1. Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone (GoodReads)
Max Gladstone’s fantasy debut reads like a wondrous mix of legal thriller, urban fantasy, and deeply satisfying high-fantasy war of gods and men. I love his depiction of gargoyles!

2. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson (GoodReads)
Lawson’s memoir of countless random and hilarious things. I seriously ached from laughing so hard.

3. How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford (GoodReads)
When Beatrice (aka Robot Girl) moves to Baltimore, she befriends the loner Ghost Boy and his strange world of John Waters movies, time traveler conventions, and late-night AM radio shows. I loved all the nods to Baltimore’s brand of weird.

4. Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson (GoodReads)
A lovely, thoughtful exploration of Tiger Lily from Peter Pan, and her victories and heartbreaks.

5. The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by B. R. Myers (GoodReads)
Really interesting study of the philosophy and doctrine behind North Korea’s propaganda, which isn’t quite Orwellian and not quite Marxist-Leninist either.

6. Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil (GoodReads)
ADORABLE nerd-love story from down under! Star Wars and World of Warcraft and music nerdery and horror films and more. I want to hug every character.

7. Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers (GoodReads)
An amazing, heartbreaking, and brilliant follow-up to last year’s Grave Mercy. Sybella is so complicated and engrossing. My heart aches for her.

8. Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith (GoodReads)
Really interesting examination of anxiety as being paralyzed with too much thinking and too little deciding.

9. The Last Policeman by Ben Winters (GoodReads)
I’m really not into the “asteroid is about to destroy Earth” trend going right now, except for this series, which profiles a policeman who stays committed to solving murder and stopping crime in the face of obliteration. I love the questions it raises about “What’s the point?”

10. The Bone Palace by Amanda Downum (GoodReads)
Follow-up to The Drowning City, which I quite enjoyed, brings the necromancer home to a really cool city setting full of ghosts, vampires, political intigue, and much more.

11. I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga (GoodReads)
Jasper Dent’s father, currently serving one hundred life sentences back to back, was America’s most prolific serial killer. Jasper’s determined not to follow in the footsteps of Dear Old Dad . . . but someone certainly seems to be. Great, gruesome, gripping.

12. Wavecrossed by Andrea Lynn Colt
An amazing story from the author of Torched that you folks are going to love when it’s out this summer!

Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil is my new love. Sam and Camilla vastly differ in their levels of social awkwardness, but they share a passion for Star Wars, World of Warcraft, obscure movies, creativity, and Battlestar Galactica. Also confirms my theory that, based on the level of quality of Aussie YA we get stateside (Melina Marchetta, anyone?), being a teen down under must be AWESOME. Also full of lines like “My dad looks just like a stormtrooper, and not the Galactic Empire kind.”

I haven’t read OCD, the Dude, and Me yet, but how could you not want to read a book about social anxiety, OCD, and The Big Lebowski? I can abide.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot maybe isn’t nerdy in the traditional sense, but I loved the interplay between Robot Girl and Ghost Boy. The Baltimore setting was perfect for their brand of weird–John Waters movies and all–and the Night Lights AM radio show listeners and their lives were entrancing. I’d go to a Time Travel party with them anytime.

I haven’t read Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl yet, but as a fan of terrible movies, MST3K/RiffTrax, and movie nerdery, I strongly approve of their quest to create the Worst Film Ever Made. I’m expecting this to be an adorable and awesome mix of Be Kind Rewind and The Fault in Our Stars.

While Eleanor & Park definitely touched on some awesome nerdery–Watchmen, X-Men, and Joy Division–Rainbow Rowell’s upcoming Fangirl promises to examine something very close to my heart: the struggle between consumption and production, between loving and living in someone else’s world and boldly crafting your own. I fight with this every day: do I spend my limited free time watching one more episode of Fringe, or do I bash my fingers with a hammer–err, crank out another thousand words on my fledgling story that I wish might someday inspire rabid fangirling, but at present moment looks like so much rubbish after it’s been picked through by wild dogs?

What awesome and awesomely nerdy contemporary books have you loved?

Adult fiction – I prefer literary books with a strong commercial hook (Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books, The Gargoyle, Neuromancer, Gillian Flynn), fantasy that’s not just dudes with swords doing dudely things in dudeland, and completely absurd humor (Ned Baumann, Christopher Buckley). I like high-stakes historicals as well, especially if there’s some sort of espionage element.

