Claudia could expose the full extent of Paige’s complicity, if she was somehow captured and interrogated, but she’d have no reason to. She knows that Paige never betrayed the Cause (she never knew enough to), so as far as Claudia is concerned, Paige is just a young Comrade in danger. For all her flaws, I think there’s…

“If Stan shot any of them, how does he tell Henry he shot his family?”

“Somehow I just didn’t buy it that Stan bought it.”

Yeah. That final scene of Stan talking to Henry at the gym was heartbreaking. Especially that establishing shot of his hockey uniform with the now-meaningless name of his nonexistent “JENNINGS”family emblazoned across the back.

Gorbachev doesn’t know Oleg’s role in all this, yet, but the people who DO know include Oleg’s father (a Cabinet-level official), Arkady (a high-ranking diplomat), and Liz and Phil (who have become, we’ve been given to know, highly respected figures in Soviet intelligence circles).

“Even if the top guys in the Centre were removed, you’d never get all their acolytes out of the bureaucracy.”

Soviet leaders don’t *admit* that they’ve been the targets of an attempted coup. They *proclaim* it, as justification for sending legions of their political enemies -and anyone else they don’t like- to the Gulag. Gorbachev didn’t get where he is by letting dangerous adversaries slide. He needs to purge them all, but…

She’ll also need to swab every last one of her fingerprints from every surface in Claudia’s apartment. It’s not a given that the FBI will ever find that place, or learn who Claudia was; but Paige would be foolish to risk it.

I actually thought they’d be driven straight to a high-level debriefing at the Kremlin by a panel led by the Centre’s latest rising star, an unparalleled expert on American intelligence operations. . . who would naturally turn out to be Martha.

My guess is that *everyone* is about to get purged. From a certain point of view, Phil and Liz are guilty of betraying the Centre, just as the Centre, from a certain point of view, is guilty of betraying the Central Committee. The Soviet Union at this point is still just Soviet enough to resolve issues like this by…

That was one of the most haunting scenes in the episode for me. That Paige would bail on her own parents to go actively looking for *Claudia*, of all people, was shocking. Whose side is she on? It seems like her plan was to enlist with the anti-Gorbachev hardliners. . . but as what?

I agree. To me, it looked like Elizabeth was giving Paige a chance to get out, or at least, as much of a chance as her loyalty to the Centre would permit. At the end of the conversation, when she was watching Paige walk away, I thought she might have been baffled at the choice Paige had made. . . and perhaps even…

True, although that might have prompted Stan to check up on those former employees and have a chat with them. . . which would almost certainly have caused Phil’s story to unravel even further, since the first thing they’d tell Stan is that Liz hasn’t worked there in years.

“I’m a Russian spy” might have been forgivable. “I’m the KGB Illegal who’s been killing your friends and that’s just the appetizer” would not be.

I don’t think Elizabeth was soliciting Paige’s lifelong allegiance to the Cause so much as giving her one chance after another to say no. For once, Elizabeth was willing to bend as far as her conscience would let her stray from her KGB loyalties.

I didn’t -or, rather, now that you’ve pointed this out to me, I remember that I saw and forgot about it. Good catch!

Great response. I think what’s especially tragic about Elizabeth is that, while she’s completely closed to the possibility that she might be wrong, she’s being constantly gnawed at by the increasingly clear knowledge that her side is <i>losing</i>.

Had to watch this again. I think I just realized what I like about her. Elizabeth is fearsome when she knows she’s right. . . but when she actually IS right on top of that (which seldom happens), we get a glimpse of who she could have been if she’d served a better cause.

I think only Paige’s last attack was fully legit, but I’ll concede that my sense of that is subjective - it depends on how much or how little you want to read into how it was choreographed and shot.

Good question. One of the undercurrents of the last season, which this episode really drove home, is that the Soviet presence in the United States has been steadily diminishing as Soviet fortunes have waned. The days when whole teams of Illegals could kidnap Phil and Liz just to test them are long gone. And now,…