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

[katiac]

I love your third one especially. That's such a great observation about how they were able to get into a deeper level of storytelling and one that really fits naturally with where the characters would be ready to go emotionally--taking those first steps to start tslking about feelings awkwardly, and now they're kind of in a stage where they're acting on them sometimes but messily and blindly... they don't really know what they're doing and sometimes that makes a bigger mess. It's funny--I sometimes think of Gregory too but I can't even picture him fitting anywhere past the point he died. Philip and Elizabeth are just so completely different in the space of a year. Elizabeth especially.

[sistermagpie]

Isn't that funny about Gregory? It's not like he's a less complex person than anyone else, but he fit so well as the person who represented a lover who embodied the same priorities. But that's comparatively really neat, as is the way Elizabeth seemed to have been able to keep the relationship compartmentalized.

[katiac]

Honestly I suspect part of the reasonI always feel that way about him is because we never get a really true picture--we only get Elizabeth's version, and I feel like that's a very limited view, not only because she has such trouble seeing anything that's not exactly what she wants to see (like the fact that he's not going to love and embrace Moscow the way she does just gets overwritten in her head because she just can't compute anything else) and therefore never really sees or comes to know more than a narrow fraction of Gregory. Whereas, it's kind of interesting how with Philip it's the opposite and she's so attuned to and put off by all the differences that by the time they fall for each other, there's somethin much more honest in place, by no merit or skill of Elizabeth's, just the circumstances.

And with Gregory himself I picture him one of two ways, either kind of emotionally stunted like Elizabeth, which might explain why he thought she was really going to leave her kids like he wanted and run off with him, or simply that he never caught on the degree to which she'd been lying to him about what really mattered to her over the years, which had to start early on and just grow greater and greater as they grew ever further apart. Her feelings for Phil I can buy warming up that quickly, but it's not like the same would be true of Henry and Paige. The only way Gregory could make that comment in the car would be if he's a complete selfish jerk who doesn't care what it would do to Elizabeth to never see her kids again (which is hard to believe) or he honestly doesn't *get* that they're actually important to her because in many ways Elizabeth was just as much a liar with him as she was with Phil.

[sistermagpie]

It's complicated question, you're right! Irina makes the same suggestion to Philip--and this while she claims to have a child herself (albeit one where it's unclear what relationship she's claiming to have ever had with him).

I always figure that part of the issue with Gregory was that he and Elizabeth got together presumably while she was pregnant with Paige or at most they'd have met right before, since they met in '68 (interestingly this means that Elizabeth would have had quasi-consensual sex with Philip before taking the step to actually consensual sex). At that time it seems like she would have been in full ambivalent mode, having made the choice to go ahead with the pregnancy but still not wanting to do it. So their initial relationship would have been probably based around him being the person she could share those fears with--which she couldn't totally with Leanne because Leanne warned her not to tell the Centre that and had done it herself.

So I always imagine that just as her feelings about Philip and the family would have slowly changed with time, so too would her relationship with Gregory. She would only have to see him on her own terms, and may have (based on what we see must have) always talked about her problems with her cover life with him, maybe even using him as a touchstone for who she "really" was with in ways she couldn't with Philip since Philip was bound up with the cover life. Over the years the Elizabeth Gregory saw would have just become a smaller part of the real woman, requiring maybe a little more artifice. But since she didn't resent the relationship with Gregory she probably didn't mind it.

So yeah, it's interesting to think about just how much the two of them are in denial about who the other one is at this point or ever was. Plus, of course, their whole relationship was always based on the idea that the cause came first, so by definition they never promised or wanted the other one to put their affair over orders. It's funny, actually, because while Philip was the relationship that was mandated by the Centre, it's the one that encompasses far more than the job, while Gregory, the secret love she took for herself, seems likely to fall apart without the cause. That's the thing they have in common.