Elizabeth surveying all the wonderful consumer products (19 inch TV, VHS tape player, digital clock radio) kind of fell flat for me. Since when has she cared about “stuff?” It seemed a little out of the blue for her character.
Was I the only one who was hoping we’d see a 4 1/2 minute montage of Philip and Elizabeth filling in a hole? What a wasted opportunity for a perfect bookending to the season.
I didn’t notice the “stuff.” I saw it as putting away another disguise, looking at family photos (that they wouldn’t be taking with them), looking around at the place she’s spent the past 15ish years for one of the last times. I remember doing the same type of thing every time I’ve moved or gone through a major change and I’ve never moved as completely or changed my life as thoroughly as she was preparing to do.
I get what you’re saying, but the photos were (intentionally, I’d imagine) periphery. It’s the closet filled with all her decadent Western clothing that grabs her attention, not the photos next to it on the wall. The TV is framed dead center, while the photos appear only on the margins. And then her gaze drifts from the refrigerator with pictures to the clock radio to the dishwasher.
To me, that’s a pretty clear indication (expressed artfully) that she’s explicitly thinking about her stuff and not having a moment of nostalgia.
But, then again, I said her looking at her stuff didn’t ring true to me, so who knows?
I don’t think she’s ever cared about stuff, including now. Despite how fixed her beliefs about materialism and decadence are, though, I think she’s become inured to the trappings of American life. In earlier seasons she had been visibly uncomfortable around, if not outright hostile toward, western luxuries – especially when they weren’t part of keeping up appearances. I got the impression that even being around that stuff probably set her teeth on edge. After Tuan’s recriminations in this last episode, I think she was taking stock of her situation, and how yeah, she’s kind of normalized her surroundings to the point where she’s grown a little complacent. She’s not a consumer, but she’s come to tolerate the fixtures of a consumer lifestyle.
What was special about that location? I missed the point of that whole scene.
(Indeed, for a moment, I thought that Paige had intuited their incipient move, and was running away from home to avoid it and stay in the US (or join Pastor Tim in South America) – but I knew that was all very implausible, so ???)
It’s the same parking lot by the food pantry where Paige watched Elizabeth kill a guy.
I would thin she’d enjoy the trapping; why not?
Taking a guess at her perspective; when she left home they were still trying to rebuild cities, infrastructure, the whole society devastated. They had lost not 1% like most countries but 10% of the population in the Great Patriotic War - the nation was utterly traumatised.
The USA, by contrast, had a super efficient, state of the art economy, huge markets without international competition and a skilled workforce.
From her pov, perhaps it was just a matter of time before the Soviet Union caught up - after all things like the space projects at home suggested technology was fine.
According to the flashbacks, they came to the US in the mid sixties. At the time the Soviet Economy was doing well and the standard of living was rising. The stagnation and collapse was 15 years in the future.
On your reading why would they use Goodbye Yellow Brick Road?
I think part of that was the realization that losing all of that was now a realistic, immanent possibility. It’s easy to be cynical about “petty bourgeois concerns” when you plan to go back to the USSR at some nebulous point in the future, but now that there are actual plans being discussed, it suddenly became real - “What am I thinking? Do I really want to do this?”
“Goodbye” should be self-evident. The Yellow Brick Road is clearly Oz. A magical land of opportunity and adventure. Now she’s about to wake up back in the boring old USSR - colorless, boring, perpetually winter*.
*And is anyone else wondering about what time of year this is? DC seems like summer, but Moscow still has snow on the ground. All the time. I’m sure there are a few months out of the year where this would happen, but it seems like it’s that time of year all year 
I was confused because in your last post you said
That was me.
I’m AK84, and so is my wife!
I’ll cop to having screwed up the thread context on that.
That’s fine, but the problem is that it comes completely from out of left field. Elizabeth is portrayed as an ardent supporter of the Soviet system who holds the West in almost total disdain. It’s not the best storytelling to just flip a switch and say, “Oh, btw, we want you to know that Elizabeth, who has spent 5 seasons despising American decadence, now is really going to miss her Manolo Blahniks.”
