KGB agents apparently really did marry lonely women in sensitive jobs. I thought this season was pretty clearly foreshadowing that she is going to put a pin through Clark’s condoms and get herself pregnant.
E.g., every religious character ever in Law and Order. I kept thinking that that’s where this show was going too.
If Clark had the slightest inkling that she would do something like that (and he should), then all he needs to do is get a vasectomy. There is no reason why he shouldn’t. They are reversible after all and if he doesn’t tell Martha, she will be boinking her boink off for a long time and becoming more and more frustrated all the time.
It’s unfortunate that most people wouldn’t find that funny. But I really dislike Martha and I would get quite a kick out of that.
Just rewatched the season premiere with my son, who has been catching up on the show. Had to bite my tongue more than usual when he was asking how someone could have overcome both the mom’s and dad’s training to kill them. I also noticed some other details that make me even more dubious that they intended Jared as the killer all along. Leaving aside for the moment the endless argument about whether this is “realistic” (within the parameters of a fictional show), I am really intrigued by their insistence that they planned this from the beginning. The runners of other shows, from LOST to Breaking Bad, have been frank with interviewers that they did indeed “make it up as they went along”; and some have even argued that when you get a showrunner who has everything mapped out way in advance, it’s dramatically limiting. With Breaking Bad in particular, Vince Gilligan has described his writers’ room method as being about getting themselves stuck in corners (or was it boxes?) and then brainstorming ways to get out.
The irony is that when it’s really well done, as in BB (most of the time–the Brock storyline being a glaring exception IMO), the brainstorming results in a solution that does not fall apart when you go back and look at the earlier episodes. It is all carefully engineered to seamlessly match with what came earlier. Yet these Americans writers, who have created so much that has been among the best material on TV, staunchly insist they planned this from the beginning–yet there seem to be holes in their story. Said holes would be less egregious, I think, in a pre-DVR/DVD era (or better yet, pre-VCR) when everyone would be hazy on what happened in the season premiere by the time the season finale came along (though there would be that one “summer” rerun in many cases).
So has anyone else here gone back and rewatched the season premiere since watching the finale? I noticed more details–about Jared and his dad at the amusement park, about the timeline, and about the way the bodies were found–that just don’t square with what we were told in Jared’s dying infodump.
Frankly, I would rather believe that the showrunners are being dishonest with interviewers now, than that they were so eager to mislead the audience from the beginning of the season that they would not play fair on even a basic level of storytelling.
Two things. I’ve never yet know a ‘hole’ that isn’t really the viewer asserting the flaw actually missing something (the ‘serial killer’ idea in this show being but the most recent example).
Imo, plot holes are as common as architects forgetting to put in doors or lawyers forgetting to send an invoice – these people are (a) highly professional and (b) their work is fine tooth-combed by a whole host of network and scripting departments way before we see it.
I’ve wondered about the plotting thing going right back to mid The Wire when I finally read about the writers room whiteboard - David Simon and the team sketched out entire series (all overarching character and story arcs, all secondary arcs, motifs, the whole lot) along a huge wall.
Subsequently, I realised there is no accepted way to plot a season. David Milch, for example (Deadwood) basically lived in his own cocaine-fuelled world for a whole season and just wrote, and wrote alone.
By contrast to The Wire, you only need to think about the disaster of Homeland from mid-Season 2 to see that show was not plotted (not until it got renewed for S3).
Imo, The Americans is so very smartly plotted – the moral juxtapositions, dilemmas, etc so well weaved, the shapes are beautiful – the season has to be plotted in quite some detail from the get-go.
What? You’re saying there has never been a plot hole in ANYTHING? EVER? Or are you just talking about The Americans?
In decent quality series drama, my own experience is people who assert ‘plot holes’ have missed something.
You have too much faith in show runners :). Even quality shows screw the pooch once in awhile - nothing is perfect. I can fan-wank and eel around inconsistencies with the best of them. But I’m aware at times that I’m having to stretch to do so ( not necessarily just talking about The Americans here ).
I was kind of floored by that assertion too. But then s/he seemed to take a different tack later in the same comment, so I dunno.
And I mean, to their credit even these showrunners did in the past admit to having made errors that they course corrected on in response to fan feedback–a rare and welcome thing indeed IMO. Specifically, they lampshaded stuff about the wigs right away in S2. (Personally, I never had a problem with that aspect of the show, but a lot of people did.)
[Homeland, BTW, seemed to me to fly off into Ridiculous Implausibility Land a few episodes into its first season. The first couple episodes, I thought the critical consensus was right, that it was brilliant. But then not too long after that, I wrote it off as risible, stopped watching, and wondered what was wrong with all the critics that they didn’t see it the same way (kind of like with this Americans finale). So when I later read a lot of comments that it had gotten OTT in S2, I simultaneously had a bit of an ITYS feeling, while wondering how much more ridic it must’ve gotten at that point to take the bloom off the critical rose.]
