S06.E10: START

[EtheltoTillie]

On 6/10/2018 at 5:02 PM, sistermagpie said:

Yes, if anything my problem with S5 is that I felt they had plenty of room to do more. Not in terms of more complications but more interesting digressions that went along with the main things they were doing because I felt like S5 moved the characters from a place that they almost were to a place where they were. Some of the ways they got them there I think could have been more interesting for me. Paige/Elizabeth seemed to get more of that than other characters and I wished they got more as well.

But for instance, the Paige story (which was the story I felt was most clearly laid out arc in S5) was completely telling us where she was in S6. I was absolutely afraid going into the season that she was a committed Soviet superspy--and I give the PR a lot of credit for that, since it did frankly often did talk about her in those terms, I mean, not that they were saying she was that, but it was very much talked about as if it was a straightforward story of Paige becoming Elizabeth II and that her spying was Paige leveling up--or maybe more accurately just that Paige's story was now also a spy story so espionage details and schemes were important. I think that was just easier as advertising, but the real story was way more interesting and completely different.

Instead Paige as a spy is laid out in that very first episode with the sailor incident. What's really the point is that last scene in S5 when she's punching the bag. That's Paige making a decision to follow her mother's lead and become "strong" to deal with fears. All these things--the self-defense, the spying, the disguises, the Cause--are pieces of ill-fitting armor she's wearing instead of building herself up more honestly from within. And along with that comes Paige committing to trying to understand her mother on her (Elizabeth's) own terms instead of honestly approaching her on her terms. (Her relationship with her father is also pretty interesting in that context and harder to pin down because she can't do that with him.)

 

Wow, I didn't know that. Season 6 does feel to me like an epilogue even at 10 episodes. It's almost like the last gasp of the characters trying to cling to a false solution before accepting what they knew in their hearts at the end of S5.

Right. And I would actually consider some of Paige's conversion to Communism a bit of a procedural detail in this case. I understand psychologically what she was doing, but not the details of how she got there that would have helped me see it through eyes the way I did her entire arc with the church.

I am really considering a deep-dive rewatch after letting the finale sink in, making episode threads for those that don't exist yet on the site and particularly looking at the characters' patterns and issues, which I think are already there very clearly in S1. (Even Henry withdrawing.)

I rewatched the pilot over the weekend, and i was amazed how every thread was telegraphed in that very first episode. 

[Bannon]

On 6/8/2018 at 1:54 PM, Milburn Stone said:

Thank you for writing this. I don't think there's a thread in the entirety of previously.tv that doesn't have some folks complaining of "lazy writing."

In truth, it takes an enormous amount of effort to write a bad television show, let alone a good one.

One may not like an episode, one may even consider the writing bad (lord knows, the airwaves are rife with shows the writing of which I consider bad), but lazy? Highly unlikely. Bad is not the same as lazy.

I hope no one takes offense, because my complaint is not aimed at any one poster in particular. How could it be? Seemingly hundreds of posters on this site traffic in the accusation.

When you rely on worn out,  tired, ripe for parody, cliched nonsense, that's lazy. Even if you take a lot of time doing it.

[Umbelina]

For me, it's not about the effort used, it's about the results.

As Don Draper once said to Peggy Olsen  “I don’t care if you work ten seconds if you bring me something I like.”

It’s not about how hard they worked. It’s about the quality of their work.  Just because you spent hours on something doesn’t make it good.

Also, I thought the craze about not bothering to end a very long story being "arty" went out in the eighties?  I didn't like it then, and I still don't.

[hellmouse]

Two things that struck me after watching the finale again: 

1) I liked that Philip was the one who went into the McDonald's and Elizabeth stayed in the car. It was his last moment of ultimate Americana. That McDonalds was the most McDonalds-looking McDonalds I've ever seen. The sign was so bright and big.  The building itself brightly lit, while all around it was darkness. It was so American. It's the equivalent of the U2 song in terms of familiarity. It was almost like an ad for McDonald's, with that happy family sitting there, probably eating happy meals. It broke my heart to see old-looking Philip look over at them. But it was also a reminder that his family is not young anymore, and they wouldn't be even if he were staying in America. Kids grow up. Families change. That happy family has its own secrets and future joy and pain ahead. Some part of him recognizes that. And as he said to Paige, he lets himself feel it, rather than denying the feeling. 

2) I liked that Elizabeth was the one driving the car when they crossed the border into Russia. She paused before going up to the gate, and they looked at each other, and to me, it seemed like they were acting as they did on their operations. They had a mission to complete - to get the info to Arkady - and they were going to do it. They were together, and they were in agreement about what they were doing. But she was the one driving. That seemed fitting to me. Also the shot of the crack in the pavement as they entered the USSR seemed symbolic of the break with the past and the damage done. The road doesn't end and neither do their lives. But it's not new or smooth or easy.  

[Dev F]

On 6/10/2018 at 4:02 PM, sistermagpie said:

Yes, if anything my problem with S5 is that I felt they had plenty of room to do more. Not in terms of more complications but more interesting digressions that went along with the main things they were doing because I felt like S5 moved the characters from a place that they almost were to a place where they were. Some of the ways they got them there I think could have been more interesting for me. Paige/Elizabeth seemed to get more of that than other characters and I wished they got more as well.

Yeah, as I mentioned back when the season first aired, one of the big things the season was missing was episodic touchstones -- meaningful things that would happen to the characters on the story level, thus forcing us to think about what their responses said about who they were and how they'd changed. Instead the season had a bunch of very long, sedate storylines in which not much happened from episode to episode -- so there was nothing to help identify when important character turns were happening.

For instance, one of the pivotal turns of the season was Philip realizing how much he relies on Elizabeth to keep him committed to their mission. That's why he ultimately decides he can't throw away the Breland tape so they can go home -- and the big moment that sets it up is in a conversation between Philip and Elizabeth four episodes earlier about Tuan's unauthorized journey to IHOP:

"Maybe that's what he wants."
"What?"
"To be pulled out of this shit. Start over."
"That's not who he is."

In retrospect, it's pretty clear how this resonates with Philip's decision regarding the tape, but it's not something I zeroed in on initially as an revelatory character moment, because on the literal level of the story P&E were just discussing a not-very-interesting plot point I found it hard to care much about. It's much easier to track the character beats if they're hung on, say, Elizabeth's dangerous mission to save a fellow illegal from the FBI instead of Tuan's secret bus ride to call his ailing foster brother.

On 6/11/2018 at 1:07 PM, Erin9 said:

I think Paige came to understand that. She got off the train because it was best for her- and I think one of those reasons it was, was for Henry. So, she can explain that and a lot of other things to Henry. I’m not saying he won’t be angry. Of course, he will. But I’d hope he would in time understand, they did what they did FOR him- in terms of lying and letting him stay in the US.

I definitely think Henry was a big part of Paige's decision. And it's a pretty big development for her that after telling Stan he has to take care of Henry and asking her parents if they can trust him, she ultimately decides that she can't count on him to take care of her brother on his own.

Because up till this point, Paige has always been eager to invest all her trust in some authority figure who can make decisions for her and tell her everything is going to be okay. That's why she idolizes Pastor Tim. That's why she glibly parrots Elizabeth and Claudia's propaganda about how the capitalist system keeps everyone down. It would be natural for her to do the same thing with Stan, to just decide, Well, Mom and Dad trust him, and he's a committed FBI agent and everything, so I can leave the country secure in the knowledge that he'll give Henry whatever he needs. To decide that she can't trust Stan or her parents, that she has to blow up her own life even worse than it's already blowed up to make sure Henry's okay, is a huge step away from codependence.

10 hours ago, Bannon said:

When you rely on worn out,  tired, ripe for parody, cliched nonsense, that's lazy. Even if you take a lot of time doing it.

But the storytelling doesn't rely on cliche and whatnot. It uses certain standard spy-thriller tropes as a starting point, but we're not expected to just accept any particular development because Stan is pointing a gun throughout the whole garage scene or whatever other unforgivably terrible cliche the writers happened to employ. I mean, I guess there are folks here who think that if Stan points a gun like he's some kind of character in a TV show about spies, anything that follows is inherently ridiculous. But what's always impressed me about The Americans -- and most other shows I admire, as a matter of fact -- is the way in which it can start with a shopworn scenario and create something unique and fascinating out of it. It seems like you'd miss most of what's interesting about the show if you dismiss the entire endeavor at square one.

And so I'm not talking entirely in abstractions here, I want to at least give one example of a way in which the garage scene is in fact carefully constructed. I don't know that I could break down every piece of it -- like I've said, it's about emotional logic, not setting forth a strictly rational argument -- but one part I have a pretty good handle on is the role of Paige. Paige is important because she's the only character in the scene Stan could conceivably trust to tell the absolute truth; as I've mentioned, if Philip or Elizabeth were totally honest, they'd have to confess to murdering people and then Stan would never let them go. But how would they get Stan to a point where he thinks he can trust her?

First, the writers make sure it's clear to Stan that she's a transparently terrible liar. "You're going home from college for a stomachache?" After Paige incompetently blows the cover story that could've gotten them away scot-free, Stan has no reason to believe that she's capable of some complicated "You think I'm telling the truth but it's really a work" deception. Then the scene establishes that Paige will insist on telling the truth even when her parents are intent on lying. "She didn't know until --" "I knew. They told me when I was sixteen." (It's also important that Elizabeth is the one who attempts the falsehood Paige corrects, so that Philip remains relatively trustworthy by comparison.) Thus, Stan has reason to trust that Paige will tell him the truth even if it weakens their position -- something that's not true of either of her parents.

Why is that important? Because of what she tells Stan next: "Henry?" "He doesn't know anything." In order for the ending to work, Stan must absolutely believe that Henry is blameless. And the garage scene is carefully constructed so that Paige can serve as ironclad confirmation of that fact.

[Bannon]

7 hours ago, Dev F said:

Yeah, as I mentioned back when the season first aired, one of the big things the season was missing was episodic touchstones -- meaningful things that would happen to the characters on the story level, thus forcing us to think about what their responses said about who they were and how they'd changed. Instead the season had a bunch of very long, sedate storylines in which not much happened from episode to episode -- so there was nothing to help identify when important character turns were happening.

For instance, one of the pivotal turns of the season was Philip realizing how much he relies on Elizabeth to keep him committed to their mission. That's why he ultimately decides he can't throw away the Breland tape so they can go home -- and the big moment that sets it up is in a conversation between Philip and Elizabeth four episodes earlier about Tuan's unauthorized journey to IHOP:

"Maybe that's what he wants."
"What?"
"To be pulled out of this shit. Start over."
"That's not who he is."

In retrospect, it's pretty clear how this resonates with Philip's decision regarding the tape, but it's not something I zeroed in on initially as an revelatory character moment, because on the literal level of the story P&E were just discussing a not-very-interesting plot point I found it hard to care much about. It's much easier to track the character beats if they're hung on, say, Elizabeth's dangerous mission to save a fellow illegal from the FBI instead of Tuan's secret bus ride to call his ailing foster brother.

I definitely think Henry was a big part of Paige's decision. And it's a pretty big development for her that after telling Stan he has to take care of Henry and asking her parents if they can trust him, she ultimately decides that she can't count on him to take care of her brother on his own.

