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I think it's a bit disingenuous to accept the premise of this show, which is about two Russian illegals who regularly put their operations and lives on the line by breaking and entering to place bugs, getting into car chases, assassinating targets and leaving trails of dead innocent bystanders in their wake, and oh by the way they live across the street from and are best friends with an FBI counterintelligence agent- things that are blatantly unrealistic and solely there for dramatic purposes, but then absolutely reject the idea that Paige could not possibly withhold information in an interrogation because it's not realistic that the FBI wouldn't pressure her into revealing every last detail she knows. If she was strong enough to get off that train, she's strong enough not to volunteer information the FBI wouldn't even know to ask her about. because really, the FBI has no reason to suspect Paige is even involved at all, beyond going missing the same night her parents fled the country, and that could easily be explained as them spiriting her away on their flight to the border without her even knowing what was going on at first. Stan's not saying anything, and he's the only one who knows anything about Paige's knowledge or involvement. And the extent of that knowledge is that she found out her parents were spies and kept their secret. Even if she admitted to that, I don't think she'd go to prison for it. even in the real world I don't think someone who found out their parents were spies and kept the secret in that same circumstance in which Paige did would go to prison. Maybe she'd receive some sort of probation and lose her passport for a time and be monitored. Maybe they'd make her sign some sort of affidavit so that she could be easily arrested if they ever did find any proof she committed a crime, but they're not going to. Because she honestly didn't do anything that would leave evidence tying her to a crime. She even had a chance to gain access to classified files from her defense subcommittee intern boyfriend that she wanted to hand over, and Elizabeth refused, which definitely would have been treason had she done something like that, but which we are told explicitly that she didn't actually get around to doing.

Re: Stan- Something else I've just noticed is that, in a sense, they foreshadowed him letting them go. Consider when he's in the car with Henry, and Henry tells him "It's important to take care of family when the chips are down", and Stan says "I hear that." In that same conversation, Henry refers to Stan as "Uncle Stan". He actually says it kind of sarcastically, lol, but not in the context of him not really considering Stan family, but in the context of him not having any other actual blood family. And there are other times in the series when Stan is compared to family. Paige says he's practically a member of the family in season 4 when she talks about how often he comes over. Stan himself is overjoyed at the idea of Paige and Matthew eventually getting married and them literally becoming family. He jokes about them moving in with each other and being "one big happy family". It's all a lot of throwaway lines that in the moment serve as "Poor Stan" dramatic irony, but that's exactly what happens in the finale. When the chips were down, Stan took care of his family. And Philip did too (because Renee is totally a spy).

I mean, that seems to have been the point? She was a mindless soldier following orders and an idealogue. Her journey to not being that anymore was her arc in season 6. They intentionally wrote that.

Wasn't the order for Mr. and Mrs. Teacup to just whack Gennadi? Because he was the propaganda nightmare. I don't think they gave a shit about Sofia, tbh. In fact, Elizabeth had a distinct "Oh shit!" moment when she snuck in to kill him and overheard Sofia in the apartment, knowing the wife and kid were there. She tried to leave before he came into the kitchen and saw her. In any event, I don't even know that I buy they needed him dead because he had been one of the stars on their national hockey team. That could have been partially it, but he was a diplomatic courier, and it probably didn't take too long to figure out he must have been working with the Americans if a couple of counterintelligence agents met him at the airport and whisked him away to a safehouse. Keep in mind the information the FBI found in that pouch led them to Harvest.

@sistermagpie You're perspective is really interesting to me because I actually prefer Philip's flashbacks to the ones we get for Elizabeth, in terms of how it establishes their characters. Like, I get that there's more concrete "This happened to me" or "I had this converstation with this person" and "this is the lesson I took from that" in Elizabeth's flashbacks, and I don't dislike them, but it's all a little on the nose for me, in the ways they relate to what she does in the present in the episodes where she has them. Philip's flashbacks to his childhood are much more about the feelings and the atmosphere, I guess, which I kind of like. He was miserably impoverished, beaten, fearful and angry, he had a father who was a stranger to him and died when he was very young, and he starved a lot. Those extremely harsh roots run soul deep in him, and it comes up a lot in the disconnect between the life he wants to live as Philip Jennings, not just never worrying about basic necessities but carefree indulging in luxuries too, and the reality of how he can never be that man because it's not compatible with his foundation. idk, I just really like it.

