The Americans sixth and final season approaches...

Great line from an episode recap I just read:

Spoiler

The Americans: a show where the most heroic character this week is the guy who beats up his daughter and has manipulative sex with a surrogate daughter figure!

 

It sure was. The whole season has been excellent so far, but that may have been the best to date.

 

It's different, though. No wigs. With Paige it's all too blended together, which is why it disturbs Elizabeth so much. Elizabeth has always had Phillip to go back to, arranged marriage that it was, always had her memories of Russia. Paige was born into this. Is she going to marry another Russian spy, or more likely, marry someone that she will spy on? With no outer life, other than her parents? That's f-ed up.

Of course, it's never going to happen. Paige will be jailed or deported. Possibly killed, though I don't think the show will go there.

 

S6E5 - The Great Patriotic War - Great episode. Worth the wait.

 

I lost track of this series sometime after the second season, but hope there will be some kind of omnibus dvd or bluray edition for us latecomers to the party.

 

Phillip was uneasy about the direction Paige has been taken under Elizabeth's tutelage but after hearing of the latest savage slayings he will be determined to halt her progress. All he needs to do that is the truth. This will be the final conflict. Philip will sacrifice himself and certainly Elizabeth to give Paige a chance in a thousand of being a person with a life.

As for Stan, has he ever seen Breaking Bad? There was this character Hank who was angry at the criminals who lied to him for so long and even angrier at himself. Then he got reckless...

 

Elizabeth is a ticking time bomb and will explode.

 

I missed a lot of episodes. Does Elizabeth usually kill that many people?

 

I still think...

Spoiler: not sure why I put spoilers on crazy theories, but...

Phillip will wind up killing Elizabeth as she tries to sabotage the treaty/kill Gorbachev/something like that. I suspect Paige will be witness to this, in some fashion, but remain committed to the Soviet cause, thereby aggravating Phillip's situation (he'll lose his wife AND daughter). Not that they would ever want to continue past this season, but it would leave them with a "sleeper" agent if they ever wanted to do a follow-up movie/Better Call Paige-type thing.

Plus it gives it a little poetic spin, that [IF!] Elizabeth dies trying to save her beloved USSR, at least her daughter lives on to fight the good fight...

 

What about that warehouse supervisor she killed? What kind of peace does his family get?

 

Just a quick note on the episode previous to this week's: I've always complained about how visually dark this show is, and so we get a 6 minute sequence of Elizabeth wandering around a warehouse in complete darkness, for her and us. Apparently the producers said that this was done to put us right there with her, but it doesn't explain how poorly the rest of the show is lit.
Anyway, as for this week's funfest:
Another line crossed by Phil-but in what I think is a really significant act he actually specifically warns Kimmy about being kidnapped. I'm not sure we've seen this level of remorse from Phil before. And what was up with that sparring match with Paige? Very odd. But we did see that Paige can take of herself, thank you very much. She's a chip off the ole wig. Speaking of which...
Elizabeth doing what she does, feeling no remorse. I think we all knew Gennadi wasn't going to be the only one taking a trip to Belize. And kudos to her-I think it's in the Russian Spy Training Handbook to regale your daughter with sex stories, to, you know, bond.
And our boy Stan-if he could only find some non-spy friends. They tend to live longer. But the wifey is inching her way in-that's going to be a major kick in the cojones when she turns out be an illegal.

 

I'm not sure what warehouse worker you're taking about, because I'm still on Season 5...but it doesn't matter, because we've seen Americans and Russians, alike, meet bitter ends. We've seen conniving and skullduggery all the way around. People die for their ideals, but seldom do they die for the truth, only the perception of.

I served my country, the United States of America, with a rifle and a purpose. I might have hurt some people really, really bad. So, what about their families?

Flip a coin.

 

The guy she interviewed under the pretext of a security audit. He didn't die for his ideals. He didn't die for his perception of the truth.

You're trying to equate combat with espionage?

 

Folks built up that fight scene between Phillip and Paige as some kind of knockdown drag-out. He swatted her down like she was a bug.

 

It's not called The Cold War because it was a tea party. It was a war fought with different ammunition, but a war, nonethess, with real casualties, including, like any other war, the dispatching of non-combatants.

I'm saying, that after a while, the United States and the CCCP deserved the respite that only peace could offer.

I mean, I don't know what show you're watching, but in The Americans, it's pretty evident that both teams are up to the same antics. You don't think we didn't have perfect-Russian-speaking American spies offing Boris and Natasha in their slumper?

