Dev F
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Posts posted by Dev F
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For me, the top tier is still Mad Men and Breaking Bad. They have a rock-solid consistency and a level of ambition -- Breaking Bad in terms of its visual artistry and willing to throw its characters over every cliff without regard for the status quo, Mad Men in terms of its tooth-aching attention to both the smallest period details and the tiniest nuances of its characters' emotional journeys -- that The Americans can't quite match. The Americans especially suffers from occasionally feeling a bit rickety on the "basic artisanship" side of things; it took a while for it to work out whether it wanted to be a procedural or a character study, and all through its run it would have moments where I thought "Well, I get what they're trying to do here, but it's not quite working" (like Jared's endless bleeding-to-death confession, or the weirdly abortive Mischa storyline).
But it's a testament to how much I love what the series does right that I would place it higher in the pantheon than any of my other favorite series that are sometimes rickety and sometimes brilliant -- for instance, Six Feet Under and The Leftovers. I'd place it at the very top of my second tier of favorites, alongside more tightly crafted shows that don't make the first tier for subtler reasons, like Deadwood (which is as polished as something out of Shakespeare but goes on weird tangents that detract from the central story) or Better Call Saul (which for me has never hit a wrong note but also has never quite reached the audacious heights of its predecessor series).
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Oh yeah -- another storyline that foreshadows Henry's fate is that of little Ilia. Stan is tormented by the fact that the Russians killed his mom and stepdad, leaving him all alone, and there's nothing he can do to make it better. Henry sort of offers Stan the chance to redeem himself for Gennadi and Sofia's deaths. This time he can actually help the poor, confused orphan boy, not by tracking down the bad guys who did this to him like he always does, but by being there for him and caring for him.
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1 hour ago, shura said:
In the garage, Philip says to Stan "All these years we watched Americans, recruited Americans - and now we finally, actually got something - and it's the fucking Russians," Finally, actually? As if everything they'd done in the previous twenty plus years wasn't that serious and didn't really amount to much? That's one hundred manipulation on Philip's part.
I disagree. That's something Philip was always tortured by -- stealing propeller plans that ended up sinking a Russian submarine, acquiring deadly viruses for defensive purposes that were instead used to murder mujahideen, killing innocent people to prevent a plague of midges only to discover that they were being used to eliminate famines, not cause them. The missions that left Philip feeling like he'd genuinely had a positive impact were few and far between.
1 hour ago, SusanSunflower said:I'm really disappointed that Elizabeth largely escaped being "outed" as the monster she is (became) ... particularly to herself, but also largely to both Paige and Phillip (who I doubt knows about how she "took care of " Erica ... I think the writers "whiffed" on this aspect, likely because (as we've seen) they really have avoided characters talking about issues and questions ... The amount that Paige doesn't know (and has not apparently asked about) in the last 3 or 6 years despite endless hours on stake-out with her mother ... see also information not shared with Paige by Elizabeth ... Paige has been kept in the dark to be blindsided again and again ...
I wish she had gotten off the train in full-boil anger, asserting her right to make decisions about her future ... but it was left vague for the audience to figure out ... like what she was doing at Claudia's (or the significance that the FBI had not yet apparently stumbled on or connected Claudia and that safe house).
See, I feel exactly the opposite. If Paige's reaction to learning that her parents were murderous monsters is just to get really mad and storm off, nothing could be less interesting to me. "Middle-class American girl is horrified by murder" is a real "Dog bites man" story, you know?
So I was glad the writers made the decision to avoid that revelation altogether (in a way that felt believable to me, since it was something her mother was deliberately keeping from her), so Paige could instead confront something much more difficult and nuanced than "Murder is bad" -- namely, the fact that she'd spent her whole teenage life trying to bring a sense of normalcy to a life that could never be normal. (And, yes, the fact that spies have to murder people is a part of why that's the case, but bringing that issue to the forefront would've inevitably drowned out everything else.)
1 hour ago, Umbelina said:As a series finale? It's only about a B-or maybe even a C+ for me.
There is no real ending here. Every single character on screen was left with several possible futures, from the horrible to the mundane and back up to maybe even happy ones. It's a "write your own ending" ending.
Oleg may be released or not. Paige may go to prison or not. Stan may be arrested or not. Henry may stay in school or not. Philip and Elizabeth may be killed by the Coup people or may go on to be miserable in Russia, or may do well in the "new Russia" to come, absolutely any of these possibilities are easy to imagine. Renee may be a spy, or not, she may get caught or not.
