with a lawyer makes sense. You couldn't trust that the lawyer or the 'Tims' don't have several copies in various locations. It's what I'd do in their shoes.

Along with his insistence on how good a woman Nina was and the efforts he went to to get the FBI to trade her back. My first thought was that too. She may well just be a woman from the gym, in the same way that Tim is just a pastor. But I wouldn't be surprised if she was conducting some sort of FBI internal affairs investigation into Stan. It's not just his relationships with Rezidentura staff, Gaad's death, Martha's disappearance after Stan implicated her, the trouble Vlad's murder caused and even Amador and Gene's deaths and the two bugs that were found in the FBI counter-intelligence offices. All happening since Stan joined the department, along with Stan swinging from being an absolute top agent getting medals and calls from the president, to pain in the ass agent who makes life harder for his bosses and can be very obstructive at times. I could see there being a definite aura of suspicion about whether he really was that good an agent or if the Russians were giving away occasionally taking 'losses' to make him look good (which they were in season 2). It's kind of gross to think that he and the new woman will probably have sex in order for her to get close to him. Somehow having sex with one of your own people in order to gauge their loyalty seems worse to me than what P&E do.

You are right, I went back and watched it a few more times and Paige's punches do actually look a bit like a version of a Systema striking drill. I've never seen the backhand smack she was adding to the back swings though. To me that looks like an aerobic exercise but I know very little about Systema, so it could be a genuine technique. But that, combined with Taylor having a dancer's way of moving is probably what makes it look inefficient and boxercise-y.

That was so weird to me. I've done a lot of MA and Paige's loose shouldered arm swinging looked like the kind of play fighting I might engage with my toddler right ahead of turning into a tickle monster. It seemed designed to lessen the power of a punch not maximise it, was it some sort of dance-y boxercise move or something? The really odd thing is that with so many fight scenes in the show, there has to be actual martial artists involved in choreographing the scenes and training Russell and Rhys. So I don't understand why one of those people wasn't involved in the scene? The thing is that learning how to use your whole body and hit with real power is very cathartic for most people. I could see Elizabeth's idea of training with Paige being really helpful for her in dealing with everything she is going through but not with that weird swingy punchy thing, that would only make Paige even feel even more pissed off and impotent.

Ah but what do you think will pop into Paige's mind when she thinks about her parents after sex? The lovely birthday party they threw her when she was 5? The conversation they had when they confirmed there was no Santa Claus but she had to keep schtum to Henry and she felt all grown up? The family holiday to Epcot? That time she walked in on them sixty-nine-ing? It'll be the latter won't it? They don't know it but they've just fucked up that poor girl's sex life forever.

I was thinking this when I watched. That maybe the point of following Nina in Russia and the point of following Oleg now had less to do with those characters and more to do with how what happens to them effects Stan. Nina could never turn Stan through their relationship because he was patriotic to the core. But now he has developed relationships with KGB agents and come to care for and respect them because he believes they were good people willing to do what was right. Then he sees his people, 'the good guys' in the FBI, CIA and government essentially using up these people not caring that it will mean their death. So Stan's belief in who and what is moral is changing. I suspect now that Oleg will meet a similar end to Nina and that will cause a fundamental shift in Stan. So when he does discover that P&E are really M&N his reaction will not be the reaction of the Stan he was for the first 3 and a half seasons. He will feel deeply betrayed obviously as he has such a personal relationship with the Jennings, especially with Philip. But he will also have an empathy with their position that he wouldn't have had before. I don't necessarily think he will ally with them but he will have a much deeper personal conflict than just feeling betrayed by the enemies he thought were friends.

I wonder how they would all feel if Gigi, the child raised by Christopher, grows up to be the sister with the more successful adult life. I could see her being driven by her father's unquestioning insistence on the brilliance of his older daughter despite her lack of adult achievement and all round not being an especially nice person. Gigi would look at this adult sister who never had any interest in her life, wasted her expensive education and yet has their father singing her praises whenever she comes up and she thinks, 'I'll show them.' Maybe she'd even become a foreign correspondent seeing as how she's bilingual and has experience living in different countries.

On the episode with the Shakespeare test. I thought what Rory was studying seemed odd as the bits we heard her say aloud were just dry facts and figures about Shakespeare. It was all really basic. I found it really hard to imagine that the best student in even the apparently awful Stars Hollow High wouldn't have known those things already and might have filled her test essays at Chilton with that type of information and expected it to be good enough. I assumed her low grades were down to her lack of in depth intelligent analysis of the literature as opposed to her not knowing a few simple facts. Was that bad writing on the writers part?

