You make an excellent point about Martha, and it raises an interesting question: what happens if she doesn't care? She's not a patriot, she has no great love or respect for her employers, and she's willing to break the law on Philip's behalf. She has no connections to anyone in the world aside from Philip and her…

True. That part of her indoctrination won't take, but it doesn't necessarily have to. During the Cold War, people far older and wiser than Paige were convinced to help the Soviets through ideology alone. In this period, "International Communism" was still a belief-system, albeit a quickly dying one.
Also, the Center…

Philip would have to jam the Gates of Hell with dead busboys before FBI Counterintelligence would take notice, but killing someone who's actually in FBI Counterintelligence is a whole different story. They have to find the killer (or at least retaliate) because if they don't it sends a message that they're weak. Also,…

Every day J'tia spends on Survivor is a day she's not out in the world somewhere working with fissile materials. Plus, her antics make for amazing television. What's not to like?

I know; but it's the fool's errand that Woo decided he was going to run from Day One. A better strategy would have been to backstab Tony at the very end, and tell the jury that he'd have been happy to backstab Tony a whole lot sooner, if it had made strategic sense to do so. But he didn't do that. Instead, he went…

They're definitely patriots, but that doesn't make their ideology irrelevant. For the US and the USSR in this period, ideology was a significant (and at times a dominant) component of national interest. The Soviets were genuinely interested in spreading Communism, for its own sake; and the Americans were genuinely…

It doesn't; but that resentment was a theme that ran pretty deeply through the rest of the jury's questioning. If Woo's plan was to emphasize his "honor" in contrast to Tony's amorality, then he should have taken the opportunity to stoke, flatter, and validate that anger at every turn.

Arkady seems like he might already be looking past the end of the Cold War to the capitalist future (and his own). He's better placed than most to have glimpsed the overall hopelessness of the Soviet position, and he might not have any real wish to delay the inevitable. . .especially not if he's hoping to profit from…

Agreed. Page is in full-blown teenage rebellion, so there's pretty much nothing that Philip and Elizabeth can say at this point that would convince her to join the KGB (except, perhaps, that they work for the CIA). On the other hand, the Center could probably bring her on board using someone young enough to be in her…

Communism and Christianity aren't as ideologically incompatible as one might think. (See, e.g., Liberation Theology in South America and the Communards in the United States and Europe). Depending on how it's pitched to her, Page might just be persuaded that "Christian Communism" is the magical solution that will put…

Even if he believes that she's outlived her usefulness (which, given the situation with Beeman and Echo, she probably hasn't), killing Martha would be a stupendously dangerous act. However innocuous her death might appear at first glance, FBI Counterintelligence would start from the premise that she'd been compromised…

The flip side of that is how the show treats its criminals. The crooks in the movie were bumbling, paranoid nincompoops who devoured each other in a pathetic, chaotic display of distrust and stupidity. In the show, by contrast, only Malvo (and now perhaps Lester) could plausibly be described as someone who sees the…

So far the story makes a certain kind of sense, but in a way that feels more like a parable than a straightforward narrative. The shoddy police work in this series is beginning to feel more and more like one of the premises of a parable: that is, a story element that's been intentionally designed to be illogical and…

We only have Chazz's word that Lester had access to the gun locker. And if Lester had the foresight to dispose of that key after locking the cabinet back up, then no part of that story will check out. At that point, the case against Chazz will be far from perfect, but it will be at least as solid (and much simpler)…

True, but the camera outside the door to Lester's room won't show anything suspicious, and that's about as far as the local police department is likely to take the kid's story, especially with the kid's dad being booked for the murder. There's apt to be a shortage of police manpower, what with every cop in a 20 mile…

Lester is suspected of being a killer, not Kayser Soze. To take the kid's story seriously, the cops would have to entertain the notion that Lester (who up until a week ago had lived his whole life as a timid, incompetent doofus) somehow contrived to escape from his closely-guarded hospital room without anybody…

The nephew will know; and he'll say as much; but literally nobody is going to believe him, because at that point he'll be a young (and to all appearances deeply disturbed) child telling a string of implausible lies to get himself out of trouble. Lester's alibi is close to airtight, and the only witness who could…

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I agree that we should never get to learn anything about Malvo's backstory. I don't want to see the horrible torture of a small child with the same haircut that might make me feel some sympathy for him; I don't want to see his training montage; I don't want to see…

That would explain why every local P.D. seems to have no interest (at the highest levels, such as they are) in pursuing any trail that seems likely to result in any evidence that could potentially solve any homicide. They know enough to know that they don't want to know any more.

Actually, come to think of it, we never actually saw what she saw in the dryer. . .which makes me think that leaving it open might have been an example of her cleverness. When she finally *does* get a warrant to search the house (which can't be far off, given that Molly's slow accretion of evidence against Lester has…