theamericans | Episode discussion post: "Cardinal"

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Aired:
5 March 2014 in the U.S. and Canada
9 March 2014 in Israel
22 March 2014 in the UK

This is a discussion post for episode 202 of The Americans, intended for viewers who are watching the show on the U.S./Canadian schedule. (Feel free to dive in to the discussion if you're reading this later and have already seen subsequent episodes, but please take care to keep comments spoiler-free of anything that comes after season two, episode two.)

Original promo trailers

"Next On: Cardinal" (Watch on YouTube)

"The Americans: Exclusive Scene from Episode 2" (Watch on YouTube)

Episode recaps

From Vulture
From Hitfix
From The AV Club
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From IGN
From Think Progress
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From Television Without Pity
From TV Ate My Wardrobe
From Filmthrasher
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From Newsmanone
From Screenrant
From the LA Times
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From tvrage.com
From Unreality TV (UK)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lovingboth

Was that common in the US then?

A book I had at the time talked about how you could - if you wanted to - freebase the stuff, but you probably didn't want to. You wanted to sniff it or inject it or...

Not being a user, I thought it was at least a decade before smoking it as crack became more common.

From:

jae

I was in the U.S. for at least a good portion of the 80s, and I remember being warned about it then (I was a teenager). It does seem like the big scares about it were at least a bit later than 1982, though--the latter half of the decade, more. That may be because I wasn't living in a major city at that point, though. Anyone else?

-J

From:

jae

I definitely think it's interesting that Lucia called it "smoking cocaine" rather than "smoking crack," which is specifically what we were warned about as teenagers. As if there was no popular term for it yet, maybe.

-J

From:

quantumreality

I remember seeing some articles in magazines and whatnot in the mid to late 1980s that discussed "freebasing". I don't know when the term "crack" came to replace that though.

From:

sistermagpie

Not that I'm an expert on these things, but I've always known freebasing and crack to be two different things. Freebasing is very pure cocaine smoked; crack is a different form of cocaine that comes in chunks.

Richard Pryor set himself on fire when freebasing cocaine and that was...looks up date...1980. So yes, freebasing was absolutely a thing they'd be doing in 1982. I think crack was like mid-80s.

From:

quantumreality

Whoops, my bad there. :O

From:

jae

Ahhh, okay, that makes sense. So they were freebasing cocaine and the congressional aide dude took too much.

-J

From:

sistermagpie

Yup. Which a quick check seems very timely. Apparently cocaine use really exploded in the late 70s early 80s and there was so much product the price dropped and this somehow was related to the invention of crack. (An invention I just always associate with the scene in New Jack City when the girl says "It looks like cracked off pieces of soap" or something like that.) I tend to associate freebasing with having more money.