The choice was to die rather than shoot other prisoners.She was basically tried in absentia and when they found her they sent people to carry out the sentence. They thought collaborators deserved death.

It was a cool question! It made me think about how much it communicated even without it being familiar. Music is so powerful that way. I remember in the last couple of seasons of Mad Men they used some songs that were right in that sweet spot for me—not so popular that they were just classics, but arpopular enough…

That's what was confusing me so much when I started watching it. Instead of focusing on the scene half of my brain was saying, "WTF are they watching on TV with this song and how on earth are they watching it? Why would this be on TV? Why would they watch it if it was?"

I was even wrong—he wasn't listening to the song. He was watching the movie The Fly. The song was either just background music or something he was thinking in his head. But either way it's indicating that Phillip's connecting to his past in exactly that way. Like either he's thinking of the song and having that…

How it sounds in what way? I think I'd heard it before—and it reminded me of other Russian songs like that from the mid 20th century. Like even without hearing the words the emotion's clear from the music and singing what kind of song it is. (I could understand enough to know what it was about, rather than just…

That's how I read it too. And even if he thought they had a chance to live, his first instinct is going to be to just side with her and get these crazy people out of there. There's no way he had time to process that his beloved grandmother wife with her pearls had mowed down people for Nazis.

Yeah, the thought of her husband learning the truth was one of the things that really upset her. A couple of people saw her as living her life to make up for what she did but she didn't seem haunted by guilt so much as haunted by being unmasked. She still felt justified—and as it turned out her husband backed her up,…

Actually, I think if there’s one thing the show’s been consistently lazy
about it’s exactly that. They’re happy to let the English-speaking actors pronounce foreign names the way they would naturally, even if the character probably wouldn’t pronounce it that way.

Yeah, there's a lot of focus, both from viewers and from Natalie herself, on that FIRST time when she needed to be drunk, but this was an ongoing. Clearly she did just make the choice to put her head down and do whatever the Nazis told her to do. Had the Germans won she would have gone on doing that. Instead the…

It sure seems like they don't, which is hard for me to believe, if only because Henry would have demanded it.

It’s worth noting since it’s been pointed out that Natalie, when she first
became a collaborator, was the same age as Paige and Elizabeth, that there’s
every reason to believe that neither Elizabeth nor Paige would have done what
Natalie did. Both would probably have chosen to die instead. Of course nobody
can say for…

Philip has never suggested such a thing ever. They have discussed how it would be difficult for their children to move to the USSR and used it as a reason they weren't going back at that moment, but never said it was impossible. Every time Philip talked about running he explicitly meant running back to Russia and said…

So a 16 year old whose family is murdered, who is raped and is forced to drink and threatened with death to force her to kill people is just selfish for wanting to preserve her own life.

Yes, I get the irony that Elizabeth is working for a regime that's not what she thinks it is. She's dedicating her life to protecting her country in a way that's not helping the way she thinks she is.

But…that's completely switching their roles to the point where the term is meaningless. Both Alexei and Baklanov are defectors who were actively working with foreign governments against the USSR.

If you look at things on the personal level probably most people have betrayed their own people. Elizabeth's actions as a supporter of the Soviet government have certainly hurt plenty of Soviets because the government is oppressive. But it's still the official government of her country that she's working for.

Why would Philip think his father didn't choose to be a guard?

Yeah, people often do talk about defection as if it's just any other retirement. You announce to the FBI that you're done and they hand you a happy, safe life in the midwest.

I don't think it honestly would have occurred to the KGB anybody needed to test that. They would expect them to enjoy killing this woman.

The children of Illegals who were born in Canada (which also has that rule, iirc) had their citizenship taken away because the parents were classified more like diplomats. The US government could classify Paige and Henry the same way—say as children of people who were here representing a foreign power they don't…