shura

Not when we are talking about the product actually causing people's deaths though. Pharma companies routinely and purposefully covering up deadly trial results is not really an established fact from real life, it's more in the conspiracy theory territory. I do see news of many pharma companies stopping clinical trials, shutting down R&D projects and even laying off people when dangerous side effects (not even deaths) are discovered. Big Pharma is all kinds of corrupt, but they are not cold-blooded killers.

Borat was from Kazakhstan. All those other countries have inferior potassium!

Ah, but the vote gave us a wonderful little scene, where the only juror to vote for the young business lady was the old guy Reese had been way off about, but Zoe had tagged correctly as a person who accepted the business lady as the alpha. He raised his hand so tentatively, clearly without much thought as to why he is voting for her. And I thought "damn, Zoe is good!" I loved that scene.

The plan, as I understand it, is to seduce the daughter and get access to her father directly through that, without regards to the loser with the portable phone. You are right though, the CIA should really replace the whole Afghan group now. And maybe try to use the current group as bait for Philip and Elizabeth (which they, in turn, should anticipate as well). Interesting. Let's see if the writers find a way to do something plausible there.

Hey, it was a Valentine's Day episode - he did it for love! This is a good point, but the way things stand now it can still work. The blown operative is removed from the Afghan group (what else can the CIA do about it?), but he is not needed anymore anyway since Philip and Elizabeth's eyes are now on the babysitter and her father.

He is suited, no doubt, but I don't know about "better than Paige". Maybe she is just not into Sandra that way. Although she did sound a bit simple with her "Are you in love with Mrs. Beeman?" Yep, love, that's what we are talking about here... But seriously, the show doesn't know what to do with Henry anymore, do they? Did Philip pull the wrong tooth at first? I wonder if Elizabeth can now go to a dentist and get a bridge or if this is still something they'd be watching for.

I liked it. It felt like the old school The Americans, the first episodes before story arcs really got introduced and developed. Odd that they have people on standby, ready to jump in and create a diversion for a tailed illegal to escape - and yet they don't have a dentist on retainer. Didn't Henry turn eleven not much more than a year ago? Wouldn't it make him a year or two too young for this stuff? Where did he get that picture of Sandra anyway?

If that's true, she must see a whole lot of "not cops" in her line of work. It's a really weird way to express the diagnosis, if you will. Besides, didn't she then asked him "Who are you?" or something like that? Is it at all realistic that a perp could identify a potential juror and then the juror would be able to get herself assigned to a particular case? I'm guessing not, but I don't know for sure. Because, if it were possible, then this whole threatening scheme could actually be effective. I don't really see a way out of it, save for Finch's intervention.

She was in the courthouse on unrelated business, fixing something or other, saw John and decided to do some pro bono work. Speaking of Zoe, this is at least the second case she is in that involves a greedy corporation deciding to let people die in order to secure super profits. Even though when people actually do die, the profits will disappear anyways. Come on, writers.

I don't know, it doesn't sound like very much to me. If that's all there is, then I would never go ahead and smuggle her out of the USSR. Imagine if the operation to bring her to the States got discovered by the Soviets. They would have had a huge PR coup - the Americans are kidnapping people out of the USSR, they are using diplomatic shipments (I assumed that was the reason why the container was not checked) in violation of all Vienna conventions, here's factual proof! Is this risk worth it if the only value she brings is being able to say "A lady nobody has ever heard of, who used to work in a place that doesn't ring any bells with the general public (but trust us, it's important!), disagrees with the Soviet policy on Afghanistan"?

She is not that useful for propaganda. She is not an artist or a scientist whose propaganda value would be the possibility to say "see, this guy is a bona fide somebody, and he thinks their system sucks." The CIA/FBI must think she knows something of value.

I think that may have had less to do with the taste than with the "we can now have Western stuff, so we will, every day" factor. My point is more that she almost went out of her way to show how good she thought the Milky Way was. By the way, I thought she should have at least paused at the lid on the coffee cup - I am not sure lids like that were common in a Soviet citizen's life. But she didn't even bat an eye.

I don't get her either. She is savvy enough to leave a note discreetly on a US diplomat car's windshield rather than to just try to walk into the US Embassy. She is deemed valuable enough by the CIA to smuggle her out of the USSR like that. She seems to know the views of the Politburo. Clearly she is not some low-level analyst who knows nothing about how things actually work. She is nomenklatura. And yet she acts like she's never had chocolate before. Believe it or not, there was chocolate in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, even for those who were not the party elite. She shouldn't be that shocked by the experience of tasting the greatness that is nothing more than a freaking Milky Way. Is she maybe playing the FBI?

Well, clearly you are not familiar with Dr. Orchard's groundbreaking research on memory, umm, stuff. One gene, one injection, and boom - results. Any point of view the plot requires. Nobel-caliber work, really.

Yes, exactly. Reese made it sound like she had made a bad choice and has to suffer the consequences, for which she should blame herself. As if her other choice would have been any better in terms of the consequences! It's like, do you want to die for reason A or for reason B? Reason B? Oh, you are such a despicable person! Whatever, Reese. I was very impressed, though, when Reese was carrying the girl out of the facility, the door in front of them opened and a guy popped out ready to shoot. Reese was holding the girl, couldn't shoot the guy, couldn't possibly know that Root was there to save them - so he simply turned around to shield the girl, essentially accepting that he will die protecting her. No drama, no emphasis on that, just a simple turn around.