They gave not a single glimmer or closure for the show. It's just another day in the life of the characters, all facing possible ruin...or not.
I dunno, I feel like Philip and Elizabeth's resolution is pretty definitive. They were the Russians trying to adjust to life in America, and now they're the Americans trying to adjust to life in Russia. Whatever happens, they'll get through it together, because they've lived the same story before. It's the end because it's the beginning.
Certainly, some of the other character get a less definitive ending -- particularly Oleg. But it's not like they ran out of time or something; it just wouldn't make narrative sense to continue the supporting characters' storylines beyond the end of the main characters'. And even the characters that didn't get closure per se were brought to a meaningfully new place, from Paige giving up her quixotic quest for normalcy, to Stan setting aside conscience-salving distractions for the first time to be there for someone he loves. Even Oleg completes his transformation from devil-may-care playboy to doomed defender of what's right, while his father confronts the most crushing limits of his ability to wave his influence at every problem and make it go away.
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16 minutes ago, MJ Frog said:
I honestly don't remember -- was that what led them to the priest? Or was it the other tattletale priest? Why did they end up talking to the older priest? He led them to the other priest, who inadvertently brought them to Philip.
They surveilled Harvest meeting with a Russian Orthodox priest in Chicago, which prompted them to investigate the priests in Chicago. Father Victor was the one who first aroused their suspicions, since he was being promoted over more experienced priests and was close with the metropolitan (sort of like the local archbishop, I think), and the CIA told them this meant he had KGB connections. But it turned out Victor was just super devout, which is why he ratted out the priest who actually did have KGB connections.
Interestingly, this season wasn't the first time we'd heard about Father Victor and his rivalry with Father Andrei. Andrei had his own rant about Victor in his first meeting with Philip:
"Father Victor was out again last Tuesday and Wednesday, very late. He came back both times drunk. I know he's been seeing the Frenchman. . . . His Eminence the Metropolitan is listening to Father Victor more and more. I've seen them meeting in private. I know what you'll think. That I'm looking out for myself, my position. That I'm jealous. I'm not. I'm telling you what's going on so you can protect yourselves."
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4 minutes ago, Bannon said:
For years now, because Martha's landlord has provided a sketch and description of Clark, I've been waiting for Stan to figure out that Phil is likely Clark, once Stan figured out that Phil was KGB. From there, any trained investigator who could beat my dog at checkers would think it a very strong likelihood that Phil was involved in Amador's murder, because A. Amador was murdered in reasonably close proximity to Martha's apartment, and B. Stan knew of Amador's romantic/sexual interest in Martha.
No one knows where Amador was murdered, though. He was stabbed outside Martha's apartment, but then Philip threw him in his trunk and took him to a safe house, where he died some time later. Gregory's people then dumped his body in an alley somewhere. The only thing connecting him to Martha is that the two of them once dated, which is a whole long series of logical leaps away from "I bet he was stalking his ex-girlfriend and came upon her KGB lover and he murdered her and framed one of his agents for it."
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4 minutes ago, Erin9 said:
He didn’t know Philip did that. I know you think he should have. I don’t. It was laid at Gregory’s feet IIRC. Which worked then and now for me.
Agreed. Especially since Stan wasn't like, "Lalala, I bet they never killed anyone." He does confront them over a horrific murder that was unusually personal for him, it's just not that particular one. And I never got the impression that he believed them when they insisted they'd never been involved in the deaths of Sofia and Gennadi and the numerous others "killed by Soviet agents here in Washington." He was moved more, I think, by Paige's incongruous apology for all the murder, and by Philip's insistence, largely the truth, that he doesn't do that sort of thing anymore.
And it's not like Stan just concluded that these horrible murders didn't matter and that's why he let them go. His decision was bound up in so much else -- Paige's plea for him to take care of Henry, the fact that they were going to make him shoot them, the geopolitical concerns raised by Philip that echoed his earlier conversation with Oleg -- that I absolutely believe the weight of all of it could've motivated him to make the choice he did.