Because up till this point, Paige has always been eager to invest all her trust in some authority figure who can make decisions for her and tell her everything is going to be okay. That's why she idolizes Pastor Tim. That's why she glibly parrots Elizabeth and Claudia's propaganda about how the capitalist system keeps everyone down. It would be natural for her to do the same thing with Stan, to just decide, Well, Mom and Dad trust him, and he's a committed FBI agent and everything, so I can leave the country secure in the knowledge that he'll give Henry whatever he needs. To decide that she can't trust Stan or her parents, that she has to blow up her own life even worse than it's already blowed up to make sure Henry's okay, is a huge step away from codependence.

But the storytelling doesn't rely on cliche and whatnot. It uses certain standard spy-thriller tropes as a starting point, but we're not expected to just accept any particular development because Stan is pointing a gun throughout the whole garage scene or whatever other unforgivably terrible cliche the writers happened to employ. I mean, I guess there are folks here who think that if Stan points a gun like he's some kind of character in a TV show about spies, anything that follows is inherently ridiculous. But what's always impressed me about The Americans -- and most other shows I admire, as a matter of fact -- is the way in which it can start with a shopworn scenario and create something unique and fascinating out of it. It seems like you'd miss most of what's interesting about the show if you dismiss the entire endeavor at square one.

And so I'm not talking entirely in abstractions here, I want to at least give one example of a way in which the garage scene is in fact carefully constructed. I don't know that I could break down every piece of it -- like I've said, it's about emotional logic, not setting forth a strictly rational argument -- but one part I have a pretty good handle on is the role of Paige. Paige is important because she's the only character in the scene Stan could conceivably trust to tell the absolute truth; as I've mentioned, if Philip or Elizabeth were totally honest, they'd have to confess to murdering people and then Stan would never let them go. But how would they get Stan to a point where he thinks he can trust her?

First, the writers make sure it's clear to Stan that she's a transparently terrible liar. "You're going home from college for a stomachache?" After Paige incompetently blows the cover story that could've gotten them away scot-free, Stan has no reason to believe that she's capable of some complicated "You think I'm telling the truth but it's really a work" deception. Then the scene establishes that Paige will insist on telling the truth even when her parents are intent on lying. "She didn't know until --" "I knew. They told me when I was sixteen." (It's also important that Elizabeth is the one who attempts the falsehood Paige corrects, so that Philip remains relatively trustworthy by comparison.) Thus, Stan has reason to trust that Paige will tell him the truth even if it weakens their position -- something that's not true of either of her parents.

Why is that important? Because of what she tells Stan next: "Henry?" "He doesn't know anything." In order for the ending to work, Stan must absolutely believe that Henry is blameless. And the garage scene is carefully constructed so that Paige can serve as ironclad confirmation of that fact.

I'm sorry, but it does rely on cliched nonsense, the nonsense that human beings, when in a hyper confrontational, weapons drawn, situation, will begin belching and bloviating at great length about their feelings, motivations, and details of their past lives. This is not how human beings behave on the planet you and I inhabit. I watch drama for insight into the human condition, so when scenes are written with cliches that are actually nonrepresentative of actual human behavior  the drama completely, wholly, evaporates. It literally is pointless. As I've written before, there is no way to resolve that scene adequately, because at this point they have left a family centered drama, and have entered the genre of fantasy, a genre I don't really care for, even at the highest levels. If they had made Phil into The Hulk at that point, and had him smash his way out of the garage, it wouldn't have been much worse.

The reason I call it lazy is due to the writers predetermining an outcome, choosing a nonsensical cliche to reveal the outcome, and then writing backwards from there, having various characters, and the logic of the world they inhabit, be whatever they are needed to be, from scene to scene, to get to that scene. The fact that they may have taken a lot of time to construct that scene doesn't obviate the lack of care getting to that scene.

I will again draw a contrast with a show that was written far better. There is no genre more ripe for shopworn, hackneyed, nonsensical, lazy cliche than The Western. David Milch, however, in Deadwood, avoided them at nearly every turn, and wrote a story which featured real human behavior. In the first episode, for example, when Bullock is faced with the potentially cliched nonsense of the lone sheriff facing down a lynch mob, he turns the cliche on it's head, by A. making the lynching victim guilty of a capital crime, and B. the sheriff realizing he can't prevail, so the sheriff, in disgust, carries out the execution himself, thus depriving the mob of their emotional satisfaction of doing so. The sheriff then quits the job in revulsion. Even with that show being abruptly cancelled, it was better resolved than The Americans, because the characters behaved like human beings, interacting in a world that had recognizable features.

[Erin9]

@Dev F

I never thought Paige decided her parents couldn’t be trusted about Stan being trustworthy/good enough to help Henry.  She was the one who asked Stan to look out for Henry to begin with. She thought he could help Henry. She may have been looking for some back up in that assessment. But she wasn’t just talking about Henry when she asked about trusting Stan imo.  She meant about everything. In fact, I think one of the reasons she stayed is BECAUSE Philip said he trusted Stan- and he wasn’t just talking about Henry either. 

 I think she decided Henry needed more than Stan to help explain things. But, P/E were never indicating that Stan was a magic fix for Henry and all he needed when they said they could trust Stan. Which I would agree with.  Obviously Paige could be helpful in a very different way to Henry. And that factored in on her decision. But I don’t see her staying as a trust issue regarding her parents trusting Stan. 

I do think Paige getting off the train is a sign of her figuring out that in order to be herself she needed to stay in her home: the US. She’s not Russian. I think she really listened to everything Philip said about Henry staying and applied it to herself. It is also a sign of her breaking her co-dependence on her mother.

IA- with how/why Stan would have found Paige credible. And that helped. (He also believed her about Matthew, which was very important.) 

Paige certainly helped convince Stan that Henry knew nothing, but that scene was primarily about him and Philip- their relationship. If he didn’t buy what Philip sold, they were not leaving imo. 

Stan had to believe a lot of things to let them walk. There’s a lot of debate over what it was that allowed Stan to let them leave- and I’ve seen many different ideas, but I think it was a culmination of things. It wasn’t one thing;  it was getting pounded over and over with reason after reason to let them go. I’m not sure if Stan believing  Henry was innocent was the absolute must have for them to walk, but it sure didn’t hurt. No doubt there. It was one more reason to let them go. 

Other things that were significant: That Philip sincerely saw him as a friend- his best and ONLY friend;  it wasn’t all a lie. That this was a job for their country, just as Stan had one for his. That Stan had moved into their neighborhood; he hadn’t gone looking for Stan. That Philip had burned out, like Stan had. That Philip had been been unhappy- the truth about them messed up Stan’s perception of his life, but spying had messed up Philip’s long ago.  

That Philip and Elizabeth getting to Moscow was important for their country-that they cared about just as Stan did his own- and for the world. He’d already heard this from Oleg. He knew they were trying to do something beneficial for everyone. That was huge. If I were to give one of the biggest reasons- I might say that was it. Paige helped back up Henry, and it was important, but there was so much going on in that 11 min.

But I hesitate to hang too much on Stan believing Paige about Henry- and it being that critical to everything. And that if Paige had said nothing, he wouldn’t have believed Philip. Philip was so clearly upset about leaving Henry, I’m not sure Stan needed Paige to be convinced of his sincerity.  Obviously Philip isn’t leaving him if he knows all. From one father to another, Stan got that imo. So, Stan believed both that Henry didn’t know AND that they were leaving him behind. Both points were important.

All that said, I think one of the many reasons this show resonates with people is that they don’t spell out everyone’s exact thoughts and motivations. They always did leave a lot for the audience to work out and think through. And that leaves room for a lot of conversation and analysis. 

[companionenvy]

17 minutes ago, Erin9 said:

Other things that were significant: That Philip sincerely saw him as a friend- his best and ONLY friend;  it wasn’t all a lie. That this was a job for their country, just as Stan had one for his. That Stan had moved into their neighborhood; he hadn’t gone looking for Stan. That Philip had burned out, like Stan had. That Philip had been been unhappy- the truth about them messed up Stan’s perception of his life, but spying had messed up Philip’s long ago.  

The problem with most of these items is that they depend on taking Philip at his word; there's no independent verification. They are also, crucially, exactly the things a master spy would recognize would be beneficial for him to say in these circumstances. I do think Philip was being largely authentic, but there's not a moment in there when he's saying anything that would go against his self-interest or be tactically unsound. 

"Stan, I spent my life conning practically everyone around me, but you were special and and our love was so real and actually, we're not so different you and I" is classic manipulation. Stan is an FBI agent; he has to know this. So for us to really buy the scene, we have to accept that Stan somehow trusts some spidey sense telling him to trust Philip -- a deep cover KGB operative who has been lying to him for their entire relationship and who has every reason to continue doing so -- enough to basically commit treason.  

That's not even adding in the fact that he actually knows Philip isn't being 100% honest, as he is aware that Philip was on a KGB mission that ended in the death of a federal agent only weeks ago, while Philip is claiming that he's retired and  just a travel agent now. 

[Plums]

I agree with literally everything @Erin9 just said, lol. 

It was super believable to me that Stan let them go. If he was in pure law enforcement mode, he would have called for backup and not confronted them alone, he wouldn't have just poked around their house while they were away like a snooping neighbor instead of an FBI agent looking for evidence, he wouldn't have looked up their names in a criminal background check database but checked for death records indicating a stolen identity instead. He would have actually discovered incontrovertible proof in a way that was easily available to him, but he didn't. Because he was never really in FBI Agent mode in the time he became suspicious of them and started figuring out they were the illegals- he was in Horrific Ultimate Betrayal mode. Noah Emmerich compared it to a spouse knowing their S.O. is cheating on them and all the clues adding up, and you know it's true in your heart of hearts, but you're in denial because you don't want it to be true because if it's true, it would completely destroy you. And that is super apt. This was always more personal and emotional for him than it was about catching the illegals. Eventually there were too many clues for him to be in denial anymore, and all that was left was confrontation. When they made it clear they weren't going to just surrender and peaceably let him arrest them, when it was a choice between shooting them or letting them go, obviously he was going to let them go, especially in combination with all the reasons previously mentioned why he would let them go. That whole encounter went the way it did because Stan loves this family, and Philip loves Stan, and relationships have always been what this show is about.

Even though Philip was manipulating him, the way he was choosing to do so is the reason why Philip is the best spy on the show- he's able to be authentic and honest and truly connect with people while he's manipulating them to do what he wants, and the other person senses that because it is true. The only thing they were really lying about there is the fact that they kill people, and I think they did that due to Paige as much as Stan. And he probably knows they were lying about that, but it's not something he was prepared to think about or fight them on in that moment. Because as soon as Philip stopped pretending to be innocent and confessed, the conversation stopped being FBI vs. KGB and became about the personal betrayal of the friendship. Even Philip mentioning EST, which I've seen derided, to me didn't seem so much about Philip using self-help jargon to persuade Stan that he knows he really wants to let them go, but about Philip reminding Stan that this is Philip, his best friend who is super into this touchy-feely self-help movement and goes to seminars and weekend Forum retreats, and I've always known he is a doofus in that particular way. It is something extremely Philip to say, which is I think what punctures Stan about it, not any sort of EST insight. 

Anyway, yeah, I love the entire garage scene and think it's masterful. Also, not for nothing, but Stan has a long established history of going rogue and betraying his country when it comes to Russians he's personally invested in. He committed low level treason for Nina when he thought she was in danger from Oleg and very nearly committed high level, execution worthy treason for her when he knew she was probably going to be die if he didn't. He barely pulled himself back from the brink of that and almost didn't. Then he blackmailed the entire Justice Department into leaving Oleg alone in Russia by threatening to admit to murder in the media and the fact that the FBI covered it up. I buy completely him lying to Aderholdt about seeing them and letting them go. His relationship with the Jenningses is way deeper than what he felt for Nina and Oleg. 

