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theamericansIn their post-season-finale interviews, the showrunners have been very consistent about not wanting to speculate about what happens to any of the characters after the events of the finale, and have repeatedly said that it's now up to audience members to decide those things for themselves. Of course, to be consistent with both the nature and the tone of the show, any future imagined developments should probably be a) realistic (both in the sense of "consistent with reality" and in the sense of "psychologically viable for that person at that time"), and b) a mixture of melancholic and hopeful. But even within those parameters there are an awful lot of possible outcomes, and there are an awful lot of characters who those possible outcomes could happen to, as well.
So what do you think happens next? For any of the characters, and at any point in time after when the finale ends?
So what do you think happens next? For any of the characters, and at any point in time after when the finale ends?
no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 10:44 am (UTC)Henry goes into finance, like many of his school colleagues. His wife divorces him for not being emotionally involved in the relationship.
Paige's future depends on what support she gets and from who.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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From:The Masha Gessen piece
Date: 2018-06-09 03:21 pm (UTC)-J
Henry, Stan, Paige
Date: 2018-06-09 03:11 pm (UTC)Mr. Beeman also tells him that he knows things are going to be hard for him, but that he wants them not to be any harder than they have to be. He tells Henry that he’s always been welcome at his house, but that he’d like Henry to consider it a real home now if he wants that. He tells Henry that he’ll pay his tuition so that he doesn’t have to leave school. He tells Henry that a lot of people he works with are going to want to talk to him about what he did and didn’t know, but that he’s going to be right there the whole time too, making sure they treat him right. And he tells him he’d like Henry to call him Stan—maybe not right away, but when he feels ready. Throughout the conversation, Stan tries a couple of times to put a reassuring hand on his knee or his shoulder, and Henry pushes him away, but before Stan leaves, Henry accepts an awkward hug and is grateful for it.
Afterward, Henry doesn’t tell anyone else what’s happened, just says to his coach that he’s not feeling well and goes back to his room. He stays there as the hours pass, lying on his bed, listening to the other kids shouting and horsing around in the hallway, feeling utterly alone. When his roommate comes back from his own day, Henry pretends to be asleep, and eventually he really does fall into a kind of fitful sleep. Then, at around two in the morning, there’s a faint knock at the door. Henry shoots bolt upright, his heart pounding, and he stumbles over to the door to reveal his sister, doing her best to hide herself under an oversized charcoal-grey hoodie. Thinking with the instincts he inherited from his parents, he rushes her away and they go sit in front of a broken freight elevator in a far corner of his dorm, away from anyone that might be coming or going at that hour. She spends hours telling him everything from start to finish: from the moment she found out about their parents, through her spy-training sessions with her mother and her Russian-culture lessons with Claudia, right through to the moment she decided not to go to the Soviet Union with them after all. She cries, a lot, and eventually Henry finally does too. At the end of the conversation, though, fully aware of what it will mean for her future, Henry says: “Paige, you’re gonna have to talk to Mr. Beeman about all this,” and Paige says, quietly: “Yeah, I know.” And in the morning, she catches a bus back down to DC, spends the rest of the day waiting in the safe house where they held her Russian culture lessons, psyching herself up, and when Stan comes home from work that evening, Paige is waiting in his kitchen with a cup of hot chocolate made by Renee.
Paige repeats the whole story, leaving nothing out (apart from the ten minutes in which Stan himself took on a co-starring role, both because Paige figures Stan knows that bit already and because she figures he might not want Renee to overhear it), and Stan sort of sits back and lets her tell it. He’s furious with her, his mind constantly snapping back to the moment he let them all go, but at no point does he show it on his face. After she’s done unburdening herself, then, he tells her she’s going to have to tell it again, on the record, and she agrees, which makes him feel a little less angry. She’s taken into custody that same night, and as Stan’s colleagues escort her away, Stan feels some sympathy bubble to the surface and he says he’ll help her find a lawyer.
