Episode discussion post: "Tchaikovsky"

[jae]

Aired:
4 April 2018 in the U.S. and Canada

This is a discussion post for episode 602 of The Americans, intended for viewers who are watching the show on the U.S./Canadian schedule. (Feel free to dive in to the discussion even if you're coming in late--and you should also feel free to start a new thread if it seems too daunting to read through what's already been posted first. If you're reading this at a point where you've already seen subsequent episodes, though, please take care to keep comments spoiler-free of anything that comes after season six, episode two.)

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Comments

Re: Claudia

[jae]

and also by the fact I sometimes feel like the sole member who actually likes the character.

FWIW, I like all of the characters.

-J

Re: Claudia

[quantumreality]

I'm personally feeling a little protective over Paige because she's getting a bad rap this season, heh.

Re: Claudia

[jae]

I feel protective over whoever's getting crapped on at the moment, so yeah. :)

-J

Re: Paige

[saraqael]

I started this season totally soured on Paige, but after this last episode I've totally got my Paige love back, for the craziest reason though. The show was pitching how great she's doing as junior spy and that grated on me because she's clearly not doing a great job. But this last episode with her utterly blowing her cover and running towards the sounds of the gunshots while yelling, "Mom!!!" made it so obvious that she's doing all of this out of love for her mom (whether she herself realizes this or not) was really endearing to me. Poor Paige. In so many ways, she's still just the little kid wandering around her weird house trying to make sense out of her faux-family. Poor kid.

Re: Paige

[sistermagpie]

so obvious that she's doing all of this out of love for her mom (whether she herself realizes this or not)

Sounds like somebody else we know. I've always thought that was at the heart of Elizabeth as well. She had to co-sign her mother's choice to "not blink" in sending her off, always feels the need to present that as just the way a mother "should be" (remember one of Paige's first questions about her grandmother was whether Elizabeth would ever do that to her).

Plus there's that memory of her mother saying that the ceremonies or soldiers weren't for her father because he was a coward. I always took that as Elizabeth learning that if she ever faltered she wouldn't be loved. Philip was the first person who didn't seem to value her primarily for being a good soldier.

I really really hope this is where they're going with the Paige story. There's, imo, very little dramatic interest in Paige being a badass spy even if Elizabeth ultimately sees she shouldn't make the same choices. Elizabeth, imo, needs the challenge of difference. Plus not only is Paige American etc. but she has a second parent who offers an alternate way, even if she instinctively responds better to her mother's.

Re: Paige

[saraqael]

Yes I agree that Elizabeth is equally motivated by love for her mother and wanting to make her proud as she is by being a 'true believer' in Soviet ideology.

Re: Paige

[sistermagpie]

One more thought about this, but I think this is also underlined in all the Paige/Claudia/Elizabeth scenes where they're literally trying to teach Paige to love Russia and hate America, whether or not one would put it in such an extreme way. There's a pattern of focus on all the ways Paige can be like them and none on how Paige might be independently.

Even the music conversation starts with Elizabeth saying Paige's preference about music and Claudia dismissing it and being sure she just needs to hear this music. It's a cliche thing for an older person to say about a younger person, but in this case there really is an aggressive molding going on here, and an erasure of anything about Paige that could conflict with that.

Paige herself responds better to stuff about her mom--she remembers seeing the Nutcracker and the character in the movie reminds her of her mother. She apparently has taken to Claudia too, but that might be mostly because of how she's connected to her mother.

Re: Claudia

[saraqael]

I appreciate all of the characters for who they are, even if I don't necessarily 'like' or approve of them all of the time.

Re: Claudia

[jae]

It doesn't occur to me to even think about who to "approve" or "disapprove" of in terms of my own personal morality. Either the show has convinced me to sympathize with each of its characters on their own merits or not (and so far, so good).

-J

Re: Claudia

[saraqael]

I totally sympathize with them but I still disapprove of things they've done. I disapprove of murdering anyone over ideology. I disapprove of breaking apart families over ideology. I love these characters but they've done some very bad things. Whether the character believes that they did something awful to serve the greater good is irrelevant to me.

I still want them all to have a happy ending though. :P

Re: Claudia

[jae]

I come at it from the opposite end of things: what I personally believe about what is right and wrong is irrelevant because the show isn't about me. I want to understand the characters' psychologies and motivations for what they believe and what they do, and for the duration of the show at least, I don't even think about my own.

-J

Re: Claudia

[saraqael]

I absolutely want to understand the characters' own moralities first and foremost. There's no point to me in watching or reading fiction if it only serves as a mirror back to confirm my own beliefs or morality. But at the same time, if a character does something that I think is immoral, I'm going to note that action and pay attention to it to see what it tells me about that character. I want to know if the character thinks that what they just did was moral or immoral.

Re: Claudia

[jae]

Oh, absolutely--how the characters judge or don't judge what they do is absolutely essential to understanding them. Especially on a show like this.

I guess what I mean is something like this: if you were to ask me if I'd want to be friends with any of these people, I'd have to say no? But it doesn't even really occur to me to think about that. By watching the show I get to see inside their heads and thoroughly understand them without being their friends, so it wouldn't even occur to me to insert myself into their lives in the way I have to in order to judge them as myself.

-J

Re: Claudia

[andy73]

I think that this show is so beautifull way it push us to see all characters out of our point of view or our morality. It want we see them as person, as human been; it want we see them for how they are.
I don’t like call them antihero because an antihero is Who does something only for his personal interest, or Who is sociopathic as, i mean, a serial killer.

