Quando

Jimmy: "I once convinced a woman I was Kevin Costner. It worked because I believed it." It wasn't a nail gun. It was a battery-powered electric drill.

My thoughts exactly. My wife fell asleep after the first ten minutes. The next morning she asked me what happened. I said, "Paige broke up with Matthew, and Gabriel left for home with a flower pot full of wheat plants. That's about it."

I love that movie too. I used to watch it all the time as a kid. It is interesting that Breaking Away also involves someone hiding their true nationality and pretending they are someone who they are not, then realizing he needs to be honest with himself about who he really is. The main character is Then Only then,

If the company puts razor wire and guards around the plants in the greenhouse, then why is there a whole field of the stuff growing out in the open down in Mississippi where anyone who wants to can just come and dig up a sample? Now that I think of it, why are Elizabeth and Phillip so sure that what was growing in that field was actually the super wheat? From what I recall, all P&E knew was that (i) Mr. Tai-Chi was taking a business trip to Mississippi, and (ii) Ms. Lotus had some shipping invoices to places in Mississippi. How did they get from that to knowing that these particular crops growing in this particular field are the super wheat? The fact that there is no guard at the field, and not even a fence or a "no trespassing" sign, makes it seem more likely that whatever was growing out there was not the real super wheat, which would be very commercially valuable to the company. Maybe is was just one of many experimental strains they were testing. ALSO, during the uncomfortable scene between Paige and Pastor Groovyhair on the couch, did anyone else get an icky feeling that the Pastor was about to make a pass at Paige?

That's funny! But I would probably peg Chuck more as lawful neutral. To continue the analogy, I guess Hector would be chaotic evil, and Mike would be lawful evil (honor among thieves).

Hmmm. I don't think Jimmy knew he was being recorded at the time. However, after Jimmy goes outside to make his phone call then comes back in and sees Chuck is already starting to take down the mylar sheets, you can see Jimmy react like he wonders whether Chuck may have just done something to set him up (or trap him in some way) and he even looks around a little as if he's checking for a recorder or camera. His reaction for about 5 seconds is like he knows something is not quite right about the situation, but he doesn't know what.

Great. We have to avail ourselves of supplemental content, again, to determine what the show we just watched "meant". While I love the way TV has improved over the years, this is one aspect I don't care for. I think that was conveyed clearly at the end of the scene. Right after Ernesto walked away, Chuck's face changed from stressed to calm to a kind of smirk, and then he casually flipped the wooden salad tongs in his hand.

Heh. I remember The President's Analyst. That was one trippy movie, but ahead of its time in a way. James Coburn didn't play a secret agent - he was a civilian psychiatrist who was brought in to be the personal psychoanalyst for the President of the United States. And because of his position (someone who heard all of the president's most secret and unguarded inner thoughts) he was constantly being pursued, spied on and almost kidnapped by every spy agency in the world. The most powerful spy agency of all, and the ultimate villain, is indeed The Phone Company, who taps everyone's phones and hears and knows everything.

. . . or maybe Soon-Hee's daughter, or niece! Wouldn't that be awesome.

Yeah. When my wife saw this awkward scene she said, "looks like Stan's a bad missionary."

I liked the scene with Phillip and Elizabeth in the hotel room when she puts on his cowboy hat. The lighting in that scene was particularly good. It had a real Urban Cowboy feel to it. I almost expected the Johnny Lee ballad Lookin' for Love to start playing.

It seems pretty clear to me what must be going on in that greenhouse. The Russian defector is helping to develop new strains of wheat that are more bug-resistant. The first few rows of dead wheat that Elizabeth saw in the greenhouse consisted of "regular" strains of wheat that were included in the experiment as the baseline and "control." The next several rows of wheat that were green and seemed to be growing fine consisted of the experimental wheat strain or strains that were altered or engineered in ways that the scientists hope will make them more resistant to bugs and disease. Then the scientists intentionally spray a ton of grain-killing bugs into the greenhouse to see which engineered strains grow most successfully despite all the bugs. The purpose of the experiment is to develop stronger strains of wheat that can resist bug infestation -- not to develop a method for sabotaging Russian crops. As Bannon noted above (just beat me to the punch), if this really was a covert CIA base for developing entomological weapons to sabotage Russian grain, there is simply no way it would be kept in an ordinary glass greenhouse, right off a public road, with nothing but a $2 padlock on the door. No guard? No deadbolt? No bars on the windows? No alarm? No dogs? No security cameras? Not even a gate or chain across the driveway to the farm blocking traffic from the main road? No way. I predict that E&P will take some rash action based on the assumption that this is a weapon meant to sabotage Russian grain (maybe even kill the defector guy), only to find out later that the defector was actually trying to help Russia by developing better strains of wheat that would be shared with Russia -- i.e., that he was trying to help the Russian food crisis not make it worse, and P&E killed him for it.

It is hard to tell unless you pause it just right, but those are definitely MIG-21s -- Russian military jets.

