I have to admit, I laughed at Paige's dramatic gesture getting undercut that way.

Yes, I think I do get the nuance of your argument. I'm not sure that your interpretation of what Elizabeth is feeling is what she's supposed to be feeling and thinking in that scene. The showrunners apparently claimed that Natalie was the most just killing the pair has ever done. fwiw. (Not that you have to agree…

I think it would be dumb if she did.

Why at this point? I mean, it seems like their thinking is that people on death squads, especially collaborators, received a punishment of death. They have plenty of eye-witnesses seeing her do this. The fact that she got away with it and was rewarded for 40 years is no reason to make it less justified now.

Well, yeah. But that probably wouldn't be something that would make all the difference to people in the situation with her who were judging her—by which I don't mean just the people she shot but everyone in her city who was also living through the occupation.

I was saying that age is not the only factor in the situation. She's also the same age as those kids who shot up their classmates at Columbine.

It is sad—but not surprising. Sometimes the people most sentimental about their own soldiers are most pro-war!

Your analogy would be much closer if the young men were going to die immediately if the cells were not harvested. So regardless of whether the intervention took place they were immediate goners.

But why replace her with a different very specific situation that has some things in common but other things that are very different when there were plenty of other people just like her? She was a normal citizen living under Nazi occupation. Sometimes soldiers would do this sort of shit. This one happened to be 16,…

No, not at all. I said exactly the opposite, that I'm not stepping outside the heads of the two characters and judging their morality based on whatever I think about the bigger picture of the history of the USSR in the 20th century, or how I think either woman did or didn't affect the larger picture.

I have no idea how her story would be taken, but since she wound up killing people over a long period time and, I believe, was helped to escape by Germans, her claims she was in fear of her life probably wouldn't hold up given what she was doing.

And Soviets born during the war at that. This wasn't ancient history for them.

I really wouldn't be so sure her parents would have wanted her to just survive no matter what. From things I've read and seen about this time, people had far more of a sense of community spirit than people do today. They didn't put the feelings of one scared 16-year-old above…well, above almost anything. It's iffy…

But a TV show that's never suggested anything like this would happen. The only time they were ever tested was when there was a specific search for a mole going on and they wanted to see who it was. They've never given them jobs just to see if they're loyal enough to do them, and this particular job would make the…

They probably could totally do that. After all, the woman was living under a false name. They could just say that she—using her real name with the details of what she did—was tracked down living a cushy life and given the punishment she deserved.

But that’s not a loose definition of choice. It’s the standard definition.
A hard choice is still a choice. And in her case it’s not like this is a
Sophie’s Choice where every choice is bad for her. One choice she dies, the
other choice she lives. Since she seemed to live just fine with being a mass
murderer that…

I do think that the same person who would put their kid into acting might also
give the kid an unusual name to make them stand out for attention. The two
impulses compliment each other. (Not that every child actor has an unusual name
by any means, but that’s what I always think when I hear them. I doubt there’s
too…

Yeah, I’ve seen several references to Natalie trying to make amends or make up
for something but the woman literally never does anything to indicate she has
wanted or does want to make amends. She’s all about getting away with it as much
as possible throughout all her scenes. She never even references emotions about…

Maybe it’s facile, but it’s clearly exactly what Elizabeth sees herself as
doing. She's happy to take responsibility for her actions.

I don’t see how that adds up to Natalie being more moral. She was murdering
people to save her own skin. Elizabeth was murdering people because she was
protecting her country. You’re speaking from a position of being far removed
from both time periods and judging what the results of those actions were, but I
don’t…