Yup. . . but is she clever enough to hide that fact from Philip? And if not, is Philip ruthless enough to simply dispose of Martha like he would any other burned asset? A season ago, I'd have said yes, but now I'm far from sure.

True- although if the FBI suspected Martha, they'd have followed her home; and when Philip showed up, they'd have nabbed him then and there. The CIA tried to get clever by playing out the thread and lost Liz because of it. The FBI won't make the same mistake.

Yes, but isn't that exactly the wrong tack to take with an idealistic teenager? It seems like Elizabeth is (for once) better at manipulating people than Philip.

I was wondering where on earth Clark was going to take her in response to that demand. . . but I should have had more faith in the Center's professionalism and attention to detail.

Actually, Taffet's ineptitude is almost suspicious in itself. In 1982, how much range could a transmitter that small possibly have? Unless there's a repeater device (which the sweep would have easily eliminated as a possibility), Martha's desk is about as far away from Gad's office as the receiver could plausibly be.

I wonder how Clark is going to cover for that. I suppose he'll say that Taffet had to go through the motions when Gad called him in or he'd risk blowing Clark's whole investigation. Pretty thin stuff, though.

There just needs to be a parallel grace note of harvest gold somewhere. . .

It's an incredibly difficult decision, but I think my favorite moment was the achingly tense exchange "date night " with Philip and Martha after the bug was discovered. Martha's expressive face spoke volumes by for once revealing almost nothing. As convincing as Clark's bachelor pad was, I don't know that Martha was…

That's a very astute observation. Almost every relationship in Philip's life, including the ones he derives real support from, come down to predator/prey. . . and it's not always clear which role he fills.

If the Pastor is league with the Center, it's as a "fellow traveler", not a doctrinaire Communist. I think his Christianity is too sincere for him to ever regard the Soviet Union as more than an ally of convenience (and the reverse is true as well).

If the FBI wanted to figure out who was swiping files from the mail robot, they wouldn't have just stopped circulating them; they'd have let the mail robot go about its business and put some surveillance on it. My guess is that they think the mail robot is just sloppy. . . or they're going to replace it with the Mail…

Oleg has kind of the opposite problem: he's only about 90% certain that Stan's theory about Zinaida is wrong. He'd have no compunctions about exposing a genuine traitor to the Rodina, but he'd have major problems if she somehow did turn out to be a spy and it came out that he helped blow up her mission. He'd have to…

If his missionary trips took him to Latin America, there's an excellent chance he picked up a dose of liberation theology (which was very much in fashion -we're still a few years out from its condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church. Helping the downtrodden is a goal that's both Christian and open to violent means of…

She could be a sincere Christian and a sincere Communist. In that time frame, in this hemisphere, that wasn't uncommon. But for a contemporary North American audience, it's a shocking (and even slightly monstrous) combination.

It's occurred to me to think that the Pastor might be a KGB plant who could eventually play a role in recruiting Paige, but the notion that Paige might already be a convert is so horrifying that it almost has to be true. I keep trying to imagine where the story could go when Phil or Liz finally tells Paige the truth.…

That could absolutely happen. Who better? The Center always has a backup plan. . .

It doesn't necessarily make him KGB, but it's also not incompatible. And the Center wouldn't leave Paige's recruitment up to Philip and Elizabeth alone. They'd need a backup plan, just in case, and it's hard to think of a better one.

Christianity could be used to recruit her, but not by Elizabeth. Her ignorance of religion is bone-deep. Philip seems to have absorbed enough theology to make that case, but of course he wants no part of that whole project.

Incidentally, regarding the Stan and Oleg plot to destroy the "false defector". . .how hard could it be for an FBI counterintelligence agent and a KGB officer working together to simply frame her as a Soviet spy and then proceed with their plan?

The episode is ambiguous about whether the prop design was legitimate (but intended for a smaller type of ship) or specifically designed to fail catastrophically in a way that Soviet engineers either couldn't or wouldn't know how to test it for.
That seems at least possible, given the strides that America was making…