Ain’t love grand?

Love, lies, and disastrous dinner parties all formed a part of last night’s Covert Affairs. We finally met Simon again and made some headway on the Little Dipper Tattoo Mystery (I’ve been referring to it erroneously as Big Dipper, fixed now!) while discovering that Arthur Campbell has seriously bad table manners. And Annie had some lovely Louboutins on.

I really want to raid her shoe collection.

So what was the theme of the episode? Love? Or the balancing of business and pleasure? Obviously Annie has some serious feelings for Simon and he clearly seems head over heels in love with her. Seems like Annie is not very good at balancing her spy side and her romantic side. And what is a girl to do when her lover kills someone for her?

After months of canoodling together, Simon finally asks Annie to come with him on a business trip, an opportunity our girl Walker has been dying to get. But, since she’s officially not working on this case anymore, she has to keep her involvement off the CIA radar, which Lena is of course more than happy to help with. Fake passport secured, Annie heads to Cuba with Simon in the hopes of uncovering some juicy details about what Simon is up to these days. 

And some uncovering she did. Wearing the least camouflaged outfit in the history of spy. It is in no way practical to climb dirt hills and try to remain unseen when you’re wearing a red (quite lovely) full-length skirt and a white top. Not to mention the wedge shoes (though marginally better than climbing hills in Louboutins I guess). It’s a miracle nobody caught her!

She did look good climbing that hill though. If I tried this shit I’d tumble head-first down that hill, landing on my ass with the skirt above my head. Good thing Annie managed it with more class than that!

In any case, Annie discovers an old, and supposedly defunct, Soviet listening device in the middle of nowhere. According to Lena, putting the device together with the substrates Simon stole back in episode 4, will create a cellular jamming station that could lead to some serious nuisance for a lot of people. Not sure if this will in any way be relevant in future episodes but it was a nice call-back to a previous mission.

In the mixing of business and pleasure corner, Simon introduces Annie to his “business partner,” Hector Serrano. He doesn’t trust Annie one little bit, rightly so. But when he seemingly convinces Simon that Annie must disappear for good, he forgets to take into account that love makes men do crazy things. And therefore he ends up dead. I didn’t believe Simon would do Annie harm but my faith in that was a little bit shaken in the end there, just after Simon locks Annie in the little storage room. So Simon killing Hector was a bit of a relief!

I have to admit I didn’t catch on to Hector being Simon’s handler until Lena mentions it to Annie afterwards. Is Simon working for the Russians after all then? We did hear Hector speaking Russian to Simon while in Cuba. And if he kills his handler then he’s more or less defecting, right? I imagine it’s not a popular act at least. What happens to Simon now?

And what will Annie do? There’s no denying that she now knows that Simon is in love with her and that he’ll do “remarkable things” such as killing his own handler because of it. And less bloody things like giving her a souvenir postcard, proving that he cares deeply. And she’s smitten with him so when push comes to shove will she be able to give him up to the CIA? (In all likelihood we’ll see that dealt with somewhat next week)

Lots and lots of questions and general musings!

Not to mention what Joan will do if she finds out about Annie going behind her back and working in cahoots with Lena. Though I have faith in Joan, more-so than in Lena, that’s for sure! I still think Lena is going to end up screwing Annie over one way or another and Annie will finally realise Joan always has her back. Indeed she seems to be willing to have everyone’s back whether or not they deserve it. We’re delving a little bit deeper into Joan’s character this season and so far I like her even more now than I did back in S01.

She goes to the bat for Annie and Auggie numerous times and last night she did a complete 180 on Arthur’s China dreams. She even threw a freaking dinner party for Arthur! And the two of them were a real comedy team let me tell ya! But comedy turned into tragedy quite quickly when Arthur forgot all about table manners and probably forfeited on China by smashing the china (pun most definitely intended). All because he didn’t like to be called a deserter. I guess this means he’ll be working overtime to solve Jai’s murder now?

Meanwhile, for the rest of the episode we weren’t treated to too much Auggie-ness but with his tenaciousness he managed to get Henry Wilcox to divulge some secrets. Seems like Jai had a secret hiding place and hopefully next week we’ll get some more info on what exactly Jai was hiding.

The way Henry compared Auggie to Arthur was pretty cool and actually quite accurate. Both men have a military background. They refuse to give up on anything, always pushing a little bit harder to get to the truth. They’re loyal to their friends but still keep some things hidden from them. And they always need to be the better man. I suppose this makes them ideal as the lead investigators into Jai’s death.

It seems that after a couple of filler episodes we’re finally back to the main issue, the Ursa Minor Tattoo. Next week promises more on that front when Arthur discovers that before Jai was killed he was investigating Simon.

Until then, what did you think of this episode? Was it interesting to see just how far Simon is willing to go for Annie? And are you happy to be back to business?