A great deal of interesting discussion here over the plausibility of the Jared story line. There have been good points made on both sides of the discussion.
What I am wondering is whether anyone here thinks the whole Martha/Clark marriage is a bit of a stretch. What spouse–male or female—would put up with such an unusual arrangement? Or is someone being setup?
Either way, I don’t like Martha’s prospects. I don’t think she gets through season three.
The fact that in his “confession” it comes across as a spur-of-the-moment reacts to a heated fight with his parents is what I find hard to believe.
Look, we all know about the Menendez brothers who shot their parents to death and deliberately tried to make it look as brutal as they could, went out and disposed of the guns and IIRC, clothes, then came back and then called the police pretending to find them and were so convincing at being the distraught children who’d just found their parents murdered that they fooled the police into not testing their hands or clothes for powder residue and actually hung a jury, but they had moths to plan the killing.
The idea that Jared in a few minutes could have killed all three without alerting anyone else in the hotel(gun shots make noise) and then collected himself, gone to the pool and then come back faking his shock and anguish strikes me as a real stretch.
I’d have found it more plausible if he’d planned and carried it out as part of some hair-brained scheme to be with Kate.
Well put. The writers want it both ways. He’s so freaked out that he kills not only his dad, but his mom and sister, and yet he’s cool as a cucumber afterward. Most people would be shaking like a leaf and gulping like a fish for the next day, even if they had shot an attacker in self defense, let alone if they had shot their completely innocent sister themselves.
There’s a word for people who can be emotionless after committing a brutal murder. “Psychopath.”
And I’m trying to think of a case, anywhere in the world, any time in my lifetime, where a kid did something like this – not to inherit money, not because he heard voices in his head, not because he was being molested, but just because he was having an argument with his dad, he ended up killing his mom and sister too. Seriously, I’ve googled around, and can’t find anything comparable, but I’m not great at it. Can anyone find a parallel in real life?
I fully agree for several reasons. Not the least of which is that this show seems to like introducing us to people who seem to play both sides of the fence and then destroying those people.
Larrick was a loyal American but then worked for the Russians because he was blackmailed. But the Russians came to him in the guise of the CIA so he must have been a very confused guy because although he knew he was working both sides of the fence, he really couldn’t be sure who was who. I was confused by him too.
Nina was a more obvious case. So was Fred. Then there was Timoshev and although we really didn’t get to know him, he did begin as a KGB agent and then defected and then was made to “disappear”.
I think Martha is the number one likely person to get whacked next year. By “whacked” I don’t know if she will be murdered or just exposed or just “disappear”. But this show seems to like exploring double agents and then getting rid of them - one way or another.
You’ll notice in his dream Stan sees her putting files in her bag. I think Stan’s going to catch her.
Seems to me much of this “controversy” could have been greatly alleviated, if not necessarily eliminated, by two little changes.
1.) Don’t show him coming back from the pool seemingly calm and collected. Instead the first time we really see Jared is next episode when he is a red-eyed emotional wreck in the aftermath. Just have him claim he was at the pool.
2.) Tweak his confession slightly. His sister wasn’t supposed to be there for whatever reason, and burst in in the midst of the killings and he shot her by accident ( reflex/she tried to grab the gun/whatever ).
These would eliminate the cold-blooded psychopath vibe and put it more into the realm of a tragic, spur of the moment act of passion that went horribly awry. It still might be a controversially soapy plot point and arguments would fly about him escaping the hotel room. Plus all the viewers would have been suspicious of the missing Jared from the get-go, debating whether his convenient absence was a red-herring or not. But it would be a bit more plausible.
Very well done, mate!
People from the show may well read this forum (at least skim through it), and if they do, they might just offer you a job.
Why does it have to be a tragic spur of the moment act of passion? I totally buy that it was very much something that had to done to be rid of a situation.
In fact, suppose the parents found out he was turned and working with the KGB. Spies who are discovered do what they do to end the discovery. Sister was collateral damage. Cold blooded killers are often the surprising quiet kid you’d never suspect.
Also, he went swimming, maybe to calm his nerves after the bloodbath. When Phillip passed him in the hall it was nothing more than a kid deep in thought… Phillip only passed him and kept going, if he stopped or watched him as a compassionate parent, we might have found that may have discovered something off about Jared. But, as an agent he was between a rock and hard place and kept moving. To me, this is what is fascinating about the series. As astute as KBG agents are, they put up a wall between themselves and their kids, and that wall is their ultimate distruction as a family.
Well, Jared claimed it was a spur of the monent act of passion ;). He got slammed up against the wall by dad who was screaming at him, pulled his gun and started opening up. Sis got snuffed to keep her from going to the police once everything went cockeyed. The problem is it doesn’t quite play as an act of passion with the pool alibi and returning to act distraught by the “discovery” of a massacre. It looks just a little too calculating.
So either a) he was lying about the sequence of events while bleeding out and confessing his sins ( which means he was a highly unusual 16-year old ) or b) it was clumsily executed from a show POV. I do feel I am caught in the middle on this debate neither despising it like some, nor loving it like others :D. It isn’t going to compromise my enjoyment of the show going forward, but I didn’t really care for how it was done.
Well here is the explanation from Joe Wisberg and Joel Fields on “Jared”
How long have you had this idea of second-generation KGB spies in your back pocket? Have you always known you were going to make it a part of the story?
Weisberg: There were a couple different pieces to it. When we broke the story of that other [spy] family getting killed, ***we very quickly and immediately knew we wanted it to be their own son who did it. Thematically in so many ways it fit with the rest of our story. That came very early in the season, ***the idea that we wanted Jared’s motivation to be that he was being developed as a second-generation illegal [against his parents’ wishes]. It was a little bit later that we linked it to The Center wanting to recruit Paige, but all of this was brewed out of an actual history of the KGB being interested in having their kids be second-generation illegals. There are a couple of actual historical precedents of that that we worked from.
