“One for the history books.” – Dean
In Berlin, Colette faces her Nazi-occupied childhood, Kate’s spy adventures are actually interesting for once, and Maggie morphs into the kind of fangirl that makes other fangirls ashamed to identify themselves as fangirls. Laura just hovers around in the background until Ted makes awkward romantic and/or sexual advances on her (it was hard to tell) and she turns him down while Dean apologizes for getting drunk in Paris last week. It sounds like a typical evening among the denizens of my undergrad residence hall, but I assure you, it’s 1963 and these people are professionals.
The various exploits of the Pan Am crew play out against the backdrop of John Kennedy’s famous speech at the Berlin wall. The good parts of this episode are very good and the bad parts are… well, they’re pretty bad. And by “they,” I mean Maggie’s entire over-the-top quest to shake JFK’s hand. The squealing, the flirting, the ditching-her-job-to-go-stalk-Air-Force-One just didn’t seem to gel with what we already know about Maggie’s characterization.
My problem with the Fangirl Maggie storyline isn’t her intense attraction to John F. Kennedy. The explanation of her dedication is certainly in character. Of course Maggie worked on his 1960 campaign. It’s Maggie. And perhaps if we had been given a glimpse of this completely irrational, out-of-her-mind-with-hero-worship Maggie before, I could swallow this storyline a little easier, but so far, Maggie has been nothing less than witty, cool, and calm.
Colette and Kate, meanwhile, fare better in their respective roles this week.For once, Kate’s spy shenanigans interested me when her latest mission goes awry and she finds herself in charge of the safety of a young German translator with a blown cover. Kate’s defiance of MI-6’s wish that the compromised asset be abandoned, plus her ingenious plan to smuggle the German woman into the American consulate so she can defect, disguised as a Pan Am stewardess, finally showed me why Kate was deemed CIA material in the first place. Kate is pretty tough when she’s given the chance to be.
Colette, meanwhile, takes the brunt of the emotional turmoil as the Majestic lands in Berlin. She admits to an excited Laura that she has never been to Germany, despite having technically held German citizenship from 1940 to 1944. She is apprehensive about visiting the city and while the rest of the crew’s excitement builds in anticipation of Kennedy’s speech, Colette becomes more and more visibly distressed by her continued presence in Berlin. It all comes to a head in an emotional confrontation at a party full of German and American diplomats… Oh, and a freakishly fangirly Maggie who, at this point, is practically flashing the press corps in an attempt to get backstage passes to the JFK Show.
The contrast between Colette’s turmoil and the optimism of the Kennedy years is some of the better writing and directing that Pan Am has featured so far. The visual and audible contradiction of Colette sobbing alone as thousands cheer Kennedy’s words is a haunting compositional dynamic and a timely foreshadowing of what the rest of the decade will hold.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.