[Erin9]

52 minutes ago, companionenvy said:

The problem with most of these items is that they depend on taking Philip at his word; there's no independent verification. They are also, crucially, exactly the things a master spy would recognize would be beneficial for him to say in these circumstances. I do think Philip was being largely authentic, but there's not a moment in there when he's saying anything that would go against his self-interest or be tactically unsound. 

"Stan, I spent my life conning practically everyone around me, but you were special and and our love was so real and actually, we're not so different you and I" is classic manipulation. Stan is an FBI agent; he has to know this. So for us to really buy the scene, we have to accept that Stan somehow trusts some spidey sense telling him to trust Philip -- a deep cover KGB operative who has been lying to him for their entire relationship and who has every reason to continue doing so -- enough to basically commit treason.  

That's not even adding in the fact that he actually knows Philip isn't being 100% honest, as he is aware that Philip was on a KGB mission that ended in the death of a federal agent only weeks ago, while Philip is claiming that he's retired and  just a travel agent now. 

IA- that’s what I meant when I said that if Stan didn’t basically buy what Philip was selling, overall, they were not leaving. So- Stan has to believe Philip is mostly honest. Philip had to just convince him. Because, as you said, he can’t prove all of it.  I bought Stan letting them leave. However,  he could- crucially- verify what Philip said about the coup. From Oleg. He had 2 sources saying the same thing. He also knows who moved in next to whom. He knew Philip didn’t go looking to play him. He certainly knew Philip had a job to do for his own country, just like Stan did for his. Philip framed the subject differently though- it wasn’t a betrayal. He did what Stan did- his job. 

Now he knows they’re lying about killing. They just lie and move on. They don’t admit it and that’s what matters in that moment. That’s what he needed. Just don’t say it. Stan’s a killer too, while we’re on the subject. 

And then Philip pounds him on other subjects. He also knows- just by Philip talking about coup attempt alone- that Philip is not totally out of things. Just mostly. Kinda like Stan stepping back in. Also- they’re moving from subject to subject fast. That’s important too. 

My main point is- Philip has to sell it. Stan has to buy enough of it and see Philip as more than a KGB officer who hurt the US,  but as a patriot for HIS country, a father, a friend, someone who genuinely wants world peace, a fellow burnout on spying, etc. Stan bought it.  I bought that Stan bought it. Philip was a friend for a long time. This was highly personal for Stan. He didn’t go looking for them as an FBI agent. He just needed a reason(s) to let them go. Philip gave him many. Philip needed Stan to focus on him as a person, not a bad KGB officer. He succeeded. 

Edited June 13, 2018 by Erin9

[Umbelina]

It honestly won't matter that much if Stan believe Henry knows nothing about this, at least not to Henry's future legal issues.

The FBI is hardly going to take Stan's word for it, his credibility was already on shaky ground, and has been for years now there.  The fact that his best friend was a KGB agent and he didn't figure it out for years, makes his opinion about Henry less than useless. 

Henry will be grilled and questioned many, many times.  Paige will as well, probably even more because she's older and because she'll probably cut a deal.  At that point, Stan letting them go will be disclosed, and I don't think Stan would let that happen, he would tell first.

So, out of a job Stan with a possible KGB agent wife isn't going to be a lot of help for Henry.

[Bannon]

16 minutes ago, Umbelina said:

It honestly won't matter that much if Stan believe Henry knows nothing about this, at least not to Henry's future legal issues.

The FBI is hardly going to take Stan's word for it, his credibility was already on shaky ground, and has been for years now there.  The fact that his best friend was a KGB agent and he didn't figure it out for years, makes his opinion about Henry less than useless. 

Henry will be grilled and questioned many, many times.  Paige will as well, probably even more because she's older and because she'll probably cut a deal.  At that point, Stan letting them go will be disclosed, and I don't think Stan would let that happen, he would tell first.

So, out of a job Stan with a possible KGB agent wife isn't going to be a lot of help for Henry.

The idea that Stan will be able to protect anybody is just laughable, among other laughable aspects in the finale. The entire mini-scene of Stan and Henry at the hockey rink is ridiculous.

[sistermagpie]

10 hours ago, Dev F said:

For instance, one of the pivotal turns of the season was Philip realizing how much he relies on Elizabeth to keep him committed to their mission. That's why he ultimately decides he can't throw away the Breland tape so they can go home -- and the big moment that sets it up is in a conversation between Philip and Elizabeth four episodes earlier about Tuan's unauthorized journey to IHOP:

And that's also something building in S4. There's that conversation where Philip and Gabriel are commiserating about, I think, William's situation and Philip's obviously feeling a lot like William. Gabriel says something that implies he understands the burnout and Philip says, "You'll always have Elizabeth." And whatever Gabriel says in response Philip agrees, "The Centre made a good match."

That's why I always disagreed when people thought Philip would eventually leave Elizabeth because of her crazy ideology. Philip *loved* that about her. There were times he thought it was genuinely wrong and wasn't afraid to say so, but he was, I think, also protective of it. She was a touchstone for him and she inspired him to not lose sight of that part of himself just the way he kept her from losing the part of herself that loved ordinary life and people. In S6 they both get too extreme and need the other person to pull them back to themselves (whether it's the other person doing it in person or them just thinking of what the other person might do).

1 hour ago, Erin9 said:

@Dev F

I never thought Paige decided her parents couldn’t be trusted about Stan being trustworthy/good enough to help Henry.  She was the one who asked Stan to look out for Henry to begin with. She thought he could help Henry. She may have been looking for some back up in that assessment. But she wasn’t just talking about Henry when she asked about trusting Stan imo.  She meant about everything. In fact, I think one of the reasons she stayed is BECAUSE Philip said he trusted Stan- and he wasn’t just talking about Henry either. 

 I think she decided Henry needed more than Stan to help explain things. But, P/E were never indicating that Stan was a magic fix for Henry and all he needed when they said they could trust Stan. Which I would agree with.  Obviously Paige could be helpful in a very different way to Henry. And that factored in on her decision. But I don’t see her staying as a trust issue regarding her parents trusting Stan. 

I do think Paige getting off the train is a sign of her figuring out that in order to be herself she needed to stay in her home: the US. She’s not Russian. I think she really listened to everything Philip said about Henry staying and applied it to herself. It is also a sign of her breaking her co-dependence on her mother.

I keep thinking about this in the context of Paige and Henry's relationship up until now. Many people often tried to shove them into a familiar dynamic that would make P&E look bad where they said Paige "raised" Henry, but that was never true. I found myself thinking that I imagined that actually being reversed, particularly in adulthood, with Henry not taking care of Paige but seeing her as somebody who creates a lot of problems for herself or whatever. He got away from her, too, when he left home. 

It made me think of Paige maybe doing more interesting projecting there than just thinking she's taking care of Henry. First, I think she thought of "taking care of him" with regards to Stan because he's an adult--even though Henry is not an individual that needs the entire thing those words conjure up. She did have some practical concerns about Henry losing his parents, like how he was going to pay for college (but then, she doesn't seem to know that Henry has already faced this type of issue and solved it which is no doubt part of why Philip feels he must stay in the US) but she's also thinking about being left alone, something we know she herself fears. 

There's nothing in the ep that I can point to to say for sure everything Paige is thinking about, but I'm remembering, for instance, how when they're throwing away their old identities into the pit the two times, iirc, they cut to Paige when we're not seeing Paige herself throw away her wallet is when her parents switch their wedding rings. On one hand that makes sense because she would not understand what they're doing, but it seems like it could also have a meaning where Paige is reminded again that she's outside her parents' relationship. (When they first show up at the door she rolls her eyes, thinking of the fight she had with her mother, and starts to say, "Oh, so you brought Dad to..." like they always still "look out for each other" more than they look out for Paige and Henry.) They even have "real" wedding rings, yet another layer of bond to each other.

I did always think that part of what made Paige know she had to get off the train is that she thinks she can be more true to who she is in the US. But when it comes to Henry I think she's on one hand not wanting to think of Henry being left alone--she wants him to have some form of family. She's that family. That's how she can take care of him, just by not abandoning him. And also Henry is her family. Her parents are too, but she's tried so hard but when she's convinced herself she "gets it" or "gets them" now they throw her some new curve ball that makes them aliens again. So I think it's not her taking on a responsibility with Henry--she doesn't go to his school at the end. It's being there so he's not abandoned and maybe siding with the member of the family that she has more of a chance of connecting to herself.

1 hour ago, Erin9 said:

But I hesitate to hang too much on Stan believing Paige about Henry- and it being that critical to everything. And that if Paige had said nothing, he wouldn’t have believed Philip. Philip was so clearly upset about leaving Henry, I’m not sure Stan needed Paige to be convinced of his sincerity.  Obviously Philip isn’t leaving him if he knows all. From one father to another, Stan got that imo. So, Stan believed both that Henry didn’t know AND that they were leaving him behind. Both points were important.

 

Also maybe Paige's instinctual idea that kids needed to be taken care of was what made her tell Stan to take care of Henry. For Stan that was appealing because it gave him another heroic role in the story. Philip jumped on the idea when it was out there because he thought it would help, but he didn't think to say that himself because I think ultimately he, like Elizabeth, was on his own at Henry's age as well. They didn't live in a world where they were taken care of as much as their own children were ever, much less when they were in military training. Philip is the character who has the closest relationship to Henry in S6 and he relates to him more like an independent person. When Elizabeth tells Paige that she was around Henry's age when she was on her own Paige says, "He's not like you! Nobody is!" But there is somebody who is. He's standing right there in the room.

6 minutes ago, Plums said:

Even though Philip was manipulating him, the way he was choosing to do so is the reason why Philip is the best spy on the show- he's able to be authentic and honest and truly connect with people while he's manipulating them to do what he wants, and the other person senses that because it is true. 

It's nice to have the garage scene turn on those strengths of Philip's when all season they also stressed how Elizabeth, under stress, under deadline and on her own, became (and sometimes had to become) more forceful and violent, often without result. She tries to blackmail Renhull into working with them and Philip immediately remembers him as an idealist. It's not so simple as Philip working him correctly and her not because Philip didn't work Renhull, he just met with him once, and Elizabeth didn't have time to work him here. But the season did still contrast Elizabeth's style of overwhelming manipulation and brute force (break-ins, blackmail, quicker, more aggressive personas that get results quicker) with Philip's longterm work (Kimmy and Stan) that are super important even in his retirement.

16 minutes ago, Umbelina said:

So, out of a job Stan with a possible KGB agent wife isn't going to be a lot of help for Henry.

Really that last moment with Stan and Henry is completely wrong wrong wrong. Why would the FBI let Stan break this news to Henry? Is Stan going rogue again and just deciding to tell him? If so, he's messing things up for Henry terribly. This is exactly why Philip didn't want to even call Henry. He didn't want to give him any hint at all that anything was up because it was essential Henry be totally innocent when the FBI got there. Philip knew he'd be grilled by the FBI but also felt he would come out clean because he was both tough and innocent.

Stan blew all that by going to Henry's school and having a long, private talk with him about the Truth. Now the FBI will never see Henry's first reaction when they tell him the news. They'll only talk to him after he's begun making his own connections. It makes no sense that anyone at the FBI would have allowed Stan to conduct what is essentially an initial interview in private with no witnesses or record. Now whatever Henry says to the FBI will not only be less innocent than it would have been (because he's been told the truth by Stan) but there will also be the suspicion that Stan had a chance to prep him because everyone knows he likes the kid.

