It wouldn't be completely unthinkable for Arya to die in this episode. The post-book show has been willing to abruptly kill off characters and plot lines that only GRRM (if indeed even he) knows the purpose of. . .especially when doing so will let them get rid of an entire expensive set and cast of secondary…

No, for storytelling the show wanted Paige to see Liz kill somebody at this point in her arc, which makes perfect sense. But I think we should also see a conversation between Elizabeth and Philip about this in which she goes over the scene and asks herself why she couldn't have simply incapacitated this guy. (The…

Well, I don't know what other moves would make actual sense, but the move that would have made action sequence sense would be for her to pivot around and away from his clumsy lunge, then cripple him by kicking his knee out from the side (sound effect: breaking pasta).

Elizabeth isn't a superhero; but she's portrayed as someone who's been through a lot of physical conditioning and training in hand-to-hand combat, and who is innately very fast and very strong. She was outweighed, but she's always outweighed, and by the time she killed that dude, the fight was one on one.

Yes. Also, a disposable paper mask and a pair of latex gloves aren't exactly the recommended gear for handling BL-4 pathogens. . . but then again, even the nurses at the hospital seemed pretty sloppy about taking precautions. Their gear was "just about" good enough for BL-2. In real life at last one of them would have…

The KGB isn't that bad at compartmentalization. For all the new FBI guy's bluster, he doesn't have a shred of evidence linking Arkady to Elizabeth and Phil.

I still have some hope that Martha is busy learning Russian and making herself an indispensable expert on U.S. Counterintelligence. It would be great if she was reintroduced next season as a high-ranking KGB badass dictating operational orders for Elizabeth and Phillip.

I think she was in a real struggle when there were two of them. But we've seen Elizabeth fight two trained FBI agents to a draw. One drunken street thug was never going to win a fight against her, knife or no knife.

It's miserable. I thought Philip's abandonment of Martha would make for the most agonizing scenes of the season, and so far they still are, but what Liz and Phil and the cast of Directorate S have done to this poor family is starting to give the Martha plotline some real competition.

That's part of her guilt, I think. No useful purpose is served by her listening to these messages - the person Young-hee is calling is supposed to be dead.

Right- also, sending defectors off to Siberian labor camps would have a certain (pardon the pun) chilling effect on the Centre's ability to encourage people to defect.

My guess is that they're using Martha as a high-level consultant on FBI counterintelligence resources and procedures. . . and that she's very, very good at this job, since she has about a decade's worth of observations to share, and she's pretty darn observant.

Did anyone else get the sense that Paige didn't try to get the tape back because she suspects that it may be the only thing that's keeping her parents from killing Pastor Tim and Alice?

It looks like Elizabeth has finally figured out a way to completely destroy Paige's interest in religion: sincerely encouraging it, and ordering Paige to be religious.

This episode was so hard to watch. We're never allowed to completely lose sight of the fact that the Jennings are evil people who serve an evil cause, but the show is also careful not to constantly rub our noses in it.

Gaad and Stan seem to know pretty much the full extent of what she did, and it's so titanic and despair-inducing that they almost seem genuinely interested in learning the truth about why she did what she did.

Good point. Or how hard Elizabeth worked to make "Clark's sister" look as frumpy and unthreatening as possible. Of course, Martha being Martha, she saw right through the bad hair and SNL Church Lady outfit and pieced together just about the whole thing. . .but still. She had to be clued in to look in the first place.

Someone -I forget who- wrote a great essay about that topic. The killer line was something like, "In Clark Kent, we see Superman's critique of the human race." That is: bumbling, ineffectual, myopic, and utterly inept at just about everything.

Do we know that for sure? In theory, there's no reason why they couldn't, but I can't remember seeing that behavior in the show.

Good point - and maybe they wanted to drag the credits out just a bit, since this episode was (I think - I didn't time it) surprisingly short.