The Americans "Echo" OAD 5/21/14

oops...started a thread at the same time.

 

Yep, surprised there was no thread, because that was an incredible episode, one of the all time great season finales, in my opinion- our jaws were on the floor by the end.

 

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I expected Beeman to hand over the Echo program. Perhaps he figured that Oleg would protect her.

As for the program itself, I doubt it would have been kept on a 5.25" inch floppy. First of all, the hardware it would have would have had tapes and not floppy drives (PCs were really wimpy compared to main frames). Second, the 360KB capacity of those disks wouldn't have held much of a program, perhaps 10,000 lines of source code.

 

Maybe it was double sided!!

 

They could have used Pied Piper's compression algorithm...

 

The bit of code that they showed briefly on the screen had several references to "GUI". Does the super-secret stealth airplane computational program really need a GUI?

I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a time-lapse in that scene or what. There was no way the entire program scrolled by for his hidden camera during the time that scene lasted.

 

LOL!!!

 

Did I detect the beginnings of a real rift between Phillip and Elizabeth?

I have to admit, I felt chilled when Elizabeth started to consider the idea of Paige becoming a long term, deep cover asset. I think Phillip is rightly appalled and afraid, and if push came to shove, I think that's a line he will not cross.

 

I thought that was funny, too, a single 5.25" drive.

Coincidentally, I was reading the F-35 wiki page this morning.
"On 21 April 2009, media reports, citing Pentagon sources, said that during 2007 and 2008, spies downloaded several terabytes of data related to the F-35's design and electronics systems, potentially compromising the aircraft and aiding the development of defense systems against it."
I wonder who it was for? China? India? Russia? Israel? Iran? N Korea?

Anyway, I agree, junior spy Paige could be a big rift between Elizabeth and Phillip.

 

Weren't 8" floppies commonly available for mainframes by 1981? I am surprised they used 5.25" rather than 8", but I'm not surprised they chose floppy over tape.

It doesn't seem unrealistic that the Echo program could have fit on a single floppy. Back in the day we could do a lot in just 16K or 64K of RAM. Hypothetically, it was probably a fairly simple program, just the execution of a series of physics equations. The value of the computers at the time wasn't necessarily to do things that humans can't, but to do things that would have taken humans too long to do by hand.

I think back to something like ray tracing -- relatively short and straightforward to program, but I recall ray tracers taking hours to render a fairly simple model.

How did Stan get the program? Did he film what was displayed on screen? That does seem a stretch, unless he was lucky enough to hit just the key portions of it.

 

It wasn't clear. He had that gadget, but they never explained what it was. I figured he somehow used it to copy the disc, which is a stretch, but...

 

No, the way they had him bending over to point his chest at the screen was an indication that his chest camera was recording the program as it scrolled by. Although I wonder if even the FBI had access to sufficiently high resolution hidden cameras (with recording device) that small at that time. And as I already mentioned, the time required does not make sense.

The camera was in his tie clip and the stuff taped to his chest was apparently supposed to be the recording device and the power source.

 

Afterwards, he went to see The Wrath of Khan and filmed a bootleg.

 

Are we sure that Stan didn't actually give the information to the Russians? I know that Nina was handed a piece of paper with an apology but it was typed and not hand written. It also looked like Stan was waiting for Nina in his car at the end and realized that she wasn't coming.

Unless I missed something, it is possible that Stan gave the Russians ECHO and the Russians still sent Nina back to Moscow anyway.

 

No, I think he was just watching her be taken away.

They were supposed to meet at the place they first met, which I'm pretty sure wasn't the Embassy!

 

Excellent double cross. But if Stan had given them echo, he would have been waiting for Nina "at the spot where we first met." I don't think that was in front of the embassy. I have a vague recollection that it was an alley or park.

 

Paige is looking for a cause, but how hard would it be to convince an American teenager that overthrowing her country and letting the communists take over would be a good idea. What if she is appalled, and decides to turn them all in?

On the other hand, I've always wondered if this "church" is them already working on her. It seems odd that the leader of the youth group of the church would get himself arrested on purpose when he's with the kids.

Weird the Russian guy telling Stan not to tell her that her loves her all the time. Was that just him letting him know that he hears every word he has said to her?

 

I thought it was odd that Arcady told Stan to stop telling Nina he loves her so much, and that Russian women don't respect that. That seemed to me like Arcady giving away to Stan that Nina was playing him. Otherwise, how would Arcady know how much Stan tells her he loves her?