S02.E09: Martial Eagle

[snorca]

 

It's so odd to find yourself rooting for P&E, knowing that they are murderous monsters

While I don't condone violence or murder, in their eyes, the Americans are the murderous monsters. They are doing what they believe is right in accordance with their country and beliefs. And I have to say, when it comes to the Reagan administration, I have to agree with them! Both sides were involved in some awful, dark, shady shit. I find myself pulling for them for many reasons...I really like both actors...the writing, acting and production of this series is fantastic and they are the central characters in the story. I know more about them than anyone else and I like them.

[SeanC]

Where is Paige supposed to gotten this money?  $600 USD circa 1981 is $1,570 USD today.  That's an absurd amount of money for somebody Paige's age to have -- either she was saving a bunch of money on a really good summer job, or she has an obscenely large allowance, or both.

[Emme]

Glad I'm not the only one who's confused about what happened to the poor truck driver. Interesting to see the infamous Oliver North get a screen credit.

I don't know if Philip's right when he says that Elizabeth finds it easier, but she's certainly much better at it, possibly because she's very, very good at channeling her own personal experiences into whatever character she's posing as. I imagine that could be somewhat therapeutic in a weird way.

The scene with the priest=Matthew Rhys' Emmy reel.

Almost every scene Rhys is in could go on his Emmy reel... Pissed he was shut out tho year - hope 2015 is his year!

Edited July 21, 2014 by Emme

[ToxicUnicorn]

Another great guest star in the pastor, I thought.  It was interesting to see how reactive and empathetic he was, in contrast to all these other repressed, egoistic, or deluded individuals.  

 

I had a hard time with the raid, in the sense that I could not believe P&E would be sent on that kind of mission.  I would have preferred it if they had given them some new team members, rather than pretending they were action stars.  The entire appeal of watching them, for me, is because their spy work is so cerebral, which necessitates the kind of compartmentalization that posters upthread were mentioning.

 

The Sandra-Stan confrontation was very welcome.  

[renatae]

It's particularly hard to watch when both Phillip and Elizabeth keep talking about the dead Soviet Sailors and nearly being moved to tears by the callousness of the Americans planning to kill their "boys" and to think of those "boys" and meanwhile, Phillip and Elizabeth are just laying waste to all sorts of people too.

 

 

I find this to be one of the more ironic themes of the show. US killed their boys? Um, if they hadn't been spying on us, they wouldn't have received incorrect info, and if they had done better at testing, there would not have been an incident, as Arkady noted.

 

Meanwhile, as you noted, both their prime targets and anyone who gets in their way get offed with barely a thought.

 

I am often sympathetic with them and can see things from their perspective often, but there are points at which I just have to say, "What??? Even you can't seriously believe that!" 

[Chaos Theory]

On 6/20/2014 at 0:35 AM, SeanC said:

Where is Paige supposed to gotten this money?  $600 USD circa 1981 is $1,570 USD today.  That's an absurd amount of money for somebody Paige's age to have -- either she was saving a bunch of money on a really good summer job, or she has an obscenely large allowance, or both.

P&E said they helped her save that money.  Birthday money.  Help out at the office money.  Babysitting money.  It does add up even circa 1980s over the years especially for a couple of parents who realize they neglect their kid.   Plus it was for a trip and they are "travel agents" so they could have started a fund.  Hey here is $100 to start you off.  

The fight was really well done though and I did find myself siding with P&E on this.  Suddenly Paige's whole personality seems to have changed.  She dropped volleyball and then a trip she has been saving money for years for a religion she has been a part of for only a few months.  Even if her parents were Russian spies what are they to think?  I'd think cult myself.   Or possibly she is acting like a surly teenager.  Possibly both.

Scary Philip sighting.  "You respect Jesus but not us!"

I did like Elizabeth's object lesson for Paige.  "Your father and I never had a childhood.  Nothing came easy for us.  Ever."  

Gaad and Arkady in a diner.  Everything I never knew I always wanted.  

Fred and Stan's talk was awesome.  "I would never betray my country."  " No one ever imagines they will."  That is like the theme of the entire show in two sentences.  

Martha stop helping the FBI.   Wait!  Who is she working for these days?  She actually is very good at her job if she wasn't committing treason that is. Another case of never imaging that she would betray her country.  