He almost dragged Henry down with him so both of them will be under more of a cloud of suspicion. But it's got to be worse for Stan who did this.

[Clanstarling]

21 minutes ago, Bannon said:

The entire mini-scene of Stan and Henry at the hockey rink is ridiculous.

How?

[Plums]

24 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:

Really that last moment with Stan and Henry is completely wrong wrong wrong. Why would the FBI let Stan break this news to Henry? Is Stan going rogue again and just deciding to tell him? If so, he's messing things up for Henry terribly. This is exactly why Philip didn't want to even call Henry. He didn't want to give him any hint at all that anything was up because it was essential Henry be totally innocent when the FBI got there. Philip knew he'd be grilled by the FBI but also felt he would come out clean because he was both tough and innocent.

Stan blew all that by going to Henry's school and having a long, private talk with him about the Truth. Now the FBI will never see Henry's first reaction when they tell him the news. They'll only talk to him after he's begun making his own connections. It makes no sense that anyone at the FBI would have allowed Stan to conduct what is essentially an initial interview in private with no witnesses or record. Now whatever Henry says to the FBI will not only be less innocent than it would have been (because he's been told the truth by Stan) but there will also be the suspicion that Stan had a chance to prep him because everyone knows he likes the kid.

He almost dragged Henry down with him so both of them will be under more of a cloud of suspicion. But it's got to be worse for Stan who did this.

I mean, I think in the universe of the show, we're meant to just take what happens in the immediate aftermath of the escape as a shorthand for knowing how events will unfold further- Stan lies to Dennis about letting the Jennings escape, and because he brought the suspicion to Dennis earlier and Dennis dismissed it out of hand, Stan will not be under suspicion. I think the fact that we saw him with the team collecting evidence from the house the next morning supports that, so plainly, both Dennis and Stan were allowed to investigate it themselves even though they both personally knew and were friendly with Philip and Elizabeth. Presumably Dennis knew Stan was going to drive to New Hampshire afterwards to break the news to Henry as they were leaving- Henry, who still hadn't been talked to or taken in for questioning even as his parents' Wanted posters had been distributed to Border Control. It's all just an example of the dramatic license with the FBI that the show has taken. 

[SunnyBeBe]

As we were anticipating the finale, I always envisioned and posted about Stan going to comfort Henry, afterwards, regardless of how it turned out.  (Parent's arrested, fled or dead.) He's still a juvenile in those jurisdictions, right? I wouldn't think that the FBI would be convinced that a juvenile, who wasn't even living in the home of the suspects and didn't even get notice that they were fleeing would be a vital source of information.  If anything, Henry was actually an informant to Stan.  His words, though unwittingly, about his parents really got Stan to thinking about their true identity.  Without that, Stan may have never put things together.  Though, it was really the word of Father Andrei that sealed the deal on them. 

What I didn't get was how in the world Stan knocking on that glass got their attention.  The guys were playing pretty intently.  Would that little knock really have been heard by the players?  I'm not that familiar with hockey, but, it just seemed odd to me.  I guess, Henry just looked up and saw Stan, went over and had the chat.   

Edited June 13, 2018 by SunnyBeBe

[Bannon]

52 minutes ago, Clanstarling said:

How?

Because Henry would be scooped up immediately by the FBI for a thorough debriefing, and nobody, Stan, Aderholt,  etc., closely associated with the largest American espionage debacle since the Rosenbergs would be involved.

[Bannon]

10 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:

As we were anticipating the finale, I always envisioned and posted about Stan going to comfort Henry, afterwards, regardless of how it turned out.  (Parent's arrested, fled or dead.) He's still a juvenile in those jurisdictions, right? I wouldn't think that the FBI would be convinced that a juvenile, who wasn't even living in the home of the suspects and didn't even get notice that they were fleeing would be a vital source of information.  If anything, Henry was actually an informant to Stan.  His words, though unwittingly, about his parents really got Stan to thinking about their true identity.  Without that, Stan may have never put things together.  Though, it was really the word of Father Andrei that sealed the deal on them. 

What I didn't get was how in the world Stan knocking on that glass got their attention.  The guys were playing pretty intently.  Would that little knock really have been heard by the players?  I'm not that familiar with hockey, but, it just seemed odd to me.  I guess, Henry just looked up and saw Stan, went over and had the chat.   

Again, you have to try to appreciate the FBI's response to one of the largest debacles it has ever endured. It doesn't have to be  convinced that Henry would be a vital source of information; it would take no chances. EVERYTHING would be seen as potentially a vital source of information, and would be treated accordingly.

[sistermagpie]

18 minutes ago, Plums said:

I mean, I think in the universe of the show, we're meant to just take what happens in the immediate aftermath of the escape as a shorthand for knowing how events will unfold further- Stan lies to Dennis about letting the Jennings escape, and because he brought the suspicion to Dennis earlier and Dennis dismissed it out of hand, Stan will not be under suspicion. I think the fact that we saw him with the team collecting evidence from the house the next morning supports that, so plainly, both Dennis and Stan were allowed to investigate it themselves even though they both personally knew and were friendly with Philip and Elizabeth. Presumably Dennis knew Stan was going to drive to New Hampshire afterwards to break the news to Henry as they were leaving- Henry, who still hadn't been talked to or taken in for questioning even as his parents' Wanted posters had been distributed to Border Control. It's all just an example of the dramatic license with the FBI that the show has taken. 

I agree that's supposed to be the idea but I think this is definitely one of those times where the practical logic completely contradicts it. It's not even just that Stan and Dennis wouldn't be working the case (though that's also true). It's that *no* agent at all would be telling Henry what happened while sitting privately by his school hockey rink. There would be more than one agent and they would be in an interrogation room with a recorder. The episode itself even brings up how important it is that Henry is completely unknowing for the FBI's very official interrogation. Stan would probably never be allowed to talk to him alone, much less to tell him what's happened--which the scene clearly says that he's doing.

14 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:

As we were anticipating the finale, I always envisioned and posted about Stan going to comfort Henry, afterwards, regardless of how it turned out.  (Parent's arrested, fled or dead.) He's still a juvenile in those jurisdictions, right? I wouldn't think that the FBI would be convinced that a juvenile, who wasn't even living in the home of the suspects and didn't even get notice that they were fleeing would be a vital source of information.  If anything, Henry was actually an informant to Stan.  His words, though unwittingly, about his parents really got Stan to thinking about their true identity.  Without that, Stan may have never put things together.  Though, it was really the word of Father Andrei that sealed the deal on them. 

 

None of these things would clear Henry in the eyes of the FBI or make them uninterested in him. He's the son of Soviet spies. Him accidentally mentioning something that made Stan suspicious in no way makes him an informant any more than Philip was because he reacted strongly to the news of the murder of Gennadi and Sophia. The fact that he even could give info like that by accident is all the more reason to talk to him.

Stan running up there ahead of the FBI, while impossible (the FBI was already watching the school--Henry would not be at hockey practice at that point), makes Stan look even more suspicious than Henry. It certainly shows that once again the FBI's and Stan's interests are not the same. 

[Bannon]

10 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:

I agree that's supposed to be the idea but I think this is definitely one of those times where the practical logic completely contradicts it. It's not even just that Stan and Dennis wouldn't be working the case (though that's also true). It's that *no* agent at all would be telling Henry what happened while sitting privately by his school hockey rink. There would be more than one agent and they would be in an interrogation room with a recorder. The episode itself even brings up how important it is that Henry is completely unknowing for the FBI's very official interrogation. Stan would probably never be allowed to talk to him alone, much less to tell him what's happened--which the scene clearly says that he's doing.

None of these things would clear Henry in the eyes of the FBI or make them uninterested in him. He's the son of Soviet spies. Him accidentally mentioning something that made Stan suspicious in no way makes him an informant any more than Philip was because he reacted strongly to the news of the murder of Gennadi and Sophia. The fact that he even could give info like that by accident is all the more reason to talk to him.

Stan running up there ahead of the FBI, while impossible (the FBI was already watching the school--Henry would not be at hockey practice at that point), makes Stan look even more suspicious than Henry. It certainly shows that once again the FBI's and Stan's interests are not the same. 

Yeah, if people want to abandon any relationship this show has to the world we live in, and be entertained by it, that's fine. I enjoy some aspects of a show that features flying  fire breathing dragons, magical 700 ft. Man made ice walls, and dead people being reanimated, after all. My hopes for The Americans was somewhat different. My hope was for a show that had some grounding in recent historical reality, where human beings behave in a way that has some resemblence to that reality. That doesn't mean I demand absolute realism. I'm willing to allow some dramatic license. This finale, however, is just chock-full of stuff that the human beings, in the world that is supposed to be depicted, just would not do. That makes it a lot less interesting to me.

[Erin9]

1 hour ago, Plums said:

I mean, I think in the universe of the show, we're meant to just take what happens in the immediate aftermath of the escape as a shorthand for knowing how events will unfold further- Stan lies to Dennis about letting the Jennings escape, and because he brought the suspicion to Dennis earlier and Dennis dismissed it out of hand, Stan will not be under suspicion. I think the fact that we saw him with the team collecting evidence from the house the next morning supports that, so plainly, both Dennis and Stan were allowed to investigate it themselves even though they both personally knew and were friendly with Philip and Elizabeth. Presumably Dennis knew Stan was going to drive to New Hampshire afterwards to break the news to Henry as they were leaving- Henry, who still hadn't been talked to or taken in for questioning even as his parents' Wanted posters had been distributed to Border Control. It's all just an example of the dramatic license with the FBI that the show has taken. 

Exactly. Realistically- Stan doesn’t break the news to Henry. Realistically Aderholt and Stan have NOTHING to do with this case at all period. But, it all happens. 

It’s one of the reasons why I find it easy to take a fair amount of dramatic license on what happens next to Paige, Henry, and Stan. 

[Dev F]

4 hours ago, Bannon said:

I'm sorry, but it does rely on cliched nonsense, the nonsense that human beings, when in a hyper confrontational, weapons drawn, situation, will begin belching and bloviating at great length about their feelings, motivations, and details of their past lives. This is not how human beings behave on the planet you and I inhabit.

We're clearly in agree-to-disagree territory here, but I honestly have no idea why that's an inevitable conclusion. I don't have extensive experience having a gun pointed at me, nor am I a trained spy, but nothing about the scenario seems outlandishly contrary to human behavior as I understand it. Indeed, another of the ways in which the scene is carefully constructed is to quickly foreclose all other possible resolutions -- Paige immediately blows up their chances of lying their way out of the garage, and there's a whole part where Elizabeth is clearly trying to get in position to take Stan out like she took out Rennhull, and Stan immediately realizes it and forces her to stop. That's immediately followed by Philip realizing he has no choice but to talk his way out of the situation with something approaching honesty.

Again, you don't have to buy all that, but it's not like the writers just plopped down the "talking our way out" scenario with no setup and expected the audience to go along with it because it's a cliche.

I'm also surprised that you cited Deadwood as an example of a show that's committed to "real human behavior" in a way The Americans isn't. I would absolutely describe Deadwood as "carefully constructed" in the way I've been describing it -- in the sense that every scene, every line is carefully constructed to serve a particular dramatic purpose. Hell, it may just be the most carefully crafted series of all time, with dialogue so painstakingly honed it's practically Shakespearean. But Deadwood is also a show that's often wildly theatrical and unrealistic, so devoted to exploring particular social themes that it'll have its characters engage in actions that barely resemble real human behavior at all.

