As others have said, that phrase goes back further than the 80s (and I don't think there's any big difference between how it was used then and the way it's used now except that it's enjoying an uptick in popularity).

I think Nina would have had spy training to work there.

I don't think DNA was an issue. Just evidence of intercourse. So Claudia would know that happened as part of the plan, or because Irina told her, or because she was just planting doubt.

Remember? They save all the documentary crew intervention for truly important moments, like Pam and Jim getting snippy with each other. That's how you know it's momentous.

Which administration? If the Reagan administration would cover it up, then wouldn't that mean everything he was fine? But if he had a police record then Reagan wouldn't want to have ties with this guy because it could blow up in their face. So he stepped down to keep from tainting the movement by being its face.

But the point wasn't to cover it up, it was to make him unwanted by the Reagan administration, I thought. If it was covered up that wouldn't work. If there's a police record it could come out later.

We did learn it a couple of weeks ago. It's Nadezhda.

No, I was saying that I think both actors did their own Russian lines but the lines were dubbed in later anyway to get the best take of them. MR was a bit better at pronouncing his Russian than the girl playing Irina was. At least I assume it was them doing their own (dubbed) voices because why hire voice actors with…

Apparently "Ir-eesh" and "Ir-eesha" is the affectionate form of Irina in Russian.

Right but if it's preemptive we don't know what we would have done, and according to her she knew that he *wouldn't* go if she was pregnant, so it seems odd to describe it that way, especially when we still really don't know what attracted Phillip to the KGB in the first place. It might not be honor and duty.

Wait, when did Phillip abandon the woman he loved for duty and honor? Phillip and Irina broke up when Irina dumped him for, she said, someone else. By this episode she was quite possibly no longer the woman he loved. If she had been pregnant way back when and knew Phillip would quit to stay with the baby, doesn't that…

Nina is a KGB operative—and was before Stan forced her to work for the USA.  She is a trained spy.

Didn't look like Grand Central to me either, at least when they were talking at the end.

Apparently it was both. Someone elsewhere said they both had very thick English-language accents and that Irina's Russian was nearly unintelligible.

I don't think her problem was that he slept with Irina, it was more that she wanted to know where she stood with him now. Since the KGB has just let her down, she wants to have something constant there. I think she's always been vulnerable underneath the badass. It's part of what makes her such a badass. She just only…

Yes, that was my feeling too. It's Phillip-centric but Phillip isn't drawn in the kind of primary colors Elizabeth is. She has basic beliefs and qualities that are her. With Phillip his flashbacks really told us very little. In a way he seemed even more opaque in the flashbacks. It's like how Stan felt like Phillip…

I tend to think Phillip's the more "natural" spy that way. I mean, there's a lot of skills they need for their jobs but in a lot of other books about spies I've read, especially Le Carre, he talks about the kind of people who live on different levels of reality at different times, which Phillip seems more inclined to…

@avclub-8e51eaf1f90afe8b1d404a79a38a7f29:disqus I think she went to the hospital/police to get official documentation of the rape. That's what would make the guy poison to the Reagan administration. Not that he raped some girl, but that there was official records and filed evidence of him being accused of raping the…

The way she talked about the kid didn't seem real to me. I figure whether he's real or not the purpose of him is to give the KGB something to hang over Phillip's head as a possibility to use against him and tie him closer to Russia.

I love how vulnerable Elizabeth manages to be the few times she is. And that however many lies Elizabeth has told, she still seems like a more fundamentally honest personality. Phillip is so much more slippery. I still have no clue about his motives for his job.