Young Adult – The more lyrical and psychological, the better. Historicals and fantasies–and combinations thereof–are my bailiwick (Seraphina, Code Name Verity, Born Wicked, Dark Triumph) but I love a contemplative and rich contemporary (Lovely Dark and Deep, The Sky Is Everywhere) and a sci-fi or alternate world that makes sense (White Cat, For Darkness Shows the Stars). I’m way burnt on nonsensical dystopians.

Nonfiction – I love history and foreign affairs, especially from the 20th century, but prefer books that focus on one little odd event or person instead of sweeping and comprehensive tomes (so less Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and more Operation Mincemeat, or Felix Youssoupoff’s account of killing Rasputin). Outsiders looking in on strange groups entertain me too, like Jon Ronson following the people who believe in secret cabals of lizardmen running the world. Neuroscience fascinates me, as well as super-nerdy cosmology stuff, like quantum entanglement.

Of course, I also welcome completely off-the-wall recommendations. Surprise me!

Obviously, I can’t tell you too much about the story, but I promise it will be full of much of the same awesomeness that I hope you all will love in SEKRET, as well as new twists: beatnik jazz lounges, a psychic sickness, underground tunnels, psychedelic records, British convertibles, and of course a vast conspiracy that threatens the world order of 1964. Also, kissing.

SKANDAL won’t be out until Spring 2015, but SEKRET will be here before you know it! I’m hoping to share the cover art and jacket copy with you all very soon.

You: So, Lindsay. According to your ruthlessly sanitized author biography, you live in Washington, DC, where you write on foreign affairs. So, like . . . Um, I’m not sure how to ask this, but . . .

You mean the whole underground congressionally-funded ice skate death match expose on HuffPo? Yeah, I know that girl kind of looked like me, and I have been known to shout “Prosecco Jones!” when I drink too much, but I swear, if I ever find myself in a DVF ballgown in the tunnels running beneath the National Mall, I’d like to think I wouldn’t get nearly that much blood on it. Like, not even half that much—

Er, what? No, I was going to ask you about—Wait, did you say ice skate death match? In ballgowns?

Of course not. That’d be ridiculous. What were you going to say?

Well, I’m just kinda freaked out about . . . this whole Korea thing.

Tell me about it. If this shit blows up before I finish this rough draft, I am so screwed.

Oh, my god! You really think they’re going to blow something up? So I’m right to be worried?

What? Oh, I meant that figuratively. En la maniere du Lady Gaga: Blowin’ up my telephone. Like, when I started this draft, Dennis Rodman didn’t even know there was a North Korea. Now I’m gonna look like Psy, still ridin’ my invisible pony through a Harlem Shake world.

I still have no idea what you’re talking about. But seriously. What is up with North Korea? Should I be scared or what?

Define “scared.” Scared that there is a quasi-nuclear state run by someone my age? Hell, I can’t even be trusted with Twitter sometimes. Forget nuclear launch codes. Scared about rampant starvation, malnutrition, political oppression, human rights violations, personality cults, dogs and cats living together? Yes, these fall under the heading of “things that scare me.” But also under the heading of “why I care about foreign affairs.”

I more meant, should I be scared that they’re gonna… y’know… attack us.

Nukes. You’re worried about nuclear provocation.

Yes! Yes. I just need to know if I should apologize to my doomsday prepper neighbor for calling the city on him when he tried to build a nuclear bunker under my property line. And start seducing him with pallets of Spam.

Well, despite those ambitious targeting sites of Kim’s—the man has stretch goals, what can I say—the DPRK probably won’t be able to deploy nuclear-armed missiles anytime soon, and their medium- and long-range missile capabilities aren’t too reliable, either. Think Iron Man 2. So unless you’re in South Korea, Japan, China, or eastern Russia, you can go back to building bunkers because of zombies and other more immediate threats.

If you are in those countries, then yeah, there’s a small likelihood, but even then, DPRK has thus far favored little temper tantrums on disputed islands to remind its neighbors that it exists. The new South Korean president has a much lower tolerance for shenanigans than her predecessor, so the recent nuclear tests are probably more about reminding her that the DPRK can look all mean and scary when it wants to, too. Like that crazy African owl that can make itself look twice as big as it really is. Then, when the DPRK gets what it wants—food aid for its starving millions, a tiny glimmer of economic growth, even just a little respect—it’ll shrink up and make itself all tiny again.

