shura

She is probably trained, but it is ridiculous that they chose her for the mission. Tatiana is officially a Soviet diplomat with a position at the embassy, a deputy attachée of some sort or something like that. Sending her is not really that different from having the ambassador himself do it. You have to think about risk management - if something goes wrong and she is exposed, imagine what it would look like in the papers, a Soviet diplomat tries to assassinate one of their own in the middle of the summit. Is it really worth a try? And really, there is no reason Nesterenko's assassination should be a requirement for the coup success. It's only a plot device to get Elizabeth into conflict with Claudia and the KGB. Well, if Father Victor was talking to the FBI that very day, there was at least a chance the FBI wouldn't be quick enough to have someone on Father Andrei already. Not that he made that calculation, necessarily, of course. At least he didn't wait a few days, at which point his message to Philip would be "I wanted to tell you, in person, that the FBI is following me 24/7."

He must have been really depressed by the movie then. It's not exactly a movie that would inspire Soviet patriotism or reinforce commitment to die for the country. It is about people infighting and backstabbing in an effort to get some parking spaces, and it touches on the injustices of life in the USSR, things like corruption and the need to be connected to get something. Kind of like Oleg's story from last season (but a comedy, believe it or not). Not intending this to be a knock on the writing, but that's not some brilliant idea the writers had to be particularly talented to come up with. It's all real life.

Question: why couldn't Claudia fudge Elizabeth's reports without having her kill Nesterenko? She wasn't going to tell Elizabeth about it anyway. If the false reports were going to convince Soviet leadership that Gorbachev must be removed, did it really matter if Nesterenko was dead or alive and denying everything? And I must say - that guy is a really good actor. I was feeling his fear there in the car. Well done. So Stan is the only person who doesn't know the Jenningses are Soviet spies, right? Pastor Tim knows. Stavos knows. The Roy Rogers guys does, too. I'm sure Renee knows as well. Next week, when Stan comes to Aderholdt, Dennis will be like, "Philip and Elizabeth? Oh yeah, I knew they were Russian."

Do we really know that they lived a particularly reclusive life and had no normal interactions with friends and neighbors? They showed up at the Beemans' door with their housewarming casserole like they'd done it before, in a perfectly neighborly way. And that was before they knew Stan was FBI, so they had no reason to pretend extra hard to befriend him. Plus, for all we know, Elizabeth could have wiped the van down while Philip was driving it to the garage.

Actually, a radio jammer would have helped with that, too. The FBI probably want to remain inconspicuous and keep watching Harvest in secret, so they don't really want to have too many people following him directly (a helicopter would probably be a bit of a giveaway, too). They'd need communication to call up all those hidden agents if something happens. It only makes sense to hit their ability to communicate. It really has to be in the SOP for this kind of operation, the more I think about it.

Stan literally murdered a guy, confessed to the Deputy AG and blackmailed the US government. That didn't kill his career. And now it's in jeopardy because he hasn't been able to catch these two illegals, the task no one else at the FBI hasn't been able to do either? I don't know. If that is what the writers are writing, then it's not very good. But, of course, they write what they want. Gaad's pen should have been on his housekeeping (or whoever is in charge of sweeping his office for bugs), not on him personally. They just chose to write it this way. Thinking about the caper, the thing that caused it to go south was the very impressive ability of the FBI guy to relay the info on every car on the scene and where each one was going. I wonder if there was a way for Elizabeth to anticipate this in her planning. And maybe get a portable, industrial-strength radio jammer (I'm sure it's a thing, probably, the KGB must have one, right?) on the scene to turn on as soon as Harvest was sprung. I'll add the scene where Elizabeth shows Philip her cyanide pill. "They gave me this. I cannot get arrested." - "Tell me why." - "I can't." - "So... why did you show me the pill?" - "I wanted to tell you." - "But you haven't told me anything." - "No, not really." Okay, good talk.

And he is not working on the Mexico job, Claudia is mistaken about that. He is working to get the sensor needed for the Dead Hand development, while Elizabeth's Mexico job is about thwarting Gorbachev and preventing a deal that would scrap Dead Hand in exchange for some US concessions. So the guy may not even have the cyanide pill.

