By Joe R
First things first: Philip and Elizabeth announce to the kids that they're separating, and they take it as poorly as you might expect. Paige suddenly finds all her snitting totally justified, so she turns all THAT up to eleven, while Henry starts getting sullen and shirks his Social Studies duties.
So, now that he's unencumbered and living out of a motel, Philip (as "Clark") is more amenable to Martha's pathetic begging for him to stay the night with her. The fallout the morning is twofold: one is that Martha ends up telling him that Special Agent John-Boy appears to be rallying agents for an extracurricular hit on a KGB agent. The second is that, as Clark makes his exit in the cold light of day, he's accosted by Agent Chris, who isn't sure what he's suspicious of, he just feels like pushing around the guy who just screwed Martha. When he threatens to take Clark in for questioning, Philip's back is against the wall. They fight, and Chris ends up taking his own switchblade (!) in the gut. So Philip piles him into the trunk and takes him to a safe house, where he and Elizabeth (whose disguise this week is going to take me SEVERAL days to figure out how to describe, so please meet me back here for the recap) decide that they need to keep him alive long enough to get him to talk about this assassination plot.
Stan, who had originally opted out of the extra-legal hit operation, is suddenly radicalized by Chris's disappearance, which he's certain is KGB-related. He has all these flashbacks to his and Chris's friendship, the better for us to see how scummy Chris really is, and he gets super cold with Nina. Most importantly, he hijacks that assassination attempt. When Arkady -- the original target -- doesn't show up for his regular jog, Stan orders the agents to grab his junior-level jogging buddy instead. He's a no-value target, but Stan delivers a painfully Walter White Lite intimidating speech in order to shake loose any information about Chris. Problem is, nobody knows a blessed thing about Chris, not this kid, not Nina, not Arkady. Just Philip and I Still Can't Talk About Her Disguise Elizabeth, who are finding it hard to get Chris to talk about much of anything, as he's in the process of dying. Once they've passed the window where the hit was supposed to take place, Chris tells them Arkady was the target. Elizabeth confirms that Arkady is still alive, however, but Chris dies before she can gloat about it.
When the FBI finds Chris's body, Agent John-Boy promises Stan there will be bloody retribution. Stan gets a head start on that when he returns to the house where they're keeping that little pipsqueak KGB agent. After offering him some Pollos Hermanos, he gets the kid to admit he's KGB, then blows his brains out. Because Stan has gone DARK, you guys.