Question of the week #3

[jae]

Which character from The Americans is, more than any other, the one who intrigues you most? Not necessarily the one you'd want to have a beer with/befriend/sleep with, but the one whose story you're most interested in, the one you find yourself thinking about even when the show isn't on? And why? You can expect spoilers for the entire first season in the comments.

(There's no expiration date on these questions, so if you're reading this post months later and feel like jumping in, please do.)

Comments

[jae]

I know this is my own question, but I can't narrow it down to just one: for me it's Philip and Elizabeth. Which is probably the most obvious answer to this question, sorry! I do love the other characters, too, but for this show, I'm quite boringly all about the central two. I love the complexity of their relationship, but I also find each of them utterly fascinating as individuals, and in completely different ways. For Elizabeth, it's the passion and vulnerability that lie underneath her professional exterior that get me, and for Philip, it's the way he completely internalizes the roles he embodies to the point where he believes them himself.

As an aside: one of the differences between the ways I react to each of these two is that I want to sit in rapt attention while the show tells me stories about Philip, while I find myself wanting to tell some of Elizabeth's stories myself. Not that I care less about her stories on the show, but I feel like I have something to say about her beyond what the show can give me, while I don't feel that with Philip. (Although I suppose during the hiatus, there aren't any new stories to be had about them anyway...hmm, why isn't there more fanfiction??? *g*)

-J

[umbo]

For me it's Claudia. I really want to know more about her! How did she get from here to there, what is her real backstory, all of that.

[jae]

Oh, man, I hope for your sake that she's back next season!

I have this whole backstory for her in my head, but I'm not married to it. :)

-J

[treonb]

I love Claudia as the bad guy handler, but now that I've started accepting that she very probably won't be back, I've been thinking about the possibilities. It could get very interesting.

[jae]

Oh, totally. And since the show didn't kill her off (and the producers clearly enjoy working with her), there's always the possiblity of bringing her back in the future anyway.

-J

[quantumreality]

1. Nina.

She's got the kind of nerve that could propel her very far in the KGB hierarchy. But from what we've seen - well, there just isn't enough info. What's her story? How did she, at a young age, get approval to go to the USA? Are her parents highly connected Soviet officials? Or did she catch someone's eye at the KGB and impress them with her intelligence and daring?

After all, she managed to run a scam right under the KGB's nose: pilfering caviar supplies and exchanging them for regular shipments of high-quality electronics. There is probably a whole smuggling ring she knows about, where at the other end people probably smuggle them into Moscow or Leningrad pawnshops, which then resell the stereo equipment at premium prices to people who want the "good stuff".

And then her gamble with Arkady! Woooow.

That shows she has the kind of initiative which could carry her far in the KGB if they forgive her her double-agent-ness on the grounds that she's bringing in valuable intelligence from the FBI.

2. Paige.

Something about her intrigues me. I was reading a Person of Interest fic recently, where the author creates a fanon back story for Harold Finch: his foster parents are actually Americans who have agreed to spy for the Soviets, and he agrees to help them.

It makes me wonder if she found out about her parents, she might even offer to help them. Feeling like you're getting away with something can be a big draw for a teenager, and Paige, like many teenagers, is still figuring out who she is and how she relates to the world around her. So she could see it as an exciting adventure without really grasping the consequences down the road.

[jae]

I thought this was what you might answer. :)

I'm totally with you on Nina. Some of what she's managed to pull of strains the boundaries of credibility, but it only just strains it--nothing the show has given us on her is actually unbelievable, if she's extraordinary. So I want to know more about that too.

-J

[treonb]

I've been thinking about this.. Paige might join Philip, but right now everything Elizabeth does is wrong. If she finds out her mother's a spy, she might just call the Feds to report her. And it's the 80s too, the Soviets were EVIL.

[soupytwist]

I definitely definitely want to know all about Philip and Elizabeth! However for me the curiosity bit is more about Philip - I feel like I understand why Elizabeth ended up in the KGB doing what she does, but I desperately want to know how Philip did the same. It's a perfect match for his talents in a lot of ways, but how did he figure that out? Did he guess that himself, did someone else point him that way? If it was his "dream" (which...the flashbacks said it was THEIR "dream", and to me that means a very different thing, so I'm not sure exactly how to read it), what did that mean to him?

And Nina and Claudia both absolutely demand more about their backstories, dammit.

Also, I think it's interesting that nobody's said Stan yet! I do want to know what his undercover op was and what happened that messed him up so badly, but I guess I think the show is going to do that and I'm quite happy for them to do so. Whereas the other stuff I wanna knoooow noooow. :D

[jae]

I definitely want to know Stan's backstory too! But yeah, I think we've gotten enough hints from the producers that that's definitely coming in season two, though, so we don't have to whimper and wonder for long. :)

And yeah, I want to know all of that about Philip too. It's funny that we've gotten so little of his past, isn't it? I'm content to let the show tell me his story gradually, though, rather than trying to contribute to it myself.