Well, my general ideas of how everyone's future ends up line up a lot with @Erin9's view. It's based on the tone of the show, and also the fact is we're dealing with a historical drama here, not history. So, Philip and Elizabeth survive and stay together and eventually readjust, living in a country that is falling to pieces, and they don't get to see their kids again until the fall of the Soviet Union, when the borders open up and the kids feel like visiting, though I can imagine they'll have been able to communicate with them beforehand. They've given the information Arkady needs for the plotters of this 1987 failed coup to be exposed and purged, and they're out of danger on that end. Maybe they continue intelligence work, maybe they transition to something else when there's a private sector in Russia. Whatever they do for work, in their personal lives, I think they become close to Philip's family in Moscow, which will help them readjust. Mischa and Philip's brother and his family. It will be hard at first because they'll treat him like he was a hero, when Philip knows that is the opposite of the truth. When they find out Mischa smuggled himself out to meet Philip in Washington and was turned back by Gabriel, both of them will go ballistic over it and confront Gabriel about it, if he's still alive and they've reconnected with him. Philip's teenage nephew will make them miss their children even more. idk, maybe by that time Mischa even has a family of his own. Maybe Philip totally gets his mind blown and finds out he's a grandfather. The fact that Elizabeth was almost completely absent from Henry's life for the last three years she was able to see him will utterly crush her, especially if they're close to Philip's other son and this family with another little boy. and the horrible conflict with Paige being how things were left between them will absolutely haunt her. I think she'll take up art as a hobby to deal with the emptiness and sadness of her situation and as a way to remember that life. When they're finally reunited with the kids when they come to visit sometime in the early '90s, (in those few years, Paige and Henry will have had each other and been able to process the deception and loss of their parents as they reestablish their lives) Elizabeth will be an emotional wreck about it, especially towards Henry and particularly because of those three years she missed out on. I think he will be able to forgive her. I envision a mirror of the hug of when Elizabeth came back from recovering from her gunshot wound, only they're adults and Henry is towering over her and she's crying. I think Henry will have initially hated them for the betrayal of the deception but will ultimately come to be grateful he didn't have to live with the same kind of damage and pressure Paige lived with when she had to keep their secret. Ultimately, he loves them. I think both Paige and Henry's minds will be blown over having an older brother. Paige may want to connect with him, but Henry could be weird about it. Mischa will definitely want to know them both though. He may eventually visit them in the United States even if their parents can't. Renee turns out to be some sort of spy, whether or not she's KGB, and Stan will figure it out very soon after the finale. In any event, he 100% moves away because there's no way he's staying in that house. Whether or not he stays in the FBI is a question. He probably moves back to regular crime if he does, but he may not even stay in DC. Maybe transfers to a field office, which is like a demotion, but the change of scenery will likely be a welcome and necessary one. I think he remains a figure in both Henry and Paige's life.

One thing I've been thinking about recently that makes Philip feel like even more of a tragic character- I've been re-watching these episodes in season 5 where we get the whole "oh actually, Henry is a super genius, and he's taking advanced math classes and wants to go to this elite prep boarding school" And just comparing his experience with his father's. When Mischa meets Philip's brother in Moscow, and he's having dinner with the family, his brother says that Philip was very smart, the smartest student in his school in fact. We know from Philip's conversation with Gabriel about his father that the KGB recruited Philip, when he was still a teenager, because they were always looking for talented people, and particularly emphasized that Philip was talented. That's in response to Philip assuming they recruited him because his father was a loyal member of the organization as a prison guard. When he found out (and was dumbfounded that) Henry was excelling in math, he mentioned offhandedly that he had been good in math. I wonder if he even understands how intelligent he was. It's just so heartbreaking to me, to think of the disparity there. Philip probably showed just as much promise as Henry at his age. And what did Henry get? He got a scholarship to an elite prep school where he gets to delve into and develop whatever interest he has, be it academic or sport, whatever. If Henry were really from the family he always thought he was from, the sky would be the limit in terms of the opportunities his intelligence and drive would get him. What did Philip get for his intelligence and drive? Recruitment by the KGB straight out of high school, presumably with no other viable options to improve his life presented to him. There may have been more of a choice for him in terms of the type of service he'd ultimately join, and out of all those options he chose the most elite and intensive one, but. He had to potential to be so many other things, he just never had the opportunities. And never even knew he didn't have the opportunities. What Aderholdt told Father Andrei applies so devastatingly to Philip. He was meant for better things.

