This is why I worry when the showrunners talk about her and act as if she's normal and bright. There's just no way to spin her that way.
In an abstract way, Paige is normal and bright. She has to be very smart to be keeping up at GW. That's a tough, prestigious university. 'Normal' in that she's doing what other young people her age do: going to school and thinking about her future, interested in dating, thinking about the her place in the world, etc. She wants her parents to respect her and be proud of her as she sets out into her adult life. Those are all normal.
What's not normal though is how all of those aspects of Paige became 100% tainted by her mother's ideology. Paige has always had a hole inside of her that needed to be filled by something. In the 3 year jump since last season, Paige filled that void inside herself with her mother's ideology. She willingly put on the ideological blinders given to her by Elizabeth and Claudia. And why? Because she's afraid of being alone. She grew up in a pretend family and that destroyed her. Henry learned how to survive being left alone by becoming independent, but Paige was broken by it and could only figure out who she was by trying to fit herself into someone else's picture of herself. She became the perfect Christian social justice warrior for a while, and basked in being around the happy normal family image of the Tims. Now she's willingly turned herself into a hollowed-out version of her own mother, even to the point of parroting loyalty to a cause and country she knows nothing about. Paige looks normal on the outside, but comes across as emotionally weird and off and flat because she is emotionally weird and wrong and flat. Of all the crimes that Elizabeth has committed, what she did to her own daughter is the worst of all, IMO. And Philip is complicit too. Sure, he tried to be the supportive, emotionally accessible parent. He loved Paige simply because she was his daughter. But he stood by and allowed Elizabeth to sacrifice her daughter for the Soviet cause. He stood on the sidelines and watched that happen to his daughter. In exchange, the center allowed him to 'have' Henry. Elizabeth conceived Paige simply to be a tool for the cause and she actively transformed Paige into that perfect, willfully blind next gen agent who is fit only for espionage. Paige went along with it because she mistook being turned into a tool for maternal love.
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In an abstract way, Paige is normal and bright. She has to be very smart to be keeping up at GW. That's a tough, prestigious university. 'Normal' in that she's doing what other young people her age do: going to school and thinking about her future, interested in dating, thinking about the her place in the world, etc. She wants her parents to respect her and be proud of her as she sets out into her adult life. Those are all normal.
What's not normal though is how all of those aspects of Paige became 100% tainted by her mother's ideology. Paige has always had a hole inside of her that needed to be filled by something. In the 3 year jump since last season, Paige filled that void inside herself with her mother's ideology. She willingly put on the ideological blinders given to her by Elizabeth and Claudia. And why? Because she's afraid of being alone. She grew up in a pretend family and that destroyed her. Henry learned how to survive being left alone by becoming independent, but Paige was broken by it and could only figure out who she was by trying to fit herself into someone else's picture of herself. She became the perfect Christian social justice warrior for a while, and basked in being around the happy normal family image of the Tims. Now she's willingly turned herself into a hollowed-out version of her own mother, even to the point of parroting loyalty to a cause and country she knows nothing about. Paige looks normal on the outside, but comes across as emotionally weird and off and flat because she is emotionally weird and wrong and flat. Of all the crimes that Elizabeth has committed, what she did to her own daughter is the worst of all, IMO. And Philip is complicit too. Sure, he tried to be the supportive, emotionally accessible parent. He loved Paige simply because she was his daughter. But he stood by and allowed Elizabeth to sacrifice her daughter for the Soviet cause. He stood on the sidelines and watched that happen to his daughter. In exchange, the center allowed him to 'have' Henry. Elizabeth conceived Paige simply to be a tool for the cause and she actively transformed Paige into that perfect, willfully blind next gen agent who is fit only for espionage. Paige went along with it because she mistook being turned into a tool for maternal love.