The Americans on FX

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

On the whole, I'm really impressed with it so far. There is a little bit of nostalgia going on, and the workings WITHOUT technology is interesting. The characters are interesting. I'm all in.

That's easily my favorite part. They're doing a spy show without all the spy gadgets. They're doing it at the ground level with the nasty, garote wire kinds of shit that actually happened. Seeing them do a spy show with technology that's 30 years old is really fascinating.

And it has some quick lines here and there that I think are just brilliant. "You and God have had a misunderstanding" was blood chilling and for some reason "Anyway...I took his caviar" and the delivery of it just cracked me up.

I wonder if we developed a spy program anywhere close to what the Russians were pulling off back in the day.

Yeah, we did. It's pretty staggering how much better we were than the Russians at almost everything. I read a story once that kinda combined both our spy network and our technology. The Russians were running subs off our coasts and thinking they were all discreet about it. We had a person inside that had intercepted the positions of the entire Soviet submarine fleet. So we put attack subs behind each one of them within sonar range.

Then popped them all with a single active ping at the same time.

They had to have absolutely shit themselves. Not only did we know where they were, but our subs were so much quieter than theirs that we were able to park right behind them without them having the foggiest idea. We essentially just told them that we could've sunk every active submarine they had right then and there.

When the USSR fell and we got more of a presence in Russia, we learned that most of the 'big bad boogeyman' in Russia was a myth. Credit to them - they had us convinced with little more than bluffs and bravado. We'd have flattened the USSR in months.