Episode discussion post: "Harvest"

[jae]

Aired:
9 May 2018 in the U.S. and Canada

This is a discussion post for episode 607 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 seven.)

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Comments

[saraqael]

The show has been dropping so many anvils about Elizabeth dying that I almost feel it's inevitable that Philip will sacrifice himself to save her. It's in his nature. He's got the most critical information that Oleg needs now to wreck the Dead Hand operation. At this point you're likely right that all Philip has left now is to follow Elizabeth around to try to save her from herself. He is the heart. She is the will. They only do well when they support each other because they compensate for what each other lacks. Philip, I think, would die for her whereas she would die for her mission.

As for Elizabeth making gestures but being unable to fully put herself into her affection for Philip...that's just what poor dying Erica keeps yelling at her to do. Elizabeth's window drawing is symbolic of the emotional barrier she has up between herself and the entire rest of the world. She can see through the window to the world outside, but she can't connect to it. She won't allow herself to simply immerse herself into her own actual, physical life. Even now, 3 episodes to the end of the series, she clings to her mission and to death. It might actually take Philip dying for her to shock her out of her ideological mind and into real self. That would be horrible.

As for Paige... what a pitiful creature she turned out to be. But my sympathy for Paige only goes so far. She is at college, interacting with her peers who are also clearly talking about economic and social inequalities, but she's shut them all out. She acts like Elizabeth is the sole font of truth in the world. Seriously, what an idiot she is. There comes a point when I cannot suspend my sense of disbelief because Paige is simply acting so willfully stupid. Everyone her age in the DC area was politically savvy and opinionated. She's going to university in the capital of the US at the height of the Cold Warm, surrounded by kids her same age who are all actively setting out on political careers and talking up a storm about how to fix the world. Lots of people her age were quite sympathetic to the idea of becoming friends with the Russian people, but no one was stupid enough to think that the Soviet Union or government was some sort of underdog workers paradise. I personally am actually angry at how genuinely stupid Paige Jennings is to be so passively accepting all the BS she hears from Elizabeth and Claudia. She's a fascinating character, but man is she one seriously f'd up mess of a human being thanks to her parents, and in particular her mother.

[sistermagpie]

As for Elizabeth making gestures but being unable to fully put herself into her affection for Philip...that's just what poor dying Erica keeps yelling at her to do.

Yeah, I kind of love how Erika's doing that. It's on the nose but the actress is great. She's "making her learn." But I'm really not sure she'll have time.

Not only are there all those anvils about Elizabeth but she continues to go through life (as she has in the past) clearly envisioning her own heroic death while taking it for granted that Philip is eternal. Like in this mission I didn't get the impression that she was worried about anything happening to him. She was just relieved he was there, felt like they had a chance with him there. He's her rock. It's like in S1. She sent him away but he was still there to support her when she needed him. She got shot, she thought she'd be the one to go down for the colonel, she thought she was infected with the disease, she's got the suicide pill, she thought she was going to die in this mission, she was the one stuck in that chase in Open House.

He worries about her dying. She doesn't really worry about him. She worries about him suffering like in this ep, but I think Philip dying is one of the many things she doesn't let herself imagine.

Which is one more reason why it seems like it's going to happen. Plus he's the person making an effort with everyone in the family where the others seem to have really given up on one or more other members. If they were a regular family and Philip died Henry probably would no longer bother to come home at all, Paige and Henry wouldn't talk, Elizabeth and Henry wouldn't talk.


I personally am actually angry at how genuinely stupid Paige Jennings is to be so passively accepting all the BS she hears from Elizabeth and Claudia.

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. Even here she almost sounded most ridiculous when trying to vaguely claim that the other kids who thought they were political just didn't understand the truth. The people in the USSR would think she was crazy.

USSR - Paige crazy

[quantumreality]

That's actually a good point.

Most people in the USSR in the 1980s at least probably privately did admit to themselves that the wheels were beginning to fall off the Soviet system. Paige rolls on in with shining eyes, saying it's TEH BEST!!!111oneone and most people would give her that not-smile that you give a corner church evangelist bellowing about the end times.

It's going to be painful when she gets busted and then a few years later, moldering away in some jail cell, she finds out the Soviet Union just dried up and blew away.

Re: USSR - Paige crazy

[sistermagpie]

Someone elsewhere really summed up that moment in the scene really well, imo. They said something about how the moment she has to talk about her big cause she manages 2 cliche sentences before falling back on an appeal to authority with "What you and Claudia always say."

The parts of the scene that stand out as meaningful is how she has no friends and how she tells herself that one day, if she does this, she'll meet her Philip. Something Elizabeth has no reason to believe will happen. Yet she doesn't say that.

Honestly, I don't even know if Paige would be that affected by the USSR falling if she was in jail by then without her Mom. I would bet that by then she'd have found something else if her mom was gone, at least.

