“I was a little drunk and I forgot for a moment how things are.” – Joe
On a flight shuttling homeward bound sailors back to the states, Laura connects with an African American soldier named Joe. They begin a tentative romance that ultimately results in Joe getting punched in the face and Laura getting a hard lesson in 1963 reality. Meanwhile, big sister Kate gets her own naivety stomped on when she turns her secret Communist boyfriend over to the CIA for safekeeping after he reveals that he is being called back to Eastern Europe. See, she misunderstood his dreams for a better Yugoslavia as a bid for double-agent status between the CIA and the Soviets. She watches her CIA contacts throw a black bag over Nico’s head and whisk him away to a secret holding site, and yet fails to understand why he’s mad at her about the whole thing.
Nico forgives her, eventually, but I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be seeing him for a while.
The contrast between the Cameron sisters and their respective “scandalous” romantic interests makes for an interesting hour, especially considering the seeming reversal of their personal philosophies now that Laura has been working for Pan Am for several months. The Cameron sisters’ mother initially accused Kate of stealing Laura away by encouraging her stewardess aspirations, and yet, just a few months later, we see Kate scolding Laura for her wild behavior. Admittedly, posing nude for a Life photographer was probably a bad life choice, but hey, we’ve all been there.
Okay, not really.
Laura’s rebuttal of Kate’s lecture with “I was thinking that I wanted to embrace my sexuality on my own terms,” smacks of a petulant teenager and it’s really quite amusing, in my opinion, considering the role Kate has played in getting Laura in the position to make such sweeping declarations about herself. Kate used to be the wild child in the Cameron family, but she’s sounding more and more like her mother every day.
And yet, for all of her rebellion and self-discovery, Laura finds that some social mores are just too hard to shake for a wealthy white girl in 1963. She admits that when Joe spent the night at Maggie’s, she locked her door. She didn’t kiss him back on the Majestic because she worried about what the others would say. When her landlord demands that she kick Joe out, she offers to show him the city, which was really just a passive aggressive way of caving to her landlord’s racially motivated demands.
Back on the Kate Cameron Spy Adventure Hour, Nico agrees to meet with her while in CIA custody and asks, “Are you just a silly naive girl, or a master liar?”
“Both,” Kate says, summing up the experiences of both Cameron sisters quite succinctly, “I’m both.”
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.