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The "Here Comes the Flood" montage from the season 2 episode "The Walk-In" is rife with material that gets called back to later. As I mentioned in the finale thread, there's a part where Elizabeth lights up a cigarette for the first time since Gregory's death, then burns the letter Leanne left for her son, echoing the "smoking = shutting out family" motif suggested by Elizabeth's cigarette-puffing "I don't want a kid anyway" declaration in the final flashback/dream sequence. In keeping with all that, the S2 montage also includes a bit where young Elizabeth is tending to baby Paige and looking none too sure about the whole motherhood thing.
Paige's own character arc gets a bookending reference in the same montage: we see that she's able to sneak out for her first church group meeting because her dad is distracted developing photos of submarine components in the basement. Thus, Paige's religious phase begins and ends with a symbolic baptism in her parents' secret darkroom.
Another interesting bit of foreshadowing is in the season 5 premiere, where Hans is murdered and buried in William's grave after being infected with the deadly Lassa virus. That's echoed in the finale, when Henry's fake passport is buried in the ground with the vestiges of his parents' old lives, along with Liz's necklace containing another deadly agent. It sort of does work as a rough symbolic parallel -- Henry infected, like Hans, by something from the life they were burying, which meant that, sad as it was, they couldn't let him follow and had to bury him as well.
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2 hours ago, Erin9 said:For a girl that feared loneliness, I also don’t think she wanted to leave Henry without any family. She kept talking about him. That was a deciding factor too. That also made her decision less shocking.
I definitely think that was a big part of her decision. It's also what made that decision so significant: she chose to defy her parents and embrace her worst fear instead of being the compliant follower she usually is.
It seems to me that one of the main reason Paige is such a follower is because she's so desperate to normalize all the shitty things in her life, to convince herself that what she's going through is just the regular stuff that everyone goes through. She joins a church group because a girl she met on a bus tells her that's what kids with screwed-up families do. She gloms on to Pastor Tim and Alice because they strike her as the attentive, socially responsible family she wants her parents to be. Even when she embraces her parents' profession, it's because she imagines it as this incongruously domestic institution where she'll find herself a nice husband just like her mom did.
And this is where I go back to what I've been harping on for most of the season, how Claudia has been trying to show Paige that the life of a true Russian patriot is full of suffering and loneliness, and that's what makes it noble and good. I've dwelled a lot on the fact that Elizabeth has stood in the way of Claudia's lessons by obfuscating the shady and unpleasant parts of their work (see the honeypot conversation). But I realize now that Paige herself is enabling that obfuscation -- because, yes, she wants to know the truth that Elizabeth is hiding from her, but yet again she wants that truth to be something not uncomfortably far from normal. She wants Elizabeth to admit that honeypotting is a thing . . . but she wants it to be a thing where she sleeps with a nice congressional intern she likes and also she gets information from him in some harmless way.
What happens in the finale, I think, is that Paige finally accepts that none of this is ever going to be normal. What's the one thing Elizabeth tells her about talking to Henry on the phone? "You have to act completely normal on the phone. Like nothing's happening." And she can't do it. Nor can she keep following her parents around, as if fleeing to a whole new country on a stolen passport could ever be just a thing a girl from a screwed-up family does. So she goes back to drink vodka alone in Claudia's safe house as Tchaikovsky plays, the music of a "life full of loneliness." She's finally embraced Claudia's lessons; she's no longer deluding herself that she'll have the not-far-from-ordinary life Elizabeth kept insisting she would.
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29 minutes ago, Umbelina said:
Safe Houses are for more than that. Roaming handler's like Claudia use them as well. Remember how quickly Gabe was able to relocate after the bio-poisoning incident. Handlers like Gabe and Claudia don't stay in one place. They are not embedded spies posing as Americans. They are Soviet Citizens and KGB running their Officers. Each place had plenty to get by on, but not a single personal touch.
Yeah, Paige herself actually noticed this when her parents introduced her to Gabriel last season:
"He doesn't live there, does he?"
"No."
"There weren't any pictures anywhere."
"It's a place we can all meet safely."And we did in fact see where one of the handlers really lived in season 2, when Larrick traced the phone system to Kate's apartment. She didn't have any photos that I could see, but the place was much more lived-in than Gabriel's or Claudia's safe house, with books and knickknacks and general clutter everywhere. Claudia probably had a place like that somewhere, where she retired to when she wasn't meeting with her officers.
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33 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:
Philby also benefited hugely from class bias in MI-6 from what I've read. Plenty of Americans and MI-5 agents were screaming that he was a spy long before he was finally allowed to escape but since he was part of the upper class MI-6 didn't believe it. Plus the head of the CIA at the time was an anglophile who was pretty much an honorary Oxbridge upper class Englishman too.
