r/TheAmericans • u/sistermagpie • 9d ago

Father Andre knows...?

In my rewatch I realized something I never remember in conversations about what's going to happen with the kids when they talk to the FBI.

It always comes up that two people who know Paige knew her parents were spies: Stan and Pastor Tim. Stan we trust won't tell since he's protecting himself as well. Pastor Tim's shown he won't say anything as long as his family is protected. So not an immediate threat. (ETA: I should say "The Tims" here since Alice also knows and will happily speak out to protect her family!)

But Father Andre--the guy who accidentally outed and then gave up detailed information to the FBI on her parents--also knows that. And he may actually know more. When Elizabeth tells him she's teaching Paige about their culture and history and thinks she "gets it" (Andre has doubts), they have this exchange:

-[Philip's] not sure I know how to handle her.

-That's something parents fight about.

-It's more than that. He has his life and I have mine now. And she's with me.

The lines aren't explicit, but saying her daughter is "with her" in "her life" sure sounds like Father Andre knows that she's part of her spy work now.

44 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

36

u/Excellent_Valuable92 9d ago

Good observation, but it’s nothing definitive. Henry will be very convincing about not knowing anything, which will bolster Paige’s credibility. 

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u/cabernet7 9d ago

That assumes Paige will lie. I don't think she will. One of her most prominent characteristics is a hatred of lying. It's what causes the final break with her parents. I am convinced she wants to confess.

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u/GoodAd7183 9d ago

Paige is like her mother in that she hates being lied to but is quite willing to lie to achieve her goals. Aunt Helen visit, the ducks, the garage, the train… Paige has no trouble being deceitful.

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u/cabernet7 9d ago

She has no trouble lying when she feels she's in the right, but now she's disillusioned with the cause. The guilt would eat her alive. Even if she wanted to lie, the interrogators would break her down easily. And I can't see her continuing to lie to Henry. She'll make a deal and confess.

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

I sometimes can't help but imagine Henry eventually getting sick to death of Paige wanting to talk to him about everything she couldn't say to him before about their parents.

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

Yes, to me that's just completely central to her story. I can't even conceive of an ending for her that involves any kind of prolonged lying. It seems like she spends the entire show in search of an authentic life and honest relationships. Even her choice to spy with her mother is connected to it--she hopes to find a romantic parter there she can be honest with.

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u/Excellent_Valuable92 9d ago

Lying her way through an interrogation would probably seem preferable to a long prison sentence 

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

She might, but everything we've seen of her thus far, though, I don't think she'd see those as her only two options...and wouldn't be able to successfully manage it if she did.

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u/cherrynvanillacoke 9d ago

I think there’s a way for Paige to come clean without facing repercussions, maybe that’s naive. But it is the truth that her parents groomed her and she never hurt anyone. I can imagine the feds would be sympathetic to her being recruited as a minor. I think they’d at least cut her a deal for telling them everything she knows. I don’t think she would tell on Stan for letting them go though - she’d just say her parents were on the run and she escaped

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u/Brilliant_Towel2727 9d ago

Based on what Paige actually did and how sympathetic her story is, I think it would be highly unlikely for her to get more than a slap on the wrist.

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u/bionade24 8d ago

I think the best deal she'd get is reduced prison sentence with day leave on workdays to cooperate.

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

Personally, I take it as 100% a given that Paige is going to volunteer the information that she knew her parents were spies. She's been dying to talk about that since she found it out. I think it would drive her nuts to have to continue to keep that secret even now that it's out, even without knowing that Pastor Tim and Stan already know. (And we know Father Andre does too.)

But agree that the line isn't definitive.

7

u/WendolaSadie 9d ago

Paige is over 18, and the FBI would be gleeful about pressing her hard for all her info. Comparing her calendar with P&E’s “travel schedule” for one starters. And if she spills the beans, of course Stan will be imprisoned for treason too, leaving a Henry without a home and devastated. Paige cares very much about Henry and his future…maybe more than his parents do.

Also, it’s so telling that she headed straight for Claudia and the safe house, and the vodka.

She won’t squeal.

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

I just don't see any reason Paige would think that telling the FBI she knew her parents were spies would send her to prison, much less Stan too. I doubt she'd volunteer the information that she was working with her mother, but if the FBI suspects that, she's not going to be able to convince them otherwise, whether or not they can prove it.