There's something missing from everyone's life though. I'm an oldest child, so I'm missing an older sibling. I only have brothers so I'm missing a sister. I have two brothers so I'm missing the level of parental attention an only child would have. Rory missed out on having a father as a genuine presence in her life and on having sibling (because she never seemed to consider Gigi a sister) but she had a kind of deep and complex relationship with her mother that wouldn't have been possible if she'd had the other two. And while we can argue in retrospect that their relationship wasn't good for Rory, that was due to Lorelai's immaturity rather than the dynamics of a single parent-only child relationship in itself.

They bring Prue back in the comics but they had to make the story be that she's in someone else's body because they still can't use ShanDo's likeness. I remember back in 2001 thinking that having Prue switch bodies would make a lot more sense considering the show's premise, than their mother having a secret fourth daughter who'd been mysteriously absent until Prue's death.

I just remember thinking she didn't sound even remotely like she came from Montreal.

She didn't have a perfect western accent though, which 'in show' seems to be the standard necessary for deep cover agents. (In real life it seems to have been common to explain accents with complicated back stories.) I have quite a few friends who grew up in Eastern Bloc countries and growing up with grandparents either fulltime or as their day care seems to have been the absolute norm. So I'm just assuming Mischa Jr, who has a living grandfather, grew up with him. But even if he grew up with Irina's late husband, she'd still have had contact with him and possible influence on his education.

I've never had the impression that Irina was a deep cover illegal like P&E. She and Philip most likely met and started a relationship while in KGB training. Philip was tapped to train for the illegals programme. Irina likely had a different path planned for her as she is presumably multi-lingual (because the Centre would probably have chosen an agent who speaks at least some Polish and fluent French to pretend to be a Polish immigrant living in Montreal). An agent with those skills would have been more valuable in short term assignments as she could work in various countries when needed. Between assignments and during training she would have been in Russia and able to have a relationship of some sort with Mischa Jr, who would have lived with her family. She, as a KGB agent, probably had enough power to ensure Mischa attended a school where he learned English and possibly other languages. The KGB would probably have approved of this as he might have followed in her footsteps and if he hadn't experienced what he did in Afghanistan could have well been on that patriotic path. Though it does make Irina's decisions to run from the KBG all the more asinine and unbelievable. To be honest, I had initially assumed she was lying to Philip as an assigned test of his loyalty, which Philip half failed for not stopping her but half passed for not going with her.

Pacha's dad is probably much more important than he lets on. The KGB wouldn't have organised a complex mission involving a pair of illegal agents and an allied agent in order to get close to some mid level agricultural worker. The FBI wouldn't have permanent minders on him either.

To the Russian speakers. Was there much lost in the translation of the subtitles? When Oleg was in the meeting with his new boss he said 'Yes Colonel' according to the credits, but he seemed to say much more than 2 words. It's the worst part of watching subtitled shows, I've come to suspect that I'm missing some of the subtleties of the dialogue. I normally don't notice when it comes to The Americans because I haven't the first clue about Russian but Deutschland 83 was a bit of a nightmare because I understand enough German to know that he dialogue and the subtitles weren't always matching up but not enough to be able to follow without them.

I have to say I really missed the goings on in the Rezidentura and hope that we will still see what goes on there. While I love Oleg and want to keep watching him no matter where he is, what happens in the Rezidentura tends to have a direct impact on or be effected what Philip and Elizabeth do. I know that with Oleg and Arkady gone, Tatiana is the only character we know working there. And I don't think anyone cares for her character in the way that we cared for Oleg, Arkady or Nina, but I still want to see what's happening in the Rezidentura. I also really miss Arkady, ever since The Colonel when he literally rolled up his sleeves and got to practical work to save his agents, I've really admired him. One thing I'm not loving about the show is how certain plot strands are built up as important and then forgotten. Gaad and Beeman's investigation into the suspicious nature of Colonel Rennhull's death (the Colonel who tells Philip that the Star Wars programme is not credible) at the start of the second season seemed like it might go somewhere important. On two different occasions that we saw, the mail robot passed in the hallway while potentially important conversations happened, but Oleg and Tatiana never came across the transcripts. Kimmy was such a huge part of season 3 but she has one scene and one mention in season 4. Fine, we can accept that Philip is continuing his operation with her in the background but that operation was the one that he really couldn't cope with and was coming close to breaking him. Sure not having to work Martha anymore and the 'vacation' lessened his day to day pressure but he has guilt about how Martha ended up and still has to visit Kimmy every week. Which has got to be taking a toll because it is just so, so unlikely that Kimmy would still be happy to have this old guy call around every week for a smoke and a chaste chat. It would be really weirding her out. Narratively it's irritating to invest emotion in a great, deeply uncomfortable storyline and then have to accept that it's still ongoing but we just aren't seeing it or it's effects on Philip anymore. It was fine during the first half of season 4 when the Martha story was taking up huge amounts of screentime. But we should have seen Kimmy more than once since then and we should be seeing that Philip is finding it to be a trying assignment. And I'd like to feel a bit more upset about Hans but as he was dropped from being an important part of the third season to a glorified extra last year, it's hard to care as much as I would have if Elizabeth had to kill him in the season 4 opener. I know a couple of older Czech and Ukrainian people who speak excellent English from listening to the BBC World Service English lessons that were broadcast via radio signal. While the Soviets certainly worked hard at jamming the BBC Russian Service there were still people who managed to listen enough to covertly learn to speak English.

