Episode discussion post: "The Great Patriotic War"

[jae]

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

This is a discussion post for episode 605 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 five.)

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Paige and WW2

[quantumreality]

Paige getting the Soviet perspective on WW2 is interesting.

Claudia's not wrong about the hagiographic way the American school system plays up the USA's role in WW2 to the point of almost excluding even the Western Allies like the UK and France. That said, the Soviets also depended crucially on Lend-Lease aid flowing in through Siberia, and later Soviet leaders implicitly acknowledged this to themselves even if they didn't do so publicly.

The total death count, civilian and military, is over 20 million Soviets. That, in stark numbers, details the horrific personal cost of the Soviet citizenry in World War Two in hurling back the Nazi menace on the eastern front.

The shot of Paige just breathing as the sheer size of that number hits her was very well done, by the way.

That kind of thing leaves marks on a country - any country - and it certainly did for the USSR. It's not surprising both Elizabeth and Claudia have the Great Patriotic War as their common touchstone.

Incidentally, from what little I know of Slavic languages, the book Claudia shows Paige is either Czechoslovak, or Polish.

Watching this part, it almost feels like Paige is getting hammered with a huge dose of reality about the prices paid by some people in the world compared to her own relatively stable life.

Re: Paige and WW2

[lovingboth]

In the UK, France as an ally gets ignored and America was late.

It would have been nice to see Elizabeth's reaction to the D-Day 40th anniversary ceremonies that Reagan and Thatcher were so keen on with its almost total ignoring of the far bigger Operation Bagration happening at the same time on the eastern front.

Re: Paige and WW2

[sistermagpie]

Watching this part, it almost feels like Paige is getting hammered with a huge dose of reality about the prices paid by some people in the world compared to her own relatively stable life.

I thought the opposite. Paige still seemed completely settled in her own pov of the world. Even when she was giving sadface at Claudia's tales of her family being killed I mostly thought that Paige herself carelessly puts her own in danger with her sloppiness and even her choice to spy.

Re: Paige and WW2

[treonb]

The Russian perspective conveniently forgets they partnered with Hitler. The minute Hitler reneged on their agreement, it was erased from memory, and people who had been loyal Soviets one day found themselves traitors the next.

Paige and Honeytrapping

[quantumreality]

Elizabeth is fooling herself if she thinks Paige isn't already getting ideas and determined to put them into practice. She already had her trial run with Matt Beeman and now she's going for a second try in using her attractiveness to blind her would-be boyfriend to the truth of what she's "into him" for.

I remember wondering last season if Paige wouldn't wake up one day next to a guy realizing she just crossed another line, and if it would even matter anymore to her.

She's already lied, cheated, stolen, and abused people's trust in service to a foreign power. The only thing left on her list is to kill someone.

Re: Paige and Honeytrapping

[sistermagpie]

Elizabeth is fooling herself if she thinks Paige isn't already getting ideas and determined to put them into practice. She already had her trial run with Matt Beeman and now she's going for a second try in using her attractiveness to blind her would-be boyfriend to the truth of what she's "into him" for.

Nobody is actually acting as if this alleged career for Paige in an important job is actually happening. She herself shows no interest in it. All her ambition goes to finding ways to make sex important. She doesn't consider becoming an intern herself, despite that potentially being good for that great future.

Everything about her training says she's a low level drone whose biggest assets are being pretty and young. She's only thinking short term and so is Elizabeth. Plus instead of using her life to be a spy she's obviously trying to just use the spy stuff to give meaning to her life. Elizabeth's very important advice about not calling attention to herself got the usual eye roll.

Elizabeth's Moral Event Horizon

[quantumreality]

I know it's pretty absurd to think of Elizabeth as having a M. E. H., but I seriously think she crossed some kind of Do Not Go There when she conceived that plan to fuck up Kimmy's life just to suborn Breland.

Yikes.

(Also, I don't think she's thinking this through long-term. Is the cost of getting one piece of intelligence that can be obtained through other means really worth the trade-off of losing all future Soviet Division recordings?)

Re: Elizabeth's Moral Event Horizon

[saraqael]

Elizabeth isn't really thinking beyond the end of the summit, IMO. So far as she's concerned, if she fails her secret suicide mission, it's game over for the Soviet Union as she knows it anyway. She said that Breland was the only angle she had left to get the intel she needs.

Re: Elizabeth's Moral Event Horizon

[sistermagpie]

Elizabeth's plan was incredibly stupid. Surely it would have scuttled the entire summit. The Americans are not going to negotiate with the Soviets threatening the daughter of the head of the CIA Soviet Division, the USSR would look bad and the coup Elizabeth's been roped in would surely be exposed, right? It just made no sense.