I love my country, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to what it takes to be a world power. It's scary stuff.

 

Please, don't lecture me with your moral equivalence. Anyone who buys into totalitarianism doesn't deserve peace.

 

HELLO! HELLO! It's a TV show.

 

Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

 

It's not to everybody.

 

Heh. No, I mean, it's a good talk. It's relevant to the show and especially the 1960s and 1980s. I understand if someone is passionate about their beliefs. Patriotism is a cool byproduct of random chance, given that none of us had a choice in what country we were born, to which parents and in what era.

My point really was, it's interesting when people produce a show, or a film, and the lead characters cut against the grain of what we believe, yet they make them sympathetic to us, because they were written that way. Walter White is a good example. We see these horrible things that he's done, and his poor decisions, yet they always wrote in something to bring us back to the human element of the tragically flawed protagonist. If they didn't write it like that then everyone would despise the characters 100% and quit watching. It's the same thing with Philip & Elizabeth, or Tony Soprano.

I mean, screw these ****ing pinko commies, right?

On the other hand, it took my father, a Vietnam combat veteran, a long time to forgive the communists, but he did. It wasn't lost to him, nor to me, that he was being shot at with Russian made AK-47s. 30 years later I was being shot at by the same damn weapons! Some of these confiscated small-arms in Afghanistan looked as if they were made 30 years ago!

Look, I don't dig on the Soviet Union. I'm a child of the '70s and '80s, and I remember being scared of nuclear war. We ran those nuclear test drils in gradeschool. I recall them testing the nuclear warning sirens in downtown Houston, during the early '80s.

But I'm not here to convince anybody that I'm not a Communist sympathizer. I'm not, but I'm certainly a human sympathizer. Also, I like synthesizers.

 

She’s on a bit of a spree this season. That last stab in the back of the fleeing, defenseless mother was ice cold. Not a very sympathetic character lately.

 

There's a difference between empathy, sympathy, pity, and compassion. Some fans of the show cheer on the protagonists, even though they're bad people, just because they're the protagonists. Shows like The Americans let me see things from the protagonist's eyes, let me empathize. But I don't sympathize, I don't cheer for them, because they're still wrong, they're still bad people.

It's been put forward in even in the kill heavy exaggerated Americans universe, that somewhere there are American spies killing just as many innocent Russians as we see the Jennings do. Well, that's conjecture. We don't really know that the American spies are as extreme. It can be a false equivalency. Sure, the Soviets forced Eastern Europe into Communism, but the USA did the same to Western Europe... oh wait we didn't.

It's frequently put forward, particularly with Elizabeth, that she's just following the ideology. Well, don't follow it then. She has a mind, she chooses not to use it. This could be used to excuse anything. I've seen countless hours of TV programming where the hero questions orders from above and acts contrary for the greater good. The Jennings are also capable of doing this. They mostly choose not to.

 

yeah, I used to think just like you.

But I don't any longer. I comprehend how much ambiguity is often present in these situations. I get that the Russian spies are wrong. But I also understand what they think their game is. I understand their motivations, and how they justify their commitments. Not as heartless monsters, but as as misled human beings.

And while you may have "seen countless hours of TV programming where the hero questions orders from above and acts contrary for the greater good", when if comes to matters of historical fact, American history isn't particularly distinguished by the presence of such individual thinkers and iconoclasts. As time goes by, I realize how rare such people are. For every Frank Serpico, there are a hundred dirty cops, and a thousand who turn a blind eye. As a corollary, I also have learned to have some understanding of the power of peer group conditioning and loyalty, and how it influences people to conform to the demands of maintaining social consensus.

It's a terrible thing, but I get Joe Paterno, too. I understand how people compartmentalize. It's wrong, but that checking-out-when-you-need-to-be-checking-in situation is too common to be incomprehensible to me. (Jerry Sandusky, I don't get that. That behavior is beyond what I'm willing to try to fathom.)

That's part of what makes "The Americans" an exceptional TV series. Yes, the Soviet spies are frontline forward recon sappers of a political adversary with a hostile ideology- but they aren't portrayed as monsters serving unfathomable evil, as if Communists were on par with serial rapists or serial killers. The Russians have simply been conditioned to be convinced that the worst aspects of capitalist economics are so ghastly that the only solution is to criminalize capitalism, and eradicate it as a pestilence. In that regard, the spies also possess a perspective about the American narrative- and its assumptions- that few Americans ever even examine, much less question. That perspective is flawed- mortally flawed- but some of its points are nonetheless factually valid. And if all too few Russians were all that courageous or open-eyed about questioning their own conditioning and national mythology- well, neither are Americans. Or, I suspect, anyone else brought up to be true to their nation, or their tribe, or their founding mythos.