[Roseanna]

On ‎24‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 6:23 AM, Happy to be here said:

Speaking of...the entire speech with the other guy about betraying his country.  I mean once you hear the words "I will never betray my country."  You can pretty much gaurentee the person is gonna betray their county.  But Stan's  was the perfect reply and perfect for him, "No one ever imagines they will."  

Yes, one can never know before one is tested. 

On ‎26‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 5:25 PM, beeble said:

she can't possibly think that her upbringing in post-war Soviet poverty was a good thing. 

You don't know Russian pride. One doesn't love one's mother less because she is poor.

On ‎19‎.‎2‎.‎2017 at 2:38 AM, Chaos Theory said:

P&E said they helped her save that money.  Birthday money.  Help out at the office money.  Babysitting money.  It does add up even circa 1980s over the years especially for a couple of parents who realize they neglect their kid.   Plus it was for a trip and they are "travel agents" so they could have started a fund.  Hey here is $100 to start you off.  

The fight was really well done though and I did find myself siding with P&E on this.  Suddenly Paige's whole personality seems to have changed.  She dropped volleyball and then a trip she has been saving money for years for a religion she has been a part of for only a few months.  Even if her parents were Russian spies what are they to think?  I'd think cult myself.   Or possibly she is acting like a surly teenager.  Possibly both.

Scary Philip sighting.  "You respect Jesus but not us!"

Lets image P&E would be real Americans, and more specificially religious and conservative, and their daughter would become an Atheist and give money for some matter that they consider un-American. Their reaction would be just the same.

That said, the more they oppose, the more Paige becomes a stranger to them.  

[Roseanna]

On ‎28‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 5:05 AM, 90PercentGravity said:

I don't think Phillip is in love with Martha, but I do think he has developed some affection for it. He probably doesn't even realize it. She gives him comfort and support in a way that Elizabeth does not.

 

On ‎28‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 2:46 PM, Hal25 said:

 

I think it's important to discern that actually, she does not. She gives comfort and support never to Philip, always to a fake person Philip is pretending to be. Philip is not on the receiving end of good feelings, loving gestures, kind words... that's all a fake person he really isn't. Does anyone really think that if Philip walked up to Martha and said, "Martha, I am a KGB spy who is using you for information. My real wife (who I am very much in love with) and I picked you out because you were desperate and gullible enough to fall for our lies. We manipulated you and got you to believe I cared about you so you would feed us FBI intelligence and we could pass it on to the KGB. I killed Chris Amador after he followed me from your apartment. I doctored this tape to make you feel bad about yourself and alienate you from Gaad. I will continue using you and making you think I love you until you are useless, and then I will dispose of you"... that Martha would still be saying those things? Of course she wouldn't. She doesn't love the "real" Philip. She loves a fake lie. Elizabeth knows all the things Philip does and still loves him. That's a HUGE thing. Philip wouldn't get any good feelings from Martha being gushy over Clark. If anything, it would make him feel worse about who he really is, every time.

 

This isn't to say Philip actively hates Martha. I'm sure he doesn't. She annoys him at times. He thinks she's a decent person at others. But I don't think he's sitting around getting good feelings from anything she says either.

 

On ‎29‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 2:07 AM, Orbert said:

I don't think that Philip is necessarily developing feelings for Martha, but when they were sitting there together, and he was all messed up (Philip because everything seems to be going to shit lately, but ostensibly Clark because he has some really disturbing stuff on tape about Martha), Martha was very sympathetic and very comforting.  There was just a moment where Philip reacted to that comfort.  Even if it was for Clark and not Philip, it felt good, and was a comfort that (as others have pointed out) he never gets from Elizabeth.  And then Philip seemed to realize what was happening, or got confused, and decided to get the hell out of there, either way.

 

Philip has always been very good at keeping his Clark persona separate from himself.  Unlike his "one-off" characters, this one's a long con, so he has to.  I wonder if Elizabeth's failed "be Clark for me" experiment, which forced him to break down the separation he'd so carefully built up, even if only briefly, has had some kind of repercussions.  He was mentally and physically exhausted, he'd had a REALLY crappy day, and whether he knew it or not, the guy needed a hug.  Here it was, and it felt good, even if it wasn't "really" for him.

