The two main Soviet newspapers were called Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News). The old joke (which it occurs to me isn’t completely inapplicable to America now) went:

What makes it worse is that soon, very soon, Philip is going to realize that the travel agency is only the smallest and least important of his failures, and that in fact his entire life has been a series of small failures, one after another, clustered beneath the arc of the failing Superpower he failed to effectively…

Seriously- he’s kept his cool under stresses that would drive almost anyone else insane, for decades. . . and a stupid toy car is what breaks him. And it makes perfect sense.

Stan probably thinks Phil is having an affair. Given Stan’s marital history, it’s not hard to see why he might think that.

Well, she’s wearing a KGB Amulet of Death around her neck. Sure, that *might* just be there to remind us of the stakes, like Martha’s revolver. . . but I fear the worst.

Philip is more sympathetic than Elizabeth this season, but it’s hard to get over some of the incredibly icky things that *he’s* done, like becoming “Clark” and utterly destroying the life of a woman who trusted and loved him. (I mean, yes, they outright KILL people all the time, but what he did to Martha felt morally…

Oh my god. I’d forgotten that scene, even though in retrospect it’s one of my favorite moments in the show. I’ve gotten so used to asking myself how I can possibly root for these people that I’ve forgotten that earlier episodes had moments like this one, when it was impossible NOT to root for them. This is probably…

For me, that actually humanized her a bit. I think what we saw in that moment was a flash of real jealousy.

I know, right? I thought there’d be at least a shot of Paige NOT reacting to that. . . but I guess she’s already a professional.

And here I thought the science vessel orbiting Venus was disassembled by the Protomolecule to create a cool visual, or perhaps just underscore a general sense of omnipotent weirdness.

You both have no idea.

Jian-Yang is a difficult person to root for. He’s pretty much a Gavin who cheats by deception instead of by force. (Case in point: he didn’t even legitimately own the rights that he was extorted into signing away). Still, he’s less loathsome than Gavin.

That was painful to watch, but genius. At almost exactly the moment Fiona succeeds in convincing us that she’s sentient (and nice!), she’s dispassionately torn apart to get a few extra dollars for Bream|Hall. . . with special attention paid to her perceptive eyes (“it’s day, but I can still see the moon”) being yanked…

Well, yes. But I think it opened Phil’s eyes a little bit as well. Paige’s first attack was little more than a halfhearted slap. Her second and third attempts were better, but still woefully inadequate. She clearly didn’t want to hurt her dad.

There was so much going on in this scene. . . but my favorite detail was the way that, as Paige escalated her attacks, she increasingly took on the ominous, insectile grace that we associate with Liz.

During the Cold War, the other side’s missile silos were a primary target. There’s a lot wrong with the ending of this game, but one of the few things I have zero trouble believing is that Russia could have forgotten to update some of the targeting coordinates on its Soviet-era missiles.

For me, it wasn’t the nihilism of the game’s ending that bothered me, so much as the lack of a satisfying boss fight. Taking out each of the three “Heralds”required a battle of epic proportions, so when my helicopter touched down in the middle of Joseph’s compound, I was anticipating an onslaught for the ages.

I agree that Paige is going to end up killing someone to save either Philip or Elizabeth (or possibly Henry). That’s what her whole character arc has been building up to. The final frame of last week’s episode (Elizabeth’s face, covered in spattered blood and brains) was pretty Paige’s first glimpse of her mother’s…

I still don’t understand why Paige is so eager to do this. She’s not a product of childhood Soviet indoctrination; and by this late stage in the Cold War, even most of the actual Soviets were ready to bail. Elizabeth, sure - she’s a dead-ender trapped in the past. But Paige? C’mon! She’s too young not to see the…

I think she’s one of the rare people who turn out to be what they seem. Like the Pastor, who turned out in the end to be. . . a pastor.