CaliCheeseSucks

Tracks was in SE, by the Navy Yard. So many memories (of getting stranded there after the Metro closed for the night).

Except that if he's still been working Kimmy's Dad's Briefcase tapes for three years, he really hasn't been out at all.

And I mean, it's lucky that Dad Of Kimmy never switched bags or anything in three years time. Nope.

Let me see if I understand this. At the backdoor of the sick client's home, Elizabeth hands off a jacket to a courier who brings it to the seamstress/expert-in-garment-bugging-devices who doozies it up in record time with the needed tech and returns the jacket back to Elizabeth at the backdoor of the sick client's house? I was really hoping Elizabeth would get her own personal shower of wig-knocking-off vomit for forcing the woman to attend the party based on Elizabeth's phony expertise.

Oh, thank god. I thought it was just me who was totally lost in the opening. Yup. I think this really cements it - the writers did *not* have this endgame locked down from the get-go. None of what has been shown this season makes any sense with regard to the way we were sold on the "meticulous plotting" on prior seasons.

Oh, Kimmie. If only I had missed you, perhaps I'd be glad to see you again. Also, what in the hell - he's still been managing to secretly tape her father - and collect those tapes, with her away at Ann Arbor? "Mom tried to stop him." Oh shut up, Paige. "Please don't tell me about the world, Paige." Thank you, Phillip. Glad to see some fire in Phillip tonight. Elizabeth's lecture to Paige about working in the State Department is a few years - and cosplays - too late.

Well, the finale fell emotionally flat for me. I was expecting a gut-punch. The cross-cutting to and emphasis on Ali in Yemen, while important in terms of information, siphoned off the energy and focus. It also made no sense to me that Vince would have been sitting on the side of the G.W. Parkway for what would have had to have been hours. I presume that is where he had stopped his car, going out towards Quantico, while the traffic on the other side - leading to the Pentagon - was stopped completely. A small nitpick, I am sure, but it sort of plays into what about this segment didn't work. The pacing was off, the focus was off, it didn't settle into a smooth, narrative POV.

My personal feeling has been if the show didn't do it all of the time, they could better get away with these suspensions of disbelief - precisely because they were limited in nature. My problem has been the show going to the suspension-of-disbelief well so many times - all the while maintaining its supposed to be at heart a domestic drama - that those missions have become laughable. I think it was in season four where the number of times we were expected to buy what Philip and Elizabeth were doing in a single twenty-four hour period - including wig and makeup changes, transportation time here to there and back, on top of pretending to run a travel agency - just became eye-rollingly, unintentionally hilarious. It worked if you bought that they never ever sleeped, got tired, or slipped up in any way. In other words, it worked as a cartoon. I'd rather the showrunners had been honest and not puffed themselves up so much about their true goal, because really, this has been for some time now a cartoonish show about superspies. There's still hints of what could have been with the non-Jennings family members. But when reviewers and commenters alike began obsessing over music and wig reports? That's when I think the showrunners made the conscious decision to emphasize style (wigs, music, other fan service-friendly Easter Eggs) over substance (meaningful, believable plot developments).

OH yes. I mean, starting with that - there's no way they would not have incinerated a human bio-hazard like that. "DO NOT BURN. PLOT MOVED FORWARD BY KEEPING HIM IN THE GROUND."

Oh boy, I had completely blocked out the nonsense with digging up Dylan Baker's body. If were ever to go back and track where I felt the train truly derailed irrevocably with this show, that would be a key moment. The idea that these two spies, and Hans, were able to correctly geo-locate William's unmarked grave on the grounds of a military installation and dig it up in the middle of the night just to steal a bio-weapon. Never mind that they'd successfully cover their tracks to the point that the military never noticed that the spot was tampered with or that a new dead guy was now in the same grave.

I don't mean to knock on Holly Taylor either. I think she's done as good a job as could be done with the material she's been given. I can't think of how anyone could convincingly sell the Teenage Spy nonsense she's been handed this year any better than she's done. It's simply a bad, unpersuasive turn for that character.

Annie Parisse is most likely Valerie James, who many of O'Neill's friends thought *was* his wife when he died but I know Parisse's character has a different name. Diane Marsh is definitely Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, who was also the primary basis for "Maya" in Zero Dark Thirty. The CIA did an amazing job of snowing Hollywood into making her the heroine of the ZDT story; Bikowsky's CV is littered with intelligence failures, even though she continued an upward career trajectory. In 2014, she and Scheuer married. Does the book address the odd harem of of seemingly all-women underlings that Scheuer/Schmidt is shown cultivating at Alec Station (the FBI's Vince, not withstanding)?

