Well, I think that the cold-blooded analysis if he won't go back to the USSR willingly would be to abduct Mischa, kill him, and make the body disappear.

I'd guessed that was probably the case, since the Kings did move. I'm assuming that it would have been far more common to be a big Royals or Chiefs fan then? And the Royals were pretty good then, and right in the middle of the George Brett era.

I could see the show largely ending before the fall of the Soviet Union. That makes the conclusion about these characters and their decisions, not the broader geopolitical situation. That said, it wouldn't surprise me to see something like a flash-forward epilogue in the last episode, with one or more of these…

Oleg's father: the former Soviet Minister of Railways who rebounded in the post-Soviet era to become a reality TV mogul. To this day, he gets an executive producer credit on The Bachelor and its spin-offs.

Think that Brin is a bit too young, born in 1973. The show is currently in 1984, and Henry's older than 11.

I could easily see the KGB re-purposing their mission to stealing details of the research, perhaps including some of the seeds. IRL, the KGB was pretty broad-based in the technological secrets that it tried to obtain. To the KGB hierarchy directing this mission from Moscow, you've already got two agents…

I'm a bit too young to have been in the workforce for that personally, but I worked in offices with financial analysis people who had been there when they first got Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc. They liked to tell us younger workers about the pre-spreadsheet software days of "run a big analysis or model and then pray that…

I agree with you in not seeing any simple resolution coming for the Mischa situation.

I was still left wondering: L.A. Kings or Kansas City Kings? (The latter were about to move to Sacramento in 1984.)

Agreed. I assume that sterile insects are being used for this research, a bit like how they're sometimes released into the wild for disease control but for different reasons here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…

You're welcome.

Thank you.

The U.S. did in fact place an embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union during the Carter administration, after Soviet forces went into Afghanistan. The actual impact on the Soviets wasn't that great because they instead bought grain from South American countries. It did have a negative impact on U.S. farmers'…

I strongly disagree that we've seen anything making it apparent to us that "this program is clearly being funded and managed at higher levels by the CIA". We have Gabriel's statement that the KGB thinks that is the case, which could be nothing more than a severe misinterpretation of intelligence information by KGB. …

Was that deliberate U.S. policy, or a quality control problem, or simple malfeasance by some crooked grain traders adding filler or poor quality grain to shipments?

"For example, I never would’ve pegged Stan Beeman as the first of the show’s main spies to threaten his bosses with going rogue. That always seemed like a Philip move"

I agree. The alleged midge/wheat plot simply hasn't added up on several levels.

Philip said it when they were in Oklahoma. Elizabeth's reaction was not to say anything about that topic, take his cowboy hat, and shift their interaction in a romantic direction.

Yes, military contractors are in a position where they pretty much have to do what the government asks. I was thinking about makers of pipeline related equipment as a separate category, though there is some overlap with big industrial conglomerates such as GE that do a lot of business with both the military and…

That's a helpful link, thanks.