Pests

This week was a relatively calm one that can be broken down into three parts.

Stan. He asked the woman out, it went well and she’s introduced to Philip at the gym. Renee (Laurie Holden from The Walking Dead) quickly agrees to another date so Stan finally has something positive in his life. On the other side, work. He’s brought into a meeting about Oleg, the CIA wants to flip him in Russia and they want info from Stan about the best way to do it. Stan tells them he can’t be flipped, he gave Stan the info about William with the bioweapon out of fear for the whole planet. If it’s not a cataclysmic event, he’s not going to be an asset. They insinuate threating Oleg’s family and Stan is mortified that someone who helped them out when it mattered solely on human grounds, and not threats, could be threatened. Oleg produced, he got moved home, now leave him be. Stan tries to stop it with zero results. In fact, when Oleg is approached, the agent tells him that Stan sent him. Also, it looks as if Oleg’s main job is to look into the food shortages (tieing Elizabeth and Philip to Stan even closer), which I’ll get to next.

The new mission. When Philip and Elizabeth hand off the bio-sample to Gabriel, he tells them of a major concern that home is freaking out about. Russia gets a lot of its food from many countries and the USA sends them a bulk of their wheat. Rumors are swirling that the wheat is being tampered with in some way. Elizabeth tracks down one of the mills where the wheat comes from and she sneaks in to find…bugs. The wheat is just swarming with them. She doesn’t know what the implication could be, but it’s not a good sign. Alexei Morozov is/could be involved with the wheat so they keep up with him and his family with their “son” Tuan. In full spy mode, they sit there at dinner listening to Alexei rail on the Soviet Union nonstop. While they couldn’t say anything, his son Pasha, does.

Paige. The other side Stan. While he’s becoming more insecure about what happens with being a spy (“Sometimes I wish I ran the whole place”) Paige is being edged into it a bit more and is not handling it well. When they come home from the bio-sample mission, they don’t find Paige asleep in bed. This could be horrible. The first thought is that she slipped out to Stan’s to be with Matt and that could raise questions about where the both of them are late at night. Turns out she felt so unsafe in bed, that she went into her closet to sleep. That first lesson from Elizabeth didn’t help at all.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Stan asks Philip if Paige is doing OK because she’s been acting different lately. Philip passes it off as her just being a moody teenager and the big life event of having a first boyfriend. Paige hasn’t done anything except spend more time around Stan and he’s picked up on something. Paige is a serious security problem that’s getting worse by the day. Elizabeth gives her another lesson and asks about Matt and it just makes Paige upset. Talking it over, they’re convinced that if she has sex with Matt, Paige is going to let something slip. She’ll have her guard down, she’ll be emotionally changed from something so intimate and not even realize what she’s saying. In a scene that completely flips the typical “birds and the bees talk,”  Phil and Elizabeth talk to Paige honestly about their concerns. They take a new approach since telling her she can’t see Matt is just making things worse. So, if she chooses to take things further with Matt, they want to teach her a technique to make things slow down and to keep her cool. When they say this, my mind went all over the place. An awkward conversation for anyone just hit new levels. They tell her to rub her index finger and thumb together and to think of them.  Yeah, that’ll pump the brakes.

The threat triangle has now become a square. While they always had to keep Stan at arms length for work, Paige’s involvement and vulnerability with Matt now means there’s another door leading to their secret that they must protect. Stan’s name is clearly being used on Oleg against his will and his reaction when he finds out (go with pushing Oleg or doing some rogue move to help Oleg) could lead Stan into a direct “on the job” encounter with Philip and Elizabeth. That could be the lead into the final season.