Episode discussion post: "START"

[jae]

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

This is a discussion post for episode 610 of The Americans (the season and series finale), 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.)

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Sistermagpie's Thoughts on START

[sistermagpie]

Scattered thoughts--everyone else's comments are so great.

I think my favorite image of the whole show will forever be Philip and Elizabeth asleep in the back of Arkady's car as he drives, like two kids being driven home by dad. That's basically what they were in a way. Children of the motherland when they were sent out and now they're just exhausted and can feel safe because it's Arkady--who's somehow always been like an unknown protector to them--who's at the wheel. And they can finally snuggle together like they couldn't do on the train or the plane.

Elizabeth's dream was also fantastic. Not just seeing Gregory again, but the way she had herself smoking (a final note on what that means to her and a nod to her smoking like a chimney with him) and when he motioned to her being pregnant saying, "I don't want kids anyway." Then that painting and the similar picture of Henry and Paige. Of course she never said such a thing, but she remembers not wanting kids and how they got to her like the painting did.

Also someone else pointed out that that picture is almost recreated in Elizabeth putting her hand up to the window to watch Paige disappearing into the distance.

Like I said above I spent a lot of the ep feeling just sad--and not in a good way--for Paige trailing after her parents to the USSR. When she got off the train it was like the healthiest thing she'd done in years. She was finally a person. The whole "Paige as junior spy" was like Elizabeth going to the church group, only Paige tried to get it.

Philip telling Henry to be himself was also the one thing he told Paige to be after her baptism, praising her for doing what she wanted despite them not liking it. Neither kid understood how important it was to him and what he meant by him. But that's finally what Paige did. And she did it after Philip made the same case for Henry. And hearing his speech to Stan.

That also leads to a little theory of mine. I've always been frustrated by lack of Philip backstory. I've also always noticed that when their real names are mentioned they almost always use the full version of her name and the shortened version of his name. With her it makes sense--she would be sensitive about who used a familiar form of her name. But Philip was almost always Mischa except when he got married and when he told his real name to Martha--but there he quickly deflated to "But everybody calls me Mischa."

I thought of it here because Father Andrei did the same thing which is bizarre. He had one scene using their real names and used full names for both. He doesn't know Philip better. So why Mischa?

My thought is that the whole thing with Philip--and this goes along with the irritating choice to not give us his story--is that he really has never been able to form his real self. Elizabeth clung to a version of herself that might have been too rigid and not completely true to who she was, but it was important to her.

Philip never became that fully formed person. It makes sense his name was shortened--it's only the name "everybody" would have called him as a child before he was formed fully. In the last scene Elizabeth imagines herself running a factory (just like the woman in the movie who Claudia said she might have ended up like!), she also mentioned wanting to be a doctor. But when she imagines fully-grown Russian Philip she's got nothing. There's no career that immediately springs to mind.

Even Philip in his speech to Stan says he's just a failed travel agent...only he isn't. Yeah, he isn't. He was working again, the travel agency wasn't an expression of his true self. He said he felt stuck and wanted to do something good. Working with Oleg seemed the thing he liked most.

So yeah, I think the idea was he'd never really gotten a chance to explore who he was outside of what he had to do--exactly the kind of thing the EST guy said. He was Mikhail only when he got married (a true expression of himself). With Martha maybe he wanted to stand up for himself but was still unsure.

Loved Elizabeth's final line, breaking the English barrier so they could speak Russian with each other at last. And of course "we'll get used to it" has been the story of their lives, the conversation echoing the one in the motel back in 1965.

Philip's speech was masterful (I was reminded of it because he seems to intentionally not set a date on how long he's been in the US.) Like all his best spy triumphs it's true...but also utterly careful. Stan give him the "You were my best friend" opening and he goes right in, painting himself as the wimp and the fool he's always subtly been compared to Stan. He even makes sure to give Elizabeth full credit for "figuring out" the Gorbachev plot that in fact Philip told her about--Elizabeth got the details from Claudia. But it was important that Philip not be so clever here. Especially after he hadn't dropped his mask yet and Stan yelled at him to STOP MOVING because he totally was angling to disarm Stan somehow.

And I love how before he starts it all he hangs his head as if in surrender but imo he's also thinking quickly. None of this means he's just lying to Stan here, but this is Philip's signature move as a spy. This is why he and Elizabeth are such a good team. She'd packed a gun. She's been using force all season, trying to force people to do things. But here it was the last of Philip's devoted sources who decided not to give him up. Like Martha didn't. A lot of people thought Kimmy was going to tell her father about Jim's last phone call but nope, she protected him too. It's Philip's dark superpower. One that he would never use on the kids.

I wonder if Paige realized at all what she was seeing there. I do think she has stopped believing the lies--when they reflexively claimed they never killed anybody I don't think she believed them any more than Stan did. But I wonder if watching Philip and watching Elizabeth watch him she realized that even if there was truth to what he was saying, he had a forked tongue.

