BingeyKohan

After hearing so much about this "Woman in White" AND Adora talking about trying to save the dead girl from a life spent playing in the woods and coming home dirty it's now impossible to miss the fact that Patricia Clarkson is dressed all in white in the show's branding. Of course, the second episode is way too early to point us in the right direction. But clearly we're supposed to think she's TWiW?

I have watched Amy Adams in the Man of Steel/Batman Vs Superman/Justice League trilogy more times than I care to admit - and this is probably an unfair comparison since Lois Lane and Camille have little in common besides being newspaper reporters - but it's striking how much more compelling and believable Adams is here as a reporter. And as a human. Maybe I'm thinking specifically of how waxen she looked in Justice League (even seeming to wear a wig for some reason) but I love how natural she and unaffected she is in this. I read somewhere that because of scheduling oddities she filmed all her scenes first, which may explain why they largely take place in Camille's car, gazing in curiosity and horror through her windshield. but she even makes those pack a lot of punch. Someone upthread mentioned the monstrosity of Adora taking a break from cradling Amma to chastise Camille. I wonder though if Adora too (deep down) knows that Amma is full of sh*t so she knew both the Amma fit and her own soothing of it were all just for show anyway. I am both creeped out and captivated by Elizabeth Perkins' character. I think now we'll just watch everybody and size up whether they're capable of pulling teeth with a pair of pliers. I also notice we have not yet been exposed to the conditions at Adora's hog-slaughtering operation and I am fine with putting that off as long as possible.

I may read too much NY mag but they ALSO posted a piece on this annoying phenomenon. You’re not alone!

From New York mag - all the words and phrases hidden in plain sight throughout the first episode: http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/sharp-objects-all-the-hidden-words-you-missed.html

Vulture/New York magazine (which promises to be obsessed with this show, from coverage so far) posted a piece identifying all the embedded words we "may have missed" in the first episode. (I'll post link in media thread) True to form, I missed almost all of them. I do think it might have been clearer that this would be a tendency of the adult Camille if the young Camille seemed to be a word collector, or muttered a word here and there to stick a "label" on something she noticed. Unless I missed her doing that? It also makes me reconsider Elizabeth Perkins' muttering "beauty, beauty, beauty" at Camille as she walked away from her in the search party scene. That was almost another form of a word being imprinted, except verbally rather than physically.

Ha, I wondered this too - I was like, is that some sort of St Louis tourism campaign that only people who live in or have visited St Louis would get? They think you might change your mind about ever leaving once you've been there? I read reviews, though, that suggested this was a tip-off that we're very much seeing things from Camille's POV. Not sure how I feel about a magical realism overlay - and it also makes it seem like The Affair, except with not other, counterbalancing perspective to compare against. In the opening dream, where Camille and her sister sneak into their own house and creep up the stairs, trying to evade notice, do we see the stepfather in the living room, examining a record album, just like he does in the later, actual scene? I was confused about how long he and Adora have been married, and if he was around when Camille was younger, or that was just dream logic, kind of half dream and half premonition.

Folks seem to think Angel is in danger from Stan but I’m more concerned about Matt. I’m afraid they’re going to do a replay of Jason Alexander in Pretty Woman thinking Vivian was fair game because she was a prostitute. I think Matt is going to figure out where Stan’s kept woman is kept and go after her since he already tried and failed with Patty.

I seem to remember that Gregory did actually have a lot of art in his apartment, so I liked that seeing his art and having it transition to "her" art was an important facet of the dream sequence. In the pilot, the Jennings catch sight of the Beemans moving in; in the finale, the Beemans watch the Jennings being moved out. It's often been Elizabeth driving the car at key moments so I liked that she was the one who got to drive them across the border. Stan confronting the Jennings in a garage was a pretty clear tie back to the pilot, his snooping around their garage. I also thought it was notable Elizabeth's final disguise (which would have been long planned) so closely mirrored the Stephanie disguise, the alter she was using the time she really kind of discovered herself. The way Paige was framed in the train window really was like a painting, and the way Elizabeth was framed in the window from Paige's POV was another painting (similar to an Erika creation), two wildly different portraits of women, definitely compositions neither of them will ever be able to unsee, so they'll live on like paintings.