Of course, Stan’s dealing with his own shit at the same time. His shame at having betrayed his sworn duty and let two longtime Soviet illegals go is immense, and he can’t talk it over with anyone—certainly not with Aderholdt, and even more certainly not with Renee, but also not with Henry, who he doesn’t want to see hurt any more than he already is. But whenever he’s not actively dealing with Henry and/or Paige and their issues, he finds himself running the entire length of his friendship with Philip through his mind, kicking himself for all the moments he should have known but didn’t, simply because he’d long since talked himself out of suspecting them of anything. Crimes keep popping into his head, too—terrible, inhuman incidents that went on for years in which Soviet agents were suspected but their involvement could never be proven—and every time he remembers the details of another one of those, he imagines all the different ways Philip and/or Elizabeth could easily have been the perpetrators. Through all this, he’s helping Paige with her trial and doing his best to be an emotional support to Henry, but inside he’s pretty angry and deeply, deeply hurt. Renee keeps trying to get him to talk about it, but he never lets her in.
It takes six months after everything goes down for Stan to leave Renee. He starts off by trying to forget what Philip told him, then moves on to trying to investigate her secretly, but eventually it’s just too much. She cries and cries when he breaks things off, saying she doesn’t understand, but he tells her he just needs a clean break and a new start after everything that happened with the Jennings family and that it has to be over, and that’s that. She moves out, and shortly after that, he does too, and eventually he sells the house and gives her half of the money—trying very hard not to think about where that money might end up if the worst is indeed true. He ends up renting a crappy apartment for a while, then buying a condo in the city with just enough room for himself and for Matthew and/or Henry when they visit. (Stan’s official custody of Henry comes through just a few months shy of Henry’s eighteenth birthday.)
It takes longer for Stan to leave his job, at first because he’s being investigated (as everyone who knew the Jennings family is investigated in the wake of their disappearance), and he doesn’t want anything he does to direct any additional suspicions his way. But Paige continues leaving out those ten minutes with Stan in the parking garage in all of her countless truth-tellings about what she and her parents did, and eventually he’s cleared of any potential involvement. In fact, he even comes to be lauded pretty universally as the crack agent “who almost caught them”—Aderholdt sees to this by admitting openly that Stan told him he suspected them and Aderholdt didn’t take it seriously—and Stan finds he can’t take that at all. So while he manages to stick it out at the Bureau for a few more years after the Jennings’ disappearance, he also jumps at the first chance he gets to take early retirement. After that, he spends the first few months of not working just knocking around his apartment and wandering aimlessly through the DC streets, trying to piece various things together in his mind, but eventually he decides to sit down and channel all that energy into writing a book. He imagines at first that it’ll be a sort of Andy MacNab-style thriller, but ultimately finds himself writing a surprisingly delicate, soul-searching memoir about the moral dilemmas of his life (while giving no details at all about what was actually happening). But throughout the rest of his life, he never again does let himself trust any men outside of his family enough to let real friendships form, and always immediately puts distance between himself and anyone that might possibly happen with before it can even start.
Over the ensuing months and years, Paige and Henry grow much, much closer than they ever were as children. He’s incredibly angry with her at first, both for having been involved with their parents’ horrifying work and for not telling him about any of it. But she’s so broken about it, and so overtly taking all the responsibility that his parents aren’t there to take, that he finds all of his pent-up anger draining out pretty quickly every time they’re together. Plus, he has a thousand questions for her (which he does end up asking, little by little). And when it comes down to it, he of course loves her, but he also actually does understand her better than he often wants to admit—he took a different path, but they each had their not-always-healthy coping mechanisms for getting through their frustrating, baffling childhood. So while he’s shocked by her involvement—especially as serious journalistic work starts to emerge speculating about the details of specific crimes his parents are suspected of having been a part of—it still wouldn’t even occur to him not to be there for her through all of her pre-trial preparation, the trial itself, and the eventual sentencing. And when one guy at school tells him he should really just drop her crazy commie ass if he knows what’s good for him, he actually ends up getting into a fistfight over it.