I guess I just never took any of that stuff as a mystery or worth knowing in the context of this show or this character. It was easy enough to infer what his life was like from the glimpses we got of it. Also, I think in terms of their childhood, what we learn about Philip and Elizabeth is pretty comparable.

I remember back in the first season people often theorized that he had a really abusive childhood to put up with her. She slaps him on the pilot and it's like he doesn't notice. This is where some backstory would have helped. We were so naive then thinking it would come. I think we did get a little bit of backstory with Philip. We know he was abused as a child by other kids and that he and his brother were shunned and sneered at by men in the town due to his father being a prison camp guard, we know he didn't know what his father did at the time that caused the clear resentment from other people, we know his father was extremely distant and barely spoke and died when he was six, leaving his family destitute and starving, we know his mother was tough, we know his violent rage issues began in childhood when he beat a bully who would steal food from him to death, and that this memory haunts him, we know at some point he showed promise in school and the KGB decided to recruit him for training when he was a teenager, that during that initial training is when he had the relationship with Irina, and she broke up with him when she became pregnant because she knew he would stay with her rather than fulfill his dream of completing this training and becoming an officer. We know he didn't ask questions. We know that he tore up a picture of Irina and threw it away like nothing when he was assigned the partner that would be his cover wife, and that when he saw her he fell in love immediately and internalized the role of her husband as if it were real, which is not at all how Elizabeth processed the situation. There's a lot to work with there. I feel like we got a lot of childhood flashbacks with Philip, even if he didn't get as many pre-1981 America or training flashbacks as Elizabeth got.

Okay, this makes more sense. I recently rewatched the episode, and I must have misinterpreted the part where Philip is yelling at Elizabeth about Gregory when he mentioned the part about the guys all thinking he was just dealing drugs as that including Philip. I was all like "wait, WTF!?"

I agree with everyone about that stretch of episodes of the Martha plot from when they discover the pen to when she's exfiltrated as being basically the pinnacle string of episodes. "Poor Martha" was just such an engrossing plot, and it's amazing that it started from such a silly place and had so many comedic elements to it at first, then evolved into what it became. I think Philip did come to deeply care about Martha as a human being, if never crossing that border into romantic feelings. Her desire to foster and adopt annoyed him for the inconvenience it brought to the operation but simultaneously, he was genuinely moved by her capacity to love and couldn't hide his admiration of it. He respected her enough to reveal more to her about himself than any of his other targets, being totally honest with her at the end. He allowed himself to be genuinely vulnerable with her sometimes, and she could tell the difference and was moved by it whenever it happened. And he was very genuinely extremely depressed after exfiltrating her and having been the means of ruining her life. One thing that always struck me, when Martha asked what his real name was, and he immediately said "philip". She had to clarify she meant his Russian name. I think he was being honest when he answered the first time. He really did think of his real name as Philip. I think it will be a terrible struggle for him to readjust to life in Russia and discard that identity.

LMAO

I just can't get over that Elizabeth kept the fact that Gregory knew they were KGB a secret from Philip for all that time. There's just no explanation I can think of that even remotely justifies that. Like, I can understand her keeping the affair a secret, if she knew Philip had feelings for her she didn't reciprocate and anyway, that was her private life. but as work partners, that is just EXTREMELY important information about an asset they both used that Philip was always entitled to know.