I went into the finale thinking they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't around Renee but damned if I didn't think it totally worked, how they treated it. That last, ambiguous shot of her watching the unpacking of the Jennings house - was that pity, contempt, triumph, relief? My personal interpretation is she's the most hardline one of them all and she thought even Elizabeth was soft, so that look was full of 'you effing idiots, I'll stay here and soldier on alone,' mixed with 'yep, that's what American lives come to, boxes of crap being carried out of your cozy little house.' Don't even ask what I think might have been up with her car in the trailer, I can't make that one work out.

Finales are so difficult to comment on - like Paige maybe it's more sensible to jump off the train a couple of stops early and let it go on without you. But I do need to process losing the family. Like Mad Men, I think this will become a show I can revisit with random episodes Sunday afternoon for quite a while. I loved how they upended expectations and roles all the way until the end. I didn't necessarily expect the major confrontation to come in Act I but it was perfect, and perfect that it was in a garage, repository of all Stan's suspicions. If there was any sense of the Renee tease having been "earned" it came as the coup de grace from Philip that I felt really allowed them to get away without Stan shooting at the car - his mind had just been thoroughly blown, already having heard them evoke the same save-the-world language as Oleg, who he knows to be essentially good. (I didn't know Laurie Holden before this show so her casting didn't feel to me portentous of some big scenes they were saving her for; she could have been cast on the strength of her unreadable expressions alone.) I have to give credit for the character of Henry and his ability to wield so much emotional power with so little screen time. Just hearing Philip, Elizabeth, or Paige say his name felt like a gut punch, in ways scenes with the actual actor (nothing against him) wouldn't have been able to accomplish. He was more of an idea than a character, which isn't a criticism. He unwittingly got a great line: "You better let Mom drive home." She did! Other things I loved (with sadness): the look on Paige's face when she sat down on the bench on the train platform, finally free; Elizabeth throwing the cyanide locket in the identity pit; the way Philip succeeded with Stan the way he spied, finding the truth in the lies; Elizabeth bewildered by art; seeing them come full circle, and arrive back home as newlyweds. It wasn't perfect, but it was never going to be - we wanted the moon but like Elizabeth once told Henry the moon isn't everything.

I am legit nervous for tonight. It's like anticipating a movie I've waited years to come out, and a dentist appointment, and a funeral, and a big vacation, and a visit with a long-lost relative, and a surprise party I sort of know about but am unsure when it might happen, all at the same time.

Like the beginning (and end) of "Love, Actually" - I wish! It is the Christmas season in the Jennings universe!

Ha! Her first day at the FBI she puts metal in the microwave and it blows up on her. That's the last scene.

Ha! Also, a middle of the night snowstorm on Staten Island - although I think they didn't necessarily want it to be snowing for the scene, it just happened to be so they either went with it or waited it out. I am someone who has even scoured the #theamericans hashtag on Instagram for random people posting pictures of what's been filmed in their neighborhood but I haven't spotted anything we haven't already seen.

I'd noticed that too - reading up on that 'actor' it seems like he's an entertainment exec so I interpreted it to mean he got a vanity walk-on part in the finale as a courtesy. But to your larger point, it does indicate there is an airplane or airport scene. Maybe Oleg and/or Nesterenko going home? Maybe Claudia? Maybe Arkady coming here?

Hmmmm I’m going to stick to my story (why not) that in the S6 trailer we’re seeing Renee’s Jeep outside the garage he’s saying this in. Maybe to her? Or the Jeep outside the garage is a red herring (like Renee herself) and Stan was driving her car that day? I’d imagined the binoculars being outdoors, and he’s watching a Henry retrieval spot. Maybe he doesn’t yet know Paige is in on it and he’s realizing?

