Or is it his turn of phrase that's ringing false to you, not that he's talking about a Russian operative?
I need to watch both 'Small Victories' and 'Watergate' again to check, I suspect. But really,I think it's both the above things that ring false. In canon, if Jack was to show antipathy to anyone with that level of bitterness, I would have thought it would have been to an East German after the disastrous mission there ('Gamekeeper') although I can see why the writers fought shy of that one *g*.
It's possible that I might be Europeanising here, that there's some kind of cultural shorthand that I'm missing: I am a child of the Cold War myself and I really don't recall that level of antipathy towards the Communist Bloc over here. Distrust and suspicion, yes, but not quite this level of outright hostility somehow, not even during Bay of Pigs. The atmosphere might well have been much more radically 'anti' in the States though (I imagine having ICBMs trained specifically on you, and no reason to think they wouldn't be used, has a quite remarkable effect in hardening attitudes) and this would likely have been intensified in anyone in the military, even in someone joinging years after events.
So yeah, I can find reasons for this reaction - they just don't seem terribly convincing in the context of Jack.
no subject
I need to watch both 'Small Victories' and 'Watergate' again to check, I suspect. But really,I think it's both the above things that ring false. In canon, if Jack was to show antipathy to anyone with that level of bitterness, I would have thought it would have been to an East German after the disastrous mission there ('Gamekeeper') although I can see why the writers fought shy of that one *g*.
It's possible that I might be Europeanising here, that there's some kind of cultural shorthand that I'm missing: I am a child of the Cold War myself and I really don't recall that level of antipathy towards the Communist Bloc over here. Distrust and suspicion, yes, but not quite this level of outright hostility somehow, not even during Bay of Pigs. The atmosphere might well have been much more radically 'anti' in the States though (I imagine having ICBMs trained specifically on you, and no reason to think they wouldn't be used, has a quite remarkable effect in hardening attitudes) and this would likely have been intensified in anyone in the military, even in someone joinging years after events.
So yeah, I can find reasons for this reaction - they just don't seem terribly convincing in the context of Jack.