First Look: Season 6
Mar. 23rd, 2018 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sistermagpie posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
theamericans-ARKADY!!! Maybe he's the one who gets Oleg hooked up with Philip. I love the idea of those 3 working together. And I'd really hope Philip would be able to like them. Just pretty happy to see Arkady again. He'd have a lot of info on Philip that might make him think he's the one Illegal they could reach out to for help.
-That woman at the hockey game looks like she's totally trying to flirt with Philip. I'll bet he comes to the games on his own a lot and there's moms who are interested.
- HT describes Paige as getting independent but in the preview we mostly see her in a world compromised of her mother and quasi-grandmother, learning about a country and a cause from 2 people who have not lived in the country for years and are practically the only Russians on the show who see that cause the same way they did in 1962 (or 1942). I guess it's just funny because Henry is coming across much more like what you imagine as an independent kid: living on his own, successful student and hockey player, drawing other people to him naturally. I know Paige is also doing spy missions, but again that's her mom telling her what to do and why (or not) and then getting approval for it. It's filtering the world through that.
- I was actually surprised that they had a parallel Henry/Philip thing to go with the ongoing Paige/Elizabeth. HT may feel they're bonding as never before but to me it seems like Paige and Elizabeth have been furiously bonding for years now while Philip and Henry didn't even talk to each other. Also sets up the different parenting styles. That is, Elizabeth has always been about teaching Paige things very clearly, and obviously she's still guiding her, while Philip always seemed adamantly free range. I wonder where Elizabeth and Henry are with each other. Philip and Paige are in conflict, but he probably still gets her pretty well. Elizabeth's always had trouble connecting to people who weren't "one of them."
- This is presumably where they are at the start of the season so I would hope we'll see the Jennings come back together, even if part of that is the collision. Elizabeth has a hard time admitting she's wrong no matter how "at sea" she feels working on her own, but still. I'm sure Philip is happy not to feel like shit every day, but I can easily imagine him not being that fulfilled by being a travel agent. I mean, he succeeds at it because he succeeds at things he focuses on, but it's not like that's his chosen career. His chosen career was about helping people and the world and he got burnt out because he didn't think he was doing that. There's clips of him both helping Elizabeth (I think) and meeting with Oleg, so I think he's still as vulnerable as ever to the idea his country needs him. Philip's getting his desire here too, where he just gets to disappear into his cover, and I'd like to see that not be as nice as he thought it would be.
--Also: ARKADY!!!
no subject
Date: 2018-03-23 10:30 pm (UTC)As Holly says, Paige is starting to be drawn towards "the cause" and I think the attraction for Paige is that it lets her be someone else for a while, or that the inherent sneakiness of spying appeals to her. We'll have to see how long that lasts. :O
Also: PFFFFFFFFFFFF ARKADY
"Hello, Oleg Igorovich."
no subject
Date: 2018-03-24 03:01 am (UTC)Can't wait for this season to start.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-25 03:21 am (UTC)From the clues in this preview, I think it's safe to say that Arkady is the one who instructs Oleg to go back to the US and contact Philip, likely to get Philip to get details on what Elizabeth is working on. It seems that Elizabeth is still firmly on the side of the old-school hardliners (Claudia) but Philip is being tapped to align with Gorbachev's more progressive reformers. And in the meantime, Stan and Dennis will be closing in on both of them, thanks to the courier they turned last season.
Random aside: Did you notice that Dennis has a little baby at the dinner scene? So cute!
I'm incredibly happy to see that Philip and Henry are doing well together now that Henry has gone off to school. This is the free and happy future that Philip envisioned for his children all the way back in S1. Henry is living the American dream and Philip is so pleased. But Paige...yikes. I said in a different post that it seemed easy for Paige to dump Jesus for Karl Marx. I think she's happy to be bonding with her mother, but I doubt she has the internal fortitude to commit to the communist cause with the same fervor that Elizabeth and Claudia have. I agree with you that what she's doing doesn't represent real independence or even maturity.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-25 10:27 pm (UTC)One of the things that drives Elizabeth is a fear that was instilled in her from an early age of being disloyal to the USSR and the cause. She had so many influences in that direction, enough to make her never question it.
