“Bear Hug” includes an actual military-involved coup, and that’s only the second-most dramatic coup in the episode. I hesitate to say that it’s a fun one, but apart from the multiple casual murders and bewildering reversals of fortune for various well-armed coup-participating men, it really is. Both coups are excellent examples of dissent and dissatisfaction bubbling along below the surface until erupting into violence and chaos; it’s really just a coincidence that they take place in the same week or so. Up on Mars, we’re continuing to get a closer, more incremental look at Happy Valley’s own dissatisfaction bubbling under the surface. It’s another deft and subtle reminder that even though communication and transportation between Earth and Mars are much faster than they were last season, each planet will always be responding to events on the other more slowly than they would prefer.
In Moscow, the coup attempting to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power is clearly quite violent — Gorbachev’s faction is supported by the Soviet Army, which has surrounded its parliament with tanks, while challenger Fyodor Korzhenko has the police on his side — but we hear more violence than we see. Through the lens of Margo’s experiences being detained and interrogated, it seems more like a series of baffling, rhetorical land-mine-riddled conversations than a pitched battle for control of one of the world’s most influential countries and economies.
Her detention comes with an ample share of pain and psychophysical terrors, including being jostled in a transport van with the other people scooped up at the end of the previous episode, being shackled to a table in an interrogation room, and being suspended for hours from a ceiling pipe. This may be an aftereffect of having watched The Americans in its entirety three times, and the visual echoes of what Wrenn Schmidt’s character Kate experiences in her last episode on that show, but the further assaults on her person that I expected and dreaded never materialized. Instead, all but one of the coup’s worst horrors are suggested rather than shown: gunshots, heavy footfalls, shouting, loud vehicles, and helicopters close by are all audible throughout the episode.
By contrast, the corporate coup pulled off by Dev, Kelly, and Aleida at Helios features no literal bloodshed but is as merciless and sweeping as if Keyser Söze had applied his take-no-prisoners style to a career in HR rather than organized crime. The three musketeers have thrown their lots in together on a whim fueled as much by spite as ambition. Had the Helios board just agreed to fund Kelly and Aleida’s research ($200 million, which is pocket change to a corporation that Aleida points out is “worth more than the GDP of Texas”), none of this would have happened. But by the same token, we also would not have gotten to see Aleida’s prickly, bittersweet reunion with Bill Strausser. Their conversation is the first in which she’s been able to be honest and vulnerable about her PTSD experiences and why she’s taking on a project that Bill knows is beneath her abilities; maybe that’s because it’s an experience she shares with him, not her husband Victor, not Kelly, not Hobson. Maybe it’s because — her long absence from his life notwithstanding — Bill is her best friend. Either way, by the end of their conversation, Bill is signing the shareholder proxy paperwork with a light heart, saying he trusts her implicitly with them and firmly declining her offer to come work for her and Kelly. We’ll see! My wishes are not at all FAM’s command, but I would just love to see Bill in future episodes.
Back to the Helios takeover, in my recap for the season-three finale “Stranger in a Strange Land,” I wondered about the company’s future: “Will Dev Ayesa return as CEO, having internalized lessons from some of the home truths he refused to entertain in the run-up to being ousted by his board in favor of Karen? Can a brilliant, arrogant boy king mature enough to realize his dream of a vast (and perhaps shining) city on Mars?” Dev is returning as CEO, and he claims to have learned his lesson, but watching him rhetorically and financially mow down his successors with such relish, I don’t believe for a moment that he’s any less arrogant than he was prior to his ouster seven years prior. Karen Baldwin could not coach him toward long-term reasonableness, and we have no reason to think that Kelly and Aleida will be any more successful than she was in that regard.
Dev remains brilliant and arrogant, but at least this time, he’s going to put all of his abilities and Helios’s financial resources to work helping his new partners move their search for life on Mars further forward. I want so badly to see Kelly and Aleida work together (and maybe even realize their dreams!) that I am stubbornly, if foolishly, optimistic about this endeavor.
Meanwhile on Mars, Miles is undertaking a new endeavor of his own by insinuating himself into Ilya’s black-market operation. Thanks to the way Helios chips away at his paycheck, he’s not sending any more money home to Mandy and their daughters than he was working in Baton Rouge, and he’s terrified that Mandy will move them all to Boise to be closer to her sister and the promise of a well-paying job. His knack for reading people and getting them to trust him with their illicit orders isn’t enough to impress Ilya, who is perfectly happy with his robust, yet cautious, side business. Once Massey tells him that Miles has a coveted green badge, which gives him access to every room on the base, Ilya is singing a different tune.
