Bennigan’s! What a perfect
place for a family dinner in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day 1984. The Eckert
and Morozov families feast on buffalo wings, Monte Cristos, baked potato soup,
Roscommon chicken and, I assume, a Death by Chocolate.
Alexei complains non-stop
again about his former homeland. If
the defection … is to the Soviet
Union, he … WILL NOT GO! He speaks Russian and apologizes for doing so in front
of the ostensible Americans at the table. “We understand,” deadpans Elizabeth.
Tuan seems pretty amped up
for the cause and I’m wondering if it will lead to trouble as it has many times
before for the Jenningses. Still, Captain Commie seemed very excited to take
home two doggie bags of capitalist Bennigan’s leftovers.
That scene with Elizabeth
in the pest-infested greenhouse was creepy and claustrophobic. It was shot like
a paranoid ‘70s horror movie, where the magnitude of the problem slowly dawns
on the investigator. Will this newest bridge-too-far by the Americans
strengthen Elizabeth’s resolve?
Stan may be starting to
doubt. Things are going his way in his personal life, since he’s dating Andrea
from The Walking Dead, but he’s been
clashing more and more with the CIA. He vehemently opposes the CIA’s plan to
get more out of Oleg, seeing Oleg’s tip about William as the Russian having
done his duty. My question: Was the person who gave Oleg the note really sent
by Stan as a warning or was this a CIA officer unfairly using Stan’s name?
The bloom is coming off the
rose for the FBI career man. Stan’s career isn’t as seductive anymore, and he
tells his Soviet spy neighbor, “Women loved the FBI when we were chasing Capone
or Dillinger but it’s 1984.” Will Stan become disillusioned enough to turn? He
seems rock-solid but I keep thinking of the CIA agent in the season 3 premier
who nearly betrayed her country to Elizabeth. That agent probably thought she
was rock-solid, too, but look what disillusionment made her do.
Stan is definitely right
that something is wrong in Paige Land. She’s sleeping in the closet and it’s
kind of funny but not really. Elizabeth doesn’t care if Paige has sex with
Matthew but does care if her daughter loses control with him. “It gets
confusing when you care about someone,” Elizabeth says. In a twisted version of
The Talk, Elizabeth and Philip teach Paige that when she loses control, she should
picture her parents watching over her and remember that they would do anything
for her. On a sitcom, it would be funny to see the parents tell her daughter to
picture their faces during sex, but here it’s quietly disturbing. Paige’s
parents will always watch over her but they will also always be watching her.
She can’t have a normal relationship with a boy. No matter how much they tell
her she can date somebody else, just not Matthew, she will always have that in
the back of her mind.
This talk of
compartmentalization is especially disturbing when you remember Philip’s
flashback to his sex training, when he had to keep his emotional feelings separate
from his physical body when seducing an asset. This training makes more sense
when instructing a spy but these are parents telling their daughter to compartmentalize
her real feelings about the boy next door, and that can only be damaging. All
this advice may protect Paige in the short term but in the long term, she’s
really going to be messed up, and I’m not sure her parents are really aware of
that.
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