But that seems sooo different from Paige. She seems to just be looking for what she wanted in the church--approval, a feeling of belonging to something important and god, her mom's approval, being special. She has no actual contact with the country, just second hand highly curated stories from Elizabeth and Claudia. She can't possibly have really worked out how advancing the aims of the USSR is making life better for everyone. And it's not like religion where it's not supposed to be fact-based. If the church let her down, there's no reason this wouldn't either. Plus if she likes bonding with her mother and Claudia, well, what if they're not there anymore? She basically just joined a club to be in the club and it's a club of about 3 people at this point. She's even cut herself off from her father because he's not allowed to know anything anymore. Claudia's replaced him the way she wanted to back in S1.
I mean, even just looking at the two "teams"-Arkady and Oleg are in the prime of their careers in the actual USSR with plans for the future that we know is coming. They *know* specifically what their fighting for.
It occurs to me to that Philip is also the one with young family in the USSR, even if he hasn't seen them in years. In some ways it's like...his time has come. That sounds overly dramatic, but it's like the attitude he has is more in line with the country and it's reaching critical mass.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-26 03:02 am (UTC)So far as Paige is concerned, she may have traded in Pastor Tim for Claudia, but if I were Claudia, I would be wary. Paige seems to want and need a cause to believe in, but if she can ditch Christianity after being baptized, she can just as easily ditch communism when the next cool idea comes along. Toss over Pastor Tim and he'll just pray for you and hope that you find your way back to Jesus. Toss over an undercover KGB agent and they aren't going to be so kind.
I hadn't really given much thought to Philip's family in Russia. that storyline was so poorly handled last season that I think I put Mischa Jr and Philip's brother entirely out of my mind. I wonder if we'll see them this season.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-26 04:41 pm (UTC)True--I tend to fall back on that language because that's what Zhukov told her, that she was chosen because of her fear of surrendering to the enemy. But it's too simple to just make it that. Plus people at that time, from what I understand, overidentified with the state.
Elizabeth is definitely morally outraged at the idea of being disloyal and the idea of being that herself would be repulsive.
Exactly. However much they "teach" Paige about what it's like to be Soviet, she's American and nothing else. Even faced with her parents being Soviet spies she still didn't really believe she couldn't just tell her Pastor whatever she wanted. You'd have to be crazy to think that just because she was totally into this idea at 18 and 19 it meant she was in it for life. Sure to *them* this cause seems obvious, and the ability to leave it impossible, but that's because they were brought up with it. Paige was brought up with totally different values and still has them. This is all imaginary to her.
I agree about how they were handled. I was really just furious at them throwing in something as big as Philip having a brother just for one scene where a non-character has dinner with him. But it also feels even more poorly thought out for it not to mean anything to the character we actually care about. And at this point it seems actually relevant to the current story since we're talking about changes in the USSR. Like it does seem like it could be important that Philip has a young family in the USSR that's looking to the future and cares about him compared to Elizabeth.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-26 05:21 pm (UTC)We know that Mischa Jr. would be pro-reform, unlike Elizabeth and Claudia who are clinging to ideologically informed notions about what Russia should be as opposed to what Russia actually is. If Philip gets kicked out of the US, he at least would have some sort of family ties back home to return to. I think that for Philip the only family that matters is Elizabeth and his American born children, but at least he does have these genuine (if estranged) family ties back in Russia. That's more than Elizabeth, Claudia, Gabriel, or even William could say.
So far as Paige is concerned, I doubt that Elizabeth or Claudia would hope that she could become as devoted to Soviet Russia as they are. What they need is simply for Paige to be disloyal to the US, in favor of what Paige would think of as loyalty to a higher, purer type of social value. They will twist Paige's own desire to do good by getting her to think that betraying America makes her an even better American than those who are merely,'blindly' patriotic. They will show Paige instances of the US doing the wrong things at home and overseas, while simultaneously painting themselves as the beleaguered underdogs of true equality and justice. Before you know it, Paige will think that she is helping the US by betraying the US. Then they will point her towards a job in the State Dept or related roles where she can leak 'little' secrets. Paige revealed herself to be just gullible enough to fall for this sort of approach. She has no friends. She doesn't think for herself, and she's hugely susceptible to getting caught up in other peoples' feel-good causes. (Can you tell that I lost all respect for Paige last season?)