Tchaikovsky

Everything is getting worse for Elizabeth. She’s being put into more and more dangerous situations by herself at an alarming rate. Her life and Philip’s have never been more different. He’s upset about a long time client going to a competitor and she has to figure out how to do a lunch meeting in the State Department cafeteria!

Philip is largely in the back seat now. He exists on the peripheral of Elizabeth’s world. He goes about his separate, civilian job while she’s in the trenches of trying to continue the Soviet Union’s fight in what are, historically, the waning years of the Cold War. He checks in with Elizabeth about Paige and that’s about it.

Elizabeth is juggling and spinning plates at the same time. And one of those plates is her most valued: Paige. While Paige is gung-ho about the secret family business, she’s still green. It’s a good three years into her training now and while she’s in the field, she’s not that good and Elizabeth is worried about her. Even worse, she’s still treating her with kid gloves.

There’s no way around it: Paige is a creampuff. Elizabeth knows this and it sounds like she’s thinking long-term with this in mind. When she talks to Claudia about Paige, she see’s her daughter being embedded into an organization like the CIA where she can stay behind a desk to pass information along, not doing covert ops on the outside.

The work that her parents do is gross. They’ve done terrible, psyche-damaging things. Philip hit his limit years ago. When Paige first found out her parents were spies, they eased her into it. They lied to her about any notion of using sex or violence to accomplish their missions–they convinced people with words. We’re talking about a young woman who got really conflicted about pushing Pastor Tim out of the country last season. She felt guilty about changing his life behind the scenes and that was a dream scenario come true for him. What her parents kept from her is that he was almost killed to get him out of the way. Elizabeth is still fronting to Paige about the world her daughter is now in and she can’t keep doing it. Paige reads about using sex as leverage and coerision and Elizabeth tells her it isn’t true. She then fights with herself about lying to her and sort of admits that it’s possible. That you can get close to targets and how dangerous that is. This all comes to a head when Elizabeth pushes an old American contact for a lithium-based radiation detector and it goes horribly wrong. Last season Paige freaked out over getting jumped in a parking lot and seeing her mother kick some ass. What’s going to happen to her now that she’s seen a man’s brains all over her mother’s face? If Paige wasn’t her daughter, Elizabeth wouldn’t be training her this way. She’s being a parent first and it’s caught up to her.

Aside from the deal gone wrong, Elizabeth is also keeping tabs on her American negotiator mark, Glenn (the husband of the ill woman, Erica). Erica is deteriorating quickly, Claudia tells Elizabeth that her goal is to keep her alive until after the summit. Elizabeth is really uncomfortable on this mission. She’s not a real nurse so her bedside manner is terrible. She openly distains art, which is basically Erica’s life force at this point. Erica has no patience for any kind of nonsense so she forces Elizabeth to sit down and take a crack at drawing. She’s going to make Elizabeth look at the world differently. In another uncomfortable scene, Elizabeth offers Glenn help to shorten Erica’s suffering.

Then she’s got her old contact set up a lunch meeting at the State Department to catch up (he thinks she’s also an employee). A Soviet spy getting into essentially ground zero for getting caught is a hell of a task and when forced into it, Elizabeth commits to it (Claudia’s face when she tells her where the meeting is, says it all). She barely pulls it off and ends up getting valuable information. Ronald Regan is apparently going senile. That means he isn’t running the show…the people around him, who are even more hard-line about the Soviet Union, are most likely calling the shots now. This throws out the rulebook the Soviets have been using.

Meanwhile, Stan and Dennis’ mark from last season is in bad shape. Sofia was always a risk, she’s a blabbermouth. The man she met, Gennadi, ended up being a lucky get. He was all about helping out and has become valuable for the services their department put them on (it looks like an info courier). Stan has moved departments though, so he’s removed from managing them. Gennadi asks to speak to him directly and he goes to help out Dennis. Sofia is fed up with Gennadi and wants a divorce. She’s convinced he’s cheating on her and she’s met a “nice man” at work. Gennadi doesn’t know why she kicked him out. Her talking to another man is bad enough (re: blabbermouth) and the dissolution of this relationship could completely kill this asset (literally too, what Gennadi does is dangerous). Also, Oleg has been spotted by the feds in the country. He’s got all the right paperwork to be in the US, but Dennis would like Stan to talk to him if they were to cross paths. I look forward to seeing that.

Finally, I noticed a disturbing undertone throughout. Elizabeth planning for her end. Everything is riding on this summit. All of her missions now are putting her in danger. The odds of getting caught at the State Department were huge. She tells Claudia what she wants her to do with Paige if she gets caught. Talking to her old contact (starting at the bookstore) made her worry about her home and thus her future. Her contact thinks the US holds all the cards and that the Cold War is really close to coming to the end. That means the end of Elizabeth’s work…in failure. She and Philip devoted their whole lives to this. Odds are, Philip would be okay with this outcome. Elizabeth, definitely not. From her perspective, she sees the end of her life. Prison, the ever-present threat of death, failure of her life’s work. And this fear makes her push the second old contact (he went to them in 1981 about the Star Wars program) too hard. He freaks out and she almost gets killed. One dangerous job turned out okay but the second is a disaster. The consequences are going to be major.