After a prolonged investigation, it turns out that the FBI doesn’t have enough on Paige to make charges of espionage stick, which is the main difference between a life sentence and something less end-of-the-road. Eventually she’s charged with aiding and abetting an unregistered agent of a foreign government (specifically for serving as Elizabeth’s lookout), and she serves eighteen months in a federal prison for it (in total, including time served before the trial). Both Henry and Stan visit her often during that time, and she basically spends it putting her mind and what’s left of her life back together. By the time she gets out, Henry’s in college at Stanford, studying statistics, and while Stan has been paying as much of his college tuition as he can afford, Paige ends up taking various waitressing and retail jobs, both to help out with that and also just to support herself. She never does go back to college full-time, and never moves out of that level of work into a more professional career, though she does take a few community-college classes here and there and does a lot of reading (for a while she spends a lot of time in libraries; she finds them calming), which keeps her brain active. She also maintains a curiosity about Russian language and culture for the rest of her life, and continues to do reading and learning about them on her own. This is, however, also the only area where she ever applies the basic spy training she got from Elizabeth to any real-life situations: she always makes sure to cover her tracks to make sure that nobody—especially not her brother or Stan but also no one she meets in the future or any casual observers—ever finds out about that ongoing interest. When she’s in her forties, she does the full Russian duolingo course (using a VPN and an innocuous pseudonym) in just under six months, and finds she has a real knack for it.
Henry finishes high school at his prep school, then goes on to Stanford. In his first few months there, while Paige is still in prison, he meets a very glam girl named Julie from a very high-society-successful family, falls instantly and completely in love with her, and ends up dating her for the whole four years he’s there. Her parents completely mistrust Henry because of the whole ordeal with his parents, though (which by this time is not just public knowledge, but a notorious enough story that it regularly serves as fodder for dinner-table conversations among people who never even knew the Jennings family), and they keep trying to talk her into breaking up with him. While Julie starts out at first rebelliously thinking the whole thing is terribly exciting, her parents’ thinking can’t help but rub off on her as well, and it remains a real problem for them throughout their relationship. They do get married immediately after finishing college, but the relationship implodes very quickly under the weight of it all, and they get divorced after less than a year. While Henry never lets on overtly to Paige that the Jennings family trauma was the ultimate cause of this, he does talk to Stan about it, which is good for both of them. (Besides the empathy and understanding Stan can of course muster up about all the ways the whole mess ruined everybody’s lives, he also turns out to be a remarkably good person for a young man to talk about a failed marriage with.)
Politically, Henry ends up becoming completely allergic to anything that even vaguely smacks of socialism, and between what happened with his parents, his conservative prep school having been his refuge, and Stan’s influence, he ends up in a place where he would never even think about voting anything but Republican. But apart from that basic civic duty, he distances himself from anything political by saying that he hates politics and wants nothing to do with it, and throughout his entire adult life, he always gives anybody he comes into contact with who’s at all involved in either politics or government a wide berth. He ultimately ends up going into IT, on the research end of things, working for a private northern California-based company.
Paige has a lot of things to sort out in her head before she can let anyone into any sort of romantic-partner role in her life. And at first, helping to maintain all possible normalcy for Henry is her overriding objective anyway (when she gets out of prison, she even thinks about moving out to California to be closer to him, before ultimately deciding to stay behind in the DC area to serve as one of the things he can come back to). But eventually—when she’s in her thirties—she falls in love with a guy named Scott who’s a few years older than she is, and who has two kids his ex-wife has custody of. He owns a small electronics store in a DC suburb, and as their relationship develops, she ends up going to work there too, which provides her with some stability in her work life at the same time as it does in her personal life. Toward the end of her thirties (and the beginning of Scott’s forties), they have one child together, a girl who they call Olivia.