[saraqael]

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.

[shapinglight]

I agree with everything in this comment. Have felt sorry for Paige all through the series because it was obvious to me she was weak. Even in season 1, it was Henry who saved them both from the creepy paedophile guy.

Saying she's weak, btw, is not meant to be condemning her, it's condemning the people who've taken advantage of her weakness.

[saraqael]

It is okay to call Paige weak. She always has been an emotionally weak person. Elizabeth used that weakness to transform her into a puppet because that's all that Paige was ever meant to be. I feel sorry for her. I'm glad that Henry escaped that fate. He withdrew and found his own life outside of his home and family. Paige unfortunately kept burrowing deeper into her home and family to try and figure out who she was...only to discover that she was nobody, only a vessel for a toxic ideology. So sad.

[sistermagpie]

Oh yes, I agree. It's not that I can't see anything in Paige that is ever curious or smart. I just think it's weird that they talk about her being those things now as if that's a description of her actions here at a time when she's being so completely the opposite.

Henry learned how to survive being left alone by becoming independent,

Honestly, I don't even think it was a question of learning to survive for Henry. He didn't know the secret so all he had to deal with was parents who weren't always there what he wanted them.

Henry in this ep is actually acting a lot like his father. He's busy. He's got stuff going on. He's choosing to not come home for the summer because school's important and he needs to work. But that doesn't mean he doesn't love his family. He accepted the flaws in his family without being obsessed with it. I mean, they don't have a pretend family. They have a real family, it's just got a bizarre secret.

When Henry finds out the truth it will probably be completely shattering because it will totally destroy everything he thought he knew about his life and himself. I understand it *feeling* pretend in that moment. In some ways of course it is. But in other ways it isn't pretend at all.

In exchange, the center allowed him to 'have' Henry.

Did they? This is off topic but it seems like everyone on the show somehow understood all along that Henry would not be brought into that story. Because I don't think Philip got any more say in what happened to Henry if the Centre wanted him than he had with Paige. Why would he?

Stupid Paige

[treonb]

Is the problem her vagueness or her support for the USSR? Because I don't think there's a lack of otherwise normal and bright college students who are completely clueless when it comes to political causes

Re: Stupid Paige

[sistermagpie]

For me it's both. It's 1987. There wasn't much of a widespread idea that the USSR were benevolent underdogs.

Certainly there's plenty of college students that might be clueless about these things. But it's one thing to be clueless about this stuff when you're a theater major hoping to move to NYC after graduation. It's another if you've already picked a side in the Cold War and are committing treason and assisting in major crimes for it. If you're claiming the USSR as somehow connected to you because of your parents and actively working for them in the Cold War you'd think you'd have more basics about it than Paige has.

Philip dying

[treonb]

I didn't think in that direction, but Philip's hug to Stan seemed like goodbye to me

Re: Philip dying

[saraqael]

At that moment, for all that Philip knew, he might have been on his way to being killed, given Elizabeth's assessment of the mission. He might have genuinely hugged Stan thinking that this might be the last time he sees his friend.

Even if it's not a literally goodbye, it could be seen as symbolizing a farewell to their friendship. Nothing will be the same from now on.

Re: Philip dying

[sistermagpie]

That's what I thought. The emotion for Philip was real in the moment--and he didn't get to hug Henry who was watching TV as well.

Paige's Ideological Convictions

[quantumreality]

Paige becoming a social-gospel New Deal Democrat was feasible as a part of her personal evolution - provided she never found out about her parents. Once she did, though, all bets were off because her life just went off the rails.

Even then her life was still salvageable. All she had to do was simply involve herself no further and not let her parents draw her into the second-gen illegals program. P&E didn't even want Paige or Henry to ever know in the first place because they sensed, probably instinctively (which is playing out now with Paige), that their children simply didn't have the context for why they did what they did - and wouldn't be able to appreciate what a very serious business it can be.

It is really ironic that Elizabeth has essentially created a miniature 1920s-era Russian revolutionary in Paige, so utterly convinced that she knows what's right and unwilling to countenance that there could be viable alternatives.

And that version of Paige is going to get twenty to life.

Re: Paige's Ideological Convictions

[sistermagpie]

In a way it's not even that she thinks she knows what's right. It's that she wants Elizabeth and Claudia to know what's right. As I mentioned someone said about her in this ep, when it comes to expressing those beliefs for herself she manages a couple of cliches before falling back on an appeal to their authority.

She's really not on fire for her cause any more than she was for Jesus. She just sees these beliefs as defining her group. If Elizabeth became disillusioned tomorrow Paige would go right along with her.

In this ep Elizabeth tries to give her an out but of course Paige can see that if she got out she'd no longer have the only relationships that mean anything to her. She'd still have Philip, but she's never been able to handle his way. He's alone--more alone than almost any other character at times. He never has any easy answers for her.