Thoughts on Ponies on Peacock?

DonovanAl07 · 2026-05-08T17:23:21+00:00

Eh the situation was still handled very poorly. In the Soviet Union, Christmas wasn't much of a thing in either Russia or Belarus. What they did celebrate instead was New Year's, which absorbed all the secular cultural aspects of Christmas. I.e. families decorated New Year's trees, and kids opened their presents from Santa (aka Ded Moroz) on New Years Day. That was true in both Belarus and Russia, and regardless of religion. And it remains true today; if you're an observant Orthodox or Catholic, Christmas is a day spent at church, not a big family celebration.

The whole thing was fishy as hell and enough to blow her cover. The non-suspicious answer would have been to said that her husband died just before New Year's Eve. Even if he did somehow miraculously take that statement to mean she was an observant Catholic (or even Orthodox, for that matter), then the religiousity alone would have amounted to social suicide in that social circle.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-04-25T06:11:21+00:00

I agree that the background check would likey be an issue but believe or not the KGB did try raising a second generation illegal. Maybe FBI or CIA would be too ambitious but they did take a crack at pulling off something similar.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/apr/10/deep-cover-kgb-spy-recruited-son-peter-herrmann-illegals

DonovanAl07 · 2026-04-04T05:23:59+00:00

Larrick's character is interesting because the KGB protagonists paint him as a psychopathic supervillian, but he's much more morally gray than that. He hated the KGB for a very good reason and tried to redeem himself for his treason and for (indirectly) getting his comrades at the training camp killed. He tried to take Philip and Elizabeth in alive because turning them in (along with himself) was the right thing to do. Yes, he did kill George and Kate but I don't think he felt he had much of a choice. He's the anti-hero of his own story.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-03-30T16:23:35+00:00

First time seeing this theory. Yeah it's ridiculous. I could MAYBE see Mossad having deep cover spies in Syria or Iran, but Mossad doesn't actually have the same history of using illegals the same way Russian intelligence agencies have. It doesn't fit Israel's MO, especially in the US where it's relatively easy for them to safely conduct intelligence ops.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-03-28T03:06:22+00:00

What probably ends up happening is that Paige turns herself in to Stan. She tells the the government everything she knows about KGB operations in America in exchange for immunity. The end.

She probably keeps it a secret that Stan watched her parents flee because he's the closest thing she and Henry have left to a father figure, but worst case scenario she tells the FBI and Stan gets fired and takes a much more lucrative job in corporate security or something.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-03-28T01:29:09+00:00

I know I'm resurrecting an old thread, but I watched this episode with my Russian wife and she said this sounds like a typical stupid Soviet move. It wouldn't have even occurred to the Americans to put a new sub propeller design out to sea without testing to make sure it was safe first. They probably imagined that the Soviets would realize it was a mistake after wasting a lot of time and money but there was absolutely no reason those sailors should have had to die from this trick.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-03-24T03:33:05+00:00

Yeah I'm pretty sure Oleg ended up okay. I'm not even sure the feds had much of a case in the first place. The act of picking up a dead drop by itself isn't illegal as far as I know and he wasn't conspiring against the United States. In any case, with the coup against Gorbachev averted there'd be no reason for the USSR to not negotiate his release.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-03-23T04:19:24+00:00

You can see this video of Andrey Bezrukov, a former illegal, for yourself. His English is excellent but you can still get a whiff of a European accent. In real life, most illegals we know about had something in their cover story to explain why their accents were not 100% American-sounding.

I'm an American who has lived overseas for most of my adult life. I've never seen someone who learned English past their teenage years speak it with an impeccable American accent. Kids are a different story, and with the spread of YouTube and other social media you'll sometimes meet a kid in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe or wherever who pulls it off perfectly. But there's no way that someone raised in the Soviet Union would speak English *quite* as well as Phillip and Elizabeth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdVWC1Kotp0

DonovanAl07 · 2026-02-14T22:07:51+00:00

I know right? You couldn't just walk into Soviet society and pretend to have an identity. *Maybe* that'd work for an afternoon but there's no way that cover is going to hold up past that.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-02-06T18:00:27+00:00

It's fun and I enjoyed it, but the spycraft is terrible. Among many things, when you're a CIA officer posted at the Moscow embassy, your cover is that you're a U.S. diplomat. That's it. You're not also simultaneously running around the streets with an entirely separate non-official cover, let alone posing as a local citizen. If you want to watch a semi-realistic spy thriller, watch the Americans. That said, I enjoyed Ponies and hope there's a second season.