Think about this crazy example- what if instead of gazing at her stuff during that montage she was gazing across the street at Stan as he’s washing his car in cut off jean shorts, tiny dollops of soapy bubbles cascading down his manly chest. After cursing me for putting that image in your head, you’d be like, “WTF?! Since when does Elizabeth have the hots for Stan?! We’ve never even seen a hint of that! That doesn’t make any sense at all!”
Crazy, but it’s pretty much the same 180 change of character from out of nowhere. I mean, I don’t know about anyone else, but I want to know how Elizabeth, a solider through and through, got to the point that she would care about her stuff. It can’t be as simple as the fear of losing it because she’s always talking about how much better life is back home and it can’t be complacency because Elizabeth is not a complacent person. Something had to change in her core to get her of all people to this point. How does she feel about that change? Does it torment her? Does Philip know? Does she try to hide it from Philip? Is she afraid she’ll look like a hypocrite in Paige’s eyes? There’s so much drama and character to explore in that space and we never saw an iota of it? That does not compute.
We have finally gotten a clarification about the seasons and the snow and all that from the showrunners. On the podcast they admitted that their production schedule and their budget just did not allow them to show the summer of 1984 despite that being the time period they were covering. So they therefore purposely avoided references to the Summer Olympics and so on.
Hrumpf.
Well, I for one am just going to assume that Moscow is in Perpetual Winter! :mad:
How did she get to the point where she cared about Pasha and Tuan? 15 years ago she’d have killed either of them without blinking.
How did she get to the point where she actually married Philip for real? 20 years ago, he was just a job she had to do.
How did she get to the point where she felt uncomfortable seducing the Special Wheat Guy? Again, that used to be just part of the job.
These things sneak up on you. You have an image in your head of what you are, hard-core bad-ass US-hating commie super-spy, but at some point, you realize that your “fake life” has become your real life.
And giving that up isn’t trivial. Look at how much time they spent this year on flashbacks to how hard life was in the USSR when they were growing up, and how hard it has been lately. Philip even commented on it at one point, “Why can’t we feed our own people?” This didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the ultimate expression of everything this season has been building.
Some of these comments feel like they’re made by pretty young people; fwiw, it’s surprising what 16 years of parenting - and life in general - can do. One of my very favourite quote is by Muhammad Ali:
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Are you listing these as examples of changes because you think I’m arguing Elizabeth is incapable of change? Because that isn’t at all what I’m arguing.
There is no drama in realizing something that has just snuck up on you. The drama is the process of coming to that realization. It could suddenly sneak up on Elizabeth that she genuinely has the hots for Stan, but you would agree that would suck as a narrative, right? It’s apropos of nothing. There is nothing in the story that has lead us to believe that should happen, nothing in her character that would lead us to believe that could happen. It’s the same thing for her sudden attachment to her stuff.
Does Elizabeth really strike you as the kind of person who would care about leaving her stuff behind in the face of the starvation of her people? That she would interpret it as a “me” problem rather than a “we” problem?
Pretty much my thoughts too - it’s been made abundantly clear she doesn’t have much truck with the decadent west and its capitalism, yet here she is looking at all her fancy appliances and nice clothes and obviously having second thoughts about the whole “Moving back to Russia” thing.
Phillip on the other hand - Mr Once-Threatened-To-Defect-And-Currently-Drives-A-Sports-Car- seems only too keen to head for the airport and get on the first Aeroflot flight back to Moscow.
And what’s with changing his mind on Henry going to boarding school? I would have thought that’d be an easy solution for him. “OK, have fun! [rest of Jennings family vanishes to Soviet Union]”
I doubt the next series will be The Improbable Adventures of Phillip Jennings, Travel Agent, though, even though that is an eminently sensible suggestion from Elizabeth.
On another note though: Do none of that Kimberley’s friends think it’s odd she is “friends” (winky face) with a guy in his late 20s or possibly early 30s? Sure, he has access to weed, but they seem to think Phillip’s persona is a genuinely cool dude and not a skeevy way older guy possibly hooking up with someone still in high school.