This episode was the first one that really felt like the 80s for me; probably because of the kid's outfits and Yaz(oo).

this episode was the worst of the season, besides the Nina stuff

Might have been the least enjoyable ep I've ever watched of the show.

agree

The creep factor was very high in that one. That commercial playing on the TV was just...wow.

I've forgotten, was Nina's cellmate supposed to be American? If so, "How did they...caught you?" seems like a big clue about that character.

I felt the Yaz stuff was anachronistic. That album didn't come out until August, 1982 (UK), and it appears that Don't Go didn't become anything until October, 1982 in the U.S. I don't know where we're supposed to be in the show yet, but I highly doubt "everyone at school" was talking about that record at the point they're at in the show since it wasn't very long ago we were grounded at some point in early to mid 1982 if I remember correctly.

I am probably seriously going to lose my s*** if Callie Thorne ends up with Twitchface in this show. Three for three in the out of his league department stretches my suspension of disbelief way too far. There's also no way she's a one and done in this show.

Someone please remind me the impact of the AA leader/sponsor. It shows that she was in an episode last season, but I can't remember any of the story points.

Did the Pastor guy want Paige to get her parents' permission for the baptism because he was scared Philip might kill him if he did that without their knowing? It's just thoroughly amusing to me that the parents could be so freaked out about her getting baptized.

It's also quite amusing that Stan is so suspicious of the defector when the devils live right next door and have played him like a fiddle...lol.

Wow, that's some serious nitpicking on the Yaz popularity. So the album came out a few months before the show may be set. Who remembers without looking what month albums came out?

Who is Callie Thorne and who is Twitchface again?

The show is terrible with details, so why should I give it a pass?

Callie Thorne was the woman Tori at the EST conference who was essentially throwing herself at Stan. Twitchface is Stan.

Because you may be wrong? I know it's 1982/83, but other than that I don't rewatch the show enough to establish a firm date. What fixed the date as being early 82 this season?

I can't remember what this season's grounding was, but something early in the season (maybe a movie sign) had grounded the show as being in early 82, plus the fact that Paige has been pretty much immune to aging the entire series run. Based on the way Paige talked, you're talking late 1982 (October-ish likely at the earliest). Again, I don't have a problem with the grounding the show in a time, it's good for the audience, but I find it exceptionally hard to believe "everyone at school" was talking about it. For them to all of a sudden accelerate time massively after having it at a standstill would be another problem. I appreciate the nittiness of the statement, but this show screws up a lot of small details that are pretty tilting to me, especially ones that are really easy to avoid.

I'm coming back to say I'm officially wrong. The Yaz storyline is plausible in the timeline, based on the grounding element I decided to look for to see if I was wrong. In the first episode, they showed that Leonid Brezhnev had died. That was November 10, 1982. It would probably be early December or so of 1982 at the point we're in the show now.

I think using a commercial that (according to the youtubes) was from 1975 is a far more serious offense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7IP5SV6GqQ

Also movies can have long runs, especially at those cheap theatres that show movies several months old.

yeah I don't know why I didn't look up Brezhnev's death, as that is fairly fixed. So they skipped a few months or something?

In 1982 a movie could run for six months

I think they showed a Raiders of the Lost Ark marquee in the first season, and I didn't think Paige was supposed to be 12 in the first season, but maybe she was.

It's thoroughly amusing to me that her mom thinks Paige is going to embrace her Russian spy heritage when she's an American teenager who is currently inclined to become a born again Christian. She seems far more likely to turn her parents in than to embrace folding dead women up into suitcases as a way of life. Elizabeth is clueless.

It's a liberal hippy church, that's why Elizabeth thinks that. If Paige was trying to become a Southern Baptist it'd be crazy for her to think that. It's a long was from whatever liberal denomination she's in to Soviet spy, but still closer than you're saying.

With the level of manipulation she used to talk about the baptism, I think Paige is pretty much capable of anything (from killing her parents, to turning them in, to running away, to becoming a spy). What's interesting is that neither Philip nor Elizabeth seem to recognize how useful her fairly easy use of manipulation would be for their purposes. She has proven herself to be cunning on several occasions, and yet these super spies consistently underestimate her as a person. Her character has basically been armed with a machine gun, but they act like she has an Exacto pencil.

It is by far easiest to just put nunnehi on ignore. He can't be objective or reasonable, probably because of his job.

lol, I am absolutely objective. You just can't see it. You equate criticism with lack of objectivity. That's a problem.

Mistakenly bitching about a line of dialog that mentions Yaz that was possibly (but not actually) slightly out of the proper time is criticism?

Uh no...that's nittery (and I admitted freely that I can give them a pass when I realized I was wrong about it once I re-checked the episode 1 grounding element). I was criticizing the fact that the show effs up a ton of details ALL THE TIME. I mean how can you not see that with stuff like him ordering two Millers and being brought two Miller Lites? The show is sloppy but a lot of you act like it's amazing. When you eff up stuff like this it immediately takes your show down notches.

Every show has eff ups every once in awhile, but you shouldn't be able to find something like that in every episode (the more egregious error is obviously the 1975 commercial used for narrative purposes, though that didn't bother me because of context as it was intentional). I can't turn my brain off on that kind of stuff, because it's the short of stuff I catch on the stuff I work on that gets fixed. Considering how easy some of this stuff would be to fix (a line of ADR, a snip in editing, whatever), it makes it that much worse. The fact that a director like Schlamme, a really good director, falls into the same trap makes it that much more frustrating. We all have things that bug us about TV, and this is mine. I'm not asking you to like it, and that also doesn't mean I'll stop pointing it out. The standard of where stuff like that stops taking me out of the show is season 1 of Fargo. That's as good as it gets for me.

The Bridge was a better show and got the boot. How the Americans can stay on with those terrible ratings and not be that good to boot is crazy.

b/c there is no beer brand called "Miller" nor was there in 1982. They had High Life, and Lite, and other brands but nothing called "Miller". Maybe they were just newb beer drinkers and didn't specify, or maybe the waitress assumed they meant Lite b/c by then light beer was becoming very popular or maybe the vernacular of the time was such that the order made sense or maybe it's a ditzy waitress who quoted the beers wrong or maybe people in DC called Miller Lite Miller as shorthand or maybe the waitress just screwed up their order

either way your nittiness is pretty crazy.

it's not that Paige is a commie sympathizer, it's that she's an easily influenced teenager (that is the real point of this storyline I think) who Elizabeth thinks she could turn. it's not like most of the people they turn start out as Soviet sympathizers, they just look for people they can get leverage on or people they can manipulate.

Are you over 40? I specifically remember Miller beer around that time. I also remember Lite beer. If people wanted a Miller, they would order a Miller, if they wanted a Lite, they'd say Miller Lite (later Miller Genuine Draft would be called MGD). The waitress named off their entire beer selection, and identified both of them as Miller and Miller Lite (what I remember them being called in that era). He said, "two Millers". They were brought two Miller Lites. That's not nittery, that's an eff up.