So…anyone go back and watch the season premiere after seeing the finale? I’m itching to discuss some specific points, but there’s no way (unless you have some kind of eidetic memory I guess) you’re going to remember it from four months ago.
Your request that people who’ve recently re-watched the season premiere discuss it with you seems reasonable to me, so I won’t weigh in except to point out this one thing:
Gunshots can disable people fast–really fast. Particularly if they hit the head.
Training doesn’t matter if the ‘trained’ people are standing anywhere near each other (and why wouldn’t they have been?) Bam, bam, bam.
Other than that, I look forward to hearing about the other details you mention having noticed.
Well, I guess I may as well just go ahead and point them out, although I’m still curious to hear if anyone who is totally buying the showrunners’ story has actually done a rewatch post-finale.
Probably the biggest issue for me is one that is hard to describe in words but makes me wish we had some technology on these boards where we could operate like a film class, inserting video, pausing at certain points, etc. It has to do with just how *warm *the interaction was between Jared and his dad. Smiling at each other, physical contact, acting excited to have fun together, the whole nine yards. If this twist really was planned all along, this was an unnecessary and disingenuous red herring. They didn’t have to be obvious and show Jared glowering at his dad, or withdrawn and sullen. They could have simply portrayed a more neutral mien, and no one would be like “Aha! A 17 year old is acting aloof from his family–he must be a killer!”.
But so the next issue (red herring) is that when he was last shown with his family, Jared says (again, in a very warm, friendly, enthused way) “Hey, Dad: when we get back to the hotel, can I go swimming?” to which his dad replies with a warm affirmative.
So Philip and Elizabeth immediately give their kids more money for rides, and leave the park. They had been instructed to do “45 minutes of clearing”, so it was about this long from when Jared was last shown with his family to when Philip and Elizabeth find the bodies at the hotel (followed in short order by Jared *returning *from the pool). It didn’t seem like the other family was leaving at the time Philip and Elizabeth did, but okay: I guess a minute or two later, offscreen, they did decide to head back. So they took however long to get to their car, drive back to the hotel, head up to their room where Jared got changed into a swimsuit, went swimming, and came back from his swim to “find” the dead bodies.
That’s a pretty tight timeline without also adding the part where Jared–somewhere in the changing into swim trunks part of the timeline–reveals to his dad that, oh, by the way, he knew his parents were KGB spies and he was secretly training to be one himself. (Did Jared just randomly blurt it out, despite his training, after a fun day at the park? Did his dad find out somehow?) So they get into a shouting match over it, Jared knows where dad keeps the gun, BLAM, perfect headshot; now Mom’s gotta go too, BLAM, another perfect headshot; Sis is hysterical and going to blab to the cops, BLAM, perfect headshot number three. Only when the bodies are found, Mom is slumped over top of Sis. So…I guess Jared killed in the order he said, but then he dragged his mom’s corpse over to lay it over top of his sister’s, for some reason, before calmly heading to the pool, getting that swim in while Philip and Elizabeth discover the bodies, and then coolly sauntering back with a smile on his face for his big pretend-to-be-horrified moment.
Okey doke, suuure.
To me there are two kinds of plot holes. Well, at least two kinds. But two relevant kinds. I basically agree with your analysis (without having rewatched episode 1 myself) that it sounds like it would have taken some very weird timing and logistics for Jared to have killed his family if events played out as depicted in episode 1. And we later on learn that he killed his family. So that’s a plot hole, having to do with whether something was possible given the circumstances.
But to me that’s a much less offensive than a plothole where person A has been acting a certain way all season, and then at the end you learn that person A was really working for the bad guys the entire time, but there were REPEATED situations all season where person A’s actions, even ones taken in private when no on else was watching, suddenly make absolutely no sense whatsoever, now that we know what his true motivations were.
So if you go back and rewatch the whole season knowing that Jared killed his parents and wanted to be a spy, there are probably some moments in episode 1 where, as you point out, the timeline doesn’t quite work out, it’s unlikely that Jared would have been able to act so casual when he should have been stressed out, etc. But that’s very different from a situation where he made decisions or took actions which a patricidal-wanna-be-spy would never take.
Remind me what gun Jared used, and why it had a silencer?
As he explained, he used his fathers gun, and knew where he kept it
Your argument seems to be with artistic choice; about weighing how much information to show. Even as it was, someone in this thread already nailed it.
Anyway, my reading: Jared was convinced he and Kate loved each other and were going to do great things together for the cause. He told his parents, they didn’t approve, there was a row, Jerad was thrown up against a wall and he flipped.
Until that moment in the hotel room when he told his parents about Kate, Jared was a happy 17-year old; in a loving family, in love, about to do wonderful things.
