Before I get to this week’s review I just wanted to have a quick chat with my editor.
Shannon is it okay if my review this week is just two words?
Holy Sh*%!
Oh, you would like for me to expand upon that thought a little more? Okay I’ll try, but I’m still pretty speechless.
Paige knows the truth. I repeat. This is not a drill. Paige knows the truth. What’s amazing to me is that the Paige reveal is something that’s been brewing since the show’s premiere. The first season ended with Paige going to the laundry room to check to see if her mom really had been doing laundry as she claimed. Last season Paige planned an unannounced visit to the “aunt” Elizabeth stayed with. In this episode she popped into the travel agency to see what her parents were doing. The entire third season has been about Elizabeth and Philip fighting over whether Paige should know the truth and be recruited to become a second generation KGB agent.
But still, the moment was utterly shocking. Perhaps it’s because after all the hand-wringing Philip has been doing this season about revealing the truth to Paige, in the end the decision wasn’t up to him at all. Paige forced the issue and her parents had nowhere to hide. “Do you love me,” she asked? “Then tell me the truth,” she demanded. “I’m not stupid. I know there’s something going on.” She listed off her theories which included that her parents were drug dealers or in the Witness Protection Program (both excellent guesses on Paige’s part).
And then Philip and Elizabeth somehow silently agreed they would come clean. Perhaps Philip was doing it out of love for Paige, and Elizabeth for the cause, but they both knew the time had come. They told her they were born in the Soviet Union and that “we work for our country getting information. Information they couldn’t get in other ways.” Slowly Paige puts it all together—her parents are spies. “If you do tell anyone we would go to jail for good,” Philip tells her. I fear a lot worse things would happen if Paige told Pastor Tim or anyone else the truth. Her parents warn her that she can’t even tell Henry. I remember how hard it was not to tell my younger sister when I learned the truth about Santa Claus. This is much worse.
Paige does the only reasonable thing and takes to her bed. Because, like I was feeling last week, it was all too much. She needed to lie down. For their part Philip and Elizabeth know there’s nothing they can do now that Paige knows. “We go to work. We hold our breath,” Philip says. Interestingly, neither alerts Gabriel that all has been revealed.