It made more sense to me as Elizabeth desperately trying to come up with a plan to force Philip back into a partnership with her. Sort of like in S1 she always wanted to use the work to get close to him without admitting she wanted him close.

[saraqael]

Well. Philip sure had a hell of a day. He was (IMO) honeypotted by his own wife which was followed the next morning by her telling him that he had to set up an innocent kid to be kidnapped and threatened/condemned to a life in a Communist prison (and more likely just killed). Then his own arrogant, idiot daughter implied that he’s a loser who couldn’t handle the rough stuff, prompting him to pick her up and slam her into a wall in the hopes of knocking some sense into her (nope!), and then, on top of all of that, he found out that his wife just slaughtered two people and left their bloody corpses to be found by a 7 year old child. Somewhere during all of that -- and I think it was Stan telling him about the 7 year old finding his dead bloody parents -- Philip finally found the line that he would not cross and made his decision to oppose Elizabeth and put a stop to whatever it is that she is doing. He chose the side of decency. Maybe he managed to save Kimmy when he told her goodbye. I’m doubtful that he managed to save Paige.

And speaking of Paige, I’m so glad that Philip knocked her down several pegs and showed her just how ridiculously self-deluded she has become but without actually saying so in words. “You’re not in to what me and Mom do, but I am,” she says. Wow, Paige. How cool you and Mom are! You’re like the coolest Soviet spy BFFs! And when you’re not out spying for the Motherland you’ve never seen, you get to hang around with your cool Mom and your other granny girlfriend and drink and giggle about having sex! What a great life! I know it’s what every young woman dreams of doing…when they’re not flipping out and beating up gross boys at the bar. Ugh. [I noted with some evil glee that when Claudia and Elizabeth were doing their level best to impart another history lesson about the bad old days in the Soviet Union – Millions killed! We traded sex for food! We ate rats! – all Paige wanted to do was drink and giggle about sex. All those lessons about dear old Russia are so, so not sinking in. Paige just wants to be cool like her cool Mom. The end.]

Sadly, I think the show meant for the bar scene to be some sort of empowering, Me Too type girl power moment for Paige, but that entire scene made me cringe. Paige isn’t a badass just because she’s been taught how to fight. She’s an incredibly messed up young woman who doesn’t know how to function in a normal life.

Sorry Teacups! You were a quirky, sometimes endearing, sometimes annoying couple, but now you’re just roadkill. I hope their fate isn’t meant to foreshadow the fate of the Jennings. Speaking of the Teacups…the agent that was guarding Gennady sure did get a good look at Elizabeth. Wonder if we’re going to see another suspect sketch of Elizabeth hanging on the wall at the FBI any time soon?

Am now officially worried about Oleg. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Tatjana was mightily scorned.

Random thought: I loved that when “Jim” called Kimmy to tell her that it was all over, Philip wasn’t wearing the Jim wig and disguise. It reminded me a lot of when he took off the Clark wig and showed Martha his true (Soviet spy) face. Of course, with Martha he did that in order to bind her to him even more tightly than before. This time, he unmasked himself to set Kimmy free, just as he set himself free.

[quantumreality]

I had the vibe that even with the... whatever it was she drank beforehand, that Paige was more than a bit buzzed when she was reacting to what Claudia was saying, and Claudia herself was kind of being a bit darkly humoristically blasé about her experiences, so Paige didn't really grok how serious Claudia's situation actually was, and that kind of fed into her questions to her mother too. I think if she had she would've been a lot less giggly and a lot more somber (she usually isn't loud normally).

Honeypotted?

[lovingboth]

I like the way it was ambiguous - he certainly wonders if he was, but Elizabeth seemed genuinely happy before coming out with the ludicrous plan.

Bar scene

[lovingboth]

I see it in context of who gets hurt in this episode. You can - and Elizabeth would - argue that Gennady deserved what happened to him, but with the exception of the bar pair, no one else did.

Hell hath no fury

[lovingboth]

I think Oleg is safe, but this is a foreshadowing of Elizabeth's reaction when she finds out what Philip's just done.

He's not there for the GRU any more, he's not there for the Philip and Elizabeth "us", and he's not loyal...

Paige and Jim

[sistermagpie]

Sadly, I think the show meant for the bar scene to be some sort of empowering, Me Too type girl power moment for Paige, but that entire scene made me cringe. Paige isn’t a badass just because she’s been taught how to fight. She’s an incredibly messed up young woman who doesn’t know how to function in a normal life.

And again she reacted to Elizabeth's actually very important advice by rolling her eyes and saying it wasn't a big deal. She just doesn't go back to that bar again.

She also turned Elizabeth telling her not to try to get information from that intern into Elizabeth telling her not to sleep with him. How does she still seem incapable of following this very simple line of thought? She couldn't do it with Matthew either.

