Question of the week #12

[treonb]

The three main characters on our show are all living discontinuous lives: Philip and Elizabeth first as their original selves and now as Americans; Stan first as himself, then as a white supremacist involved in the movement, and now as himself again. Throughout those lives, though, things have happened to them that shape the way they think and feel about things, and those psychological responses can carry over into the next incarnation. 

This week's question: How do you think that works for each of those three characters? 

You can expect spoilers for the entire first season in the comments.

(There's no expiration date on these questions, so if you're reading this post months later and feel like jumping in, please do.)

Comments

[treonb]

Having asked, I'll take a stab at answering too ;-)

First, thinking about it makes me realize that we don't really know much. We've seen Elizabeth flashbacks to her childhood, but we don't really know what Philip or Stan went through in their 'other lives'.

That is true particularly for Stan. I think he's most clearly affected by his 'other' life: He lost contact with his wife and barely knows his kid, though the show seems to imply that's just an issue of time spent away. It's also implied that he now sees the enemy behind every bush due to his undercover work.

Philip - I feel he just melds into whatever environment he's in. He's in America, he's going to enjoy it. So, once again, I can only guess this is based on his past, but I have no idea.

As for Elizabeth, she's the only one whose experiences have been shown onscreen to shape who she is today. She grew up with nothing and had to get everything she had through struggle and hard work. I guess that's how she sees her current life too - especially now that her entire life is a lie and is actually 'just work'.

[jae]

I think it's clear that each of these characters has echoes of their "past lives" (ha!) in their current ones, but we don't know the full details for any of them. It's true that we do know more about Elizabeth's past than the other two's, but even with her we don't have the full story on what happened in Nadezhda's life that might be directly affecting some of the ways she reacts to things as Elizabeth.

With Stan, it seems to me that when he underwent that change in the middle of the first season and shot Vlad, that he was likely feeling the echoes of the undercover identity he'd adopted in the white supremacist group. That's really the best explanation for that change in his personality from a very by-the-book agent who refused to participate in even officially sanctioned illegal activity to going off the rails.

With Philip, I think his knee-jerk protectiveness must have its roots in Misha's past. Part of it can be explained by his overactive empathy (because when you're picking up on the feelings of someone you care about and you find them overwhelming, it's very easy to knee-jerk into just wanting to make them go away), but I strongly suspect that something must have happened in Misha's past where he couldn't protect someone he cared about, and something awful happened.

With Elizabeth, well, Five Points Down is frankly my attempt at fictionalizing a longform answer to this question. But I'll make a specific observation anyway: as a general rule (Gregory and more recently Philip excepted), Elizabeth seems to find men's sexual responses not frightening, not shame-inducing, but contemptible. I don't know whether the choice to play it that way originally came from Keri Russell or from the writers and directors, but either way I'm in awe: it's the perfect character-specific response for someone who's perfectly confident in her ability to defend herself, but whose first sexual experience was a violent rape and the...hundreds? more?...that followed for years would have all been work-related and calculated and/or clinical.

-J

[katiac]

but I strongly suspect that something must have happened in Misha's past where he couldn't protect someone he cared about, and something awful happened.

I could very much see that being the case. Philip is usually very controlled. Like he doesn't lose his cool when he's fighting Timoshev, or when someone is trying to bait him, but every time his family is in danger, we see him visibly shaking, clearly having a deep, almost automatic response to it.