I mean, it's a show where one of the main characters delivers monologues to a severed Indian head he keeps in a box in his room. The final season introduces the leader of a theater troupe who seems to be openly gay in the Old West, but it turns out he's only pretending to be gay for some reason, and there's a weird bit of intrigue about his mistress, and another thing about an actress in his troupe who's jealous of him for reasons that are never explained, because the show never got around to establishing that she's actually his daughter, apparently. And there's a storyline spanning multiple seasons in which the owner of the livery catches the town drunk masturbating on the sheriff's horse out of spite and forces him to sign a confession that he "fucked the sheriff's horse," but then later when the drunk makes a deal to buy the livery, the chalkboard where he signed his confession has been worn clean and he accuses the livery owner of lying and demands he turn over the real confession, and the livery owner is so insulted by the accusation that he kills himself, so the drunk inherits the livery, but while trying to sabotage the horse of the original livery owner's friend so he won't leave town and will help him run the place, the drunk gets kicked in the head and falls into a coma, and the livery owner's friend carts him around town in a wheelbarrow for the rest of the series.

Like I said, we'll have to agree to disagree, I'm sure, but I can't quite get my head around the idea that this kind of writing bespeaks a deep commitment to authentic human behavior, while not accounting for the fact that Paige would have definitely read the local news is an unforgivable affront to plausibility.

3 hours ago, Erin9 said:

Paige certainly helped convince Stan that Henry knew nothing, but that scene was primarily about him and Philip- their relationship. If he didn’t buy what Philip sold, they were not leaving imo.

Oh, sure, I know. I didn't mean to imply that the Paige part of it was the be-all and end-all. Like I said, there are a lot of moving parts in the scene; that was just the part I found easiest to break down as an example of the scene's craftsmanship.

[Erin9]

Something else I think regarding Stan telling Henry one on one vs the reality of a group of FBI agents telling him and interrogating him: 

 Stan will tell the truth in the kindest, most humane way possible. This is a guy who just got persuaded to let Henry’s parents leave. He’s going to say things the FBI would never say. He’s certainly going to paint a nicer picture of Henry’s parents to Henry than the FBI would have- as well as-why they so completely kept Henry out of everything. He doesn’t know everything Paige knows, but he knows enough as a starting point. 

[Bannon]

38 minutes ago, Dev F said:

We're clearly in agree-to-disagree territory here, but I honestly have no idea why that's an inevitable conclusion. I don't have extensive experience having a gun pointed at me, nor am I a trained spy, but nothing about the scenario seems outlandishly contrary to human behavior as I understand it. Indeed, another of the ways in which the scene is carefully constructed is to quickly foreclose all other possible resolutions -- Paige immediately blows up their chances of lying their way out of the garage, and there's a whole part where Elizabeth is clearly trying to get in position to take Stan out like she took out Rennhull, and Stan immediately realizes it and forces her to stop. That's immediately followed by Philip realizing he has no choice but to talk his way out of the situation with something approaching honesty.

Again, you don't have to buy all that, but it's not like the writers just plopped down the "talking our way out" scenario with no setup and expected the audience to go along with it because it's a cliche.

I'm also surprised that you cited Deadwood as an example of a show that's committed to "real human behavior" in a way The Americans isn't. I would absolutely describe Deadwood as "carefully constructed" in the way I've been describing it -- in the sense that every scene, every line is carefully constructed to serve a particular dramatic purpose. Hell, it may just be the most carefully crafted series of all time, with dialogue so painstakingly honed it's practically Shakespearean. But Deadwood is also a show that's often wildly theatrical and unrealistic, so devoted to exploring particular social themes that it'll have its characters engage in actions that barely resemble real human behavior at all.

I mean, it's a show where one of the main characters delivers monologues to a severed Indian head he keeps in a box in his room. The final season introduces the leader of a theater troupe who seems to be openly gay in the Old West, but it turns out he's only pretending to be gay for some reason, and there's a weird bit of intrigue about his mistress, and another thing about an actress in his troupe who's jealous of him for reasons that are never explained, because the show never got around to establishing that she's actually his daughter, apparently. And there's a storyline spanning multiple seasons in which the owner of the livery catches the town drunk masturbating on the sheriff's horse out of spite and forces him to sign a confession that he "fucked the sheriff's horse," but then later when the drunk makes a deal to buy the livery, the chalkboard where he signed his confession has been worn clean and he accuses the livery owner of lying and demands he turn over the real confession, and the livery owner is so insulted by the accusation that he kills himself, so the drunk inherits the livery, but while trying to sabotage the horse of the original livery owner's friend so he won't leave town and will help him run the place, the drunk gets kicked in the head and falls into a coma, and the livery owner's friend carts him around town in a wheelbarrow for the rest of the series.

Like I said, we'll have to agree to disagree, I'm sure, but I can't quite get my head around the idea that this kind of writing bespeaks a deep commitment to authentic human behavior, while not accounting for the fact that Paige would have definitely read the local news is an unforgivable affront to plausibility.

Oh, sure, I know. I didn't mean to imply that the Paige part of it was the be-all and end-all. Like I said, there are a lot of moving parts in the scene; that was just the part I found easiest to break down as an example of the scene's craftsmanship.

You're just gonna have to trust me that people, who have weapons trained on them by angry people, don't engage in heavily verbalization with the angry person about feelings, motivations, and details of their lives over the past several years, and the angry person with the weapon doesn't either. We just can't agree on this.

We shouldn't get too sidetracked with a discussion of Deadwood,  but I'll note that I've known noninsane people who talked to inanimate objects, nothing that a severe alcoholic would do strains credulity, except possibly sobriety, and I think you missed why the livery owner killed himself.

Finally, I have no problem with Paige being an incurious,  somewhat dimwitted person, who is oblivious to what is going on around her. The point is that if this is what Paige is going to be then she needs to be that way with consistency, but that would obviate the entire arc of her training to become a spy, and infiltrating the State Department, because incurious, somewhat dimwitted, people don't get internships at the State Department. How do the writers solve this? By having Paige be whatever they need her to be, from scene to scene. She's a plot advancement device, not a human being, and that, in my view, is lazy writing.

Edited June 13, 2018 by Bannon

[Dowel Jones]

52 minutes ago, Bannon said:

You're just gonna have to trust me that people, who have weapons trained on them by angry people, don't engage in heavily verbalization with the angry person about feelings, motivations, and details of their lives over the past several years, and the angry person with the weapon doesn't either.

Not to mention the fact that Philip and Elizabeth don't know that Stan is confronting them alone.  They would at least think that there is a boatload of backup on the way, and "let's not waste time here, we gotta boogie."

That scene, with others following it such as the meeting with Henry and the noncommittal hug from Renee, I think, were all meant to show Stan first crashing an burning, realizing his whole life is a failure, and now he's circling the toilet and trying to attain closure before he eats a bullet.

[Bannon]

5 minutes ago, Dowel Jones said:

Not to mention the fact that Philip and Elizabeth don't know that Stan is confronting them alone.  They would at least think that there is a boatload of backup on the way, and "let's not waste time here, we gotta boogie."

That scene, with others following it such as the meeting with Henry and the noncommittal hug from Renee, I think, were all meant to show Stan first crashing an burning, realizing his whole life is a failure, and now he's circling the toilet and trying to attain closure before he eats a bullet.

Naw, Phil and Liz were secure in the knowledge that their besty Stan has the intellect of a mollusk, and thus there could not be any other FBI agents arriving. 

[companionenvy]

I agree with Dev that shows and novels and movies -- even realistic ones -- often involve extremes of human behavior. Some of this is simply inherent in the fact that we're dealing with a constructed narrative world, where we do expect some level of coherence and meaning. Outside of a highly religious notion of divine order in daily affairs, for the most part, real life operates in pretty random and unpredictable ways -- ways that would be considered shoddy writing in a drama. Even dramas that try to simulate that randomness do so in ways that are themselves artful and speak to a level of outside design that simply isn't normally evident in our own lives. Even in those pantheon-level shows - The Wire, Breaking Bad -- I can think of many scenes and moments and even characters who operate on a slight (or, occasionally, substantial) remove from typical events, interactions, and responses. And far from representing minor lapses, these were in many cases among the best scenes and elements of those shows. 

At risk of beating a dead horse, the problem I'm continuing to have with the Americans isn't that they have a conversation while guns or drawn, or even, honestly, that Stan lets them go. Given the characters involved, I can imagine scenarios in which this show had developed in such a way in which Stan could have believably let Philip and Elizabeth escape. My problem is that I don't for a second believe that Stan would do it under these circumstances. 

In the end, after reading responses -- and I'm going to really try to make this my last post on this subject, except for maybe responses to specific points that come up in the discussion -- it seems to me that whether or not a viewer bought that scene depends on the following:

1. Precisely how strong he or she believes Stan and Philip's friendship was. I believe it was strong. I don't believe it was so categorically different and more intense than the majority of friendships that it would withstand finding out about years of deception involving the very core of one of the parties' identities, something that I think hardly any friendship would withstand. 

2.To what extent he or she believes Stan would have seen Philip as at least mostly sincere, especially when it came to his claims about their friendship. One of the scenarios in which I could have seen Stan letting P&E escape would be one in which Philip had actually confessed to him. It would have taken a ton of motivation for Philip to have done this, but I could have imagined a version of a final arc in which P&E, having turned against their handlers for the good of their country, realize that their immediate interests are, ironically, now aligned with those of the Americans and decide that passing the necessary information to the FBI, by whatever means, takes priority over their own safety. The difference here is that Philip would have gained some credibility from the fact that he was choosing to put himself in danger. In the scene we actually got, Philip's back is to the wall. So even after reading other people's differing perspectives, I still think Stan would really have to be an idiot to buy what Philip was selling.  While I think Erin's argument that Stan was actually looking for reasons to believe Philip is interesting, I can't ultimately accept it because I think Stan did actually show a lot of persistence in looking for evidence that the Jenningses were KGB, once he became suspicious. He tracked down Pastor Tim and Gregory's associate. He broke into their house. He low-key questioned Henry. He went to the length of telling his boss about his suspicions, even knowing he was likely to sound paranoid. Did he uncover every stone? No, but that's partially because there was still a level in which he wasn't sure he wasn't being paranoid. He may have dreaded being confirmed, but he took quite a few steps toward uncovering the truth; this isn't a guy who was accepting comforting lies. If he had, he would have used Aderholt's stunned dismissal as a pretext to abandon his suspicions entirely. 

3. How much he or she believes the coup factored into Stan's thinking, and how much it should have. To me, the coup seemed clearly painted as secondary to the personal. But more than that, I'm not convinced that even if preventing the coup was a major part of his motivation, that he should have been persuaded that letting P&E go was essential for doing it. For one, he had at least two options of trying to stop the coup through other means: one, suggested by Oleg, had been to work with Oleg (who he has much better reason to trust than Philip, at this point), to decode and pass on the message himself, the other was to rely on normal channels, namely telling his superiors that two spies had independently confirmed word of a coup, and getting some version of that message to Gorbachev's people -- which it would have been in the US interest to do -- through diplomatic and political mechanisms. This is ignoring (as the show seems to have been) the fact that Tatiana's death should have kind of mooted all of this by being in itself a big honking warning sign to Gorbachev. In addition, the fact that Philip knew enough about the coup to use it in his speech does not actually confirm that he was on Oleg's side. Stan knows from Oleg that there is apparently a divide in Russia/the KGB between pro and anti-Gorbachev forces. Some anti-Gorbachev forces are fomenting a coup; some pro-Gorbachev forces are trying to stop it. These are all spies, so it is not at all obvious that people on either side wouldn't have access to information that was supposed to be the other side's secret. So the fact that Philip knows about the coup and claims to be on the side that Stan would be most likely to support should not convince Stan that he should trust that Philip will deliver Oleg's message to the right people.

