Question of the week #63

[treonb]

How do you think Henry will respond when he finds out his parents are Soviet spies? 

You can expect spoilers for the entire first three 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

[sistermagpie]

Oh, I think she is incredibly American and absolutely coming out of the American tradition. I'm just not sure she's aware that she is, if that makes sense. Like at this point it doesn't seem like the world outside the US is even real to Paige, or if she can imagine anything that isn't American because it's all she knows. So I can imagine herself thinking of herself as being international even when she's being her most American. She's pretty conservative in terms of her style, for instance, shocked at Gregory's criminal past and bad neighborhood, for instance. When I imagine Paige traveling I do think she'd prefer doing it as part of a mission trip.

Where as with Henry I can see him preferring to grab a backpack and come back with stories about guys he met on the road and had adventures with. So yeah, I do think he has the potential to be able to separate politics from people. I think the showrunners once said Henry was the most American in that he was just a happy-go-lucky kid (and his essay on the American Revolution was simply "America won"), but I can far more easily see an older Henry passing for not-from-the-US than I can Paige.

The more I think about it, the more interesting I think it would be to see Henry find a balance like that. Because we know he's always been very close to his father, presumably looked up to him as a kid. By the time he did his essay on a "hero" (I think it was) he chose Stan who had a job that was more traditionally heroic--like he thought of his dad as nice, but not larger than life like an FBI agent.

It would be interesting to see him try to balance learning that his dad is actually the villain--Stan the G-Man is his hero and his nemesis is the crafty Soviet agent--but also a hero like Stan in terms of his intentions. In fact in some ways he's got more sympathetic qualities because we see him trying to protect so many people.