America is not the savior of World War Two that most of us have been led to believe. The USSR really was the nation that paid the highest price to defeat the Nazis, and the nation that obtained the most important battlefield victories. (An obvious factual point- yet one that took my American a** more than forty years to assimilate.) At the end of WW2, the USA and the UK really did reconstitute West Germany with the aid of a lot of people who enabled Hitler; we really did help to forcibly suppress the Communist popular movements in countries like France and Italy, and put our finger on the scale wherever we could in order to put together an international order from the ruins that ensured that Western values would prevail over Marxist-Leninism. That strategy included letting a lot of bad guys and gangsters walk free. Meanwhile, the Soviets pursued their own national interests with the Eastern bloc- what else were they to be expected to do? Anyway, do you have any idea of the political complexion of the nations of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s? Do you imagine that they had all previously been Anglo-American-style open societies governed by democratic consent, exalting civil liberties and political pluralism, until that was taken away from them by the Russian Army occupation? And if the Soviets were hardline totalitarians who brooked no challenge to their rule, then why were the 1950s popular rebellions in Poland, East Germany, and Hungary addressed in the aftermath of their suppression with liberalizing measures that included reforms to increase autonomous rule?

The Russian Soviets didn't lighten up in the Eastern bloc because they were great guys- they did that because they had less power than we Americans were taught. The Russians did not have the power to take over the world with military might and bend it to their will. They had their hands full with Poland and East Germany, their buffer states against That Thing Happening Again. Which does lead to the question of why US Cold War policy implied for decades that the Soviets were bent on achieving military domination for the purpose of global conquest- including plans to roll Russian panzers through the Fulda Gap, to conquer West Germany and France through military aggression. (And then do what? Military think-tankers put millions of man-hours into gaming battlefield strategies, while ignoring the aftermath- the challenges of occupation. It's borderline hopelessly expensive to exploit a militarily conquered nation for natural resources as it is. Forget exploiting it for factories and technical expertise. fwiw, it's Russia that has the resource trove, not Western Europe.)

So anyway, I see how it gets, with Elizabeth and Paige. For example, Paige starts playing apprentice spy; puts herself in a risky position; momma bear has to take charge, through "termination with extreme prejudice", to employ some old CIA phraseology. Because it's about more than ideology. It's about Family, and Survival. Self-Defense. Which is incidentally the main reason that Elizabeth has committed to the high-stakes game of espionage in the first place, from her point of view.

That's a "moral relativist" critique. But not an assertion of "moral equivalence." There's a difference. This is about honesty and clarity. Ironclad moral absolutism isn't honest. It compartmentalizes too much. It's moral absolutism that has the problems with double standards and double-mindedness. No amount of lofty rhetoric can overcome the problem of absolutist pronouncements ringing hollow in the face of an honest appraisal of history.

Make no mistake: it's entirely possible to endeavor to see things from someone else's point of view and still find it necessary to punish them. The American revolutionaries who intercepted Major Andre had a "moral relativist" reaction to him. But they still executed him.

Moral relativism should also not be confused with the denial that there's any such thing as right and wrong. My personal position is that there is such a thing as right and wrong. But I also admit that I don't know enough to judge right and wrong in every situation. I do the best I can, when I feel like I have to make those judgements. Not to be confused with imagining that I know the truth all the time.

 

i must say that i am very curious as to how they will end 'the americans'.

lots of possible scenarios, but which one will they choose.

1 - all 3 die

2 - elizabeth and paige kill phillip because he disagrees with them.

3 - phillip and paige kill elizabeth because they disagree with her

4 - paige is killed and elizabeth and phillip turn on the USSR and end up in witsec

5 - all 3 survive, accomplish their 'mission' and go back to the USSR with their son. (who is the wild card in all this by the way)

6 - stan kills them all because his 'girlfriend' was put there to let him know what is going on across the street. stan raises the son form here on out.

7 - all 3 survive, kill the fat russian lady, and turn themselves into stan who sets the whole family up in witsec.

an aside: agreed that elizabeth has gone waaaayyyy overboard in her zeal to preserve the USSR, and of course, we all know how that ended in real life.

 

Kudos.