We do know Kate went behind his parents back but we don’t know if she told Jared his parents disapproved (maybe it was ‘their little secret’ or some such). I think we assume not because it helps explain him flipping; Jared had never considered that, given how perfect it was all for him and how great it would be to join the family firm, his father would deny him everything.
I agree, Max: it is not as egregious as what you might find on a really soapy, bad show. But I hold a show like this to higher standards.
Fornicator, even if I were to suspend disbelief about whether such a plot occurrence was plausible (and that is not an easy task) there is no way I can ever agree that it was skillfully presented by the people who made the show. And as I say, it is probably even worse creative malfeasance if they really intended it all season. I’m going to continue to assume that they did not so intend, but they have decided to stubbornly stick to this story for whatever reason.
A detail that’s not necessarily a plot hole, because it involves the motivation of a horny teenager, but assuming Jarod did it, what did he think would happen? I know, they don’t think. But still…
So, he shoots his family unplanned, goes for a swim, and comes back to “discover” the bodies. Since he knew his parents were KGB, wouldn’t it be likely that an investigation into their deaths would find that? Or, alternately, would killing them kinda put him on the outs with his KGB “masters”? Would Kate just say “oh well”? It’s not like he can continue to be an active agent at 16 or whatever he is!
Did he think going away for a swim and coming back would prevent him from being a suspect? (apparently, he was correct. but would the police be so incompetent?)
Good points, hadn’t even thought of those.
I still say it was brilliant plot line, not only because it was an amazing twist, but it hits on all the research that we are finding out about teenagers and why they do what they do. We think we know, but it does come down to science. The following is a synopisis as to why kids flip out, especially kids Jerod’s age: to read more you can read the link, there’s also been an investigation into teenage brain functions by Frontline on PBS and you can still view it on line.
http://parade.condenast.com/37715/parade/28-inside-the-teenage-brain/
Why Is He So Quick to Flip Out?You’re not imagining that teenagers often overreact to simple requests and misinterpret seemingly innocuous comments. Physiologically they may be less able than adults to accurately interpret facial expressions and the inflection in your voice.
University of Utah professor Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and a team of collaborators have been studying brain development. In an initial study at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., they wanted to see how teenagers registered emotions compared with adults. They hooked up 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 to an fMRI machine and showed them photos of people in different emotional states. When presented with a photo of a woman and asked what emotion she was registering, 100% of the adults said “fear,” which was correct. Only 50% of the teenagers correctly identified that emotion. Moreover, the teens and adults used different areas of the brain to process what they were feeling. Teens rely much more on the amygdala, a small almond-shaped region in the medial and temporal lobes that processes memory and emotions, while adults rely more on the frontal cortex, which governs reason and forethought.
This may explain the impulsiveness of some teens that has made headlines this year — like the tragic incident in September in which, allegedly, a Rutgers University student posted a video of his roommate kissing another boy, resulting in the roommate’s suicide. Were the students who posted the video incapable of considering the ramifications of their act? And what about the boy? One can’t help thinking that, with teenage lack of perspective, he imagined his family shamed and his life ruined — but could not imagine the agony his death would cause his parents.
So it is, too, with tragedies like Columbine. “There have always been adolescents who feel enraged, who want to get even, who feel ostracized. The adolescent brain is less able to control those stresses,” says Daniel Weinberger of the National Institute of Mental Health. “The difference is that while 50 years ago there might have been punches thrown, now there are automatic weapons. You put one of those in the hands of an immature prefrontal cortex, and it is more likely to go off.”
That makes a lot of sense, Andiethewestie; thanks for posting the information.
I do think that SlackerInc made some good points about the timing (and how quick an emotional turnaround it must have been for Jared). But The Fornicator’s points about Jared not necessarily acting out of long-standing resentment of his father, but instead out of a flare-up of rage over being told “no, no Kate and no KGB for you”, largely answer the questions related to timing.
(I bet I’m not the only one regretting having no new episode to look forward to, tonight…:()
There’s no requirement that he had a particularly well-thought-out plan. So he’s in the hotel room with his parents. He breaks the news to them that he’s been sleeping with Kate and knows about their true identities. He expects welcoming hugs and “we’re so proud of you comrade”. Instead he gets scorn and insults. He flips out and shoots them. The sister comes in, he shoots her (but regrets it). He’s panicked. So he decides to go swimming, which will get any traces of blood off of him (and maybe give him a chance to hide the weapon? I guess we don’t know how he hid it).
That’s as reasonable a thing to do as any if you’re in that situation.
And why was the mother’s body on top of the sister’s?
Also, again: let’s just accept for the sake of argument that it makes all the sense in the world that Jared did it. You are still okay with how it was portrayed by the showrunners? The crime happens in Episode 1; in the next(?) episode, Claudia tells the story about the lover she trusted which is never mentioned again and turns out to be a total red herring; then late in Ep 13 Jared expositions the whole explanation while dying of a neck wound; the end, see you next year. That’s good storytelling, really?