Yep. The mole hunt in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is based on this same idea, since John le Carré was one of the intelligence agents betrayed by Philby. When I read le Carré's original novel, I was stunned that unlike the miniseries and film adaptations of Tinker, which treat the search for the mole as a whodunit, the book is basically about how everyone knew in their hearts all along who the mole was, but they just couldn't accept it, because he represented everything most right and proper in British society that they found lacking in themselves.
In that way it's sort of like The Americans, in that the spy thriller elements are subordinated to a more interior struggle between the patriotic spies / spy hunters and the social structures that both motivate and alienate them.
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31 minutes ago, Bannon said:
That's right. Amador was killed in episode 9, and Zhukov episide 11, of season1. It makes no sense that Stan doesn't immediately grasp the likelihood of Phil being Clark, and having killed Amador.
But it's not like Amador's death was a hanging thread for him. Gregory was implicated in the murder via Amador's ring and the (planted) blood evidence. Stan already told Aderholt that he suspected an indirect connection to his partner's death, since he thinks Elizabeth was Gregory's girlfriend, but I don't think "What if it was really Philip instead of Gregory?" was some burning question hanging over him.
And Stan did confront the Jenningses about the unsolved murder that was the most raw and personal for him, the deaths of Sofia and Gennadi. I was totally fine with that being the avenue by which Stan worked through that particular element of the Jenningses' betrayal.
21 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:Yeah, but, wasn't that the guy we were discussing who was listed as the airline guest in Imdb? The guy is a movie producer in his 40's-50's....it looked like the photo of him online. The other guest were ignored.
Extras aren't listed with any consistency on IMDb. Since they're not in the on-screen credits and they don't usually have agents or publicists to flog their work, I think it's up to each individual extra to submit his/her appearances to the database. I assume some do and others don't bother.
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29 minutes ago, KBrownie said:I hope it is. If true, he probably feels that his character and everything he stood for was demolished.
You know, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Noah Emmerich did not really write a snotty note telling the showrunners he wishes they hadn't given him a job for five years, then leak it to the press the day after their series' final episode debuted to wide critical acclaim.
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18 minutes ago, hellmouse said:
- Interview with Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (Sepinwall/Uproxx): ‘The Americans’ Creators Explain (And Don’t Explain) The Show’s Emotional Finale
Great interview. I laughed out loud at this part:
QuoteIs there a particular song you always had on the want list that either the band never agreed to it, or you just could never find a good place to use it, that you really wish could’ve been in the show somehow?
Fields: For this season, I would have said that we always wanted Talking Heads in the show, but could never find the right sequence, but we did. Twice. So, we got to tick that off The Americans bucket list.
Weisberg: Well, what’s the woman who wouldn’t let us put the song in because the show was too violent?
Fields: I don’t even want to talk about that.
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5 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:
Not true. When they got married they both used their full names. Also Russian names don't work like that. If you know someone you use a shorter version of their name, unless you're making a point in some way. He should have called them either Mikhail and Nadyezhda or Mischa and Nadia.
Unless it was meant to indicate that he was closer to Mischa than to Nadezhda.
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3 minutes ago, echo.Echo.ECHO said:
So does Renee still have an interview next Wednesday?
I mean, it'll be clear enough come Wednesday right? Either she'll go through with it and her background check will come out clean, or she'll find an excuse to beg out of it and Stan will know that Philip was right.
That's what I meant when I said that I think the Renee thing is meant to indicate Stan's priorities rather than some long-term decision to be okay with his wife maybe being a spy. The Renee thing will still be there the next day; Henry needs his love and support now, and for once Stan is able to put all the other shit aside and just be there for him.
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Correct me if I'm wrong -- after Elizabeth muses that she could've managed a factory, doesn't she say something to Philip like "You might have m--" and then stops herself? I wondered if she was going to ponder whether Philip might've married Irina, but realized she didn't want to go there.
Edited to add: On rewatch, it's more of a pause and then an "Mmh" than an unspoken word starting with m. Even so, to me it still seems more like she's deliberately stopping herself from considering Philip's potential other path than that she can't think of anything to say about it.
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3 minutes ago, SeanC said:A surprisingly straightforward ending, after all that.
