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theamericans2018-06-08 12:42 pm
jae) wrote in theamericans2018-06-08 12:42 pm
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Where things go from here: speculation and musing
In 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?
Philip, Elizabeth, more Paige and Henry
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
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.
Re: Oleg, Martha
Re: Oleg, Martha
-J
Re: Oleg, Martha
It has just occurred to me that I bet the deciding factor in which road he goes down there is... his child. I bet that kid is going to have some trouble adjusting to a world where dad just came back from the metaphorically-dead, but if it goes OK, I think Oleg could embrace that and the new Russia and try to put the past behind him. If that does not work so well, I think Oleg would have a really hard time getting over that.
(WHY DOES THIS SHOW MAKE ME BREAK MY OWN HEART OMG.)
Re: Oleg, Martha
Re: Oleg, Martha
-J
Re: Oleg, Martha
Re: Oleg, Martha
Re: Philip, Elizabeth, more Paige and Henry
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.