If they are going to tell us that this reasonably large box has been inside this soft toy all the time since Lizzie's childhood, ready to be discovered when she is in the mood for it, and she has been carrying the rabbit around without ever noticing that something obviously foreign is in it, it will make her one the least observant people ever. Not that I will not believe it, but how does the FBI select its people then? Wouldn't the Bureau want their agents to at least see what's in front of them? I loved Luther's line "If they are so powerful, they can surely afford to pay 10 percent more." - that actually sounds very reasonable! And if I were Straithairn's character, all-powerful though he may be, I wouldn't walk around without bodyguards like that, thinking that this power will stop some crazy, irrational thug from killing you if he feels like it. Dembe had no lines at all. Does the actor get paid if he has no lines?

I had the same thought last week, when the FBI had the meeting about Zinaida. At the end of it, Stan had this thoughtful look on his face as if he was hatching a plan of some kind. Could have been nothing, of course. But now they show her as this almost useless ditz, so maybe they are setting something up and don't want the viewers to have too much sympathy for her. I almost laughed when Nina asked the guy in the cell who he was, and he replied "the Railway Minister". Of course, who else... Re: finding a dentist for cash, I am actually surprised the KGB don't have a couple of sympathizing doctors or dentists. It seems like it would be useful in this line of work to have resources like that. It's impossible to know whether someone has no secrets from you. I am leaning toward the Belgian girl being a plant fishing for the unknown unknowns there. I don't think she was a real foreign spy - those would probably be paraded in front of the cameras for propaganda purposes, not thrown into a decrepit cell. And I don't think she was an innocent from the streets. In the 80s, a foreign passport would go a long way toward protecting a person from being falsely accused or harassed by the authorities. The Soviets just didn't want the headache associated with that.

Yousaf, you've done this folding thing before, haven't you? And of course Elizabeth took a picture. I wonder if there was an element of a con going on there on Philip and Elizabeth's part or if they simply reacted to this unexpected photo opportunity. Elizabeth needs to see that $25 dentist from the previous episode thread. Zinaida is kind of dumb, isn't she? "Let's go sightseeing! You think the KGB will try to kill me? Here in America?" Well, what do you think?

It reminded me of that movie with Rufus Sewell, can't remember the name, Dark something. A bit too much straight-up sci-fi than I would like to see on PoI. See, Samaritan is perfectly capable of communicating with people via email, and it works just fine. Why did it have to see the White House Chief of Staff in person again? Not really. You can infer anything you want from the Machine not saying "Shaw's dead", but in the absence of facts, Shaw's still being alive is just a hypothesis. I think Finch understands that, he simply has no reason to accept this hypothesis as the truth. Speaking of them all being smart, Reese has never heard of Schrodinger's cat?

So your average non-KGB Soviet citizen was a character of a Dickens novel? Damn, that's rough ;).

Ironically, it seems that the only guy who tried to get in and access government data was Luther, and he was actually brought there by the very people who would have the keys to those doors in the first place. I'm pretty sure they had locks on the cell doors - those got opened only when the boiler room blew up. I didn't get why the detainees immediately proceeded to beat each other up instead of doing something more constructive with their new-found freedom though. Real thinkers those guys, clearly worthy of being entrusted with useful intel.

All she did was make the guy lose his balance and fall onto the road in front of the motorcycle. The guy saw the oncoming bike, decided, understandably, to focus on getting out of the way and pretty much let her go on his own accord. The bike then smashed into him, while Elizabeth managed not to get hit. Luck, plot considerations, sure, but I don't think it was impossible.

The more I think about this, the more I question the whole idea of a 2nd generation illegal. If Paige is not expected to be more useful than a Martha or a Fred, then what is so special about recruiting her? Is she just supposed to be easier to recruit than a random American because of the influence her parents already have on her? Is she, once recruited, expected to be more loyal because it's a family business? I suppose it's a theory worth testing. But there are certain downsides there, too. If anything goes wrong with the recruitment, Paige knows her parents' real identities and can lead the authorities straight to them. Or even go all Jared on them herself.

They did reduce the number of "I am you, I am thinking this and that", which helped a lot. Has anyone read the books this show is based on? Is this stupid device prominent in them? It reminded me of the books my 6-year-old kid is reading, where everything is explained explicitly and the reader is not really expected to connect the dots on his own. I am conflicted. On the one hand, I like some characters and their potential. Dekker's character is almost a cartoon, but, strangely, I like him. Niedermeyer is pretty cool, Gravely could be made into something interesting. On the other hand, the plot is just so stupid and, in this episode, also juvenile.

Solzhenitsyn has a novel set in a Soviet cancer ward, and if I remember correctly, the terminal patients there know that their cancer is incurable. Just saying, some generalizations are too broad to be true. To borrow from Despicable Me 2, can I be the first to say "Eww!"? And speaking of teenage boys, come on, Paige, you can do better than that Dennis person your pastor is getting out of his way to fix you up with. I'm still laughing at the Kama Sutra scene, especially at how "Clark" kept turning his head to look at the book and make sure he is following the instructions correctly. Ah, romance...