Right? I was thinking the same thing - what an authentic babushka getup, way to blend in! Got any stew? How did it get the elevator to hold the doors and wait for it? I swear, the doors were already closing when the Mail Robot decided it needed to get in. Is it one of those Internet of Things thing that Google is still working on thirty years later?

Only because the writers wanted it this way. The guy is burned out, he has said he doesn't want to do this anymore. How on Earth does the KGB agree to take the risk that he is going to break? Which he just did.

The whole idea of the KGB being okay with Philip's "retirement" like that is lazy writing. He should have been evacuated back to the USSR a long time ago. But no, he is left free to roam around unsupervised and check on what secret shit Elizabeth has been doing and decide which operations to blow up. I am shocked Elizabeth didn't shoot him right there when he told her about Kimmie.

She said that, didn't she? I don't understand why it was about Mexico City. The Kimmy operation had been running well before that, they were getting information that would be useful if not crucial for the summit. Why not report it like that and say that they need help in Greece? It didn't have to be Philip any more than it had to be anyone Gaad knew to approach him in Thailand. Just get some young Bulgarian guys to strike up something with Kimmy and her friends if that's how you want to do it. Of course, it would make way, way more sense to just have Philip convince her not to go. Speaking of Philip and Kimmy, how weird is it to talk to someone you know and hear them say "Hey, when you are in Greece next month, and someone tries to convince you to go to a Communist country, don't do it!"? I'd be like, "Dude, are you... from the future?"

All the more reasons to lay off at least some of his employees now and cut his losses. I nominate Stavos. That dude is weird, I certainly would not come back to buy another trip from him. And he probably makes enough to make a nice dent in the Henry problem. Instead, Philip chooses to mope and sigh over his bank statements. How is that a better option? When Paige was walking down the hotel hallway waving her purse from side to side, I was thinking there is no way those pictures would have anything in focus.

Yes, that would be very Soviet of him, to think that one must endure difficulties in the present for a pipe dream of some bright future that may never come. I couldn't see anything in HD. It felt like I was shown a black screen with some flashes and sounds here and there, and invited to guess what's going on and maybe fill in my own details if I care. I suppose they might have been going for the confusion effect on purpose though, where even the participants in the operation couldn't understand what's going on., so the viewers were feeling what they were feeling.

Well, she is not wrong. He is hemorrhaging money paying their salaries for no reason there. Money he could use on, I don't know, his son's tuition? I love it. Not only do they not show us what they want to convey, they don't even tell. We have to read closed captioning to understand.

I am not sure she is the moron, actually. It was Stan's and Aderholt's idea to recruit her, she didn't even want to do it at first. Nor was it her idea to go into witness protection now. Basically, she was begged to accept the wads of cash and anything else she wants (like dental) in exchange to just doing whatever she would be doing otherwise, and then told that the US government is going to take care of her, thank you very much. It's pretty smart to accept all of that, don't you think? Of course, now Elizabeth is coming for her, so yeah... Well, maybe she'll get lucky again.

Right, I get that. I guess I am thinking more "could it work like that in the show universe"? Because it seems it's either something like that or not very good writing. Ha, maybe he should get a scholarship for that! It would be a completely different show (and genre!) though. Regarding sports teams in private schools, I saw our local middle school basketball team play a team from a private school this winter. We trounced them, they were pretty terrible (although some of their players were "stars" on that team, of course). And I got to wonder how the whole thing works in private schools. Turns out, at least for this particular school, if you want to play sports, then you are on a team - it's just that they have several tiers of teams. But they all play in local leagues, getting to feel like sports stars and all. And get write-ups in the Sports section of the school's webpage.

Girls loudly cheering for a good-looking guy like Henry? Right, the NHL better take notice. And the only "numerous people" unrelated to Henry that I can remember is one of those girls' mom saying something like "Henry is getting really good, he's got his own support group," which sounds to me like commenting more on the cheering than on Henry's talent, necessarily. I wonder then if what was a full scholarship in his first year got scaled back later on as a matter of policy somehow? Like, we hooked him in, now that he is here let's get his parents to start paying some?

