Season one group rewatch: the pilot

[jae]

This is the discussion post for the pilot episode in the group rewatch of season one. When you rewatched the episode, was there anything you noticed that you didn't notice the first time (and any subsequent times) you saw it? What things about it did you perhaps view differently after having seen the later episodes?

You can expect spoilers for the entire first season in the comments.

Comments

The Garage scene

[(Anonymous)]

I would be very curious what everyone thought of the garage scene. Was there really a danger of P/E turning on each other?

It really feels like he is trying to sneak Timoshev out of the house and when Elisabeth shows up he feels threatened, especially after she gives her "I'm a KGB officer speech". You can see on Philip's face the implications - first the realization that she is completely inflexible on it, then a touch of fear that she'll tell the Center about it, which would be the end of him, then the realization that there is a whole other conflict going on that he was not aware of. He looks both horrified and confused as he sees E. beating up Timoshev.

And by the time she says "Do what you want with him" - he lets out a sigh, because he knows that he is given an out from a terrible misjudgement of her possible reaction to his "reasonable solution of defecting".

Do you think she would ever let him go through with his plan of taking Timoshev to Stan? - I thank there was no chance of that, she would have killed them both, and I think Philip clearly realizes this. This not to say that he doesn't kill Timoshev because he raped Elisabeth (he is clearly very emotional about it) ad wants to protect his wife, but that as an agent he also realized that that was his only call in that situation.

2. Another thing I like how they do the vodka scene back to back to the flashback of their arrival. In my reading it was significant for him that possibly he could reinterpret their history through this revelation - he always assumed that Elisabeth was not attracted to him, but after learning about the rape it becomes entirely plausible that the initial deflections of his attempts by her were really more rooted in the rape than in the lack of physical attraction.

3. I love the after-sex make-up scene - it is so cute and intimate.