Agreed. I can barely gage where they are now and it was very bittersweet to watch the memory of their marriage. They are just so far apart now and I don’t see that companionship they once shared- even when Elizabeth tells him about the pill, it seems like a collateral damage warning. I remember many people commenting…

Intimate is a good descriptor. It was framed like a love scene, just close in on the faces.

With Kubrick, there’s always a component of visual trickery. He was a master at suggesting that he was controlling everything within the frame, and that there was no incident. I mean, when you see a CGI film, you don’t have as strong a feeling, while the whole thing is built from scratch on computers.

Yep. I was drawn to the show because of the spy stuff, but it’s about so much more: family, people being destroyed by their society/government, the search for personal meaning and purpose in life. Great stuff.

That their incredibly important business was on Thanksgiving was a bridge too far. Stan wasn’t gonna swallow that.

After last night, I guess you were right. His involvement really felt genuine.

I mostly agree with you, but that whole sequence of extracting Harvest was still some top notch spy thriller shit.

I was hoping she was happy to see him there, but I think he (like Paige) was manipulated into being there.

As bloody as it has been, the tooth extraction scene is still the worst for me. It was shot masterfully.

I wonder now if the show is going to end up with Henry somehow being “adopted” by Stan (literally or figuratively at his age) after the rest of the family is either in jail, dead or both?

Heck, I half-believed it when I first read it!

Given the low probability of success I’m surprised they didn’t just send him a gold watch with the inscription “In recognition of 25 years of service. Now take the pill.”

That whole sequence was great, from using the truck to block the FBI’s view, the road block, and the quick switch out of Harvests car. I was just surprised the feds realized it was a different guy so fast.

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).

Earlier in the season I thought it looked like Paige had friends, but I guess she doesn’t take them seriously because they’re American sheeple.

Philip would have been more convincing if he admitted his marriage was also on rocky ground.

The chopping scene was very disturbing. I just couldn’t watch, and regretted having just eaten something. A lot grosser than the decapitation in episode 8 of Fargo S3.

As powerful as the car scene was, the problem is that it firmly establishes that Barry is a monster. On the one hand, I respect the show for forcing us to deal with that; TV often makes it too easy to treat violence as just another story beat. But it makes it hard to see how Barry can work as a sympathetic character…

At first, I was wondering if it was the same intern Paige slept with and I just forgot what he looked like. That would have been REALLY weird depending on how far Elizabeth gets with it.

Yeah, even at a table with two FBI agents, that was rather much. You’ve got guests over, Stan!