theamericans | Where things go from here: speculation and musing

jae posting in

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?

Threaded | Flat

From:

lovingboth

The final 'We'll get used to it' line said to me on first watch that Philip and Elizabeth will stay together as husband and wife - something that was very unlikely at times in the show - with the added irony that we know there won't be much time before it all changes again and having the worst aspects of capitalism arrive in Russia means it becomes a lot harder for them. There will doubtless still be jobs for people training illegals though and what else are they qualified for?

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.

From:

jae

We see the moment Stan tells Henry about his parents from afar in the episode, but here’s how that happens from closer up: Henry is initially delighted and a little confused to see Mr. Beeman at his hockey practice, but it takes about five seconds to see the look on his face and realize something terrible has happened. He skates over to him, his mind turning over all the things it could be: one of his parents was in an accident, they’re in the hospital, maybe they’re even dead. They go up into the stands for at least a bit of privacy, and Mr. Beeman starts out: “I have to tell you something—something awful. And I’m not sure how to do it—I guess there is no good way to do it. So I’m just going to give it to you straight.” He begins by telling Henry that his parents and his sister are all gone, that they’ve left the country. Then he tells them why. Henry’s completely silent the whole time, just letting Mr. Beeman talk, but his mind keeps flashing back to the last conversation he had with them, when he was half-checked out, his thoughts on his pool tournament. As he listens to what scant details Mr. Beeman knows at this point about the stuff his parents and sister were involved with, another track of Henry’s mind keeps replaying that conversation over and over again in his head until he forces it to make a new, awful kind of sense.

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.

From:

sistermagpie

I really don't have any detailed futures that I imagine for many of the characters. When I find myself imagining what comes next it's usually about Philip and Elizabeth readjusting and getting to know Philip's family--that interests me but I don't have any set ways it would go. (Though I do have certain, like, incidents or moments that pop into my head.) And I imagine how Oleg might eventually coming home and what that would be like. I'm not sure how realistic it is, but I think of Philip and Elizabeth having some contact with his family as well, not wanting to leave him like a fallen comrade etc.

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.

From:

quantumreality

Welp, as someone who's always been interested in time travel fics BECAUSE WHY NOT

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

From:

astridv

I just finished watching the show, finally, and I for one am off to AO3 to see if I can find a fic that gets Oleg out of that jail cell, preferably with Stan's help.

(It was thinking how this finale has left the door wide open for fanworks, which was very considerate of the writers :).)

From:

jesse_the_k

Thank you for these fascinating takes on the possible future for P&E.

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.

From:

mengu

Oleg is fine. He wasn't there officially, but he was pretty important to keeping Gorbachev in power and since Gorbachev is... in power, I figure he gets Oleg home in, like, a matter of months. Maybe a year.