Thought I would post some thoughts on 'Baggage' before the next episode aired. Many of the posts here have already touched on things that I noticed about this episode so I'll try not to repeat what someone else has already commented on.
Poor Stan. His near-death experience didn't help him to feel more alive at all. The EST speaker was correct that Stan and Philip (all of spies actually) aren't leading 'authentic' lives, but Stan's near-death experience only revealed how isolated and alone he truly is. That sad, awkward phone message he left for Matthew and Sandra broke my heart (props to Noah Emmerich for an outstanding performance here), but it just got worse when he went to see Sandra in person. He was so desperate to connect to her, but when she asked him why, he just mumbled that he didn't know. Argh! I wanted to shake him so hard when he said he didn't know why he needed to reach out to her. Sandra left him because of his inability to 'be authentic' with her (to use the EST guy's terminology). Their relationship was on the skids ever since the time he spent undercover. Sandra pulled away and said that she wasn't going to come back to him just because he was nearly shot. I wonder though what might have happened if Stan had been able to say that she was the only person on earth he wanted to be with at that moment because he still loved her, or even just because she was the only person on earth who truly knows who he is... what might she have done then? Poor Stan is just an inarticulate, disconnected mess of a human being right now. To me, Sandra represents Stan's past, before he went undercover and then got involved in the spy-counter spy business. Whatever Stan experienced when he went undercover with the white supremacist group changed him somehow and made him unable to be with Sandra any more.
(As an aside, I've always wondered exactly what Stan did when he was undercover. He's never talked about it. I re-watched S1 and S2, and any time that people commented on it, he only ever said 'it wasn't what they thought it was like.' There was a point during S1 when I wondered if Stan himself might be a sleeper agent who'd infiltrated the FBI because he was so good at deflecting talk about his past.)
Continuing on the EST idea that sex and near death experiences are authentic... good grief. Philip went from having emotionally awkward, regretful sex with Annelise in his car shortly thereafter to cracking apart her dead body in order to stuff it into a suitcase. OMG, that scene was so disturbing to me, not just in how gruesomely graphic it was, but also how it illuminates on just how inhuman and detached these people all are from anything remotely resembling normal human feelings. How could anyone calmly snap the limbs of someone they knew intimately and not freak out and be filled with self loathing? Philip and Elizabeth were so efficient at it, too. They must have been trained how to do this - which is gross enough to contemplate -- but they did it so quickly and so well that I wondered if they've done it before.
There was a parallel in this episode between Stan being unable to connect with Sandra (he literally cannot express his own feelings to her) and Elizabeth being unable to connect with her dying mother. When Philip suggested that Elizabeth should go home to Russia to be with her mother, Elizabeth rejected the idea completely. I'm still wondering why Elizabeth shut down that option so absolutely. Elizabeth has always been so motivated by her memories of her mother. At this point though, she hasn't even seen her mother for a significant portion of her life. Elizabeth was recruited by the KBG when she was just a teen, and she's spent over a decade in America. She's grown into adulthood with a fake identity with a fake family in a nation and culture she despises. She doesn't like people calling her by her real name, except perhaps for her mother, and now she's losing her mother. She's losing her only connection to who she really is (or was). Once Elizabeth's mother dies there will be no one left who remembers her as Nadezhda.
While Elizabeth is in the midst of losing her mother, she's still adamant about recruiting Paige. I think it would destroy Paige to find out that everything she knew about her family and her parents was a lie. Elizabeth seems to think that she can somehow turn her American daughter into a communist ideological devotee and traitor to the nation of her birth simply because Paige is seeking a way to channel her idealism. She wants to do to Paige what she did to herself.
But I think Philip is right that Paige (and Henry too) deserve better. To me, the biggest smoking gun in this series is the fact that way back in the very first episode, Philip admitted that he wanted to defect. He values his family more than anything else. He's well aware that his children are American and can't be turned into communist Russians no matter how much he and Elizabeth may miss their own true homeland. If Elizabeth and Gabriel keep pushing this agenda with Paige, I wonder if Philip might think that defecting is his only option to save his kids. I don't see any way for this series to end happily for any of these characters, but I hate to think that it's going to end with Elizabeth and Philip totally at odds with each other.
Don't let anybody say that espionage is glamorous work. All of these people are a mess: Stan unable to articulate his feelings to Sandra; Philip and Elizabeth have deadened themselves to anything remotely resembling normal human feelings so that they can crack apart the body of an acquaintance; even Nina turned away from her weeping cell mate and wrapped herself in a blanket to shield herself from this other woman.
