The Committee on Human Rights

With Gabriel giving the signal that he’s retiring, The Center works quickly to bring him home. Elizabeth and Philip bring Paige to meet him. It’s a sort of humanizing, fill in the gaps, meet and greet of someone very close to her parents (of which there are very few). She gets a certain comfort from talking with Gabriel and he gets to finally meet the daughter he’s essentially only heard about for years. Being trained as well as he has, Gabriel deftly navigates her questions.

Mission wise, Elizabeth gets the list from the psych office with no problems. Elizabeth passes off the info and Philip asks her what was in the documents. She tells him she doesn’t really know, it was a list of names. Philip has to go to Gabriel to find out.

Philip’s mark is more or less treading water. He’s working the Lotus 1-2-3 software angle to get the info he wants from her but it’s like pushing a boulder up a cliffside. Being with her is a clear struggle for him and at the rate things are going, she’s fine with a slightly elevated friend with benefits relationship with him.

Elizabeth has been having much more success with her mark and while following him around, she gets a surprise. He’s seeing other women. It’s a strange mix of shock and jealousy that gets revealed on her face when she sees it. She’s worked to keep herself emotionally detached after the ordeal she went through with Young last season, but part of her does look hurt over what would normally be a betrayal. The other part is that she’s totally caught off guard by this move. Elizabeth thought she had this guy pegged and seeing him do something so out of character has thrown her. She’s not as good at reading people as she thought she was.

Stan and Dennis continue to work on getting informants. They get some traction with a woman, but Stan is honest with her about the type of protection they can give her and without any guarantees of safety, she isn’t going for it. Stan gets called into a meeting with his boss for a private discussion. The suits above didn’t like his stunt to get them off of Oleg and want him gone. His boss bought him some time, convincing them that Stan is essential to the recruitment work he’s doing right now. Once this job is over, Stan’s career might be as well.

This weighs on Stan heavily. Renee immediately notices that he’s bothered by something and gets to vaguely tell her what happened at work. In this scene, Renee gets into some deep conversations about what they’re watching and about things in her past. If she’s a spy, this woman did an amazing amount of training and preparation to put up an intricate false identity.

After meeting Gabriel, Paige decides to pull the trigger on Matt. She breaks up with him without giving him much of a reason. “I have a lot going on” is about the gist of it and Matt tries to stay with her. “I’m not my father” and that he’ll change anything she thinks he did wrong. It’s a rough breakup and Elizabeth is the first to help her navigate her feelings. While talking with Gabriel might have pushed her into the breakup, it looks like the general fact that she has to lie to Matt all the time was too much for her to handle. While it seems like Paige is picking up on techniques, deep down it doesn’t look like she has the fortitude for her parent’s profession.

Gabriel talks to Elizbeth and Philip for the final time, separately. Elizabeth is first and when she asks him again about why he is leaving, Gabriel admits that the weight of the work is pulling him down. Years of being in the grinder have taken their toll and he wants to stop. He never mentions Mischa.  When Philip meets him, Gabriel goes over his final mission in the United States. He’s got to get the sample of wheat that Philip and Elizabeth dug up, now arranged like a 1-800-FLOWERS purchase, to the Soviet Union. Philip, stuck feeling like he’s being lied to and kept out of the loop, can’t help but ask him some more questions. First, the list that Elizabeth stole. He receives a rather vague answer: names of a growing oppositional force back home. Then, the big one bouncing around his head, is Renee one of them? Gabriel scoffs at the idea, “You’re losing it.” He’s quick to cut off Philip’s paranoia but then steps on that by continuing with this nugget: if The Center really wanted Philip not to know, they’d keep Gabriel in the dark too. As far as Philip is concerned, Gabriel’s denial holds no meaning. Then, in another shot to the head, Gabriel leaves with a final thought. He thinks Philip was right, Paige should’ve been kept outside of their world. The main worry that Philip has had with his daughter gets validation from his father figure. Thanks for your support now, dude. Could have used it a few months ago, Paige is a freaking mess now.