It's not necessarily a bad thing if you prefer this version especially. No reason people can't have different takes on characters on story.

I'm not looking for a remake or an adaptation. I'm saying just what you're saying, that this version fits this character in ways that the movie version doesn't. I don't consider it a flaw when the show strays from the movie, as it has always done.

Well, yeah, but that's kind of what I'm saying. The show works as a rehabilitation of Mother, defending her against the slander we saw in Psycho. She was in fact nothing like that at all (he even made her older and frumpier) and he was a murderer while still a minor she tragically tried to protect.

Norma can be a full-fledged person and also be abusive and shaming and nasty. Norma has never been abusive to Norman that I remember. Early on there were some great moments where she was obviously damaging and incestuous to him—like deciding that the moment Norman is about to go out to his first school dance is the…

It's not exactly that I have the movie Norman in my mind, it's just that with him the type of murder he commits and the things he does are logical outgrowths of what we know about his upbringing. This Norman commits different types of murders while his mother desperately tries to protect him from the consequences.

This show winds up making me surprisingly unsympathetic to Norma (and Romero as well). It's mostly a meta thing. In Psycho I never felt much sympathy for Norman and certainly didn't consider him a victim in it, but he seemed to psychologically make some sense given the Mother we knew. Even though the personality we…

Seems pointless to redo Psycho to me. We've already seen Psycho play out a dozen times on the show with Norman killing somebody and getting rid of the body. His getting caught for it for once, because he doesn't have the real Norma to help or not, still doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

Yeah, nobody really needs to be embalmed at all. But even with embalming Norma would probably not have looked as alive as she looked in this ep, according to what I've read.

Oh, you're definitely not the only ones. There's got to be something we don't know going on here, because there's just no way sleeping with this guy, for real or no, guarantees any kind of access to anything.

Getting someone a job at the lab wouldn't help. That's why they had to target Don. The person needs to have Level 4 clearance. They already have somebody working at the lab—William.

I think "get me clearance into your top secret lab" will out her as a professional as much as photos would.

Also maybe that Philip didn't get as much personally out of Martha. People have often claimed that he got emotional support from Martha that he didn't get from Elizabeth. I don't really agree with that but even if it's true, he always primarily saw her as someone he was using and for whom he had responsibility because…

Which is totally the argument they had last week about Gregory and Martha. Elizabeth thought Philip should suck it up over "his loss" of Martha the way she sucked it up over losing Gregory because sometimes they lose "agents." He said she was a human being—it wasn't about him missing Martha from his own life, it was…

Interesting—I'm surprised I totally didn't remember that.

Neither does Elizabeth truly have any interest in returning to her life as Nadia, really, whatever she might claim. Nobody can return to being 22. Elizabeth and Philip will always be the parents of Paige and Henry, so they will always be Elizabeth and Philip of Falls Church, VA. Neither of them have any memories of…

I'm not sure he thought he was raped (even without calling it that). He probably thought he got drunk and consented to sex.

Right, of course. But the point is he doesn't see being in Russia as any sort of deal breaker.

But according to Gabriel, William complains a lot but he is a patriot. I could believe he's been like this for years without being on the edge of defecting. Even here he doesn't just not tell anyone about the Lhassa, he's unsure of himself because he does think it could be important.

Right - even when he refused to go to the USSR and so chose death, Elizabeth couldn't kill him herself when that was what she was supposed to do. She let him choose suicide by cop against orders. (And Philip let her let him choose against orders.)

I assume it's a US government lab, or else just a lab that does work for the government.