Elizabeth was certainly upset at Philip sleeping with Irina. It's the reason she threw him out of the house in S1. (Although it was the lying that made it worse for her.)

Elizabeth go the list she was after so I don't know if she would have to go back.

They probably teach that at KGB school. Now you know!

Per your other comment, iirc when Elizabeth makes the comment about him opening the bottle on the TV seeming like old times Philip does say that he used to open them with his teeth!

P.s. Maybe its spring 1985? Paige is class of 86 so she'd be almost a senior then. Henry would be in 9th grade instead of 8th. That means a year went by between ep 1 and ep 9.

That does solve the problem of squeezing this whole season into such a short amount of time—I thought February - May/June and it seemed crazy tight (I figured I was just supposed to think it was very cold for possibly late spring). But I don't see how anything can budge the in-show logic of Henry and Chris being…

I think Stan's making a garlic chicken. Apparently on the podcast this time showrunners specifically said not to try to hard to figure out the date here because they played fast and loose with the timeline due to the weather. It wouldn't be the first time they put in a clip of Reagan that was months before it actually…

I don't remember ever seeing Thanksgiving. Henry was getting an acceptance letter for the fall, so it should still be spring 1984.

Nitpick: they're still in 1984. So even more time before the fall of the USSR.

I just think that's completely and totally false. I mean, people often say that but I've just really never seen that in the show, that they don't know their kids at all. They have one kid whose every move is an obsession to them and another kid who's more independent and secretive (and doesn't get as much screentime)…

I think they just put him into Algebra II from Algebra I. I think he'd be moving from eighth grade math to ninth grade math mid-year. We'll see what it means, you're right!

Honestly, the most promising thing to me seems to be that he's paralleling Philip's life. Henry's not a math genius, per se. He just suddenly has started working hard at school and he's good at everything. The math was just the most obvious thing that was easy to see so that was the first teacher who noted it. But…

I think he's also replaying his own life anxieties with Henry. He never wanted him to go to that school because he thinks it's a bad idea. Taking him to Russia would certainly blow up his life, but he'd never see Henry not going to the school as torpedoing future opportunities.

It's 1984. It would be silly to get to 1991.

They just didn't mean for the Reagan news to actually be happening either in August or the following October when I think it became news. Henry's private school runs on the same schedule as his regular school.

But that would be totally unrealistic. We were really lucky the only point was to have her be able to walk into the parking lot—she was afraid to be there alone all season. She's still not capable of winning most fights.

Why does everyone assume this would be the most obvious way to split the family? Paige has no interest whatsoever in going to the USSR. The only two people who would like that are Philip and Elizabeth, who are also the two people who most want to stay together. And of the two of them it's Philip who most wants to…

I think all the evidence in that scene and with everything leading up to it with Gabriel is that he's giving Martha a kid so she's not lonely. Not that there's some plot afoot to produce an illegal. Olya will be a Russian girl with an American mother. That won't make her American. They already have a program to create…

Oh, I didn't mean to make it out to be any big luxury. I just meant they made a point of showing that Elizabeth had gotten so used to living as an upper middle class suburban American housewife with a drawer full of utensils that she was at a loss at first and then reminded. (At the time somebody who'd lived in…

I wondered that too about their talk afterwards. He could have been acting. But he also could have been genuinely a little shaken and then pushed it aside to be all the more hardline with P&E later. That would fit the way he'd been before about the brother, I think. Pasha himself said it worked, so that probably made…