Caveat emptor, that MO is more applicable under the late Kim Jong Il than his son, Kim Jong Un. Jong Un may feel he has something to prove, either to his subjects or to his leadership cadre; he may miscalculate in the whole escalation game, or think P5+1 Talks is the name of an indie rock band, or get desperate and try to force the issue. Or he might pull what back in Oklahoma we like to call a “Hey Y’all, Watch This.” North Korea does have both beer and barbecue, so I’m just sayin’, the means and motive are there.

We International Relations wonks are big fans of theoretical modeling and dissecting logical fallacies (eg, the fundamental attribution error: If Jong Un is acting like a total dickwad, is it because complete and utter dickwaddery is written into his genetic code, or are circumstances just causing him to appear like a total dickwad at this specific moment in time?). But like economics, you can only trust that whole “rational actor behaving in its own self-interest” assumption about as far as you can throw it.

Not gonna lie, my eyes totally glazed over after “zombies.” So what if there was a nuclear attack on Washington? You’d be screwed, right?

So here’s the thing about nukes—they are so big and scary that people tend to lose all rationality when it comes to measuring just how big and scary they actually are. Your average warhead can level about a 1.5-square mile radius. So, yes, if you are within that radius, it’s all melty and burning and white hot bliss and mushroom clouds.

Outside this radius, immediate death is going happen from flash burns, falling debris, resultant fires, and acute radiation sickness. If I’m beyond the blast radius, I think my chances are actually pretty good. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be in the tunnels running beneath the Mall, prosecco-ing my way up the death match bracket rescuing stray bunnies. But even if I’m home, my windows face away from the city center and are fairly well-shielded; I have windowless rooms; I know how to seal up my ventilation system and pop some potassium iodide tablets and make peace with the cancer and skin lesions that will be ravaging my body for the next one to ten years while everyone I know and love suffers the same agonizing fate. And do you know how many crappy YA novels I can write in one to ten years with nothing to do but change my pustulent bandages? A whole friggin’ lot.

Not that I have rehearsed this or anything.

Sorry, just writing this down . . . potassium . . . iodide. Great. Anything else I should know?

Well, I am the ranking commander of Hero Squad, and President Obama totally stalks my dining recommendations, but I’m more well-versed in all things Soviet and post-Soviet than Korean, so I may be Kremlinologizing where there is no Kremlin. Though I’d still totally put it on my resume as being an expert on this task and/or have supervised others on it.*

So I could point you toward the National Book Award-nominated Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, or the insightful 38 North website run by the stalwart Korea-watchers at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Both are great resources for better understanding all things DPRK. But instead I’m going to link the Kim Jong Un Looking at Things tumblr, because that shit does not get old:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to googling how to get blood stains out of fine-knit Italian organza. …You know, for a book I’m writing.

*If you’re one of the three people in the world who get this joke, I love you and I feel your pain.

1. The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (GoodReads)
Oh, this book. I had to give up on highlighting it because I was basically highlighting the whole damned thing. It is so inappropriately funny and deliciously thick with its own mythos. I love every one of the awful, wretched characters in this book, and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge the insanity of the world around them, largely of their own making. Nazis and Lovecraft and iguanas and made-up logical fallacies and Midnight at the Nursing Academy–I love it all.

2. The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen(GoodReads)
Orphan Sage must compete for the right to pose as the heir to the throne. I loved Sage’s feistiness–that kid’s gonna grow up to be Locke Lamora someday.

3. The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley(GoodReads)
A woman grieving her sister’s death finds herself haunted by history at a Cornish estate. I loved the atmosphere in this book, thick and foggy like the moors.

4. The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson(GoodReads)
A string of copycat Jack the Ripper murders plagues an American exchange student in London. Johnson’s writing was just as hilarious and observant as I’d hoped, and the mystery was fun to unfold.

5. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente(GoodReads)
Valente weaves the Russian fairytale of Koschei the Deathless with the Russian Revolution, World War II, and figures from throughout Russian folklore. Though heavier on the whimsy than I usually like, her writing is stunningly gorgeous, and I loved seeing how she transposed Russian folklore with Soviet history. Perfect for fans of Miyazaki movies.

6. Dirty Little Secrets by C. J. Omololu(GoodReads)
Lucy’s compulsive hoarder mother dies amidst the wreckage of their trash-filled house and all the family secrets threaten to come spilling out. This book was brutal and disgusting and wonderful.

