What’s the Matter With Kansas?

Some interesting growth this week.

Paige decides to do her first independent spy mission when she’s babysitting for Pastor Tim and his wife. While they’re out she takes the opportunity to look around the house and finds his journal. She tells Elizabeth and mom is worried. A surprise move from her daughter, she thinks it was way too risky a move for her to be doing. Paige doesn’t think so (I agree in this case as getting caught would have been pretty difficult) and says that Tim writes names in the diary as initials. With time she could figure out who he’s writing about. Also, she didn’t see anything about them in it. Elizabeth still waves her off from it but later, when she tells Philip, it gets her thinking. What if Paige can find dirt in the journal that they can use to hang over Tim? That would be valuable.

Back on the wheat mission, the info Elizabeth and Philip got last week bore fruit. Gabriel puts them on two people, a man and a woman in Kansas who are working on the infestation plot. Gabriel tells them it’s time to strike up new relationships and they don’t want to do it. For one thing, the home front is complicated enough as it is and ducking out of state all the time makes it worse. Plus, they both hate this kind of work. The last few years doing this have worn on their resolve. They have no choice though and start the relationships. Elizabeth is much more successful. This brings some stress home.

Oleg clues his mother in on him being blackmailed. She doesn’t take it well and he shuts that emotional hole and goes back to work. He makes some headway with his partner by getting a name for a distributor from the woman who runs one of the more well off grocery stores. Due to being blackmailed, Oleg doesn’t want to do the same to someone to continue the pursuit. His boss says bologna and his partner calms those waters a bit.

A rather shocking move with Stan. A double date with his new girlfriend, Renee, with Philip and Elizabeth. It goes well. Then at work, he drops his drawers and lays it out very clearly: leave Oleg alone. He’s adamant that Oleg has paid his dues and he should be respectively left to live his life at home. If they go after Oleg, he will go public about killing someone three years ago on the job. The scandal would overwhelm anything they would want to get out of Oleg. A bold, possibly career ending move.

Henry not only shows up in a scene but he’s part of it! He has dialog and it seems like they’re actually writing an arc for him this year. He’s got some trouble at school (they’ve been called to talk to his math teacher) and they realize they have no clue what he’s up to. He talks on the phone a lot and they don’t know with whom. He’s moody as hell and Paige thinks he might be talking to not one but two girls! I’m actually really interested to see where they go with it (they better, it’s so weird how the show ignores him. They might as well have never given the Jennings’ a son). At least it fits, Paige takes up so much of their attention, Henry could do anything and they wouldn’t know.

Step by step, Misha gets closer to meeting his father. At the very end, we see that he makes it to the US!

On the micro character level, Paige inches closer to the spy life as Stan recoils from it. Philip continues to listen to Alexei differently than Elizabeth. With each meeting, you can see Philip listening. While he sees him as a traitor for aiding in a project to foster starvation in the Soviet Union, Philip understands the base of his defection. The Soviet Union has all the resources to make prosperity that the US does but everything they do is broken. There’s no advancement. Corruption is killing their citizens. There’s no reason for it. The seeds of doubt for his own purpose are growing, adding to his wavering stance that started a few years ago. The Kansas Relationship Project is tearing at his old wounds too. What happened to Martha is something he will never get over and Elizabeth with another man is no respite from the personal trauma. It’s just another piece cut from him.