So many Russians were separated from their children. Philip and Elizabeth, but also Igor from Oleg and Oleg from Sasha. Man, I grew to love love love Igor. His final flinging up of his arms in a gesture of helplessness/hopelessness was fantastic. It was like his shooting his pistol at his other son's funeral.

I guess that's why ultimately it was so right for this last conflict to be all about "fucking Russians" as Philip called. Stan kept saying he didn't care who their leader was, and even if of course he could understand that this should matter, it still made perfect sense as an FBI agent to not care about it in that moment. But it was great that the Russian characters really did care. It foreshadowed that they could actually have a purpose in the USSR that they believed in.

When Stan's telling Henry the truth you can plainly see his uniform with JENNINGS on the back. Ouch.

I also like how none of these relationships have been tested except for P&E. But warm feelings now don't give any indication how anyone's life might go or how they might deal with all this. Especially the kids.

Re: Sistermagpie's Thoughts on START

[shapinglight]

And I love how before he starts it all he hangs his head as if in surrender but imo he's also thinking quickly. None of this means he's just lying to Stan here, but this is Philip's signature move as a spy. This is why he and Elizabeth are such a good team. She'd packed a gun. She's been using force all season, trying to force people to do things. But here it was the last of Philip's devoted sources who decided not to give him up. Like Martha didn't. A lot of people thought Kimmy was going to tell her father about Jim's last phone call but nope, she protected him too. It's Philip's dark superpower. One that he would never use on the kids.

I love this about Philip. So very inciteful. Thanks.

Re: Sistermagpie's Thoughts on START

[quantumreality]

You know, Philip faking weakness - I've been rewatching S1 recently, and I noticed he's done it before in order to get the drop on someone, so it's clear in retrospect some of his woe-is-me attitude almost certainly was shamming/exaggerated, even if it was still kind of true.

Re: Sistermagpie's Thoughts on START

[shapinglight]

Yes, I thought that too actually. He was deliberately making himself look beaten and weak to seem less threatening to Stan.

Elizabeth's dream

[jae]

Elizabeth's dream was also fantastic.

Agreed! I know dream sequences are clichéd and overdone, but man, did that one pack a whopper. It even tied up some narrative and emotional loose ends, as you say with Gregory, but also with the connection between Gregory as a lover of art and the way she herself had come (too late) to love and understand art over the course of this season. It was incredibly clever and also deeply moving.

This is a really good piece about that dream: http://www.vulture.com/2018/05/the-americans-finale-dream-sequence-decoded.html

-J

Re: Elizabeth's dream

[sistermagpie]

I just tead a comment that took the dream to mean she preferred Gregory and would leave Phikip soon. Obviously I think that's silly but it made me think how after Philip has always been the one more in love this last ep gave all tge romantic gestures to Elizabeth.

She takes the rings. She tosses her old ring and gives him his (love that this isn't a reveal for him as if he's surprised she did it). She imagines an alternate life where they were fated to meet and fall in love as themselves without the work. Gregory is in the dream not as a rejection of himself but as a symbol of her earlier doubts about the kids. The fact that he's so nonthreatening as a rival in the dream really solidifies her feelings now.

Elizabeth the romantic?

[jae]

Ha! I hadn't really consciously registered that, but you're so right. It's like the encounter with art not only opened up a sense of herself as an individual, but it also put her in touch with her up-to-then hidden romantic side.

Although I'm sure a part of her is wishing she could have spared some of that for Gregory way back when, too. I thought a lot about how she would have been wishing she could tell Gregory she was starting to get his "art thing".

-J

Philip's fragmented persona

[jae]

My thought is that the whole thing with Philip--and this goes along with the irritating choice to not give us his story--is that he really has never been able to form his real self.

This rings so true to me. It's even something we've discussed on this comm before--remember the scene several seasons back where Elizabeth had been telling Philip something relevant about her past, and then she looked at him like "your turn now", and then he was like: "gulp, I guess I'd better say something too"? I think it was even you who first made that observation, way back when.

I imagine it something like this: He would have been so good at slipping into different kinds of characters as a child, both for practical reasons and as an escape from his life. Then he ended up--very young--in a situation where those talents were exploited, developed, and rewarded. It would be very, very difficult for someone under those circumstances to develop any sort of sense of self.

Of course there always was a person underneath all that, even if it was a person who lived his life in fragmented ways, the experiences were all had by the same boy/man. But he wouldn't have had any sense--unlike Elizabeth--of all the ways the various things that happened to him in the past have a direct impact on who he is now. That also would be why he would have gravitated toward EST--it was the first time he was forced to figure any of that out and think about it directly.

As for that explaining his name issue, I'm not sure that was the authorial intent, but I loooooove it as an explanation for something that's always bugged me. :)

-J

Re: Philip's fragmented persona

[sistermagpie]

Lol. Yes I didn't think it was the intent but luckily it worked!

The use of Russian and English

[jae]

Loved Elizabeth's final line, breaking the English barrier so they could speak Russian with each other at last.

I loved that too! I also love thinking about how they will use the two languages going forward. In some very real ways, English will be the nostalgia language for them now.

-J