Philip, Elizabeth, more Paige and Henry
Date: 2018-06-09 03:12 pm (UTC)For the first few weeks, neither of them talks about their kids at all, as they’re kind of stunned into silence, each alone in their private grief. But then one day they see a girl on a Moscow street who looks like Paige, and they look at each other and can tell they’re both thinking it, and then suddenly they’re both standing there with their eyes wet and kind of propping each other up. After that, the floodgates open and Philip and Elizabeth start talking about them all the time—first about everything that happened on their awful final day as a family, and then sorting through various things about the more distant past, but later just speculation about what might have become of them, and what they might each be doing right now. It hurts, every time, but they both recognize that not talking about them would hurt even more, so they keep poking at the subject until their wonderings about their kids just become a part of their daily existence together.
As far as work goes, Philip ends up very quickly falling into a job in security for the railway system, and then as things start to westernize more and more, he eventually ends up as the head of a rather successful private security firm. None of it is particularly exciting, but at this point in his life a lack of excitement is more or less what he’s looking for, and he’s both good at the work and respected by the people he works with. Elizabeth, however, refuses to tie herself down to anything, and resists all overtures from people—both inside and outside the KGB—who want to set her up with any sort of ongoing job. Finally, she decides what she really wants to do is paint, and she sets herself up with a little studio in one corner of their tiny apartment that gets good light in the afternoon. At first she takes lessons from a few different instructors, then eventually finds one in particular who becomes a real mentor to her, at which point things start to take off. She never becomes an artist of any real renown, but she does slowly begin to show and sell her work and eventually builds up a modest reputation (and of course her status as a former illegal draws more than a few curious observers to her shows who might not otherwise take notice, which she has mixed feelings about). Philip is very supportive of these new endeavours, and she’s glad for that, but she also spends a lot of time thinking about both Erica Haskard and Gregory, and wishing she could share her bourgeoning love for art with them, too.
They both stay in shape and keep up with their physical training, though Elizabeth takes it more seriously than Philip does (who ends up developing a bit of a paunch). Part of it is habit, but for both of them, and Elizabeth especially, there’s always going to be some lingering paranoia over the kinds of threats there might be from various factions of people who don’t appreciate what they were, or the specifics of what they once did.
Slowly at first, and then all at once, the Soviet Union falls apart, and Philip and Elizabeth are right in the middle of it all. Elizabeth is dismayed, but not destroyed or even all that surprised by it—by this point she’s had her eyes fully opened and has taken on a healthy streak of cynicism. Philip at first secretly, and then, later, not-so-secretly cheers on all the westernization that’s happening around them, though at the same time he can also see that not all the changes are good, and he could certainly do without the organized crime rackets that spring up everywhere (which he has to deal with daily in his job). But mostly they just live their lives amidst the chaos, muddling through it like millions of other Russians around them. They talk sometimes about how when they were working as illegals, everything they did felt so consequential, as if they’d had the entire world resting on their shoulders—but now they’re being confronted with just how much more fraught and complicated their country’s cobbled-together monster of a system had been than they could have ever imagined, and just how tiny a part of it they had always been, even then. The thought is both unnerving and comforting, for both of them.
Then one day, while Philip is on a lunch break at work, a pretty middle-aged woman and a young child show up in the doorway of his office, asking whether Philip is the former illegal who is now head of security. After getting confirmation of this, the woman introduces herself as Elina Burova, and the child as her son Sasha, and through gritted teeth, she informs Philip that he knew her husband. And then she just lets loose, railing at him about how it was his fault that her husband is rotting away in an American prison and she might never see him again, and their son is growing up without a father while he, Mikhail, gets to come back a hero, bla bla bla. Philip is shaken by the confrontation, in large part because he’s honestly never given Oleg a second thought—while he’s thought a lot about the various people he harmed or killed over the years, Oleg had never even come close to making that list. So coming face to face with his very angry wife shakes him up, and makes him wonder who else might be out there who might have ended up caught in the undertow of his own downfall. He puts her off, even lets her be forcibly removed from the building, but he can’t shake the image of her, and when he gets home that night, he tells Elizabeth about it, wondering aloud if maybe there might not be something they can do to help him, some strings that can be pulled.
