((((snicker))) Nobody killed anyone prior to 1980. Let’s tell Lizzie Borden’s Mum and Dad.
It appeared that the two sets of parents were close, and confided their concerns to each other. They had told the Jennings that when Jared was younger, they were concerned that he “spent too much time working on model planes” but that as he got older they felt he was getting more, not less, well adjusted.
Oh yeah, as close as KGB agents can be, which isn’t very. Plus that observation by the parents shows that they were way out of touch, sort of like Son of Sam’s mom, and even if they were very close to him their line of work wouldn’t allow them to do much if anything about it. If Phillip really CARED about Jared he would have taken off that KGB cap for one second and stop him in the hallway. The fact that duty over everything including family is the only way KGB agents operate tells me volumes in why these families are disfunctional in the extreme. The truth is, the kids know it in their gut that they aren’t really “family” they can’t articulate why, but they know it’s a charade.
I’d guess that most of us who post in Cafe Society have had the experience of having to cope with a plot development we don’t like. In such situations we tend to hit on an “explanation” of why the disliked plot development is bad or wrong or “stupid”…and some of those explanations make less sense than others.
Among the less sensible must surely rank the argument that ‘this shouldn’t have happened because the element in question isn’t seen in a majority of human beings’:
By “unbelievable” you seem to be saying that nothing outside the statistical norm should ever appear in a story: if only 1% of people have ever committed adultery with a relative of their spouse, then adultery with a spouse’s relative has no place in a story; if only 2% of people have committed embezzlement, then embezzlement should never be part of a story; if only 0.2% of people have won a lottery, then lottery winners should never appear in a story…and so on.
This is not the way fiction works. It doesn’t become “believable” or “unbelievable” by virtue of the statistical incidence of the elements in question.
You make an excellent point.
I will say, however, that even in non-KGB families, family doesn’t always come first. (In many instances lip service is paid to ‘family first’ but the reality is that making money/building a career is more important to one or both parents.)
(Of course in practical terms, what that does is provide the writers of The Americans with lots of metaphorical fire power…)
I think the way I would put it is that if something occurs in .00001% of families, fine: put it in the story. But don’t have an occurrence in the same family of a different thing that is similarly vanishingly rare. That’s just too great of a coincidence.
Or, to put a finer point on it: sure, go ahead and have all this insanely rare shit happen to the same family. But then I will write you off as a soap like Scandal, which lots of people love (even some seemingly discerning critics, who apparently can just enjoy going with the OTT nature of that kind of show) but I do not. And up until the past three or four episodes, this show was not in that soapy mode and I liked it that way.
ETA: Andie, I read the show as being precisely *about *a KGB family in which family comes first. That’s why Philip went and confronted Arkady; it’s even why Elizabeth wants Paige to join them, because she thinks it would be good for her.
Well, this where I have to disagree, because for all the handwringing these “parents” do about why they think they’re right, it’s obvious that the line of work is what prohibits them from being honest with their kids. There’s been so many examples of bad parenting in this show it’s hard to keep up, from the bible shredding to the midnight family vacation and all the secrets in between.
As the scientist told Philip he’s a monster, he has no heart when it comes to family. Maybe he recognizes that in himself and refuses to start a family with Martha because of it.
Now, Philip might have a stirring of conscious next season that will make us sympathetic to his plight as a KGB dad, but so far aside from his chat with Arkady, his love of shiny cars, and his chat with Elizabeth about the “things” in America that would be difficult to give up, there’s been little evidence of really understanding his American children.
No doubt! I was thinking about those parents who work so much they really don’t know what their children are up to. But it’s almost the inverse here. KGB parents work all the angles and make it their business to know exactly what their kids are up to, but in trying to find out if their kids are doing something against mother Russia, they miss understanding why.
Andiethewestie, I agree.
It’s one of the great strengths of this show that the very particular situation it depicts (sleeper spies for the Soviet Union operating in 1980s America) lends itself so readily and poignantly to an examination of marriage and family in general.
You’re the one that stated that “killings are on the rise in the US” as a defense of the plausibility, not me. I was merely pointing out that your defense doesn’t apply to a show set 30 years ago.
You are vastly off the mark with your percentages. 0.2% is so common as to be borderline normal, and perfectly fine as a story element.