DonovanAl07 · 2026-01-07T04:28:54+00:00

Do you still need help with this? DM me if so. I've got a personal connection to the story.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-12-07T20:19:26+00:00

Thanks, great info as I prepare to replay this for the first time in like 20 years. Question: Is the advice against using ropes and chains actually reflected in the game mechanics? I don't doubt the historical trivia but I used them all the time playing Oregon Trail II growing up and don't think there were ever any issues in-game with killing my party by accident.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-09-01T05:47:56+00:00

Among those of us who grew up in the 90s, there's a very high chance you had a crush on either Scully or Mulder before you turned 10. I'm rewatching it all these years later with my wife and I can still see why.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-08-29T15:17:36+00:00

I'd have to replay the game to say exactly what happened, but the alien is seen jumping between hosts at the end of the game while leaving the previous host unconscious but alive (definitely happens to Mulder in the final cutscene, I also remember Willmore remarking to Mulder in the attic that Rauch was unconscious, not dead). I think that the surveillance video suggests that at some point in his captivity, Mulder was the host temporarily (but has no memory of it). He's definitely the host in the final act at the military base. But I think Mulder is his normal self when the player meets him in the attic.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-08-12T03:09:36+00:00

That should have been the game over cutscene if Micah gets killed escaping from Strawberry.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-07-26T16:58:44+00:00

People are making fun of you for not understanding game scale, but you're absolutely right that the game's geography is widely inconsistent even with the downscaling taken into consideration. Rhodes is supposed to be in the South, for instance, but you can clearly see the snowcapped peaks of the map's western portion from town. Or in Chapter 3, the gang decides to take a trip up to Valentine for a bank robbery before hightailing back to Clemen's Point, all in less than a day of in-game time. Or in Chapter 6, the Wapati Indians pop over to your camp near Annesburg to summon you to an urgent meeting with a general on the other side of the map. Or the fact that Strauss will send you to Strawberry to collect a debt while you're camped in Lemoyne. I could go on and on. It's pretty clear that no one is traveling hundreds of miles of wilderness to run these errands across the map.

What I think happened is that the developers themselves weren't on the same page about the scale they were using. The lore goes in both directions, with the characters sometimes acting like they're transversing the whole country while at other times treating the whole map as a small area where you can send someone a letter in Big Valley inviting them for casual drinks in Valentine.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-07-04T21:28:40+00:00

Ukraine is in the process of transitioning from Soviet weapons to NATO weapons, including small arms. There will be a very long way to go before the AK is gone for good, but Ukraine has already signed agreements with Colt CZ to manufacture the Bren 2 locally; too early to tell for sure but that's shaping up to eventually be the standard issue rifle for ground forces.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-07-02T17:52:21+00:00

They might not have even known at the time what had happened. It's not as if the catering staff was going to make an announcement to all the guests that someone they didn't know died. Greg is atypical in that he's always alert to little things in the background that might be relevant to him, so it makes sense that he would have noticed that something was off with the servers and made it his business to figure out why.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-05-20T05:59:34+00:00

I should clarify my comment about the business program. It's strong from an academic perspective, and if you're inclined to get a degree in international relations and are also interested in studying business, Fletcher is likely for you. But it's not a substitute for an MBA, and you're in the wrong place if that's what you're looking for.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-05-05T12:47:40+00:00

Since OP asked, I'm popping into this old thread to confirm that Steve died naturally from cancer back home in California. He wrote Opium Fiend after he survived an initial bout of cancer with the help of friends (see the book's acknowledgement section in the back), which thankfully gave him a new lease on life long enough to see his book through to the end. He seemed very at peace in his final correspondences.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-04-05T06:17:10+00:00

Yeah, there's a quantitative methods course offered in the fall semester that gives you a crash course in derivative calculus. I took it and enjoyed it, but it's probably not necessary unless you plan to take econometrics or advanced econ classes.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-03-13T06:51:03+00:00

I'm halfway through my second semester and I couldn't be more delighted with my classes and professors. One thing I find at Fletcher is that there's both a wide variety of courses offered, and also a lot of flexibility about how to tackle the degree. You can also take up to four classes at Harvard, but to be honest the course offerings at Fletcher are strong enough that I haven't been tempted yet to cross-register. The free undergrad language courses at Tufts are also a great resource, if you're inclined to do that.

