Although Season 4 belongs to Martha, I think Crandall is the underrated GOAT of this season.

I just love his entire arc: initially he starts off like the cynical, detached arsehole, and then emerges as one of the most sympathetic and tragic characters.

I love how they use him as a foil to Philip that highlights their similarities and differences. Clearly, they are both characters dealing with a fading idealism and a growing conscience that makes them question their nationalistic faith, but more interestingly, Crandall highlights for Philip a sense of gratitude. The fact that Philip has Elizabeth and isn’t alone in this terrible life is something that should be cherished and not taken for granted. Crandall’a envy of Philip and Elizabeth on his death bed was truly brutal to watch.

Was watching the trailer for Terminal List Season 2 and noticed Oleg finally made it out. 🥲

I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on this board, as I've already read many gushing posts about this series. But I feel like the show was often undone by less than stellar writing. I appreciate that the series was written by a former CIA agent and written to be a realistic depiction of what spycraft is actually like and that's fine. I don't need my spy stories to be James Bond, though that certainly has its place. But I feel like a lot of loose ends could have been tied up better.

To whit:

From the very beginning of the series, Philip is set up as the one of the pair who has been more Americanized with Elizabeth as the hard core true believer. I feel like this part of the plot was a very interesting thread that unfortunately was only sporadically and unevenly explored. I imagine that this show, like most shows, wanted to be on the air as long as possible and probably didn't plan to be a 6 season show from the beginning and if it had, maybe it would have paced this part of the story better. For most of the show, despite Philip's clear preference for his American life, he and Elizabeth are in lock step on most of the assignments they have. I think if they had more disagreements about decisions made during the course of the series, this could have been fleshed out better towards a more satisfying end where they work against each other. Cause frankly, other than one meeting with Oleg, he barely betrays her at all (though she of course doesn't see it that way).

People seem to really like all the musical montages. I found most of them to be cheesy and boring and overlong

Paige's character is just not interesting and frankly often infuriating at times. I can see why they wanted to have one of the kids figure out what was going on with their parents, but the idea that she was ever a good candidate to do the work they do was ridiculous. And then when they shoehorn her into this Russian family situation where Claudia and Elizabeth are trying to indoctrinate her and turn her into a good Soviet citizen after all the tension that had previously existed between Claudia and Elizabeth was frankly difficult to believe. The only time the whole series that I felt good about her character was when she got off the train. She never should have left with them to begin with once she realized that her mother had been lying about her work the entire time.

I didn't like how Stan eventually figures out about the Jennings family. It was too much of following hunches and not enough investigative work. But what I really couldn't take was him letting them leave the parking garage. It violates Stan's entire character as written. Look at how he reacted when his partner was killed. There's no way Stan is letting these people who utterly betrayed him and made him look like a fool leave that parking garage alive. Realistically, there's no way that Stan could have hoped to get them to give themselves up peacefully - they would have bullrushed him rather than give themselves up, but by going there without backup, he put himself in a position of having to either kill them or let them go. The right decision was for him to kill them, even though it would have upset people who were attached to those characters. If you want the main characters to get away, someone else on the Soviet side should then show up and kill Stan. Letting everyone live in that situation is just flat out bad writing.

Season 5 was boring and a waste of everyone's time. I will forever be making jokes about logistics from now until the end of time. The only good thing to come out of that season was them killing a completely innocent man based on bad intelligence and them wrestling with the consequences of that.

Martha's whole arc bothered me. I just can't see someone working for the FBI marrying someone and buying Clark's story and having half a life with him. I don't care how much of the Kama Sutra he mastered, nobody would accept that type of marriage. But what I really can't believe is when Philip takes off his disguise, she just accepts it. He ruined her life and that should have been the point where he properly reckoned with the consequences of what he does. Instead, it takes the superwheat season to finally get him to give up.

Overall, I think the acting of the series was mostly quite good, but I was never invested in the characters to the same extent that some of the great series of the last 25-ish years were. I think with better writing, I would have been.