Great writeup on the season from Maureen Ryan.
I read Maureen Ryan’s writeup and agree it was most excellent. She provides any budding writers with a great lesson. If you make a pun, or other kind of witty remark, there is no need to draw attention to those remarks. It will go over much better if you leave it up to the reader to find them on their own.
For example, (and please excuse a huge amount of my removal of her original text in the following):
… Paige’s instincts about her parents weren’t wrong. They weren’t about an addiction to fabric softener. Elizabeth was in favor of bringing Paige into the fold …
Her writing is just so much more effective when she does not draw attention to those remarks herself. I like her style very much.
How many of you found the multiple puns in that section? I found one right away. But, it took me about 30 minutes to find the second one. I just loved it! So much like James Joyce. Excuse me for gushing.
IMHO, she is a great writer.
I’m not trying to nitpick, but can anyone please examine the following excerpt and tell me if I’m correct about there being a typo in the use of the word “honestly”? Did she not intend to use the word “honesty”? Or am I mistaken? (which is certainly highly possible).
"It was an excellent choice to have Paige demand honestly from her parents a few episodes ago – to have her find out for herself, "
If anyone who works on the show is reading this forum, please allow me to say that she certainly has got it correct in the following excerpt when she calls this show, “beloved”. IMO, it certainly is that! I love this show more than just about any other in recent memory.
“The Americans” continually avoids taking the easy path, which has made it beloved by its audience and not so much of a killer in the ratings department."
She kind of did when she asked them to speak Russian in a later scene upstairs.
If they had said they were working for an unspecified other country, Paige would have demanded to know which one. If they then lied (“Sweden!”) she would have asked them to speak that language.
And she would have been even more pissed off when it came out that they were still lying to her.
She can’t even pronounce her mom’s name 
I’m just joking here but wouldn’t it be easy for them to fake speaking Swedish?
I have heard some people speak “fake Swedish” before and it’s almost impossible to tell if it’s real or not.
The only way Paige could catch them in a lie would be if she recorded them doing that.
Sweden or Switzerland would be excellent choices for a fake out.
Why would she even want to?
Forgive me for saying this, but I think it was completely unrealistic for P and/or E to have expected Paige to have bonded with grandma and somehow that would have caused her to change her entire attitude about her parents.
As far as Paige was concerned, I think she would have just thought this was some old wrinkled strange woman. She would never have bonded with grandma. Meeting grandma would never have caused Paige to change her attitude.
IMHO, it was just far too little and far too late.
Sure, Paige said her friends had tough grannies and E said not like mine. Jesus, she wasn’t an easy person to like
Didn’t help neither spoke the others language, either.
A couple of notes from many of the good posts put up in the past few days…
First…I disagree with Up The Junction sometimes, but the lines about not being able to pronounce the mom’s name and also about the good news being that Paige hasn’t gone crazy and gone swimming after killing her family were pretty good…made me laugh…
Was I the only one surprised about the cursory nature of the Granny thing? It was as if it was, “here she is…OK, now time to go home”. Many of us thought that was the avenue through which Paige’s recruitment would be facilitated…but that seems out the window now. Or did E figure out it wasn’t going to work and so she just got it over with?
The Maureen Ryan piece was pretty decent…although the most memorable scene for me is one I believe she omitted…the Elizabeth/Betty scene in the factory. “That’s what evil people tell themselves when they do evil things”.
Fabulous!
My take was that the purpose of bringing Paige along to meet her grandmother was not about any expectation of Paige bonding with the grandmother. Instead, it was P&E’s way of saying to Paige: we trust you and we want to level with you; we see you as someone to be treated as an adult, and we understand your unhappiness about being lied to and your need to connect with the truth about your family.
All of this, presumably, would flatter Paige and mollify her resentment over the years of secret-keeping. Philip and Elizabeth would naturally hope that Paige would put aside her grievances and start to see herself as part of the Jennings family team.
(Which, as mentioned above, I see as being over-optimism or even delusional thinking on the part of P&E.)
I think it is very courageous of you to try and attach any meaning to that meeting.
I might suggest (and this is kind of silly and I expect many people might just laugh and wonder what kind of medication I may be taking) but …
It was just such a bizarre meeting and event … I would suggest one meaning that might make just about as much sense as any other would be if you were to imagine a meeting of the writers just a few days before shooting was to begin. One of the show runners might have said, …
“C’mone guys! We need to write this script and we need something to make sense and we need to do this now! Now! Now! Now!”