Did Owen Campbell, the actor who played Jared, know the truth about what had happened to Jared’s parents from the beginning?
Fields: He was in the dark. We decided that because the character would be so great at hiding what he had to hide that we wanted to leave it that way, and Owen had been doing such a great job. **For example, if you look at the season premiere, you never see Jared in the hotel room screaming in horror at discovering those bodies. You just see him in the hallway where he would have put on a show for people.
**
The rest of the interview is a great read, maybe a bit spoilerish for season 3, but it looks like another good season coming up:
But you two are talking past each other. **Tony **is saying, if I understand it right, okay, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it could be a realistic thing in real life (which is assuming a lot, but okay). But the writers didn’t “play fair” as one would expect in a murder mystery (which this plotline essentially was). They didn’t ever show us anything about the family that looked anything less than harmonious. They didn’t even show us that Jared had been meeting with Kate until, what, ten episodes after the killing?
You give the explanation we got in Jared’s dying remarks, and state “that’s how I think it was presented”. But it wasn’t really *presented *in the sense Tony meant, or the sense that is considered the gold standard in cinema and quality TV: “show, don’t tell”. They didn’t *show *any of that (except for the brief glimpse of a meeting with Kate). Instead, they just had Jared exposition it in a dying speech toward the end of the season finale, explaining a multiple murder from the season premiere. And no one on the show even started suspecting him before that.
It would be like an Agatha Christie novel with a murder in the first chapter, 23 chapters of various goings on, with Poirot getting no closer to solving the mystery, and then a random character who was never suspected burbles out the explanation of the whole thing in a couple paragraphs and expires. The end. I just wonder what a teacher of Mystery Writing 101 would say about that approach, you know?
I still don’t really believe them; but again: if that is true (that they knew but kept Owen in the dark) I just really hate that move. It actually could have been a clever thing if Owen had sort of done a less convincing reaction, and people commented on boards that “oh well, there’s another child actor who’s not that great at doing a tough scene” and then at the end of the season they were like “ohhhhh wait”.
I can certainly see how it can be argued that it’s a stretch. But Clark had a pretty plausible reason: he could go to jail for having a relationship with Martha. So it comes down to whether Martha would be willing to have what Clark had to offer. And she did draw the line when he initially said her parents couldn’t know. It seems to me she has gamed it out in her head that she just needs to put up with it for a relatively short time, like a year or two, and then she or Clark will get a different job and they will “go legit”. It works for me, but YMMV.
Yes. So much this. I love not only your suggestions, but the way you wrap it up. Because, yeah: I would still find it a “controversially soapy plot”–well said. But it would be only about half or maybe 40 percent as egregious as it is now, much more in the tolerable range.
To clarify my posts, I have no objection to the KGB trying to turn the kids. I rather like that angle, actually.
My only objection is to Jared murdering his entire family. That alone is my objection, because it’s an incredibly stupid plot line. I know stories on the news makes it seem like teen shooters are common, but they are not. They are vanishingly rare.
This is why I added the Jeffrey Dahmer line. It really is about as plausible as if next season, Philip and Elizabeth’s son turns out to be murdering random people in the neighborhood, chopping them up, storing them in the fridge and eating them.
It strains plausibility so crazy far as to cross over into “stupid” territory. Not trying to turn the kids, but having one of the only five kids we’ve ever even seen in the show be a literal psychopath.
It’s even more stupid because the whole point of showing the kids in the series at all, their entire reason for existance, is to contrast Phili and Elizabeth’s “Super Spy” life with the average American children they have.
Ohhhh…good point. They were portrayed as the “innocent bystanders” and now that framing is undermined by association. It’s worse than I thought! 
Stupid? Again just look at the news today. Killings are on the rise in the US. And its seriously obtuse to think this show wants to keep the kiddies all American as Apple Pie when Mom and Dad don’t got to church, or have a faith base, don’t seem to have a lot of friends or interact with many, Paige takes off to visit an aunt she doesn’t know, and she’s spying on her parents because something is off. Henry breaks into houses. That’s not usual behaviour for an All American kid. They’ve been unwitingly born into the world of espionoge and singing the Star Spangled banner won’t keep them warm at night.
The show is set in the early 80s, not today. It is not believable that there would just happen to be a scociopathic teenage family-murderer on the show. It is so unbelievable that it crosses into “stupid” territory.
It’s seriously obtuse to equate any of this to murdering your entire family.
A “faith base”? Oy. That’s right, we atheists are just ready to kill our families on the slightest provocation, because we don’t have Jeebus to keep us in line. :rolleyes:
On the other hand:
[QUOTE=Jesus H. Christ (Luke 14:26)]
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
[/QUOTE]
Don’t just look at it; read it. That kid in Santa Barbara had been seeing therapists since he was 8 years old, including almost every day during high school. His own parents called the cops on him, a couple of times. His aunt, who lives in France and had only met him three times, the last time years ago and just for a few minutes, said it was obvious that he was mentally disturbed even then.
Exactly the opposite of the no-warning scenario in the show.
Good point, and I think that’s generally been the case with other young killers as well.
And my point is No one knew who Jared was. He lived in a family that didn’t socialize much if they’re like the Jennings. If anything the Jennings show just how out of touch they are with their own kids. Your assumption that he was fine living in a family that lived in constant paranoia might have been a tipping point for a kid who is just the right age for when mental health problems can manifest. This was 1980 with far fewer resources than what we have today, and they can’t get it right even today. Mass murders are on the rise regardless if they have red flags or not.