Charlie Wayne, you mean the pic where she is dressed in the cream and gold crop pants and jacket? She is wearing reasonably dressy clothing for the FX event which looks like an informal artsy type of occasion. Ie, not the kind of event that demands a full length dress. Her hair and makeup are nicely done. I’m female, so this type of outfit appeals to me, and she looks really great, IMO.
In the Americans, she is made out to be rather frumpish, and a bit of a counterpoint to Liz, for obvious reasons.
The contrast you see between Martha and Alison is the same kind you might see when you compare Betty Draper in Mad Men to January Jones IRL. Totally different image, again, Imo.
It may well be that my earlier observation about a mail robot bug being totally useless will come true and Elizabeth will realize that she basically murdered that old lady for nothing.
Congrats on that terrific blog. I think you are the only one who has cottoned to the fact that Philip is developing Martha as an asset.
I read the Hitfix blog on the Americans, by Alan Sepinwall, which is kinda meh, IMO. He called Martha and Clark’s dinner ‘cordial’, but I think he missed the subtext, totally. You are right, he is developing her and she is a willing subject. That phone call where Martha says its not te right time for kids, and her subtle steering of Clark, was masterful. It goes both ways, in fact, how Clark uses her and she him.
In this show, subtext is so important. If the FBI doesn’t consider Martha as a suspect, it will be because of how she handled herself when Taffet interviewed her, and also because they would not consider a female secretary as a possible agent for the KGB.
I think Martha decided a long time ago to support Philip/Clsrk simply because she loves him so much, and she is willing to do anything for him.
I thank you for your opinion. It’s definitely worth my taking a second look. I would never have considered what you said on my own. But after reading what you said, it is worth taking a second look.
After thinking things over, I have come to the conclusion that I really must try to withdraw my statement that Alison Wright looked strange or “weird” in that photo.
I have to withdraw that because I just have no standing or experience to make such a statement.
After all, I really don’t know anything about women’s fashion and so for me to make such a statement is just plain wrong. I have to eat some crow here because it may have looked weird to me, but I had no right to make some kind of statement like that and I really need to say thank you to Athabaska for offering her opinion. I should have worded mine very differently. Perhaps it would have been OK for me to have given my opinion - but just to leave it at that or to ask if it was reasonable to continue with that train of thought.
So, thanks again to Athabaska for putting the brakes on and offering me a stop and preventing me from leaving a foolish remark intact.
My theory for the scene was to remind the fanboys that P&E are NOT the good guys. They are, effectively, even scumbags who deserve to die in a fire (maybe with a nice radial tire thrown in), and the audience shouldn’t forget that. Don’t start being apologists for them. They’ve killed more innocent civilians than James Bond has in 20 movies. Especially with hindsight, we KNOW that E saying that the world will be a better place with the old woman’s death is patently untrue.
I really like the fact that the program encourages the audience to identify with Philip and Elizabeth and root for them in tense moments, while also demonstrating that they are not at all decent people. And simultaneously the writers show Stan and his fellow FBI agents as incompetent at work and not particularly sympathetic on a personal level, as well as being willing to engage in all sorts of morally questionable behavior. The traditional good guys/bad guys dichotomy is turned on its head and spun around a few times in nearly every episode.
Someone above mentioned that the show is meant to be realistic. I don’t actually think it is. If you start to examine it from the perspective of authenticity, the show breaks down very quickly. That’s why I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and accept the series on its own terms (for the most part). It’s much more an allegory than anything else IMO.
So far example, killing Betty at all, let alone by forced suicide, really makes no sense from a logical perspective. If we accept the premise that Philip and Elizabeth are such outstanding master spies that they have managed to elude capture for decades while leaving a trail of murder victims in their wake, it would certainly have been possible for Elizabeth to kill Betty in some other way and construct a reasonable cover-up (hapless crooks surprised during a robbery attempt or something like that). But the scene wasn’t about logic, as far as I can see. It was about Elizabeth killing something in herself: suicide by proxy.
Now I think you’re oversimplifying in the other direction. Elizabeth and Phillip volunteered for incredibly difficult and dangerous jobs out of patriotism and loyalty to their home country, which they believe in (as do most of us). They have performed those jobs at an incredibly high level for decades. There is certainly something admirable in that. At the same time, they kill innocent people when they have to (although they don’t take any pleasure in it, and have put themselves at risk to avoid killing). At the same time, we know that the ideology they are following is flawed and doomed.