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timeasmymeasure
Some late thoughts on Baggage
Date: 2015-02-11 07:08 am (UTC)Poor Stan. His near-death experience didn't help him to feel more alive at all. The EST speaker was correct that Stan and Philip (all of spies actually) aren't leading 'authentic' lives, but Stan's near-death experience only revealed how isolated and alone he truly is. That sad, awkward phone message he left for Matthew and Sandra broke my heart (props to Noah Emmerich for an outstanding performance here), but it just got worse when he went to see Sandra in person. He was so desperate to connect to her, but when she asked him why, he just mumbled that he didn't know. Argh! I wanted to shake him so hard when he said he didn't know why he needed to reach out to her. Sandra left him because of his inability to 'be authentic' with her (to use the EST guy's terminology). Their relationship was on the skids ever since the time he spent undercover. Sandra pulled away and said that she wasn't going to come back to him just because he was nearly shot. I wonder though what might have happened if Stan had been able to say that she was the only person on earth he wanted to be with at that moment because he still loved her, or even just because she was the only person on earth who truly knows who he is... what might she have done then? Poor Stan is just an inarticulate, disconnected mess of a human being right now. To me, Sandra represents Stan's past, before he went undercover and then got involved in the spy-counter spy business. Whatever Stan experienced when he went undercover with the white supremacist group changed him somehow and made him unable to be with Sandra any more.
(As an aside, I've always wondered exactly what Stan did when he was undercover. He's never talked about it. I re-watched S1 and S2, and any time that people commented on it, he only ever said 'it wasn't what they thought it was like.' There was a point during S1 when I wondered if Stan himself might be a sleeper agent who'd infiltrated the FBI because he was so good at deflecting talk about his past.)
Continuing on the EST idea that sex and near death experiences are authentic... good grief. Philip went from having emotionally awkward, regretful sex with Annelise in his car shortly thereafter to cracking apart her dead body in order to stuff it into a suitcase. OMG, that scene was so disturbing to me, not just in how gruesomely graphic it was, but also how it illuminates on just how inhuman and detached these people all are from anything remotely resembling normal human feelings. How could anyone calmly snap the limbs of someone they knew intimately and not freak out and be filled with self loathing? Philip and Elizabeth were so efficient at it, too. They must have been trained how to do this - which is gross enough to contemplate -- but they did it so quickly and so well that I wondered if they've done it before.
There was a parallel in this episode between Stan being unable to connect with Sandra (he literally cannot express his own feelings to her) and Elizabeth being unable to connect with her dying mother. When Philip suggested that Elizabeth should go home to Russia to be with her mother, Elizabeth rejected the idea completely. I'm still wondering why Elizabeth shut down that option so absolutely. Elizabeth has always been so motivated by her memories of her mother. At this point though, she hasn't even seen her mother for a significant portion of her life. Elizabeth was recruited by the KBG when she was just a teen, and she's spent over a decade in America. She's grown into adulthood with a fake identity with a fake family in a nation and culture she despises. She doesn't like people calling her by her real name, except perhaps for her mother, and now she's losing her mother. She's losing her only connection to who she really is (or was). Once Elizabeth's mother dies there will be no one left who remembers her as Nadezhda.
While Elizabeth is in the midst of losing her mother, she's still adamant about recruiting Paige. I think it would destroy Paige to find out that everything she knew about her family and her parents was a lie. Elizabeth seems to think that she can somehow turn her American daughter into a communist ideological devotee and traitor to the nation of her birth simply because Paige is seeking a way to channel her idealism. She wants to do to Paige what she did to herself.
But I think Philip is right that Paige (and Henry too) deserve better. To me, the biggest smoking gun in this series is the fact that way back in the very first episode, Philip admitted that he wanted to defect. He values his family more than anything else. He's well aware that his children are American and can't be turned into communist Russians no matter how much he and Elizabeth may miss their own true homeland. If Elizabeth and Gabriel keep pushing this agenda with Paige, I wonder if Philip might think that defecting is his only option to save his kids. I don't see any way for this series to end happily for any of these characters, but I hate to think that it's going to end with Elizabeth and Philip totally at odds with each other.
Don't let anybody say that espionage is glamorous work. All of these people are a mess: Stan unable to articulate his feelings to Sandra; Philip and Elizabeth have deadened themselves to anything remotely resembling normal human feelings so that they can crack apart the body of an acquaintance; even Nina turned away from her weeping cell mate and wrapped herself in a blanket to shield herself from this other woman.