It still feels not very logical though. Elizabeth kept telling him not to tell anybody about the "audit" and presumably felt it was enough to let him live, even though he could have totally been friends with all kinds of people in security that she did not know about. Then he tells her that he does, in fact, know people in security. What does that change? The risk does not increase, she simply becomes aware of it. Why not stress again that he cannot tell anybody, even his girlfriend? He had signed the confidentiality agreement after all. Also, it was pretty stupid for her to lie and tell him she knew Theresa when she doesn't even know if there is a Theresa. Just tell him no, I haven't met her, must have been someone else from my organization who has, I don't know. Although, I suppose, at that point she had already decided he was a goner, so it didn't matter that much. Do we really know that the school still thinks he is such a huge star? We've seen his proud parents brag about him and some girls who were really happy to watch him, but other than that, has there been independent confirmation? Maybe he is just average now compared to his peers.

You are probably right, I didn't actually hear him say he'd told her, I just kind of filled in the blanks to try to make sense of the situation. Maybe Elizabeth was planning to kill him from the beginning, even before they sat down to talk? And now she has Tracy's name and is going to show up at her work to "investigate" her boyfriend's disappearance and then wander around the place and grab herself a detector? (My favorite line from Philip last night: "A radiation detector? What for?" Um, to detect radiation?)

And even if someone were to identify the stew as Russian, so what? Can't she have some leftovers from a Russian restaurant? Maybe that restaurant (and even that dish, for that matter) one of the US negotiators was talking about. How is having stew in the house a big no-no, but Paige reading espionage manuals during a stakeout is not a big deal? 'Cause I am assuming that's what she was reading there. Speaking of the negotiators, the young Russian guy who said he would go watch baseball is the one Elizabeth is watching, right? The one Gorbachev purportedly instructed to trade Dead Hand for SDI? It must have sounded super suspicious to her when he said it. I didn't quite get that either. I think he said he had already told his girlfriend, her being in security and all, and she must have talked to the auditing firm already anyway, something like that. Then Elizabeth made sure to take her name and bam! But doesn't that mean she now has to kill Tracy too? And that is not going to make getting into that warehouse more difficult?

He is not even claiming anything, really - he is telling her what he is reading in the papers. Elizabeth is the one whose point requires actually having been in contact with people back home. And she throws it in his face that he has not been in Russia in years and doesn't know what he is talking about? That was cooked by Claudia. That Elizabeth only chopped the onions for. That's got to be symbolic of something, no?

I laughed at Stan being shocked that Sophia told Bogdan she works for the FBI. Dude, that's what she does! That is exactly how you got Gennady, remember? Oh, she's got to be Russian, with this utter incomprehension that rules and procedures matter. She probably thinks that Stan can arrange for her to skip the academy training (which, surprisingly, is only 20 weeks long - who knew?) and get her assigned to the same unit he works in. Like, tomorrow.

Didn't that percentage ultimately come from your own pocket though? The airline needed, say, $1000 to be profitable, they quoted $1100, you paid that to the travel agency, and the airline let the travel agency keep the extra $100. Philip could have shared some of that with his customer. Sure, but he still needs to be worried somewhat about the FBI watching Oleg and discovering Philip, simply because, if that happens, then the whole idea of sending Oleg on this mission becomes pointless. It's almost a paradox. I guess we are to think that they have some safeguards against that.

She does not. She reads that paper and thinks "Wow, Officer Heimlich was right, that really is a bad neighborhood." "Now I need sleep, Matthew. Let me SLEEP!" I am actually bored with the travel agency story line. I liked the scene with Philip and Jeremy, it was well acted and you could feel the awkwardness of the situation, but that's not really the Philip I enjoy watching. All his moping and indecisiveness almost look like what they did to Stan's character in Season 2. I hope they don't drag this out.

Wait, so Arkady sent Oleg Burov, the man he knows the FBI knows was/is KGB, under his real name he had to declare at the port of entry, to go meet the most prized Directorate S assets? In the hopes that the FBI would not watch him? Good plan.