Same here. I tuned in 11 minutes into the episode planning to rewind and skip a few commercials, and that's when I realized it hadn't been recording the actual episode. I had to wait until the second run.

When we cut to Russia, I thought we might be peeking in on Martha's new life.

Stan's going to have his moment when he visits the Jennings' bathroom and finds a copy of Leaves of Grass inscribed with, "To Elizabeth. You're so pretty. I'm so lucky. I'm glad we have a couple of kids. Love, Philip."

He fixated on "ambulance" and not "air," thinking siren instead of helicopter. I made the same mistake before re-reading (because Emergency! didn't make sense as "Historic TV").

I will say in his defense that I did think of Emergency! first because I parsed the clue as making the sound of a siren. Only upon re-reading did I realize that "AIR ambulance" would be a helicopter, not something with a siren, and then it was obvious how much better M*A*S*H fit the category.

It might be interesting if Stan finds out about Elizabeth, and ONLY Elizabeth, and goes to Philip with, "I don't know how to tell you this, since you're such a good guy, but…your wife. She's KGB. I know it's a shock, but it can happen to anyone. It even happened to a woman in my office!"

At the last commercial break, I was wondering what was going to happen. The dinner passed without incident. The Young-Hee/Don operation wrapped up. Tim and Alice were apologetic. It seemed like a lot of falling action, which meant that something devastating was going to happen in the last act.

The gun, the valium, the bridge… Last week I joked that we'd be seeing Martha casually walking past a noose, then contemplating a knife.

I like that Elizabeth made the connection between EST and Mary Kay. She knows exactly how manipulative American commercialism can be.

Yup. Unless the next episode takes place in real time from the exact moment where this one left off, I do not expect her to survive it.

Elizabeth finds out Paige has been drinking and dismissively sniffs, "Only most of one American beer? Heh. I could knock back a liter of vodka by the time I was six."

The necklace! Will Martha's necklace spark something in Beeman's memory of it being on Elizabeth at some point?

I am guessing (and hoping) that there was some intentional misdirection in the editing, making it appear as though Martha is calling the FBI when she's really calling Clark.

It's significant that this is the first time we've seen Elizabeth allow her spy life to bleed into her personal life. Even though I don't expect that she'll confuse her mark for a real friend, there's some part of her that desperately wants her to be a real friend, an Elizabeth-friend and not a cover-friend.

I loved the bit about Paige's actor initially using her thumbs on the calculator, instinctively treating it like a phone and texting. The adult actors have memories of the 1980s and a mental encyclopedia of cultural references to know how to get into the period; for the younger actors, the 1980s are pretty foreign.

I agree. The Centre isn't sloppy about stuff like that. (This is the same organization that made sure there was an old picture of Elizabeth hanging in the house of her fake aunt, just in case Paige showed up, after all.) He might not be a priest, but he probably knows enough about Catholicism to bluff his way around…

Did you read his blog in the days when "For Better or for Worse" was still going? I think the level of vitriol he had for that strip is matched only by his (justified) hate of "Funky Winkerbean."

I wonder whether she'll find out he's married to his "sister."

That was beautiful. I loved being able to sit back and watch it unfold, trusting the show to give us just enough detail necessary to build a story.

I liked how they re-used the sound editing technique from Kim's struggling montage to have the audio of her on the phone to Paige before the visual got there. It put us right back into Kim's stressed mindset and reminded us of what it took to get Mesa Verde.