There are 300 million people in the US. Let’s say 1 in 30 is a teenager just for ballpark math. That’s 10 million teenagers. 0.2% would mean 20,000 teenagers in the US. That’s plenty common enough to include as a story element.
Do you think 20,000 teens murder their family? Or even win the lottery? We’re talking more like 0.000002%. That is so vanishingly rare that it is indeed bad storytelling to focus a major plot point around it.
So your method of evaluating fiction is to consult tables of statistics?
It occurs to me that this series, set as it is thirty years ago, has an opportunity to do a “where are they now” as part of its finale.
What are your thought, I’ll post mine tomorrow.
So you don’t understand the difference between 0.2% and 0.000002%?
I accepted the Jared story because in the 1980’s something similar happened in my town. A boy the same age as Jared killed his parents and both of his younger siblings. He came from a devout Catholic family, so it came as a surprise to the community. But it doesn’t surprise me now.
As I said before, I’m okay with a story that includes one extremely rare occurrence in a family. If it happens at all, it is fine for us to be peeking in on the family that it happens to (otherwise we couldn’t have shows about being president, for instance). But to have two different vanishingly rare things in the same family? No, now you are in soapland.
I don’t know why you’re snickering, if that’s the best you can do.
a) she was 32 when her parents were killed
b) she was acquitted, so it’s not even a sure thing that she did it
c) no innocent little sister involved
d) over 100 years ago, and so unusual we’re still talking about it
JohnGalt, your example sounds much, much better. With the clues you gave, I was able to find this case:
where 16-year old David Brom killed his parents, brother, and sister.
But for the nth time, it’s not just that Jared killed his family; it’s that he gave no warnings before, and was completely cool immediately afterward, disposing of all evidence and then pretending to discover the bodies and be horrified. Nobody even suspected hm for a second, although both the police and the KGB were investigating, and he was extensively interviewed by the cops, Elizabeth, and (presumably) Kate.
Contrast that with the case in the link:
“David was at Lourdes Roman Catholic High School Thursday morning. Friends at the school said he had dyed his hair black, shaved the hair from the sides of his head and spiked the hair on the back of his head, the sheriff said.
According to the charges, David told a friend on Wednesday that he was going to kill his parents that night, and another person indicated that he told her on Thursday that he had killed his parents.”
David didn’t cooly dispose of the evidence and then call the police and pretend to be horrified. He evidently was so screwed up that he thought nobody would notice his family was missing, and his friends wouldn’t be concerned if he told them what he did. He blabbed to friends at school that he had killed his family, and the rumors were so persistent that someone called the police, and they checked the house and found the victims. They also found the bloody axe that he used; Brom had just put it back in the basement, blood and all. He did everything but wear a T-shirt saying he did it.
Not even close to the perfect crime committed by Jared.
So again, can anybody find a case, anywhere in the world, any time in the last 100 years, that makes this episode sound plausible?
I just happened upon this post in a thread on capital punishment, and I think it’s relevant:
In other words, his ex-employer is not a psychopath.
For what it’s worth, I found the following info on “suspension of disbelief” in Wikipedia. I believe it applies to the discussion about this show and how much of it is realistic vs. unrealistic. I’m posting this here because although I have heard of the expression before, I never understood what it meant and I like the following explanation very much. It helps me to understand how people can enjoy this show - despite the fact they know certain elements are clearly unrealistice and maybe even not believable.
Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Suspension of disbelief often applies to fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves using a person’s ignorance or lack of knowledge to promote suspension of disbelief.
The phrase “suspension of disbelief” came to be used more loosely in the later 20th century, often used to imply that the burden was on the reader, rather than the writer, to achieve it. This might be used to refer to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. These fictional premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps proposition of thoughts, ideas, art and theories.[1]
Suspension of disbelief is often an essential element for a magic act or a circus sideshow act. For example, an audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut in half or transforms into a gorilla[2] in order to enjoy the performance.
That last sentence especially hit home for me.
Is there anyway that this story can be “fixed” next season which would not look tacked on. As it is, they have little information right now. What if Kate told them to kill the rents?
Kill the rents?
Do you mean “kill the parents”?