4x10 Munchkins

[7.8/10] The hardest thing is the uncertainty of it all. Problems can be tackled. Definite issues can be addressed. And even when something unfortunate happens, if there’s closure, we can make peace with it. But if we just don’t know what happened, what’s happening, why it happened, it becomes unmooring, gnawing at us deep down until we just want something to hold onto.

“Munchkins” stacks uncertainty on top of uncertainty here, for characters of all stripes. The headline is that Pastor Tim is missing in Ethiopia, a state aligned with the U.S.S.R. Nobody knows what happened to him. Alice assumes that the Jennings had something to do with it, and threatens to send a tape to the Justice Department exposing them. Paige doesn't know if her parents protestations of innocence are true or if Alice is right to suspect them. And the Jennings don’t even know if the Russian government is behind Tim’s disappearance, or whether or not Alice could be bluffing.

That helps the audience to connect with everyone in the situation, because we’re as much in the dark as anybody. We know, eventually, that the Jennings didn’t plan this. But we can feel Alice’s pain and difficulty at being about to bring a child into the world while laboring under the possibility that the KGB has assassinated your husband. We can feel the push and pull inside Paige, where she genuinely feels for Alice, and is genuinely frustrated at her inability to trust her parents, but just as upset that Alice would threaten to destroy her family like that.

And we can feel the anxious determination of the Jennings, who have to wonder if the Centre would go behind their backs to stamp out this potential problem, and whether this means that they have to suddenly uproot their lives and run to Russia. Nobody knows what’s going on, least of all the viewer, which not only puts us on the edge of our seats to find out, but helps us to relate to the different characters feeling the same thing in the moment.

But “Munchkins” doesn't stop there. Whether in small drips or big developments, everyone in the episode is contending with the great unknown in some way shape or form. One of the most affecting instances is Stan and Aderholt’s dinner with Martha’s dad. Martha’s disappearance is one of those events without closure, where the FBI has their (correct) theories, but no proof and no complete explanation.

So if you’re Martha’s father, it just doesn't compute. You know your daughter. Or you think you do. And this doesn't seem like her. So you beg the people looking into her case to get to the bottom of it, to give you answers where none are likely to be, because it’s too much just to sit with it.

The uncertainty creeps into the other bigger storylines in the episode as well. Agent Gaad is dead, in a freak accident. A trio of Russians step into his room in Thailand with a “proposal.” Rather than deal with them, Gaad makes a break for it. He stumbles and crashes through a glass door, cutting himself and bleeding out in the process.

As the audience, we don’t know anymore than Gaad does whether those Russians were there to talk peace, or to blackmail him, or to kidnap him, or just to take him out. Their seeming leader appears genuinely sorry that things ended this way, and later in the episode Arkady says that an operation went wrong, but who knows. For Gaad, and for us, we just see three enemy agents coming where they weren’t invited, for reasons unknown, and a good man ends up dead because of it.

The uncertainty spills into the Young-Hee storyline, where in a heartbreaking phone call left for “Patty,” she confesses that something seems wrong with Paul, but she doesn't know what. She detects something wrong, something standoffish about him, but worse than knowing what it is and being able to sense that something is amiss while having no idea what. It eats up Elizabeth just as much because she does know, because she feels for Young-Hee, and in the end, wants another way.

It’s that dreaded empathy that, again, Gaad warned Stan, and by extension us, about. The Jennings are putting more of their real selves into their work, and it’s making their jobs harder. There’s an interesting reflection of that with the first appearance from Kimmi we’ve seen in a long time. She tells Philip that her father is in the CIA, something he shared with her, and while Philip should be soothing her or making it seem like no big deal, he can’t help but put on his “brotherhood of fathers.” He softly chastises her for telling him, knowing that sharing that kind of secret with a daughter is a means of trying to get closer with her, and that confiding that sort of secret in a third party only jeapardizes that.

It certainly made life tougher for the Jennings, Paige in particular. There’s a big wave of relief that comes when Pastor Tim is found, safe and sound. It’s a relief for Paige that this terrible thing didn’t happen, that her relationship with Alice is whole, that her family isn’t under active threat. But it’s also a relief because it means her parents weren’t lying to her (or were, at least, too siloed to know what was happening).

There’s one of those adult conversations at the end, where they talk to Paige about having to build trust in their line of work, but always having one another to speak the truth to. Now Paige is in that circle, and as Philip says to Kimmi, they mean for that to bring something closer. In short, they want Paige to be able to know, to be able to sweep away that uncertainty, to have something to hold onto despite all of the Espionage Jr. stuff she has to pull off with Pastor Tim and Alice and even Matthew to keep up appearances.

But that’s the thing in the world of spies and warring governments. They’re in the secrets business. They’re in the manipulation business. When everyone has layers of cover, layers of schemes, sometimes things just happen and you don’t know why. In truth, the Jennings can only make their daughter’s world, and the world at large, a little more certain. The not knowing, the potential at any second for some enemies to barge into your room and end your vacation or “vacation,” is always there, and always going to be, for people caught in this world.a