[7.6/10] When the Centre tells you to do something, you do it. You may not want to do it. It may not fit into your plans or what you hoped for. But they’re the ones who give the orders, and so you follow. It’s your job to effectuate their will. That’s what Philip and Elizabeth have been taught from day one. But when Gabriel, the voice of the Centre, leans on the two of them separately, each encouraging them to cross a new line, to bring something very adult into the lives of a young woman, each skirts the edge of complying, but can’t go through with it. “Born Again” is an episode of parallels between Elizabeth and Philip, with twin challenges and conversations, that show them facing different obstacles, even having different wants, but addressing them in similar ways. Part of that comes through in their continuing cold war over whether Paige will join the service. They both seem uncomfortable at her baptism, at the idea that someone else is influencing her over what the next phase of her life will be. But in private moments, they each subtly (or not so subtly) nudge her in their preferred direction. For Philip, that means telling Paige that she knows what’s right for her, and she should trust that feeling no matter what anyone else, even people who care about her, say. It’s honestly a kind of funny conversation, because Paige, little knowing what her dad is hinting at, thinks he’s giving her a “don’t do drugs” speech or trying to talk her out of church. It’s easy to imagine Philip’s “just trust you own instincts no matter what people say” speech to his fifteen year old daughter coming back to bite him down the road, but it’s easy to see how it’s the sort of choice Philip would make, especially when he’s playing an awkward, well-meaning dad rather than a superspy. But Elizabeth has a parallel conversation with her daughter, one where the theme and thesis is “you’re so grown up.” The big debate between Philip and Elizabeth isn’t just whether this life is right for Paige, it’s whether she’s even old enough to deal with the knowledge of who or what they really are. Elizabeth, either to herself or to Paige, is trying to convey the idea that Paige is mature enough, that she for the people she loves to be fully open with her. That’s the other idea at play in this episode, that EST-tinged concept of complete openness, and what it means. Obviously that comes into play with Stan, who is fooling around with the woman he met from EST, only to be stopped when Tori realizes that his head is somewhere else. She prompts him to confront his feelings about his (ex in all but name) wife, and encourages him to realize how good it feels to be open and honest about his lingering feelings for her. The show definitely seems to be setting up what I can only conclude is Stan’s pipe dream of reconciling with Sandra. The death of a friend from his early days in the FBI gives him and Sandra a brief moment of reunion and mutual grief, and it’s enough for Stan to ask Sandra if she’ll join him for the memorial, another offshoot of that openness and self-admission. But you can’t help but feel like he’s barking up the wrong tree, expecting the honesty to get him what he wants rather than just following it wherever it takes him. There’s the sense that this path is only going to lead him to deeper heartbreak, or worse. But on the other side of the world, you have Nina showing the real danger of being that open with someone, even someone you think you can trust. What I love about that plotline in “Born Again” is how economical it is. You really just have three brief scenes: Nina prompting a confession out of her cellmate, Nina enjoying a nice meal as a reward for her compliance, and Nina either being things stoically or treating it coldly when that cellmate is dragged away by the guards. The cellmate’s honesty, the assumed rapport between her and Nina, is what ultimately doomed her. And yet what’s interesting about that setup is that the thing that Nina used to get her cellmate on the hook was honesty. Her truths are used for a dishonest purpose, but we’re given reason to believe that Nina means what she says, about having no one, about loving both Stan and Oleg in different ways, about her bitterness at the sense that the same men loved their countries more than her. It’s manipulative, but it’s that honesty, that injecting truth into the deceptive goal you’re trying to achieve, that makes it work. It’s certainly striking in Philip’s scene with Kimmy. What gets him out of having to sleep with this underage girl are two pieces of truth, or at least something that is truth-adjacent. The first is his daughter sense of wanting to be better through the church, and the second is Gabriel’s confirmation that Irina was at least potentially telling the truth, that he might have a long lost son. And Philip combines those things to provide him an out, even when the Centre (through Gabriel) strongly implies that he needs to become intimate with Kimmy in order to gain her trust. But when the moment comes, he just can’t go through with it, but instead relies on a real part of his life and history to get him out of it. The same is true for Elizabeth’s final scene with Paige, one where she too is set up to bring a young woman into a situation that’s quite possibly too mature and too much for her at that tender age. Elizabeth can’t quite offer her confession, can’t quite let Paige in on the secret, to end the illusion, just yet. But what she can do is offer her daughter some truths: that there was an important man in her life named Gregory, that she and Philip used to fight (at times illegally) as part of the civil rights movement, and that the devotion to cause and willingness to do what’s necessary for something you believe in, is something that unites her and Paige, not separates them. It’s not pulling the trigger; it’s not letting the scales fall, but it’s a bit of honesty to try to achieve the same goal, to establish that trust and prepare a teenage girl for what comes next, without Philip or Elizabeth having to do something they don’t believe the young woman they’re working with is ready for yet. Philip and Elizabeth are on different pages, as pointed in opposite directions as we’ve arguably ever seen them. But in a way, they’re going through the same thing, and that still brings them together. There’s something incredibly endearing about the two of them, secretly smoking pot and blowing smoke out their windows, giggling at the absurdities of their two situations. As far apart as they are on this, here they’re both a little bit the rebellious teenagers, getting their instructions from a surrogate father, and choosing not to follow them, to do things differently, because like Philip says to Paige, they believe they know what’s best, and aren’t ready to let anyone tell them otherwise.