Miles’s initial success leads him to reach beyond what he can reasonably grasp, which results in the need to put that green badge to work in service of a mini-heist in the North Korean module. He’s mostly successful, but Lee Jung-gil, who has spoken perhaps ten words this season so far, catches him in the act and asks to be read into Ilya’s scheme. This may or may not open a new market for Ilya — a mini-monopoly, no less! — in the long run, but Lee’s request is pretty far out of the ordinary. He doesn’t want cigarettes, pornography, or laser discs. He wants to be reunited with his wife. That’s going to be quite a creative challenge.
A far smaller illicit-goods situation is underway in Ed’s greenhouse, where he’s growing very healthy strawberries, some leafy greens, and weed. This scene provides the second reference of the season to how quickly and healthily plants grow on Mars. In both cases, it’s been almost a throwaway detail, but two mentions in consecutive episodes suggest that it’s less of a detail and more of A Thing. I remain skeptical about the need for Ed Baldwin to still be a major part of the show, but this scene between him and cosmonaut/mentee/potential special lady friend Sveta is quite lovely. A sincerely tender and restrained love scene (yes, a hushed conversation and chaste clasping of hands qualifies as a love scene to this Regency-romance aficionado) is not an easy thing to pull off anywhere, and this one is particularly well done.
The greenhouse in general and the weed in particular are significant for a bunch of reasons: setting aside its illegality and the hot water it would land him in with Palmer, it signals a sea change in Ed’s views on herbal refreshment (remember how in the second season, he and Molly rolled their eyes at Karen and Wayne’s routine joint-splitting?), and he actually says out loud that gardening makes him feel close to Karen. I’m glad to see that he’s not 100 percent emotionally stagnant.
For her part, Sveta is (metaphorically) touched by being brought into Ed’s confidence about his horticultural work, his deeply worrying tremor, and the emotional resonance gardening has for him. In turn, she shares that the greenhouse brings back happy memories of time spent with her father, who tended the gardens at Brezhnev’s dacha on the Black Sea. Not hearing so much as a proof-of-life peep from him while the coup at home continues to unfold — Dani’s order to prioritize bandwidth for all official and personal communications from the Soviet Union is kind, but even she can’t conjure vidmail that isn’t being sent — has been agonizing for her.
Sveta’s specific anxiety about her father should resolve pretty quickly once the coup ends in victory for either Gorbachev’s more western-influenced approach to economic and social policy or for Korzhenko’s promised return to “traditional Marxist/Leninist principles.” Unfortunately for Margo, her only hint at which way the political wind may be blowing is the changing of the guard among her interrogators. She’s a valuable pawn in the interagency squabbling that the coup-in-progress has stirred up, with the police and the army each hoping to secure a tactical advantage over the other by bringing the shiniest intelligence bauble to Korzhenko or Gorbachev.
Margo’s first interrogator, police lieutenant Gura, is shot dead right in front of her by the second interrogator, Colonel Kolikov, which seems excessive to me, but then again, I have no firsthand experience with coups d’état. Both men have been desperate to learn everything they can about the provenance of the card with the phone number on it that the bird-feeding woman at the park left for Margo. Shouldn’t a country with as sophisticated and paranoid a domestic-surveillance apparatus as the USSR have more answers than questions about a phone number on a business card? That minute-long interaction in the park is the source of all of Margo’s worst torments today.
Unfortunately for her, there’s no way to provide information she doesn’t possess. The bird woman didn’t give an alias, let alone her real name, and all Margo can recall is that she wore a nice babushka and looked to be perhaps in her 60s. Kolikov reveals that he already knows far more than Margo does about the card — callers are meant to think that it reaches the KGB’s Third Directorate (which supports Gorbachev), but it’s actually a trap line for the Second Directorate, the KGB division that monitors the rest of the KGB, and more importantly, is a wing of the agency supporting Korzhenko in his coup attempt.
All of these details are rendered moot when Kolikov is removed from the interrogation room and then from existence on Earth entirely by a nameless higher-up. Margo’s certainty that she’s about to face summary execution, too, only fades when the transport van she’s bundled into deposits her at Roscosmos HQ in Star City. Who should greet her, with a smile and her glasses, but the bird lady from the park! Now that the Army and Gorbachev have come to terms, the coup is over and Karshenko is president. The bird lady apologizes for how much time was needed to locate and extract Margo from police detention, and introduces herself as Irina Morozova, the new director of Roscosmos. How would Margo like to come work for her?
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• Needle drop of the episode: “The Riot,” by Afshin and Kiss My Black Jazz, which plays over Miles and Ilya’s black-market salesmanship training/tribute to Ocean’s 11 montage.
• The Americans alumnus of the week: interrogator lieutenant Gura is played by Konstantin Lavysh, who appeared as Father Andrei in the last two seasons of The Americans.
• Who knows if we’ll ever see her again, but I loved the interaction between Dev and the surfer who crashes his beach. He’s so used to cowing people by saying things in an authoritative way that her being totally unimpressed with his “the universe doesn’t send messages” spiel is one of those rare moments where someone else throws him for a loop.