7. The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson(GoodReads)
Followup to The Girl of Fire and Thorns, continuing Lucero-Elisa’s journey to accept the power of her Godstone and protect her adopted kingdom. This one had everything I loved about the first book and none of the things I didn’t love–a solid follow-up. Also, how much do I love Hector? Lots.

Fringe ain’t perfect. It’s often downright ridiculous. But the heart of the story–Walter and Peter Bishop’s complicated father-son relationship–kept me going through all the stupid twists and unnecessary timejumps and cringy technononsense. Because at its core, I think Fringe is a wonderfully-dressed retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Yes. Seriously. Hear me out. (SPOILERS FOLLOW)

Walter Bishop will not accept his son’s imminent death. As a scientist, as the only god in his laboratory, he will not accept that he cannot create a cure. Even after his Peter’s death, he won’t accept that he cannot save Walternate’s Peter. It’s that dangerous, delicious mix of hubris and grief that leads him into the parallel universe to bring Peter back.

It’s not looking back too soon that damns them, though. It’s a slower, more insidious damnation, compounding in too many ways to be undone. He doesn’t let Walternate know what he’s doing; he can’t bring himself to send Peter home after he’s cured. September saves their lives at Reiden Lake, but not without damning himself and altering the Observers’ trajectory into Invaders. No, looking back would have been too easy. Walter didn’t–couldn’t–look back into that other world, and therefore cursed both universes to suffer fringe events, and made a true Hades out of his other self.

Mister Secretary.

Honestly? The whole series could have been about Walter battling Walternate and I would’ve been thrilled–not least because Walternate’s same ruthless, callous qualities are present in Walter, lying in wait under what’s left of his brain and under all the institutionalization and acid trips. (They both have no problems shooting Olivia in cold blood, after all, though for entirely different reasons.) We get to see some of that come out when they engineer their own fringe events in Season 5 against the Observers, but, oh, there could have been so much more!

I cried. Not even gonna lie.

But because this is an Orpheus and Eurydice story, Walter had to pay for his sins. He had to lose Peter again. So as many problems as I had with Seasons 4 and 5, the ending was so tragic and so perfect and such a relief.

Some other thoughts:

Olivia. This poor freakin’ girl. How many different consciousnesses did she end up with inside her head? Agent Scott’s, William Bell’s, Other-Universe-Olivia’s, Other-Timeline-Olivia’s… Often I think the writers played up her independence almost to the character’s detriment; I loved getting to see vulnerable Olivia, freshly escaped from the parallel universe, tearing through her apartment, finding her clothes in the washer where Other-Olivia left them, and breaking down.

Nina Sharpe. What a great character, in all her incarnations–calculating and passionate and aloof and courageous, in turns. Each tweak of her character served a great purpose, even though her other-timeline connection to Olivia seemed totally unnecessary.

Tying Up Loose Ends. Relative to LOST, Fringe did such a great job of finishing what it started. Most elements, though certainly not all, got their due, even if I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the way the Observers became relevant in Season 5 as bland, generic dystopian fodder. I loved the way the porcupine fringe case came back in Season 4′s timeline, and the ongoing legacy of Henry, and the threading of the First People (though I wish it had lined up with the Observer business a bit more). Bringing David Robert Jones back. The white tulips and young Olivia giving Walternate the key to Peter’s whereabouts. Lincoln Lee embodying the heart of alternate universe storytelling: are you happy with yourself and with the choices you’ve made? There were a lot of dead ends, too, but I didn’t get the same sense of every question opening into five more, with no answers in sight, that made me hate LOST.

Could’ve done without… Etta, Ella, and Rachel. Sam Weiss getting written off/offed. Randomly closing the bridge to the other universe. The endless break apart/come back together of Olivia and Peter (it was just too contrived). And the acid trip episodes, especially of the “it’s cheaper for us to just animate this fight sequence” variety.

Mostly, though, I love Fringe for exploring all the silly, nerdy pseudoscience and fringe science I love, and for tackling time travel and alternate universes in a genre-defining way.

So much has happened here, and so much is about to.

