I just want to add to this that from her own point of view, it's even worse, because as far as she knows, her parents have been quite forthcoming and almost shockingly honesty, if circumspect, about what they do for the USSR, so in direct opposition to what Pastor Tim is saying in that diary. There's a thread above…

As opposed to allowing them to train her to instinctively shy away from trusting anyone in her life, to lie to people without qualm, to commit treason for a country she knows very little about, to maybe go so far as to use sex to manipulate and extract information and to kill cold-bloodedly and without cause other…

Oh, all those things stand, of course, and I'd never blame him for putting his wife and child before a parishioner, but when he did have the room to make the choice, he didn't, and I didn't notice any text in that diary about how his own inaction at the opportune moment has contributed to Paige's situation. I just…

Not only that, but he directly contradicted himself in their conversation by saying that he thinks she'll handling things well and that she'll do great in life. Now, of course, he didn't know she knew he was lying, but that's a very bald-faced lie. Beyond that, I don't think he's doing much of anything to try and help…

Why aren't you assuming that his mother has left him forged visas along with all his other forged documents? It's not like he'd actually walk into a US embassy with who knows which passport and ask for one, I don't think even he, in all his naiveté, is that stupid.

You're right about that; I do wonder, though - how common was it that random kids in the USSR at the time were taught English (as opposed to spies like Philip and Elizabeth, for whom that was the integral part of their mission)? My knowledge of the USSR is super limited to what we were taught in history class. OTOH,…

My experience, having crossed the border between EU and non-EU dozens of times in my life (post Balkan war, to be clear), is that when you're exiting a country, no one really looks at you whatsoever, they just glance at the passport and stamp it and let you go on your merry way. The side you're entering is the one…

Yugoslavia was NOT Eastern Bloc. If you'd include in that list communist countries, even THEN we'd not be on it (though we had a one-party system with the Communist Party, economically, we were self-governing socialist system), but as for the cold war 'Eastern Bloc' concept, we were part of that for all of 4 years at…

Ah, but if that's so, then why would he need to be smuggled out of Yugoslavia in the back of a car? Why couldn't he have just flown out, or crossed the border on a bus? Visas weren't necessary for Europe, according to my father, but were always necessary for the US, and we see him clearly crossing into either Italy or…

Interesting; that's definitely well outside of my knowledge base, but I see the logic. Could we assume that Irina had supplied him with documents that are forged well enough to fool customs agents at the airports? Perhaps a passport from a western European country? I don't even really know what sort of (or if any at…

Yeah, if it was shipped on the 20th, it's no doubt still in transit. I'm sure it'll arrive soon enough :)

Did it bother you too much that the scenes weren't done in Slovenian? I was born right when Yugo was falling apart, so my primary information about how things worked is my family, but any time I traveled to or through Slovenia from the Croatian side in the past decade, the people at the crossings always speak…

Er… March 30th is tomorrow? Did you by any chance accidentally write the wrong date? Either way, if you're in the US, it'll take some time to arrive, I know for me the other way around (US to Europe) it could be up to three or even four weeks, depending on whether I was ordering within the EU or not. It should be on…

I believe they were not requirements, so much as option, at least in some parts of the country (my personal experience would be with Bosnia). I know my mom learned French in school only and had to learn English extracurricularly, and she also had no German in school (this was in the 70s). And I know of at least one…

It was an option, though not a requirement. No one in my family learned Russian, though we had a family friend who did. You could choose between several languages.

I just chalked it up to 'they probably help a whole host of USSR immigrants smuggle themselves out, so it's a bit of a job necessity to speak Russian in addition to Slovenian and/or Serbocroatian'. Besides, Russian was one of the primary foreign languages that were taught in high schools at the time (my mom learned…

Oooh, I need to search for that blog, though to be honest, I quit TGW some time in season 6, I didn't have the time for it when the quality nosedived in my opinion so swiftly, but if they'd continued the work on the blog with the TGF episodes coming out, I'd love to read that.

It's not as blatantly nonsensical a science as I've seen in some other shows, it can be excused given that they're a legal show and not a science show and so should focus on getting the legal stuff correctly first, and the case was quite interesting to me personally, so given all that, I didn't mind it very much.

That's very true. The fact still stands, though, that there's an imbalance of need between the two parties, in that the egg in question is the only one Laura could have that's got her DNA, while the couple technically needs any donor egg that has healthy mitochondria, and there is probably nothing so special about…

That's also how I saw it. And thinking about the ending and you saying they could purchase it in the UK - it wouldn't even cost them more than 750 pounds there! Because legally you can't sell eggs for more there, which is why the sale contract was voided by that watchdog group Diane and Luca called in the end