By Joe R
Remember poor Hotski, a.k.a. Robert, the Directorate S agent who died of a stab wound in the season premiere? Philip ends up getting a coded message that could only have come from Robert in the newspaper, scheduling a meeting. The Jenningses have to figure out what's up, but they can't go themselves, so Elizabeth gets in touch with Gregory, a young black radical she recruited (and fell in love with) some years back. Gregory and his team stake out the meeting -- as do the FBI -- and it turns out, Robert had a secret wife and baby in Philadelphia, unknown to Philip and Elizabeth.
The Feds are assuming the wife -- Joyce Ramirez -- could be Directorate S as well, while the Jenningses need to find out what she knows, and in an exciting little setpiece, Gregory's team engineers a pickup of Joyce and her baby right under the Feds' noses. He brings her to Philip and Elizabeth, who say they're here to protect her. Joyce thought Robert was a drug dealer or something, and she's freaked out to learn he's dead. Privately, Gregory opines to the Jenningses that they can't trust that she doesn't know about them, and they should kill her, if only to tie up the loose end. This consultancy gets complicated by the fact that Gregory outright tells Philip that he should let Elizabeth go, as she doesn't love him. (Elizabeth has already told Gregory she IS developing feelings for Philip, however, so this move is shady as hell.)
Meantime, Philip decodes a message from Robert (a name and a phone number) and takes it to meet his handler, only his old handler, Gabriel, has been replaced by a woman Philip refers to as "Granny." She's played by Margo Martindale, so she's already my favorite. Seems tough as nails, too. She tells Philip that Robert had been working on a lead to get intel on a weapon the Americans are working on that will threaten the Soviet nuclear arsenal. That's what the name and number are about. Philip makes contact and goes to a meeting with a shadowy guy and his two thugs. The two thugs won't stop menacing in Philip's blind spot, so he beats the shit out of them, before exchanging a briefcase of money for a briefcase full of plans for an anti-ballistic missile device.
In the end, Philip and Elizabeth win out and they don't kill Joyce and the baby. They instead hand her over to Granny, who's going to set them up in Cuba, where they can live out the rest of their days on a white sand beach. PSYCH! You idiots. Of course Granny is going to kill Joyce, and indeed, by episode's end, the baby ends up back in Russia with Robert's parents (but of a downgrade from the white sands of Cuba, eh?), and Joyce ends up in a parked car in Philly, dead from a "drug overdose."