I think a lot of us are probably correct on guessing storytelling intent but few of us (especially not me because my guesses tend to be very specific) are right on execution. For example I predicted in Jennings, Elizabeth we would see Elizabeth watching Nesterenko (easy guess) and that’d we’d see her see an assassin approach (correct). I predicted it would be Tuan (way wrong). But I feel I was somewhat right on storytelling intent, since even if not Tuan I guessed for dramatic impact the assassin would be someone we (viewers) recognized on sight. I don’t think Tatiana would have occurred to me, though. My latest too specific to be viable theory is that the reason the writers had Stan and Henry talk about Aunt Helen is that the Jennings will go there rather than New Hampshire, and Stan will realize that and be able to track them somehow. Doesn’t hold up much under scrutiny but the storytelling intent behind it is I don’t see Stan being just one of a bunch of agents getting to them at the same time. He needs special time alone with them so the story has to make that work somehow.

Claudia mentioned it by name in Summit so it’s on their radar. I think it (START) will get a passing reference as subtext and the traditional meaning of ‘start’ (no acronym) will be the text.

Predictions: bold, maybe final (likely wrong) Renee gets apprehended trying to approach one of the garages under surveillance. She tries to explain it away but the combo of being married to a now suspicious Renee and the obviously suspicious Jennings are enough to get Stan off the case. As in barred from it. So any steps to reach the Jennings himself (to talk them into surrendering) are extrajudicial. The final choices come down to: is disappointing your kid a fate worse than death? The scales haven’t all fallen from Paige’s eyes. One way they could is by a parent (likely Philip) following the impulse to kill Stan, right in front of her. He does, they’re free, but lose Paige and Henry forever.

You’re right, and I bet we get some exposition about that in the P and E rendezvous scene. If they had access to their full network maybe they had an operative in place in New Hampshire to get Henry out with a compelling cover story. Maybe the woman Philip talked to on the sidelines of the game earlier this season is like a hockey Aunt Helen, there for Topsy Turvey On Ice! ’we’re in the penalty box. Gonna have to be an away game’

Since it set the tone for the season I was just looking back over the lyrics for ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over.’ The lines you’ll never see the end of the road while you’re traveling with me seem very poignant now. As she looks around at her family, it feels like that would be Elizabeth’s point of view on things. Another I've been thinking about, not referenced on the show: From Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, about the doomed Charlotte Douglas. "She lost one child to 'history' and another to 'complications.'" I think it will apply to one or the other of the Jennings (which I guess is a way of saying I fear only one gets out alive). And losing a child doesn't mean the child has died. Philip has two sons, and could lose both, one to history (Mischa), another to complications (Henry). Elizabeth could lose one child to history (Paige, to the history she's evoked in her training, and their fraught history of lies), and another to complications (Henry, to the impossibility of reconciling his American lifestyle with however Elizabeth ends up living). I'm sad for this family we've come to care about.

I’m actually a little excited to see how Stan behaves next week. He’s not totally at the center of the investigation. He’s more an extra set of hands with a vested interest. (They don’t know quite how vested.) That gives him some freedom to maneuver. He’s the one who can really think, what would Phil do? It’s on his mind they abandoned their kid recently, over Thanksgiving. He’s going to zig where other agents zag, I think. He could be the only one who knows they likely won’t go to New Hampshire precisely because they’ll be expected to. I’m not sure how he’d figure out where they would go, unless Oleg has some insight. But he may be the only one in position where they end up.

Another star in the constellation of things the finale is maybe too short to fully deliver on! If we’d ever imagined how Henry would react learning the truth now his reaction (if it’s shown) will come under extreme duress. Oh, you’re spies? Oh, Paige has known for years? Oh, I have to leave my life behind? Oh, we’re in extreme danger? I have a hard time imagining them writing that scene so the only alternative I can imagine is there’s not a version of it.

I guess I’d have to know more about what P&E think their options are at this point to feel confident about a prediction, but it seems to me even the best-case scenario for their escape is worse for Henry than for anyone. Maybe it’s more a Stella Dallas comparison I’m making but I could imagine them deciding hurting him now at least guarantees him an American life.

I’m starting to think they won’t actually go after Henry - they’ll do the hard calculation he’s better off not having known anything. It’s like they’ve made a Sophie’s Choice in slow motion all these years and chose to save Henry.