In case you were wondering, yes, there is a Roy Rogers restaurant in Franconia, Virginia, near Alexandria. http://royrogersrestaurants.com/node/101 It might be the prearranged location of someone's covert meeting (Oleg & Stan maybe?).

After the ice cream delivery truck went into the warehouse and they shut the overhead door you could hear a whirring sound like those compressed air power lug nut drills that they use to quickly change tires on NASCAR vehicles during a pit stop. Mike had a look on his face like he understood what was going on. I think that means they were removing the truck's tires and filling them with drugs, money or other contraband to be smuggled.

Nice ending. I thought the finale was the strongest episode of the series. Did you notice that during the opening credits the connecting red strings (between the gun, the car, the clock, etc.) were all slack and loose, rather than tight as they had been in the openings of all prior episodes? And the string to the gun was not even connected. (It reminded me of the song One Man Wrecking Machine by Guster). My complaints were: (1) I would have liked to hear more detail about what actually ended up happening in the world without the JFK assassination. All we got that JFK was re-elected, followed by George Wallace (!), something about riots and a vague reference to "the first bombing". Given that Wallace was president, are we to assume that "riots" might mean race riots? Is the "bombing" a reference to nuclear war? Was there more than one nuclear war? Why? I know this was not meant to be the focus of the story, other than to point out that things were actually worse if JFK lived, but just a little explanation of the mechanism by which Kennedy's survival led to all this crap would have been nice. It only would have taken a few sentences from Harry (something like, "Kennedy's civil rights programs in his second term led to racial backlash by southern whites," "Kennedy intervened in a Czeck uprising, which touched off war in Europe and a nuclear exchange", etc.). The alt-history nerd in me wanted to know. (2) Jake seemed to give up on the idea of a Sadie-saving "reset" far too easily, just because the yellow card man told him it was pointless because Sadie would "always die". Maybe in the book Jake learned that lesson by trying several resets that always ended in Sadie's death (which makes more sense), and given the TV format they just didn't have time for him to learn the lesson that way through multiple reset trips. But since it was such a key decision -- arguably THE key decision of the show -- it seems odd that he would make it based on nothing more than the ramblings of some mystery man who he doesn't even know that much about. Since Jake had already decided not to kill Oswald & stop the JFK assassination, why not do a reset just to come back and find/marry Sadie and live happily ever after (making fortunes in the stock market) and see what happens? Finally, even if he is going to give up on Sadie, before he went back to 2016 for the last time he should have at least set up a trust fund and bought some stock in companies that he knew were sure to boom in the next 50 years and be worth a ton when he arrives back in 2016, or at least open a bank account and put all his cash in a savings account so he could have 50+ years of compounded interest when he arrives back in 2016.

Yes, that was my thought exactly. Al said he didn't just shoot Oswald immediately because he didn't want to take the chance of killing an innocent man. So fine, go through the portal and kill Oswald immediately, then go back to 2016 and see the effect. If JFK survived, then Oswald was in fact a lone gunman, and you were justified in killing him. If JFK was killed anyway, then Oswald was an innocent patsy (or at least not alone in carrying out the assassination). In that case you can just go back through the portal and everything resets and Oswald is alive again. At that point, whether you continue to investigate to find the "real" assassins, or just give up and go home to 2016, Oswald is alive again meaning you did not actually (permanently) kill any innocent person. That would be a lot better than spending years listening to Oswald argue with his wife in Russian and still not knowing for sure if he was a lone gunman (whether he took the shot at Walker or not).

The third one was the fictional Ronald Reagan movie "Moonbase Freedom" that was playing during the 1951 flashback scene in the movie theater when Otto and little boy Dodd took out that other crime boss.

In case it was not already mentioned, this episode's title, "March 8, 1983," is the date on which Ronald Reagan gave the now-famous speech in which he referred to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire." Interestingly, Reagan gave that speech at a convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. Maybe Paige decides to go down to that convention with Pastor Tim, and gets to hear Reagan's speech in person?

Exactly. In fact, they would have given everyone a lie detector test as soon as they found the bug. They gave Stan one in a previous episode, and the FBI/CIA loves those things.

Why hasn't Taffet been giving lie detector tests to everyone who had access to Gadd's office? That is certainly what they would do in the real world. The FBI/CIA love those things. And although Martha may be a fairly competent amateur snoop, there is no way she's beating a lie detector test.

LOL!! I am picturing Philip running around the room picking up all the spinning gold coins that suddenly come flying out.

Poor Philip. All the Yaz in the world is not going to get that naked fat guy's image out of your head.

Don't you mean what is Omar Suarez doing with Haqqani? That's who I always think of. http://s1086.photobucket.com/user/ReptoidHumidian/media/Random%20Access%20photo%20stock/OmarSuarez.jpg.html

I think you missed an example of "Casual racism! 'Cause it's edgy." Right after Unser and the Sheriff talk to Juice, Unser tells the Sheriff that the plan for Juice must be, "kill the chink, get back your cut".