Yep. I'm surprised that I'm surprised by that. I was guessing all sorts of spy-thriller plot twists and dramatic endings for various characters, but that's never been what the show was about.
QuoteOnce Philip raised his suspicion to Stan about his wife, the endgame for that became really clear to me, i.e., it's meant to be a lingering thing that Stan will be stuck wondering about. Poor Stan.
I saw it more as a chance for Stan to rethink his priorities. He could've obsessed about the investigation across the street and snooping after his maybe-Russkie wife, but he left all that behind to be there for Henry when he needed him most. It's the first time, I think, that we've seen him running toward something instead of running away from things.
Loved Gregory's dream cameo, and a surprisingly coherent explanation for what smoking has meant to Elizabeth all along: the shutting out of family. I just watched the episode from season 2 where Elizabeth lights up a cigarette for the first time since season 1 -- and burns the letter Leanne wrote for her son.
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17 hours ago, Dev F said:
One possibility that occurred to me: If Renee is actually a spy for the Centre, and she exposes herself to the Jenningses in order to help them escape, I could imagine Philip deciding that he can't let Stan become another Martha and secretly arranging for her to be killed (maybe by poisoning her with Elizabeth's cyanide capsule?) -- defying the interests of his own people to do one last service for his friend that Stan will never realize.
Wait, no, new prediction: Elizabeth is the one who poisons Renee, because she realizes how much it would destroy Philip to know that she's out there turning another person he cares about into a doomed puppet. Not only would Liz be symbolically killing the most ruthless and heartless part of herself, but she'd be paying Philip back for his actions in the pilot, when he gave up his dreams of defecting to quell his wife's pain by killing Timoshev.
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17 minutes ago, Bannon said:
It is bad writing, no matter what Renee does or does not do in this final episode, and really, really, bizarre casting. I would be interested in hearing from Laurie Holden as to how the role was described to her. Why didn't the producers save some money by hiring a 40ish attractive unknown actor, who would work for scale? There are likely hundreds of actors who could have played this nothing part, without any difference noticed by the audience.
I would imagine the writers didn't want someone who'd just play "nothing part," but someone who would be able to pull off "behaving in a way that seems vaguely suspicious, but maybe it's all in our imaginations." It hasn't been a hugely rewarding role up to this point, but it hasn't been an easy role, either. A lesser actress could've easily screwed up the balance one way or another, making her seem either so innocuous that it's insane for Philip or us to wonder whether she's a spy, or so obviously a plant that Stan looks like a complete idiot for not realizing.
And certainly the fact that Laurie Holden is probably best known for playing a maybe friendly, maybe devious informant on The X-Files plays in to what the producers have been trying to accomplish with the character.
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12 minutes ago, icemiser69 said:
Was Renee brought on to the series before it was announced that this was the last season of the series?
Nope. In 2016, The Americans was renewed for two final seasons of thirteen episodes and ten episodes, respectively, and then Renee was introduced in the second episode of what the writers knew was their second-to-last season.
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4 minutes ago, Ina123 said:
I agree. I question that if she is KGB why has there been no contact between P and E and her ...unless it has been behind the scenes?
The show has made it clear that if Renee is a spy, P&E don't know about it. And unless Gabriel was lying at the exact moment when he was being most honest with Philip, he didn't know either. The idea seems to be that if she's an operative at all, she's been compartmentalized away from P&E and their handlers.
QuoteAnd I still think it would be crap to have not only Stan's best friends be spies, but his wife also.
But it's not like it's some wacky coincidence. Philip suspects that the Centre created a honeypot for Stan based on the Jenningses' reports on him over the years. (Presumably it would also be based on Nina's reports, but I don't think Philip knows about those.) If Stan married yet another KGB agent, it's because the people who knew him most intimately ensured that Renee would be just what he was looking for.
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On 5/27/2018 at 9:43 PM, sistermagpie said:
I think the reason I didn't see it before was I don't quite see it as being about teaching about spying. It's more just who they are. They're slightly different things. So, for instance, when I think of who's tried to prepare Paige for the uglier parts of spying at least a little I think of neither Claudia nor Elizabeth--I think of Philip. He deals with that aspect so directly that it's hard to think of anyone else more committed to it (not that he's that committed himself). He's the one who tries to talk to her about seeing horrible things, tries to lead her to the obvious fact that the General was murdered and warns her against thinking her fighting techniques make her invincible.