And as they’re talking about what might be and what still wouldn’t be possible to do to help Oleg, it hits them both at once: if enough has changed that it might be possible to help Oleg, enough might also have changed that it might be possible for them to contact their kids without endangering either them or themselves. And they talk about it for a while, very tentatively poking at the idea, but with mounting excitement. Philip wants them to write a letter together, but Elizabeth says, very adamantly (remembering the letters she used to get from her own mother): “No. We’ll send a tape.”
Meanwhile, back in the US, Paige and Henry are watching the collapse of their parents’ country with more than a little bit of interest (and a lump in their throats) as it plays out on the news. Henry mostly tries really hard not to think about it, but Paige obsesses over it, and after a few weeks of worrying herself sick over what might have become of them, she decides to start trying to track them down. She doesn’t tell either Henry or Stan about the search because she doesn’t think either of them would approve (for different reasons). She starts by just doing a lot of reading, and eventually she elicits the help of a friendly librarian who’s sympathetic to what life must be like for her, but she just hits dead end after dead end. And then one evening there’s a knock at the door, and there’s a Mexican-looking guy she’s never met before, with a package and a card with his contact information. Paige opens up the package and finds two envelopes, one addressed to her and one addressed to her brother, in her mother’s handwriting, along with a cassette tape. She tears her own note open, reads it, and then starts to play the cassette tape on her own, but then thinks better of it, and instead calls Henry at Stanford.
They talk about other things for a while, but then Paige very casually asks: “Hey, I was just wondering: if I ever heard from Mom and Dad, would you want to know about it?” And at first he’s put off and touchy about it, all “Why would you even bring that up out of nowhere?”, but then Paige doesn’t answer, and Henry knows it must have actually happened. And there’s this sudden explosion of old rage in him (along with a big dose of hurt that once again they have defaulted to involving her and not him), but then Paige tells him that there’s a note addressed to just him and there’s a tape for both of them that he can listen to the next time he’s back home if he wants, and that she won’t listen to it herself until he’s there to listen to it too. Of course, at first Henry’s not at all sure he wants anything to do with any of this, but it’s a few weeks until his spring break, so he has time to think it over. And by the time he gets back to DC and he’s sitting there with his sister, he finds that he really does want it—the note, the tape, all of it. They decide to listen to the tape separately but on the same day, and they both cry, first separately, as they each listen to it and hear their parents’ voices, and then afterward, together, while talking about it.
Paige’s first instinct is that they should make a tape together to send back—they’re clearly meant to do just that, since the courier guy gave her his contact information—but Henry doesn’t feel ready to. So she records something on her own, and while Henry says at first he doesn’t want to be involved at all, eventually he ends up sticking a photocopy of his latest (excellent) Stanford report card into the package along with a note that reads: “Hi. I’m still angry but I’m glad to know you’re alive. Love, Henry.”
Eventually, though, even Henry comes around, and the four of them send things back and forth like that for three years, keeping up with each other’s evolving lives that way. Their interaction is a little stilted: as light as possible under the circumstances and completely focused on the superficial-and-positive things rather than any of the elephants in the room. But they still hear from each other every few months like clockwork, and they’re all invested in keeping the relationship going. And then finally, at Christmastime in 1996, nearly nine years to the day since they last saw each other, they all make the trek to meet up in Budapest. They take care not to be seen together in public, and spend most of the trip catching up in their respective hotel rooms (punctuated by occasional tourist outings in pairs to see the main sights), but everyone travels under their own legal names, and no one uses any disguises. The whole visit is fraught with all kinds of emotion, of course—Philip tears up visibly at two different points (when Paige briefly mentions her time in prison and when Henry tries and fails to talk casually about his marriage not working out) and Elizabeth is much more physically affectionate than either of the kids has ever seen her before—but by that point it’s mostly just good, even for Henry. And Elizabeth gives them each a painting she created for them, which they’re both really touched by.