In college, I spent a whole summer in Russia. It wasn’t my first trip there, but it was the longest, and the most formative in terms of the amount of freedom and responsibility I had. I stayed with a host family, but they were backdrop–the grandmother appeared in the afternoon to boil tea and bitch about the bus routes; the mother somehow always made breakfast appear without appearing herself; the daughter manifested maybe once a week to drag me to the movies or the club. I shuttled myself to class and field trips and whatever other cultural events our grades demanded we attend, which usually involved copious amounts of Sovietskoye Shampanskoye–I swear there must be old Soviet missile silos jammed full of that stuff.

There was nothing tragically, overwhelmingly different about Russian life for me, not at first. I was living the language and culture that has always been my passion, and that puts a glossy sheen on so much. Isn’t it cute how the express bus to Moscow is less reliable than Kate Gosselin’s menstrual cycle, and oh, yes, I’d love to eat deep-fried potatoes with an extra gallon of grease on top. The casual sexism is adorable and really, it makes perfect sense that the only safe non-carbonated water I can find is from the tea kettle at school. Of course we should have some more vodka. It’s already 9am and who knows when the next bus will actually show up, so pass it around.

Now they’re shutting off the hot water for your block for the rest of the summer. Now the washing machine, which was probably rationed to this apartment sometime under Khruschev, has decided all your clothes should be the same beigish blue color. Now your jeans are too tight because the one time you asked someone for a salad they handed you a bruised tomato and every night is a fresh dehydration headache and every morning a new nosebleed, which is a nice change from the black sludge that’s been dripping from your nose. Now walking down the Moscow sidewalk is a deathwish because at any moment, some dipshit junior oligarch is going to tear up onto the sidewalk in his Mercedes SUV and park it right there, on top of you if that’s what’s required.

Then it’s your last week and you’re standing on a boiling hot express bus, nose shoved into hundreds of raised armpits, and the ticket lady has decided you’re an easy mark for a few extra rubles so she’s pretending she can’t understand your Russian and insists there’s something wrong with your ticket, then she’s screaming at you, then when you won’t bribe her she kicks you off the bus and you’re standing on the side of the road in the middle of the thick forest on the express path to Moscow, waiting for the next express bus. But this is normal, really.

Then I got home and wondered who that strange girl was in Russia who had tread such a convoluted path to maintain some semblance of a normal life, and how she’d managed to convince herself that path was perfectly direct.

**

Rainbow Rowell’s newest, ELEANOR & PARK, features a terrifyingly dysfunctional family, in which Eleanor’s mother undertakes the most insanely elaborate rituals to evade her husband’s wrath. The kids, all five (six?) of them, learn to do without toothpaste and time their bathroom trips for the moments when the stepfather is either at work or asleep. Eleanor’s mother’s own system for managing him is so ridiculous and believable that one can just see what fight led to what new protocol, what electric shock in the mouse maze taught her to, no, go that way. Then an outsider looks in on it all.

**

My crit group recently worked a member’s ms that includes a really cleverly executed murder mystery. I loved the direction our conversation took about the book, and I can’t wait to see how she works with it.

The murderer is no cold-blooded killer; It (being ambiguous because I know this book will sell like awesome and don’t want to spoil) is a mostly reasonable human, like all of us, who lets a chain of events get away from It to the point where trying to brush over one thing leads to this leads to that leads to murder, then trying to gloss over the murder leads to more… And isn’t that the most staggering, quick-cutting crime? The people we see every day–what if they are treading that tortuous path, so incrementally and obliviously that only in retrospect can we follow the breadcrumbs back from the crime scene?

This is what going mad feels like, I suspect–until it’s too late, you don’t feel it at all.

1. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (GoodReads)
National Book Award-finalist account of North Koreans’ hardships under the Kim dynasty. This one had been sitting on my shelf for far too long, but it’s more relevant now than ever. You can read your Orwell, your Hunger Games, your dystopian book o’ the month, but this is what a truly oppressive regime looks like, and it is heartbreaking.

2. Paper Valentine by Brenna Yovanoff (GoodReads)
Hannah must confront her past ghosts and her surreal present to stop a serial killer. There’s so much going on in this short read–Hannah’s ghostly best friend, hauntingly realistic small-town characters, and terrifying egos. Great character study.

3. Taken by Erin Bowman (GoodReads)
On their 18th birthday, the boys of Gray’s village are taken away, and Gray’s determined to find out why. I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but Bowman really knows how to layer in the twists and turns.

4. The Demon King by Cinda Williams Chima (GoodReads)
The ancient legends of the Demon King aren’t what they seem, imperiling the Seven Realms’ future. I loved the diversity of characters and unique approach to mythology.