True, but the difference is that Philip is trying to get her to think about these things so she'll stop wanting to be a spy. Which of course requires less of a delicate touch than what I think Claudia is doing.
QuoteIf Paige had more of Claudia's attitude she would absolutely be more suited to spying, but looking back I think the whole idea that these scenes are about teaching was an illusion. They're more about three different women from three different generations expressing themselves and mistakenly assuming they all get it. Claudia celebrates Tchaikovsky's loneliness and Elizabeth celebrates constant fighting to combat fear. Paige's perspective is nothing like either.
It's in later eps like Harvest and now Jennings, Elizabeth that we see just how central loneliness is to *Paige*. But far from being something she's embraced via Claudia, it's her biggest fear--and I don't think there's anything Elizabeth could have done about that because Paige will never look at her mother and see a life of suffering and loneliness. Her mother has Philip.
As I said before, looking back at the series now that's always been the thing Paige seems most fascinated with: her parents' marriage. She wants that intimacy, just as she admitted to Elizabeth in Harvest. She doesn't want to be Tchaikovsky (who I believe was gay so specifically denied a happy love life). On the contrary, she's gotten it into her head that this life is the ticket to true love because that's the example she grew up with. Nothing Claudia could say could destroy that idea.
That's a really good and really interesting way of looking at it. I'm not sure, though, that I see it as a mutually exclusive way of looking at it. Because, yes, we're dealing with women from three generations, one who's Soviet to the core, one who was raised in Russia but spent the past twenty years in the West with her American family, and one who's never known anything but an American way of life. And, yes, it's going to be impossible for Paige to ever come all the way around to Claudia's point of view. But that's why I think Elizabeth's failures with Paige are so significant -- because she's the one who could serve as a bridge between the oldest generation and the youngest, between the Russian world and the American one, since she's got one foot in each world.
I just keep coming back to that initial honeypotting conversation, and wondering how the entire arc of Paige's education could've been different if Elizabeth hadn't been so dead set on protecting her from a reality that she already knew about -- that she arguably had suspected for years. I don't see Paige as fundamentally closed to the idea of using sex in tradecraft; indeed, since she subsequently broaches the subject in relation to Brian the intern, I think she's trying to work out how these scary, alien ideas might fit into her own life. That's exactly the thing that Elizabeth can help her with in a way Claudia can't (since presumably Grannie doesn't do much honeypotting nowadays), but Elizabeth refuses to do it.
But this may just be a matter of interpretive preference on my part. I'm always apt to look for a linear narrative wherever possible (because the character made X choice, the outcome was Y) rather than something closer to portraiture (because of circumstance A, the inevitable outcome was B). But there's certainly room for the latter as well, especially with the generational dynamics you laid out in this particular instance.
On 5/28/2018 at 3:57 PM, SlovakPrincess said:I would be fine with Renee not being mentioned in the series finale at all. It is far too late for me to give a crap, show!! I just want to focus on the fate of P and E and their kids and poor sweet Oleg and how Stan feels about his best buddy turning out to be a spy -- the Stan and Philip relationship means for more to me, quite frankly, than anything to do with Renee.
I can't imagine that Renee's role in the finale will just be about her as a standalone character. Presumably she'll be used to make some final statement about how Stan's friendship with Philip and his other experiences over the course of the series have either helped him to find a partner with whom he can share both his life and his career the way he's always wanted, or doomed him to hook up with yet another KGB operative.
One possibility that occurred to me: If Renee is actually a spy for the Centre, and she exposes herself to the Jenningses in order to help them escape, I could imagine Philip deciding that he can't let Stan become another Martha and secretly arranging for her to be killed (maybe by poisoning her with Elizabeth's cyanide capsule?) -- defying the interests of his own people to do one last service for his friend that Stan will never realize.
7 minutes ago, Umbelina said:Yes, the Soviets would have had a hit man/squad take him out normally. That said, it certainly implies that Tatiana was in on the Coup, that would be the only real reason to choose her, to keep it among those that want Gorbachev disgraced, discredited, out, or dead.
Which is in keeping with what's already been established about Tatiana, since in season 4 she was working with Directorate S authorities above Arkady's head on dangerous bioweapons projects that were actually for offensive rather than defensive purposes.
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22 hours ago, Umbelina said:
Maybe they only needed North for one episode, they got the whole gist of the character and tactics then. Maybe they didn't like working with North, so they didn't pull him in as consultant on other episodes. Too many options to guess at really.
