Fan community for FX's The Americans

I agree that the details are important. As a viewer, I don't like being asked to merely accept that in the 3 years the show skipped over, that Paige was so thorough brainwashed that she has clearly lost all capacity to think for herself. Last season the show spent hours and hours on a pointless storyline showing Philip's son trying to sneak out of Russia in a plot thread that ultimately went nowhere. There was an inordinate amount of screen time given over to scenes of the Jennings driving around to spy on the wheat. Yet with the show's most core, crucial plotline, the show cut from Paige reading Marx is S5 to her becoming such a brainwashed knockoff of her mom in S6 that she seems incapable of independent thought or authentic emotions. How the hell did that happen? The show asks me to believe that Paige Jennings is a smart, politically aware young woman living in the DC area in the 1980s. Everybody in the 80s knew all about the murderous, failed flaws in the Soviet system. Everyone except for Paige Jennings, apparently. I would much rather have seen how Elizabeth crushed her daughter's mind (because that's what she did) than any amount of scenes of Philip's Russian son, or Martha, or yet another scene of the Jennings driving out to spy on the wheat.

As for the scenes of Paige becoming disenchanted with Pastor Tim, I disagree that it would have been easier to buy if they'd skipped showing us how that happened. It was an important to see because showing us what it took to get Paige to reject Tim parallels what it will take to get her reject her parents, assuming she'll ever be capable of rejecting them.