like, it's crazy to me how different the show becomes. The whole CI division of the FBI hatches a rogue plot to abduct and murder the fucking Rezident in a retaliatory move, and this tit-for-tat escalating spy warfare goes on with Vlad being murdered and the CIA killing people in the USSR. Meanwhile, flash forward to Persona Non Grata, and the US's response to the KGB bugging their office, pursuing biological weapons, and the former division head being murdered is to just kick the Rezident out of the country and moan about how that's all they're ever able to do and nothing changes, like a proper bureaucratic institution. Stan becomes the only real maverick in the office after season 1, and the most he does is defy Frank Gaad, who suddenly cares about the red tape, into pursuing Oleg as a source and then defending Oleg when the CIA wants to blackmail him. I don't think they originally planned to kill Zhukov and Amador. Like you say, the dueling philosophies of Zhukov and Claudia were the Angel and Devil on Elizabeth's shoulders, with one encouraging her to be close to Philip and the other encouraging her to keep him at a distance. They both went away as mentor presences by the end of season 1, Zhukov killed and Claudia conceding she was wrong about Philip. It's an interesting callback actually, that Claudia was trying to use Elizabeth in a rogue mission to avenge Zhukov's murder, and Elizabeth walked to the very ledge of that cliff before ultimately refusing and then demanded a different handler, and the same thing basically played out in season 6 with the coup plot. Still though, I feel they were set up to be longer term presences than that, with the drama of how real or not real the marriage would become lasting a lot longer than it did. I'm less sure about their plans for Gregory, if he was going to stick around or not as a presence in Elizabeth's life representing an alternate identity for her. That whole retaliation for Amador's murder plot was crazy to me. They try to create this huge, significant relationship between him and Stan to make it believable just how effected and particularly enraged Stan was at his death. But Amador was such a flat character, and it feels like he and Stan barely knew each other at all before he was killed. Stan had just moved to DC and joined CI at the start of the season, and Amador seemed to spend all his free time hooking up or stalking Martha when he wasn't encouraging Stan to cheat on his wife. Yet we're supposed to believe the relationship between them was so deep by the time Amador was killed that he'd have a picture of him and Stan sitting on his end table, among the pictures of his family? I definitely think he wasn't originally going to be killed off so soon.

The more I think about the layers of motivation for Paige's decision, the more I'm thoroughly convinced that one of them was her realizing she's an American, not a Russian. She had that whole night journey to the Canadian border to think about it, and besides knowing she couldn't leave Henry, I think she knew she didn't want to and just couldn't live in Russia. Playacting apprentice spy in the Russian Ladies' Cultural Appreciation Club on your afternoons off from school and referring to the Soviets as your people and the Americans as the enemy is one thing. Actually facing the imminent reality of uprooting your entire life and erasing your identity to live in the Soviet Union permanently is quite another. Especially when you so clearly have an American perspective of the world rather than a Soviet one. All that black and white thinking wrt morality. Also, you can't get much more American than being unfazed from seeing your mother covered in brains and viscera but freaking out and being scandalized from discovering she regularly has extramarital sex with her marks.

Rewatching the first season, and it's so interesting to me to see what the show was before it really found it's footing. First of all, obviously the more procedural quality of the first season, with the plot of the week structure, made for some superficially more exciting episodes- I particularly liked the episode where P&E are trying to stop that German bomber from killing scientists and the cold open features them boredly blowing up a car- and there seemed to be a lot more of an FBI vs. KGB feel. The relationship/family talk juxtaposed with the espionage was more on-the-nose and felt almost like humorous device than the subtle drama it turned into. Also, the characterizations of everyone feels more exaggerated and overdramatic as well. I can't believe a character like Chris Amador even existed, he's so different from the characters post s1. Everyone becomes way more real when the show shifts to long arcs and focuses on the effects of espionage on characters and relationships rather than the espionage itself. It's interesting to see some of those early things I totally forgot about that kind of just blow my mind given the later parts of the series when things were more established. Like, there was that pundit with the TV show that was an agent of Philip's, and Philip would meet him in public as himself, no disguises or false names or whatever. I was so surprised! No. 1, I had completely forgotten about that guy, and No. 2, that was soooooo out of line with the MO of how they operated that was established later. They didn't meet Gregory with disguises or false names either, and Philip at least thought Gregory was an agent that believed a cover story about them. Even still, it almost felt like agents that were recruited and knew they were working for the KGB and were committed to the Cause didn't get the disguises that marks got, when later on, everyone got disguises and false names regardless. I was also aghast that they decided to go to a party at Stan's house when the whole CI division was there, and that they thought that was a good idea. like, nooooooo, omg you guys, what if they ever get sketches of you!!! I totally had forgotten about that as well. Gaad met them there! That just blows my mind.

