Question of the week #35

[treonb]

A lot of the critics have talked this year about things that changed on the show between seasons one and two. What are three changes that you yourself have noticed?

You can expect spoilers for the entire first two seasons 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

[(Anonymous)]

The closer relationship between P&E is appreciated but it seems very sporadic. I liked the fact that Elizabeth seemed to be the one who is really making the decisions about what Paige does and Phillip just goes along. Some (Matthew's) expressions and eye movements are very telling when E makes a decision. He's very good at that.

Still, that is what makes this relationship so delicious...it is so volatile and unpredictable, and 'weird' as Keri suggests. Such tension, electricity, chemistry, and the subtlety that we love. And as season 3 approaches, we have no idea what to expect.

CA
sorry I thought I posted CA the first time :(



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[sistermagpie]

It is really fascinating the way that dynamic works, particularly when you consider Elizabeth's canonical ambivalence about having children to begin with. Yet she clearly has these set ideas about how the kids should be raised and we don't know what Philip's ideas are and how they were formed. (Plus he goes along anyway, like on the issue of them not having any "real friends.) It's just funny when you see it happening so blatantly, like when Elizabeth takes the hardline about Paige's involvement with the church but then gives her permission to go to the nuclear protest on the spot.

[katiac]

The interesting thing about Elizabeth, to kind of twist your words around just a little for fun, is that I don't think it's so much that she has a set idea about how the kids *should* be raised but rather that she has a whole lot of strong, screaming, overpowering influences all around her in how she thinks they *shouldn't* be raised so she and Philip just make one sloppy course correction after the next. Like I think she never pictured the idea of raising her own daughter and once she had to do it, the circumstances were so unideal I think she disengaged to an extent. I think she spouts a lot of what *kids* in general should be doing but almost seems more impersonal whereas even in the short flashback scenes and recorded scenes with her own mother that isn't the way their relationship comes across.

[sistermagpie]

Wow, I hadn't thought of that but you're absolutely right. She really is probably often thinking about correcting more than anything else. I mean, I think she genuinely associates parenting with teaching--and we do see in the flashback with her mom, for instance, where her mom is explaining to her how gifts come with strings attached, etc. But both of them can be very much roused by the kids doing something that they feel genuinely makes them "other." Even Philip, when he really freaked out on Paige, did it in response to her seeming to reject him for other people. Most of the time he was able to follow the kids along their American way, but the church is a place he can't follow.

And a lot of Elizabeth's corrections to Paige really do tend to be about how her life is different than her mother's.