Oh, I don't think there's any connection between the number of episodes the actual Oliver North worked on and the number of episodes the character of Oliver North was scheduled to appear in. My point was, the casting notice for the character wouldn't have indicated that he was going to appear in a single episode with only the potential of a guest arc later if he was originally the proto-Larrick antagonist for the entire season.
As for the real Ollie North, the sense I got was that he consulted on the entire Contra storyline, not any one particular episode, and that they gave him a story credit on the most Contra-heavy episode essentially as a courtesy. In any event, he and the producers apparently parted on good terms, to the point that North later did press for the season out of the series' production offices.
7 hours ago, TimWil said:Motorcyclist-20s-40s. Male. MUST SPEAK FLUENT (NATIVE) RUSSIAN. Badly injured and in need of medical attention after his motorcycle crashes on a quiet road. ONE LINE. IN RUSSIAN.
Note: This particular casting breakdown was for Episode #603 (Season 6, Episode 3) which was shot in mid November but the character didn’t actually appear until this past
Wednesday’s #609, which was shot in late February. Hmmm. I wonder if that flashback of Elizabeth back in the USSR was meant to be used earlier as a counterpoint to some other situation much earlier in the season?
Very interesting. "Urban Transport Planning" indeed.
This strengthens my belief that the painting in Erica's bedroom that haunts Elizabeth was meant to represent the disapproving look of young Liz's trainer after she left her comrade to die in the street. Obviously, that connection would've been much clearer if we'd seen the training scenes before most of the stuff with the painting.
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23 minutes ago, WatchrTina said:
We saw a rotting corpse that was supposed to be Ford's (with his head blown away and full of maggots -- courtesy of Dolores + a week in the hot sun) so I don't think he WAS a 'bot in Season 1.
Well, presumably there was a virtual version of Ford somewhere during the time frame of season 1. I doubt he waited until he was dead to activate the virtual version in the Cradle -- he'd at least have to make sure it worked and test it for fidelity, right? But, yeah, unless there's some double-triple-secret twist still upcoming, it's most likely that the Ford we saw live and die was the original human version.
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S06.E10: START
in The Americans [V]
· Edited by Dev F
I guess I still don't understand why we should by default think she was paying attention to the local news. To me that seems based on a particular reading of the character -- that she'd become this ideologically committed Communist with the deep interest in politics and current events -- that the series never validated. Certainly the reading that I ended up landing on, which sees Paige as a profoundly traumatized person who embraced a sanitized version of her parents' profession as the latest codependent way of mitigating her sense of weakness and loneliness, suggests a character who would in fact not go looking for sources of information outside her protective sphere of "honest" people she depends on for reassurance.
And Philip admits that. "It was all just screwing people for . . . I don't even know for what." When he says "We finally . . . we actually got something," he's talking about seeing an upside for the first time, but he always saw the downside.
And of course it's also true that he was sanitizing things by not admitting to anything more egregious than "screwing people" and "recruiting Americans." The showrunners have talked about how of course Stan wasn't going to let them go if they just shrugged and said, "Oh, sure, we killed a whole buncha people." Philip is deliberately not telling the whole truth, but what he does share is very close to what he truly believes. So it's hard for me to consider it "one hundred percent manipulation."
Arkady warned Igor of that possibility after Oleg was arrested, when he thought there was now no way to expose the hardliners' treachery. Philip and Elizabeth returning home with the information Oleg was supposed to obtain resolves that concern. Plus, we know that the conspirators didn't succeed in moving against their enemies, because the series reflects real history, and Gorbachev was not in fact deposed in 1987 for ceding Russian military secrets to the Americans.
As for more speculative concerns like "What if the CIA tries to kill them?" I don't know why we need to account for possibilities the series never invited us to consider. Indeed, unless the show ended with Philip and Elizabeth's deaths, I can't imagine a situation in which it would be impossible to imagine them getting killed in some retaliatory operation by one side or the other. So I don't know why the chosen ending should be considered a failure for not foreclosing outcomes that virtually no possible ending would foreclose.
The assassination attempt was never supposed to a secret, though. The whole point of the conspiracy was to admit that the KGB killed Nesterenko but lie about why he was killed. So of course Gorbachev was going to learn that his negotiator was targeted and thus realize that some plot was afoot, but it wouldn't provide him with a specific defense against what they were planning.