On the flight on the way back, Paige and Henry talk about the visit, quietly enough so that no one around them might overhear and get curious. Henry: “It was weird to see them so…emotional. Especially Mom.” Paige: “Yeah. They freaked me out a couple of times, too.” Henry: “I hope it doesn’t mean—” Paige: “What?” Henry: “That things aren’t actually okay. For them.” Paige: *thinks* “It is hard to know for sure. Like, we don’t tell them everything, who knows what they’re not telling us.” Henry: *frowns* Paige: “But I like to think—maybe it means things really are okay? Like, for such a long time they felt like they had to be so hard. And now they get to just be regular people. So maybe what they’re showing us now is just…who they always were. Without all that other stuff.” Henry: *smiles*
When they get back to the US, both of the kids put the paintings up in their respective homes, and Stan notices Henry’s, even comments on it. But neither Henry nor Paige ever tells him about the true purpose of their trip, so they never let him know the paintings are Elizabeth’s work, and he certainly never guesses. On his part, Stan does wonder what was up with the strange brother-sister trip to a former Communist country, and thinks about asking Henry at some point, gently: “Hey, was there maybe something you wanted to tell me about that trip?” But Stan’s long out of the FBI by this point, and he knows there’s little he could realistically do about a couple of former illegals if they’re now private citizens living somewhere in Eastern Europe anyway, and anything more personal than that isn’t really his place to ask about if Henry and Paige aren’t telling him of their own volition. So he squelches both his worry and his curiosity, washes his hands of the whole thing, and just lets Henry and Paige talk about it with him like it was an ordinary non-suspicious overseas vacation they just happened to want to take together.
The two parents and the two kids remain in touch for as long as they all live, though the exact setup of how they communicate with each other changes a few times based on shifts in the geopolitical situation, and both those kinds of issues as well as money and life factors prevent them from seeing each other in person any more than a handful more times after the Budapest trip. There is also always an unspoken agreement among them to keep things superficial and informational in their letters and to remain positive and not dwell on past grievances on the rare occasions they get to see each other face-to-face. As a result of this, the kids never have the kind of truly confrontational conversation with their parents that Henry in particular might have wanted to have at some point. But he’s able to sort through things well enough with Paige (in conversations where she sometimes gives him “this is what I think they were trying to do” kinds of explanations, and sometimes gives him “you’re right, that sucked, and they shouldn’t have done that” kinds of validation) that this status quo is never soul- or mental-health-destroying for him (and on her part, Paige gets a lot out of those conversations as well).
Oleg, Martha
Date: 2018-06-09 03:12 pm (UTC)As for Martha, she adopts the orphan child presented to her at the end of season five, and deliberately choosing a name that could be pronounced in either Russian or English, she calls her Liliya, Lily affectionately. And while it takes some time and a lot of false starts with other men, she eventually does fall in love with a Russian man named Anatoly/Tolya. When they first meet, he’s working in a government-run food store, but as the Soviet Union falls apart and society changes around them, he breaks away from that and goes into the import-export business. Then, just before the turn of the millennium, Tolya is offered a position at a company in Tunisia, and after some back and forth (and checking to see whether Tunisia has an extradition treaty with the US), the family eventually moves there. Martha never does go back to the United States, and she never does see her parents again. And although first she and Lily and later she, Tolya, and Lily live in Moscow for more than ten years before they move on to Tunisia, overlapping with the time Philip and Elizabeth live there, she never does run into either of them.
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From:Re: Philip, Elizabeth, more Paige and Henry
Date: 2018-06-09 05:54 pm (UTC)I don't know why, but I love this detail. I always assumed the first part, but not the second. Even though of course it's the most natural thing to do.
