I agree. I don't see Paige as rebellious so much as neglected. I mean, her mother was gone for two months! And every time a discussion starts up in this family someone (usually Philip) says "We'll talk about this another time." I mean, every damn time.

Yeah, the Christian youth groups I remember from the eighties were kind of big on being hip.

The Soviets were famously anti-semitic. He wouldn't belong to an important Moscow family and also be Jewish.

Making it seem that he can't have her because she's traumatized by an event for which he could be the one to bring her closure was the obvious reason she held off on that.

Yeah — who IS their new handler??

There wasn't a longer conversation. Philip hung up the phone. This confused me at first but then I realized that it must have been a cover story they had all agreed on long ago. The second Helen saw Paige she went into it, and all she had to say to Philip was that Paige had been there.

I thought that when she burned the letter it was clear she had never intended to give it to him. Why risk talking to him, even in disguise, if she was going to hand him something that would lead to her discovery? I thought we were supposed to realize she had only taken the letter to make sure no one would ever find it…

That's first name and patronymic, actually, not full name. IIRC that's the correct form of address between equals in Russia and they use it in both professional and informal settings. I think I remember reading that the Soviets tried to replace it with Comrade.

Everyone's hair is at least a little too high off the head for very early eighties. Mrs. Beeman's is closest to accurate, IMO. Martha's hair is totally off. Elizabeth's looks nice but it's too long and she would have had bangs.

The metaphor was for Elizabeth, not for us. The point of that scene was the look on Elizabeth's face.

I see Philip and Elizabeth's relationship as representative of marriage in general. I think most marriages go through phases where you feel like impostors, pretending to be conventional grownups for the sake of the kids. It's interesting to me to watch two people still living out the ideals of their youthful selves,…

By the eighties everyone in the USSR was miserable. Remember the famous stories about queueing all day long for groceries? Those stories weren't made up. Only the high-level apparatchiks were leading anything approaching a comfortable existence. I think a lot of commenters here are forgetting that you had to freaking…

I don't see that. Stan got put into the spying game before he had recovered from his undercover operation. Emotionally he has no idea what he's doing half the time. I find that really understandable and I feel sorry for him. I also saw the shooting of Vlad differently from everyone else here. He wanted to get…

The point is kind of moot because the person we are supposed to root for is almost always (in fact, it may be always) at least slightly out of step with the CIA/FBI/police force anyway. We Americans just don't generally like organizational idealism. So the KGB bad guys are generally presented as bad guys precisely…

No, he said he had to go and Elizabeth told him to make some excuse. But he didn't seem like he wanted to go at all.

The beginning of Season 1 established Philip as having quite a sense of humor with the kids. There were two or three scenes of him using humor to get points across to them.

Yeah, it turned out she wasn't lying to Elizabeth about — well, anything, actually.

Yes. It would have made more sense for Stan and Nina to have been watching a movie on Showtime. That was the bee's knees in 1981.

Before The French Lieutenant's Woman officially came out in theatres reviewers were raving about Streep's performance, especially her accent. Which, incidentally, sounded atrocious in those clips, didn't it? We've gotten better at accents since then. But anyway, I still agree that people wouldn't have been saying…

She can't be the equivalent of Martha because conditions in Soviet Russia required everyone to involve themselves in some kind of systeme D behavior to some extent just to survive. She was running that little scheme to get food to her family. But she didn't enter the spying game technically until she took that oath.