She maybe have been guilty in the sense that she did the things that she was accused of but she was in an impossible situation in the middle of a war. Maybe she wasn’t technically innocent buts he certainly wasn’t a threat to anyone nor a traitor.
Don’t you know - the Russians love their children, too! I heard that somewhere…
Or it was bullshit justification after the fact. She was notorious enough that the Soviets knew her name and had been looking for her. She was more than a 16 year old innocent caught up in things. She knew she had to hide her identity from the very moment that she entered the hospital. Pretty savvy if you ask me.
[QUOTE=QuickSilver;20216081Finally, what the fuck is Elizabeth thinking with that “Let’s just go home” bullshit? She’s going to destroy her kids’ lives by dragging them to Russia? This is all about her and her starting to lose her faith in the mission but wanting not to become someone she’d consider a traitor.[/QUOTE]
Going home may be a lot harder than it was at the end of last season. Even if Paige and Henry were willing to go with a minimum of fuss, it’s doubtful they’ll be allowed to go. Gabriel might’ve had the clout and the respect to just send them home when they were burnt out. But Claudia likely expects to work them to death and then put a bullet in the backs of their head when they are no longer useful.
The Rezidentura have already had “concerns” about Philip’s allegiance, and Gabriel tacitly warned the Jennings a few episodes back that the KGB are not their friends. I think the end might not be Stan Beeman and the FBI closing in on Philip & Elizabeth, they may have to go on the run, just like the woman they just assassinated.
When Elizabeth said, “let’s get out of here,” for a moment, I thought that she meant that they should take the kids and make a run for it and then the next sentence: “let’s go home,” was just a gut punch.
Me neither. I was like, “Ehhhh…no.”
A lot of people missed this somehow. Even Alan Sepinwall, who I thought watched things multiple times, pausing and taking notes. Here was her admission:
Yep that, and I remember something like: ‘they made me so drunk I could hardly stand up/see’. Can’t recall which.
Show seems to be headed for, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall”, and they won’t have to run and hide. They’ll simply be cut loose by the dissolution of the USSR and find themselves free to live the rest of their lives as “The Americans”.
As you might have guessed, my own take is juuuuust a bit less rosy, and I see the Jennings family and their likely fates serving as a sort of allegory for the USSR when it was broken apart into the separate republics.
They’ll just quit when they want. Claudia would try emotional blackmail for while but i’s up to them.
The only considerations at this point are Paige and Henry. Don’t understand they might need permission or something. They completed any obligation many years ago.
Yes, it was well-established by the writers that the woman was anything but a remorseless traitor.
My post #427:
Nothing in the interview-remarks you quoted changes my assertion that the writers did not intend us to see the shooting of the woman as “an act of justice” by Soviet agents (in this case, Elizabeth Jennings). What you are not seeing is that “as deserving of being executed as anyone they’ve ever killed” is not the same thing as “is deserving of being executed.”
Weisberg is making a comparison among all the people we’ve seen P&E kill (and placing the Russian woman at the far end of the continuum)–but that does not mean that her killing is ‘deserved.’ It just means that it comes closer to being ‘deserved’ than do the many other killings we’ve watched them commit. Weisberg nowhere asserts that any of the people killed by P&E actually were “deserving of being executed.”
If you can come up with a quotation from Weisberg or a member of his writing staff that does more than simply make a ranking along the ‘less deserved or more deserved’ scale–a quotation that states outright that a killing IS ‘deserved’–than that will be something else. As it stands, I agree with QuickSilver that what that particular killing showed us is not ‘the execution of Justice’ but instead:
The scene showed the moral corruption of the Soviet system–it was not intended by Weisberg or his staff as a depiction of an act of justice.
:rolleyes:
So before you read this, you would have already taken for granted that Joe and Joel would see Natalie as being just as deserving of execution as, say, Elizabeth’s rapist from the pilot? Riiiight. :dubious:
ETA: Again, if you watch this show and see Philip and Elizabeth as the bad guys, you’re either watching it wrong or the showrunners have failed to achieve what they set out to do, depending on how you look at it. From another Slate interview:
The Weisberg quotation you brought up said:
It’s clear he was making a point about Philip’s state of mind. Even so, I think you’d be on shaky ground if you claimed that Weisberg’s intent in the pilot was to show that the rapist was “deserving of execution,” or that in general Weisberg’s message is that extra-judicial killing is a good thing or something to admire.
To what does this refer? I haven’t tried to make the case that Philip and Elizabeth are “the bad guys.”
That’s what Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames thought, but the collapse of the USSR led to huge breaches in the Soviet security archives and years later there was a reckoning, just like in the most recent episode.
If not, sorry. There have definitely been people ITT who have done so, and I thought you were among them. But my point still stands for those who make that case, and hope for them to be punished in the end.
There’s a difference between being “bad guys” and being “the bad guys”. P&E are certainly not the antagonists in The Americans. But you could make a very convincing argument that they would be going to hell (if one believed in such a thing).
You definitely could! I acknowledge that. But such an argument would also have to consign Joe and Joel to going there as well. And that’s the key point: these showrunners have something of a cockeyed sense of ethics in some ways. I love it, but I can’t necessarily defend it against many of these kinds of arguments. But if you watch the show and don’t understand that this is their morality, you’re going to be looking for punishments and “karma’s a bitch” type stuff by the finale that is unlikely to come, and you will be disappointed.
Wait, making a show about people doing unethical things is, itself, unethical? Huh?
Wow, vast oversimplification much? :smack: I’m not going to go back and recap every point that has been made on this topic, but to sum up: it’s pretty clear that they admire Philip and Elizabeth and want the audience to do so as well. They often talk about their marriage in kind of reverent terms, and then–again–there was this, that I quoted just upthread:
“Worrying” is mentioned three times. They very much want the audience to “sympathize” with Philip and Elizabeth and find them “likable”. But they also can’t seem to help themselves in terms of writing stories in which the couple does “some terrible things”. Which makes them go back to worrying that the audience won’t like them. From a certain point of view, you could say these showrunners are sick fucks. But then I must be a sick fuck as well, because I have no trouble rooting for Philip and Elizabeth.
I doubt the show is trying to be prescient about that. I understand there is only one season left, which would give the story enough time to conclude with the dissolution of the USSR and the immediate consequences of abandoning large numbers of spies. Given P&E’s developing disillusions and dawning truths, this would be a fortuitous ending for their characters (i.e. unexpectedly become real “Americans”). Whatever reckoning happens years after that seems out of scope, IMHO.