"Everything we have put onto paper up till now has just been a load of garbage. So, we need someone to step up to the plate (or maybe there is some Russian equivalent to baseball?) to take a swing and suggest just what might make sense here. Then, after a little delay, a timid soul might just speak up and say, “Why don’t we try this following idea?”
Suddenly, the room would be filled with gales of laughter followed by a single pistol shot. BAH BOOM!!! … and a body hits the ground. KA THUMP!
Next, another timid soul speaks up and asks, “How’s about we try this instead?” A Russian housekeeper then asks, “May I remove this body now?”
Oh dear. Please forgive me for presenting this most foolish suggestion for a meeting script. I know it’s just downright stupid and I’m sorry. Really I am. But, I just don’t know what else to suggest. Would anyone else here present know the Russian equivalent to the game of baseball? Is there some Russian game that is as popular as baseball with the masses?
Oh dear. Anyway …
Yeah, I figured it possibly might have been along the lines of “Paige, the reality is in fact, that you are a Russian, not an American. Your true home is the home where your Russian ancestors were born, so join us and our cause.”
I also agree that it borders on the delusional on P and E’s part…especially E, and the decision to raise Paige as an American may turn out to have been a tactical mistake. Then again, as was accurately posted earlier, P and E’s main objective is to their immediate mission. Paige becoming an illegal herself is secondary.
This may be a illustrating the obvious, but I get the feeling that P down deep thinks the chances for Paige living a good life are better living as a typical American as opposed to ultimately being a spy for the USSR.
Whether or not either is a realistic option, though, is another matter.
The issue for Paige - atm - isn’t anything to do with spying it’s the giant lie. She keeps asking about the lie. She has moved on a little from the shock of finding her family was a lie and her parents had lied to, now, the impossibility of keeping the lie.
She can’t see a way to essentially live a giant lie, especially in relation to Henry and her friends - that’s why she disappears upstairs as soon as they get home (she doesn’t want to see anyone, inc. Henry). She’s basically a recently baptised evangelic.
It’s nothing to do with ‘spying’ atm.
And if Paige was just some random snoopy person who was asking them questions, they would presumably have just told her a different lie.
What I think you’re underestimating is that Paige is their DAUGHTER, who they unquestionably love. (Whether Elizabeth loves Paige more than she loves her homeland and her mission is arguable, but she clearly loves Paige). They don’t want to lie to Paige, both because they don’t like lying to someone they love and because they know that if they lie now and then it’s revealed later that this was also a lie she’ll probably never forgive them. And they also want to believe that the truth about their lives is something that Paige will be able to understand and respect, because that will mean that they aren’t just evil monsters.
Plus this caught them totally unprepared.
Are there other things they could have said which would have been more prudent? Quite possibly. But “this person made a decision in the heat of a stressful moment with tons of emotions raging around that was not an optimal decision” is not a plot hole.
Oh, and as for the meeting with the grandma, I don’t think that we’re meant to believe that we saw every moment of the meeting. Maybe E and her mom talked (in Russian) for several hours.
It has everything to do with spying.
Granted, it may not be about spying at this moment…after all, Paige has no clue right now that they want to make her a spy…but you can bet the ranch that it will matter eventually.
Barring a change in policy–such as discontinuing the second gen program entirely–the plans made for Paige by The Centre, and backed by Gabriel, Claudia, and Elizabeth aren’t going away. Anyone who thinks they are going to give up on bringing Paige into the fold is making a mistake.
Whether it works (as I said before)…that’s a different matter altogether.
Max, just want to cosign both of your posts just above.
If so, they’re idiots. They know that Paige has been suspicious for years, to the point of taking a bus to a different state to verify the existence of her aunt. They know the Center wants them to recruit her.
How could they not have thought about what to say if she asks them what’s really going on? How could they not have lain awake night after night, rehearsing what they should say?
These are people who are supposed to be world class liars and deceivers, sometimes adopting several different personas in a 24-hour period, extremely convincing in any situation when they have to think on their feet, and yet they were complete deer in the headlights when Paige FINALLY confronted them.
It has nothing to do with loving her. Every parent loves his kids, but he still has an answer ready when they ask about Santa Claus, or the birds and bees, especially if he’s had plenty of warning that the question was coming.
Any attempt to recruit Paige without indoctrination from infancy is insane, but that aside, they should have had a story ready like several people have outlined above — not outright lies, but incomplete information. You don’t just blurt out that you’re Boris and Natasha.
It almost seems to go off on tangents so you don’t have to like the show. It’s a little weird reading your posts … it reads like you’re angry.
Paige said “If you love me tell me the truth” and they did.
There is no back up plan because there doesn’t need to be one. They decided to tell her the truth. They don’t regret that.
Who has “blurted” what?