One thing I've heard some critics say - and I am not under the impression that any of the them have seen the finale, just from the eps that they *have* seen so far - is a spitballed wish for a spinoff series for Paige. And I have just one reaction to that idea idea.

Hey you! I know people both in X and Echo trying to glom on to the other cohort, but Kander's insistence on claiming millennialism by "five months" was funny. At the very least, you could say you straddle the two. By no means is that a firm claim. (There's a guy I know who was born in the mid-1950s. Who refuses to admit that he's a Baby Boomer. Because "I'm not the product of a returned GI." *headdeskheaddesk* THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS!!!!!!!!) See you at DL :)

I laughed and laughed and laughed when Kander (in Overtime) grabbed at straws to claim he's a Millennial. He was born in 1981, which is firmly Gen X camp. Strictly speaking, the cohorts tend to be defined as eighteen years. Boomers: 46-64, X: 65-83, Millennials: 84-2002. It's not unheard of for social historians to blur the start and end points a little when they look back at certain trends and groupthink that emerged with the benefit of hindsight; but Kander was really pulling that claim firmly out of his behind.

I was remembering how he was at first called "the 20th hijacker" but then that designation was rolled back. Some googling suggests that it is believed there were a number of 'backup hijackers' in the country, in the event any of the cells had an issue with a member. It's very odd it wasn't in the book at all, though!

Yes, this is a good example of a recurring issue on the show: Poor economy of storytelling. They could have established some semblance of what Nina was facing and the futility of it all without devoting so much time to it, particularly given where it ended up. And I feel like I say this about a majority of arcs. Yes, to all of this. I get wanting to end in 1987. I don't get treading so much water in 1984 and then leaping to the end, bypassing the critical developments that we're dealing with in 1987. Yes to all of this as well. Even if by some miracle Misha returns to have a part somewhere in the final seven hours, I'm hard pressed it will validate all the time we spent with it before as necessary. You are definitely not alone there. I loathed the Kimmie arc when it was happening and I hate it even more now in retrospect that it was largely for naught. Again, perhaps - as with Misha - a kernel of that mission will prove relevant to the last seven episodes but I am quite skeptical any such return appearance or link to that time is going to rationalize the amount of time we, as viewers, were forced to follow that storyline. It would have made hella more sense if we'd jumped three years and found Paige actively working towards being a missionary. They spent five seasons emphasizing her social justice concerns - even if she was torn with the knowledge of her parents' true identities and missions. Flipping her into this enthusiastic spy cosplayer is just eye rolling. It goes against the teenager that we were shown. Yes to all of this too, particularly wasting plot opportunities with Henry over the years; Pastor Tim's indifference to hearing that the parents of a congregant were FREAKIN' RUSSIAN SPIES - as someone who was a child in the eighties, um, that would have been a VERY BIG DEAL. I don't buy that just because of his progressive faith, he would have not given two whits; Gaad's death being completely meaningless in retrospect (from a plot development point, at the very least); and undercutting Oleg.

I'd add the poor sucker in the wheat lab last season, the poor Naval Observatory guard this season (which I think was motivated by a combination of "my daughter screwed up" *and* "dude hit on my daughter"), the general last week, the audit guy this week... Even though we didn't know them well, I'm so over Elizabeth Jennings: Murder Machine that it is bothering me innocent person after innocent person is disposed of so she can keep getting her way. Maybe the end game is the FBI realizes they're dealing with a serial killer. (And then the BAU sweeps in! Just kidding.) But the show was far more suspenseful when the kills were rare and grounded, organic to the narrative. The first three seasons seemed very earnest in trying to depict realistically the drama of Russian illegals living, working and raising an American family. The suspensions of disbelief were rare and within reason. Not so much anymore.

I haven't read The Looming Tower but that moment didn't pop out to me as questionable or a composited because it rang a bell. From The New York Times, December 22, 2001:

I agree with you that the "hard side of capitalism" angle could have been interesting one to explore; as Phillip is one of the characters whose journey I've found most compelling, it would have surely made for an engaging study. But then we wouldn't have had that long, nowhere arc with Tuan last season - that was last season, right? - and this season's Elizabeth Jennings' Gratuitous Kill Of The Week (among other things) eating up airtime. Gotta work in the wigs and cool music cues ahead of logical plotting.

My point being, the show has expended enormous amounts of time on things that probably could have been far more economically handled given where we find ourselves now. We sat through how many scenes of Philip agonizing over leading a teenager on, so that maybe her father will be a factor in the final seven episodes?

