So, Philip bought his funeral suit, Elizabeth showed pity and defied a direct order, Claudia dropped her nice Granny facade, and Stan got a solid maybe? on his hunch about Elizabeth's link to her ex-lover Gregory. There are only two episodes left of this show but I'm not ready for it to end. Even though I've been expecting everything to crash down on the Jennings since the start of the show, to see it finally happening is hard to watch.
I wonder what it was exactly that made Elizabeth finally go against all of her training and demand to be given a real explanation for why she's been ordered to kill someone who seems like a decent person? Nesterenko wasn't a traitor. Unlike Gabriel, who years ago betrayed his own friend to be murdered by Stalin, Elizabeth wouldn't - couldn't - just murder an innocent fellow Soviet. Was it the vicious argument she had with Philip? He wanted her to think about her actions, not just plot the best way to carry out her orders but to actually think about why she doing it. 'We believed [past tense] in something so big', he said. 'They tell us what to do but we're the ones who do it.' If her orders now were going against the values that they used to believe in, he wanted her to question those orders and not just obey like a robot. She was furious that he thought that she'd become inhuman, but .... she did not tell Claudia about this argument or about the fact that Philip had betrayed her to Oleg. Considering that she'd previously betrayed him to the Center simply because she suspected that he liked the US lifestyle too much, the fact that she didn't tell Claudia that Philip had tipped their plan to Gorbachev's people was a massive shift in her thinking and her loyalty. As furious as she was that Philip had 'betrayed' her, I think that she was just as equally shocked that Philip of all people, the person closest to her in the world, would think that she had become inhuman. That cut her deeply, but it also made her think. She knows that she can trust Philip to tell her the truth, even when she doesn't want to hear it. Having him hold up a mirror to herself and say, 'yeah, I actually am concerned that you've stopped thinking and have lost your humanity' was a huge wake-up call to her.
It would be poetic if the last murder that Elizabeth commits in this series was her mercy killing of Erica. I hope it is. Every time she appeared in her nurse disguise I thought about the time she told Paige that if she hadn't become a spy, she might have become a doctor so that she could alleviate suffering. Here, she finally did end someone's suffering. Her murder skills finally served some good purpose.
I was surprised but relieved when she decided not to murder the intern, even though not killing him meant that a motivated witness who could easily identify her was now running free. She didn't tell Claudia about that, either. Intern Jackson will never know just how close he came to being murdered. Did she let her emotions override her common sense or did she think for herself and decide to take a calculated risk that the intern wouldn't run to the police to blab about her?
Philip is acting like a dead man walking. If that suit he picked out wasn't meant to be his burial suit, I'll be quite surprised. Far from hiding any hint of being Russian, he rents a Russian movie (Garage) and sits in the dark in his house watching it. Like, who cares if the FBI broke down the door at that point. He doesn't care. He knows it's all over. It's only a matter of time. He apologized again to Stavos and said it was for the best that Stavos got out early before the business went under. I wondered at that point if Philip fired Stavos on purpose so that Stavos might be spared from being caught up in the inevitable FBI raid on the business.
And speaking of the FBI, I was so not expecting to see Stan reach out to someone from Gregory's gang, but it showed that Stan still suspects Elizabeth. From the way that Stan reacted to the 'smoked like a chimney' comment, I think that Stan had secretly been hoping that Curtis would rule out Elizabeth as a suspect. [As an aside, I wondered if Curtis' comment about Elizabeth having terrific hair was an in-joke about Keri Russell's previous role in Felicity, since all I ever heard about that show was her fabulous hair.]
Last thoughts: - I still hope Elizabeth slips the cyanide pill into Claudia's tea. - I wish the show would just stop with the is she/isn't she a spy tease with Renee.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-05-17 12:39 pm (UTC)I wonder what it was exactly that made Elizabeth finally go against all of her training and demand to be given a real explanation for why she's been ordered to kill someone who seems like a decent person? Nesterenko wasn't a traitor. Unlike Gabriel, who years ago betrayed his own friend to be murdered by Stalin, Elizabeth wouldn't - couldn't - just murder an innocent fellow Soviet. Was it the vicious argument she had with Philip? He wanted her to think about her actions, not just plot the best way to carry out her orders but to actually think about why she doing it. 'We believed [past tense] in something so big', he said. 'They tell us what to do but we're the ones who do it.' If her orders now were going against the values that they used to believe in, he wanted her to question those orders and not just obey like a robot. She was furious that he thought that she'd become inhuman, but .... she did not tell Claudia about this argument or about the fact that Philip had betrayed her to Oleg. Considering that she'd previously betrayed him to the Center simply because she suspected that he liked the US lifestyle too much, the fact that she didn't tell Claudia that Philip had tipped their plan to Gorbachev's people was a massive shift in her thinking and her loyalty. As furious as she was that Philip had 'betrayed' her, I think that she was just as equally shocked that Philip of all people, the person closest to her in the world, would think that she had become inhuman. That cut her deeply, but it also made her think. She knows that she can trust Philip to tell her the truth, even when she doesn't want to hear it. Having him hold up a mirror to herself and say, 'yeah, I actually am concerned that you've stopped thinking and have lost your humanity' was a huge wake-up call to her.
It would be poetic if the last murder that Elizabeth commits in this series was her mercy killing of Erica. I hope it is. Every time she appeared in her nurse disguise I thought about the time she told Paige that if she hadn't become a spy, she might have become a doctor so that she could alleviate suffering. Here, she finally did end someone's suffering. Her murder skills finally served some good purpose.
I was surprised but relieved when she decided not to murder the intern, even though not killing him meant that a motivated witness who could easily identify her was now running free. She didn't tell Claudia about that, either. Intern Jackson will never know just how close he came to being murdered. Did she let her emotions override her common sense or did she think for herself and decide to take a calculated risk that the intern wouldn't run to the police to blab about her?
Philip is acting like a dead man walking. If that suit he picked out wasn't meant to be his burial suit, I'll be quite surprised. Far from hiding any hint of being Russian, he rents a Russian movie (Garage) and sits in the dark in his house watching it. Like, who cares if the FBI broke down the door at that point. He doesn't care. He knows it's all over. It's only a matter of time. He apologized again to Stavos and said it was for the best that Stavos got out early before the business went under. I wondered at that point if Philip fired Stavos on purpose so that Stavos might be spared from being caught up in the inevitable FBI raid on the business.
And speaking of the FBI, I was so not expecting to see Stan reach out to someone from Gregory's gang, but it showed that Stan still suspects Elizabeth. From the way that Stan reacted to the 'smoked like a chimney' comment, I think that Stan had secretly been hoping that Curtis would rule out Elizabeth as a suspect. [As an aside, I wondered if Curtis' comment about Elizabeth having terrific hair was an in-joke about Keri Russell's previous role in Felicity, since all I ever heard about that show was her fabulous hair.]
Last thoughts:
- I still hope Elizabeth slips the cyanide pill into Claudia's tea.
- I wish the show would just stop with the is she/isn't she a spy tease with Renee.