4. How disillusioned he or she believes Stan is about the FBI, and how much of a moral equivalence he or she thinks Stan would have seen between his actions and those of P&E. Yes, Stan is disillusioned. Yes, he knows the agency has done things that he disapproves of, and that he himself has crossed some serious moral lines (most obviously, killing Vlad). Yes, I think he could appreciate, on some level, that Philip isn't actually a traitor; he's a patriot from another country. But again, it comes down to degree: I just don't think as Stan has been written this last season, he is so deeply cynical about the USSR/USA division, or so self-loathing about his years-old killing of Vlad, that he's going to conclude that there is enough of a moral equivalence between himself/the FBI and the Jenningses/the KGB that it would factor heavily into a decision to let them go in these circumstances. Stan may have been somewhat reluctant, but he did agree to come back to CI. He likes Aderholt, and presumably some of his other colleagues. Even if we look at his Thanksgiving speech in part as an attempt to convince himself, this is a guy who has been at least playing the part of the committed Cold Warrior extremely recently, and even if he isn't totally on-board on the level of ideology, his disgust at what the KGB has been doing -- especially the recent killings of Sophia and Gennady -- is genuine. In a hypothetical scenario in which Stan lets P&E go in a way I found credible, I could buy his understanding that Philip, too, was doing a job for his country serving as some part of his reasoning. But in a scene in which Philip is also transparently working Stan to save himself, Elizabeth, and Paige, I think it is far too sudden a reversal for Stan to suddenly embrace extreme relativism. Especially because even in a situation in which you do recognize that your counterpart is, on an individual level, perhaps not very different from you, that doesn't mean you automatically decide that you can't act against them. One of the realities of war is that you are going to kill individual people who may not be any more evil or less deserving than you simply because they are on the other side. Stan doesn't have to hate Philip to arrest or even kill him - or, even if he finds he can't kill him (which I would have found believable), that he isn't at least going to call it in to his superiors very soon after, having given P&E no more than a slight head start.

[Bannon]

11 minutes ago, companionenvy said:

I agree with Dev that shows and novels and movies -- even realistic ones -- often involve extremes of human behavior. Some of this is simply inherent in the fact that we're dealing with a constructed narrative world, where we do expect some level of coherence and meaning. Outside of a highly religious notion of divine order in daily affairs, for the most part, real life operates in pretty random and unpredictable ways -- ways that would be considered shoddy writing in a drama. Even dramas that try to simulate that randomness do so in ways that are themselves artful and speak to a level of outside design that simply isn't normally evident in our own lives. Even in those pantheon-level shows - The Wire, Breaking Bad -- I can think of many scenes and moments and even characters who operate on a slight (or, occasionally, substantial) remove from typical events, interactions, and responses. And far from representing minor lapses, these were in many cases among the best scenes and elements of those shows. 

At risk of beating a dead horse, the problem I'm continuing to have with the Americans isn't that they have a conversation while guns or drawn, or even, honestly, that Stan lets them go. Given the characters involved, I can imagine scenarios in which this show had developed in such a way in which Stan could have believably let Philip and Elizabeth escape. My problem is that I don't for a second believe that Stan would do it under these circumstances. 

In the end, after reading responses -- and I'm going to really try to make this my last post on this subject, except for maybe responses to specific points that come up in the discussion -- it seems to me that whether or not a viewer bought that scene depends on the following:

1. Precisely how strong he or she believes Stan and Philip's friendship was. I believe it was strong. I don't believe it was so categorically different and more intense than the majority of friendships that it would withstand finding out about years of deception involving the very core of one of the parties' identities, something that I think hardly any friendship would withstand. 

2.To what extent he or she believes Stan would have seen Philip as at least mostly sincere, especially when it came to his claims about their friendship. One of the scenarios in which I could have seen Stan letting P&E escape would be one in which Philip had actually confessed to him. It would have taken a ton of motivation for Philip to have done this, but I could have imagined a version of a final arc in which P&E, having turned against their handlers for the good of their country, realize that their immediate interests are, ironically, now aligned with those of the Americans and decide that passing the necessary information to the FBI, by whatever means, takes priority over their own safety. The difference here is that Philip would have gained some credibility from the fact that he was choosing to put himself in danger. In the scene we actually got, Philip's back is to the wall. So even after reading other people's differing perspectives, I still think Stan would really have to be an idiot to buy what Philip was selling.  While I think Erin's argument that Stan was actually looking for reasons to believe Philip is interesting, I can't ultimately accept it because I think Stan did actually show a lot of persistence in looking for evidence that the Jenningses were KGB, once he became suspicious. He tracked down Pastor Tim and Gregory's associate. He broke into their house. He low-key questioned Henry. He went to the length of telling his boss about his suspicions, even knowing he was likely to sound paranoid. Did he uncover every stone? No, but that's partially because there was still a level in which he wasn't sure he wasn't being paranoid. He may have dreaded being confirmed, but he took quite a few steps toward uncovering the truth; this isn't a guy who was accepting comforting lies. If he had, he would have used Aderholt's stunned dismissal as a pretext to abandon his suspicions entirely. 

3. How much he or she believes the coup factored into Stan's thinking, and how much it should have. To me, the coup seemed clearly painted as secondary to the personal. But more than that, I'm not convinced that even if preventing the coup was a major part of his motivation, that he should have been persuaded that letting P&E go was essential for doing it. For one, he had at least two options of trying to stop the coup through other means: one, suggested by Oleg, had been to work with Oleg (who he has much better reason to trust than Philip, at this point), to decode and pass on the message himself, the other was to rely on normal channels, namely telling his superiors that two spies had independently confirmed word of a coup, and getting some version of that message to Gorbachev's people -- which it would have been in the US interest to do -- through diplomatic and political mechanisms. This is ignoring (as the show seems to have been) the fact that Tatiana's death should have kind of mooted all of this by being in itself a big honking warning sign to Gorbachev. In addition, the fact that Philip knew enough about the coup to use it in his speech does not actually confirm that he was on Oleg's side. Stan knows from Oleg that there is apparently a divide in Russia/the KGB between pro and anti-Gorbachev forces. Some anti-Gorbachev forces are fomenting a coup; some pro-Gorbachev forces are trying to stop it. These are all spies, so it is not at all obvious that people on either side wouldn't have access to information that was supposed to be the other side's secret. So the fact that Philip knows about the coup and claims to be on the side that Stan would be most likely to support should not convince Stan that he should trust that Philip will deliver Oleg's message to the right people.

4. How disillusioned he or she believes Stan is about the FBI, and how much of a moral equivalence he or she thinks Stan would have seen between his actions and those of P&E. Yes, Stan is disillusioned. Yes, he knows the agency has done things that he disapproves of, and that he himself has crossed some serious moral lines (most obviously, killing Vlad). Yes, I think he could appreciate, on some level, that Philip isn't actually a traitor; he's a patriot from another country. But again, it comes down to degree: I just don't think as Stan has been written this last season, he is so deeply cynical about the USSR/USA division, or so self-loathing about his years-old killing of Vlad, that he's going to conclude that there is enough of a moral equivalence between himself/the FBI and the Jenningses/the KGB that it would factor heavily into a decision to let them go in these circumstances. Stan may have been somewhat reluctant, but he did agree to come back to CI. He likes Aderholt, and presumably some of his other colleagues. Even if we look at his Thanksgiving speech in part as an attempt to convince himself, this is a guy who has been at least playing the part of the committed Cold Warrior extremely recently, and even if he isn't totally on-board on the level of ideology, his disgust at what the KGB has been doing -- especially the recent killings of Sophia and Gennady -- is genuine. In a hypothetical scenario in which Stan lets P&E go in a way I found credible, I could buy his understanding that Philip, too, was doing a job for his country serving as some part of his reasoning. But in a scene in which Philip is also transparently working Stan to save himself, Elizabeth, and Paige, I think it is far too sudden a reversal for Stan to suddenly embrace extreme relativism. Especially because even in a situation in which you do recognize that your counterpart is, on an individual level, perhaps not very different from you, that doesn't mean you automatically decide that you can't act against them. One of the realities of war is that you are going to kill individual people who may not be any more evil or less deserving than you simply because they are on the other side. Stan doesn't have to hate Philip to arrest or even kill him - or, even if he finds he can't kill him (which I would have found believable), that he isn't at least going to call it in to his superiors very soon after, having given P&E no more than a slight head start.

There would have been a helluva lot more credible scenarios available, if the writers had not made the choice to have Liz and Phil rack up a body count consistent with the Battle of Stalingrad, as an easy means of building dramatic tension and internal conflict within characters.

[companionenvy]

13 minutes ago, Bannon said:

There would have been a helluva lot more credible scenarios available, if the writers had not made the choice to have Liz and Phil rack up a body count consistent with the Battle of Stalingrad, as an easy means of building dramatic tension and internal conflict within characters.

That's an important point that also relates to the issue of moral relativism. Stan is not morally comparable to P&E because bad as killing Vlad was, they each have to have a body count  that, conservatively, approaches 100  (presumably, the combined 70-ish or so kills we see on screen is not the extent of P&Es kill list in their 20 + years in the US), including many unambiguous innocents. That's a significant difference. So, the fact that there may be a theoretical equivalence between an FBI and a KGB agent, in terms of dirty tactics, doesn't actually apply in this case, because we never see Stan -- or for that matter, any other American agent -- get close to P&E levels of violence or disregard for innocent life.  And Stan knows that the illegals he's chasing have been dropping bodies right and left, as of late, which is not typical of his own behavior, and is several orders of magnitude worse than even something as unsavory as the attempt to blackmail Oleg. 

[Bannon]

14 minutes ago, companionenvy said:

That's an important point that also relates to the issue of moral relativism. Stan is not morally comparable to P&E because bad as killing Vlad was, they each have to have a body count  that, conservatively, approaches 100  (presumably, the combined 70-ish or so kills we see on screen is not the extent of P&Es kill list in their 20 + years in the US), including many unambiguous innocents. That's a significant difference. So, the fact that there may be a theoretical equivalence between an FBI and a KGB agent, in terms of dirty tactics, doesn't actually apply in this case, because we never see Stan -- or for that matter, any other American agent -- get close to P&E levels of violence or disregard for innocent life.  And Stan knows that the illegals he's chasing have been dropping bodies right and left, as of late, which is not typical of his own behavior, and is several orders of magnitude worse than even something as unsavory as the attempt to blackmail Oleg. 

So many of the issues I have with writing would have been mitigated if the ludicrous volume of homicide had been greatly reduced. It really is  a very puzzling writing mistake. It is as if the writers couldn't think of other ways to have characters build internal tension.

[sistermagpie]

17 minutes ago, Bannon said:

So many of the issues I have with writing would have been mitigated if the ludicrous volume of homicide had been greatly reduced. It really is  a very puzzling writing mistake. It is as if the writers couldn't think of other ways to have characters build internal tension.