I vote a third option: both things. One of the writing fails that leads me to believe the writers really did not have their ducks in a row from the beginning as to how they would get from A-Z by the end. I know some viewers, myself included, suspected her appearance in his life (from the way they met) was not intended to be viewed as accidental. She surely would have hit the wall with Stan's discretion with work talk well before the three-year mark. Then again, it could be just another red herring or dropped plotline in a series that is littered with them - the girl on the bus who drew Paige into Pastor Tim's ministry, Kimmie, wheat, the drawn-out drama of Philip's son coming to America (only to turn right around and go home), on and on. Seven hours is not a lot of time to finish assembling a puzzle that once seemed intriguing and enigmatic but now seems just a jumble of ill-fitting pieces of 'whatever works, use it.'

This is where a significant season bridging time jump hurts a show. We are meant to assume that over three years, Philip, able to concentrate on actually running the travel agency - instead of running around doing everything *but* running the travel agency - turned it into a flush money machine. But now, out of the blue, and in the wake of one client failing to repeat business? The situation is so dire, he doesn't have the monies for Henry's tuition. Much in the same way, we're meant to believe Paige has been under her mother's tutelage during that time (even though the second generation illegal plan wasn't supposed to involve Elizabeth's kind of work). Paige is taken to a late night meeting in an isolated area, and acts/reacts like, well, we might have expected her at the start of this journey three years ago. And Stan's wife waits three years to make her sketchy (to suspicious viewers, who've suspected her of being a mole/spy from the outset), "I wish I did something that made me proud to be an American - say, can I join the FBI?" play. Uh, okay. The showrunners wanted to get to 1987, come hell or high water, regardless of whether or not the characters had earned any growth in that unshown period. It reminds me a lot of Downton Abbey, where they quite often took time leaps while the characters behaved as if they were frozen in time after each jump. To reiterate my feeling from last week's thread, this is where the imbalance of the season five vs. six episode order shows most clearly. We treaded endless amounts of waterwheat last season, and now there's no time left for believable atmosphere and character building during the period of history that clearly makes most sense for the endgame. How much time was lost with Philip working Kimmie, which resulted in very little (if any) return on investment; meanwhile, Elizabeth's Air Force asset ends up dead, so she quickly switches gears to Plan B, complete with a jazzy new wig and fake name, and the surely much more complex operation of running a phony security audit on warehouse workers that would have taken some significant time to set up/roll-out. It's disappointing, as I care about the fates of Oleg, Stan, and Phillip. I've lost interest in Paige's development with the cringeworthy turn into the teenage spy curve. (Full disclosure: I've never cared for Elizabeth and just hope her story ends with her getting her just deserts.) I had high hopes when Brandon Dirden was promoted to regular cast that Aderholt would get more to do but nope. I'm not sure why they bothered to cast a recognizable face (Peter Jacobson) as Gaad's replacement, when that role has gone nowhere. But hey, Margo Martindale got to give a Russian cooking lesson tonight. Time well spent.

Close call but at least Bill wasn't saying, "But Donald Trump never lied to me in forty years!" Those two things aren't comparable. People wish Hillary would go away because of a feeling - whether or not you personally subscribe to it - that as long as she's in the spotlight, she's keeping the party/anti-Trumpers from really moving forward and finding new voices. She's been in the spotlight nationally since the early '90s, and has been dogged by the same toxic right wing culture all along. Some people are legitimately tired of this and want to hear new voices and see new faces. It's one reason why the right-wing doesn't want to see her go: She's a great boogeyman for them, and she causes a serious divide on the left. That's helps their side. Along those lines? As long as Ingraham shoots her mouth off, it actually benefits the Parkland kids and their movement, because even moderate people can see how disgusting and vitriolic the right wing nuts are - how threatened they are by these victims - and so the more Ingraham and her ilk attack them, the more they push moderate or indifferent people away from "the Second Amendment at all costs."

Everything about Paige Jennings: Teenage Spy just reinforces my belief that the showrunners never really had this planned out as tightly as they claimed. Personally, I found her internal struggles at coping with the awareness of her parents' real occupation vs. Paige's own instinctive spiritual leanings far more compelling, and believable. And even that storyline was wasted by the ultimate cop-out of just writing off Pastor Tim when the writers ran empty with where to take it. If the show doesn't end up sticking to the landing by the end, the gif of Paige screaming, "MOM!" in the woods will become the avatar for where it all went wrong.