Re: Henry, Stan, Paige
Date: 2018-06-19 03:34 pm (UTC)Re: Henry, Stan, Paige
Date: 2018-06-19 03:37 pm (UTC)-J
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From:no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 03:47 pm (UTC)The only things I really find myself thinking as natural in my head longterm are Elizabeth and Philip staying together and getting used to each new thing and Henry actually not developing close relationships with Paige and Stan as a result of this. I think he'll be fine with both of them and have a some relationship with Paige (not as much with Stan) but in general live a new life where very few people know about his history. (When he does tell people it's in such a way that it seems unreal to them.) But privately and in many different ways he'll always be trying to work out his past, often without realizing it.
It would be great if Stan decided to really consider why he seems to choose relationships with people who are intentionally always trying to mirror back what he wants from them, but I don't know that that he'd really look too deeply into that. When he does think about stuff like that he'll frame it as thinking about Philip instead of himself somehow.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 03:57 pm (UTC)This is a GENIUS observation. And I would bet Stan never sees that at all.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-09 03:58 pm (UTC)As for Stan, you're totally right. And man he has REALLY had a lot of relationships with Soviet spies and maybe-spies, hasn't he? That is so fascinating, and if he thought for more than two seconds about it, it would really give him pause. (But I agree that he wouldn't.)
-J
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Date: 2018-06-09 04:06 pm (UTC)Stan might have had a much more interesting friendship with Philip as Mischa. The black humor alone might have been something that really got through to him.
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Date: 2018-06-10 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-11 01:31 am (UTC)I wrote an idea up on my own blog but I'll flesh it out here as I wouldn't mind seeing other people's thoughts:
Paige slips up somehow after the safe house - maybe she's had too much vodka and isn't thinking quite right with her liquid courage. Stan, who's angry at himself for letting P&E slip out from his grasp, decides to focus all the terrible weight of the FBI's power onto Paige, and she cracks like a cheap walnut without her mom to help buttress her. The USSR does nothing to help, knowing that anything the KGB does will just screw it up even more.
She spends 20, 25 years in jail for espionage, aiding and abetting homicides, obstruction of justice, etc, etc, etc.
When she gets out, all she has is the fact that she obsessively studied Russian for years, and it's 2012, just in time for Cold War II to start in earnest. She decides to try and find SVR/FSB contacts in Moscow who might want to use her bilingualism to some advantage, and Arkady, on the verge of retirement from his job at the FSB, decides out of sympathy to employ her: he decides she can pretend to be a native Russian-speaker among English speakers who would assume she doesn't speak the language, and puts her to work infiltrating low-level UK/Canada/Australia embassy shindigs (Never the US, though. They might still have her picture).
And then, fast forward and all of a sudden it's 2048, and a secret Russian-financed project taps her to be a test subject: time travel.
Paige, knowing she's had to deal with the hard lessons she's learned about facing the consequences of her actions, decides to take one last gamble: after all, if she dies, she's over 70 and what the hell. But if she succeeds, she might be able to swerve the course of history...
... or can she? :P
no subject
Date: 2018-06-19 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 05:52 am (UTC)"Paige takes part in an experiment she never imagined would work. She wakes up in her bed in 1981, and wonders at the possibilities - and dangers." :P
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From:no subject
Date: 2018-06-17 08:09 pm (UTC)(It was thinking how this finale has left the door wide open for fanworks, which was very considerate of the writers :).)
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Date: 2018-06-19 04:10 pm (UTC)-J
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Date: 2018-06-19 08:47 pm (UTC)No really, that is pretty cool. Do you think they've read yours?
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Date: 2018-06-20 01:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
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From:(Just saw the final last night)
Date: 2018-06-30 11:39 pm (UTC)I appreciate all your optimistic thoughts.
I must admit mine are much sadder, heavily influenced by the French 1999 movie EAST/WEST, where Stalin invites all Soviet citizens back to the motherland post-WWII.
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Date: 2020-03-26 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-27 12:44 am (UTC)