The Americans on FX

[DJ's left nut]

Another good episode but I thought they 'warmed' Elizabeth entirely too quickly.

2 days ago she was willing to roast her family on a spit for Mother Russia. Now she's being criticizing mission objectives and getting all giggly while piercing her daughters ears at midnight.

Wait....I forgot. It's a woman we're talking about here. Since when did their emotions run evenly for more than 15 minutes straight?

Retracted. FX hit the nail on the head.

[kcxiv]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

Another good episode but I thought they 'warmed' Elizabeth entirely too quickly.

2 days ago she was willing to roast her family on a spit for Mother Russia. Now she's being criticizing mission objectives and getting all giggly while piercing her daughters ears at midnight.

Wait....I forgot. It's a woman we're talking about here. Since when did their emotions run evenly for more than 15 minutes straight?

Retracted. FX hit the nail on the head.

I was about to say dude is a women! lol

Anyways, so far so good. Its keeping me interested. I just need to remind myself the setting is in the 80's not current times. lol im always waiting for a cell phone or some high tech and its not happening really. haha then im like oh yeah, 80's lol

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

Another good episode but I thought they 'warmed' Elizabeth entirely too quickly.

2 days ago she was willing to roast her family on a spit for Mother Russia. Now she's being criticizing mission objectives and getting all giggly while piercing her daughters ears at midnight.

Wait....I forgot. It's a woman we're talking about here. Since when did their emotions run evenly for more than 15 minutes straight?

Retracted. FX hit the nail on the head.

I think they did a decent enough job of making the event of smoking off of that dude that raped her a kind of turning point, at least a point of reflection. And the smoking off of that dude that raped her provided some closure on getting raped and all the trauma associated.

I can empathize with her position. The draw between country and children is tough. Being married for 20 years to someone you know nothing about and your commie bastard government told you to marry is tough. The whole identity crisis is very interesting to me. Bottom line, I'm OK with Keri Russell's character.

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.

[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.

[Fritz88]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

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.



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.

Interesting. I need to check out the show.

But do you really think that it would have been that easy? Months?

It was Stalin, after all, who pretty much took on Germany in WWII.
Posted via Mobile Device

[KC native]

Originally Posted by Fritz88

Interesting. I need to check out the show.

But do you really think that it would have been that easy? Months?

It was Stalin, after all, who pretty much took on Germany in WWII.
Posted via Mobile Device

Yes, the USSR was collapsing for a long time. They were a paper tiger.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Fritz88

Interesting. I need to check out the show.

But do you really think that it would have been that easy? Months?

It was Stalin, after all, who pretty much took on Germany in WWII.
Posted via Mobile Device

Yup. They would build one big, bad flagship for every class they had, be it bomber, gunboat or space shuttle. It would look scary as hell, be about 25% operational and would be the only one of the class even close to functional. They would leak its 'capabilities' and inflate numbers.

Most of the time they would have to mothball their scariest toys anyway. Even stuff like the Kirov class ships, which were scary sonsabitches, never worked right and are pretty much death traps. They only really used one of them for any extended period of time and spent billions on the other 3-4, which were decommissioned within a few years of launch.

The worst thing the Soviet Union could have done was try to keep pace with the US arms buildup through the 80s. They just didn't have the industrial capacity to do it efficiently so it ended up incredibly expensive for them and ultimately completely ineffective.

Reagan probably got a little bit lucky, but his policies throughout the 80s really did spend the USSR into oblivion. By the late 80s, everything they had was crap and they didn't have the financial wherewithal to maintain it. The Russians could've zagged, kept themselves more financially solvent as we were spending more than we had, and bought up US debt and potentially remained a legitimate threat to the United States. Instead they played our game and just weren't prepared to play it.

Yeah, we'd have probably maintained some presence in Russia for years thereafter, but storming and collapsing the Soviet Union wouldn't have taken us more than 6 months, IMO. The only wildcard would've been Chinese intervention, but at that point you have WWIII and who knows how that would've gone?

[Silock]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

Yup. They would build one big, bad flagship for every class they had, be it bomber, gunboat or space shuttle. It would look scary as hell, be about 25% operational and would be the only one of the class even close to functional. They would leak its 'capabilities' and inflate numbers.

Most of the time they would have to mothball their scariest toys anyway. Even stuff like the Kirov class ships, which were scary sonsabitches, never worked right and are pretty much death traps. They only really used one of them for any extended period of time and spent billions on the other 3-4, which were decommissioned within a few years of launch.

The worst thing the Soviet Union could have done was try to keep pace with the US arms buildup through the 80s. They just didn't have the industrial capacity to do it efficiently so it ended up incredibly expensive for them and ultimately completely ineffective.

Reagan probably got a little bit lucky, but his policies throughout the 80s really did spend the USSR into oblivion. By the late 80s, everything they had was crap and they didn't have the financial wherewithal to maintain it. The Russians could've zagged, kept themselves more financially solvent as we were spending more than we had, and bought up US debt and potentially remained a legitimate threat to the United States. Instead they played our game and just weren't prepared to play it.

Yeah, we'd have probably maintained some presence in Russia for years thereafter, but storming and collapsing the Soviet Union wouldn't have taken us more than 6 months, IMO. The only wildcard would've been Chinese intervention, but at that point you have WWIII and who knows how that would've gone?

Maybe, but you just can't underestimate the soviets. All of them fight. All the men. All the women. And they don't give up. Now, I'm not sure that Fedorchuk (probably not Gorbachev) would have given the order to shoot those who retreat, but it's not too far out of the realm of possibility.

And if we encountered any delay, those Russian winters are always a bitch to deal with. We would have been far better prepared than the French or Germans, but you never know.

There's no doubt we would have eventually won.