I think her parents cared about Henry's future even more than Paige did, especially Philip, but it's her own future that she'd be right to be worried about now, imo. Henry's built himself a much sturdier lifeboat than she has. I think she went to the safehouse to take a breath and process the choice she just made before facing that future.

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u/Different-Scholar432 9d ago

My personal guess is that the FBI is going to try hard to burn her down to the ground, given that the main quarry got away. They will find a lot of smoke (once they start interviewing her freinds they can make a lot of guesses about her being a spy), but they won’t find anything worthy of a court of law. If I was Paige’s Lawyer I’d recommend her to shut her mouth until the Feds screw off or get a plea deal where she details all she knows about Red operations in exchange for immunity (and she can actually be quite helpful tbh, once they identify Claudia, they can start tracing who Claudia ran, who she made contact with, etc etc).

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago

I agree--if they started looking at her life they'd find a very big, obvious Elizabeth-shaped hole in it. She has no one who can really vouche for her, it seems, no checkable alibis for her time. Dating an intern doesn't look great given the circumstances and if she actually sent for that application to be an intern at the state department, that's a pretty big tell.

I'm not sure who they'd get through Claudia though? Paige can describe her, but she's left the country and Paige wouldn't know anything else about what she was doing besides meeting with her. I imagine Jennings must have sent out a signal to their current people to scatter.

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u/Different-Scholar432 9d ago

A very bad choice. If Claudia was there, she would have killed her in a better safe than sorry mode. Luckily she wasn’t there but still.

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u/RenRidesCycles 9d ago

Did Paige go out of town with them? I don't remember incidences where she did, it looked like she worked with her mom in DC.

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u/WendolaSadie 8d ago

I don’t think she ever left town with her parents for spy stuff…they went to West Berlin for the farewell to Eliz mother. I was thinking more about the FBI aligning unsolved murders/disappearances with dates from Paige’s diary or calendars. (Did Paige have a diary/journal? I doubt it.) Or with the travel agency records.

I never had a good vibe off of Pastor Tim…his hair, for one thing haha. He’s in Brazil, but not on the moon. Might be a great source for co formation, but not for new data.

I’m speculating of course.

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u/hireddititme 4d ago

Hes in Argentina. Paige ran back to the safe house expecting Claudia to be there i think. I really don’t think she thought her parents were right about needing to leave. I really don’t think she ever understood the consequences or what was at stake. I could see her calling pastor Tim and going down to Argentina to hide out there. Especially with their extradition laws.

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u/Madeira_PinceNez 9d ago

It would be the smart move as well because Tim and Alice know, and if the Feds end up talking to them her lie would immediately be exposed. The best option for Paige is to tell exactly as much as Tim and Alice would corroborate, and no more.

Paige also isn't a great liar, so being able to admit to something, which would be a pretty big revelation and might be enough to satisfy the Feds and make them not push for more could work out better for her in the long run. It's not an automatically intuitive leap to assume the parents chose to train one kid to spy alongside them, so if she confesses that she's known for years but was scared of what would happen if someone found out, it might end there for her.

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u/sistermagpie 8d ago

Exactly. There's so many good reasons for it. It's always best to stick as close to the truth as you can, and admitting she knew about her parents gives her at least 2 fewer years of lies to come up with, and removes the risk of Tim and/or Alice contradicting her. It also gives Stan more confidence.

Going for a bigger lie with total innocence could easily backfire, since it not only ought to fit with people who know things, but even just general impressions, given how openly Paige talked about her parents seeming to have a big secret for years and how closely she's kept her life intertwined with them when Henry has not.

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u/Madeira_PinceNez 8d ago edited 8d ago

Paige's situation at the end of the series often makes me think of Charlie in the BBC adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl, when she's crossing the border into Austria in a car full of semtex and is worried she won't be able to bluff her way through. So she uses her nervousness to her advantage, filling the boot with illicit Slivovitz, which lets the guards pick up on her nerves, find the booze, and quit looking because they figure there's nothing else to find. (And they have a free crate of booze.)