I just rewatched this one the other day as well! It's been awhile since i've seen any of the first two seasons, tbh. I particularly appreciate the early episodes with Gregory in light of the way the writers made a point of not ignoring what he meant to Elizabeth after he was gone- her bringing him up in the 4x08 fight and then the dream sequence in the finale, which was so amazing. The thing that gets me about it is that in those early episodes, it really felt like Gregory and his crew were a huge resource for them. I imagine them being like Hans, Marilyn and Norm were in the later seasons- the default, on-call surveillance team and general mission support. So Philip would have been super familiar with them as well, not just Elizabeth, even if Gregory was her agent. So the betrayal of not telling Philip about the relationship feels even worse somehow. And like, Philip was totally blindsided not just by the affair, but the fact that Gregory was not just an agent, but a recruit. He knew Elizabeth's name, he knew everything about her life, he was her confidante. And Philip had no idea about that either, he just thought Gregory the same story as his crew, that he was working for drug dealers. I'm sorry, I love Elizabeth as a character, and I love their marriage, but what she did to Philip with the Gregory affair was just SO much worse than him sleeping with his ex and then denying it later. Like, orders of magnitude greater a betrayal. And yet Philip gets kicked out of the house, lol.

I've been rewatching s1, and this really stuck out to me as so incredible- In the episode where Philip teams up with Irina for that mission out of town, when he and Elizabeth were on the rocks after he found out she'd been informing on him, Elizabeth calls him up to tell him she misses him and to come home. He's in bed with Irina at the time- omg, the look on his face as he's listening to her, is one of the greatest bits of acting from him on the show to me. Like, he can barely say anything, and he just looks completely gobsmacked. You can read the sheer disbelief and amazement that this woman he's been one-sided completely in love with for years is actually reaching out to him and being vulnerable and reciprocating anything like what he feels for her, probably for the first time, mingled with the Oh Shit Instant Regret of just having betrayed her by sleeping with his ex, and the confusion and guilt and love is all so completely present. OMG, it's perfect.

I loved that scene because of all this basically. There are so many amazing layers to it. Philip is showing Paige she's not nearly the badass she thinks she is, that she's deeply mistaken to think of him as the disapproving, sensitive milquetoast not cut out for spying, that her mother has been lying to her about what she's physically capable of and giving Paige a sense of unwarranted confidence in her capabilities. And this level as well, that he could easily have killed her, that he's trained to kill. Implication being that he has killed, because killing people is something spies do, in contradiction to what her mother has been telling her. He couldn't bring himself to come right out and say they kill people, but he implied it pretty strongly, and that piece probably fell into place for Paige when Stan asked her if she knew how many people Soviet agents had killed in the past 10 years. Something else though that's interesting in that scene- We've seen Elizabeth use her legs to push off and gain the advantage when a stronger person has her in a chokehold. She did it to Claudia's goon who her broke into her house in s1, and she did it to Aderholdt in s3. Paige didn't use her legs at all, but she did improvise in a way that Elizabeth never did. She bites him. She really goes for it and digs in too. And you can see he's not expecting her to do that, and that she's really hurting him. He still could have killed her, but I think the fact that she actually was able to do anything to him very reluctantly impressed him. I think that "not bad" was sincere. She had the presence of mind to fight back in a way none of their actual victims did.

