Season 3, Episode 1: EST Men
We’re back! I took an extra month because frankly I was overwhelmed by the things I was and wasn’t working on and the TV I was and wasn’t watching and needed a little more time to decide if I wanted to keep doing this newsletter or if it was making a chore out of something I used to have fun with. Clearly I decided to go ahead with it (though who knows when that may change!) but since the loosey-goosey “I’ll see what I feel like writing about!” structure clearly wasn’t working out in terms of “not making it a chore” I’m going to make a much more concerted effort towards conciseness, eschew the whole recap thing, and keep it to a paragraph or two focused on What This Episode Made Me Think Of.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff154009e-fa3c-4f1e-8948-8490075111bd_1366x768.png)
image: a white woman in her 50s with shoulder-length blond hair says “Screw the CIA” in a dark bar
and the screenshots I pull are only going to be things I personally found compelling, like this disillusioned CIA agent or this next photo:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e9f61d0-876a-4a05-a2c4-123a5ef9b9d8_1366x768.png)
image: Elizabeth and Philip embracing at their kitchen sink, Philip standing behind Elizabeth and pressing his face into her hair
!!!!! they are trying to end me!!!!
What This Episode Made Me Think Of this week is trust, which feels a little self-evident because in a lot of ways that’s what the entire series is about. Trusting your partners, trusting your authorities, trusting yourself and your own values, etc. But the arc of this season as I remember it is largely focused on all of our characters reframing who they trust and why. As you likely remember, Philip and Elizabeth were shaken to their core last season with the realization that they couldn’t trust the Center the way they thought the could, Paige really starts to not trust her parents and is looking for something or someone else to put her trust in, Nina finds out for certain she can’t trust Stan, or really any man. In a lot of ways Season 2 is about trust falling through, and in this season everyone, including the audience, is reevaluating who or what they trust on the show.
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image: Stan and Martha at a gun range, both wearing protective glasses and headphones while Martha fires a gun
putting aside for a moment the innate horror of seeing Martha with a gun, I enjoy that this moment looks like either a promo image for a zany procedural or perhaps an album cover for one of those duo-bands where the duo is like “we’re totally not romantically linked!!” and we’re all like “……aren’t you though?”
One of the first scenes features Arkady pleading with Oleg not to speak too freely in front of the new hire, Tatiana, because they don’t know if they can trust her yet. [somethin here] We have a new-to-us handler who P & E seem to know well and have a great deal of affection for (I believe he’s the one Claudia and then Kate temporarily replaced) but who to us is a seemingly-sweet wild card. And of course at our center, Philip and Elizabeth’s push-pull about whether to “bring in” Paige, trying to figure out if they mean what they say to each other, if they say the same things with different meanings, if they can trust each other above country.
There are already a zillion little things I want to say about the little dynamics of trust in this episode but I am STOPPING because I have RESTRAINT and as a TREAT for that restraint, another sexy image of Arkady smoking:
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image: Arkady holding a cigarette while sitting in a chair and saying “They never promised to let it go.”
Similarly I never promised to let go of finding Arkady smoking extremely compelling. Smoking is bad, except for when you look hot doing it, I think we can all agree.
See you next week, comrades!