The people at Netflix can't fail to be aware of the level of criticisms that AYITL garnered. So if they do a second series of some kind they may (hopefully) insist on more editorial control. Imo, it's pretty obvious that ASP wants to do another series. Too many of the stories ended in a way that allowed for GG to continue. Characters played by actors that have become more successful (or may want to retire) were written to have lives that would explain their absence in future episodes, ie, Emily's relocation, Doyle's move to LA, Sookie's return being just for the wedding, etc. Those plots weren't necessary for AYITL but they were for another series. So it seems to me that ASP really, really has her eye on as many new episodes as she can get from Netflix. So maybe she'd submit to more input from Netflix in terms of writing because she really has become too much of a victim of her own success and needs to be seriously reined in.

The problem all boils down to those last four words and Amy's insistence that the characters come 'full circle.' Yes, there were ways for Rory and Logan to have been written as sympathetic cheaters. But pretty much any of those storylines would have meant that Rory wouldn't have been able to go to Chris in Fall and decided Logan was her Chris and as such would be a pretty crap dad. I suppose she could have made Rory more sympathetic by having had a single Rory meet a deceitful Logan who let her believe that he too was single at the start of their affair. But I don't think Amy wanted to make him wanted to make him be out and out dastardly, so she created Paul and made Rory and Logan equally blithely selfish and careless with the feelings of their partners. Which made her characters impossible to root for and the story boring and mildly confusing.

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm not a fan of cheating but it's a mainstay of any long running drama series because it is dramatic. And over the decades there have been various writers and actors that have found ways to make the audience have a degree of sympathy with the couple that are cheating. Whereas in the revival, Rory and Logan were just written as selfish and completely callous about Odette and Paul.

He was supposed to be in Conversations With Dead People (or at least the First appearing as him) but the actor wasn't available. It's why Xander wasn't in the episode either.

True and as this was endgame for a potential series 8, Rory should have been about 23 when it happened. That said birth control isn't always effective. I knew a girl back in college who was always super careful she was on the pill and always insisted on a condom. She had a one night stand with a guy she met on a weekend away and as she also threw up over the weekend she decided to cover all bases and take the morning after pill. Her kid is 18 now. Sometimes even the best laid plans don't work out. Though Rory couldn't even remember that she had a boyfriend of nearly 3 years at the time she got pregnant, so who knows what her birth control plan was!!!!

We have to remember when assessing Buffy's actions is that Buffy is basing her opinion of what her friends want from her on the lie Xander told her before her 'final' confrontation with Angelus. Willow, Cordy and Oz were preparing to once again attempt to re-ensoul Angel and Willow asks Xander to go tell Buffy about what they are doing. Xander starts to tell her then changes his mind and tells her Willow wants her to kill Angelus. It was very much this that drove Buffy away from her friends until DMP and still carries into their friendship for years after. Buffy was at an incredibly low point as she walked into face Angelus and having Xander tell that Willow wants Angelus dead would have solidified her guilt and misery. It would have made it so very, very much harder for her to let Willow in about just how very, very heartbroken she was. If Xander had told her the truth it would have been different. She would have gone into that fight with a small degree of hope that might have allowed her to buy time for Willow to complete her spell before Angelus opened the gates to hell. And even if she failed and had to kill an ensouled Angel in the manner she did, she would have known that Willow in spite of the attack on the library, Willow was still willing to go as far as she did just to have her back. She'd know Willow didn't blame her for her injuries and would have sympathised entirely with her heartbreak. If Xander hadn't lied, Buffy probably wouldn't have ran away. And frustratingly it's never, ever addressed apart from a couple of throw-away lines in the fourth season.