They are certainly not “good guys”, but they’re far more than just thugs or psychopaths.
Perhaps. I often oversimplify my position in threads like this so as not to bog it down. I think the scene also shows that, in her own way, E has her own doubts about her work as P does, and she was really speaking to herself in that scene, justifying to herself that she is not a bad person.
(emphasis mine)
That’s what evil people tell themselves when the do evil things.
It seems to me that the show runners and writers never back away from making it clear the entire concept of the “illegals” is very very complicated.
On the one hand, every country who engages in this kind of activity seems to believe they are making the world a better place - even though they are engaging in a great deal of brutality and thuggery - Hell! - even murder and mayhem. So, how can that possibly be making the world a better place? And yet, we keep seeing them engage in behavior that really does tend to make the world a better place - in some small ways.
So, really, what can we expect from this show?
Also, this show does present some of the bad guys as looking like Keri Russell who appears to be a very sweet and loveable character. How can you hate such a sweetie?
There really are some very deep issues involved in these illegal activities and it requires some very deep thinking to even scratch the surface of these issues.
It’s a very tough row to hoe! (I hope that I got that expression correct).
Anway, Keri Russell appears to be a very sweet and loveable lady. So, how can we find fault with her or think of her as a murderer or thug? I seem to think of her as a very sweet an loveable character and I would really love to have her around. She’s a real sweetheart, after all.
What are you gonna do about her? I’ve can’t recall ever seeing anyone post an opinion that P&E belong in jail or that they deserve to be murdered by the so-called “good guys” (the FBI or CIA). When you think of these issues, it’s really not at all clear how to sort out one’s feelings about things. I think that is a large part of what makes this show so great.
Can’t say there are any good guys in the show. The Jennings are fundamentally good people, who are doing a difficult and morally iffy job.They do not make policy, they just are at the sharp end of it.
I do wonder if actual Americans have a different reaction to the protagonists actions.Tell me, if the show was about Misha and Svetlana in Moscow, undercover Americans, would they be condemned so quickly as evil, or just doing whats needed, even if its unpleasant.
As for killing Betty, Elizabeth did not want to, she was told by Philip she had to---- “she was in at the wrong time”.
Moreover anything that suggested a violent death would be investigated and the pills gave her a way to stop that.
I guess you missed that this was the old lady’s own heart medication.
Yes, this.
I listen to the showrunners’ podcast every week, and have read numerous interviews with them. According to them, you’re wrong: they do intend it to be realistic. The only way in which they acknowledge non-realism is that Philip and Elizabeth are much busier spies than would be realistic, because of the need on TV to have new espionage plots every week. But they make this concession only in the context of specifically avowing that the rest of it is intended to be excruciatingly realistic, helped by Joe Weisberg’s experience in the CIA.
That said, I think it is more realistic (appearing) than most espionage stories on TV and in movies most of the time, but not always (a notable exception, for me, being the shark-jumping Jared-murdering-entire-family revelation last season).
So, anyone have any ideas on what Oleg is up to? I did not really catch it when watching the episode, but after reflecting on it and reading other comments, I don’t think what he is doing is necessarily what he is telling Stan he is doing. I’m not exactly sure what he is trying to do, though. What angle is he shooting?
Oh, that would be so wonderful! As between the two of them (P&E), I think Rhys has turned in a much stronger performance. IMO, he has done an amazing job.
I have. Despite liking the show, I have trouble rooting for P&E to succeed, even in the context of the show. They are working to undermine our way of life, bring down the USA, and install Communism over the world. They also murder innocent people, people who could be me (the guy under the 'cuda that got smushed) or my mom. I have no trouble relating to the innocents, and seeing P&E for what they really are.
To borrow a familiar phrase, they hate our way of life - they hate our freedoms. While the US has done questionable things, there is not a moral equivalent with the Soviet system. They are not just like us, but different. The Soviet system was inherently evil, and no “liberal hand waving” will make it not. “The Russians [may] love their children, too”, but the Soviet system did not. Oversimplified, the American side of the cold war was fighting to give people a choice, and the Soviet side was fighting to take away choice.