-J

[treonb]

Tough question.. I'm not sure I focus on any specific char. But I guess it would be Elizabeth and how she got used to both Philip and living in the US. Philip might have had to leave his girlfriend, but he likes the US and I think he liked Elizabeth from the beginning. I think Elizabeth had a much harder time.

But overall, I'm quite content waiting for the story to unfold on the show :-)

[jae]

Oh, I totally agree that Elizabeth had a harder time in the early years. Philip would have been totally in his element from day one, while Elizabeth would have been good at the work, but struggling with so many things. And given what we saw of their relationship in the pilot before things changed between them, her feelings for him seem to have ranged from tolerant to mildly hostile, which wouldn't have been much fun at all for all those years.

-J

[katiac]

Yes. And I would theorize they would've switched back and forth at intervals a lot (the tolerant to mildly hostile feelings) because she has to keep him at bay and let it be known that he's not getting any closer than she wants, but at the same time, they have to work together practically 24/7 and raise children together. If she pushes him away to the point they're both tense and unhappy, they can't work together effectively. So I think she was constantly striving to maintain that "just giving enough to make it workable" status, conflict coming in when he tried to nudge for something more.

[jae]

I'd never put it this way to myself, but I really like this interpretation!

-J

[katiac]

It's funny because all the snippets and flashbacks we're given paint such a varied picture. In Zhukov's office, she's clearly on edge, but not mean. In the hotel, they're a little smiley and friendly, she's not ready for sex, but clearly they're not angry at each other. They transition right to a civil conversation even after she rejects his advance. In Zhukov's flashbacks, it's clear they're not getting along. In the table conversation with Gregory, it's revealed Elizabeth came to him in tears when pregnant. Paige talks fondly about family games of round robin checkers. Even when you see them together in the pilot, there's a level of comfort in the way they interact that suggests things aren't always icy. He wouldn't come up and kiss her neck if a knife was pulled every time. With all those wildly different snippets, I can only assume things were rocky, but okay at times too.

[jae]

I'm with you on all of this. I think there are time periods when he's just too much for her to take, given all of her issues (and the period when she was pregnant with Paige was probably the worst of those), but she always fundamentally likes him. And she always, always values him as a colleague, because they are just dynamite together when it comes to the work, and have been right from the start. That's what Zhukov is referring to when he says it's a good match. When it comes to the work, it really really is. I'm sure he has pairs to watch over that don't deal with each other nearly as well.

-J

[katiac]

Yeah, I agree the pregnancy would've brought a lot of issues to a head. She can't get out of a baby. Even if she wasn't planning to run off before, a baby really seals the deal in a way where she can't have the fantasy in her head either. Sort of like Philip can no longer lie to himself and pretend everything is going to turn out fine for their family. In my head, the more the kids turned into real little people, the more obvious it became that going off to Russia wasn't a viable option and if anything happened to him and Elizabeth (quite likely) they were screwed.

But I don't think she hates Philip. I think she's not particularly attracted to him until much later, but respects him as a partner, a father. There would've been a lot of resentment at first, I think, for all the little things she couldn't control about her life in the US (the Elizabeth in my head is all about control) and since Philip was the only one other than Gregory that she didn't have to lie to, I think he would've been the target for some of those frustrations, particularly since some of them (living in the US, having sex, having kids), he didn't particularly mind--even liked--and she deeply didn't want.

I'm interested in the Philip/Zhukov angle, what made him choose Philip for his little darling Elizabeth...

[katiac]

Completely agree. I think we could see from that flashback to the hotel room that Philip at least found Elizabeth physically attractive from very early on. Well, I guess we know that from when he told her his impressions of their first meeting too, but in any case, I think Philip wouldn't have seen the situation as that bad, initially. The US wasn't such a bad place to get "stationed" and he was married off to a really cute girl! Given the adaptability of his personality, there was little problem. I think something closer to "love" probably took longer to form, but there seemed to be chemistry and attraction there for Philip from the start.

[jae]

I'm totally with you on all of this. I think he fell in love with her a few years in, and started calling it that in his head a few years after that.

-J

[katiac]

I'm with Jae on this one. It's Philip and Elizabeth for me and I can't pick one that I like better than the other because they're both quite fascinating. I'm fond of almost all the other characters in their own way, but Philip and Elizabeth have a complex and intriguing aspect to their personalities and backgrounds that keeps me thinking about them.