treonb ([personal profile] treonb) wrote in [community profile] theamericans 2014-03-27 09:19 pm (UTC)

First thoughts

I'm not as excited about this episode as everybody else.. I guess this goes back to the fact that the Anton story doesn't make sense to me, going back to the previous episode.

As for the deal itself, I'm very iffy about it. If Anton is such a prize, why give him up? On the other hand, Israel has a very strong 'leave nobody behind' tradition and having a Mossad agent in Russian hands is also very problematic, so there's certainly a lot of reason for the exchange. The only reason I can see for not saving the Mossad guy (Yossi, btw), would be to complete the mission, which obviously didn't happen. So why add those Refuseniks to the mix? It looked more like a way to keep everybody happy story-wise. If at all, I can see the Israelis demanding somebody of equal value. Like a very well-known Refusenik. The numbers game doesn't seem right to me.

Other than that:

1. Not for the first time - the promo had cut scenes. Grrrrr.

2. And the exclusive preview scene for some reason got into my head so much, that I could have sworn it was already aired in a previous ep. I had the weirdest deja-vu feeling watching it in the show. Maybe because it was picked from the middle of the ep.

3. The exchange in Hebrew, if anybody cares: "Are you OK, Yossi?" (said with the most Israeli intonation), "The best I've ever been" (the pronunciation's right, but something's off with the intonation of the sentence.. it's sort of like a question).

4. Shekels were very new at this stage, they were only introduced in 1980.

5. Brad - I think just gave up too easily. Unless it's so obvious that she just wanted the files and is not interested in him at all, in which case he should be getting suspicious as to why she wanted them to begin with.

6. Oleg and Arkady - love those two. I'm not sure which more. Though I don't get Oleg's deal (to be) with Stan. I'm assuming he's playing his own game here, and he's playing with fire.

As for Arkady's Russian-Israeli comparison: I don't buy that Arkady will do anything to save his men. I would assume, though, that if anybody killed off a Mossad family like what happened to Emmett's family, their friends won't rest until they got revenge.

7. Elizabeth and Martha - just wow. Martha is becoming much more human now. But to repeat a question already asked: who starts talking to somebody about her brother's sexual prowess? And which sister would actually want to know? Was Elizabeth asking because she wanted to know, or because she thought she should in-character? Anyway, the scene was done very well, and didn't seem as awkward as it could have been. "He just makes me his" - doesn't he?

8. The new handler - not what I expected, but there's a lot of potential there.

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