You’d think that P&E, having lived here for, what, 20 years?, would notice that the USA is not as bad as they were taught. That they’d begin to question what they are fighting for - the right to live in a cold apartment, standing in line for a meager piece of bread or meat?
Daddy, what will Communism be like when it is perfected?
Well, everyone will have everything they need.
But, daddy, what if there is no meat at the store?
Then there will be a sign: “You do not need meat today.”
Philip’s already there. In fact one of the biggest beefs I have with the show is why Philip continues to do this when he was more than ready to defect in the pilot. Yes, he loves his family, but that does not seem like a good enough reason to be doing some of the morally repugnant things the KGB asks of him.
Philip and Elizabeth got into this for different reasons. Elizabeth had something to prove because her father was killed for desertion in WWII. And she wants to make her mother proud. We still don’t know how Philip was recruited, but I think Philip saw the KGB as an escape more than anything else, hence his lack of ideological drive.
Hey Athabasca, thanks so much for taking a look! Feedback has been like gold dust so I really am so grateful you took the time to review the blog post!
It’s really encouraging - and just after I saw you’d written this someone on Facebook said they preferred mine to Vanity Fair! how abut that! It was only one person but hey … Not so many from Straight Dope are looking at it this week so maybe I need to work on the style more.
Fwiw, I sometimes getting the feeling people like Sepinwall either ‘phone it in’ or even have someone write it for them. That’s kind of why I started the blob - because the material deserves better!
I know Charlie Wayne hasn’t looked at the blog yet so here’s the link again for Charlie - I’m looking for him in the referrals … https://clevertelly.wordpress.com/2015/03/
It’s interesting that the producers of the show believe it to be realistic. And I have to say that if they think it is anything other than spy fantasy, they are delusional. A suburban couple, travel agents by day, super spies by night! Of course it’s fantasy. But even if the producers do envision it as realistic, that still doesn’t change my opinion of the series as allegory. We don’t have to agree with the producers of any creative work WRT their interpretations of said work. Gogol claimed that The Government Inspector was really about divine justice vs. earthly justice. Nevertheless I interpret his play as being social satire. (Of course, I’m not suggesting that my interpretation is radically new. It is actually the standard way of reading Gogol’s play.)
I don’t want to venture too far afield into a political discussion, but I certainly do not believe that the USSR was an evil empire and the US was fighting the good fight for truth and justice. The cold war was all about power and influence, and neither side exactly covered itself in glory. I think it was a stroke of genius for the writers to set The Americans in the early 1980s, when everyone was convinced that ideologies were far too entrenched for any change ever to happen, and everyone on both sides believed that these two great powers would balance each other, and the arms race seemed never-ending. But in fact, as we know, major changes were right around the corner.
Watergate was 10 years before, Nixon resigning was like 7. Kent State was 12! The Viet Nam war ended 8 years prior (all times rounded, depending on when it is supposed to be in season 3)
How old are you? Do you think the USA was a shithole in the 60s, 70s and early 80s? Well it wasn’t.
There’s more to America than Watergate and Kent State.
The Jennings lived in America likely from about 1962-65 ish. They lived here through the swinging sixties, the polyester disco 70s, the anti war movement, Woodstock, the Beatles, Star Wars, muscle cars, the Apollo program (how’d the Soviet moon landings go, by the way?). They’ve been exposed to rock and roll, C&W, ice cream, McDonalds, Saturday morning cartoons, the Civil Rights movement, the ERA, avocado appliances.
They lived here during the height of the Viet Nam war - you don’t think they have more misgivings about Afghanistan than just worrying about Phillip’s son? They saw what a quadmire the US involvement was, they have a broader perspective than the average Soviet citizen.
Well-said (your entire post for that matter). The showrunners aren’t interested in presenting a black-and-white morality play. They are examining the ethical ambiguities always present in any endeavor undertaken “for country.”
It was only one person but hey … Not so many from Straight Dope are looking at it this week so maybe I need to work on the style more.
…
Of course it’s fantasy. But even if the producers do envision it as realistic, that still doesn’t change my opinion of the series as allegory. We don’t have to agree with the producers of any creative work WRT their interpretations of said work. Gogol claimed that The Government Inspector was really about divine justice vs. earthly justice. Nevertheless I interpret his play as being social satire. (Of course, I’m not suggesting that my interpretation is radically new. It is actually the standard way of reading Gogol’s play.)