Plus it often didn't do that. It became a blur at best and a joke at worst. Even the characters themselves were more haunted by the emotional damage they caused than any one murder. Even Betty the mail robot lady.

[Clanstarling]

4 hours ago, Bannon said:

Because Henry would be scooped up immediately by the FBI for a thorough debriefing, and nobody, Stan, Aderholt,  etc., closely associated with the largest American espionage debacle since the Rosenbergs would be involved.

Fair point. Time has passed and I've forgotten the order of the final scenes, so I assumed Stan went up there before Henry was scooped up.

[hellmouse]

4 hours ago, Dowel Jones said:

5 hours ago, Bannon said:

You're just gonna have to trust me that people, who have weapons trained on them by angry people, don't engage in heavily verbalization with the angry person about feelings, motivations, and details of their lives over the past several years, and the angry person with the weapon doesn't either.

Not to mention the fact that Philip and Elizabeth don't know that Stan is confronting them alone.  They would at least think that there is a boatload of backup on the way, and "let's not waste time here, we gotta boogie."

I agree that the idea of people having a long conversation with someone pointing a gun at them doesn't make sense. But the only thing that makes this situation slightly different is that Philip and Elizabeth are KGB officers who have handled all kinds of situations with angry people before. They've murdered people. They have talked their way out of situations. They're constantly assessing their options as a situation unfolds. They are not going to surrender without every effort to get out. In this case, Philip decides that the weapon best suited to disarm Stan is emotional honesty and manipulation. He is like a gambler placing a bet that Stan will not shoot, that Stan is susceptible to appeals to his emotion, and that there aren't 100 FBI agents outside the building. He gets an unexpected assist on the emotional side from the things Paige says, who is transparently a poor liar and therefore more believable.  Elizabeth wisely keeps mostly quiet since she is more likely to provoke Stan's anger. Philip knows that his bet is paying off as Stan gradually lowers the gun. 

Should it have worked? IDK. But it did.

[Bannon]

Yes, the writers decided that is the scene they wanted. We will agree to disagree on what it means to say a scene works.

[sistermagpie]

1 hour ago, hellmouse said:

They have talked their way out of situations.

Yes, one person I could believe talking about feelings etc. in any situation it's Philip just because for him that would be an automatic defense, it seems to me. I don't know about normal people or even Stan, but Philip's got a lot of conditioning.

I remember years ago there was a kid who was held up at the convenience store where he worked. He'd just won an essay contest where his essay was about what he would say to a person holding him up with a gun. So when he was held up and he gave the speech to the guy.

He got shot. I'm not sure if they took back the essay prize...

[Clanstarling]

13 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:

Yes, one person I could believe talking about feelings etc. in any situation it's Philip just because for him that would be an automatic defense, it seems to me. I don't know about normal people or even Stan, but Philip's got a lot of conditioning.

I remember years ago there was a kid who was held up at the convenience store where he worked. He'd just won an essay contest where his essay was about what he would say to a person holding him up with a gun. So when he was held up and he gave the speech to the guy.

He got shot. I'm not sure if they took back the essay prize...

Well, that was an ending I wasn't expecting. I'm guessing he survived?

[sistermagpie]

3 minutes ago, Clanstarling said:

Well, that was an ending I wasn't expecting. I'm guessing he survived?

IIRC, he did not, sadly.

[Clanstarling]

37 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:

IIRC, he did not, sadly.

Once again, an ending I wasn't expecting.

[Umbelina]

7 hours ago, companionenvy said:

That's an important point that also relates to the issue of moral relativism. Stan is not morally comparable to P&E because bad as killing Vlad was, they each have to have a body count  that, conservatively, approaches 100  (presumably, the combined 70-ish or so kills we see on screen is not the extent of P&Es kill list in their 20 + years in the US), including many unambiguous innocents. That's a significant difference. So, the fact that there may be a theoretical equivalence between an FBI and a KGB agent, in terms of dirty tactics, doesn't actually apply in this case, because we never see Stan -- or for that matter, any other American agent -- get close to P&E levels of violence or disregard for innocent life.  And Stan knows that the illegals he's chasing have been dropping bodies right and left, as of late, which is not typical of his own behavior, and is several orders of magnitude worse than even something as unsavory as the attempt to blackmail Oleg. 

Beautiful posts, and I agree.  I'd like to add one major factor you left out.

Stan KNOWS 3 FBI agents, fellow officers, just died, left the earth and their families, and he knows Elizabeth and Philip killed them.

FULL STOP.

Cops do not let cop killers go.  It just simply wouldn't have happened.  I come from a family of cops, and I've dated a few, including a couple of Intelligence Officers.  They simply don't do that.  Wouldn't do that. 

I mentioned the massive increase in murders leading up to this finale several times as something that makes absolutely no writing sense if this is the finale you've planned.  Normal, longer seasons, Elizabeth averaged 3.2 kills or something like that.  This SHORT season?  10.  Including 3 FBI agents. 

It's bizarre for the writers to have increased the murder sprees and then have Stan let them go.

6 hours ago, Clanstarling said:

Fair point. Time has passed and I've forgotten the order of the final scenes, so I assumed Stan went up there before Henry was scooped up.

The FBI would have had men there the minute Aderholt had those sketches of Philip and Elizabeth.  They wouldn't have to drive hours either, I'm sure there would be available agents or at least cops to surround Henry immediately.  He'd already sent them to Paige's place.

 

After all of that though?  The thing that bothers me most about the finale is still this.  The writers exited stage left, after leaving ALL of their characters in peril.  They didn't "end" shit.

Edited June 14, 2018 by Umbelina

[Clanstarling]

8 hours ago, Umbelina said:

After all of that though?  The thing that bothers me most about the finale is still this.  The writers exited stage left, after leaving ALL of their characters in peril.  They didn't "end" shit.

And that's what I loved about it, oddly enough. While I love tidy finales (Sense8 rocked), I also like slice of life endings that leave it up in the air, especially when they've at least hinted at the probable directions.

[Erin9]

Regarding the Stan/Philip confrontation. Do I think something like that would have happened in the real world? No. Of course not. 

But in this fictional world, in the context of this show where relationships are the focus, it absolutely worked for me. It was a fantastic, long awaited, masterfully handled confrontation between Stan and Philip. And frankly- a heck of a lot more interesting to watch than a more real world shoot out or arrest. 

Regarding killings: in my mind- I go with the idea that P/E are no different from any other spies  and move on. I never thought I was supposed to see them otherwise. Some were noteworthy and memorably sad.  Plenty were basically faceless individuals.  Personally- I find Stan and Claudia’s revenge killings more disturbing than almost anything. 

Generally I like loose ends relatively tied up. In almost any other book or show, I’d be mad. But given what a dark show this could be- I’m sure the ending I’ve written is more positive than anything they would have come up with. Lol 

Edited June 14, 2018 by Erin9

[Bannon]

3 hours ago, Clanstarling said:

And that's what I loved about it, oddly enough. While I love tidy finales (Sense8 rocked), I also like slice of life endings that leave it up in the air, especially when they've at least hinted at the probable directions.

It's one thing to have an ambiguous ending, ala The Sopranos, where Tony continues life as a crime boss, which logically entails a constant, ongoing, threat of indictment and/or murder. It is another thing to have an ambiguous ending like this, which entails things that logically should not be happening, like Stan traveling to New Hampshire to tell Henry, at a hockey rink, about the truth of his family, or things which are wholly undefined, like how Paige will exist on her own, when she gets done with the vodka bottle at Claudia's safe house.

Hell, I thought Deadwoods unplanned finale was far superior. Bullock loses the election. Hearst leaves but doesn't destroy the town, after Sweringen offers up a blood sacrifice, and Al then takes it upon himself to scrub the gore out of the floorboards, the gore of a wholly innocent young woman that Hearst forced him to murder, so as to avoid having to murder the woman, Trixie, that Al truly loves.

Milch writes better show finales when he isn't trying to, than these folks did on purpose. It helps when you've written a better story all along.

Edited June 14, 2018 by Bannon
Spelling

[Bannon]

4 minutes ago, Erin9 said:

Regarding the Stan/Philip confrontation. Do I think something like that would have happened in the real world? No. Of course not. 

But in this fictional world, in the context of this show where relationships are the focus, it absolutely worked for me. It was a fantastic, long awaited, masterfully handled confrontation between Stan and Philip. And frankly- a heck of a lot more interesting to watch than a more real world shoot out or arrest. 

Generally I like loose ends relatively tied up. In almost any other book or show, I’d be mad. But given what a dark show this could be- I’m sure the ending I’ve written is more positive than anything they would have come up with. Lol 

If Phil and Liz getting away to the U.S.S.R. was the desired end point, the creative thing to do would have entailed a confrontation scene between Stan and the KGB trio,  that could actually happen on the planet we inhabit, while still having a logical, plausible, explanation for the escape. There were ways to accomplish this, but the writers decided they wanted to use a trope worthy of parody in an Austin Powers movie, and had the audience jump through multiple plausibility hoops to get to that scene . I have been puzzled for two weeks now about that decision (I've neglected to get my lithium scrip refilled), and just as puzzled that a majority of the audience sees it as masterful. I will never get it, I'm afraid.

[Erin9]

We all have our “bridge too far” moments with fiction vs reality. I love history and most of the time I can just go with whatever details they got wrong or dramatic license they decided to take to make a better story. Most of the time.

Didn’t happen with The Crown. It didn’t help that I got distracted about 5 minutes into the first episode with details that were just wrong. But my breaking point was a conversation later in the series between The Queen and Churchill that simply never would have happened. Not the context, not the tone they took.....nothing. Never watched another episode. I couldn’t wave it off. 

So- I get how that’s happened for some in this show. Personally I don’t care at all that the dead FBI agents never got brought up. I didn’t know them. Stan was never seen having a close relationship with them. He was with the Teacups. Worked for me. 

[SunnyBeBe]

I was praying that Philip wouldn't be killed and he wasn't. So, I can't really complain, because, I really thought he would be, because, he was well loved by a lot of fans and it would seem that he would go down and E would survive, since, she was more detested by viewers, imo. I can't say that START was all that believable.  But, it's something that I can accept. We all have our own levels of acceptability.   I can relate though, because, I recall how I felt watching the last season and finale of Dexter! OMG.  Talk about suspension of belief.....it was horrendous.  I still wonder how I survived that torture.  lol  

[Bannon]

5 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:

I was praying that Philip wouldn't be killed and he wasn't. So, I can't really complain, because, I really thought he would be, because, he was well loved by a lot of fans and it would seem that he would go down and E would survive, since, she was more detested by viewers, imo. I can't say that START was all that believable.  But, it's something that I can accept. We all have our own levels of acceptability.   I can relate though, because, I recall how I felt watching the last season and finale of Dexter! OMG.  Talk about suspension of belief.....it was horrendous.  I still wonder how I survived that torture.  lol  

I tried to watch Dexter, found it too ridiculous, so I stopped after a few episodes. I think my issues with The Americans, which I am glad to have watched to the end, are closely related to how high my expectations were. "Not as good as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or Deadwood" is hardly blistering criticism.

[Bannon]

35 minutes ago, Erin9 said:

We all have our “bridge too far” moments with fiction vs reality. I love history and most of the time I can just go with whatever details they got wrong or dramatic license they decided to take to make a better story. Most of the time.