5. Crewel by Gennifer Albin(GoodReads)
The Spinsters are able to literally weave the strands of time and fate, and Adelice must choose to what end. This was such a creatively realized world!

6. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (GoodReads)
Park cannot believe the weird girl has to sit next to him on the bus, reading his Watchmen comics over his shoulder, listening to his Joy Division cassette… until he realizes he wants nothing else. Such a straightforward 1980s love story, and yet in Rainbow Rowell’s hands, it’s divine. I adored her debut, Attachments, and cannot wait for Fangirl!

7. Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick (GoodReads)
When the Khmer Rouge takes control of Cambodia, Arn does whatever he must to stay alive. This was so gut-twisting and heart-smashing and brutal and completely and utterly true. A must-read for everyone alive ever, so we never turn a blind eye to such atrocities again.

8. A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church (GoodReads)
Police inspector O must fight bureaucratic red tape and a massive government conspiracy to solve a seemingly simple murder in North Korea. In the vein of my much-loved Arkady Renko (Soviet-era detective) novels, with additional espionage flare.

9. Tears in the Ash (DRAFT) by Ellen Goodlett
I have the awesomest critique partners. Ellen’s latest–about a narcoleptic Hawai’ian girl who may or may not have killed her secret ex-girlfriend–blew me away.

Hope you all are as thrilled as I am that March is here. What was your favorite read in February? What are you looking forward to reading in March?

Well, I’m happy to report that, with few exceptions, The Americans gets it right–way right. I adored the pilot and cannot wait for tonight’s episode. In fact, I love this show so much that each week, I’m going to talk about the new episode. This means that there will be SPOILERS, so if you don’t want to read SPOILERS, do not click the jump cut below. Okay? Okay.

So I’m going to start with the one major arc that I really didn’t like about the episode, even though I think it culminated in an excellent scene. As we’re just getting to know Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, the embedded KGB spies, we get a flashback to the USSR, where Elizabeth’s commanding officer brutally rapes her when she fails to defend herself in a fight. Now, I tend to agree with Maggie Stiefvater on the exploitation of rape as a literary device–it’s an awful reality, but too often it’s used in fiction to add instant depth to female characters. So much so that sometimes, when it’s one of the first things we learn about them–as is the case in The Americans–we feel that the writer no longer wants us to see them as people but as victims, which I think does a disservice to rape survivors everywhere.

But this is the Soviet Union, where women were treated as equals in public and objects in private; furthermore, this is the KGB, preparing the agent for a lifetime assignment living amongst the enemy. I could see if the writers set it up as another component of psychological training–we will break you down and shatter you so that you can endure anything the enemy might attempt. (In fact, when the first Phillip USSR flashback started, J said, “And now he’s going to get raped.”) But no, later in the episode, when Elizabeth confronts her attacker–now a defector, living fat on an American stipend–he called it just one of his perks of the job.

The moment Elizabeth decided not to kill him is when I felt the writers were finally treating her as a character with complexity and not a victim, a prop.

The moment Phillip snapped his neck anyway is when I realized HOLY SHIT THIS SHOW IS FOR REAL.

So, yeah, overall this episode showed us so much more about Phillip as a character than Elizabeth, which is a real shame, but what it did right, it really did right. Every Phillip scene was so uncomfortable and terrifying in the best way possible. Whether he’s popping on a wig and gladhanding secretaries to get them spill counterintelligence secrets, listening in on Elizabeth’s “information gathering” with the perfect mix of repulsion and respect on his face, or blundering through small talk with Agent Beeman–he is on.

He loves his false family. He likes his life with Elizabeth, he is ferociously protective of his children (the BBQ scene! oh, wow), and he has no problems playing the KGB’s games, whatever they may be, but he would be perfectly happy to cut and run to protect the life he’s built. And in the final moments of the episode, as Agent Beeman noses around his garage and we see Phillip lurking in the shadows with his loaded gun–we know he is capable of anything.

I hope we get to see Elizabeth as deeply soon.

Other random thoughts: The Miami Vice moment, complete with “In the Air Tonight” playing, was epic. I love the dynamic between the Beemans, where he’s been paranoid for so long that she can’t take it seriously anymore. I hope we get to learn more about his last undercover assignment. And I want more USSR flashbacks.

What did you guys think of the pilot?