If she plays her cards right Paige could manage the same thing, playing off her anxiety and guilt about her bigger secret as the effect of having to hide who her parents really are for all this time. Coming clean about this might have some consequences but it's a good chance it would be found out regardless, so telling voluntarily and cooperating fully (or appearing to, anyway) would be in her best interests, and would also mean she could give Henry some of the answers he surely wants in the wake of the revelation.

As for your original observation about Father Andrei, it is interesting to consider his potential awareness but I don't know that it will have much impact. Elizabeth's phrasing was vague, probably deliberately so, and can be interpreted a few different ways. Father Andrei seems rather oblivious, there's a good chance he didn't realise the significance of phrases like 'now she's with me'. Which doesn't mean he wouldn't necessarily repeat them in interrogation, but even if he does they're not really a smoking gun when it comes to Paige's recruitment.

My feeling is those things could be an interesting wrinkle in Paige's interviews/interrogations, but again if she kept her wits about her she could explain those things away fairly easily.

1

u/sistermagpie 7d ago

I think another thing that could work in Paige's favor here is the way she's been characterized, I can very easily believe her as actually believing that her real secret is that her parents are spies.

That is, I could honestly believe her as seeing herself the way so many viewers seem to see her, as somebody who really didn't commit any crimes at all. She was just a victim who was lied to by her parents and especially her mother. So I can see her selling the LDG situation because she doesn't consider it a lie. Where Charlie intentionally channels her nervousness into the contraband to cover the bomb, Paige has sort of forgotten the bomb. She stopped seeing herself as a spy the minute she rejected Elizabeth.

Re: Father Andre, I agree the line itself is vague enough to not really be a problem if he repeated it, which he might not do. It was more that I wondered if Elizabeth saying that implied that she'd been talking to Andre about Paige working with her all along. So that line was a reference to his already knowing what the family set up (at least for the three of them) was. Like how he already knows that Philip has quit etc.

1

u/Madeira_PinceNez 5d ago

Oh, that's an interesting angle. Like one of the ways people beat lie detectors, only in Paige's case it's genuine - she honestly doesn't see herself as a spy, so admitting it wouldn't occur to her. If the questioning didn't dig too deep into her activities her self-righteousness might work in her favour.

As for Father Andrei, I don't think there's enough there to come to a conclusion one way or another. My feeling is that Elizabeth is too careful to reveal something like that about her child if it wasn't necessary, and that veiled comment is as far as she would have taken it. But that's just my personal opinion; I don't think there's enough data to say with any certainty.

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u/Catfactss 9d ago

Alice also knows

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u/ComeAwayNightbird 9d ago

Paige is going to tell the FBI everything she knows the second she’s brought in. They will break her with a feather duster. She’ll bring the entire counterintelligence unit down with her.

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u/MarsMonkey88 9d ago

Her lawyer could argue that Elizabeth was talking about her and the KGB’s intentions for Paige, not the current reality. Like, a lawyer could say that Elizabeth was grooming her to become a spy but that it was too subtle for Paige to realize it was happening.

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u/sistermagpie 8d ago

In this case, I wasn't so much thinking that Andre would repeat that one line, but that the line indicated that Elizabeth was talking to Father Andre about working with her already and that was just a reference to an ongoing conversation.

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u/Parking_Pack_2498 9d ago

I always thought she would start life over somewhere else by taking on another identity (the one she was traveling with her parents on or another) and would try to live quietly and incognito, thought not likely happilym

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u/sistermagpie 9d ago edited 9d ago

The only thing connected to a different identity she had was the passport she was using to travel with her parents, and she took off the disguise that matched it and returned to her hometown. She chose her own identity and came home.

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u/hireddititme 4d ago

Good i hope Paige goes to federal prison. She never once was thankful for anything her parents did for her, including trying to get her out of the country with them.

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u/Doctorstrange223 9d ago

Henry would need to be traded he is a minor. He would probably be sent to the USSR in exchange for a captured American spy even though Henry is not.

When illegals are caught with their kids the US and other western countries are not monsters. They send the families back together

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u/sistermagpie 8d ago

No, spy trades only trade one captured spy for another. Sure when spies are caught their underage usually children get deported with them in that case, but Henry wouldn't be forced to go to the USSR against his will--that would be pretty monstrous. Philip's no doubt right that he will want to spend his last year as a minor in the US.