Didn’t happen with The Crown. It didn’t help that I got distracted about 5 minutes into the first episode with details that were just wrong. But my breaking point was a conversation later in the series between The Queen and Churchill that simply never would have happened. Not the context, not the tone they took.....nothing. Never watched another episode. I couldn’t wave it off. 

So- I get how that’s happened for some in this show. Personally I don’t care at all that the dead FBI agents never got brought up. I didn’t know them. Stan was never seen having a close relationship with them. He was with the Teacups. Worked for me. 

Not to go too far astray, but which conversation in The Crown? I find so many of the portrayals of Churchill in various shows and movies border on ridiculous one note caricature that it becomes a real problem. The recent movie with Gary Oldman as Churchill was one of the few portrayals where the writing began to afford this historical figure some of the needed complexity.

[Plums]

7 minutes ago, Erin9 said:

We all have our “bridge too far” moments with fiction vs reality. I love history and most of the time I can just go with whatever details they got wrong or dramatic license they decided to take to make a better story. Most of the time.

Didn’t happen with The Crown. It didn’t help that I got distracted about 5 minutes into the first episode with details that were just wrong. But my breaking point was a conversation later in the series between The Queen and Churchill that simply never would have happened. Not the context, not the tone they took.....nothing. Never watched another episode. I couldn’t wave it off. 

So- I get how that’s happened for some in this show. Personally I don’t care at all that the dead FBI agents never got brought up. I didn’t know them. Stan was never seen having a close relationship with them. He was with the Teacups. Worked for me. 

Yeah, at the outset, The Americans was established as depicting the lives and operations of illegal spies as way more dangerous and violent than they really were during the Cold War, and this was treated as SOP by the characters. I accepted that dramatic license with history the premise took, and from there, the most important thing for me is that it never became internally inconsistent with the established rules, and the characters stayed true, which, if either of those things were violated in service of a story that felt inorganic, would have really have bugged me. But I never felt that way. Others may disagree, and I'm sorry they couldn't enjoy this show as much as I did. 

 

2 hours ago, Erin9 said:

Personally- I find Stan and Claudia’s revenge killings more disturbing than almost anything.

I wasn't personally disturbed by Claudia's revenge killing. I thought that was kind of a badass mini horror movie, tbh. But Stan killing Vlad remains to me one of the most disturbing acts committed by anyone on the show, and it's one of the only scenes that is super difficult for me to rewatch because of how horrific it is. Yeah, their kill count is probably a lot higher than Stan's, but at least the Jennings never targeted an innocent person to terrorize and murder. They may have incidentally terrorized innocent people over the course of their murdering unfortunate witnesses, but it was never something they intentionally set out to do. 

[sistermagpie]

11 hours ago, Umbelina said:

Cops do not let cop killers go.  It just simply wouldn't have happened.  I come from a family of cops, and I've dated a few, including a couple of Intelligence Officers.  They simply don't do that.  Wouldn't do that. 

That's a thing that stuck with me too, but it also made me think how in some ways they've always built into Stan that he wasn't like that himself. He seemed to feel that way about Amador and he jumped onto the revenge plot with Arkady, but in general he always put his personal feelings about the team spirit of being a cop.

Which is so unusual they probably should have used it in his character. There's a period where everyone at the bureau's mad at him because of his actions that got Gaad kicked out, but then it just blows over. Well, maybe his figuring out about Martha helps that out, which would make sense. But it still seems like Stan would have been really disliked by other guys at the job all the time.  Seems like everyone would see him as a guy who was ready to stab his fellow officers in the back to advance himself or also just that he was completely untrustworthy when it came to Russians, be they the source everyone knew he was sleeping with or that Burov guy who seemed to have turned him. He even tricked TPTB who don't know what's really going on into thinking he was being a hero when he wasn't acting in the interest in the country at all. 

I don't know how they could have used this to get to the finale they wanted but it does sometimes seem like show's presenting him as a steadfast, regular FBI guy when he's not acting that way at all. I guess they sort of want him to be a reflection of Oleg and Philip who push back against the KGB but he just isn't. Even when they pulled really gutsy moves against the KGB it was clear how far they were pushing it or not and there was danger in it. Oleg's most daring move in outing William couldn't be proven but did put him in danger. Philip's most dangerous move in warning Kimmy was something only Elizabeth knew about.

Stan did a lot more things and most of them just were fine. The show kind of ends by giving him a hero moment by having him talk to Henry (and a possible new spy to bag with Renee) and no ambivalence shown on his part about how he's betrayed the FBI again by making his own call on Russian agents he personally knows. There's a suggestion that his relationship with Renee (which already played as shallow and superficial) is poisoned but not his relationship with Aderholdt, which was real and seems very valuable.

The fact that Stan would confront Philip and Elizabeth knowing for a fact that they just murdered 3 FBI agents and the only reason it's important to him is that they both missed Thanksgiving is even more extreme. I get why the show was more interested in his relationship with Gennadi and Sophia because they were his agents and he knew them personally and I'm fine with him caring about them--they were his responsibility so he'd be personally angry about that too. But still, fellow agents would take precedent. The KGB agents don't have that kind of tribal loyalty to each other as police do but even Philip clearly sees the difference between a source like Martha and William.  

11 hours ago, Umbelina said:

The FBI would have had men there the minute Aderholt had those sketches of Philip and Elizabeth.  They wouldn't have to drive hours either, I'm sure there would be available agents or at least cops to surround Henry immediately.  He'd already sent them to Paige's place.

I believe Aderholt confirmed that there were already agents watching the school too so yeah, Henry was already scooped up. They seemed to be only waiting in case Philip and Elizabeth tried to come close or Henry tried to leave or whatever.

6 minutes ago, Plums said:

I wasn't personally disturbed by Claudia's revenge killing. I thought that was kind of a badass mini horror movie, tbh. But Stan killing Vlad remains to me one of the most disturbing acts committed by anyone on the show, and it's one of the only scenes that is super difficult for me to rewatch because of how horrific it is.

I remember we had to see it over and over too because the first time it aired the DVR settings on FX were messed up so a lot of people's episode cut off before he did it. To make up for it they made the ep available and also showed the murder on the previouslies like four weeks in row. 

To me another difference with Vlad is that it still comes out of nowhere. With Claudia there's no confusion as to why she would kill that guy. Not only is it in keeping with Claudia's character it's obviously a reflection of Elizabeth. They're both types who'd be unable to show somebody love in life and instead just take revenge as an act of love. Claudia was standing up for everything she believed in by killing that guy--Zhukov was even a WWII hero.

With Vlad it almost seemed like Stan was itching to kill someone--anyone--and this was the guy. He wasn't that close to Amador, no matter what the show tried to retcon at the last minute. It was almost like Stan himself was trying to make himself believe he thought this was necessary but really he was just being a psycho.

3 hours ago, Clanstarling said:

And that's what I loved about it, oddly enough. While I love tidy finales (Sense8 rocked), I also like slice of life endings that leave it up in the air, especially when they've at least hinted at the probable directions.

Me too, tbh. To me it didn't feel like things weren't ended. It seemed like an ending for everybody even if there were many ways that ending could fall out afterwards--so intentionally not settling everyone. It's funny because often when people were predict the ending online it was all putting everyone on shelves, settling them into situations that would take almost an entire season to get to *after* they were caught/escaped/killed. 

2 hours ago, Bannon said:

It's one thing to have an ambiguous ending, ala The Sopranos, where Tony continues life as a crime boss, which logically entails a constant, ongoing, threat of idictment and/or murder. It is another thing to have an ambiguous ending like this, which entails things that logically should not be happening, like Stan traveling to New Hampshire to tell Henry, at a hockey rink, about the truth of his family, or things which are wholly undefined, like how Paige will exist on her own, when she gets done with the vodka bottle at Claudia's safe house.

It doesn't seem like these are problems with ambiguity, though. It's just a problem with the logic of what's happening onscreen then. It's unrealistic for Stan to be able to talk to Henry the way he is, but it's not ambiguous. We don't know what's going to happen next, but we know what's happening there. Paige being alone is the ending. How she will exist on her own is another story. 

[Umbelina]

One thing I find very odd is that some people really DO think this was a happy ending, and other people really DO think that every character we care about on screen is going to have a very sad ending.

I'm with the later group.

So, in one way I guess the writers not bothering to end the show really worked for them, and for others.

Logically I can't see any one of Stan, Henry, Oleg, Paige, Elizabeth, or Philip with anything other than ruined lives, and in Philip and Elizabeth's case, most probably killed by furious and very powerful Coup people, so no life at all.

Emotionally I'd like to see them all make it as well, except for Paige.  Paige to me is the most dangerous and unlikable of all of them, because she's basically a cult follower, willing to do anything anyone tells her to without examination.  Yeah, getting off the train may signal an end to that for some, but it may also just be that Paige didn't want to go live in Russia, because Russia sucks, and she wouldn't have cool clothes, music, electricity, and like, you know, food she likes and stuff.

Stan's character has always been problematic for some, but until the finale, I always thought of him as a pretty decent fellow, and a loyal FBI officer, so I still do, in spite of him letting them go.  So either he's full on traitor now, and will be lying to the FBI for the rest of his life (maybe he can squeeze his anus during annual polygraph tests?) or he will do the only thing I can see him do logically and confess, be fired, possibly be jailed.  He can either kill Renee himself, or warn the FBI, but he simply could NOT let her work there in any universe I find even slightly believable from what we've known as Stan all these years.  He's still a loyal "Goddamn American!" after all.   He's also not a complete fool, he knows Paige will tell, so it's better to get in front of that.  His life is ruined.

The kids?  May recover, Paige may avoid prison if she spills every single thing she knows, but she's not going to get custody of Henry, so Henry goes into the system as a 16 year old. 

Maybe that's the real reason I loved the episode but hated it as a finale?  The LOGICAL end for everyone on the show is really terrible, but the writers were too chickenshit to show it?  I think there are ways that the LOGICAL ending could have been more hopeful, and this kind of ending would make more sense, but the lead in final season shows simply didn't allow that.

• Either clear Renee of being KGB, or have her arrested, or her mission aborted earlier in the season
• No season long murder spree for Elizabeth
• DO NOT KILL FUCKING FBI AGENTS!!!  I'm firm on this, that would be Stan's FULL STOP about letting them go, it doesn't matter to cops if they knew the dead cops, it only matters that they WERE cops.  They say it's because "anyone who would kill a cop would kill anyone, so it's more dangerous, so of course we go after them harder" but the truth is?  It's an unwritten law, a code.
• Do something other than sending Philip and Elizabeth back to face nearly certain deaths from the Coup people, or for crying out loud don't make them all powerful, from every single area, political, military, AND KGB.  Have it be simply a KGB thing, so that all of them could be neutralized before they return.  By all means, kill Claudia in the USA immediately since she knows you've foiled the plan.
• Do not have Henry's school fees even be a damn question.  Either let the scholarship be a full boat, or have Philip pre-pay them until graduation.  It would be MUCH more likely for him to escape the system if he already had a place to live, eat, be educated safely, and his summer job and place to live with adult supervision already be handled by his friend's dad.  After that?  He's 17, he could probably be declared an emancipated minor.  Or you know, have him ALREADY be 17 and had work experience behind him at the tanning factory.

Oleg's the only story the writers did finish.  In their minds, and in the actor's, I've read a few times that Oleg's end is just what we saw, he's in prison for life.  That one is fan-wankable though, and I still hope he's released in the afterglow of the giant orgasm that is the USSR falling apart in a few years, ceasing to be at all.

Edited June 14, 2018 by Umbelina