I liked the part with Philip teaching Paige to drive too! That was so me my first time driving a car. Petrified and amusing my dad. On a much different hand, I really liked all those split second lingering reaction shots of Sad Henry after Paige found out, and P&E were so stressed out about her emotional state, just the look of abandonment on his face basically. Like when she got back from minigolf with the Tims and Philip and Elizabeth immediately stopped playing driveway hockey with him to shepherd her inside, is one example that stuck with me, but there are a few of them over the course of that period that led him to believe they loved her more than him, and that was just so sad to me. And on a much lighter note, I think my favorite funny moment in the show is when Elizabeth is ranting to Philip about Paige getting sucked into Christianity on their car stakeout, where they are both dressed like criminals basically, and making it sound like she's gotten into drugs or something. XD And Philip's reactions to her made it even more hilarious.

in fairness, everyone in the tv universe sleeps with their mouth shut. but yeah, that full makeup shot of her sleeping felt so deliberate and was such a record scratch.

which would have worked out way worse for him, tbh. because of Stan's suspicions slow burning into the finale confession, that confrontation was more a "how could you do this to me" because Stan had already started to feel and get used to the idea of the betrayal. I feel like it would have been SO much worse if Stan was totally blindsided by those sketches after Philip and Elizabeth flee the country, never having known or suspected anything.

It feels so obvious to me that Renee is a spy, given how much we've seen of her actions that reflect what we've seen in the other long running honey pots P&E engaged in. The only thing I can see that puts a wrench in the idea for me is Gabriel denying it in such an honestly bewildered way when Philip asked him. But then he made sure to qualify that with "well, they may not have told me". I don't know why the Center would care if Philip and Elizabeth knew about her though, such that they'd make an effort to keep them out of the loop of the operation when she lives right across the street. The only thing I can think is that the Center being worried about Philip's loyalties throughout the course of the series is the reason why they didn't want him to know. Maybe she's there to keep an eye on him as well? But yeah. Looking back, she meets Stan at the gym in a season that deliberately had Philip honeypot someone by meeting them in a gym, she's basically tailor made for Stan to be attracted to, she moves in with him super quickly after they meet, she encourages him to stay in CI when he says he wants to quit, with the exact type of persuasion Philip used when Martha wanted to transfer out, she doesn't get bothered by him being distant when she's trying to seduce him (with false details! "U of I" and I am never letting it go) and instead needles him for information and happily accepts the vague details he offers her- in fact she never seems to have any problems with him or fights with him at all- she tries to needle information from Aderholt's wife in that dinner, and when she's firmly established in his life as his wife and so above suspicion for asking (much like P&E would play characters who insinuate themselves in the lives of their targets for months if not years in order to be above suspicion when they execute whatever ultimate goal they had in mind) she tells him she wants to work at the FBI. Plus that inscrutable look at the end there that drove me crazy. My ultimate speculation is that she's a spy, and that Stan will find out in short order. He doesn't have to give away why he suspected it because no one would blame him for becoming paranoid about everyone in his life and digging into them. I don't think she's a KGB illegal because she wouldn't be able to get an FBI security clearance if she were, but she may have been recruited, or she may be from a different agency. Mainly though, I want her to be a spy now because if Stan confirms she's a spy, it will also confirm for him that Philip was genuinely trying to look out for him and really did care about him, which I think will help him heal a bit, though obviously nothing will make up for the magnitude of that betrayal. But honestly, self indulgently I want to speculate that Henry will eventually reconcile with his father, and since I see Stan becoming a permanent fixture in Henry's life (honestly, I think Paige's as well), he will still be tied to Philip in some way for the rest of his life, and I'd like them to be able to reach some sort of peace with one another before they die. Renee being a spy will totally help with that, lol.

That was 2010. The Cold War was a distant memory then, and people just thought it was a weird, interesting story. 1987 is super different. And like I said, those 2010 spies were caught by the feds, which completely changes the situation with regard to the government caring if the story gets out. Caught = Humiliate Russia in the Media. They Get Away = The US is Humiliated if the Story Gets Out. Also, I don't think Paige and Henry's US citizenship could be stripped from them like the Canadian boys. They're natural born citizens, it doesn't matter if their parents were there illegally.

One thing I don't think he'll have to worry about is being hounded in the media as the son of KGB spies. That would probably have happened to him if his parents were caught, but they got away, and they lived across the street and were good friends with an FBI counterintelligence agent, and on friendly terms with the head of the counterintelligence division. This is absolutely NOT going to make it to the news. This whole fiasco is getting locked away and more securely buried by the government than William Crandall.