Ponies: Season 1

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I’m pretty sure this isn’t how any of this works. Sure it was 1977. And it was the Soviet Union. But is there not formal training for CIA agents? Both then and now? Well, that is a logic hump you’re going to have to clear to believe what happens in Ponies happens. Because, yes, two women with absolutely no training — other than formerly being married to two dead CIA agents — are pulled into the spy game by their husbands’ former boss, the CIA Moscow Station Chief. Their motivation? Well, at first it’s to uncover what actually happened to their husbands. But that is soon abandoned for… Well, that part is a bit unclear. But without that conceit there is no show and the whole concept just falls apart. So, put your logic hat on the shelf here and just go with it.

I will say right off the bat that hanging with Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson is a fun time. Them in their retro 70s outfits, fish-out-of-water in a world they are not trained to be in, nor prepared for. It’s absolutely bonkers that this Station Chief dude, Dane (Adrian Lester), would put them in the situations he puts them in. All predicated on the fact that, as women, they are not POI (person of interest), but PONI (person of no interest), and as such won’t draw the attention of the Soviet spies who are constantly trailing any Americans who walk in and around the city. I suppose it makes sense — the Soviets being so sexist and blind that they couldn’t even imagine a “wife” also being a spy — but there are Russian women we’re introduced to along the way who are, in fact, spies. So, that whole thing doesn’t exactly hold water. I will cut this thing a little bit of a break, seeing as it’s posed as comedy-adjacent, but the fact these two are pushed way far into the spy business without so much as a couple weeks of spycraft classes is pretty absurd. Typified by Bea’s two minute lesson about how to use a micro spy camera, which requires precision instructions, which she is then to pass on to an asset with only a vague idea of how to convey its usage. Honestly, the whole thing feels like a bit of a clown show and not particularly well researched in terms of how a real spy network might operate. Or at least I’d hope our people are more professional than all that.

But, again, I did enjoy hanging with Clarke and Richardson. Clarke plays a Russian-speaking American of Belarusian decent. Her grandmother (Harriet Walter), who also gets pulled into the game, is supposed to be a Holocaust survivor from Belarus. Clarke has to speak Russian for a good deal of the show, which is super-impressive. Though I suppose she learned Dothraki, so perhaps she’s just good at languages. Richardson is also American and seemingly has some pretty severe ADHD. Or maybe that’s just her acting style. Whatever the case, she is incredibly high-energy and acts as the comic foil to Clarke’s more considered character. Granted, part of Clarke’s character’s charge is to pose as a local — or a current local who moved to Moscow from Belarus — and basically get close to (aka seduce) the show’s KGB baddie, Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz). While Richardson’s character — who doesn’t speak Russian and gives very American energy everywhere she goes — basically has to be proactive and just use her friendly wiles to get info around the edges. Honestly, the American footprint seems very small in Moscow based on how many people from the CIA we meet, so I’m not sure why these two ladies and their very suspicious activities don’t draw the eyeballs of the KGB. It’s like they declared them people of no interest as the show’s conceit and had to stick with it despite the overwhelming evidence that they were up to something shady. In this world, though, the KGB is both hyper-competent, but also complete dumbshits, I guess. It’s all very Spy vs. Spy shit.

As time goes by, Bea gets in deeper and deeper with Andrei. A guy on the rise in the KGB , and apparently both a master blackmailer and murderer. At one point he strangles one of the prostitutes to death whom he’d used to get kompromat on an American businessman. It’s crazy that Dane would put Bea in this position, tenuously keeping up the charade that she’s a Belarusian school teacher and not the American wife of a dead CIA agent. Moscow seems like a pretty small place, at least in terms of the circles these people live in. The fact that Bea keeps up the act as long as she does (which, actually isn’t that long) feels pretty unlikely. In fact, her whole thing is very poorly constructed and seems to always be on the edge of falling apart. Until it does. Dragging down a young Russian asset (Petro Ninovskyi) whom the CIA has cultivated and was vaguely involved with some other thing that was going on. Who she is also into in like a sexual way? A guy twelve years her junior whom I think the show maybe is trying to pass off as her age? Anyhow, the plot is not very well-formed. There are holes and coincidences and some silly stuff that is not intentionally silly. For instance, there is a storyline where it’s discovered a spy has infiltrated the US embassy. The only new, unvetted human being to show up right before the mole thing comes to light is a random Finnish nanny that one family hires. Now, even if the show is using her as some sort of head-fake to take focus off another character, it feels completely disingenuous that the CIA characters on the show wouldn’t immediately jump to her being the mole the moment it came to light. It’s negligent writing. Also, there’s a whole storyline about prostitutes being murdered in Moscow, and we see in the Moscow Times (or whatever) that each and every prostitute who has been killed has a whole obit with an included glamour shot the day after their murder. Did they have those photos on file just in case? Of sex workers? In 1977? I mean, that’s just some poorly thought out expositional nonsense that kind of has to exist to offer clues to our newly minted spy ladies. And it’s ludicrous. And, frankly, a little insulting to the audience.

That all said, the show does look good. The period sets and clothing definitely give Cold War. The leads play well off each other, though Richardson’s franticness and acting tics can sometimes wear a little thin in long stretches. Gilz, as the big bad, is an intimidatingly scary dude who can turn on the charm when needed. And Harriet Walter is, once again, asked to do an accent that isn’t hers, but her fake Yiddisher / Belarusian accent is, at least to my ears, way better than her pretty awful American accent work in Silo. Never having been to Moscow myself, it feels like Budapest does a decent job of doubling for that city here — gray, grim and blocky in all the right ways. Honestly, the biggest issue is the cluelessness and general inattentive way the CIA goes about their business. They are constantly doing dumb stuff that anyone with even a modicum of sense would avoid. Like putting two completely untrained people in charge of a huge investigation that could most definitely compromise and expose years of work. Letting said people go to a big Elton John concert in Moscow as US envoys despite the fact the place will be crawling with high-level KGB, including the high-level KGB operative the CIA is lying to about Bea’s identity. I mean, duh. Not to mention keeping a completely compromised Station Chief in place, and trying to pass off a clearly Hungarian dude, falsely named Emile (Pál Mácsai), as French without ever teaching him a word of French. There’s a bunch of other goofy stuff that any real spy agency would be way more careful about, but I guess this isn’t a “hard” spy thriller, but rather a fun vehicle for our leads with some twists and turns, some sex worker murders and even what I think may be some extreme gay conversion therapy?