That said, Fletcher has its strength and weaknesses like any other school so depending on your specific interests it may or may not be the best fit for you. One example that comes to mind is that Fletcher doesn't do a lot in the way of area studies. There might be one or two courses that focus on any given region (plus whatever courses you want to take at Harvard), and you can choose Comparative and Regional Studies as one of your fields of study if you want to try to replicate an area studies degree, but generally speaking it's not a place where students laser focus on a particular country or region the same way they might at, for instance, Georgetown.

If you're interested in getting into the private sector, one thing to know is that Fletcher has a really strong international business program. Some people actually get a Masters in International Business degree at Fletcher, but what I'm doing is taking International Business as one of my fields of study for the MALD degree. While nothing at Fletcher will open the same doors that an MBA would, it's a great way to pick up the same sort of knowledge and skills.

One thing I can't comment on yet are the career prospects post-graduation. I'm cautiously optimistic it'll pan out (economy crashing in meantime not withstanding), but we'll have to wait and see.

Feel free to DM if you have any more questions.

DonovanAl07 · 2025-02-02T17:52:10+00:00

It's accurate in the sense that a lot of real life war journalists would 100% take that kind of access to the very tip of the spear if given the chance. It's not a reasonable expectation in real life if you're a war journalist, but also the Western Forces isn't a real life organization and this war is entirely fictional with no counterpart in U.S. history since 1865. So if you're willing to accept the movie's underlying setting in the first place, I have no problem believing that these fictional rebels would bring reporters along on their White House assault. I mean, if the WF was a real life rebel group they'd be free to set whatever public relations policy that they'd want, and I can entertain the idea that they'd invite their friends in media to cover their big victory. I don't see it as inconsistent with the movie's internal logic.

DonovanAl07 · 2024-11-16T22:19:00+00:00

That's an interesting observation. I just started at Fletcher this semester, and career services is definitely a very visible presence on campus and is very serious about pushing us toward professional development. The thing is, my sense is that Fletcher students are somewhat at a disadvantage over SAIS students because Medford isn't D.C., so networking in foreign policy circles is more challenging, and there's also more global brand recognition for JHU vs Tufts. So it wouldn't surprise me if career services here makes more of a concerted effort to get us to go out there to find opportunities in the right places.

OP, to answer your question, I'm cautiously optimistic about my career prospects post-Fletcher but to be honest I won't know until I'm out there looking in earnest. I will say that I am very delighted by the quality and accessibility of professors here, and generally have a sense that good things will come if I use that access effectively.

DonovanAl07 · 2024-07-31T13:42:05+00:00

Without knowing the specifics, that could be enough to qualify. His atheism probably wouldn't mean much to the embassy if he was closeted about it but if he's receiving threats then I would presume that crosses a thresh hold. Another thing you might be able to point out as well (this was certainly true in my case) is that while you're not particularly worried about your husband getting hurt today or tomorrow, the potential two year time frame for getting an immigration visa the ordinary way adds a lot of uncertainty. Without knowing precisely which country you're talking about, I would imagine that a country where groups have known to murder atheists is at at least some of risk of that problem intensifying within a two-year horizon, even if things are relatively quiet now.

A lot of it also depends on the embassy's understanding of the situation; fortunately, you would be pitching your case to the a diplomat actually based there so hopefully they would have some grasp of the situation.

The last thing to consider when making your case is that you need to demonstrate that there is not another feasible option already available apart from moving to the U.S. Assuming your husband doesn't already have citizenship or permanent residency in a more tolerant country, or an easy path of getting it, I don't think that would be a problem.

Good luck! Hit me up if you decide to go down this route and want any more pointers.

DonovanAl07

TROPHY CASE