 

On ‎29‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 3:36 AM, Hal25 said:

 

I actually disagree that he never gets that from Elizabeth. Elizabeth has been shown to be quite loving with him this season. She's not prone to gushing her heart out but then, neither is the real Philip (you always have to remember the way he acts as "Clark" is a big con.) They tend to share their true emotions with one another in more reserved and personal ways, sometimes in emotional times fully saying how they feel, and more often they have an understood, wordless way of comforting each other that shows how well in touch they are. Elizabeth is in some ways more freely giving with emotion than Philip. He's the only one who's said "I love you" but as a general pattern, she tends to offer truer slices of herself to him.

 

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one because I don't feel that false hugs offered to a man who isn't him actually feel "good" to Philip--I think they feel the opposite and that's why he stays carefully in "Clark's" head the whole time and doesn't let Martha anywhere near the real man. Philip is feeling so awful because of the horrible things he's forced to do. Not only the murdering, but the horrible thing he's doing to Martha. Having Martha be all gushy and demonstrative as he's having to do something horrible that will wind up destroying her in the end is about like if he knows he has to kill some kid and it's this sweet, innocent child who smiles up at him, takes his hand and says he's a nice man and she trusts him. That won't make the murder easier to commit. It won't make him smile inside and feel great about himself and have a good warm feeling for a minute that this sweet little kid he's about to murder thought he was a good man. It would make him feel a thousand times worse. And what he's doing to Martha is really no different.

 

The show is playing at obvious parallels with things Elizabeth doesn't do in a relationship and things Martha does in the fake one, just like it plays with all things in that manner (Philip is the family man who protects her relationship with her kids while Gregory is the guy who tells her to run off on her kids and that she should be willing to sacrifice them for the cause) but I see the way they're doing it with Martha as merely highlighting the sadness of the whole thing for both Elizabeth and Philip. Elizabeth gets to feel in control of her honey traps because she hates every last one of them as a rape survivor. Philip hears false words of love for the false men he portrays from Martha because he was always the one who wanted to be loved by Elizabeth in the years it wasn't reciprocated. But that doesn't mean Elizabeth is loving the sex she's having with random marks for work and it doesn't mean Philip is enjoying the fake-love the women he's fooling are throwing at his alter-egos.

Thank you for both for pondering the nature of the relationship between Martha and Clark which I never hasn't done so deeply. 

I must say that I agree Hal25. Martha can't really comfort Phillip, because when he, as Clark, is down at home Martha's, he doesn't really show his true feelings, but it's only an act in order to make Martha to feel closer to him and thus ultimately do what he wants.

Also, Elizabeth isn't so demontsrative and, most of all, talkative like Martha, but f.ex. the way she once put her hand on Phillip's hand in the car, told volumes in volumes: "I know it feels bad, I have felt the same, this feeling must only be suffered and in time it will pass, I am here for you, I am with you always".   

[Roseanna]

On ‎24‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 6:23 AM, Happy to be here said:

Sandra is cheating on Stan.  I'd feel bad for Stan but he's been cheating on Sandra...oh hell and his country for awhile now.  

I woudn't call Sandra's action cheating. She openly, although not at first, told Stan that she was going with another man in order to prove if their real feelings toward each other were real.  Sandra didn't tell if they had had sex before the trip but that isn't really an issue. 

As Sandra said, if Stan had cared for her a bit, he would have noticed the signs - I am sure the whole audience did. 

I can't really feel bad for Stan. If any spouse "deserved" this, it would be Stan. Not only for having an affair with his mole, but concentrating so wholly on his work that there was no room in his mind and heart for his wife and son, and not trying anything to make his marriage work (except by bying a holiday but even that was too little too late). Also, considering that we have seen others have sex but Stan and Sandra haven't even once, one must make a conclusion that they hadn't for months.

So in every way, they had no real marriage, no connection in any level, except that they slept in the same house and bed. 

What was Sandra suppose to do? To waste her life or take it in her own hands?  

Edited May 12, 2017 by Roseanna

[Roseanna]

On ‎26‎.‎4‎.‎2014 at 5:25 PM, beeble said:

she can't possibly think that her upbringing in post-war Soviet poverty was a good thing. 

That's not the crux of the matter. It's Elizabeth homeland and she is evidently proud that she has shared, and won, its hardest times.