It's a shame that after Elizabeth actually said the words that Paige wasn't cut out for this she backtracked again and rewarded Paige with that drinking afternoon. It was implying that the real problem was Paige "learning from her mistakes" by teaching her to hang out in bars like a spy by drinking olive oil.

Except the real problem isn't that she drank too much, it's that she doesn't understand the danger she and her family are in and thinks this is all about her being cool. Even the next day when she was sober she was defending her actions, lying about events to pretend she had no choice and brushing off the danger. It's just one bar she can't go to anymore!

By making it about teaching her to drink I think Elizabeth rewarded her for her actions, frankly.

Random thought: I loved that when “Jim” called Kimmy to tell her that it was all over, Philip wasn’t wearing the Jim wig and disguise. It reminded me a lot of when he took off the Clark wig and showed Martha his true (Soviet spy) face. Of course, with Martha he did that in order to bind her to him even more tightly than before. This time, he unmasked himself to set Kimmy free, just as he set himself free.

Someone else said that too--they also said they thought the camera angles changed at the end when Philip was really speaking to her as himself, warning her not to go to a Communist country.

[alley_skywalker]

hen his own arrogant, idiot daughter

I mean…Paige is mostly young and sheltered and manipulated by her mother (a professional manipulator) until she doesn’t know what way is up and which way is down. I never liked this storyline much because I didn’t really understand how Paige really…got here. But, as some people here have said, I think it makes sense, that Paige has never felt close to her mother. Elizabeth could be pretty awful to her and their relationship sucked until…well, this. And suddenly they’re connecting and doing important things and she has a direct, clear way of making her mother proud. And Elizabeth is taking full advantage in all of that. It’s Elizabeth who’s extremely reprehensible and blind in this situation, imo.
As for the bae scene…I don’t actually think it was supposed to be empowering, especially not in a Me Too sort of way. More like…Paige loosing control and instinctively falling back on what protective mechanism she has as opposed to thinking of the big picture. And I thought it was pretty ironic that she gets told off for using the self-defense skills she initially started learning for the very reasons she used them for – to stave off rapey creepers.

While watching thoughts

[lovingboth]

The previously is screaming there will be more on the sex plots - Paige and Kimmy.

I'm surprised they're not already in Oklahoma.

A quick jump to conclusion from Elizabeth about someone else's motives.

Was 27 million the official figure for Great Patriotic War deaths at that point?

Oh ghod, not another 'I was at Stalingrad'. Anyone would think that there weren't any other battles or campaigns.

Stan bringing food in an 'I am visiting a safe house' way again.

Love the difference in the enthusiasm in watching ice hockey. 'Huh, what? Is it still going?'

Elizabeth is right about the presentation of history though.

'Oh, by the way mum, I happened to ignore your advice / instructions...'

Why on earth would anyone want to separate from him? :)

Is that a blatant guard standing outside the building?

'Are you suggesting we have sex?' look on Philip's face when she asks if he's more work to do.

How long has it been since she giggled like that?

'Were you using me?' look on Philip's face..

.. followed by a 'Are you fucking serious?' one as Elizabeth tells him the 'let's kidnap Kimmy in Greece' idea. Why does he need to go? They know what she looks like.

"I haven't asked for much.." apart from involving Paige in the work.

If you're going to kidnap her, why not do it now??

Not a good idea to go down dark stairways if you're defecting. Yes, it was a guard...

Ha at the friend's charming help. Time to demonstrate the self-defence? Ha yes. Elizabeth won't be too impressed at drawing attention to herself, but I was cheering her.

That was a very telegraphed kiss... and I was wrong.

Philip still doesn't want to do it though.

'Hey, you could clean the toilets at the Bureau...' Personnel wouldn't be a bad place if she is an agent.

"There's someone in there who knows how to see.. that's what time is for". Given the number of things Elizabeth does without thinking, it's interesting that this one is so hard for her.

Like the way he doesn't answer the "We have engineering schools".. and the way they're both saying they're honest when they're not, until later in the conversation when they don't need to say it.

"Fine." "Yep."

Be careful about who you annoy. True for Oleg and anyone near Paige.

"What's going on?" Ha, I knew she'd be annoyed.

"What??"

"Why would I sleep with them if I didn't like them?"

"Well, that's just great" - Philip has spent most of the episode saying one thing and meaning another.

Why close the window? She may need to leave in a hurry, and.. ha, they're having a reunion.

Do American safe houses normally have that much space to hide behind the fridge?

Why she doesn't want to kill both of them, I don't know. She's prepared to do it, obviously, but she wasn't going to do it.

Ha, I like the look on her face when she realises that their child is there.

I wonder if the contrast between Elizabeth breaking in to kill someone and Philip asking to come in to talk to his daughter is deliberate.

