Louie’s creative free reign ultimately made the show very pretentious and tedious to me, and I confess I was nervous the same thing would happen this season here.

Yeah, something has to happen with Renee. I don’t see her turning out to be a red herring.

^ YES!!!!!

Not just about Elizabeth being one of the true believers fighting the good fight decades later after the was had long been decided, but I also looked at the upcoming episode titles. Next week’s? No big deal. The one after? The penultimate episode?! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!! And I have no idea what to make of the…

Introducing an innocuous woman to show that Stan had settled down and was living a happy, domestic life would have been ok I think but Renee was introduced in a suspicious way and then wants to work for the FBI? Something has to be in the works with her though I’m at a loss for how it’ll play into the end game.

That threw me off. Does Paige really think that her parents were, like, dating and both just happened to be in the KGB and then get assigned to the US together?

Yeah, I mean how the hell does Paige think she’s going to “meet someone” and settle down in DC while working as a Soviet spy?

I’ll fully admit I’m looking for reasons. One would be that it allows them the opportunity to befriend Stan and get some feel for what he’s doing or how things are working on the FBI’s part.

What I’m wondering is if there is some precedent for that at all with spies (by design or accident) living close to and…

I had the same thought about each character crossing points of no return, and also struggled to find such a point for Elizabeth. I think that’s part of her tragedy - she didn’t choose the life so much as get filtered into it by the system. The point in her conversation with Paige about “meeting someone, like you did…

In speculating about Stan’s fate, the absence of Renee in this episode seems portentous. Why introduce her character, keep her almost totally removed from the main plot for all this time, letting the viewer’s suspicions just hang stagnant, if not to function as Stan’s achilles heel that trips him up — or worse — as…

Paige, I think she’ll end up stuck in Russia, by herself and hating life. The fact that she said her greatest fear was being alone made me think that this is still going to be the case. I somewhat jokingly have been guessing that the last scene will be of her in a poorly lit and off-putting grey Soviet factory…

Did anyone feel like Elizabeth was trying to dissuade Paige when warning her it was a lifelong commitment? Does she think that the work will break her like it did to Philip?

It’s gonna be pretty weird for Henry once he finds out that his parents and sister are Russian spies, but nobody ever asked him to be a Russian spy.

You mean when she kicked the shit out of Gaad? lol

No, Stan isn’t stupid for failing to notice the illegals next door. But man oh man is he going to *feel* stupid if/when he finds out for sure. He’s going to feel like the worst FBI agent ever. I think it will destroy him, though I hope it doesn’t.

I think the most difficult thing for me to watch was when Philip and Elizabeth watched other operatives burn a man alive in a stack of tires. The sounds alone made me change channels (and there was some spiffy name for that method of murder but I seem to have blocked it from my memory).

“I’m pretty good at sensing when people are keeping things from me.” - Stan

Stan’s flashback reminded me an awful lot of Hank’s scene in Breaking Bad when he finally figured out who Heisenberg was.

This also strikes me as a point where things may not only start going bad, but where things went to the point of no return. Philip could have confessed to Stan and got his family a way out. Paige…

Following my chronological habit:

One interesting thing I’ve just remembered. In episode 1 Fitzjames says to Franklin something like “One look from him [Crozier], and I have to remind myself that I’m not a fraud”. I just love how their friendship was developed during the course of the series, so that now it’s Crozier who supports Fitzjames…