Re: Approving of characters

[sistermagpie]

On one hand I usually like to just look at whatever anybody's doing and why, but sometimes they'll be a character that does personally irritate me. Probably usually when whatever is happening in the text or what's being said about them seems to conflict with how I see them, I've noticed. :-)

Re: Approving of characters

[saraqael]

It can throw you out of your comfort zone when a character you think you've figured out does something that conflicts with what you thought you knew about them. I tend only to get irritated at characters when they're written poorly or inconsistently. And then, I really just irritated with the writer(s). So far, all of the characters on this show have been consistent. The new things we've learned about them have been consistent with what we already knew about them.

Re: Approving of characters

[sistermagpie]

True, I can't think of any time when a character's really gone against their personal mode of behavior. I was recently talking with someone about how I don't think Stan's undercover period with the white supremists ever seems part of his character to me, but Stan himself is consistent.

Re: Approving of characters

[saraqael]

I always keep Stan's undercover history in mind when he's in the story. Stan knows what it takes to create and inhabit a false identity. He knows how hard it can be to keep a false identity consistent and he'd be constantly alert for slip-ups. His first instinct was to suspect the Jennings. All it would take would be one tiny slip-up and Stan would realize the truth.

Re: Approving of characters

[sistermagpie]

I honestly can't think of a single moment on the show that was about Stan knowing exactly what goes into creating and inhabiting a false identity. I also can't think of a single moment that shows his own lingering. He spent years as a white supremacist but there's no moments where that behavior accidentally comes out. Even his relationship with Aderholdt seems completely consistent with an ordinary white middle aged guy in the 80s rather than an ex-neo Nazi. He's sometimes been violent, but it never seems to cross a line that fits with the FBI guy.

I see plenty of scenes that show Stan having been away in a stressful job for years, but it seems more consistent to someone who was fighting a war or something rather than a guy who was undercover, much less specifically being a Nazi. Even the times when he's got a hunch it doesn't seem to need the undercover past to explain it.

His original suspicion of the Jennings to me seems best explained by paranoia and their car because otherwise it's too much like him being a psychic detective.

This isn't a problem for me with Stan at all--like I said I find him as a character totally consistent. I just mentally usually change "deep undercover" with "away on a hard assignment."

Re: Approving of characters

[saraqael]

I honestly can't think of a single moment on the show that was about Stan knowing exactly what goes into creating and inhabiting a false identity.
I agree that they haven't shown this through his actions on the show to date. We saw his hyper sensitivity to the Jennings in the first episode but nothing since. He was merely presented with this as a fact about his background.

Re: Approving of characters

[jae]

I am a little sad the show never did anything with that (I think it could have been great). Ah well, I suppose they can't do everything.

-J

Re: Approving of characters

[saraqael]

It does feel like a wasted opportunity to explore Stan's character in more depth, but you're right that the show can't do everything. I suspect that if the show had stuck to it's original focus on spy story-of-the-week, they might have gone more in depth about Stan's background to position him as an equal adversary to the Jennings. Instead of FBI agent with intensely skilled undercover experience vs. skilled undercover KGB agents, the show switched it's tone and focus to the Jennings' marriage and family. It almost seems to me that Stan's role in the story changed from opponent to merely being a component in Philip's journey to self-awareness. Philip has genuinely become friends with Stan, and it's via Stan that Philip got introduced to EST.

I still keep the image in my mind of Stan being 'undercover agent infiltrating horrible white supremacist group' because it reminds me to not take Stan for granted. He's not just the nice guy next door who hangs out and has dinner with the Jennings. He can be dangerous when he needs to be, and he's unpredictable. I think about the time when he shot that Russian guy from the Embassy out of what seemed to me to be purely self-righteous anger.

Re: Approving of characters

[sistermagpie]

Instead of FBI agent with intensely skilled undercover experience vs. skilled undercover KGB agents, the show switched it's tone and focus to the Jennings' marriage and family. It almost seems to me that Stan's role in the story changed from opponent to merely being a component in Philip's journey to self-awareness.

I think Stan's been more of his own character than just someone there for Philip--if you think back on the show he has a very clear arc that's a natural reflection of the Jennings. The way he couldn't assimilate into his family life, his struggles with his wife and son, Nina and Oleg and all that. He's paralleled the Jennings and Philip especially in a lot of ways--or not paralleled but had a parallel running story.

I'm not sure what to make of Renee. She's so much less of a character than Sandra, I think that's why she comes across as a spy. Even in this ep Stan's saying cliche things about how "you want to tell Renee I'll be home late!" and gossiping about secret stuff without any sense of who she is as a person beyond Stan's new wife. Sandra was far more of an individual and her relationship with Stan far more unique.

Re: Approving of characters

[sistermagpie]

It seems like they almost went the opposite way with the way they portrayed him, because there's so much about Stan that seems to completely negate the idea.

Which I can except--I just erase that little fact from his background and replace it with something that fits better. It's important that he was away for years and immersed in a job that was traumatizing, not that he was undercover as a white supremacist. Since they've done so little with it it doesn't take much adjustment on my part.

Re: Approving of characters

[andy73]

It can throw you out of your comfort zone when a character you think you've figured out does something that conflicts with what you thought you knew about them

How many times does this happen in the real life? More than I can expect

I really just irritated with the writer(s). So far, all of the characters on this show have been consistent. The new things we've learned about them have been consistent with what we already knew about them.

Me too.