"Do you.. want anything?"

Bonus points for Philip for not saying how naive Paige is. Just showing her.

Well that was an interesting visit, and the second one he's made where he leaves feeling dirty.

I wonder if Elizabeth phoned the police.

First time in a while Stan's been reminded that this is a dangerous game.

Well, that's an interesting training session.

Stan at the door? Yes. Philip being told what Elizabeth was up to by Stan first is nice.

Ghod, Paige is naive. Of course you'd have sex with someone for food.

I thought Philip would back out of the Kimmy operation. Especially after everything else this episode.

"You're going to be ok" has loads of meanings, followed by what's the biggest betrayal by Philip yet to try and make sure she is...

Re: While watching thoughts

[saraqael]

I think 27 million is a fair estimate of Soviet casualties in WWII when you add in all the civilians that were killed by the Germans and the Soviets. Maybe half were soldiers, the rest were civilians. Elizabeth was correct when she told Paige that the Soviets defeated Germany on the Eastern Front, not the US/British allies who fought on the Western Front. The Soviets broke the German war effort and made it possible for the Allies to reclaim Europe from the Germans.

As for Claudia's 'I was at Stalingrad' comments...That actually makes me respect and understand Claudia. The assault on Stalingrad was the biggest, bloodiest and most deadly battle in modern warfare (maybe in all of human history). It's no wonder that Claudia became such a hardcore Soviet enforcer. Elizabeth was born and raised in the immediate aftermath of that war so it's understandable why she is also so dedicated to defending her country. But Paige has zero connection to Russia or these memories. Paige is sympathetic to the suffering that Claudia experienced because any rational, sensitive person would be sympathetic. But Paige will never be able to truly understand what Claudia experienced and she'll never feel the same zeal for the motherland that Claudia and Elizabeth do.

Re: While watching thoughts

[sistermagpie]

If you're going to kidnap her, why not do it now??

The idea was that it wasn't supposed to be a kidnapping. Jim would convince Kimmy to take a side trip across the Iron Curtain. Once there they'd plant drugs on her (despite her not even smoking much anymore) and throw her in prison. Then they'd tell Breland she'd rot there if he didn't give them info.

Do American safe houses normally have that much space to hide behind the fridge?

You'd think a safe house would be a lot more safe. It was totally easy to follow Stan to it, break in, hide, kill everyone, and sneak out. A fire escape? Really?

[shapinglight]

Did anyone else think that after killing Gennady and Sofia, when Elizabeth stood for a moment in the corridor outside the room where little Ilya was watching TV, she was trying to decide whether or not she should kill him too?

That was a very chilling moment in an episode full of them.

After the murders

[sistermagpie]

Oh yeah, she considered it.

Weirdly, she was not covered in blood despite those two bloody murders. Maybe bring a gun with a silence next time?

[saraqael]

I think if Ilya had been awake, I think she would have killed him immediately. Since he was asleep, I interpret that scene in a couple of ways: she was standing there wondering if she should kill him, but she was also in a bit of shock and regret because she knew how traumatic it was going to be for the child when he woke up. Even at her most extreme, I don't think that Elizabeth would want to cause this sort of visceral trauma to a child if she could avoid it.

[lovingboth]

This is why I wondered if it was her who called the police - it minimises the horror for her, because she has (slightly) less on her conscience.

And it ensures the FBI can't cover it up = the message gets out.

After the murders

[treonb]

That scene threw me back to cases of terrorists knifing off families at home, and then going after the little kids. I was sure she was going to finish him off. Even though she didn't, she definitely considered it.

Treon's thoughts

[treonb]

The artist lady's sentence really struck me: "There's someone in there who knows how to see. But you have to put in the time."

I think that Elizabeth is doing a lot of stupid things, because she doesn't have the time to stop and see. For example, her Kimmy plan is extremely complicated and dangerous. But, as always, she sees no other way. There must be many other ways. Even if she insists to go the Bulgaria abduction route, there are other ways besides Philip.

Stan was kind of a disappointment. It was way too easy to follow him. He didn't even try to lose a tail.

It was interesting, though, how things were turned around. Now it was Elizabeth who was chasing Stan (in order to catch somebody else)

Paige really needed somebody to bring her down to earth. And she really has no idea who her father is and what he's capable of.

Elizabeth is now down to seducing Philip, and Philip almost went and did the same thing to Kimmy. At least he stopped himself in time.

Re: Stan

[saraqael]

Stan was easy to follow, wasn't he. He didn't appear to even consider that he might have been followed. Everything about the FBI safety precautions around the Teacups seemed to be heavy handed and obvious to me. I suppose that if Stan had noticed that he was being tailed, the entire plot of the episode would have changed because they'd have moved the Teacups to new locations.